The Press. — London, England, 1854-04-01 00:00:00

804 himself as " those in which he used to write " for legs of mutton and beefsteaks," the young adventurer thought it would be an excellent thing if he also were to try what he could do in the Junius style. Accordingly ha wrote, like several others, letters to the public jour nals, Ain o f glittering invective and sowy epigrams. But they fell flat; for what could the penniless young Hibernian know of the aroana of politics or the undercurrents of official life ? Given eloquence and art , there mu st still be truth and novelty of facts before wr iters can have claims for the interest of a reader. We make these remarks because we are sur prised at one of Mr. Morley's literary know ledge and experience selecting Jerome Car dan as the subject of a biography. Cardan was a character without intrinsic claims to posthumous interest. He might deserve the honour of a few pays in a volume of " Curio allies of Literature, but two volumes on so unsatisfactory a theme are more than we can digest. Reference to any encyclopaedia, or to " Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary," will show that Jerome Cardan has had ample atten tion given olready to his name. It may be very true that Gabriel Naude was flippant, and that the Scaligers were mistaken in their remarks upon Cardan ; but, if we are to have lives com posed ou the ground that contemporary cen sors or rivals were unjust, where is republica tion to end, and originality to commence? We are afraid, and we say it with regret, that Mr. Morley's present work will be looked on as a case of bookmaking ; and, without sub scribing entirely to that opinion, we may ob serve, that he has shown no judgment in the choice of his subject, and that he has ex pended, we fear, his research and trouble in vain. We are sorry to record this opinion, because we were much pleased with his for mer publication of " Palissy the Potter," which read with freshness, and which was seasonable at a period of increased attention to the application of the arts of design. We will, however, allow Mr. Morley to register his plea for having composed this work. In his preface he says of Cardan But the man of profound genius sometimes wrote, we are told, as if he were a fool. His folly may instruct us. It belonged—bating some eccentricities--not to himself alone. His age claimed part in it, and bought his books. He was the most successful scientific author of his time ; the books of his that were most frequently reprinted being precisely those in which the folly most abounded. He was not only the popular philosopher but also the fashionable physician of the sixteenth century. Pope and emperor sought him; kings, princes, cardinals, arch bishops were among his patients. There were other physicians in those days wise enough to be less credulous on many points, but greater wisdom did not win for them an equal fame. Carden obtained a splendid reputation wholly by his own exertions, not only because he was a man of power and genius, but because he spent much of his energy upon ideas that, foolish as they now seem, were conceived in the true spirit of his age. He belonged completely to his time. Hence it is that, as a philosopher, he almost perished with it ; and for the last hundred years his reputation has existed only as a legend. I was first attracted to the study of Cardan, from which this work has arisen, by the individuality with which his writings are all marked, and the strange story of his life reflected in them. The book is twice as large as it was meant to be, and still there was matter that might have occupied another volume ; for, as I worked on, T found that out of the neglected writings of this old physician it was possible to reconstruct the history of his career, with much minuteness in the kind of detail that would make it not only pleasant reading, but also, if rightly done, of some use to the student of the sixteenth century. Mr. Morley analyses with considerable skill the various works of Cardan, and gives us epi tomes of their contents. Here we have a sketch of his treatise on palmistry : Of the works already named as having been written by Jerome during the six or seven years of his life in Sacco, there remain two, both of which underwent at a later period of their author's life a great deal of revision. One of them is the little treatise upon cheiromancy, which afterwards was published as a chapter in a philosophic work of great extent the labour of maturer years. In his maturest scars, however, Carden never escaped from the hold of superstition. Stara and dreams were always por tents to him, and he never ceased to believe that there was a portentous science to be studied on the palm of a man's hand. The hand, he said, is the instrument of the body, as the tongue is of the mind. He therefore studied all that he found written upon cheiromancy, and his treatise on the subject is no more than a dull abstract of his studies. He gives, for example, a woodcut-picture of an outspread hand, with the name of each part inscribed on it, according to the cheiromantic nomenclature. Above the joint of the hand at the wrist there is the carpus. The side of the hand against which the thumb rests is the thenar. The other side, between the little finger and THE PRESS. the wrist, is called the hypothenar. The ball of the thumb is entitled stethos. The joints of each finger from the hand upwards are called procondyle, condyle, and metacondyle. Then there