By Order of the King.

Otago Witness, Issue 921, 24 July 1869, Page 20

By Order of the King.

A ROMANCE OF ENGLISH HISTORY.

BY VICTOR HUGO,

PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.*

, URSUS. TTrsus and Homo were fast friends. Ursus was a man, Homo was a wolf. Their dispositions tallied. The man had christened the wolf, and he thought the name fitted. Man and wolf turned their partnership to account. They went from cross-road to cross-road— from country-side to coun-try-side — from shire to shire — from one end of the United Kingdom to the other. Ursus gossipped and sold quack medicines at village fetes, at the corners of streets, and in the market places, one of which exhausted, they went on to another. Ursus lived in a small van on wheels, which Homo was civilized enough to draw by day and guard by night. On bad roads the man pulled fraternally with the wolf. When the cart drew up in a fair green, Ursus harangued and Homo approved, and went round with a bowl in his mouth, politely making a collection amongst the audience.

Never did the wolf bite — the man did now and then. At least to bite was the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope ; and to- italicize his misanthropy, he had made himself a juggler. To live also, for the stomach has to be consulted. Moreover, he was a doctor and a ventriloquist, He imitated all sorts of sounds, amongst others that of a crowd, and therefore he called himself Engastrimythos. Ursus was sagacious, contradictory, odd, and given to romance, which he told with impudent humour, and an assumption of believing in the fables he related. Hei practised palmistry, told fortunes, and taught omens. He used to say — " There is one difference between me and the Archbishop of Canterbury ; I avow what I am." Hence the Archbishop, justly indignant, had him up one day before him, but Ursus cleverly disarmed his grace by reciting a sermon he had composed upon Christmas- day, which the delighted Archbishop learnt by heart, and delivered from the pulpit as his own. As a doctor Ursus wrought cures by some means or other. He used aromatics, he was versed in simples, he knew the virtue of every flower that grew in the wood, every neglected plant on the hedgeside. He had many recipes. He posBeesed a retort and a Bask ; he effected transformations ; he sold panaceas. They had once done him the honor to take him for a madman, and confine him in bedlam, but they set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. The fact was, UrBUB was a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an old Latin poet. Too much knowledge could only end in starvation. Tho school of Salerno says — " Eat little and often." Ursus ate little and seldom, thus obeying only one half of the precept, and disobeying the other, but then thiß was tho fault of the public, who would not buy from him. At a pinch he composed comedies, which, in recital, he almost acted ; this helped to sell his drugs. He was great is soliloquy. Any one who has lived, a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To speak out loud when one is alone is, in effect, to have a dialogue with the divinity within oneself. Thia was the custom of Socrates and Luther, and Ursus took after these great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his own audience. The passers by, who have their own way of appreciating clever people, used to say, " He is au idiot." Fortunately Ursus had never been in tho Low Countries, where they weighed a man to see if he were of the normal weight, above or below which a man is a sorcerer. Nothing could bo simpler. Too heavy, you were hanged ; too light, you were burned. Tho balance in which sorcerers woro weighed may be seen at Oudowator, but is now iisod for weighing cheosoa. But then religion has degeneratocL Ursus would certainly liavo had a crow to pluck with that balance. In his travels he kept away from Holland, and ho did well : indeed, it is believed he never quitted tho United Kingdom. Howovor this might have been, ho had made tho acquaintance of Homo in a wood, and a tasto for wandering life had come ovor him. Ho had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him gono forth into tho highways, living in tho opon air— the groat chance of life Ho had industry and reserve, and great skill in everything connectod with healing operations, restoring the sick to health, and also in working wonders peculiar to himseif. Be was a clovor mountobank, and a good doctor. He did not wish to pass for a wizard, for in tho those days it was not a aafe thing

• Tho preliminary chapter*, m ftbovo, uro oon« denied from tho original treiulfttion in th« Anttml<utian, to which journal w<» ar« lm!«bUd for the work.-S4, O.W.

to 3 be thought a' f rieftd. ' of the -devil. For. ;all thrttj 1 he was'liable "to suspicion, seeing, that he went to' gather heibs in rough thickets where,' as had been proved by the Counsellor D'Ancre, one might, in the evening mist, meet a man who comes out of the earth, "blind of the right eye, barefooted, without a- cloak, and a sword by his side. " But Ursus, eccentric in manner and disposition, was too honest for a conjuror. He was incapable of the abominations of speaking German, Hebrew, or Greek, without having learnt them. If he Bpoke Latin it was because he knew it. Be never would attempt to speak Syriac, which he did not know. Besides, it is said that Syriac is the language in which uncanny people worship the devil. In medicine he preferred Galen to Cardan. To sum up, Ursus did not fear the police. His van was large enough for him to lie down in, and to contain his wardrobe He owned a lantern, several wigs, a flute, a violoncello, and a stove of two compartments, in one of which he cooked his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes. At night the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain. H omo's hair was black— that of Ursus, who was fifty, if not sixty, years old, grey. Ursus was long, not tall. He was bent and melanoholy. He could not weep. He could scarcely smile. An old man is a thinking ruin ; such a ruin was Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a prophet, the irascibility of a savant. In his youth he had been a philosopher in the mansion of a lord.

Such was Ursua

This happened 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they are now.

