Mr. Milton blew air downwards from his fine nostrils and, said he: “That there is no precise mention made in the Scriptures of the virtue that I have already sufficiently adumbrated, need not disquiet you as a Christian. The Patriarchs and Prophets, whose genius was spiritual rather than encyclopedical, stood mum and mute upon many notable questions, especially those latterly propounded in Physics and Mathematics and Music: and whether God had distinctly vouchsafed the answers to them I think we need not now closely enquire. For is it not said generally by our Lord Jesus Christ that ‘All things are possible with God?’ And when that which is possible can, by shrewd and lively reasoning, be demonstrated to be not only probable, but the single inescapable Sol of diverse difficult Obs, how shall we deny it to be very truth?”
“Yet I confess, sir, I do not find your Sol altogether a necessary one,” my Uncle Jones said, “when Noah’s Flood would settle the matter for us out of hand.”
Mr. Milton waved his hand with an impatient good-bye to Noah’s flood. “Sir,” said he, “I am not one of those carping lynxes who deny the Deluge to have been universal, and contend (forsooth) that at most it overwhelmed only the single Continent of Asia, sparing Africa and Egypt—for if Ararat were for a while submerged, how was Egypt spared, which lies low beside the Middle Sea? Nor do I presume that other notorious floods, such as the Ogygian or Deucalionian, in Greece, and that which Plato declares to have overwhelmed the Continent of Atlantis, were distinct and national deluges: nay, in faith, there was but one Flood only (whereof the tale survived imperfectly among the Gentile authors, but was perfectly revealed to the Hebrews), in proof of which God set that glorious and reassuring arc, the rainbow, in the heavens. But this Universal deluge proceeded from a forty-day flood of rain, the rushing torrents of which would have carried shells down further into the sea, rather than drawn them up into the high places.”
“You forget, sir,” put in my Uncle Jones, “that the fountains of the great deep were broken, and that the Deluge, though it began with copious rain, proceeded partly from the over-flowing of the sea, which naturally would cast up shells upon its uppermost strand.”
“Nay, I believe I have a pretty good memory of that chapter,” said Mr. Milton with a short laugh. “I do not forget that God ‘caused not any wind to pass over the Earth till the waters began to assuage’; wherefore (as must be plain to the veriest clod) the rain raised the height of the sea gently and commodiously; which being so, why should I believe that such shellfish of the testaceous kind as cockles, oysters and the like, which commonly cling to rocks and have no locomotion but what is afforded them by the furious movement of great waters when they are driven by a tempest—that these (I say) being wrenched from their customary beds and carried indiscriminately aloft to higher ground should now—and as near to here as at Charlton-upon-Otmoor—be found lying in beds as orderly as if these had been their native breeding-places?”
Though Mr. Milton paused for breath after this ponderous and well-articulated sentence, my Uncle had nothing to answer, or else he did not wish to rouse Mr. Milton’s anger and so disincline him from his present intention towards marriage with me.
However, my brother James spoke. Said he: “Sirs, if I may be so bold as to break in upon your disputation, I undertake to answer the objection to the cockles. Otmoor lies not many feet above the level of the sea, and the waters of the Deluge, subsiding in Armenian Ararat, must have driven outwards towards the outer rim of the Earth to whirl at last over into the great gulf; which motion must have caused a current sufficient to roll along with it all manner of shells, stones and fishes. Then Otmoor, which was ever a marsh, would have become for a while a salt marsh, or lagoon, and the dissettled shellfish would have found a home and thriven there.”
Mr. Milton gazed at him, as at a schoolboy who interrupts his master’s grave discourse with an impertinence, and replied disdainfully: “Ay, boy, I warrant they were fine oysters, every whit as good as your juicy, grass-green Colchesters! Had we fortuned to have been born in those ancient days we should have sat down on the strand where the church now is and passed a crooked oyster-knife from hand to hand, banqueting like London aldermen. Here, Sirrah, take this poor scallop as a gift, for I have no tasty Otmoor oyster by me to-day! Eat, eat! Break your teeth upon the sweet meat under the shell!”