is assigned to each finger a planet, cheiromancy being, in fact, a sister science with astrology. The thumb and stethos belong to Mars: on them we read of violence or strength, of lire or hostile ac cidents in life ; there also we read of rough attachments, similar to that which inclined Mars to Venus. It is a curious fact to note how intimately a belief in the old heathen mythology was blended with those pseudo. sciences, astrology and cheiromancy, and in that form could be fostered even by grave Christians and dignitaries of the Church of Rome. The index finger belongs to Jove: upon it we read of priesthood, honours, magis tracy. Middle fingers are all subject to Saturn : Saturn writes on them dark hints of prisons, fevers, poisons, fear, grief, profound meditation, occult studies, toil without re ward. The ring finger is the Sun's : on it we read of high honour, power, and the favour of kings. Venus holds man by the little finger: upon it she writes of wives and soca and other pleasant things that suit her humour. The Moon rules over the hypothenar: upon that she tells of shipwrecks, suffocation, and submersions. In the next place, concerning lines, the line within the hand, bound ing the ball of the thumb, is the line of life, of the heart, and of the sun. The line across the middle of the hand is the line of the brain and of the moon. There is a line running sometimes from the carpus to the middle finger, called the sister to the line of life, and they who have it lead lives full of labour and pain. It would be weary work to multiply the details of so dull a science. - - Many general readers will echo the last sen tence of the foregoing extract, and apply the words "dull science " to Cardan's musty trea tises. How cleverly Mr. Morley can write, and with what skill he can use his practised pen, is seen in the last passage of the work, where he contrasts his hero with Galen : Many things in the writings of Cardan make it evident that he had studied Galen to good purpose, and it is not unlikely that it pleased him secretly to feel that he him self resembled Galen in a good many particulars. Hip pocrates stood on his own pedestal, and was a great man by himself. The old father of Medicine, contemporary with the wisest men of Greece—younger than Socrates, but at the same time an older man than Plato—merited his crown of gold from the Athenians and his dinner in the Prytaneium, for he was morally and intellectually great. He wrote simply, tersely, royally as a king issuing wealth from his own mint, not as a rich man pouring out his hoard of coins, with all manner of kings heads and dates upon them. He was a fearless old fellow who would not move one step from the enemies of Greece. He was a tree-hearted physician, who gathered men about him in a grand spirit of kindliness. He visited the poor without reward, loved knowledge for its own sake, bound his disciples by a vow to mutual courtesy, to a religious keeping of all secrets trusted by sick people to their charge, and enforced with all his might a code of prac tice that became a noble calling. To the end of the world physicians will appreciate their fine-hearted old father, and be proud to think themselves the children of Hippocrates. But Galen was a man of smaller stature, living at a time when it was not so easy to be noble. He was physician to five Roman emperors, and one of them was Commodus. He commented upon Hippocrates, and wrote much ; not in the clear, royal style, but with diffuseness. Like Cardan, Galen had a passionate mother; like Carden, he was persecuted, for he could with diffi culty keep his ground in Rome against the sects in medicine whose theories he laboured to demolish; and the parallel holds good, though Galen became great in his day, and was sought by kings. Like Cardan, again, Galen was deficient in personal courage, and su perstitious, having much belief in dreams and omens. Galen and Cardan were both boasters, and both men who really rose above the level of the intellect around them. Galen fought against the mere scholastic sects into which the doctors had degenerated and divided, the dogmatics, the empirics, the methodics, the episynthetics, the pneumatics, the eclectics, and especially attacked them in a lost book, of which the title is preserved, " De Empiricorum Contradictis," " The Differings of the Em• pirics." Cardan found the physicians in his day straying away from the truth, and losing the best sense of the teaching of Hippocrates, as Galen had restored and ampli fied it. The first attempt, therefore, of Cardan, as a medi cal author, made in direct imitation of Galen, was a work entitled " Contradicentia Medicorum," on that wide sub ject the Differings of Doctors. The titles of some other of Cardan's works are borrowed from the example of Galen. The list of resemblances is scarcely made complete, when I add that the style of Galen, brilliant, pompous, and dif fuse, would not pair badly with the style of Cardan, though Carden, equally diffuse, wrote with less rhetoric and more true genius. Galen was also a prominent example of pro lific authorship, Cardan himself being no mean proficient in the art of bookmaking. In that respect, however, he was utterly eclipsed by the sage of Pergamus, since it is said of Galen that he wrote seven hundred and fifty books ; five hundred on medicine, and the rest on geometry, philosophy, logic, and grammar. Galen wrote two treatises especially upon the books that he had written, and the order in