pair of rosy lips, and peculiarly beautiful eyes. But it is powerless to move, while a monk recites it in a sing-song voice, and points out the enormous holes, or glaring orbs of glass that replace those which tempted men to assassinate each other, and occasionally the possessors, for allowing them to shine too softly on some more favoured rival. A woman, whose lips are described as resembling rosebuds, and whose breath is compared to a south wind passing over groves of blossoming orange-trees and myrtles, bears the mark of a poignard on her breast-bone. Yet how far is she not removed from what tradition paints her? The ashes of an extinguished fire are not less capable of calling up an image of expired heat and flame than hers are of giving a notion of her bygone loveliness. The reader will, however, be spared a description of her as she now appears, just as the Capuchins should have spared the sight of her decomposing frame to their disgusted visitors.
She is the last of the modern remains exhibited immediately before passing into the vaults, where no Palermitan can be found who has not been staying in them for less than a couple of hundred years. There is in this antique department, a canon who died in the year 1500. The cicerone always leads the stranger to him on first entering the vaults appropriated to the bi- and tri-centenaries. The one who has by at least sixty-one years the precedence of the latter, is a mummy dry as a piece of parchment. His tongue sticks stiffly out of the middle of a widely opened mouth. It looks as though it had been as carefully smoked as any Yarmouth bloater. The guide makes all the visitors touch it, after touching it himself. He assures them that it was a tongue so eloquent that had not death early silenced it, all Sicily and Italy along with it, would have donned the frock and cowl.
In addition to the feeling of awe, disgust, and horror, is another very different one. The immense number of dead bodies ranged round the walls; their outlandish and dingy garments; their quaint and dusty finery; their strange attitudes; and the universal grin upon the faces of those preserved with arsenic, create a tendency to laugh, or to regard the whole thing as a hideous burlesque on the charnel house. One mummy has a mocking air, another sneers like a Voltaire, or a Mephistopheles; a third seems tired of the company in which he finds himself; and a fourth hangs his head upon his breast, as if in the act of sleeping. Not one among all the thousands in it, looks venerable, or even respectable; and when disgust does not prevent the stranger doing so, there is nothing more frequent than to see him inspecting and handling the dressed dead as one would a stuffed bat or owl in a museum.
We do well to hide our dead, to bury them out of our sight. But the ancients did better to burn them, before the hideous changes of mortality had time to make themselves visible. Their system is repugnant to modern ideas. But after a visit to Palermo, or to a grave-yard, while the sexton is at work, we would feel convinced that for the dead it is the most respectful, and for the living, the least unwholesome. Consigning a friend to the funeral pyre, could prejudice once be surmounted, would certainly be found preferable to consigning him to the worm! and the fire would be less humiliating than the transformations from which mother earth cannot preserve us. In France, the substitution of the urn, instead of the cemetery, is warmly advocated by the majority of the enlightened; the ignorant and the clergy are ready to oppose it. But in doing so the churchmen are mistaken: for the skeleton and death’s-head take little hold on French imaginations; and when they do, it is only to give rise to mocking outbursts, and attacks the reverse of reverent.
EARLY ENGLISH STATUTES.
A study of the law is commonly accepted as the driest, dullest, most monotonous investigation the mind can make. The speculations of antiquaries concerning dinted weapons, broken ware, or battered coins, are considered fascinating when compared to the dingy, heavy web of the law. No one takes up a law-book for leisure perusal: no one studies the law as a leisure pursuit. A curious quality, however, belongs to our theme: like architecture, the older it is the more picturesque it appears: like wine, the more remote its season the more mellow it proves. Modern law is a maze of verbiage; but law two centuries old is as clipped and trim as the trees in an old Dutch garden—not written in irritating black letter, but printed in plain, clear type, and its orthography only differs from our own in such minor points as old wine bottles do from new, affording just that conclusive evidence of age that is satisfactory. Ponderosity is not necessarily a feature of an old law-book, for a man may hold in his palm a volume before us, printed in 1679, containing abstracts of every statute then in force: neither is dryness an inevitable quality, for pictures of mediaeval manners and customs flash up from the tawny pages as from the lays and lyrics of the troubadours.
We will quote the abstract of a statute made by King James the First:
“No innkeeper, victualler, or alehouse keeper, shall suffer any town-dwellers to sit tippling in his house, on pain of 10sh., nor sell less than a full alequart of the best ale or beer, or two quarts of the small, for one penny, in pain of 20sh. And here the view of one justice, or proof by two witnesses upon oath before one justice is sufficient conviction.”
Is this not as Falstaffian as a page from the “Merry Wives of Windsor”? Who could the one justice be but Shallow? And do we not read of the “full ale-quart” as of a vast tankard chased and gilded at least? The thirsty “town-dweller” convicted of having sat “tippling in any inn” was to forfeit ten groats, and, says the abstract ambiguously, “being not found able to pay it shall remain in the stocks four hours.”
There is scarcely a limit to the variety of information we may thus obtain. Henry VIII. in passing an Act forbidding any person who was not possessed of lands to the value of 100l. per annum from shooting with, or even keeping in his house, crossbow, hand-gun, hagbut, or demi-hake, has handed down a list of the beasts and birds
