Servetus and Calvin. Robert Willis
Ireland and the Irish our editor does not speak so favourably. The country, he observes, is generally marshy, so that, unless the summers are dry, the cattle are apt to get lost in the bogs. It is free from noxious creatures of every kind, there being no reptiles, such as snakes, toads, and frogs, and no insects, such as spiders and bees—a state of things which, if it ever obtained, certainly does so no longer. The climate is very temperate, and the soil of great fertility; but the people are rude, inhospitable, barbarous, and cruel, more given to hunting and idle play than to industry. Only three days’ sail from Spain, the Irish, he says, have many customs in common with the Spaniards.
Of Spain, the account given is particularly full, but by no means complimentary, and its people are contrasted—not to their advantage—with their neighbours the French. The extreme dryness of the climate is noticed, which tends to make the country less fertile than France. Irrigation, however, being practised on an extensive scale in many parts, tends to make up for the infrequency of rain, the conduits being often carried to great distances from the rivers. His description of the people is far from laudatory. ‘The Spaniard,’ he says, ‘is of a restless disposition, apt enough of understanding, but learning imperfectly or amiss, so that you shall find a learned Spaniard almost anywhere sooner than in Spain. Half-informed, he thinks himself brimful of information, and always pretends to more knowledge than he has in fact. He is much given to vast projects, never realised; and in conversation he delights in subtleties and sophistry. Teachers commonly prefer to speak Spanish rather than Latin in the schools and colleges of the country; but the people in general have little taste for letters, and produce few books themselves, mostly procuring those they want from France.’ The Spanish language, indeed, he speaks of as defective in many respects, and does not fail to remark on the number of Moorish words incorporated with it. The people, he says, ‘have many barbarous notions and usages,’ derived by implication from their old Moorish conquerors and fellow-denizens. ‘The women have a custom that would be held barbarous in France, of piercing their ears and hanging gold rings in them, often set with precious stones. They besmirch their faces, too, with minium and ceruse—red and white lead—and walk about on clogs a foot or a foot and a half high, so that they seem to walk above rather than on the earth. The people are extremely temperate, and the women never drink wine. Spaniards, he concludes, are notably the most superstitious people in the world in their religious notions; but they are brave in the field, of signal endurance under privation and difficulty, and by their voyages of discovery have spread their name over the face of the globe.’
Of France, M. Villeneuve has less to say than of Spain; but what he tells us of the royal touch for the cure of scrofula is still interesting in the annals of superstition. ‘I have myself seen the king touching many labouring under this disease, but I did not see that they were cured.’
Of Germany, and he uses the title in a very comprehensive sense—he speaks at considerable length. Smarting under the rebuff he had received at the hands of the Swiss and German Reformers, he is nowise disposed to find the Teutons and their congeners or neighbours however designated, an interesting people, or their territories as in any way attractive. Referring to Tacitus’s account of Germany proper, as overgrown by vast forests, and defaced by frightful swamps, its climate he says is at once as insufferably hot in summer as it is bitterly cold in winter. ‘Hungary,’ he observes, ‘is commonly said to produce oxen, Bavaria swine, Franconia onions, turnips and liquorice, Swabia harlots, Bohemia heretics, Switzerland butchers, Westphalia cheats, and the whole country gluttons and drunkards. The Germans, however, are a religious people; not easily turned from opinions they have once espoused and not readily persuaded to concord in matters of schism, everyone valiantly and obstinately defending the heresy he has himself adopted;’ words in which we may presume Villanovanus sought to give ease to the pent-up displeasure he felt against his repudiators, the Reformers of Basle and Strasburg.
Of Italy and its people he has little to say; and that not good. The natives readily enough pretend to forgive injuries, but, occasion offering, none revenge themselves so savagely. They make use in their everyday talk of the most horrid oaths and imprecations. Holding all the rest of the world in contempt and calling them barbarians, they themselves have nevertheless been alternately the prey of France, of Spain, and of Germany.
In his survey of Babylonia, he refers to a certain abominable custom observed by young marriageable women, which is particularly mentioned by Herodotus and also by the writers of the Bible, when read by unsealed eyes, as obtaining among the Jews, and of the money, so objectionably earned in our estimation, being devoted to the service of the Temple.
But the most interesting to us perhaps of all the commentaries attached to the Ptolemy, inasmuch as it influenced the fate of Servetus on his trial at Geneva, is the one appended to the map of Palestine or the Holy Land. Demurring to much that is said in praise of Judæa in the Bible and by Josephus, as a country specially blessed in various ways, as being well-watered, fertile, &c., the commentator says, that in so far as climate is concerned, it is a temperate land, obnoxious to the extremes neither of heat nor of cold; a condition of things that may have led the Israelites or Hebrews to imagine that it must be the land that was promised to their forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; a land metaphorically said to be flowing with milk and honey. ‘The Israelites,’ it is said in continuation, ‘lived at length under laws received from Moses, although they had gone on piously and prosperously enough through countless ages, before his day, without any written law, having had regard to the oracles of divine or natural truth alone, gifted as they were with aptitude and greatness of mind. Moses, however, that distinguished theologian, thinking that no state could exist without a written code of law and equity, gave them one reduced to ten principal heads, engraved on two tables of stone; with the addition of a great number of minor commandments for the regulation of their lives and dealings with one another. But any more particular notice of these, they being so numerous—great birds not sitting in little nests—must here be passed by. Know, however, most worthy reader, that it is mere boasting and untruth when so much of excellence is ascribed to this land; the experience of merchants and others, travellers who have visited it, proving it to be inhospitable, barren, and altogether without amenity. Wherefore you may say that the land was promised, indeed, but is of little promise when spoken of in everyday terms.’
The Ptolemy of Villanovanus was well received, and though costly, a second edition was by and by required. We find it much commended in subsequent reprints by their publishers; and no wonder, for the Ptolemy is really a sumptuous book, upon which a large sum of money must have been spent, the typography being excellent and the text profusely ornamented with woodcuts on the sides of the pages as well as at the heads and tails of the chapters.38
CHAPTER IX.
LYONS. DOCTOR SYMPHORIEN CHAMPIER.
It was whilst engaged in the revision of such works as the Ptolemy and others on the natural sciences, anatomy, medicine, pharmacy, &c., in the service of the Trechsels, that Servetus may be said to have entered on the second, if it were not rather the third, stage of his mental development. The typographer’s reading-room had in truth proved the means of his continued education; each new volume he read and corrected being found a teacher not less influential than the Professor from his chair. The Convent school, Toulouse, and his engagement with Quintana had borne fruit of the kind we discover in the book on Trinitarian error; it was the reading-room of the printers of Lyons that brought him back from the empyrean of metaphysics to the earth, and put him in the way of becoming the geographer, astrologian, biblical critic, physiologist and physician we are made familiar with in his subsequent life and writings.
Among the learned works that flowed in a sort of ceaseless stream from the presses of the Trechsels during Servetus’s tenure of his office as reader with them, were several from the fertile pen of Doctor Symphorien Champier, or, when he latinised his name, Campeggius, a man of large and liberal culture, of a truly noble nature, an admirer of learning and a patron of the learned; possessed moreover of that restless vanity which made him feel it as much a matter of necessity to live in the eye of the world as to breathe; the effect of