Pinakidia — 1902 historical reading — reading text

Pinakidia Historical reading from James A. Harrison’s 1902 Complete Works, volume XIV. This is a later collected edition, not the first periodical printing. The selected historical work sections are preserved locally; modern website commentary and double-bracketed corrections are excluded. Paragraph and verse-line boundaries are retained, with simplified typography. No independent word-by-word proofreading is claimed. PINAKIDIA. [Southern Literary Messenger, August, 1836.] UNDER the head of Random Thoughts, Odds and Ends, Stray Leaves, Scraps, Brevities, and a variety of similar titles, we occasionally meet, in periodicals and elsewhere, with papers of rich interest and value — the result, in some cases, of much thought, and more research, expended, however, at a manifest disadvantage, if we regard merely the estimate which the public are willing to set upon such articles. It sometimes occurs that in papers of this nature may be found a collective mass of general, but more usually of classical erudition, which if dexterously besprinkled over a proper surface of narrative, would be sufficient to make the fortunes of one or two hundred ordinary novelists in these our good days, when all heroes and heroines are necessarily men and women of “extensive acquirements.” But, for the most part, these “Brevities,” etc., are either piecemeal cullings at second hand, from a variety of sources hidden or supposed to be hidden, or more audacious pilferings from those vast storehouses of brief facts, memoranda, and opinions in general literature, which are so abundant in all the principal libraries of Germany and France. Of the former species, the Koran of Lawrence Sterne is, at the same time, one of the most consummately impudent and silly; and it may well be doubted whether a single paragraph of any merit in the whole of it may not be found, nearly verbatim, in the works of some one of his immediate cotemporaries. If the Lacon of Mr. Colton is any better, its superiority consists altogether in a deeper ingenuity in disguising his stolen wares, and in that prescriptive right of the strongest which, time out of mind, has decided upon calling every Napoleon a conqueror, and every Dick Turpin a thief. Seneca; Machiavelli;(1) Balzac, the author of “La Manière de bien Penser”; Bielfeld, the German, who wrote, in French, “Les Premiers Traits de L’Erudition Universelle”; Rochefoucault; Bacon; Bolingbroke; and especially Burdon, of “Materials for Thinking” memory, possess, among them, indisputable claims to the ownership of nearly everything worth owning in the book. Of the latter species of theft, we see frequent specimens in the continental magazines of Europe, and occasionally meet with them even in the lower class of periodicals in Great Britain. These specimens are usually extracts, by wholesale, from such works as the “Bibliothèque des Memorabilia Literaria,” the “Recueil des Bonnes Pensées,” the “Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses,” the “Literary Memoir” of Sallengré, the “Mélanges Littéraires” of Suard and André, or the “Pièces Intéressantes et peu Connues” of La Place. D’Israeli's “Curiosities of Literature,” “Literary Character,” and “Calamities of Authors,” have, of late years, proved exceedingly convenient to some little American pilferers in this line, but are now becoming too generally known to allow much hope of their good things being any longer appropriated with impunity. Such collections, as those of which we have been speaking, are usually entertaining in themselves, and for the most part, we relish everything about them save their pretensions to originality. In offering, ourselves, something of the kind to the readers of the Messenger, we wish to be understood as disclaiming in a great degree every such pretension. Most of the following article is not(1) original, and will be readily recognized as such by the classical and general reader — some portions of it may have been written down in the words, or nearly in the words, of the primitive authorities. The whole is taken from a confused mass of marginal notes, and entries in a common-place-book. No certain arrangement has been considered necessary; and, indeed, so heterogeneous a farrago it would have been an endless task to methodize. We have chosen the heading Pinakidia, or Tablets, as one sufficiently comprehensive. It was used, for a somewhat similar purpose, by Dionysius of Harlicarnassus. ———— The whole of Bulwer's elaborate argument on the immortality of the soul, which he has put into the mouth of the “Ambitious Student,” may be confuted through the author's omission of one particular point in his summary of the attributes of Deity — a point which we cannot believe omitted altogether through accident. A single link is deficient in the chain — but the chain is worthless without it. No man doubts the immortality of the soul — yet of all truths this truth of immortality is the most difficult to prove by any mere series of syllogisms. We would refer our readers to the argument here mentioned. ———— The rude rough wild waste has its power to please, a line in one Mr. Idiorne's poem, “The Progress of Refinement,” is pronounced by the American author of a book entitled “Ante-Diluvian Antiquities,” “the very best alliteration in all poetry.” ———— The Turkish Spy is the original of many similar works — among the best of which are Montesquieu's Persian Letters, and the British Spy of our own Wirt. It was written undoubtedly by John Paul Marana, an Italian, in Italian, but probably was first published in French. Dr. Johnson, who saw only an English translation, supposed it an English work. Marana died in 1693. ———— The hunter and the deer a shade is a much admired line in Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming — but the identical line is to be found in the poems of the American Freneau. ———— Corneille's celebrated Moi of Medea is borrowed from Seneca. Racine, in Phædra, has stolen nearly the whole