0 1 -2 S sustenance which each leper displayed in You should have seen how excitedly the My more impetuous readers will no doubt fancy that the life I led in this house was deadly dull. But it really was not. The landscape on the southern side was alone enough to keep ennui at a distance, even had I not had books on my table, and English-speaking friends within a few minutes' walk of my door. I never tired of the snow mountains, whether I saw them by day, with the snow melting down them in long, glistening lines, or by night, with the glow of the moon or the stars upon them. Their peaks, about eight thousand feet above the sea, were not more than nine or ten miles from my window, so that I often projected an ascent of them when the snow should go; an expedition doomed, however, to fail of fruition. And in the near foreground were their abrupt green flanks, riven with deep defiles, down which the melted snow poured in many a cascade; and there were white villages set on the hillsides in romantic perches. There was also the suggestion of sterner things in view from my house. High up among the snows, I could discern two or three burly buildings of a mysterious kind. To the stranger they would have no raison d'être; but in Crete they were symbols of terrorism. They were the block houses or forts which the sultan erected after the revolt of 1866. Previous So I thought at first. But by-and-by to that time, the mountaineers, or Sphathere came some blustering March days, kiots, as they are called, after Sphakia, with tempests of cold rain, which altered their province, had never, since the fall of the aspect of affairs. My house was Candia from Venice to Turkey, acknowlabundantly supplied with windows; but edged the Turkish rule. They had kept there was not a pane of glass in them. In their proud independence as firmly as in the daytime, therefore, when I was at the olden days, when their forefathers home, I enjoyed the most thorough venti- succeeded in holding the Romans aloof, lation. And at night I could, if I chose, though all the island else had yielded to guard against the nocturnal dews by clos- Metellus Creticus. But, in 1866, not withing the wooden shutters, which were my out prodigious loss of blood, Turkey only shield against the storm. With the pierced the mountain fastnesses, and gales of March, therefore, which deep-made the Sphakiots into subjects. And ened the snow on the mountains so that to retain her hold upon these strong, bold black rocks, which had heretofore been highlanders, she raised the block houses free, were now white as the summits, I which stare down upon the plains from began to growl at my quarters, and ex- their cool elevation among the snows for press fears that the very house itself several months in the year. The Turkish might not be proof against the force of garrisons of these block houses are as wind which entered it and whistled about little in love with their residence as the my pillow. To remedy the chilliness, the mountaineers themselves. It is a life of furniture was again augmented. A big the most chilly isolation. But, as a stroke tub of earthenware was brought, and set of policy, the sultan has done wisely in on a tripod of iron in the middle of the setting these padlocks upon the land. apartment. In this rude brazier I burnt during the day so many bundles of olive twigs that at night I seemed to sleep the sounder for the narcotic that pervaded my domestic air. My outlook upon the other side of the house had more of human than scenic interest. This was quite as it ought to have been. I was near a school kept by Greek priests for Christian boys and girls. There they were fat or lean, shapely or deformed. It was my turn to laugh when they took the air, as they sometimes did, in the green valley at the foot of the acclivity on which my house stood. It was a charming and a myriad of flowers among the grass. Perchance a shepherd in blue, with a scarlet turban on his head, a long gun on his shoulders, and a mandoline in his hands, would be sitting in the shade pretending to guard his flocks; and he, too, was as effective an aid to the landscape as the crimson anemones, the blue petals of the mandragora, or the tall, pale asphodels which here abounded. was a church adjacent to the school, and in the church a wooden screen of wonderful workmanship and colors. When I pleased, upon an evening, I could go into the church, with other worshippers, and listen to the hearty chants of the long-little pastoral nook of country, with big bearded ecclesiastics. It used to be a old olive-trees scattered over the sward, perpetual source of marvelling to me how the chanters could chant through the nose as they did, and for so long a time. Perhaps it may have been, as an intelligent German has said, that they are habituated to sing with their nostrils closed. Be that as it may, the two sounds are akin, and equally eccentric. The pictures in this old church I dare say as a foundation it dated from the time of the Crusades at the latest were of the sanguinary school executions and tortures of saints, such as the Greek Church_loves. Here was further a canvas of Saint Michael trampling upon the devil-in which the archangel possessed a feminine cast of features; and where Satan was depicted, prone at his feet, as an old man with white hair, naked, except for a girth-band, and having his mouth very wide open to signify his cries of pain under the archangelic infliction. But, for all this atmosphere of blood, the Greek priests themselves were mild, kindly men, and very courteous at