Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

the day the 11th of the Kal. of April (March 22); after which came many tokens all over England, and many spectres were seen and heard. And on the night of the 8th of the Kal. of August (July 25) there was a very'great earthquake over all Somersetshire and in Gloucestershire. Afterwards, on the day the 6th of the Ides of September, that was on St Mary's mass-day, there was a very great wind from the third hour of the day to the second night. Afterwards there were many shipmen on the sea and on (fresh) water, who said that they saw in the north-east a great and broad fire near the earth, which at once waxed in length up to the sky; and the sky separated into four parts, and fought against it as if it would quench it; but the fire, nevertheless, waxed up to the heavens. The fire they saw in the dawn, and it lasted so long till it was light over all."

Can any meteorologist suggest an explanation of this wonderful fire, or must we conclude that the good monk had been listening to some traveller's story? The report of a great earthquake felt in Somersetshire is neither without probability nor without interest. There is nothing said to connect the appearance of the spectres with any remarkable event; unless they portended the defeat, which is mentioned in the next paragraph, of the monastic party in their struggle against the regular clergy for the appointment of an archbishop of Canterbury. The primacy was vacant, and the Bishop of Salisbury, who, as the chronicler says, "ruled all England," was resolved that no monk should have it. The prior and the monks of Canterbury had a candidate of their own, but the Bishop of Salisbury, who "never loved the rule of monks," defeated them. Our chronicler seems, in good faith, to regard the triumph of the monks as identical with the triumph of religion. One may concede to them that the Norman bishops, with a few splendid exceptions, were not, on their side, very faithful representatives of the apostles.

There is no more spirited sketch in the book than that of Henry of

Poitou, who was a relation of the king's (Henry Beauclerc) and of the Count of Poitou. This man seems to have brought dissension wherever he went. He was constantly obtaining some new clerical appointment, which he lost again by his misconduct, or deserted for another more lucrative. His last and greatest offence was his obtaining the abbacy of Peterborough. "All that he could take, within and without, from clerical and from lay, he sent over sea, and did no good there, nor any good left there." At another time our chronicler exclaims, "May God Almighty have his mercy over that wretched place!" the miseries of Peterborough kindle some wild imagination that reads more like a nightmare than anything else. A host of devils seem to have welcomed this Henry of Poitou to the abbey, which he pillaged and dishonoured. "Let it not to any one seem incredible, and that we say not sooth; for it was fully known over all the land, that as soon as he came thither, which was on the Sunday when they sing

And

Exurge quare, O Domine,' then immediately afterwards many men saw and heard many hunters hunting. The hunters were black, and large, and ugly, and all their hounds black, and broad-eyed, and ugly; and they rode on black horses and on black bucks. This was seen in the very deer-fold in the town of Peterborough, and in all the woods that lead from the same town to Stamford; and the monks heard the horns blow that they blew in the night. Truthful men, who observed them in the night, said, from what it seemed to them, that there might well be about twenty or thirty horn-blowers. This was seen and heard from the time that he came thither, all the Lenten-tide on to Easter. This was his entrance; of his exit we cannot yet say aught. God provide."

Although this publication is designed rather for the writer than the mere reader of history, yet the

excellent translation of Mr Thorpe will be perused, we think, with pleasure by very many who make no pretence to be either scholars or antiquarians. Those who like such reading as Froissart, for example, will find much amusement in turning over the pages of this translation. And perhaps the perusal of such a work may teach them how much they owe to the labours of the modern historian, who has to compile his classical narrative out of many imperfect and broken records. It is well that all of us should occasionally look into what are called the historian's authorities, that we may know something of the difficulty of constructing a complete intelligible narrative. We should learn to excuse the historian when he is, here and there, found to be at fault; we should learn not to expect perfect accuracy even in the most carefully constructed narrative. Contemporary writers are the very best authorities we have; and contemporary writers are frequently under some flagrant bias, or they omit to mention some essential circumstance, for the very reason that it is so familiar to themselves that they cannot calculate upon a time when it will be un

known. There are many entries in this Chronicle which the writer no doubt thought perfectly clear, but which to us require a world of explanation. This is to be sought elsewhere, and perhaps will be sought in vain. Turn, for instance, to p. 184 of this Chronicle; you meet with a recital which bears the impress of being written by a contemporary of a most strange disturbance amongst the monks of Glastonbury. The writer has omitted to state,

what no doubt was quite familiar to his own mind-the motives or circumstances that led to this disturbance; and thus, though a curious scene is brought very readily to the imagination, it remains, without some explanation from other sources, a quite unintelligible narrative. We read of an abbot calling in the laity to shoot down his monks. A quarrel between an abbot and his monks is nothing very startling; but a dispute conducted in this manner piques our curiosity. We do not quote the passage, for we have already devoted a considerable space to extracts from this Chronicle, which we must now leave, with a repetition of our admiration of the perfect manner in which it has been edited and translated.

PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON.

EVERYBODY Who knows anything about the American Republic knows that, for the first half of the years which this century counts, its affairs were administered by men of great ability. Those men were either the leaders of the Revolution, and the framers of the constitution, or the inheritors of the traditions of those sagacious statesmen. It is equally well known that, for the second half of the same period, the Presidential chair has been filled by a dreary succession of nonentities, whose scarcely-remembered names are associated with no principles or policy, and who were merely the cards and counters of gambling politicians. The short interval between these two classes is sharply marked by the distinct figure of Andrew Jackson. If he was not a great statesman like the Fathers of the Republic, he was quite as far from being a nonentity. His own merits alone, whether great or small, raised him to the chief office of the State; and that politician must have been both bold and astute who would have ventured to play the dangerous game of making the stern and uncompromising Old Hickory" the tool of a party. As the most popular and powerful American since Washington-as a favourable specimen of American character in its later and lower development as one who played a chief part in important events-he possesses unusual claims to notice; but, beyond all this, he demands attention at the present juncture as having done more than any other public man to stamp, with their present well-known characteristics, the most conspicuous features of the modern Union.

66

Jackson, the posthumous son of a poor Irish emigrant, who squatted with his family in North Carolina, was born in that State in 1767. In boyhood he not only displayed the irascibility and resolute pugnacity

[ocr errors]

which continued to distinguish him in all positions, private and public, but he developed another peculiarity not so common, and scarcely so much entitled to indulgence in youth,-" He was," says his biographer, a swearing lad from an early age; and, indeed, he needed to begin early, in order to acquire that wonderful mastery of the art to which he attained in after life, surpassing all known men in the fluency and chain-shot force and complication of his oaths."

This early proficient in profanity was also precociously initiated in the adventures and mishaps of war. As a boy of fourteen he began to take part in the desultory skirmishes between Tories and Whigs, siding with the rebels, and was cut down, as well as his brother, by a dragoon officer, whose boots they had refused to clean when prisoners. This was but the beginning of a long course of ill-usage. They were cruelly treated on the road to the jail in which they were confined at Camden, where, by the villany of a contractor who cheated the prisoners of their rations, they were nearly starved. Their hopes were at one time raised by the approach of a force under General Greene, who encamped within a mile of the town; but, through a crevice in the fence around the prison, Andrew had the mortification to see Greene's troops (twelve hundred in number), confident in their superior force, and careless of precaution, attacked by Lord Rawdon with nine hundred men, and put to flight. The youthful prisoners were afterwards exchanged, but not till they had both caught the small-pox; and they made the journey home, Andrew on foot, his brother on horseback, over forty miles of wilderness, while suffering under the first attacks of the disorder, and from their still unhealed wounds. The brother died, and Andrew recovered with difficulty;

and, while still an invalid, he lost his mother, who, going with two other charitable women to Charleston, to comfort the prisoners there with food and medicine, died of the fever of the prison-ships. Andrew was not yet fifteen when he had become thus familiar with the ills of life.

After being a saddler's apprentice, and, according to some authorities, a schoolmaster-though what he could possibly be qualified to teach, except swearing, does not appear he became, at the age of eighteen, a student of law, and in two years had qualified himself to practise in the courts of North Carolina. At this time he was a very tall, thin, and straight youth, with sandy hair, blue eyes, and a long freckled face. He was an excellent horseman, very fond of racing, and still fonder of cock-fighting; and, in his tastes and style, appears to have been one of those young men of pleasure so often to be met with in communities that lie on the outskirts of civilisation, who would be condemned as irreclaimably vulgar, low, and disreputable, if judged by a social standard more refined and exacting than their own, but whose excuse lies in the fact that the desire for amusement natural to their age can only be gratified in the rude sports and in the questionable society which such circumstances afford. One of his friends being appointed a judge in Tennessee, gave Jackson the office of solicitor or public prosecutor in that district, which then formed part of the territory of North Carolina. The country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi was then inhabited by settlers, many of whom had obtained grants of land from the State as the reward of their services in the Revolution, and who maintained an incessant contest for life and property with the hostile Indian tribes that surrounded them. Men were shot down at their own doors. The labourers who tilled the ground, and the women who went to the fields to gather fruit,

were protected by guards-and if a man went to drink at a spring, another covered him with his rifle. Jackson's future wife's father was killed while alone in the woods, and it was never known by what hand he fell. The young solicitor's business lay in two places far apart-Jonesboro and Nashville; and, in the course of seven years' practice, he made the journey between them twenty-two times. These legal expeditions were of themselves a valuable military experience; for the whole track, nearly two hundred miles in length, was infested by savages, whose hostility was incessantly active, and whose endless stratagems forced the strong and well-armed parties that alone could venture to traverse the road, to be always vigilant, observant, and ready for conflict. friend the judge, and his companions, were once surprised, and escaped with difficulty by swimming à river, leaving horses and baggage to the Indians; and some of Jackson's own personal adventures were as hazardous and romantic as those of Cooper's hero the Leather-stocking.

