Autobiographical Sketches eBook

[18] The names and history of the Pyrenean Cagots are equally obscure.  Some have supposed that, during the period of the Gothic warfare with the Moors, the Cagots were a Christian tribe that betrayed the Christian cause and interests at a critical moment.  But all is conjecture.  As to the name, Southey has somewhere offered a possible interpretation of it; but it struck me as far from felicitous, and not what might have been expected from Southey, whose vast historical research and commanding talent should naturally have unlocked this most mysterious of modern secrets, if any unlocking does yet lie within the resources of human skill and combining power, now that so many ages divide us from the original steps of the case.  I may here mention, as a fact accidentally made known to myself, and apparently not known to Southey, that the Cagots, under a name very slightly altered, are found in France also, as well as Spain, and in provinces of France that have no connection at all with Spain.

[19] “Strulbrugs.”—­Hardly strulbrugs, will be the thought of the learned reader, who knows that young women could not be strulbrugs; since the true strulbrug was one who, from base fear of dying, had lingered on into an old age, omnivorous of every genial or vital impulse.  The strulbrug of Swift (and Swift, being his horrid creator, ought to understand his own horrid creation) was a wreck, a shell, that had been burned hollow, and cancered by the fierce furnace of life.  His clockwork was gone, or carious; only some miserable fragment of a pendulum continued to oscillate paralytically from mere incapacity of any thing so abrupt, and therefore so vigorous, as a decided HALT!  However, the use of this dreadful word may be reasonably extended to the young who happen to have become essentially old in misery.  Intensity of a suffering existence may compensate the want of extension; and a boundless depth of misery may be a transformed expression for a boundless duration of misery.  The most aged person, to all appearance, that ever came under my eyes, was an infant—­hardly eight months old.  He was the illegitimate son of a poor idiot girl, who had herself been shamefully ill treated; and the poor infant, falling under the care of an enraged grandmother, who felt herself at once burdened and disgraced, was certainly not better treated.  He was dying, when I saw him, of a lingering malady, with features expressive of frantic misery; and it seemed to me that he looked at the least three centuries old.  One might have fancied him one of Swift’s strulbrugs, that, through long attenuation and decay, had dwindled back into infancy, with one organ only left perfect—­the organ of fear and misery.

[20] This was a manoeuvre regularly taught to the Austrian cavalry in the middle of the last century; as a ready way of opening the doors of cottages.

CHAPTER III.

INFANT LITERATURE.