See < Shins = BY ORDER OF THE KING. A Romanee of English History. “DAIn . \ - ery. ra, wen ‘dMOUN GZHL DNINONVUVH SNsdn — NY \ Wy ivebe os mY { i = 1 ong Pda Be Wag ian ie ee an \\ 2 af %Z BY ORDER OF THE KING. THE AUTHORISED ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF VICTOR HUGO’S L’HOMME QUI RIT. IN THREE VOLUMES.—VOL. I. NY WES, SS EX AS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY S. L. FILDES. LONDON: BRADBURY, EVANS, & CO., 11, BOUVERIE STREET. 1870. aes a as el ed Ssbce |b. SLOCUiii CONTENTS. —_4——- PAGE PRELIMINARY CHAPTER. URSUS , fi ANOTHER PRELIMINARY CHAPTER. ~ZHE COMPRACHICOS : A . 5 30 iy OD 'y Ol oz Part I. ra BOOK THE FIRST. a Night not so Mlack as Sean. —+— . CHAPTER I. ™ LORTLAND BILL . OL ‘ CHAPTER II. § LEFT ALONE 60 CHAPTER -II. 3 ALONE 65 ~ CHAPTER IV. /~ QUESTIONS "3 CHAPTER YV. THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION vi CONTENTS. CHAPTER YI. PAGE STRUGGLE BETWEEN DEATH AND NIGHT 5 : Z : wt i¢ 83 CHAPTER VII. THE NORTH POINT OF PORTLAND ; ; 5 ; ; : 92 BOOK THE SECOND. The Wooker at Sea, CHAPTER I. SUPERHUMAN LAWS > 3 4 P j ; ; ? ee OF CHAPTER It. OUR FIRST ROUGH SKETCHES FILLED IN. : s 2 P AR CHAPTER III. TROUBLED MEN ON THE TROUBLED SEA . 5 : F Se MR CHAPTER IY. A CLOUD DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS ENTERS ON THE SCENE LS CHAPTER YV. HWARDQUANONNE . E i Z 4 : : 4 “ : yj tate CHAPTER VI. THEY THINK THAT HELP IS AT HAND . A : ; ape Let CHAPTER YII. SUPERHUMAN HORRORS : F ; 4 4 : r - te Les ‘CHAPTER YVIILII. NIL ET NOX . ; ° ‘ opt lids . . ; 3 ree he CHAPTER IX. ‘THE CHARGE CONFIDED TO A RAGING SEA. 5 : : : . 145 CONTENTS. ne ee ———— OHAPTER X. THE COLOSSAL SAVAGE, THE STORM CHAPTER XI. THE CASKETS CHAPTER XII. FACE TO FACE WITH THE ROCK CHAPTER XIII. FACE TO FACE WITH NIGHT CHAPTER XIV. ORTACH . CHAP TIME OY. PORTENTOSUM MARE CHAPTER XVI. THE PROBLEM SUDDENLY WORKS IN SILENCE CHAPTER XVII. THE LAST RESOURCE CHAPTER XYIII. THE HIGHEST RESOURCE BOOK THE THIRD. The Child in the Shadow. ee eae CHAPTER I. CHESIL CHAPTER II. THE EFFECT OF SNOW Vil 153 162 164 167 74 184 197 204 viii CONTENTS. CHAPTER III. A BURTHEN MAKES A ROUGH ROAD ROUGHER CHAPTER IV. ANOTHER FORM OF DESERT . CHAPTER V. MISANTHROPY PLAYS ITS PRANKS CHAPTER VI. THE AWAKING Parr [I]. BOOK THE FIRST. Che Everlasting Wresence of the Past. PAan reflects Man. poe Gey CHAPTER I. LORD CLANCHARLIE CHAPTER ILI. LORD DAVID DIRRY-MOIR CHAPTER IT. THE DUCHESS JOSIANA ° ° CHAPTER IY. THE LEADER OF FASHION PAGE 210 216 223 243 251 276 288 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. oO URSUS HARANGUING THE CROWD.—Frontispiece. ‘‘ SKIPPER, DO YOU SEE THAT ?”’—Title-page. THE COMPRACHICOS. GWYNPLAINE ABANDONED. THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION. LASHED TO THE HELM. ‘LET US PRAY.” GWYNPLAINE DISCOVERS DEA. ba PELL ie iS fea ete . \ eae » : iy ‘ i f ‘ é H . _ j : 2 . 7 ’ sf ah, = bre us 3 F n ; i R : " ‘ | yoy a ‘ at <> q's aS d i ‘ ‘ , 1 . om : a ‘ nd th . i f ; ‘ aoe i : % { 4 na] wi = } a : tg } \ . = bar } eee ¥ y . wl =~ i ort = 1 ‘ ‘ we } i =—9 : oi is ae ve OM a ee nf Vo San ie iP om! ree PEN ; tk ae ‘Sma BY ORDER OF THE KING. @ Romance of English History, PRELIMINARY CHAPTER. URSUS. RSUS and Homo were fast friends. Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf. Their dis- positions tallied. It was the man who had christened the wolf: probably he had also chosen his own name. Having found Ursus fit for himself, he had found Homo fit for the beast. Man and wolf turned their partnership to account at fairs, at village fétes, at the corners of streets where passers-by throng, and out of the VOL. I. ( B 2 BY ORDER OF “THE. KING. need which people seem to feel everywhere to listen to idle gossip, and to buy quack medicine. The wolf, gentle and courteously subordinate, diverted the crowd. It is a pleasant thing to behold the tameness of animals. Our greatest delight is to see all the varieties of domestication parade before us. This it is which collects so many folks on the road of royal processions. | Ursus and Homo went about from cross-road to cross-road, from the High Street of Aberystwith to the High Street of Jedburgh, from country-side: to country-side, from shire to shire, from town to town. One market exhausted, they went on to another. Ursus lived in a small van upon wheels, which Homo was civilised enough to draw by day and guard by night. On bad roads, up hills, and where there were too many ruts, or there was too much mud, the man buckled the trace round his neck and pulled fraternally, side by side with the wolf. They had thus grown old together. They encamped at hap-hazard on a common, in the glade of a wood, on the waste patch of grass where roads intersect, at the outskirts of villages, at the gates of towns, in market-places, in public walks, on the borders of parks, before the entrances of churches. When the cart drew up on a fair green, when the gossips ran up open-mouthed and the curious made a circle round the pair, Ursus harangued and Homo approved. Homo, with a bowl in his mouth, politely made a collection among the audience. They gained their livelihood. The wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers URSUS. wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. ‘“ Above all things, do not degenerate into a man,” his friend would say to him. Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite was the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicise his misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also ; for the stomach has to be consulted. Moreover, this juggler-misanthrope, whether to add to the complexity of his being or to perfect it, was a doctor. To be a doctor is little: Ursus was a ventriloquist. You heard him speak without his moving his lips. He counterfeited, so as to deceive you, any- one’s accent or pronunciation. He imitated voices so exactly that you believed you heard the people themselves. All alone he simulated the murmur of a crowd, and this gave him a right to the title of Engastrimythos, which he took. He re- produced all sorts of cries of birds, as of the thrush, the wren, the pipit lark, otherwise called the grey cheeper, and the ring ousel, all travellers like himself ; so that at times when the fancy struck him, he made you aware either of a public thoroughfare filled with the uproar of men, or of a meadow loud with the voices of beasts—at one time stormy as a multitude, at another fresh and serene as the dawn. Such gifts, although rare, exist. In the last century a man called Touzel, who imitated the mingled utterances of men and animals, and who counterfeited all the cries of beasts, was attached to the person of Buffon—to serve as a menagerie, Ursus was sagacious, contradictory, odd, and inclined to the singular expositions which we term fables. He had the appear- B2 4 BY | ORDE RitOf iil lo eV G, ance of believing in them, and this impudence was a part of his humour. He read people’s hands, opened