CHAPTER XC.

WHEREIN THE CURIOUS READER MAY FIND SOME THINGS WHICH HE IS NOT LOOKING FOR, AND WHICH THE INCURIOUS ONE MAY SKIP IF HE PLEASES.

Voulant doncques satisfaire à la curiosité de touts bons compagnons, j'ay revolvé toutes les Pantarches des Cieux, calculé les quadrats de la Lune, crocheté tout ce que jamais penserent touts les Astrophiles, Hypernephelistes, Anemophylaces, Uranopetes et Ombrophores.

RABELAIS.             

A minute's recollection will carry the reader back to the chapter whereon that accidental immolation took place, which was the means of introducing him to the bas-bleus of Poictiers. We were then engaged upon the connection which in Peter Hopkins's time still subsisted between astrology and the practice of medicine.

Court de Gebelin in his great hypothetical, fanciful, but withal ingenious, erudite, and instructive work, says that the almanack was one of the most illustrious and most useful efforts of genius of the first men, and that a complete history of it would be a precious canvas for the history of the human race, were it not that unfortunately many of the necessary materials have perished. On peut assurer, he says, que sans almanach, les operations de l'agriculture seroient incertaines; que les travaux des champs ne se rencontreroient que per hazard dans les tems convenables: qui il n'y auroit ni fêtes ni assemblées publiques, et que la memoire des tems anciens ne seroit qu'un cahos.

This is saying a little too much. But who is there that has not sometimes occasion to consult the almanack? Maximilian I. by neglecting to do this, failed in an enterprize against Bruges. It had been concerted with his adherents in that turbulent city, that he should appear before it at a certain time, and they would be ready to rise in his behalf, and open the gates for him. He forgot that it was leap year, and came a day too soon; and this error on his part cost many of the most zealous of his friends their lives. It is remarkable that neither the historian who relates this, nor the writers who have followed him, should have looked in the almanack to guard against any inaccuracy in the relation; for they have fixed the appointed day on the eve of St. Matthias, which being the 23d of February, could not be put out of its course by leap year.

This brings to my recollection a legal anecdote, that may serve in like manner to exemplify how necessary it is upon any important occasion to scrutinize the accuracy of a statement before it is taken upon trust. A fellow was tried (at the Old Bailey if I remember rightly) for high-way robbery, and the prosecutor swore positively to him, saying he had seen his face distinctly, for it was a bright moon-light night. The counsel for the prisoner cross-questioned the man, so as to make him repeat that assertion, and insist upon it. He then affirmed that this was a most important circumstance, and a most fortunate one for the prisoner at the bar: because the night on which the alleged robbery was said to have been committed was one in which there had been no moon; it was during the dark quarter! In proof of this he handed an almanack to the bench,—and the prisoner was acquitted accordingly. The prosecutor however had stated every thing truly; and it was known afterwards that the almanack with which the counsel came provided, had been prepared and printed for the occasion.

There is a pleasing passage in Sanazzaro's Arcadia, wherein he describes two large beechen tablets, suspended in the temple of Pan, one on each side of the altar, scritte di rusticane lettere; le quali successivamente di tempo in tempo per molti anni conservate dai passati pastori, contenevano in se le antiche leggi, e gli ammaestramenti della pastorale vita: dalle quali tutto quello che fra le selve oggi se adopra, ebbe prima origine. One of these tablets contained directions for the management of cattle. In the other eran notati tutti i di dell' anno, e i varj mutamenti delle stagioni, e la inequalità delle notte e del giorno, insieme con la osservazione delle ore, non poco necessarie a viventi, e li non falsi pronostici delle tempestati: e quando il Sole con suo nascimento denunzia serenita, e quando pioggia, e quando venti, e quando grandini; e quali giorni son della luna fortunati, e quali infelici alle opre de' mortali: e che ciascuno in ciascuna ora dovesse fuggire, o seguitare, per non offendere le osservabili volonta degli Dii.

It is very probable that Sanazzaro has transferred to his pastoral, what may then have been the actual usage in more retired parts of the country; and that before the invention of printing rendered almanacks accessible to every one, a calendar, which served for agricultural as well as ecclesiastical purposes, was kept in every considerable church. Olaus Magnus says that the northern countrymen used to have a calendar cut upon their walking sticks (baculos annales, he calls them); and that when they met at church from distant parts, they laid their heads together and made their computations. The origin of these wooden almanacks, which belong to our own antiquities, as well as to those of Scandinavia, is traced hypothetically to the heathen temple, authentically to the church. It has been supposed that the Cimbri received the Julian calendar from Cæsar himself, after his conquest as it is called of Britain; and that it was cut in Runic characters for the use of the priests, upon the rocks, or huge stones, which composed their rude temples, till some one thought of copying it on wood and rendering it portable, for common use:—donec tandem, (are Wormius's words), ingenii rarâ dexteritate emersit ille, quisquis tandem fuerit, qui per lignea hæcce compendia, tam utile tamque necessarium negotium plebi communicandum duxit: cujus nomen si exstaret æquiore jure fastis hisce insereretur, quam multorum tituli, quos boni publici cura vix unquam tetigit.

The introduction of the Julian calendar at that time is however nothing better than an antiquary's mere dream. At a later period the Germans, who had much more communication with the Romans than ever the Scandinavians had, divided the year into three seasons, if Tacitus was rightly informed; this being one consequence of the little regard which they paid to agriculture. Hyems et ver et æstas intellectum ac vocabula habent; autumni perinde nomen ac bona ignorantur.