which they were to be taken. Those treatises he called "De Libris Propriia." Cardan wrote three works of precisely the same kind, and gave them the same title. The next application of Mr. Morley's re search and talents will, we hope, be on a theme more attractive and variously interest ing than the subject of his present perfor mance. . _ SATURDAY, Armenia. A Year at Erzeroum, and on the Frontiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia. By the Hon. Robert Curzon. London : Murray. - - - MR. Cuazow possesses the first requisite of a travel-writer—a natural and singularly agree able style, which gives novelty to old inci dents and point to trifles. Nor does he, like a bookmaker (especially a French bookmaker), abuse this privilege by filling his volume with mere olever trivialities, devoid of substance or truth. His descriptions of men and manners are always good—that is, always characteristic, every word producing its right effect, just as in a well-drawn sketch every stroke of the pencil has its purpose. With the more serious part of a traveller's work he does not deal, rightly judging that the days of guide-books are gone by, and that at least within the Turk ish empire little remains to do except to de scribe society and nature as they appear to the passer by. It is a mistake to call such descriptions useless. Whatever enables un travelled persons to picture to themselves the aspect of distant lands and their inhabitants is a real contribution to human knowledge. Measuring rivers and mapping countries are useful too ; but he who puts us in the way of really understanding how men live and dress, and govern or are governed, in a Mahometan province of Asia, does really teach to more purpose, so far as the mass of readers are con cerned, than the most skilful geologist or na tural historian. The occasion of Mr. Curzon's visit to Arme nia was this. It seems that the Koord tribes, like those of the Scotch border two hundred years ago, avail themselves of their position between the frontiers of Persia and Turkey to plunder impartially in both countries, those residing in Turkey selecting Persia as their scene of operations, and vice versa. To put an end to this (state of things, the two Govern ments, with assistance from England and Russia, agreed to settle their boundary line by treaty, which was done, after five years' negotiation, in 1847. A survey was next to be made of the districts thus partitioned, and the affair finally terminated in 1852. On this diplomatic duty Mr. Curzon was employed, during the illness of the British commissioner, and the result is the book before us. Erzeroum, Mr. Curzon's head-quarters for a considerable time, is graphically described : I have never seen or heard of anything the least like it. It is totally and entirely different from anything I ever saw before. As the whole view, whichever way one looked, was wrapped in interminable snow, we had not at first any very distinct idea of the nature of the ground that there might be underneath ; the tops of the houses being flat, the snow covered city did not resemble any other town, bntappeared more like a great rabbit-warren t he y of the houses being wholly or partly subterranean, doors looked like bur rows. In the neighbourhood of the Consulate (very com fortable within, from the excellent arrangements of Mr. Brant) there were several large heaps and mounds of earth, and it was difficult to the uninitiated to discriminate correctly as to which was a house and which was a heap of soil or stones. Streets, glass windows, green doors with brass knockers, areas, and chimney-pots, were things only known from the accounts of travellers from the distant regions where such things are used. Very few people wery about, the bulk of the population hybernationg at this time of theyearintheirstrangeholesandburrows. The bright colours of the Oriental dresses looked to my eye strangely out of place in the cold dirty sn ow ; scarlet robes, jackets embroidered with gold, brilliant green and white costumes, were associated in my mind with a hot sun, a dry climate, and fine weather. A bright sky there was, with the sun s hining away as if it was all right, but his rays gave no heat, and only put your eyes out with its glare upon the snow. This glare has an extraordinary effect, sometirnes bringing on a blindness called snowblindnes, and raising blisters on the face precisely like tho se which are produced by exposure to extreme heat. Another inconvenience has an absurd effect : the breath, out of doors, congeals upon the moustaches and beard, and speedily produces icicles, which prevent the possibility of opening the mouth. My moustaches were converted each day into two sharp icicles, and if anything came against them it hurt horribly ; and those who wore longbeards were often obliged to commence the series of Turkish civilities in dumb show ; their faces being fixtures for the time, they were not able to speak till their beards thawed. A curious phenomenon might also be observed upon the door of one of the subterranean stables being opened, when, although the day was clear and fine without, the warm air within immediately congealed into a little fall of snow ; this might be seen in great per fection every morning on the first opening of the outer door, when the house was warm from its having been shut up all night. This intense cold, however natural in a city which lies 7,000 feet above the sea, in a plain surrounded by mountains, is unfavourable to I