salutations. I dare say they knew only enough of the Greek grammar - though, of course, their language was Greek to set their scholars upon the road of education; but they were none the less amiable for their ignorance. Hither, then, used to trip and roll my Turkish fair ones now and again, when their lord and master was out of the way. They were in white from head to ankle, and their little feet were wrapped up in I know not what form of cobblery. And the dear creatures were not above letting the yashmak· -as the flowered muslin which hid the lower part of their face is called – slip away, when they thought we were well within viewing and appreciative distance of each other. I am really sorry to confess my rudeness; but they were such oddities, alike in their reeling gait, their affected little screams at nothing at all, and even in their lack of the chief ele ments of beauty, once their faces were displayed, that I could offer them no homage more sentimental than an echo of the laughter with which they were wont to greet me. However, as they seemed to like this tribute of notice, it did not matter very much. Besides the priests and the scholars, with wallet of books upon the back, I had fairer solace in the vicinity of some Turkish damsels. I declare I was delighted Perhaps my readers will be curious when I realized that my house was suffi- about my housekeeping expenses in this ciently near to the house of a Turk for Cretan abode. Well, they were not exocular conversation. The master was travagant, although, of course, they were wont to waddle off to town in the morning, much greater than they ought to have and leave his ladies to look after them- been. For my house, together with the selves. I suppose he was not rich enough services of my neighbor and his family, to keep them under more effectual lock who made my bed, cleaned my floors, and key. Or, more probably, he was in-cooked and marketed for me, I paid but different to their gallantries. The conse- thirty shillings the month. Had I been quence was that, when I opened my shut- of Greek blood, I should no doubt have ters on their side—it was at a sufficiently bargained the cost down to considerably late hour of the morning I was gener-less. But to me it did not seem necesally fortunate enough to come under the sary; besides, a struggle of such a kind light of their eyes without loss of time. would have given me congestion of the They were, I judge, infantine little women, brain, and put me out of all patience with with boundless capacity for levity. At any the dictionary from that time forward. rate, I have never met damsels so free of their smiles, and who could put so many different expressions into eyes of uniform brownness. As for their figures, there was no knowing from externals whether a The marketing was a more important matter. My neighbor's eldest boy. consummate little merchant, with the trad ing instincts very thoroughly developed upon him - daily visited the capital, and bought what I wanted, and what he con- 2 piastres, 20 paras. 66 I 20 16 66 66 66 2 20 66 66 for some of the solaces of civilization. This gentleman was much tickled at the idea of a bachelor settling in Crete, as I had settled there. Just like an Englishman!" said he; "there is not a man of any other nation who would have done it." This was, of course, an absurd statement to make; but, perhaps, the gradations to it were natural enough. I parted from my house when the spring showed warm signs of waning into summer. By that time the hot sun had melted much of the snow from my mountains. They were, however, still impracticable in the lower valleys; and they were not a jot less beautiful than at first. But, daily, the 24 piastres, 25 paras.heat at noon grew more and more vexatious, and lengthened the hours which had to be cancelled from the active part of the twenty-four. As the Turkish piastre is worth about twopence farthing, and there are forty paras in a piastre, this day's bill came to about four shillings and sevenpence. But neither bread nor wine appears in it; because, I suppose, enough had been bought on the previous morning to last a couple of days. I offer my readers the bill for their entertainment, and not by any means as a truthful record of the worth of edible produce in Crete. Had I begun to tax my bills, I should have involved myself in endless disputes, in all of which I was likely to come off second best. It seemed better to suffer with resignation, though, of course, the suffering was not very acute. ture. But I confess that I did demur in this instance to the price of the fowl. It was, perhaps, four times the worth of the creaTo begin with, one might as well term a centenarian a child as call the fowl in question a chicken. It was killed under my own eyes, and its blood was shed upon the vines of the garden; and not all the stewing of all the cooks in the world could have made it aught but the tough piece of flesh it proved to be. I do not know if fowls, like human beings, go grey when they are old; but the chicken of my bil! was white, whether from age or abnormality, and there was no doubting that it was so decrepit and weak upon its legs that it ought long previously to have been indulged with crutches. However, I am not disposed to think harshly of my Cretan home because of these unavoidable little touches of the tiresome. We were good friends my neighbors and I-in spite of the chicken and other trifles of the like kind. What they thought of me I cannot tell. I dare say they held the same views as a certain Austrian naval officer who