Entries from December 2005 ↓

These golfers are strange creatures, rabbit-coloured, except that many are bright red about the middle, and they repel and yet are ever attracted by a devil in the shape of a little white ball, which leads them on through toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns; cursing the thing, weeping even, and anon laughing at their own foolish rambling; muttering, heeding no one to the right or left of their career,–demented creatures, as though these balls were their souls, that they ever sought to lose, and ever repented losing. And silent, ever at the heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedgehog, all set about with walking-sticks, a thing like a cylindrical umbrella-stand with a hat and boots and a certain suggestion of leg.

A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654 Vol II (of 2), by Ambassador Bulstrode Whitelocke. Published by Charles Morton, revised by Henry Reeve, 1855.

A record of the negotiations of the treaty between Queen Christina’s Sweden and Oliver Cromwell’s England. You can read more about the treaty at the British Embassy in Sweden.

From the British Embassy in Sweden:

The Treaty was negotiated in Uppsala by a Puritan lawyer, Bulstrode Whitelocke, who was sent as English Ambassador to Sweden in 1653/54.

There is, even today, dispute about Whitelocke’s character and achievement. By some accounts he was a classic Vicar of Bray, bending to every political wind. He prospered under Charles I; held the Great Seal of the Commonwealth under Cromwell - making him the equivalent of Lord Chancellor; and then survived the Restoration, managing to get himself included in the Act of Pardon and Oblivion (without which he would have been hanged, and his property confiscated). Thomas Carlyle, writing in the 1840s, considered Whitelocke not just a trimmer, but a bore, objecting even to the occasional “poetic friskiness” in Whitelocke’s diaries “as if the hippopotamus should show a tendency to dance”.

Others — and notably his fullest modern biographer, Ruth Spalding — are inclined rather to praise Whitelocke’s learning, energy, intelligence and independence of character. Certainly the diary he kept of his Embassy to Sweden is a fascinating document, and one of the fullest existing accounts of that period.

I haven’t been able to get Volume I yet, but this work stands very well on its own. There are diplomatic machinations, a wedding, an account of the abdication of Queen Christina, and a shipwreck!

I found it quite readable, though sometimes a bit heavy-handed with the Calvinism.

Thanks to Louise Pryor for post-processing this text!

The Dreamer, by Mary Newton Stanard. Published 1909. A biography of Poe, “true to the spirit if not to the letter.”

Mary Newton Stanard (1865-1929) wrote several books on Virginia history.

An excerpt:

Suddenly his heart stopped. The deep, sweet, hollow, ghostlike voice of the bell in the steeple, tolling for a funeral, was borne to his ears. In a moment his fevered imagination associated the tolling with the absence of his divinity from her pew, and in spite of passionately assuring himself that it could not be, and recalling how lovely and full of health she had been when he saw her through the gate, he was possessed by deep melancholy.

The days and hours until Sunday seemed an age to him–an age of foreboding and dread–but they at last passed by. In a fever of anxiety, he walked with the rest of the boys to church, and mounted the steps to the school gallery.

It was early; few of the worshippers had arrived, but in a little while there was a stir near the door. A group of figures shrouded in the black habiliments of woe were moving up the aisle–were entering her pew, from which alas, she was again absent!

Then he knew–knew that she would enter that sacred place nevermore!

Thanks to Josephine Paolucci for Post-processing this text!

… Indeed, for lurid and somewhat pessimistic narrative, there is nothing like the ordinary currant bun, eaten new and in quantity. A light humorous style is best attained by soda-water and dry biscuits, following café-noir. The soda-water may be either Scotch or Irish as the taste inclines. For a florid, tawdry style the beginner must take nothing but boiled water, stewed vegetables, and an interest in the movements against vivisection, opium, alcohol, tobacco, sarcophagy, and the male sex.

For contributions to the leading reviews, boiled pork and cabbage may be eaten, with bottled beer, followed by apple dumpling. This effectually suppresses any tendency to facetiousness, or what respectable English people call double entendre, and brings you en rapport with the serious people who read these publications. So soon as you begin to feel wakeful and restless discontinue writing. For what is vulgarly known as the fin-de-siècle type of publication, on the other hand, one should limit oneself to an aërated bread shop for a week or so, with the exception of an occasional tea in a literary household. All people fed mainly on scones become clever. And this regimen, with an occasional debauch upon macaroons, chocolate, and cheap champagne, and brisk daily walks from Oxford Circus, through Regent Street, Piccadilly, and the Green Park, to Westminster and back, should result in an animated society satire.

