Notes & Queries: A Fragment on Mummies

I was recently reading volume three of Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (1964 edition). The volume contains mostly miscellaneous pieces and lesser-known works by Browne. It ended with a little piece that I found absolutely charming, “A Fragment on Mummies”. I had never come across the “Fragment” before, and although I enjoyed it immensely, there was something a little odd about it. After finishing it, I referred back to Keynes’ introduction to the volume to see what he had to say about it. He wrote that the fragment

 “was initially supplied to Wilkin by his friend, James Crossley of Manchester, who pretended to have forgotten where he had seen the original manuscript. Wilkin printed the piece in good faith, but afterwards saw that there was reason to doubt its authenticity, and it was omitted from Bohn’s reprint of his edition in 1852. Crossley never publicly admitted having written it himself, and the reader may be left to judge whether Browne would have owned to its verbal extravagances, or would even have gusted so irreverent a pleasantry.”

 The story is that James Crossley (1800-1883) of Manchester had sent the “Fragment on Mummies” to Simon Wilkin, who was preparing his 1835 edition of Browne’s works. Crossley claimed to have gotten it from a manuscript in the British Library, but no one has managed to find any such manuscript. (The documentary history of this story is laid out in Samuel Swett Green’s 1903 paper.)

Keynes’ account, above, is a bit ambiguous, making it sound as if it were still an open question whether or not the “Fragment on Mummies” was written by Browne, and if it was not, what telltale signs within the piece might give it away as a fake. (I believed I had spotted at least one such sign.) So, of course I needed to learn more.

The consensus of course is that it is not genuine, which leads me to the question of Crossley’s intentions. I have seen the “Fragment” described as a “parody”. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian (17 December 1901), C. W. Hutton referred to it as a “hoax” and a “jeu d’esprit”. Since Crossley fessed up to it only much later and only once he was directly accused, and since his confession was not to poor Wilkin, I would prefer to call this a forgery. But it is a very beautiful one, as this passage, once famously quoted by Emerson, demonstrates:

“Of their living habitations they made little account, conceiving of them but as hospitia, or inns, while they adorned the sepulchres of the dead, and planted them on lasting bases, defying the crumbling touches of time and the misty vaporousness of oblivion. Yet all were but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semisomnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveller as he paceth amazedly through those deserts asketh of her, who buildeth them? and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.”

Three days after Hutton’s letter appeared, the editor of the Guardian thanked him for clearing up the mystery: “We should never have guessed that it was not a genuine piece by the author of the ‘Urn Burial,’ and are inclined to place Mr. James Crossley, who wrote it, among the most skilful imitators of other men’s style of whom literary history tells us.” Note again the indulgence granted here to Crossley. He is not a fraudster, he is an imitator.

Anyway, as I said, I guessed it was not genuine, and here is why. As I was reading the piece, I stumbled at one word in the following sentence:

“Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? Surely such a diet is dismal vampirism…”

Now, the OED’s earliest citation for “vampire” (or “vampyre”) is from The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh (1734). And the earliest citation for “vampirism” is from Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794-96). This was the rat I smelled.

Now I wish, dear reader, that I was clever enough to have been the first to note this. But it turns out that I was anticipated by at least one other person, Robert Kane, in a 1933 paper. Two further lexical anachronisms in the “Fragment” identified by Kane are worthy of mention, if for no other reason than to give Crossley his due as an innovator. First, Crossley’s 1835 use of “blinkingly” pre-dates the OED’s earliest citation of 1879. Second, the OED’s earliest citation of “semisomnous” is from Henry Rogers’ The Supernatural Origin of the Bible (1873). But in that work Rogers was himself quoting from the “Fragment on Mummies”!

 

Sources

 BROWNE, Sir Thomas. The Works (4 Vols.). Geoffrey Keynes (ed.). London: Faber & Faber, 1964.

 GREEN, Samuel Swett. “Did Sir Thomas Browne Write ‘Fragment on Mummies’?” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 15 (1903), 442-447.

 KANE, Robert J. “James Crossley, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Fragment on Mummies,” Review of English Studies 9.35 (1933), 266-274.

Notes & Queries: Bird of Liberty

Hint: It's not him.

Repeat visitors to this blog will know that The Spectacled Avenger’s favourite book is Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. I have a particular fascination with the engravings commissioned for the second edition (1714), executed by Simon Gribelin. These consisted of a large frontispiece plate for each of the three volumes of the work, with elaborate headpiece engravings designed for the individual treatises that comprise its entirety. Most (but not all) of these engravings have a tripartite structure, and all of them are intended as emblematic illustrations of key parts of the text.