Homo was no ordinary wolf. He was five feet long, which is a fine length for a wolf even in Lithuania ; he was very strong, he looked at you askance, which was no fault of his ; he had a soft tongue, with which he sometimes licked Ursus ; he had a narrow brush of short bristles down his backbone, and he was lean with the wholesome leanness of a forest life. Before he knew Ursus he thought nothing of doing his fifty miles in a night. As a beast for draught work Ursus preferred him to a donkey, for Ursus thought too highly of the ass for that, having remarked that the ass (a four legged thinker little understood by man) has a habit of cocking his ears when philosophers talk nonsense, as they sometimes do. Ab a friend he preferred Homo to a dog, considering the love of a wolf more rare. Therefore Homo sufficed for Ursus, being more than a companion, in that he was an analogue. Ursus had taught Homo to stand upright, to restrain his rage into sulkiness, to growl instead of howling, and other talenta peculiar to men, and on his side the wolf had taught the man what he knew—to do without a roof, to live without bread and fire, to prefer hunger in the woods to slavery in a palace. In front, outßide the van was a board, a kind of frontispiece, on which was written the following inscription in black letters on a white ground. " By friction gold loses every year a fourteen-hundredth part of its bulk. This is what is called the wear. Hence it follows that on fourteen hundred millions of gold in circulation throughout the world, one million is lost annually. This million dissolves into dust, flies away, floats about, is reduced to atoms, oharges, drugs, .inct weighs down consciences, amalgamates into the souls of the rich, whom itrendors proud, and with those of tho poor, whom it renders brutish."

The characters in which this inscription was written had become confused and blurred by rain and the kindness of nature, and fortunately so, for it is possible that this philosophy concerning the inhalation of gold, although at the same time enigmatical and lucid, might not have been to the tastes of tho sheriffs, the provostmarshals, and other dignitaries of the law, and English law was no joko in those days. It did not take much to mako you a felon. Magistrates were ferocious by by tradition, and cruolty was a matter of routine. ' Judges of Assize had incroased and multiplied. Jeffries hod become a brood. lnßido the hut, on a white- washed plank, and written in ink, woro two other larger inscriptions. One was headed "tub ONLY THINO9 NBOJBSBARY TO KNOW," and was a description, taken from Ohamborlayne'nwork " The present state of Eitgland." of tho rights and privileges of the English Peerage. The other, written in tho samo fashion, was a lis of thirty-throo English Peers, with their titles, the amounts of thoir revenues, and descriptions of thoir palaces, gardens, and domains, Tho last of these was us follows :— "Linnrous, Lord Olanoharlio, Baron Olanoharlie and Honkerville, Marquis of Corleone, in Sicily, dorivea hii fcitlo from the Castle of Olanoharlio, built in 012, by Edward the Elder, as a defence against tho Danes. Bosidea Hunkerville house. in London, whioh U a palace, he hat, at Windsor, Carltone todgo, which U

another,* and; eight castle wards; ond: at Burton, dntTr'ent, -With a royalty P ori the carriage of plaster of -Paris ; then Gumdraith Humble, Moricambe, Trewardraith r Hell-Kesters:(where there is a miraculous well), Phillinmore, with its turf boys, Reculver, near the ancient city Vagniac, Vinecaunton, on the Meel-eulle mountain; besides nineteen boroughs and villages with reeves, and the whole district of Penneth Chase, all of which bring in his lordship £40,000 a year." " The 172 peers enjoying their dignities under James 11. possess among them altogether a revenue of £1,272,000 sterling a year, which is the eleventh part of the revenue of England."

In the margin, opposite the last name (tha,t of Linnaeus, Lord Clancharlie) a note could be read in the handwriting of Ursus " Rebel, in exile ;, houses, and lands, and chattels, sequestrated. It is well."

It is a law of nature that one admires one's like, therefore Ursus admired Homo."

The normal condition of Ursus was to be continually raging inwardly and grumbling outwardly. He waß one of the malcontents of creation. A man ever in opposition. Taking the world unkindly, he gave his satisfecit to nobody. The bee, in his case, did not atone, by its honey- making, for its sting. Probably, in secret, he criticised Providence a good deal. He approved of princes. Oh, yes, he approved of princes — but in his own way. One day when James 11. made a gift to the Virgin in a Catholic Chapel, in Ireland, of a massive gold lamp, he, passing with Homo, who was more indifferent to such things, said, in admiration before the crowd "Of courae, the blessed Virgin wants a lamp much more than those barefooted children there require shoes. " Such proofs of his loyalty, and such evidences of his respect to the powers that were, probably contributed to make the magistrates tolerate his vagabond life, and his low alliance with a wolf.

From a political point of view iv's writing about gold, not very intelligible in itaelf, and now become almost a smear, gave no handle to the enemy.

Even after the time of James, 11. and under the " respectable" reign of William and Mary, he travelled peaceably and quietly round the little English towns. He sold his philtres and his phials, and passed easily through the meshes of the nets which the police of that period had spread all over England in order to sift all wandering gangs, and specially to atop the progress of the Comprachicos. That was right enough. Ursus belonged to no gansr. Ursus lived with Ursus, a society into which a wolf gently thrust his nose. H e passed his life in passing on his way, and the sight of towns increased his taste for brambles, thickets, thorns, and holes in tho rock, and drew him closer to his wolf, for hia home was the forest, and he would have liked to have realised his idea by putting a cave on four wheels, and travelling in a den. We have said he did not smile. No, but he laughed sometimes, indeed frequently. His was a bitter laugh.

His great business was to hate the human race Having made it clear that human life is a dreadful thiug ; having observed the superposition of evils, kings on the people, war upon kings, the plague on war, famine on the plague, folly on everything ; having recognised that death is a deliverance, he cured the sick, he prolonged the lives of the old. And then he would rub his hands and say " I do men all the harm lean." Passers by could, through a little window at the back, read on the ceiling of his van these words, were written within, but visible from without, inscribed with charcoal, in big letters —

"Ursus, Philosopher"