of selection and arrangement. His works contain innumerable gems, but piled pages on pages without method, huddled up in so obscure a heap that the ordinary reader yawns past them with half-closed eyes. There is good raw material; but then it is so very raw,-half developed ideas crawling about on all fours, unpeeled witticisms, and a heterogeneous mass of scientific facts, which ought to be neatly labelled and put away in an appendix, or cunningly introduced into the body of the text. In short, Captain Burton's mind is represented in his books, as the zoological collections of the British Museum are represented in the glass cases of that establishment-nothing is seen to its best advantage, and half of the specimens are not seen at all.

It is evident that his style has been corrupted by his Oriental studies; but since he possesses these immense stores of information, with considerable powers of original thought, humour, and observation, why does he not study the science of book-making, in which there is so much that is mechanical, but which cannot be mastered without brain-sweat and patient thought? No writers accumulated facts with greater interest than Balzac and Macaulay; but they exercised yet greater labour upon their style, till they had so perfected it that the common eye, dazzled by the beauty of the fabric, often fails to observe the materials of which it is composed. How was this done?

By scrupulous self-criticism and unremitting toil. Macaulay would sometimes write a sentence over half a dozen times before it would read smoothly to his ear; and Balzac wrote the Peau de Cagrin sixteen times. Thus drudged the great masters of two great languages. No genius, however splendid, can afford to dispense with style. Style is structure, without which a book is not a building, but a quarry,-style is voice, without sweetness of which there can be no true eloquence,style is art, which adorns the nakedness of human thought, and composes symmetry of sentiments and of ideas.

I have said much upon this subject because I am convinced that, if Captain Burton chose, he might become an agreeable writer. But I am aware that it is not true criticism to demand neat literary manipulation in the works of men who spend the greater portion of their lives away from their own language, and who are usually forced to write hurriedly, that the book may appear before the discovery has died from the public mind. Sir Samuel Baker is a literary artist, as well as a gallant explorer; but we have no right to expect this double talent in travellers, and to blame them if we do not find it. They are great authors, though in another way, they perform poems instead of writing them; and some day, perhaps, from the deeds of these heroes of Central Africa a Camoens will rise to put them into words.

plained, but entirely mis-translated. It is made to say,

"Nay, Cadwal, we must lay his face to the east ;" "Nach Osten, Cadwal, muss sein Antlitz liegen;"

which is certainly wide of the original by just half the circumference of the

east;

My father hath a reason for 't. What was that reason? In the flood of annotation which has been poured over the plays of the greatest of poets, there has been no reply to this rather interesting inquiry. We have quite enough of a guidance that perplexes or misleads, of illustrations that do but darken, and emendations of what was quite straight till private hands intermeddled to crook it. There is plenty of vapid and false criticism, from one of the most learned of English bishops; from one of the most ponderous of English moralists; from one of the most shining names in classic English verse. But no critic or commentator that we know of, from "piddling Tibbald" to Coleridge the transcendental, with his cloudy pomp of professional words and fanciful abstractions, has had a syllable to bestow upon this point. Knight's Pictorial has no representation of it. The ingenious Mr. Hudson offers no lesson or conjecture about it. Mr. Richard Grant White-and he alone, so far as we know, has had his attention called to this subject-says: "What was Belarius's reason for this disposition of the body in the ground, I have been unable to discover."

If we

turn to the German version of the play by Schlegel and Tieck, we find that the passage is only not ex

ward, the head must, of course, be reclined westward. The two brothers were about to bury the brutish Cloten, whom Guiderius had just slain, at the same time with the beautiful boy whom they had so tenderly lamented. And doubtless he would have them both laid out in the same direction; for, as he said

"Thersites' body is as good as Ajax,

When neither is alive;"

and the reason that his father had given, whatever it was, would still apply here. But again, what was that reason? If the command had been to lay the head to the opposite quarter of the sky, we can readily suppose that the motive was for such a requisition. The face would then be turned towards the east, the sunrise, and the doctrine of the resurrection might thus seem to be symbolised. But, on the contrary, the countenance of the dead is made to front that portion of the heavens where the sun does nothing but sink towards its setting, and set.

And yet that cheerful and encouraging idea is not the one that is most frequently presented in the religious usages of the ancient world. Quite the reverse. The description that we here have in Shakspeare corresponds with the funeral customs that generally obtained before the Christian era. We have it from

There is some discrepancy, indeed, among the Greek writers on this subject. But there can be little doubt that the fact is as we have stated.

Sir Thomas Browne, in his Hydriotaphia, asserts-and seems to have good authority for the assertionthat the Phoenicians, children of the East as they were, turned the dead

face towards the west.

Under the influence of Christianity this order was reversed, and doubtless for the reason that has been

already assigned. The ancient Christian writers are agreed in their testimony, so far as they give any, that, in burial, the countenance was turned towards the sky, in sign of a heavenly origin; and towards the east, in sign of an immortal hope. Robert Herrick, the Catullus of English poetry, expresses this in the Hesperides:

"Ah, Bianca! now I see

It is noon and past with me.
In a while it will strike one;
Then, Bianca, I am gone.
Some effusions let me have
Offered on my holy grave;
Then, Bianca, let me rest

With my face towards the east."

