the latter years of his life he had occasionally fits of play upon him that were little short of madness.

"This year (1608) we sojourned some days at Fontainebleau, playing all the time the most furious play that was ever heard of. A single day did not pass without there being twenty thousand pistoles, at least, lost and won. The least of our markers were for fifty pistoles; and these markers we called Quinterotes, because they went very quick, like the English horses which Mr. Quinterot had brought into France more than a year before, and which have since been cause why we use English horses, not only for hunting, but for travelling through the country: all which was never done before them."-Memoires du Mareschal de Bassompierre, vol. i. p. 172, Edition de Cologne.

According to our humorous old traveller, Coryat, who was at Fontainebleau that same year (1608), it should appear that Henri Quatre had no English horses there. He says, "Here I saw two stables of the King's horses, wherein there are only hunting-horses; in both, as I take it, about forty: they were fine and fair geldings and nags, but neither for fineness of shape comparable to our King's hunting-horses, nor, as I take it, for swiftness."

XXX. PIGS, KINGS, AND MONKS.

LOUIS the Fat, of France, associated his son Philip with him on the throne, and had him crowned and consecrated with the usual solemnities at Rheims. Shortly after, as the young King was riding through St. Gervais on horseback, a fat sow (probably one of many that

paraded the town in those cleanly times) ran between his horse's legs, and made him stumble; on which Philip, falling forward, received so much injury that he died the next morning, on the third day of October in the year of Grace 1131. His grieved and irritated father forthwith issued a proclamation that in future no swine should be allowed to run about in the streets of cities and towns, and to this order the people were fain to submit ; but the monks of the order of St. Anthony entered an energetic and successful protest, stating to his Majesty that it was contrary to the respect and reverence due to their patron saint (who may certainly be called the patron saint of pigs) to prevent the swine of their houses, which were the swine of St. Anthony, from enjoying the liberty of going where they (the swine) thought fit.

The subject of the remonstrance, and the rights of the saint and pigs, were solemnly deliberated in council, where it was finally decided to grant the monks of that order an exclusive privilege to be nasty, and to allow their swine to wallow in the streets without molestation, provided only that they had bells tied round their necks. -Histoire de la Ville de Paris, par Sauval.

In old pictures Saint Anthony is almost invariably painted with a sow at his feet.

An old English adage says, "Every man to his taste, as the Welshman said when he kissed his cow."

The Italians say, "There is no accounting for taste; St. Anthony loved a sow." This arose out of a queer story in the legendary life of that saint.

XXXI. ETIQUETTE ON THE SCAFFOLD.

ON the 9th of March 1648, in pursuance of a sentence passed by Cromwell and the Commonwealth, the Royalist leaders, the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Holland, and the Lord Capel, were executed in front of Westminster-Hall. They were brought to the block and beheaded one at a time, each of them addressing the people; and the Lord Capel being the last of the three, of whom he was undoubtedly the most honourable and the best.

"As soon as his lordship had ascended the scaffold, he looked very vigorously about, and asked whether the other lords had spoken to the people with their hats on?' and being told that they were bare,' he gave his hat to his servant, and then with a clear and strong voice he spoke."-Clarendon Hist. Reb.

XXXII. MISCELLANEOUS POINTS * IN THE HISTORY OF THE SCIENCES.

I.-Persecution for matters of opinion. We are accustomed to believe, that the spirit of persecution which prevailed during the "dark" ages, was a consequence of ignorance, which was confined only to the

* In preserving such circumstances as we have thought remarkable, we have attended to no rule but this: never to say of any work more than we have actually seen in the work itself. Of all the things which can lead to inaccuracy, that of citing citations is the most dangerous; and we shall take care, if obliged to do so, to name the citer as well as the author.

ignorant; and that men of information, even in those days, were guiltless of desiring to enforce their opinions literally. We imagine, for example, that the wrongs of Galileo would arouse the indignation of all contemporary men of learning at least. What we here do, is to give instances to the contrary, by producing the printed opinions of two men of education, one a Frenchman, the other an Italian, both written within the half century preceding the forced recantation of Galileo.

Vieta, the first who so materially extended algebra as to entitle Europe to claim the honour of having introduced new principles into the science received from Asia, was a man remarkable for every kind of knowledge. He was, by the confession of an opponent, as well as from what is otherwise known of him, statesman, diplomatist, lawyer, theologian, mathematician, orator, and poet. (Born in 1540, died in 1603). He lived during the reformation of the calendar, which was completed by Pope Gregory the Thirteenth in 1582; the plan of Lilius, then dead, having been committed to the execution of the Jesuit Clavius, celebrated as the commentator upon so many of the Greek geometers. This subject then exercised much of the attention of the learned, not only because the correct time of keeping Easter was a point of faith, but because it had divided the Eastern and Western churches for centuries, and had been written upon, and considered a principal application of astronomy, by many authors on that science; Roger Bacon, for instance. Among others, Vieta wrote in opposition to the scheme patronised by Clavius, who answered very

mildly, and referred all his critics to his forthcoming work. Vieta became furious, and published, in 1602, his "Adversus Christ. Clavium Expostulatio;" in which he says that Clavius, "in his contempt of religion, would rather fall into crime, and overturn all things by any hazard, rather than appear ignorant of the matter;" "that he was a false mathematician and theologian, if indeed he had any title to either appellation;" that the protestants, if he did not take warning, would get the true calendar from their own reason, and not from the papal authority; "that Augustus Cæsar, one Pontifex maximus, had altered the calendar arranged by Julius Cæsar, another Pontifex maximus," which, euriously enough, he cites as a precedent for his own Pontifex. He then calls upon the society of Jesuits to take up the matter, and ends by assuring them that all religious men look for nothing less at their hands than that all who obstruct a work of so much benefit to the Christian republic (as his own reformation of the calendar, of course,) should be "driven out as exiles from the happy congregation of the pious." So much for the toleration of Vieta: it only remains to add, that he was wrong in most of his notions on the subject. In the mean while, (in 1603,) an advocate for Clavius rose up in the person of Theodosius Rubeus, who appears to have been a personal friend of the Pope, and who published his answer, under the usual permission of his superiors; which circumstances, with the style of the passage we shall cite, incline us to suspect that the arm of power was ready to be raised by the church in case the gentle hint was not