chanced to visit a friend of Khalepa, upon whom I relied The zephyrs breathed coolly as before upon the stony hills within a short climb of my cottage; but the toil of ascending in search of them intensified every day. With the heat, too, came many insects. My house seemed to generate them spon. taneously. There was no shielding my larder from the ants, and no protecting myself from vermin of the worst kind. became convinced that I had had enough of Crete. And so, one day, having packed my portmanteau, and replaced my revolver in its case, I once again accompanied a loaded ass on the road between Khalepa and Canea, and said a regretful farewell to my surroundings. It seemed to me much that I had for forty nights slept in a house as open to all the Cretans of Crete as the fields themselves, and that I had not been visited by marauders. The Cretans have been much defamed in the past, or else they have latterly developed sundry very estimable qualities. From The Spectator. THE INTELLECTUAL EFFECT OF OLD AGE. WITH two great poets publishing characteristic poems, the one in his seventyseventh and the other in his eighty-first year, and the elder of the two publishing at least one poem, written but a few months ago, which would have been singled out at any period of his life as one of the most exquisite of his lyrics, it is at least impos sible to say that the first effect of age is to destroy the creative power of the imagi. nation. Indeed, it ought to have been impossible to say that, ever since Sophocles produced his last great trilogy, and, according to the tradition, read one of its most splendid choruses to his judges, by way of proof that his mind had not been weakened by age. Indeed, there is hardly any intellectual power of the perfect survival of which in old age there is better evidence than the poetic. Goethe wrote one of his most beautiful poems when he was in his seventy-fifth year, Victor Hugo some of his finest when he was far beyond seventy, and Milton his great epic when he was nearly sixty. No doubt the greater number of great poets have died before the last stage of life, like the greater number of other great men, so that we have nothing like the same means of judging exactly what the effect of old age is on the intellect of the exceptionally gifted, that we have for judging what it is on the average mind. Horace, Virgil, Lucretius, Dante, Tasso, Spenser, Shakespeare, Molière, George Herbert, Collins, Thomson, Schiller, Goldsmith, Fielding, Burns, Scott, Shelley, Byron, Keats, none of them lived to reach old age, and we could easily add a host of others, as, indeed, it would be easy to do in every department of intellectual eminence. But so far as we have the means of judging, though it may be certainly said that old age slackens the rate at which men live in every way, physical and mental, there is no kind of reason to suppose that it slackens their mental powers so much as it slackens their physical powers. Tennyson has certainly produced very little that is more perfect than the poem on his own death, written, we believe, but a month or two ago, and the exquisite poem on Demeter and Persephone, which certainly cannot have been written long. And Browning's intellec tual energy could hardly be better attested than by the general vigor of the volume published just before his own death. A distinguished writer said but three weeks ago, in our own columns, that age, in giving tranquillity, gives more than compensation for anything that it takes away; but of the tranquillity we have considerable doubts. There can be no question, indeed, that youth, especially early manhood, has a feverish restlessness of its own which never recurs after the faculties and powers have once gained their maturity; but that is the special bitterness of youth, and its disappearance is not the gift of old age, but the gift of maturity and of the self-knowledge which usually accompanies maturity. Does old age bring any special tranquillity of its We greatly doubt it. Not unfre own? quently it brings a restlessness peculiarly its own. 'Locksley Hall Fifty Years After" is hardly less restless than the "Locksley Hall" of the poet-laureate's youth, though the later poem is restless with the sense of something that has vanished from the social life around him which he cherished, and the earlier poem with the sense that something has not yet come into it for which he craves. Wordsworth's old age was certainly not so tran. quil as his middle life, and Goethe's was not so tranquil as his childhood, which in its dignity and rather formal precision it resembled much more than it resembled his middle life. Victor Hugo's old age again was certainly not remarkable for its tranquillity. Some of his most excitable and hysterical moods were moods which came upon him in old age: And to pass to a very different region, no one would say that Mr. Gladstone's old age is especially tranquil, or that Lord Palmerston's old age was especially tranquil, or that M. Thiers's old age was especially tranquil. Of course, it will be replied that political life is not favorable to tranquillity; but then, if old age is a season of great tranquillity, why do not the old retire from political life? Again, is there any evidence that Mr. Darwin's old age was more tranquil than his maturity? We should say that it was less so; more conscious of the inadequacy of a merely scientific life, and yet less capable of interest in any less inadequate life. There is a popular impression, which we believe to be quite erroneous, that old age is intrinsically