CHAPTER XII.

LIFE OF A GIANT.

"It would much conduce to the magnanimity and honour of man, if a collection were made of the ultimities (as the schools speak) or summities (as Pindar) of human nature, principally out of the faithful reports of history; that is what is the last and highest pitch to which man's nature of itself hath ever reached in all the perfections both of body and mind."-LORD BACON.

I REGRET that all my efforts to learn something really worth knowing about the natural history of giants, have been almost as fruitless as those given in the chapter on species. Indeed the present writer has a heavy charge to bring against the british public; he accuses it of neglecting the giants. In its youthful days it enjoys the services of these benevolent men; they are as much an institution as the british lion, the man in armour, or the javelin men; but it cherishes the british lion, it takes the man in armour to its heart, it upholds the javelin men, and ungratefully forgets the giants.

Not the giants of whom the knight of the rueful countenance was wont to discourse beneath the corktrees of La Mancha; nor those of whom Spenser sang in his sweet, dreamy, half-finished tales; nor the giants thirty-six feet high found near queenly Athens; nor the monster Mazarino, whose head was the size of a large cask and whose teeth weighed five ounces each; nor the ancient king of Dauphiny, whose mortal

remains rest in a tomb thirty feet long: the said remains being twenty-five feet in length, with teeth the size of an ox's foot and a shin-bone measuring four feet-which means that, despite the tradition that gave the name of the giant's field to the spot where he was buried, and that his remains are said to have been found in a real tomb of brick, on which lay a grey stone bearing the words Theutobachus Rex cut on it, he was not a giant at all, but like Mazarino and divers others, an extinct mole or mammoth or something of that kind; nor Philargyre, the "great gygant of Great Britaine;" nor the giant Ferragus, eighteen feet high, slain by Orlando, nephew of the immortal Charlemagne; nor the hairy giants of the South Sea; nor those slain by our immortal Jack; nor a thousand others, for the old monks and chroniclers were somewhat given to credulity and knew not the bones of a hippopotamus from those of a giant. Thus Father Jerome de Rhetel, missionary in the Levant, in a letter written from the island of Scio giving a long narrative of the finding of a giant's skeleton in the wall of a village named Chailliot, not far from Thessalonica, says that a tooth of the under jaw weighed fifteen pounds. Now this is a good deal less than the tooth of a mastodon often weighs.

A hundred and fifty years ago some huge bones, probably of the mastodon, were found in New England. The notorious Increase Mather, a great man among the rebellious tyrannical puritans of that seditious spot, sent an account of them to London, describing them as being the remains of the giants before the flood. One tooth was four pounds and three quarters in weight, and a thigh-bone seventeen feet

long is spoken of; respecting the latter we may assume there was some slight mistake.

In Kirby's "Wonderful Museum "* will be found a tale which looks as though there were a basis of truth in some of these old legends. We are there told that at Triolo, a castle in Upper Calabria, some labourers found in a garden an entire skeleton measuring eighteen or more feet in length; the head being two feet and a half in length and the grinding teeth an ounce and a third in weight. The skeleton lay stretched upon a mass of bituminous matter like pitch; the bones were extremely brittle and easily crumbled into dust.

Now I think the old writer has here unwittingly given the best proof that his story was true. It is not easy to imagine for what purpose he could have invented this part about the skeleton lying stretched upon a mass of bituminous matter like pitch. Yet the geologist knows this is precisely what was very likely to happen, if some great fish, a shark for instance, had been stranded at this spot and rapidly covered with mud. It is what has happened to uncounted millions of fish in old rocks.

But to return, it is the real domestic giant whose interests are now represented. The writer appears in behalf of the melancholy but benignant-looking giant of the caravan, such as he rises up amidst the dreams of bygone times when the writer was admitted to the privilege of seeing him for twopence, fittingly dressed in a rather antique and very faded suit, and generally accompanied by some other prodigies of nature, which

*Vol. ii. p. 378. 1804.

the public was also graciously permitted to view for this ridiculously small sum.

Many a time and oft has the author wondered whether the giant always lived in that small yellow house on wheels, with the bird-cage, regulation chimney, and brass knocker; whether all through life he continued to give an account of himself every quarter of an hour; whether he ever grew tired of showing the size of his foot, and having his sides poked and his legs pinched by sceptical old gentlemen who wouldn't be put down; whether when he grew old he still continued to walk about the streets at two in the morning, lighting his pipe at the lamps; whether he married the giantess, or the pig-faced lady, and retired to live in his castle.

In his youthful days the writer wanted to be a giant himself, and several times thought he had discovered an infallible method of attaining the object of his ambition, such as overfeeding, stretching by dint of violent jerks from beams, &c., to the great amazement of his relations and friends. He failed egregiously however; indeed with the exception of several strains and one rather hard fall across a washing-tub he cannot report any particular results.

For this failure he feels grateful. Apart from the fact that the giant is essentially short-lived, and that he is generally a poor credulous blundering creature, he is the most unhappy of all the tribe of wonders. The pig-faced lady may hide her facial angles behind a Shetland veil; the albino can dye her hair and wear spectacles; the living skeleton may now assume any size he likes by the help of balloon sleeves and pegtops: the dwarf is petted and kissed, retires with a

fortune and a wife three times his size, generally a lady of a masculine turn of mind who quells anything like rebellion by putting him upon the chimneypiece till he has had time to think matters over and cool down somewhat, for these little men are marvellously fiery. To the giant alone is denied alike the pleasure of retirement and the bliss of connubial life; he is interdicted from appearing in public except while there is no public to appear in; he pines while living and dies of his own greatness ere half the span of his life is run.

As I have already said, the unmerited neglect of these eminent men has rendered it rather difficult to procure authentic information respecting them; but such little scraps as have been gotten together by a faithful admirer are now presented to, it is sincerely hoped, a repentant british public.

M. Le Cat gives in his memoir a long list of giants from the days of Hercules to the middle of last century, and from seven feet to a trifle over fifty, to which the reader is referred for further information. Now it is possible that in the midst of all M. Le Cat's fables there may be some which are not altogether to be rejected. It is quite possible as he says that Hercules was seven feet high, though it is doubtful whether we can take the evidence as absolutely certain; it is likewise possible that the emperor Maximin was above eight feet high because we have skeletons to prove that men can grow to this size, and that Antoninus was seven feet seven ;* that the giant Galbara brought from Arabia to Rome during the time of

* He was a syrian and lived in the reign of Theodosius. He died at the age of twenty-five.