books at random and drew conclusions, told fortunes, taught that it is perilous to meet a black mare, still more perilous, as you start for a journey, to hear yourself accosted by one who knows not whither you are going ; and he called himself a dealer in superstitions. He used to say: “There is one difference between me and the Archbishop of Can- terbury : I avow what I am.” Hence it was that the archbishop, justly indignant, had him one day before him; but Ursus cleverly disarmed his grace by reciting a sermon he had composed upon Christmas-day, which the delighted archbishop learnt by heart, and delivered from the pulpit as his own. In consideration thereof the archbishop pardoned Ursus. As a doctor, Ursus wrought cures by some means or other. He made use of aromatics ; he was versed in simples; he made the most of the immense power which lies in a heap of neglected plants, such as the hazel, the catkin, the white alder, the white briony, the mealy-tree, the traveller’s joy, the buckthorn. He treated phthisis with the sundew; at opportune moments he would use the leaves of the spurge, which plucked at the bottom are a purgative and plucked at the top, an emetic. He cured sore throat by means of the vegetable excrescence called Jew’s ear. He knew the rush which cures the ox and the mint which cures the horse. He was well acquainted with the beauties and virtues of the herb mandragora, which, as every one knows, is of both sexes. He had many recipes. He cured burns with the salamander wool, of which, according to Pliny, Nero had a napkin, URSUS. 5 Ursus possessed a retort and a flask; he effected transmutations ; he sold panaceas. It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to some such legend about us, The fact is, Ursus was a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an old Latin poet. He was learned in two forms; he Hippo- cratised and he Pindarised.. He could have vied in bombast with Rapin and Vida. He could have composed: Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than that of Father Bouhours. It followed from his familiarity with the venerable rhythms and metres of the ancients, that he had peculiar figures of speech, and a whole family of classical metaphors. He would say of a mother followed by her two daughters, U'here is a dactyl; of a father preceded by his two sons, There is an anapest; and of alittle child walking between its grandmother and grandfather, There 1s an amphimacer. So much knowledge could only end in starvation. ‘The school of Salerno says, “ Hat little and often.” Ursus ate little and seldom, thus obeying one half the precept and disobeying the other; but this was the fault of the public, who did not always flock to him, and who did not often buy. Ursus was wont to say: “The expectoration of a sentence is a relief. The wolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by its finch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his .epiphonema.” Ursus at a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted ; this helped to sell the drugs. 6 BY ORDER VORCTAL KING, Among other works, he had composed an heroic pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river to London. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles from London; the knight came and took possession of it. He brought a brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pick-axes ; set to breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in another—now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep ; made wooden aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred ,bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his bed, saying, “I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay them,”—an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh Middleton had completed the work at his own expense. Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once un- sociable and talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one’s nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is an outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took after those great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty URSUS. 7 of being his own audience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised himself, blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquising in his van. The passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever people, used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just observed, he abused himself at times ; but there were times also when he rendered himself justice. One day, in one of these allocutions addressed to himself, he was heard to cry out, “I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries —in the stalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpel, in the ovule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I have thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy ; that is to say, the formation of colours, of smell, and of taste.’ There was something fatuous, doubtless, in this certi- ficate which Ursus gave to Ursus; but let those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy cast the first stone at him. Fortunately Ursus had never gone into the Low Countries; there they would certainly have weighed him, to ascertain whether he was of the normal weight, above or below which a man is a sorcerer. In Holland this weight was sagely fixed by law. Nothing was simpler or more ingenious. It was a clear test. They put you in a scale, and the evidence was conclusive if you broke the equilibrium. Too heavy, you were hanged ; too light, you were burned. To this day the scales in which sorcerers were weighed may be seen at Oudewater, but they are now used for weighing cheeses; how religion has degenerated ! Ursus would certainly have had a crow to pluck with. those 8 BY ORDER SOR AVIHE “IENG. scales. In his travels he kept away from Holland, and he did well. Indeed, we believe that he used never to leave the United Kingdom. However this may have been, he was very poor and morose, and having made the acquaintance of Homo in a wood, a taste for a wandering life had come over him. He had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him had gone forth on the highways, living in the open air the great life of chance. He had a great deal of industry and of reserve, and great skill in every thing connected with healing operations, restoring the sick to health, and in working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered a clever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be imagined, he passed for a wizard as well,—not much, indeed; only a little, for it was unwholesome in those days to be considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth, Ursus, by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid himself open to suspicion, seeing that he often went to gather herbs in rough thickets where grew Lucifer’s salads, and where, as has been proved by the Counsellor De l’Ancre, there is a risk of meeting in the evening mist a man who comes out of the earth, “ blind of the right eye, bare-footed, without a cloak, and a sword by his side.” But for the matter of that, Ursus, although eccentric in manner and disposition, was too good a fellow to invoke or disperse hail, to make faces appear, to kill a man with the torment of excessive dancing, to suggest dreams fair or foul and full of terror, and to cause the birth of cocks with four wings. He had no such mischievous tricks. He was incapable of certain abominations, such as, for URSUS. 