International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science — Volume 1, No. 3, July 15, 1850. Various
eighth century, Leo the Isaurian ascended the throne of the East, and for a time the public or private worship of images was proscribed, but the edict was vigorously and successfully resisted by the Latins of the Western church. Charlemagne, whose literary tastes are attested by his encouragement of the learned, by the foundation of schools, and by his patronage of the arts of music and painting, gave a great impulse to the practice of illumination: and the Benedictines, whose influence extended throughout Europe, assigned an eminent rank among monastic virtues to the guardianship and reproduction of valuable manuscripts. In each Benedictine monastery a chamber was set apart for this sacred purpose, and Charlemagne assigned to Alcuin, a member of their order, the important office of preparing a perfect copy of the Scriptures.
The process of laving on and burnishing gold and silver appears to have been familiar to oriental nations from a period of remote antiquity, and the Greeks are supposed to have acquired from them the art of thus ornamenting manuscripts, which they in turn communicated to the Latins. Their most precious manuscripts were written in gold or silver letters, on the finest semi-transparent vellum, stained of a beautiful violet color (the imperial purple), and these were executed only for crowned heads. One of the most ancient existing specimens of this mode of caligraphy in the fourth century, the Codex Argenteus of Ulphilas, the inventor of the Visigothic alphabet, was discovered in the library of Wolfenbüttel, and is now at Upsal, Sweden. This fine MS. is written in letters of gold and silver on a purple ground; and the fragments of a Greek MS. of the Eusebian Canons of the sixth century, preserved in the British Museum, is perhaps a unique example of a MS. in which both sides of the leaves are illuminated upon a golden ground. Mr. Owen Jones' illustrations commence with a page from the celebrated Durham book, or Gospels of St. Cuthbert, in the Hiberno-Saxon style of the seventh century, which was borrowed originally from the Romans, and afterward diffused throughout Europe by the itinerant-Saxon Benedictines. This style is formed by an ingenious disposition of interweaving threads or ribbons of different colors, varied by the introduction of extremely attenuated lizard-like reptiles, birds, and other animals. The initial letters are of gigantic size, and of extreme intricacy, and are generally surrounded with rows of minute red dots.
The Coronation Oath Book of the Anglo-Saxon kings is a curious specimen of the rude state of art in the ninth century. The Lombard and the Carlovingian styles, of which latter the Psalter of Charles the Bold, is a fine specimen, prevailed on the continent during the eighth and ninth centuries. Toward the end of the tenth century, the Anglo-Saxon school, under the patronage of Bishop Ethelwold, at Winchester, assumed a new and distinct character, which was not surpassed by any works executed at the same period. This style, with its bars of gold, forming complete frames to the text, when enriched with interweaving foliage of the acanthus and the ivy, became the basis of the latter and more florid school of illumination, which attained its highest perfection in the twelfth century, and of which the Arnstein Bible is an example. This Bible belonged to the Monks of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, of Arnstein, and the value which was attached to it may be inferred from the following quaint and mild anathema at the end of the first volume:—
"The book of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, in Arnstein, the which, if any one shall purloin it, may he die the death—may he be cooked upon the gridiron—may the falling sickness and fevers attack him—and may he be broken upon the wheel and hung!"
In the thirteenth century Paris became celebrated for its illuminators, and the productions of Franco-Bolognese, whose skill in illuminating manuscripts was then paramount, is mentioned by Dante. Mr. Humphreys thus graphically describes the style of the fourteenth century:—
"It was a great artistic era—the architecture, the painting, the goldsmith's work, the elaborate productions in enamel, and the illuminator's art, were in beautiful harmony, being each founded upon similar principles of design and composition; even the art of writing lending itself to complete the chord of artistic harmony, by adopting that, crisp and angular feeling which the then general use of the pointed arch introduced into all works of artistic combination."
THE PHANTOM WORLD. 1
MR. CHRISTMAS, in his "Twin Giants," attacked the stronghold of popular superstition by exhibiting the foundations and growth of error in the early and ignorant ages, and of the progressive dissipation of these delusions as the light of history and science spread over the world. The present work is a translation from Calmet. It deals with spectres, vampyres, and all that tribe of visionary monsters. We have here the learning and opinion of the enlightened portion of the world a century ago. M. Calmet traversed all history for his facts, and gives us a mass of monkish inventions, which prove to what an extent the Romish church fostered superstition for its own purposes. We have dead men called from their graves to show the danger of neglecting to pay tithes, and to rivet on the rich the necessity of building churches, and paying liberally for masses. At p. 286 of vol. 1 we have a proof that the "knockings" which have made so much noise in the United States, are no novelty:—
"Humbert Birk, a burgess of note in the town of Oppenheim, had a country-house, called Berenbach. He died in the month of November, 1620, a few days before the feast of St. Martin. On the Saturday which followed his funeral they began to hear certain noises in the house where he had lived with his first wife; for at the time of his death he had married again. The master of this house, suspecting that it was his brother-in-law who haunted it, said to him: 'If you are Humbert, my brother-in-law, strike three times against the wall.' At the same time they heard three strokes only, for ordinarily he struck several times. Sometimes, also, he was heard at the fountain where they went for water, and he frightened all the neighborhood. He did not utter articulate sounds; but he would knock repeatedly, make a noise, or a groan or a shrill whistle, or sounds as of a person in lamentation."
This went on, at intervals, for a year, when the ghost found a voice, and told them to tell the cure to come there; and when he came he said he wanted three masses said for him, and alms given to the poor. The author has the following sensible observations on the modes in which ghost stories originate:—
"We call to our assistance the artifices of the charlatans, who do so many things which pass for supernatural in the eyes of the ignorant. Philosophers, by means of certain glasses, and what are called magic lanterns; by optical secrets, sympathetic powders: by their phosphorus, and, lately, by means of the electric machine, show us an infinite number of things which the simpletons take for magic, because they know not how they are produced. Eyes that are diseased do not see things as others see them, or else behold them differently. A drunken man will see objects double; to one who has the jaundice they will appear yellow: in the obscurity people fancy they see a spectre, where there is but the trunk of a tree.
"A mountebank will appear to eat a sword; mother will vomit coals, or pebbles. One will drink wine, and send it out again at his forehead; another will cut off his companion's head, and put it on again. You will think you see a chicken dragging a beam. The mountebank will swallow fire, and vomit it forth; he will draw blood from fruit; he will send from his mouth strings of iron nails; he will put a sword on his stomach, and press it strongly, and instead of running into him, it will bend back to the hilt. Another will run a sword through his body without wounding himself. You will sometimes see a child without a head, then a head without a child and all of them alive. That appears very wonderful; nevertheless, if it were known how all these things are done, people would only laugh, and be surprised that they could wonder at and admire such things."
If we are so easily deceived in these matters, is it strange that in peculiar states of mind or body, we are so completely imposed on in others? At p. 353 we have the story on which Goethe has founded a singular exploit of Mephistopheles in the cellar of Auerbach.
"John Faust Cudlington, a German, was requested, in a company of gay people, to perform in their presence some tricks of his trade. He promised to show them a vine loaded with grapes, ripe and ready to gather. They thought, as it was the month of December, he could not execute his promise. He strongly recommended them not to stir from their places, and not to lift up their hands to cut the grapes, unless by his express order. The vine
THE PHANTOM WORLD: a Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions, &c. By AUGUSTINE CALMET. Edited by Rev. Henry Christmas.