His

The nature of Jackson's legal practice explains the difficulty there else might be in understanding how a youth of twenty, after two years' study of law, varied extensively with drinking, cock-fighting, and rowdyism, could be qualified for the duties of his profession. Disputed claims for land, cases of assault, and the collection of desperate debts, made the chief part of his business, which was very considerable and profitable.

"Jackson's arrival, as we have intimated," says his biographer, "was most West Tennessee was engaged exclusively opportune. The only licensed lawyer in in the service of debtors, who, it seems, made common cause against the common enemy-their creditors. Jackson came not as a lawyer merely, but as the public prosecutor, and there was that in his bearing which gave assurance that he was the man to issue unpopular writs and give them effect. The merchants and others who could not collect their

debts, came to him for help. He undertook their business, and executed it with a promptitude that secured his career at the bar of Tennessee. Before he had been a month at Nashville, he had issued, it is said, seventy writs to delinquent debtors. He was the man wanted. And this was the first instance of a certain good fortune that attended him all through his life he was continually finding himself placed in circumstances calculated to call into conspicuous exercise the very qualities in which he excelled all mankind."

The circumstances of Jackson's marriage were just as odd and original as those of his legal career. In the first years of his residence at Nashville he boarded with a widow named Donelson, some of whose relations probably gave a name to the Fort Donelson which has just been so conspicuous in the civil war. With the widow also lived her daughter and the daughter's husband, Captain Robards, a suspicious and irritable spouse, who, having previously lived unhappily with his wife, was now jealous of Jackson. Andrew's friends say that this jealousy was the cause of his subsequent proceedings, and not the consequence of previous intimacy with Mrs Robards. However that may be, when she left her husband in 1791 on the ground of ill treatment, Jackson accompanied her down the river from Nashville to Natchez. Thereupon the legislature of Virginia granted a divorce to Captain Robards, and Jackson married the lady. This step was, however, premature, for the divorce was not complete till the Act of the Legislature had been followed by proceedings in the supreme court of Kentucky. The divorce having gone through the first stage, Robards let the matter rest, and the new-married pair continued to live together "beloved and esteemed," says one of his friends, "by all classes." At the end of two years, however, the troublesome Robards interrupted their domestic felicity by applying to the court for the completion of his divorce, which was now made

final whereupon, in 1794, Jackson got married over again.

"He was most prompt," Mr Parton tells us, "to defend his wife's good name. The peculiar circumstances attending his marriage made him touchy on this point. His temper, with regard to other causes of offence, was tinder; with respect to this it was gunpowder. His worst quarrels arose from this cause, or were greatly aggravated by it. He became sore on the subject; so that, at last, I think he could scarcely hate any one very heartily without fancying that the obnoxious person had said something, or caused something to be said, which reflected on the character of Mrs Jackson. For the man who dared breathe pistols in perfect condition for thirtyher name, except in honour, he kept

seven years."

Practising steadily in his two court-houses of Nashville and Jonesboro-which were built of logs, the one 18 feet square, the

other 24 Jackson continued to grow in wealth and consequence. He dabbled in trade, and bought land. In 1796 Tennessee was admitted as a State into the Union, and the solicitor was then a person of so much influence as to be elected as its first representative, and became the Honourable Andrew Jackson. He was what was then

known as a democrat, though the signification of the term has since undergone wide changes.

"A democrat of that day," says Mr Parton, "was one who sympathised with, and believed in, the French Revolution; who thought the United States doubly bound-bound by gratitude and by community of principles-to aid the French Republic in her struggle with the leagued despotisms;' who thought it due to the human race that the Mistress of the Seas should be humbled, and that the United States ought to assist in that undertaking; who hated kings, nobles, and all privileged orders, with a peculiar warmth of animosity; and who believed in Republicanism, pure and simple, as established by the Constitu tion, and as expounded by Jefferson."

Some of the principles of the party are placed in a strong light by the list of toasts given at a banquet of the Tammany Society of

« AnteriorContinuar »