The "Annus Mirabilis" of Dryden—1870 a more wonderful
Year in its way than i6£6 — Winter—Number of Killed and Wounded in the
Franco-Prussian War—Battles of Langside, Tippermuir, Cappel—Carrier
Pigeons—The Velocity with which Birds fly.
One of
Dryden's best poems, and in many respects one of the most curious poems
in the language, is the Annus
Mirabilis, an
effusion of historical panegyric, which, after the lapse of two
centuries, no one can read unmoved or undelighted, so beautifully is it
written, so masterly is the versification, and so vividly are its events
portrayed. The year commemorated is 1666, and the "wonders" that
entitled it to such pre-eminence were the naval war with the Dutch and
Danes and the great fire in London. In 1666, however, was an annus
mirabilis, surely
1870 is an annua
mirabilior, a
more wonderful year still, nay, an annus
mirabilissimus, if
you like, for you shall go back in our annals very far indeed—much
farther, if you try it, than at the outset you might think at all
necessary— before you meet its match. Just consider, first of all, the
great Franco-Prussian war, with
its countless hosts of slain; with its sieges of Strasbourg, Metz, and
Paris, not to mention strongholds of less importance; its capitulation
of Sedan and captive Emperor; the Empire ruined, and a Republic in its
place, Avith all that may yet happen ere peace is proclaimed and the
Germans have recrossed the Rhine. Think, again, of the promulgation of
the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, so speedily, and let us say
unexpectedly, followed by the capture of Rome and the dethronement of
this very infallible Pope as a temporal Prince, by the Catholic
(proh pudor !) King
of Italy. At home, a daughter of the Queen, Avith the royal consent and
concurrence, marries one of that Queen's subjects, for we suppose we may
regard the matter as a fait
accompli,
an event so unheard-of and unusual that we must go hack for an exact
parallel for more than two hundred years, when the Duke of York,
afterwards James II., "a man of many woes," married the Lady Anne Hyde,
daughter of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, whose history of the Rebellion is
one of the most interesting, and, on account of its inimitable
portraiture, one of the most valuable works of its kind in the English
language. If to all this be added such events as the loss of the "
Captain," built and armed on a principle, the ultimate adoption or
rejection of which will so materially affect the navy of the future; the
revision of the Authorised Version of the Scriptures; and many other
matters, both at home and abroad, that will readily occur to the reader,
this may be regarded as a very wonderful year indeed. Occupying the
centre, as it were, of all these events, Ave are too near them at
present to appraise either their magnitude or importance at their
legitimate value. Not the man at the base of a lofty tower, but
he who stands at some distance from it can take its proportions aright,
and we may depend upon it that the reader of the history of our period a
hundred years hence will turn to the page that records the events of
1870 as at once the most interesting and important in the annals of many
centuries. Reverting for a moment to the Annus
Mirabilis of
Dry den, it is but fair to
acknowledge that
they seem to have had one wonder to
boast of in 1666 that we cannot claim for 1870, to this date at least;
the wonder in question being two blazing comets in the nocturnal sky.
Describing the English fleet advancing to attack the enemy at night, the
poet, with a
boldness of hyperbole for which he
is always remarkable, says—
"To see that
fleet upon the ocean move,
Angels drew down the curtains of the skies;
And Heaven, as if there wanted lights above,
For tapers, made two glaring comets rise!"
But if we have no comets to boast of in 1870, let not
thfe reader forget that the 14th November is nigh at hand, and that he
who gets up betimes on the morning of that day, and watches till the
daybreak, will assuredly witness a sight more startling, and grand and "
glaring" than Dryden's comets, wonderful and startling as they doubtless
were. We must be permitted one other extract from this extraordinary
poem. It describes the state of the contending fleets and the feelings
of their respective crews on their withdrawing for a time from an
engagement that resulted in something like what at the present day we
should call a drawn battle :—
"The night comes on, we eager to pursue
The combat still, and they ashamed to leave
Till the last streaks of dying day withdrew,
And doubtful moonlight did our rage deceive.
"In th' English fleet each ship resounds with joy,
And loud applause of their great leader's fame;
In fiery dreams the Dutch they still destroy,
And, slumbering, smile at the imagin'd flame.
"Not so the Holland fleet, who, tired and done,
Stretch'd on their decks, like weary oxen lie;
Faint sweats all down their mighty members run
(Vast hulks which little souls but ill supply).
"In dreams they fearful precipices tread,
Or, shipwreck'd, labour to some distant shore;
Or in dark churches walk among the dead;
They wake with horror, and dare sleep no more."
