27th January

Born: Dr. Thomas Willis, 1622, Bothnia; J. C. W. Mozart, Celebrated composer, 1756.

Died: Sir William Temple, 1699; Thomas Woolston, 1733, King's Bench Prison; Admiral Lord Hood, 1816; Dr. C. Hutton, mathematician, 1823; Rev. Dr. Andrew Bell, originator of the Madras System of Juvenile Education, 1832; John James Audubon, naturalist, 1851, New York.

Feast Day: St. Julian, bishop, 3rd century. St. John Chrysostom, archbishop, 407. St. Marius, abbot, 555.

ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

St. John Chrysostomus is one of the most celebrated of the fathers of the Eastern or Greek church. He was born about the year 347, at Antioch. His father was commander of the Imperial army in Syria. He was educated for the bar, but became a convert to Christianity; and the solitary manner of living being then in great estimation, and very prevalent in Syria, he retired to a mountain not far from Antioch, where he lived some years in solitude, practicing the usual austerities. He returned to the city in 381, and was ordained by Meletius, Bishop of Antioch, to the office of deacon, and to that of presbyter in 386. He became one of the most popular preachers of the age; his reputation extended throughout the Christian world; and in 398, on the death of Nectarius, he was elected Bishop of Constantinople. He was zealous and resolute in the reform of clerical abuses, and two years after his consecration, on his visitation in Asia Minor, he deposed no less than thirteen bishops of Lydia and Phrygia. His denunciations of the licentious manners of the court drew upon him the resentment of the Empress Eudoxia, who encouraged. Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, to summon a synod at Chalcedon, in which a number of accusations were brought against Chrysostom. He was condemned, deposed, and banished to Cucusus, a place in the mountain-range of Taurus, whence, after the death of the Empress, it was determined to remove him to a desert place on the Euxine. He travelled on foot, and caught a fever, which occasioned his death at Comana, in Pontus, September 14th, 407, at the age of sixty.

The works of Chrysostom are very numerous, consisting of 700 homilies and 242 epistles, as well as commentaries, orations, and treatises on points of doctrine. His life has been written by Socrates, Sozomen, Theodora, and other early writers, and by Neander in more recent times.

The name Chrysostomus, or golden-mouthed, on account of his eloquence, was not given to him till some years after his death. Socrates and the other early writers simply call him John, or John of Constantinople.

DR ANDREW BELL

Dr. Andrew Bell, being a holder of rich livings, was able, by the aid of very frugal or rather penurious habits, to realise a large fortune, all of which he devoted at his death to exemplify and perpetuate that system of juvenile education, the introduction of which, first in Madras and afterwards in England, had given him celebrity, but of which, it need scarcely be remarked, the merits are now found to have been largely over-estimated. It is sad to reflect that, among the founders of useful institutions, several, if not many, or the greatest number, have been wretched egotists, or noted in life rather for the unfavourable aspect they bore towards their fellow-creatures, than for anything of a benevolent or genial cast. Thus Guy, the bookseller, whose money established the medical hospital bearing his name, is alleged to have made it chiefly by purchasing seamen's tickets, and a not very creditable success in the affair of the South Sea bubble. Of George Watson, founder of an hospital for the nurture of boys in Edinburgh, the papers preserved in his cabinet shew how penuriously he lived, and how rigorous beyond measure he was as a creditor. James Donaldson, who left a quarter of a million for a similar purpose, over-looked in his will all his old servants and retainers, and assigned but one or two poor annuities to those nearest him in blood. There are, of course, many instances in which benevolent intentions have solely or mainly ruled ; but, certainly, many have been of the opposite complexion here indicated. Among such must be reckoned Andrew Bell, who left £120,000 Three per Cent. Consols, to found an extensive establishment for juvenile education in his native city of St. Andrews. The egotism of this old gentleman, as indicated in his ordinary conversation, and in his leaving a considerable sum for the composition and publication of a memoir to glorify him, allow no room to doubt that, in the hoarding of money, and in the final disposal of what he acquired, he had purely an eye to himself.

