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LITERARY WISCRLLANY, |

THE DAYS THAT ARE GONE,

BY CHARLES MACKAY, L. L. D.

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“ Por at least a thousand years the whole country seemed ina

long and sunny éream. * Every man had his little plot, or could enclose it fer a small annual acknowledgment, and the rural race lived on with little exertion and no care. [—William Howitt, in Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine .

Who is it that mourns. for the days that are gone,

When a Noble could do as he liked with his own ?

When his serfs, with their burdens well filled on their backs, .

Never dared to.complain of the weight of a tax ?

When his word was a statute, his nod was a law,

And for aught but his “order” he cared not a straw?

When each had his dengeon and rocks for the poor,

And a gibbet to hang a refractory boor ?

They were days whea a man with a Thought in his

Le,

Weanibia that was born for the popular hate ; And if ’twere a thought that was good for his kind, ‘The man was too vile to be unconfined ; ‘The days when obedience in right or in wrong, Was always the sermon and always the song; When the People, like cattle, were pounded or driven. And. to, scourge them was thought a king’s license from

Heaven.

They mere days when the Swerd settled questions of right,

And flochood was first to monopolize might ;

When the fighter of battles was always adored,

And the greater the tyrant the dearer the lord;

When the. King who by myriads could number his slain,

Was considered by far the most worthy to reign ;

When the fate of the multitude hung on his breath—

A god in his life and a saint in lis death.

They he days when the headsman was always pre- pared—

The block ever ready—the axe ever bared;

When a corpse on, the gibbet aye swung to and fro,

And the fire at the stake never smouldered too low,

When famine and age made a woman a witch,

To be roasted, alive, or be drowned: in a ditch;

When difference of creed was the vilest of crime,

And martyrs were burned half a score at a time.

They were days when the gallows stood black in, the. way,

The larger the town the.more plentiful they ;

When. Law never dreamed, it was good.to relent,

Or thought it less wisdom to kill than prevent;

When Justice herself, taking Law for her guide,

Was never appeased till a victim. had died ;

And the stealer of. sheep and the slayer of men,

Were strung up,together again and again.

They were days when. the Crowd. had. no freedom of speech,

And reading and writing were out of its reach;

When Ignorance, solid: and dense was its doom,

And bigotry swathed it from cradle to tomb ;

When the Few thought, the Many mere workers. for them,

To use them, and when they had used, to condemn;

And the Many, poor fools, thought the treatment their due,

‘tnd crawled in the dust at the feet of the Few.

eo Present, though. clouds o’er, her. countenance roll,

Haga light in. her eyes and a hope in her soul.

And we are too wise, like the Bigots to mourn,

For the darkness of days that shall: never return,

Worn out and extinct, may their history serve

As a beacon to warn us. when e’er we swerve ;

fo shun the Gppression, the Folly and Crime,

Phat blacken the page of the Record. of ‘Pine.

Their chivalry lightened. the gloom. it is trae,

And Honour and Loyalty dwelt with the Few;

But small was the light, and of little avail, Compared with the blaze of our Press and our Fnii;, Success to that blaze! May it shine over all,

Till ignorance learn. with what grace she may fall, And fiy from the world with the sorrow she wrought,

THE EXAMINER.

bottom, and the worthy dominie resolved to descend and bring it up full. Having filled the bucket with the ‘crystal treasure,’ the master gave the word, and the youths forthwith commenced ee him up again. When near the top, as ill luck would h ceptor sneezed! "Blinltabeously the boys let a and, clapping their hands, vociferated the accustomed ‘

live our noble master!’ while the luckless dominie, bucket and all, went ratding down to the bottom again ——breaking at once his back and many of his prejudices in favour of etiquette.

flective though we were, sneezing we thought was an

discoveries of our maturer years have sufficiently proved how very ignorant we must have been to come to any such conclusion. Jewish rabbi and Christian pope— Arab, novelist and classic author—-the sands of Africa,

Long

tify that whenever the king of that region sneezed, a}! those who were in the place of his residence, or ever in the environs, were simultaneously apprised of j

either by signs, or certain forms of prayer made on hig

ave it, their pre-| behalf, whicl instantly spread the intelligence from the

palace to the city, and thence to the suburbs; go thar nothing was heard around but devovt wishes for the prince’s health, anda kind of ‘God save the king ? which every one was obliged to repeat aloud. More extraordinary still, this piece of etiquette was witnessed by the Spaniards among the natives of the new world

When this tale first met our youthful eye, little re-|Tle author of the ‘History of the Conquest of Florida,

informs us that the cazique of,Guachoia having sneezed jp

odd thing to make the subject of compliment. But the|the presence of Soto, all the Indians present immedi

bowed low before their prince, venting aspirations that the sun would preserve him, enlighten him, and be a}- ways with him.