We do not know whether the reader will agree with us, but
we look upon these verses as wonderfully fine, and upon the Annus
Mirabilis as,
of its class, amongst the finest, if not the very finest, poem in the
language.
Even from a meteorological point of view, this year, in
our part of the country at least, has had not a little of the mirabilis about
it. Byron, we know, awoke one morning and found himself famous, and we
awoke one morning last week and found ourselves in mid-winter, albeit
the previous day had been mild, and calm, and sunny, and bright as if it
were "Whitsuntide, rather than the Eve of St. Luke the Evangelist. Since
then we have had incessant storms, shifting about and sometimes blowing
from every point of the compass within the four-and-twenty hours, with
such deluges of rain as Lochaber alone can supply in season, or
sometimes, entre
nous, out of
season as well. The mountain summits are, at the moment we write,
covered with a lamb's-wool-like coating of virgin snow, and the air has
become so chill and raw that we were fain some days ago to don our
winter habiliments for the season. We have no right or reason to
complain, however; a finer summer and autumn were never known in the
Highlands, and since winter must come some time or other, it is better
that it should come in season. The fourth week of October is not a bit
too early for snow, and sleet, and storms, so that when we hear the
winds howling over ferry and firth, and the waves breaking with sullen
roar upon the vexed strand, and listen to the rattle and the dash of
rain and sleet upon the window panes, we shall, first taking care that
the shutters are properly closed and the curtains drawn, just draw our
arm-chair a little nearer the fire, which our " lassie," you may be
sure, has trimmed betimes, like Horace's boy, large
reponens peats
and coals thereon, and then, with the Courier,
Scotsman, or Standard on
our knee, or a stray copy of the Saturday
Review or Spectator, which
some distant friend has kindly sent us, or some fresh volume from
Ardgour's library, the worst we. shall say will be in the words of poor
old Lear, "Blow
wind, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!" blessing God the while that if
our lot be a humbler one, it is also a happier one than the poor old
king's.
A good deal has been written about the enormous numbers
of killed and wounded in the present Franco-Prussian war, the fact being
nevertheless, as we learn on competent authority, that notwithstanding
the improvements made of late years in arms of precision,
there were, considering the numbers engaged, quite as many men disabled
as in the good old days of "Brown Bess" in the wars of the first
Napoleon and in our battles in India. Mr. Hill Burton, in one of his
recently published volumes of the History
of Scotland, and
an admirable and very impartial history it is, tells us that in the
battle of Langside, an historical combat on the issue of which so much
in the after history of England and Scotland depended, 10,000 men were
engaged for three-quarters of an hour, with a loss to the Queen's party
of 300 hors
de combat, while
the victors only lost one
man ! A
very extraordinary fact certainly; but a more wonderful fact still, and
neither Mr. Burton nor his reviewers seem to be aware of it, is that of
the battle of Tippermuir, fought
in 1644, between the Covenanters and the famous Marquis of Montrose, in
which Montrose was victorious without the loss of a single man on his
own side, although of the Covenanters between four and five hundred were
killed in the battle and pursuit. Another curious thing connected with
the battle of Tippermuir was this : a body of Highlanders, keen enough
for the fray, were without arms of any kind, when Montrose, pointing to
the stones that thickly strewed the field, advised them to try these to
begin with, and they did, appropriating the arms of their enemies as
they fell, and using them with such effect that the battle proper was
over in less than half an hour. The only other battle that we can
recollect in which such primitive weapons as stones were employed by the
combatants was that of Cappel, fought
in 1531, between the Protestants of Zurich and the Catholics of the
neighbouring cantons. It was in this battle that the celebrated reformer
Zwingle, or Zwinglius, met his death. He was first of all knocked down
by a stone that, fiercely hurled, struck him on the head, and then, with
the exclamation, "Die, obstinate heretic," the sword of Fockinger of
Unterwalden pierced his throat, and the reformer was no more.
The reader has, of course, seen in the papers how
beleaguered Paris keeps up communication with Belgium and the provinces,
by means of balloons and carrier pigeons. Of balloons and ballooning we
have no practical experience; of carrier pigeons we do know something,
the bird being as well-known to us as is a robin redbreast to a
gardener. We kept them for some time, but were obliged to get quit of
them on account of their ineradicable propensity to purloin our
neighbours' turnip seed from the drill immediately after being sown and
before they got time to sprout. All pigeons have this habit, but the
carrier worse and more persistently than any other. The speed and power
of wing appertaining to the carrier pigeon is extraordinary, and if not
well attested would be deemed incredible. We remember, for instance,
that at the Christmas of 1845, when a student at the University of St.