… For short stories of the detective type, strong cold tea and hard biscuits are fruitful eating, while for a social science novel one should take an abundance of boiled rice and toast and water.

However, these remarks are mainly by way of suggestion. Every writer in the end, so soon as his digestion is destroyed, must ascertain for himself the peculiar diet that suits him best–that is, which disagrees with him the most. If everything else fails he might try some chemical food. “Jabber’s Food for Authors,” by the bye, well advertised, and with portraits of literary men, in their drawing-rooms, “Fed entirely on Jabber’s Food,” with medical certificates of its unwholesomeness, and favourable and expurgated reviews of works written on it, ought to be a brilliant success among literary aspirants. A small but sufficient quantity of arsenic might with advantage be mixed in.

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Including a Treatise of the Etiquette of Marriage: describing the Invitations, the Dresses, the Ceremony, and the proper behavior of both Bride and Bridegroom, whether in Public or behind the Nuptial Curtain.

• It also tells plainly how to begin courting.
• The way to get over bashfulness.
• The way to “sit up.”
• The way to find the soft spot in a sweetheart’s breast.
• The way to write a love letter.
• The way to easily win a girl’s consent.
• The way to pop the question to her.
• The way “to do up things” before and after an engagement.
• The way to receive and the way to decline an offer.
• The way to “give the mitten” genteely.
• The way to make yourself agreeable during an engagement.
• The way Bridesmaids and Groomsmen should dress and perform their duties.
• The way you should act and the things you should do at a Wedding and at Wedding Receptions.
• The furniture, decorations and behavior in the Bridal Chamber.
• The way to make Wife and Husband “real happy.”

This is just the book that has long been wanted. It speaks in plain, honest words, revealing knowledge that everybody ought to know, upon subjects of as vital import to all as the very air we breathe. Neither those already married nor those contemplating the tying of the connubial knot, can afford to be another day with a knowledge of the

that are so truthfully and vividly explained in this work. It is just the very treatise to be in the hands of

In fact, there is not a lady or gentleman in the world–young or old, single or married–who cannot glean a vast amount of useful information that will enlighten them on all points of Courtship and Marriage, as well as their ancillary duties, pleasures and obligations.

This is the most complete, and by far the most valuable work that has ever been brought out on this all-important subject. We beg of you, therefore, not to confound it with any of the worthless books heretofore issued, but remember the title and obtain “The Real Secret Art and Philosophy of Wooing, Winning and Wedding.”

Old Doctor Sobersides, the minister of Pumpkinville, where I lived in my youth, was one of the metaphysical divines of the old school, and could cavil upon the ninth part of a hair about entities and quiddities, nominalism and realism, free-will and necessity, with which sort of learning he used to stuff his sermons and astound his learned hearers, the bumpkins. They never doubted that it was all true, but were apt to say with the old woman in Molière: “He speaks so well that I don’t understand him a bit.”

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Some additional experiments have been made in France, it appears, to determine the specific action of a considerable lowering of temperature upon the brilliancy of certain bodies which shine in the dark after having been exposed to sunlight. Tubes of glass filled with the powdered sulphides of calcium, barium, strontium, etc., all substances possessing the property of phosphorescence in a high degree, were exposed to the solar rays and afterward proved to be luminous in the dark, this being done in such a way as to fix upon the memory the mean value of the progressive diminution of the emitted light, and the time also was noted during which the light was strong, less strong and weak, respectively. The tubes were next placed in bright sunlight for one minute and then suddenly introduced into a double-walled glass cylinder, the interspace of which was filled with nitrous oxide at 140 degrees C. In about five or six minutes the temperature of the tubes was some 100 degrees. They were then withdrawn, and, when observed in a perfectly dark chamber, no luminosity whatever was perceptible. As the tubes recovered their normal temperature, however, the phosphorescence returned without the exciting agency of the sun’s rays or of diffused light. These results were proved to be general for all phosphorescent substances employed. The experiments showed, too, that the production of the phosphorescent light requires a certain movement of the constituent molecules of bodies.

The Awakening, by Count Leo Tolstoi, translated by William E. Smith. The classic novel better known as The Resurrection, in an unauthorized, contemporary translation. This work was quickly done and quickly printed, if the number of typos is any indication.

Thanks to Diane Monico for her excellent post-processing!