My father laughed and applauded Mr. Milton’s retort, saying: “That was indeed a choking oyster for my son, whose contentiousness I pray you will pardon. His heart is in the Oxford Schools, where every day of term he wrestles with his fellow-students of the College. This Whitsuntide vacation irks him, he would be back there again, disputing and confuting.”
Mr. Milton’s anger was assuaged by his triumph, and he confessed James’s fault a forgivable one, saying that he himself as a youth had ever desired to break into disputes of men elder and more learned than himself; and sometimes in the Hall at Christ’s College his impetuosity had overborne his modesty, and he had interjected a word or two even at the risk of being cast out of doors by the beadle. Then, pausing awhile as a victor upon the field, and raising a trophy, he advanced his colours and pressed upon the rout. “Now, Mr. Jones,” said he, “I was prepared to hear you oppose an objection to what I have laid down concerning the plastic virtue of the Earth, to wit, that you find it contrary to the infinite prudence of Nature (which is observable in all natural works and productions—namely to design everything to a determinate end, and by no way or means that contradicts or runs counter to human ratiocination)—you might perhaps, I say, have fribbingly advanced it as imprudent in Nature to have elaborated these fossilia (which were never shells, but only stones), with all those curious figures, adornments and contrivances for which they are remarkable—as witness, for example, this pretended hinge to the stone scallop-shell—and to have elaborated them with no more reasonable end than to make a vain exhibition of pattern and form—”
“I should never have dared,” cried my Uncle Jones, “to cast such a slur upon the wisdom of God, Who, as is generally confessed, enhances His marvels by inscrutability.”
“…why then,” continued Mr. Milton, “if you had, I should have ground you to powder by this observation, that the wisdom and goodness of the Supreme Nature, or Naturans, which orders the Natura Naturata here below, commands not only the production of commodious and useful things, to maintain man’s health, but also that of beautiful and curious things to instruct his eye and cheer his soul. What other use have lovely flowers which lack any proved medicinal virtue, as daffodils, anemones, Turk’s caps and asphodels, or such strange and coloured fish as are not fit meat for man to eat; or the innumerable distinct kinds of campestrian grasses upon which the dull ox promiscuously grazes—but to beautify the earth and raise man’s soul to admiration of the infinite kindness of God?”
“Ay, what use indeed!” my Uncle Jones echoed devoutly.
“So, this matter is settled,” said Mr. Milton, “but there remains the other matter of the great bone which we saw to-day at the house of the master of the quarries. You maintained, sir, did you not, that it was not bone but a mere stone, which had not more than an accidental and deceitful likeness to the lowermost part of a man’s thigh bone? For, when I measured it, you objected that, so great it was, being in compass (near the capita femoris) just two foot, that no animal was ever bred in England proportionable to it?”
“Aye, sir, that was my contention,” said my uncle; “but now that you have convinced me of the plastic virtue of the Earth, a property with which before I never credited Nature, I beg leave to withdraw it; and am the more strongly convinced that it is no bone, nor ever was, but one of those lapides sui generis whereof you spoke. For in the quarries of rubble stone near Shotover Hill are found stones in the likeness of some parts of the abdomen; and some near the Windmill at Nettlebed so perfectly resembling the secret parts of a man’s body that, for modesty, I will not make any description of them in this company; and on Stokenchurch Hill are flint stones strangely like to human paps, ha
ving not only the mamma but the papilla, too, surrounded by an areola and studded with small protuberances—”
Here my Aunt Jones excused herself and drew my mother out with her into the garden, but I sat on, to hear what Mr. Milton would say in reply. Well, he would not let my uncle go to ground easily, but ran in after him like a terrier dog that pursues a fox or badger into his hole and unkennels him with furious barking and snarling.
“So, Mr. Jones,” he cried, “if you are not man enough to stand by your first opinion, let me tell you this, that until I have seen the other stones whereof you speak, I cannot pronounce an opinion upon them. But of this great bone we know that it was found embedded in stony earth in such a manner that no other bone can formerly have been joined to it there, and that even the lower shank of the same bone was wanting; and therefore we must accuse Nature of forming a broken and partial object, as the spooner’s unskilful apprentice spoils many a horn before he cuts a good horn spoon; which would plainly be to blaspheme.”
