LITERARY

CURIOSITIES AND ECCENTRICITIES.

CURIOSITIES OF CHARACTER.

LUTHER AT HOME.

It was a delightful thing to spend an evening with him. His broad, beneficent nature expanded into the sunniest, playfullest kindliness. His talk was full of wisdom, of humour, of genuine insight. Nature, art, humanity, philosophy, theology,-he was at home in them all. Floods of light came forth from him in single utterances, given freely, without effort. It is something more than curious to find him at one of these fireside conversations laughing at the absurdity of the Copernican system of astronomy, curious to go back so far as to find the first man of his generation counting for fancy what the merest child now knows to be fact. It is seldom you find such things, however. His mind was open as a child's for truth. It is most exhilarating to be beside him when he first discovered, studying the Greek language, after the Reformation had begun, that metanoia did not mean penances, but a change of life.

You know, amongst other courageous things he did, that he cast off the monk's cowl and married a nun. Catherine de Bora was her name. She had to beg her bread from door to door after her husband's death. With his wife he lived a noble domestic life, and yet an everyday one. How playfully he bantered her, laughed at her attempts to fathom the deep thoughts of her husband. "My Eve," he called her "my Kit-my lord Kit-my rib Kit-that most learned dame, Catherine Luther de Bora. Ah, Kit, thou shouldst never preach! If thou wouldst only say the Lord's prayer always before beginning, thy lectures would be shorter." In the history of his married life you will not miss acts of the highest benevolence, of hospitality afforded to those who could not return it, of just dealing with old servants. Luther and she were often very poor. The princes took his preaching, but left him to live as he might. He never would take money for his writings: the booksellers got all the profit. At one time he took to turning wood for a little money; at another, to

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gardening. Yet, in the midst of all this hardship, when he had not a coin for himself, he would take the silver drinking cups he had got as keepsakes from the princes, and give them to poor students.-Noble Traits of Kingly Men.

SHELLEY'S STRANGE FANCY.

ONE evening, Lord Byron and Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, two ladies, and another gentleman, after having perused a German work called "Phantasmagoria," began relating ghost stories; when his lordship having recited the beginning of "Christabel," then unpublished, the whole took so strong a hold of Mr. Shelley's mind, that he suddenly started up and ran out of the room. The physician and Lord Byron followed, and discovered him leaning against a mantel-piece, with the cold drops of perspiration trickling down his face. After having given him something to refresh him, upon inquiring into the cause of his alarm, they found that his wild imagination having pictured to him the bosom of one of the ladies with eyes (which was reported of a lady in the neighbourhood where he lived), he was obliged to leave the room in order to destroy the impression.-Preface to the Vampire.

In reference to the above incident, Byron, in a letter to Murray the publisher, dated May, 1819, writes :-The story of Shelley's agitation is true. I can't tell what seized him, for he don't want courage. He was once out with me in a gale of wind in a small boat, right under the rocks between Meillerie and St. Gingo. We were five in the boat : a servant, two boatmen, and ourselves. The sail was mismanaged, and the boat was filling fast. He can't swim. I stripped off my coat, made him strip off his, and take hold of an oar, telling him that I thought (being an expert swimmer) I could save him, if he would not struggle when I took hold of him, unless we got smashed against the rocks, which were high and sharp, with an awkward surf on them at that minute. We were then about a hundred yards from the shore, and the boat in peril. He answered me with the greatest coolness, that he had no notion of being saved, and that I would have enough to do to save myself; and begged not to trouble me. Luckily, the boat righted, and, baling, we got round a point into St. Gingo, where the inhabitants came down and embraced the boatmen on their escape, the wind having been high enough to tear up some huge trees from the Alps above us, as we saw next day. And yet the same Shelley, who was as cool as it was possible to be in such circumstances (of which I am no judge myself, as the chance of swimming naturally gives self-possession when near shore), certainly had the fit of fantasy, which Polidore describes, though not exactly as he describes it.—Byron's Letters.

AN ECCENTRIC CLERGYMAN.

THE Rev. Thomas Priestly, who died in 1814, was a brother of the celebrated Dr. Priestly, and minister of the dissenting chapel in Cannon

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Street, Manchester, from the pulpit of which he uttered many eccentricities, which have been attributed erroneously to other preachers. Observing one of his congregation asleep, he called to him (stopping in his discourse for the purpose), "Awake! I say, George Ramsay, or I'll mention your name.' He had an unconquerable aversion to candles which exhibited long burned wicks, and often in the midst of his most interesting discourses, in the winter evenings, he would call out to the man appointed for that purpose," Tommy! Tommy! top those candles." He was a man of great humour, which he even carried into the pulpit. He was the preacher, though others have borne the credit or odium of the circumstance, who pulled out of his pocket a half-crown, and laid it down upon the pulpit cushion, offering to bet with St. Paul, that the passage where he says "he could do all things," was not true; but reading on, "by faith,” put up his money, and said, “ Nay, nay, Paul, if that's the case I'll not bet with thee."