Andrews (hest as
well as oldest university
in Scotland, gainsay it who may !) we spent our holidays at Kirkmichael,
a pleasant little village in the Highlands of Perthshire. On leaving St.
Andrews we took with us a carrier pigeon, a magnificent bird. On the 1st
of January 1846, at the hour of noon precisely, we gave this bird, with
a bit of narrow blue ribbon tied under his wing, his liberty on the
bridge of Kirkmichael. When let out of his basket he instantly soared up
in a sort of spiral flight, ascending and ascending cork-screw fashion
until he seemed to the eye no bigger than a wren, then straight and
swift as an arrow from a bow he urged his flight southwards, and became
lost to view. On returning to St. Andrews, we found that our bird had
reached his dovecot, eagerly watched and waited for by his owner, as the
College bells were chiming one o'clock on the same day, so that it must
have done the distance, about fifty-four miles as the crow flies, in
about one hour, or very nearly at the rate of a mile a minute. Now, it
must be remembered that this was the bird's ordinary flight. He
doubtless sought his distant home in what one might call a brisk and
business-like manner, nor swerved, we may be sure, an inch from his
course, nor loitered by the way. He was going well—very well,
if you like—throughout, but not going his best. The probability is that
under extraordinary pressure, with a falcon in chase, for instance, the
same bird could and would have gone twice as fast, or at a rate of
something more than a hundred miles an hour. If the reader likes to
experiment in this direction, he can easily try it with the common
domestic pigeon, as we have done more than once. Years ago we recollect
a brother of ours taking, at our suggestion, a common black and white
pigeon from the dovecot here to Oban, where, at a preconcerted hour on a
day agreed upon, he set it at liberty. The bird took nearly two hours to
do the distance, some twenty-three or twenty-four miles as the crow
flies; but it probably lingered some time the way to feed, as, instead
of being well fed, which should always be strictly attended to, it
received no food at all on the morning of its liberation at Oban. The
house-pigeon, however, is useless except for comparatively short
distances, and even then is never to be much depended upon. His extreme
domesticity predisposes him to pay a visit to every dovecot 011 the
route, and to fraternise with every flock of brother pigeons he may
happen to fall in with. His peculiar mode of flight, besides, and his
extreme timidity, mark him out as an easy and desirable prey for any
keen-eyed hawk or falcon that may be at the moment impransm, as
Johnson in his early days once signed a note in London—dinnerless. The
common pigeon, too, wings his flight at a comparatively low altitude,
and becomes an easy shot to any one with a gun ready to hand when it
passes by. Not so the true carrier pigeon, which flies at a great
height, far out of range of needle-gun or artillery—out of range of
human sight, in fact; so that it is never in danger of being brought to
grief, as was poor Gambetta in his balloon when passing above the
Prussian lines the other day. The velocity with which some birds fly is
almost incredible. A hungry falcon, with his blood up and in eager
pursuit of his quarry, will fly at the rate of 150 miles an hour, and
keep it up too until his object is attained; and the tremendous impetus
of the bird at such a speed accounts for the dreadful wounds that a
falcon inflicts when it strikes its prey, sometimes ripping up a grouse,
or blackcock, or mallard, from vent to breastbone, as if it had been
done by the keen edge of a butcher's cleaver. A goshawk (Falco
palumbarius)
belonging to Henry of Navarre—the Henri Quatre of after days—having its
royal owner's name engraved on its golden varvels, made
its escape from Fontainbleau in 1574, and was caught in Malta within
four-and-twenty hours afterwards—a distance of 1400 miles, or at the
rate of sixty miles an hour, supposing him to have been on the wing the
whole time. But a hawk never flies by night, so that, on a fair
computation, the bird's speed in winging the enormous distance must have
been at the rate of at least 100 miles an hour. "We have calculated that
a snipe, thoroughly alarmed, and going its best, can fly at the rate of
a mile a minute, and there are other well-known birds equally fleet of
wing. Xor must it be supposed that the velocity of birds is a mere "
flash-in-the-pan," so to speak—a "spurt," as it were—which could not be
kept up. The long-sustained flights of migratory birds proves the
contrary—that birds are not only inconceivably fleet, but, to use a
racing term, that they can
stay as
well. Of our more familiar birds, we should say that the common wild
duck of our meres flies with greater velocity than any other bird with
which the reader is likely to be well acquainted. |