9 instance, speaking German, Hebrew, or Greek, without having learned them, which is a sign of unpardonable wickedness, or of a natural infirmity proceeding from a morbid humour. If Ursus spoke Latin, it was because he knew it. He would never have allowed himself to speak Syriac, which he did not know. Be- sides, it is asserted that Syriac is the language spoken in the midnight meetings at which uncanny people worship the devil. In medicine he justly preferred Galen to Cardan; Cardan, although a learned man, being but an earthworm to Galen. To sum up, Ursus was not one of those persons who live in fear of the police. His van was long enough and wide enough ~ to allow of his lying down in it on a box containing his not very sumptuous apparel. He owned a lantern, several wigs, and some utensils suspended from nails, among which were musical instru- ments. He possessed, besides, a bearskin with which he covered himself on his days of grand performance. He called this putting on full dress. He used to say “I have two skins; this iy the real one,”—pointing to the bearskin. The little house on wheels belonged to himself and to the wolf. Besides his house, his retort, and. his wolf, he had a flute and a violoncello on which he played prettily. He concocted his own elixirs. His wits yielded him enough to sup on sometimes. In the top of his van was a hole, through which passed the pipe of a cast-iron stove; so close to his box as to scorch the wood of it. The stove had two compartments ; in one of them Ursus cooked his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes. At night the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain. Homo’s hair 10 | BY ORDER OF WHE KING, was black, that of Ursus, grey ; Ursus was fifty, unless, indeed, he was sixty. He accepted his destiny, to such an extent that, as we have just seen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs and convicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He was not tall—he was long. He was bent and melancholy. The bowed frame of an old man is the settlement in the archi- tecture of life. Nature had formed him for sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able to weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears, as well as of the palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin was _ Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In his youth he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord. This was 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they are now. Not so very much though. II. Homo was no ordinary wolf. From his appetite for medlars and potatoes he might have been taken for a prairie wolf; from his dark hide, for a lycaon; and from his howl prolonged into a bark, for a dog of Chili. But no one has as yet observed the eyeball of a dog of Chili sufficiently to enable us to determine whether he be not a fox, and Homo was a real wolf. He was five feet long, which is a fine length for a wolf, even in Lithuania ; he was very strong; he looked at you askance, which was not his UJRSUS. II fault ; he had a soft tongue, with which he occasionally licked Ursus; he had a narrow brush of short bristles on his backbone, and he was lean with the wholesome leanness of a forest life. Before he knew Ursus and had a carriage to draw, he thought nothing of doing his fifty miles a night. Ursus meeting him in a thicket near a stream of running water, had conceived a high opinion of him from seeing the skill and sagacity with which he fished out cray-fish, and welcomed him as an honest and genuine Koupara wolf of the kind called crab-eater. As a beast of burthen, Ursus preferred Homo to a donkey. He would have felt repugnance to having his hut drawn by an ass; he thought too highly of the ass for that. Moreover, he had observed that the ass, a four-legged thinker little under- stood by men, has a habit of cocking his ears uneasily when philosophers talk nonsense. In life the ass is a third person between our thoughts and ourselves, and acts as a restraint. As a friend, Ursus preferred Homo to a dog, considering that the love of a wolf is more rare. Hence it was that Homo sufficed for Ursus. Homo was for Ursus more than a companion, he was an analogue. Ursus used to pat the wolf’s empty ribs, saying: “I have found the second volume of myself!” Again he said, “ When I am dead, any one wishing to know me need only study Homo. [I shall leave a true copy behind me.” The English law, not very lenient to beasts of the forest, might have picked a quarrel with the wolf, and have put him to trouble for his assurance in going freely about the towns ; but Homo took 12 BY (ORDER SOL TEE Gaye. advantage of the immunity granted by a statute of Edward IV. to servants : “Every servant in attendance on his master is free to come and go.” Besides, a certain relaxation of the law had resulted with regard to wolves, in consequence of its being the fashion of the ladies of the Court, under the later Stuarts, to have, instead of dogs, little wolves, called adives, about the size of cats, which were brought from Asia at great cost. Ursus had communicated to Homo a portion of his talents: such as to stand upright, to restrain his rage into sulkiness, to growl instead of howling, &c.; and on his part, the wolf had taught the man what he knew,—to do without a roof, with- out bread and fire, to prefer hunger in the woods to slavery in a palace. The van, hut and vehicle in one, which traversed so many different roads, without, however, leaving Great Britain, had four wheels, with shafts for the wolf and a splinter-bar for the man. The splinter-bar came into use when the roads were bad. The van was strong, although it was built of light boards like a dove-cot. In front there was a glass-door with a little balcony used for orations, which had something of the character of the platform tempered by an air of the pulpit. At the back there was a door with a practicable panel. By lowering the three steps which turned on a hinge below the door, access was gained to the hut, which at night was securely fastened with bolt and lock. Rain and snow had fallen plentifully on it ; it had been painted, but of what colour it was difficult to say, change of season being to yans what changes of reign are to courtiers. In front, outside, URSUS. 