liver, had been rendered familiar to them by the noblest poem that ever proceeded from an uninspired pen. The first direct mention of the Wandering Jew dates in the year 1215, when his story was made known to the learned of that day by an Armenian prelate, who came on a pilgrimage to the relics of the saints, which the Crusaders had brought from the Levant to England. According to this episcopal pilgrim, who averred that he had seen and conversed with the wanderer, the name of the hapless Jew was Cartophilus; a name which not a little strengthens the theory of the Greek origin of the legend. He was a subordinate officer in Pilate's court; one of the many chronicles which have repeated the story, calls him "the crier ;" and, when Jesus was condemned, he struck him a violent blow on the back, and pushing him towards the infuriate crowd, exclaimed, "On with thee, Jesus! wherefore dost thou tarry?" Jesus turned round, and, with a severe accent, replied, "I go; but thou must tarry until I come!" The doom was no sooner pronounced than Cartophilus found himself irresistibly hurried onwards from his family and friends, compelled to be a vagabond and wanderer on the face of the earth, without ever finding any relaxation from his toils. After wandering over the whole of the East, he was converted and baptized by the same Ananias who baptized St. Paul, when he took the name of Joseph. Baptism, however, could not efface the curse; he still continues his erratic life, and looks daily for the second coming of the Messiah. Every hundred years he is seized with a strange malady, which brings him to the very point of death; but, after remaining for several days in a trance, he awakes, restored to the same condition of youth and health which he possessed when he insulted our Saviour.* The chroniclers of the fourteenth century, in relating this legend, changed the name of Joseph into Isaac Lackedem or Lackedíon, and omitted the fine incident of his periodical renovation. The ballad which we have translated is founded on this version of the story, which was generally received in Brabant. Indeed, he visited this country, according to the Brabantine Chronicle, in 1575. Notwithstanding the meanness of his apparel, he was found to be a man of superior education, for "he spoke better Spanish than any nobleman in the court of the Duke of Alva." 66 Goethe's travestie of the story is derived from an earlier appearance of the Wandering Jew in Europe. On the Easter Sunday of the year 1542, two German students encountered him in a church in Hamburgh, listening to the sermon with great attention and devotion. He was a very tall man, with white hair that reached below the middle of his back, and a beard that extended to his girdle; though the weather was still cold, his feet were naked; his dress, which the chronicler describes with edifying particularity, consisted of a sailor's trowsers world too wide for his shrunk shanks," a tight-fitting vest, and a large, loose cloak. He readily entered into conversation with the students, telling them that his name was Ahasuerus, and that he had been a thriving shoemaker at the time of Christ's crucifixion. Impelled by the vulgar passion for excitement, which collects crowds to witness executions, rather than by religious bigotry, or personal rancour, he formed one of the multitude which surrounded the judgment a * Godwin has introduced this part of the legend into his singular romance of St. Leon. seat of Pilate, and clamoured for the release of Barabbas. When Jesus was condemned, he hastened home to give his wife and children an opportunity of seeing the procession which was to pass by their doors. When Jesus came up the street, he staggered under the weight of the cross, and fell against the wall of the house. Ahasuerus repulsed him rudely, and pointing to Calvary, the appointed place of punishment, which was visible in the distance, said, "Get on, blasphemer, to thy doom!" Jesus replied, "I will stop and rest; but you shall march onward until I return." He was instantly hurried forwards by an irresistible impulse, and never afterwards knew rest. Ahasuerus, according to the report of the students, was a man of few words, very abstemious in his mode of living; accepting alms only for the purpose of distributing them to the poor, and at the same time soliciting their prayers, that he might be blessed with the boon of death. Twenty years later Ahasuerus appeared in Strasburg, where he reminded the magistrates that he had passed through the place two centuries before, -a fact which was verified by a reference to the police registers of the city! He inquired rather affectionately after the students with whom he had spoken at Hamburgh, and declared that since his conversation with them he had visited the remotest parts of the Eastern Indies. It is recorded that he spoke German with very great purity, and had not the slightest foreign accent. In 1604, the Wandering Jew visited France; "The true history of his life, taken from his own lips," was printed at Bourdeaux, in 1608; and his "Complaint," set to a popular air, was a very favourite ballad. The learned Louvet saw him, on a Sunday, at Beauvais, coming from mass. He was surrounded by a crowd of women and children, to whom he recounted anecdotes of Christ's passion in so affecting a manner as to draw tears from the most obstinate eyes, and to unloose the strings of the tightest purses. On this occasion, he asked for alms with a lofty tone of superiority, as if he was conferring, instead of receiving, a favour. His