I call not upon that heart which is a stranger to the throbs and yearnings of curiosity, so excited, to justify the abbess of _Quedlingberg_, the prioress, the deaness, and sub-chantress, for sending at noon-day for the trumpeter’s wife: she went through the streets of _Strasburg_ with her husband’s trumpet in her hand,——the best apparatus the straitness of the time would allow her, for the illustration of her theory—she staid no longer than three days.
The centinel and bandy-legg’d drummer!——nothing on this side of old _Athens_ could equal them! they read their lectures under the city-gates to comers and goers, with all the pomp of a _Chrysippus_ and a _Crantor_ in their porticos.
The master of the inn, with his ostler on his left-hand, read his also in the same stile—under the portico or gateway of his stable-yard—his wife, hers more privately in a back room: all flocked to their lectures; not promiscuously—but to this or that, as is ever the way, as faith and credulity marshal’d them——in a word, each _Strasburger_ came crouding for intelligence—and every _Strasburger_ had the intelligence he wanted.
’Tis worth remarking, for the benefit of all demonstrators in natural philosophy, &c. that as soon as the trumpeter’s wife had finished the abbess of _Quedlingberg_’s private lecture, and had begun to read in public, which she did upon a stool in the middle of the great parade,——she incommoded the other demonstrators mainly, by gaining incontinently the most fashionable part of the city of _Strasburg_ for her auditory—But when a demonstrator in philosophy (cries _Slawkenbergius_) has a _trumpet_ for an apparatus, pray what rival in science can pretend to be heard besides him?
Whilst the unlearned, thro’ these conduits of intelligence, were all busied in getting down to the bottom of the well, where TRUTH keeps her little court——were the learned in their way as busy in pumping her up thro’ the conduits of dialect induction——they concerned themselves not with facts——they reasoned——
Not one profession had thrown more light upon this subject than the Faculty—had not all their disputes about it run into the affair of _Wens_ and œdematous swellings, they could not keep clear of them for their bloods and souls——the stranger’s nose had nothing to do either with wens or œdematous swellings.
It was demonstrated however very satisfactorily, that such a ponderous mass of heterogenous matter could not be congested and conglomerated to the nose, whilst the infant was _in Utera_, without destroying the statical balance of the fœtus, and throwing it plump upon its head nine months before the time.——
——The opponents granted the theory——they denied the consequences.
And if a suitable provision of veins, arteries, &c. said they, was not laid in, for the due nourishment of such a nose, in the very first stamina and rudiments of its formation, before it came into the world (bating the case of Wens) it could not regularly grow and be sustained afterwards.
This was all answered by a dissertation upon nutriment, and the effect which nutriment had in extending the vessels, and in the increase and prolongation of the muscular parts to the greatest growth and expansion imaginable—In the triumph of which theory, they went so far as to affirm, that there was no cause in nature, why a nose might not grow to the size of the man himself.
The respondents satisfied the world this event could never happen to them so long as a man had but one stomach and one pair of lungs——For the stomach, said they, being the only organ destined for the reception of food, and turning it into chyle—and the lungs the only engine of sanguification—it could possibly work off no more, than what the appetite brought it: or admitting the possibility of a man’s overloading his stomach, nature had set bounds however to his lungs—the engine was of a determined size and strength, and could elaborate but a certain quantity in a given time——that is, it could produce just as much blood as was sufficient for one single man, and no more; so that, if there was as much nose as man——they proved a mortification must necessarily ensue; and forasmuch as there could not be a support for both, that the nose must either fall off from the man, or the man inevitably fall off from his nose.
Nature accommodates herself to these emergencies, cried the opponents—else what do you say to the case of a whole stomach—a whole pair of lungs, and but half a man, when both his legs have been unfortunately shot off?
He dies of a plethora, said they—or must spit blood, and in a fortnight or three weeks go off in a consumption.——
——It happens otherwise—replied the opponents.——
It ought not, said they.
The more curious and intimate inquirers after nature and her doings, though they went hand in hand a good way together, yet they all divided about the nose at last, almost as much as the Faculty itself.
They amicably laid it down, that there was a just and geometrical arrangement and proportion of the several parts of the human frame to its several destinations, offices, and functions, which could not be transgressed but within certain limits—that nature, though she sported——she sported within a certain circle;—and they could not agree about the diameter of it.
The logicians stuck much closer to the point before them than any of the classes of the literati;——they began and ended with the word Nose; and had it not been for a _petitio principii_, which one of the ablest of them ran his head against in the beginning of the combat, the whole controversy had been settled at once.
A nose, argued the logician, cannot bleed without blood—and not only blood—but blood circulating in it to supply the phænomenon with a succession of drops—(a stream being but a quicker succession of drops, that is included, said he.)——Now death, continued the logician, being nothing but the stagnation of the blood——
I deny the definition——Death is the separation of the soul from the body, said his antagonist——Then we don’t agree about our weapons, said the logician—Then there is an end of the dispute, replied the antagonist.
The civilians were still more concise: what they offered being more in the nature of a decree——than a dispute.
Such a monstrous nose, said they, had it been a true nose, could not possibly have been suffered in civil society——and if false—to impose upon society with such false signs and tokens, was a still greater violation of its rights, and must have had still less mercy shewn it.
The only objection to this was, that if it proved any thing, it proved the stranger’s nose was neither true nor false.
This left room for the controversy to go on. It was maintained by the advocates of the ecclesiastic court, that there was nothing to inhibit a decree, since the stranger _ex mero motu_ had confessed he had been at the Promontory of Noses, and had got one of the goodliest, &c. &c.——To this it was answered, it was impossible there should be such a place as the Promontory of Noses, and the learned be ignorant where it lay. The commissary of the bishop of _Strasburg_ undertook the advocates, explained this matter in a treatise upon proverbial phrases, shewing them, that the Promontory of Noses was a mere allegorick expression, importing no more than that nature had given him a long nose: in proof of which, with great learning, he cited the underwritten authorities,[11] which had decided the point incontestably, had it not appeared that a dispute about some franchises of dean and chapter-lands had been determined by it nineteen years before.
It happened——I must say unluckily for Truth, because they were giving her a lift another way in so doing; that the two universities of _Strasburg_——the _Lutheran_, founded in the year 1538 by _Jacobus Surmis_, counsellor of the senate,——and the _Popish_, founded by _Leopold_, arch-duke of _Austria_, were, during all this time, employing the whole depth of their knowledge (except just what the affair of the abbess of _Quedlingberg_’s placket-holes required)——in determining the point of _Martin Luther_’s damnation.
The _Popish_ doctors had undertaken to demonstrate _à priori_, that from the necessary influence of the planets on the twenty-second day of _October_ 1483——when the moon was in the twelfth house, _Jupiter, Mars_, and _Venus_ in the third, the _Sun, Saturn_, and _Mercury_, all got together in the fourth—that he must in course, and unavoidably, be a damn’d man—and that his doctrines, by a direct corollary, must be damn’d doctrines too.
By inspection into his horoscope, where five planets were in coition all at once with Scorpio[12] (in reading this my father would always shake his head) in the ninth house, with the _Arabians_ allotted to religion—it appeared that _Martin Luther_ did not care one stiver about the matter——and that from the horoscope directed to the conjunction of _Mars_—they made it plain likewise he must die cursing and blaspheming——with the blast of which his soul (being steep’d in guilt) sailed before the wind, in the lake of hell-fire.