The Catholic World
Chapter 166 : But possibly the rings are formed of flights of disconnected satellites, so small and

But possibly the rings are formed of flights of disconnected satellites, so small and so closely packed that, at the immense distance to which Saturn is removed, they appear to form a continuous ma.s.s, while the dark inner ma.s.s may have been recently formed of satellites drawn by disturbing attractions or collisions out of the bright outer ring, and so thinly scattered that they give to us only a sense of darkness without obscuring, and of course without refracting, the surface before which they spin. This is, in our guide's opinion, the true solution of the problem, and to the bulging of Saturn's equator, which determines the line of superior attraction, he ascribes the thinness of the system of satellites, in which each is compelled to travel near the plane of the great planet's equator.

Whatever be the truth about these vast provisions for the wants of Saturn, surely there must be living inhabitants there to whose needs they are wisely adapted. Travel among the other planets would have its inconveniences to us of the earth. Light walking as it might be across the fields of ether, we should have half our weight given to us again in Mars or Mercury, while in Jupiter our weight would be doubled, and we should drag our limbs with pain. In Saturn, owing to the compression of the vast light globe and its rapid rotation, a man who weighs twelve stone at the equator weighs fourteen stone at the pole.

Though vast in size, the density of the planet is small, for which reason we should not find ourselves very much heavier by change of ground from earth to Saturn. We should be cold, for Saturn gets only a ninetieth part of the earth's allowance of light and heat. But then there is no lack of blanket in the House of Saturn, for there is a thick atmosphere to keep the warmth in the old gentleman's body and to lengthen the Saturnian twilights. As for the abatement of light, we know how much light yet remains to us when less than a ninetieth part of the sun escapes eclipse. We see in its brightness, as a star, though a pale one, the reflection of the suns.h.i.+ne Saturn gets, which if but a ninetieth part of our share, yet leaves the sun of Saturn able to give five hundred and sixty times more light than our own brightest moons.h.i.+ne. And then what long summers! The day in Saturn is only ten and a half hours long, so that the nights are short, and there are twenty-four thousand six hundred and eighteen and a half of its own days to the Saturnian year. But the long winters! And the Saturnian winter has its gloom increased by eclipses of the sun's light by the rings. At Saturn's equator these eclipses occur near the equinoxes and last but a little while, but in the regions corresponding to our temperate zone they are of long duration. Apart from eclipse, the rings lighten for Saturn the short summer nights, and lie perhaps as a halo under the sun during the short winter days.

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From Chamber's Journal.

SLIPS OF THE PEN.

When Mrs. Caxton innocently made her wiser-half the father of an anachronism, that worthy scholar was much troubled in consequence. His anachronism was a living one, or he might have comforted himself by reflecting that greater authors than he had stood in the same paternal predicament. Our old English dramatists took tremendous liberties this way, never allowing considerations of time and place to stand in the way of any allusion likely to tell with their audience. Shakespeare would have been slow to appreciate a modern manager's anxiety for archaeological fidelity. His Greeks and Romans talk about cannons and pistols, and his Italian clowns are thorough c.o.c.kneys, familiar with every nook and corner of London. And so it is with other caterers for the stage. Nat Lee talks about cards in his tragedy of "Hannibal;"

Otway makes Spartan notables carouse and drink deep; Mrs. Cowley's Lacedaemonian king speaks of the _night's still Sabbath_; D'Urfey's ancient Britons are familiar with Puritans and packet-boats; and Rymer (though he set himself up for a critic) supplies a stage direction for the representative of his Saxon heroine to pull off her patches, when her lover desires her to lay aside her ornaments.

When Colman read "Inkle and Yarico" to Dr. Moseley, the latter exclaimed: "It won't do. Stuff! Nonsense!"--"Why?" asked the alarmed dramatist.--"Why, you say in the finale:

'Come let us dance and sing.

While all Barbadoes' bells shall ring!'

It won't do; there is but one bell in the island!" This mistake was excusable enough; but when Milton described

"A green mantling vine, That crawls along the side of yon small hill,"

he must certainly have forgotten he had laid the scene of "Comus" in North Wales. Ernest Jones, describing a battle in his poem, "The Lost Army," says:

"Delay and doubt did more that hour Than bayonet-charge or carnage shower;"

and some lines further on pictures his hero

"All worn with wounds, when day was low.

With severed sword and shattered s.h.i.+eld;"

thus making his battle rather a trial of the respective powers of ancient and modern weapons than a conflict between equally-armed foes.

Mr. Thackeray perpetrates a nice little anachronism in "The Newcomes,"

when he makes Clive, in a letter dated 183-, quoting an Academy exhibition critique, ask: "Why have we no picture of the sovereign and her august consort from Smee's brush?"--the author, in his anxiety to compliment the artist, forgetting that there was no consort till 1840.

A bull in a china-shop is scarcely more out of place than a bull in a serious poem, but accidents will happen to the most regular of writers. Thus Milton's pen slipped when he wrote:

"The sea-girt isles That like to rich and various gems _inlay_ The _unadorned_ bosom of the deep;"

a quotation reminding us that the favorite citation,

"Beauty when unadorned, adorned the most,"

is but a splendid bull, beautiful for its {273} boldness. Thomson was an adept at making pretty bulls; here is another:

"He saw her charming, but he saw not half The charms her downcast modesty concealed;"

as if it were possible to see some of them, although they were concealed. Pope, correct Pope, actually tell us:

"Young Mars in his boundless mind.