appearance excited great emotion throughout France; some being alarmed at such a portentous apparition, and others affecting to be edified by the instructive narratives he related. Indeed, for nearly twenty years, about this time, several impostors made large sums of money by personating the Wandering Jew. Passing over some vague accounts of his being seen at Salamanca, Venice, and Naples, in which last city he was rather successful as a gambler, we find that he visited Brussels on the 22nd of April, 1771, and sat for his portrait, to illustrate the ballad composed on his interview with certain of the burgesses some centuries before. The portrait was graven on wood, and copies of it may be seen suspended in most of the cottages of Belgium, where his legend has always been more popular than anywhere else. In fact, the two great objects of hero-worship among the Flemings are the Wandering Jew and Napoleon. Dr. Southey has based "The Curse of Kehama" on this legend; and Dr. Croly has made it the subject of his gorgeous romance, Salathiel; but the fiction has never laid hold of the popular mind in England, as it has in France and Germany, though there are few superior to it in the power of captivating the imagination. 53 CHRISTMAS EVE. THE STORY OF A SKULL. BY HENRY CURLING. I ONCE spent a merry Christmas at a regular old-style country mansion in Yorkshire, where the yule-clog, the hudening-horse, and the morris-dance, together with all the time-honoured observances of "the old age," were most scrupulously and sacredly held in especial reverence and delight during that festive season. Alas! well-a-day! such practices and pastimes are fast fading away in merrie England, even from our remembrance! 'Tis a cold, calculating, and selfish age, my masters! this that we have fallen upon. The good old customs of former times are now considered slow, unworthy, and ridiculous; consequently they have been altogether reformed, and refined away. As I am not about to give another version of Bracebridge Hall in this paper, I shall not, therefore, describe the jovialities, and the varieties of diversion, which followed fast upon each other during the delightful visit I have before hinted at. Suffice it, there were all sorts of revels, masques, games, dances, and even a play toward; whilst nothing was omitted which could by possibility contribute to pass away the lazy-footed time, and ease the anguish of a torturing hour, should one be found, that at all hung on hand. Such, however, was not likely to be the case in a hospitable and ample mansion, situate upon the wolds of canny Yorkshire, and in which were assembled a party composed of several members of those families of condition resident in the immediate neighbourhood; most of them related to the host and hostess, and picked and culled, from their known conviviality and amiability of disposition. My own introduction was accidental; I was visiting on the wolds, and consequently introduced by my invited friends there. It was after a somewhat noisy revel on Christmas-eve, and on which we had been rehearsing the play intended to be produced a few nights afterwards, as we were seated cozily around the ample fire-place, watching the crackling log upon the hearth, and listening to dark December's snow-storm against the casements, that story-telling commenced. Now came in "the sweet o' the night," as old Falstaff words it, 'twas the very witching hour, when churchyards yawned, and graves stood tenantless, accordingly, many and awful were the ghostly stories and withered murders then and there recounted. Hebe faces then might be observed crouching more nearly to their protecting partners of the dance; and even the hostess, as she drew her high-backed chair closer to the hearth, was fain to glance "a faroff look" into the gloom of the old oak-paneled hall we were seated in. Amongst the stories related on that night was one which, perhaps, more from the manner of its relation, and the appearance of the narrator, than from anything else, particularly interested me. The narrator was an officer on half-pay, a remarkably stern-looking, sedate, and Quixotic-visaged individual; he was a Cornish man, but lately returned from foreign parts, where, since childhood, he had been a wanderer and an exile; a true soldier of fortune, who had seen the sun rise and set in foreign parts, till his own country, when he returned to it, seemed the only spot of earth where he had neither kindred nor friends to greet him, and whose customs and manners were now totally at va riance with his habits and tastes. He was, however, very distantly related to our hostess; and but lately landed in England, laden with an accumulation of rupees which he had neither health nor wish to make use of. Fifty years had elapsed since, a youth, he had left his home; and now, as the poet says, "there came a worn-out man." He stalked about, I remember, during this visit with a most unbending presence, watching all that was going on, but taking no part in the diversion. At the present time, as more than one ghost was dilated upon, the bright eyes of several of the young ladies sought and dwelt upon the Bois-Guilbert visage of the stern-looking soldier. At length his turn arrived. "Come," said the squire, "now let's have your tale, Colonel Penruddock. Methinks one who hath put a girdle round about the globe, and in the spiced Indian air' so long been sojourner, must have seen many things worthy of record." The Colonel's iron visage slowly relaxed; he drew himself up, looked around, and smiled, after a sort, - Tales of flood and field, captures by an insolent foe, deeds of blood, he said, were not exactly sport for ladies. He must be held excused in sooth, he must "Not for the worth of his commission," said the squire, “shall he escape. A song, a story, or a quart of salt and water, one or other shall go round the circle, though we sit by the fire till the early village cock salute the morn." "What shall 't be?" said the militaire,-" a tale of gramarie, a lovestory, or a murder?” "Most hands up for love and murder," cried the squire. "Murder has it; I thought so; all the ladies are for deeds of horror. Begin, murderer! begin!