I was lately pondering the significance of the storks in the bottom panel of the triptych to the plate for Volume I:

Why storks? They must have some significance. In interpreting the meaning of Shaftesbury’s emblems, there are, generally speaking, two loci classici. One is the so-called “Virtuoso-Coppy Book” or set of detailed instructions that Shaftesbury sent from Naples (where he was dying) to Gribelin in London. The second is a 1974 paper by Felix Paknadel, “Shaftesbury’s Illustrations of Characteristics”.

Turning to Paknadel, here is what he notes about this panel:

“Shaftesbury had thought of the picture of ‘a boy holding the cap of Liberty in a triumphing manner’, but then decided to keep the boys for the ‘treatise plates’, which were to be of a lighter character. The lower border represents social harmony [on one side ‘two right hands meeting and clasped’ above the three altars of different forms; on the other side, the emblems of music] and prosperity, mainly in the oval frame [night and day-the face of Apollo at the top, that of Diana at the bottom abundance reigns-cornucopias, a vine growing up a tree, the Rotundo and a ‘palace in good repair’, the caduceus with two wings, the two storks ‘which with their wings seem to support the work above’]. The motto ‘FEL.TEM.’ is the abbreviation of ‘Felicia Tempora’…. The social implication of the whole emblem is clear. Freedom, maintained by a wise ruler, breeds social harmony and fosters the development of civilization.” (p. 299)

No enlightenment here; just the laconic mention that the storks exist and that they support the larger panel above it (not reproduced here). As a gloss, this is no more informative than the “Virtuoso-Coppy-Book”, indeed, it simply reproduces the relevant passage from the Copy-Book. The latter also fails to explain the significance of the storks, though it does mention that they are significant (“essential”):

“Note that in the mere Grotesque-Work of this Under-Border there are four Pieces essential viz^t. The Two Storks which with their Wings seem to support the Work above, and between their allmost joyning Bills (just at the Top the Oval frame-Work) the Head or rather Face of an APOLLO…” (Virtuoso-Coppy-Book 184)

(Sadly, it is worth mentioning that the design for this Volume I frontispiece is the only one for which Shaftesbury lived to see Gribelin’s finished plate.)

Now, it often happens that one cannot “read” one of these plates in isolation from the others. In this case, for reasons I won’t elaborate on here, it bears a relationship to the bottom panel of the triptych to the plate for Volume III. Suffice to say that, whereas the former illustrates the fruits of political and religious liberty, this one is meant to illustrate the evils of a policy of tyranny, superstition, and religious bigotry. Here is that panel:

 

 

 

 The twin storks in the earlier panel have been replaced with

“two metamorphos’d Human Forms which seem of a female Kind and serve as Supporters, back to back, against the Frame-Work, [and] must appear blind-folded.” (Virtuoso-Coppy-Book 154)

Here is Paknadel’s gloss:

“The results of such a policy are shown in the oval frame. [The ancient monuments are tumbling down; day is turned into night, birds of bad omen are flying; the vine has become a bare tree. The faces of Apollo and Diana are replaced by those of Ignorance at the top and Stupidity at the bottom; the storks by two blinded females. The motto is now EN QUO, the abbreviation meaning ‘Behold, whither are we brought! To what state reduced!’]” (pp. 304-305)

I did recently chance upon a rather obscure connection between the above-mentioned “birds of bad omen” and storks. In his posthumous Select Discourses (1660), the Cambridge Platonist philosopher John Smith (1618-1652) makes the following remark: “as Aelian observes of the Stork, that if the Night-owle chanceth to sit upon her eggs, they become presently as it were υπηνεμια, and all incubation rendred impotent and ineffectual” (p. 7). (The reference is to Book I.37 of Aelian’s De natura animalium.)

Now, this is all very interesting, one supposes. But still my question persists: why storks? If he simply needed some creature as mere ornament to frame the head of Apollo, presumably any bird would do. Why not eagles? Or roosters? Shaftesbury doesn’t tell us, and Paknadel makes no attempt to decode the symbolism of the storks, if indeed there is any.

In my experience, when in need of information about the traditional lore of the natural world, it is often helpful to reach for Pliny, or, failing that, to pull Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) from the shelves. Lo and behold, in the latter’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646, last revision 1671), Bk. III, ch. 27, we find out that it was once a commonly held belief that “Storks are to be found, and will only live, in Republikes or free States”. Browne’s work does not appear in Shaftesbury’s library catalogue as it has come down to us, but no doubt he was familiar with the notion.