scene of the declaration of love from the same puerile writer. ———— The peculiar zodiac of the comets is comprised in these verses of Cassini: — Antinous, Pegasusque, Andromeda, Taurus, Orion. Procyon, atque Hydrus, Centaurus, Scorpius, Arcus. ———— Speaking of the usual representation of the banquet-scene in “Macbeth,” Von Raumer, the German historian, mentions a shadowy figure thrown by optical means into the chair of Banquo, and producing intense effect upon the audience. Enslen, a German optician, conceived this idea, and accomplished it without difficulty. ———— A religious hubbub, such as the world has seldom seen, was excited during the reign of Frederic II, by the imagined virulence of a book entitled “The Three Impostors.” It was attributed to Pierre des Vignes, chancellor of the king, who was accused by the Pope of having treated the religions of Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet as political fables. The work in question, however, which was squabbled about, abused, defended, and familiarly quoted by all parties, is well proved never to have existed. ———— The word Τυχη, or Fortune, does not appear once in the whole Iliad. ———— The “Lamentations” of Jeremiah are written, with the exception of the last chapter, in acrostic verse: that is to say, every line or couplet begins, in alphabetical order, with some letter in the Hebrew alphabet. In the third chapter each letter is repeated three times successively. ———— The fullest account of the Amazons is to be found in Diodorus Siculus. ———— Theophrastus, in his botanical works, anticipated the sexual system of Linnæus. Philolaus of Crotona maintained that comets appeared after a certain revolution, and Æcetes contended for the existence of what is now called the new world. Pulci, “the sire of the half-serious rhyme,” has a passage expressly alluding to a western continent. Dante, two centuries before, has the same allusion. De’ vostri sensi ch’ è del rimanente, Non vogliate negar l’esperenza Diretro al sol, del mondo senza gente.(1) — Inferno, XXVI., 115. ———— Cicero makes finis masculine, Virgil feminine. Usque ad eum finem. — Cicero. Quae finis standi? Haec finis Priami facorum. — Virgil. ———— Dante left a poem in three languages — Latin, Provençal, and Italian. Rambaud de Vachieras left one in five. ———— Marcus Antoninus wrote a book entitled Των εις εαυτον — Of the things which concern himself. It would be a good title for a Diary. ———— Lipsius, in his treatise “De Supplicio Crucis,” says that the upright beam of the cross was a fixture at the place of execution, whither the criminal was made to bear only the transverse arm. Consequently the painters are in error who depict our Savior bearing the entire cross. ———— The stream flowing through the middle of the valley of Jehoshaphat, is called, in the Gospel of St. John, “the brook of cedars.” In the Septuagint the word is κεδρον, darkness, from the Hebrew Kiddar, black, and not κεδρων, of cedars. ———— Seneca says that Appian, a grammarian of the age of Caligula, maintained that Homer himself made the division of the Iliad and Odyssey into books, and evidences the first word of the Iliad, Μηνιν, the Μη of which signifies 48, the number of books in both poems. Seneca, however, adds, “Talia sciat oportet qui multa vult scire.” ———— The tale in Plato's “Convivium,” that man at first was male and female, and that, though Jupiter cleft them asunder, there was a natural love towards one another, seems to be only a corruption of the account in Genesis of Eve's being made from Adam's rib. ———— Corneille has these lines in one of his tragedies: — Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez-vous en eau — La moitié de ma vie a mis l’autre au tombeau, which may be thus translated, Weep, weep, my eyes! it is no time to laugh For half myself has buried the other half. ———— Over the iron gate of a prison at Ferrara is this incription “Ingresso alla prigione di Torquato Tasso.” ———— Hèdelin, a Frenchman, in the beginning of the 18th century, denied that any such person as Homer ever existed, and supposed the Iliad to be made up ex tragediis, et variis canticis de trivio mendicatorum et circulatorum — à la manière des chansons du Pontneuf. The Rabbi Manasseh published a book at Amsterdam entitled “The Hopes of Israel.” It was founded upon the supposed number and power of the Jews in America. This supposition was derived from a fabulous account by Montesini of his having found a vast concourse of Jews among the Cordilleras. ———— The word assassin is derived, according to Hyle, from Hassa, to kill. Some bring it from Hassan, the first chief of the association — some from the Jewish Essenes- Lemoine from a word meaning “herbage”; De Sacy and Hammer from “hashish,” the opiate of hemp leaves, of which the assassins made a singular use. ———— “Defuncti injuriâ ne afficiantur” was a law of the twelve tables. ———— The origin of the phrase “corporal oath” is to be found in the ancient usage of touching, upon occasion of attestation, the corporale or cloth which covered the consecrated articles. ———— Montgomery in his lectures on Literature (!) has the following — “Who does not turn with absolute contempt from the rings and gems, and filters, and caves and genii of Eastern Tales, as from the trinkets of a toyshop, and the trumpery of a raree-show?” What man of genius but must answer “Not I.” ———— The Abbé de St. Pierre has fixed in his language two significant words, viz: bienfaisance, and the diminutive la gloriole. ———— There is no particular air known throughout Switzerland by the name of the Ranz des Vaches. Every canton has its own song varying in words, notes, and even language. Mr. Cooper, the novelist, is our authority. ———— Incidis in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim is neither in Virgil nor Ovid, as often supposed, but in the “Alexandrics” of Philip Gualtier, a French poet of the thirteenth century. ———— Under a portrait of Tiberio Fiurilli who invented the character of Scaramouch, are these