Thomas De Quincey tells some things of a domestic nature regarding Dr. Bell, which, in the case of any reasonably respectable man, one would not desire to see repeated, but which, regarding him, do not call for being put under any restriction. 'Most men,' says the Opium-eater, 'have their enemies and calumniators; Dr. Bell had his, who happened rather indecorously to be his wife, from whom he was legally separated .. . divorced à mensă et thoro. This legal separation did not prevent the lady from persecuting the unhappy doctor with everlasting letters, endorsed outside with records of her enmity and spite. Sometimes she addressed her epistles thus:

Or again:

Many others, most ingeniously varied in the style of abuse, I have heard rehearsed by Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd, &c.; and one, in particular, addressed to the doctor, when spending a summer at the cottage of Robert Newton, an old soldier, in Grasmere, presented on the back two separate adjurations, one specially addressed to Robert himself, pathetically urging him to look sharply after the rent of his lodgings; and the other more generally addressed to the unfortunate person as yet undisclosed to the British public (and in this case turning out to be myself), who might be incautious enough to pay the postage at Amble-side. 'Don't grant him an hour's credit,' she urged upon the person unknown, 'if I had any regard to my family.' 'Cash down!' she wrote twice over. Why the doctor submitted to these annoyances, nobody knew. Some said it was mere indolence; but others held it to be a cunning compromise with her inexorable malice. The letters were certainly open to the 'public' eye ; but meantime the 'public ' was a very narrow one: the clerks in the post-office had little time for digesting such. amenities of conjugal affection ; and the chance bearer of the letters to the doctor would naturally solve the mystery by supposing an extra portion of madness in the writer, rather than an extra portion of knavery in the reverend receiver.'

ROBERT BURTON

On the 27th January 1639, there was interred in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, one of the most singular men of genius that England has at any time produced,-the famous Robert Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy. Though occupying a clerical charge in his native county of Leicester, he lived chiefly in his rooms in Christ Church College, and thus became a subject of notice to Anthony Wood, who, in his Athence Oxonienses, thus speaks of him: He was an exact mathematician, a curious calculator of nativities, a general-read scholar, a thorough-paced philologist, and one that understood the surveying of lands well. As he was by many accounted a severe student, a devourer of authors, a melancholy and humorous person, so, by others who knew him well, a person of great honesty, plain-dealing, and charity. I have heard some of the ancients of Christ Church say, that his company was very merry, facete, and juvenile; and no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dexterous interlarding his common discourse among them with verses from the poets, or sentences from classical authors, which, being then all the fashion in the University, made his company more acceptable.'

The Anatomy of Melancholy was the only work which Burton produced. After the 8th edition (1676), the book seems to have fallen into neglect, till Dr. Johnson's remark, that it was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise, again directed attention to it. Dr. Ferrier has shewn that Sterne was largely indebted to it, and other authors have been poachers on the same preserve. The work contains a vast number of quotations, nearly all Latin, combined with. his own reflections on the large mass of historical and other materials which he has collected. His humour is quaint and peculiar. His melancholy resembles that of Jacques in As You Like It. The fine stanzas prefixed to his book, beginning:

exhibit the meaning which Burton attaches to The word, which seems to be, not depression of spirits, but rather a habit of rumination, during which the feelings are cheerful or sad according to the succession of thoughts which pass through the mind.

These lines are thought to have suggested to Milton many ideas in his Il Penseroso:

An edition of the work was published in 1849, in 8vo, with notes, in which the quotations are translated, explained, and referred to the respective works from which they have been derived.

Burton died at or very near the time which he had some years before foretold from the calculations of his own nativity, and which, says Wood:

We have no other evidence of the truth of this than an obscure hint in the epitaph on his tomb, which was written by the author himself, a short time before his death. Over his grave, against the upper pillar of the aisle, was raised a monument, with the bust of Burton, painted to the life; and on the right-hand, is the calculation of his nativity; and under the bust is the epitaph:

EARLY NOTICES OF COFFEE IN ENGLAND - FROM BROADSIDES IN THE LUTTREL COLLECTION

A manuscript note, written by Oldys, the celebrated antiquary, states that 'The use of coffee in England was first known in 1657. Mr. Edwards, a Turkey merchant, brought from Smyrna to London one Pasqua Rosee, a Ragusan youth, who prepared this drink for him every morning. But the novelty thereof drawing too much company to him, he allowed his said servant, with another of his son-in-law, to sell it publicly, and they set up the first coffee-house in London, in St. Michael's alley in Cornhill. The sign was Pasqua Rosee's own head.' Oldys is slightly in' error here; Rosee commenced- his coffee-house in 1652, and one Jacobs, a Jew, had established a similar undertaking at Oxford,-a year or two earlier. One of Rosee's original shop or hand-bills, the only mode of advertising in those days, is now before us; and considering it to be a remarkable record of a great social innovation, we here reprint it for the amusement of the reader:

It is observed that in Turkey, where this is generally drunk, that they are not troubled with the stone, gout, dropsy, or scurvy, and that their skins are exceeding clear and white. It is neither laxative nor restringent.