favorable to the balance of the judgment. Now, of course, with a good judgment to begin with, the accumulation of a long experience provides a man with new materials for judging rightly; but without that sound judgment, we conceive that it provides him only with new excuses for judg. ing wrongly. Lord Palmerston's latest years were among his least discreet years. He was nearly seventy when he needlessly offended the queen by his precipitation in giving his support to Louis Napoleon's coup d'état. He was over seventy when he irritated the English people by his Conspiracy Bill. He was approaching eighty. when he needlessly snubbed the emperor of the French in relation to the proposed congress. And he was_close upon eighty when he gave the Danes reason to expect help which at the last moment he withdrew. Mr. Gladstone was considerably over seventy when he sanc tioned the sending of Gordon on the fatal mission to the Soudan, and he was seven I T ty-six when he propounded his still more fatal scheme for revolutionizing the history of the United Kingdom. We take the truth to be that, as a rule, old age usually undermines first whatever is naturally the weakest organ, whether of body or mind. The man whose sight or hearing is previously disordered, feels the advance of age first in the more rapid failure of the eye or ear; the man who suffers from a feeble heart feels its advance in an increase of palpitations; the man who is a martyr to asthma feels its advance in the diminution of the intervals between the attacks, and the greater duration of each successive illness. And so it is, we imag. ine, with the intellect. The man whose memory is weak shows the advance of age chiefly by greater and greater obliviousness; the man whose imagination is feeble shows its advance chiefly by increasing matter-of-factness; the man whose judgment is uncertain and arbitrary shows its advance by greater and greater obliquity and impulsiveness of judgment. Lord Brougham's judgment was always hasty and feeble, but it grew hastier and feebler as he grew older; Lord Lyndhurst's was always strong, and he retained it in perfect order to the very end of his long career. It was the same with the emperor William and with Marshal von Moltke. The former retained and the latter retains his clear and sagacious judgment to the utmost limit of a very long official life. As Victor Hugo's powerful but rather melodramatic imagination held out to the last; as Tennyson's rich and tender in sight into the spiritual life of the soul is still as vivid as ever; as Browning's shrewd and penetrating analysis of human motive is graven deeply on his latest book; as Goethe's majestic and tolerant criticism, which sparkled clearest, as he himself described it, "at dead of night" remained with him till his death; and as there was no decay to the very end in the imaginative serenity of Sophocles, of whom it has been said that his even-balanced soul, From first youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull nor passion wild, Who saw life steadily and saw it whole, The mellow glory of the Attic stage, Singer of sweet Colonus and its child, so, too, calm and stately judgments have held their ground to the last, as surely as the poets' lofty vision. As surely, but not more surely; for there is nothing to show that the strong judgment relatively loses less by the advance of age than the strong imagination. The predominant faculty keeps its predominance, but does not keep it more effectively in one region than it does in the other. Indeed, the orator keeps his impressive oratory to old age with a pre-eminence at least as remarkable as that with which the logician or the dialectician keeps his logic or his dialectic, or the mathematician his command of deductive or analytic processes. For our parts, we believe that whatever shrinkage there may be in the intellectual powers of the aged, makes itself just as visible on the reasoning side of the mind as on the imaginative side, and is only the kind of shrinkage which is due to a generally diminished vitality, in other words, to the slower rate at which the mind's messages thrill along the nerves, and to the greater obstruction which the physical organs of life offer to the commanding power of the will and the imperious energy of the spirit. No From The English Illustrated Magazine. THE CATS OF ANCIENT EGYPT. BY PROFESSOR W. M. CONWAY. IT has been said with truth that one of the greatest triumphs of human perseverance is the domestication of the cat. tame animal has lost less of its native dignity or maintained more of its ancient reserve. The domestic cat might rebel to-morrow. We could not reach it for capture, nor beat it into submission. We could only kill it if it did not consent to be harmless. and to make itself at home. Nothing but the experience of countless generations of cats that they would not be harmed by man, can have produced the result we now universally observe. Where and when did this taming of the least tamable of animals take place? The monuments of ancient Egypt enable us to answer the question. In pre-historic times the religion of the Egyptians was pure and simple totemism. Probably in those days the inhabitants of Egypt were not united under any common government, but consisted of a number of small tribes or clans, each of one kindred. Every such clan or kindred had its totem. Totems are defined by Mr. Frazer, in his learned work on the subject, as a class of material objects, which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation." The members of a to 66 |