remedy both for external and internal use in the treatment of smallpox and dropsy) was neither more nor less than powdered toad.

Frogs are well-nigh as valuable as toads to the sick poor, who are rarely lacking in the primary necessity of faith in the means adopted. Thus frog's spawn placed in a stone jar and buried for three months till it turns to water has been found wonderfully efficacious in Donegal when well rubbed into a rheumatic limb. How much of the credit was due to the rubbing is not recorded. In Aberdeenshire a cure recommended for sore eyes is to lick the eyes of a live frog. The man who has thus been healed has henceforth the power of curing all sore eyes by merely licking them! In like manner it is said in Ireland that the tongue which has licked a lizard all over will be for ever endued with a marvellous power of healing whatever sore or pain it touches.

Another Irish remedy is to apply the tongue of a fox to draw a troublesome thorn from the foot; the tooth of a living fox to be worn as an amulet is also deemed valuable as a cure for an inflamed leg. The primary difficulty is to catch the fox and extract his tooth!

With respect to deep-seated thorns, the application of a cast-off snake-skin is efficacious, not to attract the thorn towards itself, but to expel it from the opposite side of the hand or foot. But once we touch on the virtues of the mystic snake, we find its reputation just as great in Britain's medicine folk-lore as in Japan, where the great snake-skins held so conspicuous a place in the druggist's shop, or in China, where the skin of a white spotted snake is valued as the most efficacious remedy for palsy, leprosy, and rheumatism.

Strange to say, in the old Gaelic legends there is a certain white snake who receives unbounded reverence as the king of snakes, and another legend tells of a nest containing six brown adders and one pure white one, which latter, if it can be caught and boiled, confers wondrous medical skill on the lucky man who tastes of the serpent broth.2

In some of the Hebridean Isles, notably that of Lewis, the greatest faith prevails in the efficacy of so-called 'serpent stones,' which are simply perforated water-worn stones. Some have had two plain circles cut upon them. These are dipped in water, which is then given to cattle as a cure for swelling or for snake-bite. Should such a charmed stone be unattainable (and their number is exceedingly limited), the head of an adder may be tied to a string and dipped in the water with equally good result.

The oft-quoted remedy, 'A hair of the dog that bit you,' appears in many forms. In Devonshire, any person bitten by a viper is advised at once to kill the creature and rub the wound with its fat. I am told that this practice has survived in some of the northern states of

2 See In the Hebrides. By C. F. Gordon Cumming. London: Chatto & Windus.

America, where the flesh of a rattlesnake is accounted the best cure for its own bite.

In Black's very interesting volume on Folk Medicine, he mentions that the belief in the power of snake-skin as a cure for rheumatism still exists among the sturdy New-Englanders, some of whom are not above the weakness of wearing a snake-skin round the neck, or keeping a pet snake as a charm. The use by American Indians of rattlesnake oil for the same malady seems not devoid of reason; but the New-England faith in snake-skin is probably a direct heritage from Britain, where Mr. Black tells of an old man who used to sit on the steps of King's College Chapel at Cambridge, and earn his living by exhibiting the common English snake, and selling the sloughs of snakes to be bound round the forehead and temples of persons suffering from headache.

In Durham, an eel's skin worn as a garter round the naked leg is considered a preventive of cramp, while in Northumberland it is esteemed the best bandage for a sprained limb.

So too, in Sussex, the approved cure for a swollen neck is to draw a snake nine times across the throat of the sufferer, after which operation the snake is killed, and its skin is sewed in a piece of silk and worn round the patient's neck. Sometimes the snake is put in a bottle, which is tightly corked and buried in the ground, and it is expected that, as the victim decays, the swelling will subside.

The quaint little drug store at Osaka has led me into a long talk; but the subject is a large one, and the chief difficulty lies in selecting a few examples from the mass of material before me. I am sure that should these pages ever meet the eye of my Japanese friend, he will acknowledge that my interest in the medicine lore of his ancestors was certainly justifiable.

C. F. GORDON CUMMING.

LECKY'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.1

MR. LECKY has long ago reached so high a position in the honourable company of contemporary historians as to place him beyond the action.

of

any fears and hopes, in connection with possible criticism, as may ruffle or perturb the minds of authors who have not yet obtained their certificate. To treat him with less than freedom would be a bad compliment to such a man; to pay him off with stinted approval an error certain to recoil on the offender. A writer in the Quarterly Review long ago made it a charge against Hallam that he dealt rather in deduction than in detail. Such a remark almost of necessity applies to a compressed historian. It cannot be applied to Mr. Lecky, who habitually labours to place before his reader in the clearest light the evidence that has convinced himself, and to enrich the world with the harvest gathered from his wide fields of knowledge, his penetrating insight, his conscientious research, his habitual effort to present both sides, and his enviable powers of luminous expression. It is no great subtraction from the value of these volumes if I presume to remark that his liberal fulness seems to come nearer than it formerly did to the borders of redundance; and that he has the advantages and the drawbacks, like Dean Milman in his History of the Latin Church, of treating history by gathering conspicuous persons and events around the centres of most commanding interest, rather than by a continuous presentation, in the older manner, of a chain of occurrences. It follows that there is no difficulty in making choice from his pages of points, on which to exhibit and to canvass the views he has set before us.