But, as if here also there must be some confusion, we read in one of the old dramatists the following lines:

I turn thy head unto the east,
And thy feet unto the west;
Thy left arm to the south put forth,
And the right unto the north.

Just the contrary of what was quoted before. And it is worth observing that the figure thus described is cruciform. The hands extended at right angles with the body, instead of lying at the side, or being folded upon the bosom, could never have

many

This

been a prevailing mode of interment, and is evidently meant to be merely an image of the great crucifixion. And all this corresponds perfectly with the aspect of the vast church structures which were going up in various parts of Europe in the Middle Ages, taking centuries to build, with thousands of men sometimes working at once upon a single building. A hundred thousand work. men, Michelet assures us, were em ployed at the same time upon the sculptured pile at Strasburg; and there is the marvel at Cologne not finished yet. The cathedrals were in the shape of a cross, with their head, the most sacred part, where was the chapel of the Madonna, always lying towards the east. latter fact is remarkable, and may have now in view. We naturally conthrow some light on the subject we clude that this position was adopted on account of the superior sanctity of that quarter of heaven from which Christ came, and the light of his Gospel first dawned. The lines just quoted clearly transfer this position and idea from the church building to the human body as it is laid in the grave. There is a passage in Michelet's History of France that sets forth the same thought, and expands it with so much fancy and rhetorical fervour that it is worth reciting, if it were only as a sample of his peculiar style, poetic and idealistic, of writing history. "The cathedral," he says, "is a petrified mystery-a suffering in stone; or, rather, it is the Sufferer himself. The whole edifice, in the austerity of its architectual geometry, is a human body. The nave, stretching out its two arms, is man on the cross; the crypt, the church under ground, is man in the tomb; the tower, the spire, it is still he, but up, and mounting to heaven. In that choir, bent from the line of the nave," it should be remarked that only in a very few instances is it found so bent,-"you see his head

1871.] bowed in agony; you recognise his blood in the burning purple of the windows. Let us touch these stones

with care; let us tread softly upon these pavements. Everything there bleeds and suffers yet. A great mystery is passing before." This may sound very fanciful. But even the cautious Dean Milman avers, in his History of Latin Christianity, that the Gothic cathedral was "typical in every part, from the spire to the crypt."

Under impressions like these, it would not have been singular if a correspondent usage had sprung up (though there is perhaps no positive evidence of it) of laying the heads of the deceased towards the rising sun, as is indicated by the old dramatist quoted. Indeed, we should wonder if it had been otherwise; and there is fair ground of conjecture that such may have actually been the case in some instances; in some instances, we say, for it does not seem likely that the original tradition of all Christendom should ever have been extensively departed from, and its primitive usage been thus inverted.

But now, again,-as if the subject could never be wholly free from contrary facts and discordant testimony, the direction in which the apse of the church pointed was by no means universally the same. In France and in Germany it pointed, indeed, pretty uniformly to the east, in the great Gothic structures, perhaps, invariably so. In the temple of St. Sophia, at Constantinople, erected centuries before the Northern builders arose, it was so. In London, the modern cathedral of St. Paul's, as well as the ancient Abbey, are both calculated on the same principles of orientation. But in Italy the case is strikingly otherwise. The greatest churches of Rome, with St. Peter's at their head, open their vast portals to the populace on their eastern side, instead of presenting to that sacred quarter the close

707

mysteries of their chancel and high altar and uppermost recess.

It is now time to gather up inta some distinct statements the result of what has been suggested, and seeif we can get at what was in the mind of Shakespeare when he made Guiderius say, "My Father hath a reason for 't." And first, it has been the habit of all religions to regard some one particular point of the horizon as holy above all the rest, to which all observances had reference. The

The

stationary Hindoos sought with their eyes the fabulous mountain of the gods, towards the cool north, through the fair mists that would never allow them the vision of it. roving Goths, in their worship of Odin, stormed towards the South after that city of Asgard where they were to find fulness of joy. The Mussulmans, wherever they spread their carpets for devotion, turn towards Mecca, the city of the prophet. The Hebrews worshipped towards the holy temple, and, when that was thrown down, towards the hill where it had stood. So early as when that temple was dedicated, King Solomon spoke of those who, in the after ages, should pray towards. that place; and the Prophet Daniel, in his exile, when he opened his windows in the direction of Jeru salem as he prayed, was imitated by whole generations of his people, in their longer exile and wider dispersion over every part of the earth. Now this same Jerusalem was the point toward which turned Christian worship in the early centuries of the Church. Jerusalem invited Chris tian arms for its deliverance a part of the time, and attracted Christian hearts to it by their sacred sympathies always. It was not like Mount Merû in the north, where the gods sat in council; nor like the city Asgard in the south, where the gods sat at feast; but, far away in the East, it was the place of the Mas ter's grief and sepulchre.

We are tempted here to repeat a