13 was a board,—a kind of frontispiece, on which the following in- scription might once have been deciphered; it was in black letters on a white ground, but by degrees the characters had become confused and blurred : “ By friction gold loses every year a fourteen hundredth part of its bulk. This is what is called the Wear. Hence it follows that on fourteen hundred millions of gold in circulation throughout the world, one million is lost annually. This million dissolves into dust, flies away, floats about, is reduced to atoms, charges, drugs, weighs down consciences, amalgamates with the souls of the rich whom it renders proud, and with those of the poor whom it renders brutish.” The inscription, rubbed and blotted by the rain and by the kindness of nature, was fortunately illegible, for it is possible that its philosophy concerning the inhalation of gold, at the same time both enigmatical and lucid, might not have been to the taste of the sheriffs, the provost-marshals and other big-wigs of the law. English legislation did not trifle in those days. It did not take much to make a man a felon. The magistrates were ferocious by tradition, and cruelty was a matter of routine. The | judges of assize increased and multiplied. Jefferies had become a breed. LAGE In the interior of the van there were two other inscriptions. Above the box, on a white-washed plank, a hand had written in ink as follows :— 14 BY ORDER OF THE KING. “Tak Onty THInes NECESSARY TO Know.* “The Baron, peer of England, wears a cap with six pearls. The coronet begins with the rank of Viscount. ‘The Viscount * A translator as a rule has no right to interfere with the text of the Author. I hope, however, that I may be excused for having ventured to correct some manifest slips which M. Hugo has made in preparing for Ursus the description of the rights and privileges of the English peerage. I have not, indeed, cor- rected all mistakes. Thus, for example, in the very first sentences of this passage about the peerage, it is stated that the baron wears only a cap, and that the viscount is the lowest rank of peer entitled to a coronet. This was true up to the end of Charles the Second’s reign. It is not true now, and it was not true at the time when Ursus wrote. Yet it was a statement which he might reasonably have supposed to be true, and therefore I have let it remain. Ihave even ventured to pass anachronisms of the opposite kind— where Ursus speaks of that as existing which had not yet come to pass. Thus there will be found among his list of great peers, at the period of the Revolu- tion, some titles, as those of Lords Grantham, Lonsdale, Scarborough, Kent, and Coningsby, which were not created till afterwards —when the century was at its close, or even when the next century had commenced, These are errors of detail which do not interfere with the general truth of the picture. With other statements which never were at any time true, I have been less tender. Thus I have struck out the statement that, on the top of Devonshire House, there was a lion which turned its tail on the king’s palace. Again, where the writer states that daily in the king’s palace there were eighty-six tables spread, each with 500 dishes, —I have ventured to give the true statement that there were 500 dishes in all, And so with some other details. With a few passages I have had a little difficulty in deciding how to deal. Thus Victor Hugo makes his hero write —‘‘ Toute fille de lord est Jady. Les autres filles anglaises sont miss.” With regard to the first of these statements it is well known that every daughter of a peer does not bear the title of lady; it is only the daughters of a duke, a marquis, or an earl, who are so honoured. Still, in the general obfuscation of intellect which titular niceties are apt to produce, URSUS. Is wears a coronet of which the pearls are without number. The Earl a coronet with the pearls upon points, mingled with straw- berry leaves placed low between. The Marquis, one with pearls and leaves on the same level. The Duke, one with strawberry leaves alone—no pearls. The Royal Duke, a circlet of crosses and fleurs de lys. The Prince of Wales, crown like that of the King, but unclosed. “The Duke is a most high and most puissant prince, the Marquis and Earl most noble and puissant lord, the Viscount noble and puissant lord, the Baron a trusty lord. The Duke is his Grace; the other Peers their Lordships. Jost honourable is higher than right honourable. * Lords who are peers are lords in their own right. Lords who are not peers are lords by courtesy :—there are no real lords, ex- cepting such as are peers. “The House of Lords is a chamber and a court, Concilium et Curia, legislature and court of justice. The Commons, who are the people, when ordered to the bar of the Lords, humbly present themselves bareheaded before the peers, who remain covered. The Ursus might be supposed likely to designate as Jady every peer’s daughter whomsoever. On the other hand, the daughters of commoners were not called miss in those days, and I have made bold to give the title which Ursus must have known. Let me add that most of the details as to THE ONLY THINGS NECESSARY TO KNOW are borrowed from Chamberlayne’s well-known work, The Present State of England, and that I am a little surprised at the omission by M. Victor Hugo and his hero Ursus of one curious touch which will be found in Chamberlayne’s chapter on the peerage—‘‘ No viscount is to wash with a marquis, but at his pleasure.’”—TRANSLATOR. 16 BY “ORDER®S-OF “THE ING, Commons send up their bills by forty members, who present the bill with three low bows. The Lords send their bills to the Commons by a mere clerk. In case of disagreement, the two Houses confer in the Painted Chamber, the Peers seated and covered, the Commons standing and bareheaded. “ Peers go to parliament in their coaches in file; the Commons do not. Some peers go to Westminster in open four-wheeled chariots. The use of these and of coaches emblazoned with coats of arms and coronets is allowed only to peers, and forms a portion of their dignity. “Barons have the same rank as bishops. To be a baron peer of England, it is necessary to be in possession of a tenure from the king per Baroniam miegram, by full barony. The full barony consists of thirteen knights’ fees and one third part, each knight’s fee being of the value of 202 sterling, which makes in all 400 marks. The head of a barony (Caput baronie) is a castle disposed by inheritance, as England herself, that is to say, descending to daughters if there be no sons, and in that case going to the eldest daughter, celeris filiabus aliunde satisfactis.