My father courteously inquired of what living animal Mr. Milton concluded that this gigantic bone (which he had himself seen) had formed a part before it became petrified in the quarry. He asked: “Was it perhaps an elephant? For I read once in Dio Cassius’s history that Claudius Cæsar, when he was called from Rome to the assistance of his Prætor, sorely pressed by the Britons, brought his elephants over into this island—”
“Pray give me leave to contradict you in that, Worshipful Sir,” answered he, “for Dio Cassius alleges no more than that the Emperor gathered together his elephants, not that he ever disbarked them in this island; and Suetonius in his Twelve Cæsars, who also makes particular mention of this expedition, speaks no word about the use in battle of any elephant; nor in the time of Nennius did any memory survive of this unwieldy beast having ever pounded English earth with his great feet. Wherefore I conclude that no elephant came to this land until about four hundred years ago, when one was sent as a present by the Ninth Louis of France, to our Third Henry, which Matthew Paris accounts to have been the first seen this side of the Alps since Hannibal’s crossing of them; and four hundred years hardly yield time for a thigh-bone to petrify in like manner to this one, even had King Henry been to the pains of disjointing the beast when it died and parcelling out its bones to several obscure sepulchres—for bones of similar bigness are reported to have been found at Chatham and at Farley in Kent, and at two small places in the County of Essex. Then, since no horse ever had bones of this bigness (even the great horse, which was not known here until the Norman knights showed it to us) and no ox neither, reason is it to suppose that this bone is a relic of those giants whom Brutus the Trojan is related to have encountered and subdued when, from a fleet of three hundred, four and twenty sail, he and his fellow Trojans came ashore at Totnes in Devon; and among them was one Goegmagog, who was full twelve cubits high and exceeding strong. Such a bone as that we saw, which was perfect bone, though petrified, and showed both the posterior and anterior sinus, and the marrow within of a shining spar-like substance, would be proportionable to a person of Goegmagog’s height; and it emboldens me to give credit to a history, so glorious to our nation, which otherwise might be exploded for fiction. Now, as you know, Goliath the Philistine is reputed to have been a little above half the height of Goegmagog; and we have the testimony of Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews that among the presents sent to the Emperor Tiberius by the King of Persia was a Jew named Eleazar, who was taller than Goliath by a span or two; and, to come closer to the business, in the Town Hall at Lucerne—though I confess that in my late passage from Italy I did not turn aside to examine so great a curiosity—is exhibited the complete skeleton of a man, found under an old oak near the village of Reyden, which falls short of the reputed height of Goegmagog by a bare ten and a half inches….”
Mr. Milton continued to speak of giants, comparing their heights, and the trustworthiness of the authors who measured them, for near an hour longer, until my father, taking advantage of a pause, suggested that since the time was at hand when we must ride home to our supper, Mr. Milton and he should break the ice of their business together.
My Uncle Jones lamented that the feast of wit was cut short, for never had he heard such bold opinions, such apt language, or authorities so carefully cited; and gratulated my brother James that he had come in upon it. “I warrant,” he said, “you never receive such lively instruction from your College tutors at Christ Church.”
James, wishing to avoid a comparison between the sister Universities, was content to let this go by; but when Mr. Milton and my father had gone into another room and my Uncle Jones down to the cellar for wine, he complained that the husband who had been found for me was a marvellous monologian. When I did not know the word, he interpreted it as one who loved to hear himself talk and could not abear that another should be the protagonist in any drama of words.