A custom so singular and so universal could not fail

even the savannas of the new world-—all furnish proofs of the high improtance attached to the sternutative func- tions. Records of this are found in all countries and in al} times—except the antediluvian,

And this brings us at ence into contest with the Jewsh rabbis—those extraordinary feilows, who seem to have been better acquainted with Eden than ever were Adam and Eve—who know all the secrets of the Ark, and would beat Noah himself at an inventory of its furniture. Such extensive chronological attainments must be invaluable in searching out the origin of things; and we are glad we can derive the early history of sneezing from autho- rities sounimpeachable. As there is no mention in the Sacred Writings of illness among men until some time after the Flood, the rabbis declare that sickness was altogether unknown in the early world. How, then, it

to attract the notice of ancient writers, who have endea- voured to deduce its origin from natural religion, The head, they said, is the principal part of man: it is the fountain of the nerves, of all the sensations—it ig the dwe)ling-place of the soul, that divine particle which thence, as from its throne, governs the whole mass. hence a peculiar dignity always attached to it, and men in early times used to swear by their head as by some. thing sacred—that they never dared to. taste or. touch any kind of brain—that they even avoided naming the word, usually expressing it by a periphrasis, , such as ‘white marrow.’ From all this, itis added, it. is not strange that their descendants should continue. to reve- rence the brain, and attach importance to sneezing, which is its most visible manifestation.

may be asked, did men die in those days? Why, the just sneezed, and expired. Sosay the rabbis. They tell

from life, earnestly desired that some warning should be given in order to prepare for the momentous change. This, say the rabbis, was the object for which he wrestl- ed with the angel. His prayer was granted : he sneezed,

a man sneezing, and yet surviving, must, on the supposi- mankind: still more would the advent of disease—and

the most important phenomena of the human system. So much for tradition But mythology also pays 2 like. homage to this‘ wind of the head.’ Sneezing is said to have been the first act of the first man made by Pro- metheus. After giving the last finish to his work, Pro- metheus, we are told, cudgelled his brains as to how he was to impart to it life and motion. The difficulty, how- ever, was found to be a poser : he needed celestial aid to accomplish his purpose. Accordingly, conducted by the goddess Minerva,he skimmed lightly through the regions of several planets, and at last.approached the sen. This

his divine guide, Prometheus neared the resplendent orb, and filled with its liquid fire a phial which he had brought for that purpose, hermetically sealed it, and forthwith regained earth sound in limb and overjoyed in spirit. Applying the flask to the nostrils of his statue, he opened it, and instaataneously the subtle sunbeams insinuated themselves with such power through the pores of the spongy bone that the image sneezed. Upon this impulse the living principle was diffused through the brain, the nerves, the artsries—and the image stood forth as geod a man as its manufacturer. {tis added that Prometheus, overjoyed at the success of his experiment, broke into words of benediction and of prayer for the preservation of the wondrous work of his hands; and |that this first man, awakening into consciousness while the words. were being spoken, ever afterwards remember-

It was thus that the poets of Greece and Rome endea- voured to account for the existence of the wide-spread custom of saluting any one who sneezed; but the monks of the middle ages have not been behind-hand with them in the attempt. According to their legends, in the days of St. Gregory the Great: there reigned a deadly poison

ed instantly fell dead; and in consequence of the great tnortality, the Pope ordained that on all occasions when a yawn or sneeze occurred, the bystander should repeat

wight who.had been seduced into so perilous an indul- gence, 5

And leave it to. Virtue and Freedom of Thought,

~~ ee

From, Chambers’ Edinburgh JSourual, July 8, 1848.4 SNEEZING.

Among the. many enchanting tales of.the “ Arabian Nights,” ia which our youthful fancy of old luxuriated, we remember there was. one of a certain humpbacked school-master, who gives the history of his unfortunate deformity. Among the various valuable precepts which he inculeated, those of politeness seem to have held a ¢bief place; and when he sneezed, we are told the scho-

| Alexander the Great, whose preceptor Aristotle made i ithe subject of erudite remark. In all countries the ispirit of the salutation was the same—from the terse * Salve” of the Romans, to the rather-frish Orientalism, |‘ May you live.a thousand years, and never die!” and among the Greeks and Jews the very word was.identical

their comedies of an old fellow called Proclus, who had

and fell sick. The hitherto unheard-of circumstance of tion of the rabbis, have made a great sensation among