* “ Barons have the degree of lord: in Saxon, laford; dominus in high Latin; Zordus in low Latin. The eldest and younger sons of viscounts and barons are the first esquires in the kingdom. The eldest sons of peers take precedence of knights of the garter. The younger sons do not. The eldest son of a viscount comes * As much as to say, the other daughters are provided for as best may be. (Note by Ursus on the margin of the wall.) URSUS. i after all barons, and precedes all baronets. Every daughter’ of a peer is a Lady. Other English girls are plain Jistress. “ All judges rank below peers. The serjeant wears a lambskin tippet; the judge one of patchwork, de minuto vario, made up of a variety of little white furs, always excepting ermine. Ermine is reserved for peers and the king. “A lord never takes an oath, either to the crown or the law. His word suffices ; he says, Upon my honour. ‘“‘By a law of Edward the Sixth, peers have the privilege of committing manslaughter. A peer who kills a man without premeditation is not prosecuted. “The persons of peers are inviolable. «A peer cannot be held in durance, save in the Tower of London. « A writ of supplicavit cannot be granted against a peer. « A peer sent for by the king has the right to kill one or two deer in the royal park. “A peer holds in his castle a baron’s court of justice. “Tt is unworthy of a peer to walk the street in a cloak, followed by two footmen. He should only show himself attended by a great train of gentlemen of his household. ‘A peer can be amerced only by his peers, and never to any ereater amount than five pounds, excepting in the case of a duke, who can be amerced ten. “A peer may retain six aliens born, any other Englishman but four. “ A peer can have wine custom-free; an earl eight tuns. VOL. I, CG YS) BY \ORDERSOPLTAL Ghva, “A peer is alone exempt from presenting himself before the sheriff of the circuit. “ A peer cannot be assessed towards the militia. “ When it pleases a peer he raises a regiment and gives it to the king; thus have done their graces the Dukes of Athol, Hamilton, and Northumberland. “A peer can hold only of a peer. “Tn a civil cause he can demand the adjournment of the case, if there be not at least one knight on the jury. © “A peer nominates his own chaplains. A baron appoints three chaplains; a viscount four; an earl and a marquis five; a duke six. “A peer cannot be put to the rack, even for high treason. A peer cannot be branded on the hand. A peer is a clerk, though he knows not how to read. In law he knows. ‘A duke has a right to a canopy, or cloth of state, in all places where the king is not present; a viscount may have one in his house; a baron has'a cover of assay, which may be held under his: cup while he drinks. A baroness has the right to have her train borne by a man in the presence of a viscountess. “ Highty-six tables, with five hundred dishes, are served every day in the royal palace at each meal.* * This sentence is probably derived from the following passage in Chamber- layne’s book, but in the French version it has suffered some alteration in the process of transition :—‘‘ The magnificent and abundant plenty of the king’s tables hath caused amazement in foreigners ; when they have been informed that in King Charles I.’s reign, before the troubles when his Majesty had the ORSUS, 19 “Tf a plebeian strike a lord, his hand is cut off. “A lord is very nearly a king. “The king is very nearly a god. “The earth is a lordship. “The English address Gd as my lord!” Opposite this writing was written a second one, in the same fashion, which ran thus :— “ SATISFACTION WHICH MUST SUFFICE THOSE WHO HAVE NOTHING. “Henry Auverquerque, Harl of Grantham, who sits in the House of Lords between the Earl of Jersey and the Earl of purveyance, there were daily in his court 86 tables well furnished each meal, whereof the king’s table had 28 dishes, the queen’s 24; four other tables, 16 dishes each ; three other, 10 dishes each ; twelve other had 7 dishes each ; seventeen other tables had each of them 5 dishes; three other had four each ; thirty-two other tables had each 3 dishes ; and thirteen other had each 2 dishes ;—in all about 500 dishes each meal, with bread, beer, wine, and all other things necessary. All which was provided most by the several pur- veyors, who, by summons legally and regularly authorised, did receive those provisions at a moderate price such as had been formally agreed upon in the several counties of England.” The next sentence has been allowed to stand as in the original, but it is probably based on the following from Chamberlayne :—‘‘ The king’s court or house where the king resideth, is accounted a place so sacred that if any man presume to strike another within the palace where the king’s royal person resideth, and by such stroke only draw blood, his right hand shall be stricken off, and he committed to perpetual imprisonment and fined.”— TRANSLATOR, og 20 BY ORDERNOFP 31HE VRINE. Greenwich, has a hundred thousand a year. To his lordship belongs the palace of Grantham Terrace, built all of marble and famous for what is called the labyrinth of passages,—a curiosity which contains the scarlet corridor in marble of Sarancolin, the brown corridor in lumachel of Astracan, the white corridor in marble of Lani, the black corridor in marble of Alabanda, the grey corridor in marble of Staremma, the yellow corridor in marble of Hesse, the green corridor in marble of the Tyrol, the red corridor, half cherry-spotted marble of Bohemia, half lumachel of Cordova, the blue corridor in turquin of Genoa, the violet in granite of Catalonia, the mourning-hued corridor veined black and white in slate of Murviedro, the pink corridor in cipolin of the Alps, the pearl corridor in lumachel of Nonetia, and the corridor of all colours, called the courtiers’ corridor, in motley. -“ Richard Lowther, Viscount Lonsdale, owns Lowther in West- moreland, which has a magnificent approach, and a flight of entrance steps which seem to invite the ingress of kings. “ Richard, Earl of Scarborough, Viscount and Baron Lumley of Lumley Castle, Viscount Lumley of Waterford in Ireland, and Lord Lieutenant and Vice-Admiral of the county of Northumber- land and of Durham, both city and county, owns the double castle- ward of old and new Sandbeck, where you admire a superb railing, in the form of a semicircle, surrounding the basin of a matchless fountain. He has, besides, his castle of Lumley. “ Robert Darcy, Earl of Holderness, has his domain of Holder- ness, with baronial towers, and large gardens laid out in French UTES OS: 21 fashion, where he drives in his coach-and-six, preceded by two outriders, as becomes a peer of England. “Charles Beauclerc, Duke of St. Alban’s, Earl of Burford, Baron Hedington, Grand Falconer of England, has an abode at Windsor, regal even by the side of the king’s. “Charles Bodville Robartes, Baron Robartes of Truro, Viscount Bodmin and Karl of Radnor, owns Wimpole in Cambridgeshire, which is as three palaces in one, having three facades, one bowed and two triangular. The approach is by an avenue of trees four deep. “The most noble and most puissant Lord Philip, Baron Herbert of Cardiff, Harl of Montgomery and of Pembroke, Ross of Kendall, Parr, Fitzhugh, Marmion, St. Quentin, and Herbert of Shurland, Warden of the Stannaries in the