-leave your damnable faces, and begin!" The Colonel cleared his brazen throat with a preliminary cough or so, and commenced his story with military brevity. THE SOLDIER'S STORY. "Near the village of Abbots Lillington, in Cumberland, in the year 1616, stood a small church, of Saxon architecture: on the right of the overgrown pathway of the hungry-looking churchyard, on Christmaseve of that same year, yawned a newly-dug grave. "The sun was setting upon the walls of that old grey tower, as a stranger slowly took his walk of meditation amongst the tombs. Ever and anon, as he paused to decipher some moss-covered epitaph upon the sunken grave-stones on either hand, his ear caught the sounds of mirth and revelry, which floated upon the evening breeze from the distant hamlet. Wrapped in his own imaginings, as he continued to saunter onwards, he gradually approached within a few yards of the newly-made grave, and his eye rested upon a skull, which Goodman Delver had that morning thrown up. "The stranger paused, and gazed intently upon the poor remains before him. What he thought, or what the reflections this bleaching fragment of mortality called forth, is not at all necessary to the story. Perhaps, amongst other things, it struck him for the first time that it was a somewhat hard case, when even the sexton's spade could give no secure and certain resting-place, but that in the cold damp grave, like an inn or caravansera, the old guest was made to turn out to give room for later company. Suddenly the stranger started, and, just as he was about to turn away, gazed more intently at the skull. "There was nothing very uncommon in a skull thus lying upon the fresh mould, which had so recently been thrown up from a newly-dug grave, but that which followed was a trifle more extraordinary; for, as the stranger gazed upon the skull, he distinctly beheld it move. Starting back a pace or two, he involuntarily shook his riding-cloak from his shoulder, and laid his hand upon his rapier. 666 Pshaw!' said he, smiling at his own folly, what an idiot I am, to grasp my hilt in opposition to a decaying piece of bone like this! How full of shapes is fancy!' "Just as he was about to turn and leave the spot, again he distinctly beheld the skull move. This time he was convinced that it was not his fancy which had deceived him. The skull continued in motion; and, rolling off the ridge of earth it had before lain on, actually reached the pathway, and struck the toe of his heavy riding-boot. Still more astonished, he kicked the skull from his path, and out rolled a great lump of poison, in the shape of a huge, bloated, overgrown toad! "The stranger had been a soldier in his time, and even now had returned to his native land, after many years of toil and service. In fact, he was one of those adventurous blades who, following the fashion of the time, set by Sir Walter Raleigh, and other choice and masterspirits of his age, had for many years buffeted the broad waves of the Atlantic, in search of unknown islands and continents, which existed but in their own heated brains. He had sold his own lands, as Rosalind has it, to see other men's; and returned to his native country to find his kith and kin for the most part dead, and his inheritance in the hands of strangers. "He felt rather annoyed with himself for being thus startled at so simple a circumstance as that of a toad having taken shelter in a dead man's skull, and, in the endeavour at emancipating itself, caused it to roll to his feet. With a 'hah!' and a fierce twist at his moustache, he stooped, and picked up the skull. The sundry contemplation of his travels had, doubtless, wrapped him in a most humorous sadness, and it is likely he moralized, curiously as the royal Dane, upon the memento in his hand. Whether, however, it was the pate of a politician, one that would circumvent God, or that of a courtier, who praised my Lord Such-an-one's horse when he meant to beg it, or whether it was the skull of a lawyer, with his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks,' he did not give himself time enough to consider; for, as he turned it over and over in his hand, to his surprise, he discovered that, just above the right ear, a twenty-penny nail had been driven into it. Struck with the circumstance, he examined it yet more attentively, and found the nail had evidently lain in the earth as long as the skull itself, the decomposing iron having formed a red stain, an indelible mark upon the bone, of at least half an inch in breadth, around the spot where it had been driven in. "The circumstance of a skull, with a rusty nail sticking in it, having rolled to his feet, was somewhat curious, independent of the fact that an overgrown toad had been its inside-passenger. "Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak ; By maggot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth Yes! blood will have blood, they say.' |