The new beverage, as may readily be supposed, had its opponents, as well as its advocates. The following extracts from A Broadside against Coffee, published about the same period, informs us that Rosee's partner, the servant of Mr. Edwards's son-in-law, was a coachman; while it controverts the statement that hot coffee will not burn the mouth, and ridicules the broken English of the Ragusan:

But, in spite of opposition, coffee soon became a favourite drink, and the shops, where it was sold, places of general resort.

One of the most noted was at the Sultan Morat or Amurath's head in Exchange-alley; another was 'Ward's' in Bread-street, at the sign of the Sultan Solyman's head. Tokens, to serve as small money, were issued by both of these establishments, and are here represented. Another of the earliest houses was the Rainbow, near Temple-bar, which still flourishes, but altogether in a new style. There can be little doubt that the coffee-house, as a substitute for the beerseller's fire-side, was a movement towards refinement, as well as temperance. There appears to have been a great anxiety that the coffee-house, while open to all ranks, should be conducted under such restraints as might prevent the better class of customers from being offended. Accordingly, the following regulations, printed on large sheets of paper, were hung up in conspicuous positions on the walls:

The above rules are ornamented, with an engraved representation of a coffee-house. Five persons, one of them smoking, and, evidently, from their dresses of different ranks in life, areseated at a table, on which. are small basins, with-out saucers, and tobacco pipes, while a waiter is engaged in serving coffee. Believing that the public will feel some interest in the seventeenth century coffee-house-the resort of Dryden, Wycherley, and the wits and poets generally-we have caused a transcript of this print to be here presented.

Immediately after their first establishment, the coffee-houses became the resort of quidnuncs, and the great marts for news of all kinds, true and false. A broadside song, published in 1667, thus describes the principal subjects of coffee-house conversation:

In 1675 a proclamation was issued for shutting up and suppressing all coffee-houses. The government of the day, however, found that, in making this proclamation, they had gone a step too far. So early as this period, the coffee-house had become a power in the land-as Macaulay tells us-a most important political institution, when public meetings, harangues, resolutions, and the rest of the machinery of agitation, had not come into fashion, and nothing resembling a newspaper existed. In such circumstances, the coffee-houses were the chief organs through which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself. Consequently, on a petition of the merchants and retailers of coffee, permission was granted to keep the coffee-houses open for six months, under an admonition that the masters of them should prevent all scandalous papers, books, and libels from being read in them; and hinder every person from declaring, uttering, or divulging all manner of false and scandalous reports against government, or the ministers thereof. The absurdity of constituting every maker of a cup of coffee a censor of the press, was too great for even those days; the proclamation was laughed at, and no more was heard of the suppression of coffee-houses. Their subsequent history does not fall within our present limits, but may be referred to at another opportunity.

THE ORIGIN OF SOME WELL-KNOWN LINES

The origin of these somewhat famous lines seems not to be generally known. In our contemporary Notes and Queries (for November 30, 1861, p. 448) they are spoken of as 'Dr. King's well-known quatrain upon A Giant Angling.' This is a mistake at least, if Dr. William King, the Oxford wit and poet, is the person meant; indeed, there seems every reason to suppose that they were composed before Dr. King was born. With one or two trifling variations, they are to be found in the Mock Romance, a rhapsody attached to The Loves of Hero and Leander, a small 12mo published in London in the years 1653 and 1677; the following being the context:

Dr. King, however, is not the only unsuccessful claimant of the above four lines. They are printed in the fifth volume of Dryden's Miscellany, and have been attributed to Daniel Kenrick, a quack physician, at Worcester. As, however, Kenrick was thirty-two years of age in 1685, it is as impossible that they can have been written by him as by Dr. King. Their true origin we have given above; their authorship is, and probably always will be, unknown.