Moreover Wormius was assured, (and this was a fact which might well have been handed down by memory, and was not likely to have been recorded), that the wooden almanacks were originally copied from a written one in a very antient manuscript preserved in the church at Drontheim. There is no proof that a pagan Rimstoke ever existed in those countries. The clergy had no interest in withholding this kind of knowledge from the people even in the darkest ages of papal tyranny and monkish imposture. But during the earlier idolatries of the Romans it seems to have been withheld; and it was against the will of the Senate that the Fasti were first divulged to the people by Cneius Flavius Scriba.

The carelessness of the Romans during many ages as to the divisions of time, seems scarcely compatible even with the low degree of civilization which they had attained. We are told that when the Twelve Tables were formed, no other distinctions of the day than those of sunrise and sunset were known among them by name; that some time after they begun to compute from noon to noon; and that for three hundred years they had nothing whereby to measure an hour, nor knew of any such denomination, tamdiu populi Romani indiscreta lux fait. A brazen pillar, which marked the hour of noon by its shortest shadow, was the only means of measuring time, till, in the first Punic war, the Consul M. Valerius Messala brought thither a sun-dial from the spoils of Catana in Sicily. This was in the 477th year of the City; and by that dial the Romans went ninety-nine years without adapting it to the meridian of Rome. A better was then erected; but they were still without any guide in cloudy weather, till in the year 595 after the building of the City, Scipio Nasica introduced the water-clock, which is said to have been invented about eighty years before by Ctesibius of Alexandria. When the Romans had begun to advance in civilization, no people ever made a more rapid progress in all the arts and abuses which follow in its train. Astrology came with astronomy from the East, for science had speedily been converted into a craft, and in the age of the Cæsars the Egyptian professors of that craft were among the pests of Rome.

More than one Roman calendar is in existence, preserved by the durability of the material, which is a square block of marble. Each side contains three months, in parallel columns, headed by the appropriate signs of the zodiac. In these the astronomical information was given, with directions for the agricultural business of the month, and notices of the respective gods under whose tutelage the months were placed, and of the religious festivals in their course, with a warning to the husbandmen against neglecting those religious duties, upon the due performance of which the success of their labours depended.

Those learned authors who look in the Scriptures for what is not to be found there, and supply by conjectures whatever they wish to find, have not decided whether astronomy was part of Adam's infused knowledge, or whether it was acquired by him, and his son Seth; but from Seth they say it descended to Abraham, and he imparted it to the Egyptians. Whatever may be thought of this derivation, the Egyptian mind seems always to have pullulated with superstition, as the slime of their own Nile is said to have fermented into low and loathsome forms of miscreated life. The Rabbis say that ten measures of witchcraft were sent into the world, and Egypt got nine of them.

The Greeks are said to have learnt from the Babylonians the twelve divisions of the day. The arrow-headed inscriptions at Babylon are supposed by some of those who have bestowed most attention upon them to be calendars: and there can be little doubt that where the divisions of time were first scientifically observed, there the first calendar would be formed. In Egypt however it is that we hear of them first; and such resemblances exist between the Egyptian calendar, and the oldest of those which have been discovered in the north of Europe, that Court de Gebelin supposes they must have had a common origin, and in an age anterior to those Chaldeans whose astronomical observations ascended nineteen hundred years before the age of Alexander. This is too wild an assumption to be soberly maintained. What is common to both found its way to Scandinavia in far later times. Christianity was imported into those countries with all the corruptions which it had gathered in the East as well as in the West; and the Christian calendar brought with it as many superstitions of European growth, as there was room for inserting. There was room for many even upon the Norwegian staff.

The lineal descendant of that rimstoke was still in use in the middle of England at the close of the 17th century; though it was then, says Plot, a sort of antiquity so little known that it had hardly been heard of in the southern parts, and was understood but by few of the gentry in the northern. Clogg was the English name, whether so called from the word log, because they were generally made of wood, and not so commonly of oak or fir as of box; or from the resemblance of the larger ones to the clogs, “wherewith we restrain the wild, extravagant, mischievous motions of some of our dogs,” he knew not. There were some few of brass. Some were of convenient size for the pocket; and there were larger ones, which used to hang at one end of the mantle tree of the chimney for family use; as in Denmark the rimstoke was found in every respectable yeoman's house at the head of the table, or suspended from a beam. Plot minutely and carefully described these, and endeavoured, but not always with success, to explain some of the hieroglyphes or symbols by which the festivals were denoted; all which he had seen had only the Prime (or Golden Number) and the immoveable feasts; the Prime, so called as indicating primas lunas through the year, our ancestors set in the margin of their calendars in characters of gold,—and thence its other name.

The rudest that has ever been discovered was found in pulling down part of a chateau in Bretagne. Its characters had so magical an appearance, that it would have been condemned by acclamation to the flames, if the Lord of the Chateau had not rescued it, thinking it was more likely to puzzle an antiquary than to raise the Devil. He sent it to Sainte-Palaye, and M. Lancelot succeeded in fully explaining it. Most barbarous as it was, there is reason for concluding that it was not older than the middle of the 17th century.

In Peter Hopkins's time the clogg was still found in farm houses. He remembered when a countryman had walked to the nearest large town, thirty miles distant, for the express purpose of seeing an almanack, the first that had been heard of in those parts. His enquiring neighbours crowded round the man on his return. “Well—well,” said he, “I know not! it maffles and talks. But all I could make out is that Collop Monday falls on a Tuesday next year.”