2

Mr. Lecky has been bountiful beyond the ordinary practice of historians in presenting us with a summary account of what the eighteenth century might have been if the fatal influence of the French Revolution, and of the war which it produced, had not checked, blighted, and distorted the natural progress.' We should probably have had from it, he thinks, the abolition of the slave trade, a reform of Parlia

1 A History of England in the Eighteenth Century. By W. E. H. Lecky. Vols. v. and vi. (London: Longmans, 1887.)

2 vi. 297.

ment, the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, and an immense reduction both of debt and of taxation. The great industrial transition'. might have been accomplished with comparatively little suffering but for the famine price of corn and the absorption of the mind of Parliament; and it was the introduction from France of the revolutionary spirit into Ireland that for the first time made the Irish problem almost insoluble.'

So far as regards the use of the potential mood, and the sad contemplation of what might have been, I cannot but agree closely with the historian. The list of benefits which were in view might probably, and the list of evils which have had to be encountered might certainly, have been enlarged. The mournful contrast is summed up in what there is a temptation to call the cruel destiny of Mr. Pitt. Never perhaps in history was there such a solution of continuity as that which severs his earlier from his later life.

Mr. Lecky's fifth volume commences with a review, copious perhaps even to excess, but luminous, impartial, and valuable in the highest degree, of his character and career. It may be doubtful whether Macaulay, in treating of Pitt, has bestowed on his subject all the pains it deserved, or has done justice in all respects either to its greatness or to the extraordinary wealth of his own mind. But Mr. Lecky's account is not less conscientious than it is searching, and has a worth only to be measured by considering how vast a space that full but short existence covers in our British history. The first years of his parliamentary efforts constitute a brilliant romance of real life, presented within the walls of St. Stephen's, which had no precedent, and which has had no parallel. It may be seriously doubted whether Mr. Pitt continued all along to grow in due proportion to the lapse of years; but there surely cannot be a question that his youth was colossal, and his mental stature to the last superlative. His life presents to us a restorative and a destructive epoch; but, whether right or wrong, he was always great; and, down to the period when the rather impossible New Zealander is to sit on the ruins of London Bridge, he must remain to every student of English history-I wish I could add to every English minister and politician-a subject of earnest study and of profound interest. And he was not only great but upright. The love of power, nay the avarice of power, which Mr. Lecky ascribes to him,3 is a dangerous propensity, and one most difficult to bring in any manner within the lines of the Christian ideal; but it does not of necessity import, and in Mr. Pitt's case did not entail, any deviation from integrity. The worst act of his life, so far as I know, was his formal abandonment of the Roman Catholic claims in deference to the bigotry, and to the quivering sanity, of George the Third. This, however, seems to me to have been in his mind not the base surrender of a purpose consecrated by association

3 v. 14.

with the highest ideas of justice, generosity, and good faith, but part of a vast retrogressive or obstructive process, one example amongst many, although the most conspicuous, of the action of those influences which had changed the colour of his mind; of the force of the torrent which had borne him leagues away from his earlier moorings, and which in a greater fulness of years might even have brought him to the point marked by the names of Eldon and of Sidmouth, whose followers appropriated his name and figured as his worshippers.

What seems to me to be lacking in Mr. Lecky's masterly delineation of Mr. Pitt is an adequate appreciation, or perhaps any appreciation, of the chasm which separates the later from the earlier life. In the main I hold with the proposition of Mr. Goldwin Smith in his remarkable Lectures, that (altogether apart from Lord Chatham) there were two Mr. Pitts; and this not the less firmly on account of the untoward fact, patent to all who compare the earlier with the later utterances of the author, that, on the great question of Ireland, to which he gave so deep a study, there have been two Mr. Goldwin Smiths as well as two Mr. Pitts. I will quote a passage which may deserve Mr. Lecky's attention.

During the first part of his life Pitt is to be classed with the philosophic and reforming kings and ministers before the Revolution, whose names ought not to be forgotten. During the second part he tends, though he does not actually sink, to the level of the Metternichs, the Polignacs, the Percevals, and the Eldons. . This evening we speak of the happier Pitt: of him whose monuments remain in free trade, an improved fiscal system, religious toleration, the first steps towards colonial emancipation, the abolition of the slave trade, the condemnation of slavery. Another evening we shall speak of the Pitt, whose monuments remain in six hundred millions of debt, and other evils, political and social, of which the bitter inheritance has descended to us, and will descend to generations yet to come.*

Apart from its tempests and catastrophes, in the more silent portion of its annals, and especially in that profoundly inward department which records the influence of circumstances, or as it is now said of environment, upon character, I do not know a page of history which presents a more touching subject of contemplation than is supplied by a comparison between Pitt before, and Pitt after, the outbreak of the Revolutionary war. We see him in the first fervour of youth, combined with the full solidity of manhood, step forth upon the stage with all the ideas, and with the very highest aptitudes, of a minister of peace: but an unkind fate requires him to be the author and the champion of a war the most onerous and deadly that is known to the history of the nation; a war which was in its silent and unnoted effects more mischievous, more pestilent, than the whole of them put together; and finally which, as if with the malice of a wicked fairy, instead of the appropriate, beloved, and familiar offices of his earlier life, saddled him with a description of

Three English Statesmen, 1867, pp. 149–51.