"PRESERVED" LADIES.

AMONGST the curiosities and objects of interest to be seen by visitors to the Museum of the College of Surgeons, at Lincoln's Inn Fields, there is the body of a woman preserved in spirits in a glass case. It is the body of the wife of an eccentric quack doctor, Martin van Butchel, who died at his residence in Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, London, on the 30th October, 1814, in his eightieth year. This odd personage had been originally a surgical-instrument maker of considerable note, but relinquished that respectable profession for the more than questionable occupation of an empirical practitioner. Every afternoon Van Butchel took a "constitutional" in Hyde Park, mounted on a little white pony, to whose head was attached an ingenious contrivance by which a pair of blinkers could be instantaneously drawn over its eyes, to prevent the pony from "shying" at any uncommon object. His personal appearance was rendered the more remarkable, at a period when shaving was so generally practised, by his wearing a magnificent beard of twenty years' growth, which an Oriental might well have envied. According to popular tradition, the body of Van Butchel's spouse was thus embalmed and kept in his surgery, "for the purpose of securing a handsome income, which he only was to enjoy whilst his 'rib' remained above ground." This crafty plan of the quack doctor was well known'among his acquaintance, and suggested a clever jocular "Epitaph on Mary Van Butchel," of which the following are the concluding lines:

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"O fortunate and envied man,

To keep a wife beyond life's span !

Whom you can ne'er have cause to blame;
Is ever constant and the same;

Who, qualities most rare, inherits

A wife that's dumb-yet full of spirits!"

This "lady in a glass case" reminds me of another and more distin

guished female personage, whose embalmed body the gallant secretary and garrulous diarist, Mr. Samuel Pepys, had the pleasure to kiss in Westminster Abbey. He has recorded the whimsical incident as follows:-"To Westminster Abbey, and saw, by particular favour, the body of Queen Catherine of Valois. I had the upper part of the body in my hands, and I did kisse her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kisse a queen, and that this was my birthday, 36 years old, and that I did kisse a queen." Mr. Pepys apparently did not deem a living dog better than a dead lion; in other words, he did not consider that the "rud-red" lips of his own pretty Mistress Elizabeth, or, for the matter of that, the cherry lips of one of the tripping milkmaids he admired on a May-day, when on the way "to the office," were to be preferred to those of Catherine of Valois, "dead, and buried, and embalmed.”— W. A. Clouston.

FOOTE'S MAD PRANKS.

AT college, while under the care of the provost Dr. Gower, Foote's reckless conduct drew down upon him severe lectures from the learned provost, who does not however appear to have administered them with much judgment, interlarding his objurgations with many sesquipedalian words and phrases. On such occasions Foote would appear before his preceptor with a huge folio dictionary under his arm, and on any peculiarly hard word being used, would beg pardon with much formality for interrupting him; turn up his book, as if to find out the meaning of the learned term which had just been uttered, and then, closing it, would say with the utmost politeness," Very well, sir; now please go on."

Another of his tricks was setting the bell of the college church ringing at night, by tying a wisp of hay to the bell-rope which hung down low enough to be within reach of some cows that were turned out to graze in a neighbouring lane. The mishap of Dr. Gower and the sexton, who caught hold of the peccant animal whilst in search of the author of the mischief, and imagined they had made a prisoner of him, provided a rich store of amusement for many days to the denizens of Oxford.

The following is Dr. Johnson's declaration regarding him, as related to Boswell :-"The first time I was in company with Foote was at Fitzherbert's. Having no good opinion of the fellow, I was resolved not to be pleased; and it is very difficult to please a man against his will. I went on eating my dinner, pretty sullenly, affecting not to mind him; but the dog was so very comical that I was obliged to lay down my knife and fork, throw myself back in my chair, and fairly laugh it out. Sir, he was irresistible." On another occasion he thus contrasts him with Garrick: "Garrick, sir, has some delicacy of feeling; it is possible to put him out; you may get the better of him ; but Foote is the most incompressible fellow that I ever knew: when you have driven him into a corner and think you are sure of him, he runs between your legs, or jumps over your head, and makes his escape."