counties of Cornwall and Devon, hereditary visitor of Jesus College, pos- sesses the wonderful gardens at Wilton, where there are two sheaf-like fountains, finer than those of his most Christian Majesty King Louis XIV. at Versailles. “ Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, owns Somerset House on the Thames, which is equal to the Villa Pamphili at Rome, On the chimney-piece are seen two porcelain vases of the dynasty of the Yuens, which are worth half a million in French money. “Tn Yorkshire, Arthur, Lord Ingram, Viscount Irwin, has Temple Newsam, which is entered under a triumphal arch, and which has large wide roofs resembling Moorish terraces. “Robert, Lord Ferrers of Chartly, Bourchier and Louvaine, has Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, of which the park is 22 OY SORDE RRO MATL sarin, geometrically planned in. the shape of a temple with a facade, and in front of the piece of water is the great church with the square belfry, which belongs to his lordship. “In the county of Northampton, Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, member of His Majesty’s Privy Council, possesses Althorp, at the entrance of which is a railing with four columns surmounted by groups in marble. “ Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, has,;in Surrey, New Park, rendered magnificent by its sculptured pinnacles, its circular lawn belted by trees, and its woodland, at the extremity of which is a little mountain, artistically rounded, and surmounted by a large oak, which can be seen from afar. “Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, possesses Bretby Hall in Derbyshire, with a splendid clock tower, falconries, warrens, and very fine sheets of water, long, square, and oval, one of which is shaped like a mirror, and has two jets, which throw the water to a great height. “Charles Cornwallis, Baron Cornwallis of Eye, owns Broome Hall, a palace of the fourteenth century. “The most noble Algernon Capel, Viscount Malden, Harl of Essex, has Cashiobury in Hertfordshire, a seat which has the shape of a capital H, and which rejoices sportsmen with its abundance of game. “Charles, Lord, Ossulston, owns: Darnley in. Middlesex, ap- proached by Italian gardens. :: “ James Cecil, Harl of Salisbury, has, seven: leagues from London, Hatfield. House, with: its. four lordly pavilions, its URSUS. 23 belfry in the centre, and its grand court-yard of black and white slabs, like that of St. Germain. This palace, which has a frontage 272 ft. in length, was built in the reign of James I. by the Lord High Treasurer of England, the great-grandfather of the present earl. ‘To be seen there is the bed of one of the Countesses of Salisbury : it is of inestimable value and made entirely of Brazilian wood, which is a panacea against the bites of serpents, and which is called milhombres, that is to say a thousand men. On this bed is inscribed, Hons sot que mal y pense. “Edward Rich, Earl of Warwick and Holland, is: owner: of Warwick Castle, where whole oaks are. burnt in. the fire- places. “Tn the parish of Sevenoaks, Charles Sackville, Baron Buck- hurst, Baron Cranfield, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, is owner of Knowle, which is as large as a town and is composed of three palaces standing parallel one behind the other, like ranks of infantry. There are six covered flights of steps on the principal frontage, and a gate under a keep with four towers. “Thomas Thynne, Baron. Thynne of Warminster, and. Viscount Weymouth, possesses Longleat, in which there are as many chim- neys, cupolas, pinnacles, pepper-boxes, pavilions, and turrets, as at Chambord, in France, which belongs to the king. “Henry Howard, Harl of Suffolk, owns, twelve leagues from London, the palace of Audley End in Essex, which in grandeur and dignity scarcely yields the palm to the Escorial of the King of Spain... “In Bedfordshire, Wrest’ House and. Park, which is a whole 24 BY ORDER: OF THE KING. district, enclosed by ditches, walls, woodlands, rivers, and hills, belongs to Henry, Marquis of Kent. “ Hampton Court, in Herefordshire, with its strong embattled keep, and its gardens bounded by a piece of water which divides them from the forest, belongs to Thomas, Lord Coningsby. “@Grimsthorp, in Lincolnshire, with its long facade intersected by turrets in pale, its park, its fish-ponds, its pheasantries, its sheepfolds, its lawns, its grounds planted with rows of trees, its eroves, its walks, its shrubberies, its flower-beds and borders, formed in square and lozenge-shape, and resembling great carpets ; its race-courses, and the majestic sweep for carriages to turn in at the entrance of the house—belongs to Robert, Earl Lindsey, hereditary lord of the forest of Waltham. “Up Park, in Sussex, a square house, with two symmetrical belfried pavilions on each side of the great court-yard, belongs to the Right Honourable Forde, Baron Grey of Werke, Viscount Glendale and Karl of Tankerville. “Newnham Paddox, in Warwickshire, which has two quad- rangular fish-ponds and a gabled archway with a large window of four panes, belongs to the Karl of Denbigh, who is also Count von Rheinfelden, in Germany. “ Wytham Abbey, in Berkshire, with its French garden in which there are four curiously trimmed arbours, and its great embattled towers, supported by two bastions, belongs to Montague, Earl of Abingdon, who also owns Rycote, of which he is Baron, and the principal door of which bears the device Virtus ariete fortior. ‘William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, has six dwelling- URSUS. 25 places, of which Chatsworth (two-storied, and of the finest order of Grecian architecture) is one. “The Viscount of Kinalmeaky, who is Harl of Cork, in Ireland, is owner of Burlington House, Piccadilly, with its ex- tensive gardens, reaching to the fields outside London ; he is also owner of Chiswick, where there are nine magnificent lodges; he also owns Londesborough, which is a new house by the side of an old palace. “The Duke of Beaufort owns Chelsea, which contains two Gothic buildings, and a Florentine one; he has also Badmin- ton, in Gloucestershire, a residence from which a number of avenues branch out like rays from a star. The most noble and puissant Prince Henry, Duke of Beaufort, is also Marquis and Earl of Worcester, Earl of Glamorgan, Viscount Grosmont, and Baron Herbert of Chepstow, Ragland, and Gower, Baron Beaufort of Caldecott Castle, and Baron de Bottetourt. “ John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, and Marquis of Clare, owns Bolsover, with its majestic square keeps; his also, is Haughton, in Nottinghamshire, where a round pyramid, made to imitate the Tower of Babel, stands in the centre of a basin of water. «William, Karl of Craven, Viscount Uffington, and Baron Craven of Hamstead Marshall, owns Combe Abbey in Warwick- shire, where is to be seen the finest water-jet in England ; and in Berkshire two baronies, Hamstead Marshall, on the facade