The bird doth not betray its nest, but flutters
Afar. Thus we our fairy broods conceal;
Closing o’er conscious eyes opaquest shutters,
Locking set lips, through which a tied tongue mutters
The opposites of what we really feel.
We live an inward life that shows no sign;
We have a sense beyond the outward senses,
Which recognises essences more fine
And subtle than the senses five combine
To render through the dull exterior fences.
We have our fairy children, still the dearer
That we have reared the bantlings from their birth
In silence babbling to no careless hearer
The sacred secret of a kindred nearer
Than those most loved who bear our name on earth.
OLD ENGLISH PRODIGIES.
In the dull season of the year we occasionally find some very startling information in our daily papers. The gigantic gooseberry, the mushroom as large as a lady’s parasol, birds’ nests behind doors or in letter-boxes at post-offices, a fall of large hailstones, an eight-legged calf, or three children at a birth, are “subjects” that pleasantly enliven reports of the disease in potatoes, the smut in wheat, or the fly in turnips. The popular taste for what is curious must, in fact, be gratified. But how tame are the greatest achievements of the most ingenious paragraph-monger of the present day compared with the stories furnished to Englishmen two hundred years ago! In the British Museum Library—that mine of treasure inexhaustible as Aladdin’s cave—there are tales without end of marvels that formerly no man thought of doubting. Let us disentomb some of them, bring them to the light of day, and judge how they would look in the columns of the “Times.”
In the year 1641 there was placed before the public “A strange prophecie of a Maid that lately lived neere Worsop in Nottinghamshire.” This was by no means an ordinary prophecy. The maid in question had calmly departed this life, but a few days after the sad event she returned and divulged the secrets of fate. The object of the prophecy was to inform the world that the end of all things was “neer at hand.” The maid while in the flesh had been much “flooted” one day by some of her companions respecting the poverty of her wardrobe. Nay, one of the taunting young ladies displayed—doubtless, with an amiable and friendly motive—“curious wrought hadkirchers, and the like, which caused admiration”—unmingled, of course, with envy. But the sight of the “hadkirchers” overpowered the Maid; she gave up the ghost next day, and lay four-and-twenty hours quite silently and still. Her mother was weeping over her remains when, lo! the Maid of Worksop arose, and “with a mild and cheerefull countenance” told her story. She had met an old man, it seemed, in the land of shadows—people, alack! grow old there also—who took her, she said, “to a faire and costly fort, no Prince’s Court like it, where we were let in; in which place we saw many bright angells, shining like the sun, all singing melodiously with cleare voices.” It was in this enchanting scene that the Maid was charged to come back to earth with a message warning all persons against wearing fine dresses, and especially denouncing her former companion who had “flooted” her. “The very cloathes,” said the seer, “which Miss Anne did weare, for her Pride shall become loathsome to all people, whereby none shall be able to weare them, but shall become unnecessary to all men.” And “unnecessary” they were for ever after, since we are told that “this speech, twice spoken, was markt and found to be true, by reason of an evill savour about them.” This disagreeable incident satisfied the irate and wounded Maid, and she once more retired from an ungrateful world.
A greater prodigy still was Charles Benet, the “Man-child of Manchester,” who made his appearance in the year 1679. The record of his life declares that “at three yeares of age he doth speak Latine, Greek, and Hebrew, though never taught those languages.” There was something in his appearance betokening the possession of marvellous gifts. “His countenance,” says the discriminative biographer, “is very solid and composed; he is somewhat inclined to Melancholy, yet hath a kind of Majestical Gravity even already appearing in his looks, which is frequently attended with a modest smile.” His eye “darted a piercing and sprightly ray upon all things,” and his modesty was no less remarkable than were his talents as a linguist, for when he heard people praise himself “he did commonly blush and reprove them.” Here was an example for his seniors! Happily for the peace of families such children are rare, or what would become of parents? One night, when the prodigy’s father was, “according to his usual and commendable custom, reading to his family in the Bible, and indeed misreciting one sentence, the child of a sudden (then two years old) broke out into these words: ‘Father, you read wrong, for it is not so in the Scripture.’” The unhappy parent was “wrapt in amazement” at this alarming instance of precocity, nor was he much comforted to learn that his son had oftimes read the Scriptures in “Latine, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as English.” As to his mode of talking, we learn that he was “very vehement in the delivery of his Speeches, with a manly voice, but something thick in the delivery of his words.” Cotemporary with Master Benet was a child in Switzerland, who preached edifying sermons to the neighbours when but three years of age; and at Basil there was a girl who delivered discourses uninterruptedly from the 3rd of February to the 22nd of May, “rising as fresh in the morning as if she had neither said nor done anything.” What a treasure of a wife this girl must have been in after years! Let us hope her husband appreciated her unusual powers of eloquence.
Another wonderful girl was Martha Taylor, “the famed Derbyshire damsel.” It was this young person’s lot to exist twelve months without eating. She lived near Bakewell—what good angler has not sojourned at that quaint village?—and in the year 1667 she received “a blow on her