I laughed at him and, “Don’t be peevish,” said I, “just because you spoke out of your turn and were rapped on the knuckles for’t. Every man is by inclination a monologian, I believe, though not every one has the skill to gather an audience together and hold it. You cannot deny that to-day Mr. Milton spoke both learnedly and to the purpose; nor would you, I believe, conjecture him to be a man who utters the same argument or anecdote in the same words to every new acquaintance. To me, he seems a man with a very copious store of knowledge, keen judgment and so ready a tongue that I cannot believe him to be ever overcome in argument; for wherever his knowledge proved insufficient he would patch it out with sharp railing and splendid eloquence and bear away the board. Nor does his voice drone mournfully in the common style of University doctors or the clergy; for he varies each sentence with lively inflections of his voice.”
“I am content if he contents you,” said James, “forasmuch as you are my sister and I greatly desire your happiness. Nevertheless, I could have wished you married to a man nearer to you in age, and one who wanted that cold, dry peremptory air usual in a capable schoolmaster.”
I answered: “Since I am not to be his pupil, but his wife, and will have the management of his household, I trust I shall not be inconvenienced by the air whereof you complain. You are still a pupil at the University, and naturally you chafe against any speaker whose voice and bearing remind you of the whippings you earned when you were a naughty school-child tussling with your Propria quae maribus.”
Then my mother and my aunt came in again, and my uncle with a bottle of Cyprus wine, mantled over with spiders’ web and dust, which had been long lying in his cellar and which he held dotingly in a napkin. My aunt set out a few saffron biscuits upon a plate, and we sat waiting until my father and Mr. Milton should have agreed upon the articles of the marriage settlement. My aunt discoursed to me upon the honourableness of marriage in a way that did little to recommend that condition to me.
“Remember,” said she, “that Eve was formed from Adam’s rib, not from the bones in his head, and that therefore woman cannot presume to argue with man. Man was created the perfect creature, and not the woman with him at the same time, as happened with both sexes of other creatures; nor was she made to be his equal, but for his use and benefit, as his servant. You must look to your husband evermore to reverence him and obey him, and please him, and sail by no other compass than that of his direction. If he be angered with you, rest not until you have pacified him; and if he blame you without a cause, bear it patiently without an unkind word, and rather take the fault upon yourself than seem to be displeased. Oh, may the Lord give you a patient command of yourself to do nothing that will discontent him! Avoid idleness, avoid vain babbling and a proud carriage, preserve a decent sadness in your behaviour and apparel, give yourself to honest exercises—to spinning, sewing, washing, wringing, sweeping, scouring and the like. If your husband praise you, let your heart sing. Put off the tom-boy, put on the grave matron. Go not from the house except as he give you leave: for the cock flies abroad to bring in, and the hen sits upon the nest to keep all at
home. Marriage is a grievous condition for a woman, but honourable; for though she be by nature weaker than a man, both in mind and in body, yet she is an excellent instrument for him if she yield herself wholly.”
My brother James brooded to himself by the window; my uncle clasped his fingers together, keeping his two thumbs free to roll slowly round and round like a water-mill. But my mother began to grow uneasy, wondering what sort of a bargain my father would drive. She said to my uncle: “I hope, brother, that Dick will not try to play Laban with this Jacob, for despite your declaration that Mr. Milton has a soul above lucre, yet a scrivener’s son is scarce likely to be a fool in these matters, and Dick may catch hold of the worse end of the staff. Moreover, if I recall the scripture, Jacob, being of honest Hebrew stock, over-reached that scheming old Welshman, or Midianite, before he had done.” She began to fidget in her chair, and at last could sit there no longer, but must go out and along the passage. Presently we could hear her high, gay voice breaking in upon the earnest interlocutory mumble of my father and Mr. Milton that came from the room next to us.
How my mother settled the business I did not then know, nor for some weeks after; but soon all three returned together, Mr. Milton complacent, my father a little downcast, my mother roguish and merry. My mother spoke first and said to me: “Daughter, this troublesome matter is now safely behind us. Your father and I have agreed together very harmoniously with Mr. Milton, and the wedding will be celebrated so soon as ever the banns can be asked in our church; which will give you three Sundays more of your virginity. Here, my girl, come over here and kiss your husband, and if you have the wit that you were born with, you will hereafter render him a careful obedience; for he is a very choleric man, I believe, if ever he is crossed, but cherishes well all that is his own.”
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