of which are five Gothic lanterns sunk in the wall, and Ashdown Park, which is a country seat situate at the point of intersection of cross-roads in a forest, 26 BY OORDERDONATHE KING. _“Tinneeus, Lord Clancharlie, Baron Clancharlie: and Hunker- ville, Marquis of Corleone in Sicily, derives his title from the castle of Clancharlie, built’ in 912. by Edward the Hlder, as a defence against the Danes. Besides Hunkerville House, in Lon- don, which is a palace, he has Corleone. Lodge at Windsor, which is another, and eight castlewards, one at Burton-on-Trent, with a royalty on the carriage of plaster of Paris; then Grumdaith Humble, Moricambe, Trewardraith, Hell-Kesters (where there is a miraculous well), Phillinmore, with its turf bogs, Reculver, near the ancient. city Vagniac, Vinecaunton, on the Moel-eulle Moun- tain; besides nineteen boroughs and villages with reeves, and the whole of Penneth chase, all of which bring his lordship 40,0002. a year. 7 “The 172 peers enjoying their. dignities under’ James II. possess among them altogether a revenue of 1,272,000/. sterling a year, which is the eleventh part of the revenue of England.” In the margin, opposite the last name (that: of Linneeus, Lord Clancharlie), there. was a note in‘ the handwriting of: Ursus: Rebel; in. exile; houses, lands, and chattels sequestrated. It is well. IV. Ursus admired Homo. One admires one’s like. It isa law. To be always raging inwardly and grumbling outwardly was the. normal condition of Ursus. He was. the malcontent of creation. By nature he was a man ever in oppositions He URSUS. 27 took the world unkindly; he gave his satisfecit to no one and to nothing. The bee did not atone, by its honey-making, for its sting ; a full-blown rose did not absolve the sun for yellow fever and black vomit. Itis probable that in secret Ursus criticised Providence a good deal. “ Hvidently,” he would say, “the devil works by a spring, and the wrong that God does is having let go the trigger.” | He approved of none but princes, and he had his own peculiar way of. expressing his approbation. One day, when J ames II. made a gift to the Virgin ina Catholic chapel in Ireland of a massive gold lamp, Ursus, passing that way with Homo, who was more indifferent to such things, broke out in admiration before the crowd, and exclaimed,—“ It is certain that the blessed Virgin wants a lamp much. more than. those: bare-footed children. there require shoes.” Such proofs of his loyalty, and such evidences of his respect for established powers, probably contributed in no small degree to make the magistrates tolerate his vagabond life and his low alliance with. a wolf.. Sometimes of an evening, through the weakness of friendship, he allowed Homo ‘to stretch his limbs. and wander at liberty about the caravan. ‘Thewolf was incapable of an abuse of confidence, and behaved in society, that is to say among men, with the discretion of a poodle. All the same,:if. bad- tempered officials had to be dealt with, difficulties might have arisen; so Ursus kept the honest wolf:chained up ‘as much: as possible. From a political point of view his writing:about gold, not very intelligible in itself, and now become undecipherable, was but a 28 BY ORDER GOP ALA KING, smear, and gave no handle to the enemy. ven after the time of James II., and under the “respectable” reign of William and Mary, his caravan might have been seen peacefully going its rounds of the little English country towns. He travelled freely from one end of Great Britain to the other, selling his philtres and phials, and sustaining, with the assistance of his wolf, his quack mummeries; and he passed with ease through the meshes of the nets which the police at that period had spread all over England in order to sift wandering gangs, and especially to. stop the pro- gress of the Comprachicos. This was right enough. Ursus belonged to no gang. Ursus lived with Ursus, a /éte-d-téle, into which the wolf gently thrust his nose. If Ursus could have had his way, he would have been a Caribbee; that being impossible, he preferred to be alone. The solitary man is a modified savage, accepted by civilisation. He who wanders most is most alone; hence his continual change of place. To remain anywhere long, suffocated him with the sense of being tamed. He passed his life in passing on his way. The sight of towns increased his taste for brambles, thickets, thorns, and holes in the rock. His home was the forest. He did not feel himself much out of his element in the murmur of crowded streets, which is like enough to the bluster of trees. The crowd to some extent satisfies our taste for the desert. What he disliked in his van was its having a door and windows, and thus resembling a house. He would have realised his ideal, had he been able to put a cave on four wheels and travel in a den. CRS US. 29 He did not smile, as we have already said, but he used to laugh; sometimes, indeed frequently, a bitter langh. There is consent in a smile, while a laugh is often a refusal. His great business was to hate the human race. He was im- placable in that hate. Having made it clear that human life is a dreadful thing; having observed the superposition of evils, kings on the people, war on kings, the plague on war, famine on the plague, folly on everything, having proved a certain measure of chastisement in the mere fact. of existence, having recognised that death is a deliverance, when they brought him a sick man he cured him; he had cordials and beverages to prolong the lives of the old. He put lame cripples on their legs again, and hurled this sarcasm at them, “ There, you are on your paws once more, may you walk long in this valley of tears!” When he saw a poor man dying of hunger, he gave him all the pence he had about him, growling out, “Live on, you wretch! eat! last a long time! It is not I who would shorten your penal servitude.” After which, he would rub his hands and say, “I do men all the harm I ean.” Through the little window at the back, passers-by could read on the ceiling of the van these words, written within, but visible from without, inscribed with charcoal, in big letters,— URSUS, PHILOSOPHER. ANOTHER PRELIMINARY CHAPTER. THE COMPRACHICOS. z, ~Wuo now knows the word Comprachicos, and who knows its meaning ? The Comprachicos, or Comprapequefios, were a hideous and nondescript association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the 18th, unheard of in the 19th. The Compra- chicos are like the “succession powder,” an ancient social characteristic detail. They are part of old human ugliness. To the great eye of history, which sees everything collectively, the Comprachicos belong to the colossal fact of slavery. Joseph sold by his brethren is a chapter in their story. The Compra- chicos have left their traces in the penal laws of Spain and England. You find here and there in the dark confusion of English laws the impress of this horrible truth, like the foot- print of a savage in a forest. Comprachicos, the same as Comprapequefios, is a compound Spanish word signifying Child-buyers. The Comprachicos traded in children. They bought and sold them. They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children COM PRACHICOs. THE THE COMPRACHICOS. 