thus associated, sneezing thenceforth ranked as one of

was the stuff he wanted. Concealed under the mantleof

in the air of Italy, so that any one who sneezed or yawn-|

certain words of prayer, to avert danger from the luckless,

—‘Live” The Greeks have a capital story in one of

_As the ancients cannot now defend themselves, it would be ungenerous to make disparaging remarks on this theory of theirs; so we will rather purste our theme,

us, moreover, that Jacob, disrelishing this speedy exit and find the sternatative function, in unholy. wedlock

with superstition, playing the part of an influential, but on the whole very harmless, familiar spirit. Greeke, Romans, Egyptians, all listened to its ‘ warning trump’ as to the voice of a present deity ; and there are on re- cord endless instances in which a sneeze has determined an embarrassed heathen in his line of conduct, One day, for instance, Xenophon was haranguing his troops, and just as he was impetuously exhorting them to adopt a hazardous, but in his view indispensable resolution, a soldier sneezed : spontaneously, says the historian, the whole army adored the deity; and Xenophon, skilfully profiting by the incident, wound upjby proposing a sa- crifice to the ‘saviour god’ who had thus counselled

} . jthem to adopt the salutary plans of their general. In

| Homer, likewise, when Penelope, harrassed by the im- portunities of her suitors, is venting imprecations against ‘them, and b reathing wishes for the return of her Ulysses, her son Telemachus interrupts her with a sneeze so loud, that it shakes the whole house: Penelope giyes way to transports of joy, and sees in this incident an assurance ofthe speedy return of her long-absent husband. Even the wondrous demon of Socrates, which the sage so often consulted in the exigencies of his eventful life.was neither sy]ph nor salamander, if we are to trust a pas- sage in Plutarch—neither genii nor conscience—it was a sneeze!

it is true there is something rather anti-romantic in a ‘sneeze ; yet in olden times, when Venus was still queen lof beauty and Jove, a gallant would often not have ex- ‘changed the sound of its rasping blast for the softest | breathings of Zephyr, or the sweetest song of the night- jingale. Indeed, in the ever-shifting world of love—of ali. pothers the brightest, yet most troubled—this omen was /regarded as the weightiest and happiest of all. Parthenis, ‘a young Greek girl, who has rather foolishly allowed her-

\self to get lead and ears in Jove with a youth, after manv

ed them ; and on every instance of sternutation in himself SOT ty pT and long irresolations, resolves to write or his descendants, imitated the example of his artificer! 8" ®V0™ wl of her passion to her dear Sarpedon, Let us.

ifollow her to her bower or herboudoir. There she sits, ‘the loving, foolish creature! with as heavy and anxious 'a heart as ever belonged to a sweet girl ofsixteen, The gentle murmurs of the AZgean come floating into the ‘room; andas she looks up, the evening sunlight falls cheeringly on her pale check as it quivers through the ‘vine trellis, Her eye is brimming, and her heart futters ‘as she resumes her stylus; for now she is at the very crisis of her letter, and is avowing her passion with guileless ardour, when a light, rapid convulsion shakes ‘the stylus from her grasp. She has sneezed! Jt iz enough: Parthenis is once more all joy: for she knows

that at the same instant Sarpedon is thinking of her

The custom was ef long standing even in.the days of}¥!th Sentiments as loving as her own. he heathen ws ° de it divinities themselves seem to have sneezed when more

‘than usually pleased, and inclined to be beneficent: and

‘the poets used to say of persons remarkably beautiful, ‘that ‘the Loves had sneezed at their birth.” Cupid ap- pears to liave been especially fond of thus testifying his ‘approbation, as we learn from the sweet little poem of | Acme and Septimellus, from. which the following linea

‘are. translated :—

tirs were tatight to.clap their hands, anhexelaim ‘ Leng|

ive our noble master!’ One day the dominie and his'

popils were walking in the country: the day was sultry,}

and they were all glad when at last they fell in with a, }

“ell, But, if ve remember oright, the bucket, was at the]

a nose so. very big that he could not blow it, as by no. possibility could his hands reach to the end of his nasal | protuberance ; and to give posterity a still better idea of} this formidable proboscis, the Greek dramatist adds, that when this Mr. Proclus sneezed, he could not even cry, ‘God heip me.’ aa.the noze was too far off for the ear to! hear.

But far from being confined to classic ground and the realms of Asia, the. practice existed even in the depths of barbarous Afica. Old accounts of Monomopata tea

‘ Acme then her head reflecting, Kissed: her sweet youth's ebriate eyes, With her rosy lips connecting r Looks that glistened with replies.’ ‘Thus, my life, my Septimeljus! Serve we Love, our only master: One warm, love-flood seems th thrill ue, Throbs it not.in me the faster 7’ She said: and, as before, T.ove on the left hand aptly sneezedi— “Phe omen showed that he wae leap To give his blessing.’