A work t' _outlast immortal_ Rome designed."

The author of "The Spanish Rogue" makes "a silent noise" invade the ear of his hero. General Taylor immortalized himself by perpetrating one of the grandest bulls on record, in which he attained what a certain literary professor calls "a _perfection_ hardly to be surpa.s.sed." In his presidential address he announced to the American Congress that the United States were at peace _with all the world_, and continued to cherish relations of amity with the _rest_ of mankind. Much simpler was the blunder of an English officer, during the Indian mutiny, who informed the public, through the _Times_, that, thanks to the prompt measures of Colonel Edwardes, the Sepoys at Fort Machison "were all unarmed and taken aback, and, being called upon, laid down their arms." There was nothing very astonis.h.i.+ng in an Irish newspaper stating that Robespierre "left no children behind him, except a brother, who was killed at the same time;" but it was startling to have an English journal a.s.sure us that her majesty Queen Victoria was "the last person to wear _another man's_ crown."

A single ill-chosen word often suffices, by the suggestion of incongruous ideas, to render what should be sublime utterly ridiculous. One can hardly believe that a poet like Dryden could write:

"My soul is packing up, and just on wing,"

Such a line would have come with better grace from the author of "The Courageous Turk," a play containing the following curious pa.s.sage:

"How now, ye heavens! grow you So proud, that you must needs put on curled locks, And clothe yourself in perwigs of fire."

Nearly equalled in absurdity by this from Nat Lee's "OEdipus:"

"Each trembling ghost shall rise, And leave their grisly king without a waiter."

When the news of Captain Cook's death at Owhyhee came to England, the poetasters, of course, hastened to improve the occasion, and one of the results of their enthusiasm was a monody commencing:

"Minerva in heaven disconsolate mourned The loss of her Cook;"

an opening sufficient to upset the gravity of the great navigator's dearest friend.

Addison lays it down as a maxim, that when a nation abounds in physicians it grows thin of people. Fillibuster Henninpen seems to have agreed with the essayist, or he would hardly have informed General Walker, in one of his dispatches, that "Doctors Rice and Wolfe died of the cholera, and Dr. Lindley sickened, _after which the health of the camp visibly improved._" Intentionally or not, the stout-hearted soldier suggests that the best way of getting rid of the cholera is to make short work of the doctors. Among the obituary notices in a weekly paper, not many months ago, there appeared the name of a certain publican, with the following eulogium appended to it: "He was greatly esteemed for his strict probity and steady conduct through life, he having been a subscriber to the 'Sunday Times' from its first number." This is a worthy pendant to Miss Hawkins's story of the undertaker writing to the corporation of London, "I am desired to inform the Court of Aldermen, Mr. Alderman Gill died last night, by order of Mrs. Gill;" and not far short, in point of absurdity, is Madame Tussand's announcement of the exhibition of the effigy of the notorious Palmer, "who was executed at Stafford with two hundred other celebrities." {274} The modern fas.h.i.+on of naming florists' flowers must be held responsible for the very dubious paragraph we extract from a gardening paper: "Mrs. Legge will be looked after; she may not be so certain as some, but she was nevertheless very fine in the early part of the season. Lady Popham is useful, one of the old-fas.h.i.+oned build, not quite round in the outline, but makes up well."

Thackeray seems to have had an intense dislike to the trouble of revision, for his popular works, especially those published periodically, abound in trivial mistakes, arising from haste, forgetfulness, and want of care. The novelist mortally wounds an old lady with a candle instead of a candlestick, and afterwards attributes her death to a stone staircase. Newcome senior is colonel and major at one and the same time; Jack Belsize is Jack on one page and Charles on another; Mrs. Raymond Gray, introduced as Emily, is suddenly rechristencd f.a.n.n.y; and Philip Fermor on one occasion becomes transformed into the author's old hero, Clive. With respect to the last-mentioned gentleman, author and artist seem to have differed, for while Mr. Thackeray jests about Clive's beautiful whiskers and handsome moustaches, Mr. Doyle persists to the end in denying young Newcome's possession of those tokens of manhood.

It is not often that an author is satirical upon his own productions; but Charles d.i.c.kens has contrived to be so. Describing the old inns of the Borough, in his "Pickwick Papers," he says they are queer places, with galleries, pa.s.sages, and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough "to furnish materials for a hundred ghost-stories, _supposing we should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any_." How little could Boz have antic.i.p.ated certain charming Christmas books witching the world a few years later! So, also, "American Notes," Mr. Jefferson Brick, and the transatlantic Eden lay unsuspected in the future, when he made Old Wellor suggest Mr.

Pickwick's absconding to America till Dodson & Fogg were hung, and then returning to his native land and writing "a book about the 'Merrikens as 'ill pay all his expenses and more, if he blows 'em up enough!"

From The Month.

SAINTS OF THE DESERT.

BY THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN, D.D.

1. Abbot Antony said: The days are coming when men will go mad; and, when they meet a man who has kept his senses, they will rise up against him, saying, "You are mad, because you are not like us."

2. While a.r.s.enius was still employed in the imperial court, he asked of G.o.d to lead him in the way by which he might be saved.

Then a voice came to him: "a.r.s.enius, flee the company of men, and thou art in that saving way."

3. Abbot Agatho said: Unless a man begin with the observance of the Precepts, he will not make progress in any one virtue.