3 is another branch of industry. And what did they make of these children ? Monsters. Why monsters ? To laugh at. The populace must needs laugh ;and kings too. The mounte- bank is wanted in the streets; the jester at the Louvre. The one is called a Clown, the other a Fool. The efforts of man to procure himself pleasure are at times worthy of the attention of the philosopher. What are we sketching in these few preliminary pages? A chapter in the most terrible of books; a book which might be entitled—The Farming of the unhappy by the happy. TI. . A CHILD destined to be a plaything for men—such a thing has existed ; such a thing exists even now. In simple and savage times such a thing constituted an especial trade. The 17th century, called the great century, was of those times. It was a century very Byzantine in tone. It combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity ; a curious variety of civiliza- tion. A tiger with a simper. Madame de Sevigné minces on the subject of the faggot and the wheel. That century traded a good deal in children. Flattering historians have concealed the sore, but have divulged the remedy, Vincent de Paul. 32 BY SORDER ROE ATE WARING: In order that a human toy should succeed, he must be taken early. The dwarf must be fashioned when young. We play with childhood. But a well-formed child is not very amusing ; a hunchback is better fun. Hence grew an art. There were trainers who took a man and made him an abortion; they took a face and made a muzzle ; they stunted growth; they kneaded the features. The artificial production of teratological cases had its rules. It was quite a science ; what one can imagine as the antithesis of orthopedy. Where God had put a look, their art put a squint; where God had made harmony, they made discord; where God had made the perfect picture, they re-established the sketch ; and, in the eyes of connoisseurs, it was the sketch which was perfect. They debased animals as well: they invented piebald horses. Turenne rode a piebald horse. In our own days do they not dye dogs blue and green? Nature is our canvas. Man has always wished to add something to God’s work. Man retouches creation, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The Court buffoon “was nothing but an attempt to lead back man to the monkey. It was a progress the wrong way. A master-piece in retrogression. At the same time they tried to make aman of the monkey. Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Southampton, had a marmoset for a page. Frances Sutton, Baroness Dudley, eighth peeress in the bench of barons, had tea served by a baboon clad in gold brocade, which her ladyship called My Black. Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, used to go and take her seat in Parliament in a coach with armorial bearings, behind which stood, DHIs COMPRACHICOS. 33 their muzzles stuck up in the air, three Cape monkeys in grand livery. A Duchess of Medina-Celi, whose toilette Cardinal Pole witnessed, had her stockings put on by an ourang-outang. These monkeys raised in the scale were a counterpoise to men brutalised and bestialised. This promiscuousness of man and beast, desired by the great, was especially prominent in the case of the dwarf and the dog. The dwarf never quitted the dog, which was always bigger than himself. The dog was the pair of the dwarf; it was as if they were coupled with a collar. ‘This juxtaposition is authenticated by a mass of domestic records; notably by the portrait of Jeffrey Hudson, dwarf of Henrietta of France, daughter of Henri IV., and wife of Charles I. To degrade man tends to deform him. The suppression of his state was completed by disfigurement. Certain vivisectors of that period succeeded marvellously well in effacing from the human face the divine effigy. Doctor Conquest, member of the Amen- street College, and judicial visitor of the chemists’ shops of London, wrote a book in Latin on this pseudo-surgery, the processes of which he describes. If we are to believe Justus of Carrickfergus, the inventor of this branch of surgery was a monk named Avonmore; an Irish word signifying Great River. The dwarf of the Elector Palatine, Perkeo, whose effigy—or ghost—springs from a magical box in the cave of Heidelberg, was a remarkable specimen of this science, very varied in its applications. It fashioned beings the law of whose existence VOL. I. D 34. BY OR DERG OPMIE WEING. was hideously simple: it permitted them to suffer, and com- manded them to amuse. III. THE manufacture of monsters was practised on a large scale, and comprised various branches. | The Sultan required them, so did the Pope; the one to guard his women, the other to say his prayers. These were of a peculiar kind, incapable of reproduction. Scarcely human beings, they were useful to voluptuousness and to religion. ‘The seraglio and the Sistine Chapel utilised the same species of monsters; fierce in the former case, mild in the latter. They knew how to produce things in those days which are not produced now ; they had talents which we lack, and it is not with- out reason that.some good folk cry out that the decline has come. We no longer know how to sculpture living human flesh; this is consequent on the loss of the art of torture. Men were once virtuosi in that respect, but are so no longer; the art has become so simplified that it will soon disappear altogether. In cutting the limbs of living men, in opening their bellies and in dragging out their entrails, phenomena were grasped on the moment and discoveries made. We are obliged to renounce these experiments now, and are thus deprived of the progress which surgery made by aid of the executioner. The vivisection of former days was not limited to: the manu- facture of phenomena for the market-place, of buffoons for the palace (a species of augmentative of the courtier), and .eunuchs THE COMPRACHICOS. 35 for sultans and popes. It abounded in varieties. One of its triumphs was the manufacture of cocks for the king of England. It was the custom, in the palace of the kings of England, to have a sort of watchman, who crowed like a cock. This watcher, awake while all others slept, ranged the palace, and raised from hour to hour the cry of the farmyard, repeating it as often as was necessary, and thus supplying a clock. This man, promoted to be cock, had in childhood undergone the operation of the pharynx, which was part of the art described by Dr. Conquest. Under Charles II. the salivation inseparable to the operation having disgusted the Duchess of Portsmouth, the appointment was indeed preserved, so that the splendour of the crown should not be tarnished, but they got an unmutilated’ man to represent the cock.