Incidentally – this entire post has been incidental – we also learn from Browne (Bk. V, ch. 22) that the owl had historically been seen as a harbinger of misfortune, and by extension had in his time become emblematic of superstition.

 

Bibliography

BROWNE, Sir Thomas. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne (Vol. II: Pseudodoxia Epidemica). Geoffrey Keynes (ed.). London: Faber and Faber, 1964.

PAKNADEL, Felix. “Shaftesbury’s Illustrations of Characteristics,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974), 290-312.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3^rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 vols.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.

—— PRO 30/24/24/13. (“Virtuoso-Coppy-Book”, consisting of Shaftesbury’s instructions for the engravings in Characteristicks.) Reproduced in Standard Edition (Vol. I,3), Wolfram Benda (ed.). Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromman Verlag, 1992. 

—— PRO 30/24/23/12. (“Catalogus Librorum Anglicorum, Gallicorum, Italicorum etc…. Anno Ærae Christianæ 1709”, catalogue of works in vernacular languages in Shaftesbury’s libraries in Chelsea and St. Giles.)

SMITH, John. Select Discourses. London: J. Flesher for W. Morden, 1660.

Notes & Queries: Amicable Collisions

Occasionally, upon reading a work of literature, one comes across a phrase, a sentence, or a thought that is particularly well-expressed, and gets echoed down the years in the works of other authors with whom it resonates. Sometimes it’s just that – an echo, so faint it might have come from somewhere else. Sometimes it’s clear as a bell, though even then the writer might not be fully conscious of its origin.

And sometimes, because the thought behind the phrase is commonplace – though perhaps never so well-turned – one is apt to wonder whether it was the original invention of that author, or whether he had cribbed it from someone else (again, perhaps unconsciously).

There is a line in Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), which struck me the first time (of many) that I read it:

“All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision” (Vol. I, p. 64).

I would not go out of my way to argue that the thought is original to Shaftesbury. But one finds it in many later writers, expressed in words so similar, that there can be no mistaking the provenance. Here are a few examples:

“I like the description of your pic-nic, where I take it for granted, that your cards are only to break the formality of a circle, and your Symposion intended more to promote conversation than drinking. Such an amicable collision, as Lord Shaftesbury very prettily calls it, rubs off and smooths those rough corners, which mere nature has given to the smoothest of us.” Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son (29 October 1748).

(No mistaking that one; it’s a direct citation.)

“The genius of a people where nothing but the monarchy is salique, having ceded this department, with sundry others, totally to the women – by a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and sizes from morning to night, like so many rough pebbles shook long together in a bag, by amicable collisions, they have worn down their asperities and sharp angles…” Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), p. 54.

“It was those Meetings in particular [i.e. of the Select Society], That Rub’d off all Corners as we call it, by Collison [sic.], and made the Literati of Edin^r. Less Captious and Pedantick than they were Elsewhere.” Alexander Carlyle (1722-1805), Anecdotes and Characters of the Times, p. 150n.

From the above fairly obvious allusions, we descend to the less obvious. Here, they tend to fall into two classes: a) they either borrow Shaftesbury’s idea and express it in different words, or b) they borrow Shaftesbury’s imagery to express a thought somewhat different. The next example is Samuel Johnson’s verbose but elegant expansion of (what I believe to be) his source in Shaftesbury:

“In cities, and yet more in courts, the minute discriminations which distinguish one from another are for the most part effaced, the peculiarities of temper and opinion are gradually worn away by promiscuous converse, as angular bodies and uneven surfaces lose their point and asperities by frequent attrition against one another, and approach by degrees to uniform rotundity.” Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 138 (13 July 1751).

Although the wording is quite different from Shaftesbury’s, the thought is very similar. Except that here, Johnson puts his own typically pessimistic spin on it: Yes, liberty enables us to rub off our rough corners in a sort of amicable collision, but we get polished down to a sameness in the process; there is a loss of individuality and variety. Politeness leaves little room for eccentricity.

In the next example, from Herder (1744-1803), Shaftesbury’s idea is extended from individuals to polities:

“[S]o many edges had first to be worn down with force before that round, smooth, well-behaved thing which we are could appear!… Behold how these great state-bodies, within which mankind is no doubt best cared for, are now rubbing against one another without destroying each other, and cannot ever destroy each other!” Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind (1774), §2

The next two examples are of interest for their authors’ genealogical proximity to Shaftesbury. In a very Shaftesburean philosophical dialogue, his nephew James Harris (1709-1780) offered up this line:

“My Reproaches produced a sort of amicable Controversy.” Three Treatises (1744), in The Works of James Harris, Esq. (1801), Vol. I, pp. 25-26:

One cannot help but think that Shaftesbury’s more famous descendent, the 7^th Earl, had this passage of his ancestor’s in mind when, in the preface to his a collection of his speeches, speaking of the mental life of the agricultural labourer, as contrasted with the urban industrial labourer, he wrote:

“He has not, of course, the acquirements and acuteness of the urban operative; his labour is passed in comparative solitude, and he returns to his home at night, in a remote cottage or a small village, without the resource of clubs, mechanics’ institutes, and the friction of his fellow-men” [italics added]. Speeches… upon Subjects Having Relation Chiefly to the Claims and Interests of the Labouring Class, (1868), p. viii.

I assuming throughout here that the third Earl’s phrasing was original (corners and rough sides, amicable collision, etc.), if not the idea itself.

QUERY: Was it? Is there a predecessor whom Shaftesbury was imitating, much like the above authors imitated him?

Though not identical, here is a candidate:

“Moreover, thanks to the prizes which a republic offers, an orator’s intellectual gifts are whetted by practice, burnished, so to speak, by friction, and share, as is only natural, the light of freedom which illuminates the state.” Longinus, On the Sublime, 44.3.

*          *          *          *          *

Bibliography

CHESTERFIELD, Philip Dormer, 4^th Earl of. Selected Letters of Lord Chesterfield. London: Oxford University Press, 1929.

HARRIS, James. The Works of James Harris, Esq. (2 vols.). London: F. Wingrave, 1801 (facsimile, Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003).

HERDER, Johann Gottfried. Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004.

JOHNSON, Samuel. Works (12 vols.). London: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1823.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3^rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 volumes). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001. 

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7^th Earl of. Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G. upon Subjects Having Relation Chiefly to the Claims and Interests of the Labouring Class. London: Chapman and Hall, 1868. 

STERNE, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, to which are added The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance. Ian Jack (ed.). London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

 

Notes & Queries: Eric Roop

 

Updating my previous post, I can now say that I have finished reading Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t intended to plough through it so quickly, but it was just that enjoyable.

 One thing I noticed is that from time to time, Davies has a touch of that donnish love of wordplay and anagram. For example, in the third book in the trilogy, World of Wonders, Magnus Eisengrim, the narrator for most of the book, tells the following anecdote about his dining experience on the Canadian Pacific Railway while touring with a theatrical troupe:

“There were bottled sauces too. Commercial stuff I learned to hate because at every meal that dreary utility actor Jim Hailey asked for Garton’s; then he would wave it about saying, ‘Anybody want any of the Handkerchief?’ because, as he laboriously pointed out, if you spelled Garton’s backward it came out Snotrag; poor Hailey was that depressing creature, a man of one joke.”

In the second book in the trilogy, The Manticore, the narrator, David Staunton, describes how, upon his wealthy father’s death, his stepmother Denyse intended to commission a statue of him, as well as a biography:

“What she wanted now was a monument for my father, and she had decided that a large piece of sculpture by Henry Moore would be just the thing. Not to be given to the Art Gallery or the City, of course. To be put up in the cemetery. I hope that gives you the measure of Denyse. No sense of congruity; no sense of humour; no modesty. Just ostentation and gall working under the governance of a fashionable, belligerent, unappeasable ambition.

“Her second great plan was for a monument of another kind; she announced with satisfaction that my father’s biography was to be written by Dunstan Ramsay. She had wanted Eric Roop to do it — Roop was one of her proteges and as a poet he was comparable to her dentist friend as a sculptor — but Roop had promised himself a fallow year if he could get a grant to see him through it. I knew this already, because Roop’s fallow years were as familiar to Castor as Pharaoh’s seven lean kine, and his demand that we stake him to another had been circulated to the Board, and I had seen it.”

“Castor” here is not the character of mythology, but rather the name of the charitable foundation set up by his father. It seems that Eric Roop the poet is one of those starving artist types who is allergic to hard work and has made a habit of resorting to the Castor well for grants to support his accustomed standard of leisure.

Here is what makes this example worthy of a Notes & Queries post: knowing about Davies’ love of anagrams, I can’t help but wonder whether he was playing with us here, and that the poet’s name ought really to be “Crie Poor”.