DECEMBER 17. (Sunday.)
On this day, from a sense of propriety no doubt, as well as
from having, nothing else to do, all the crew in the morning
betook themselves to their studies. The carpenter was very
seriously spelling a comedy; Edward was engaged with " The
Six Princesses 5 Babylon ;' a third was amusing himself with a
tract I On the Management of Bees;' another had borrowed the
cabin-boy's "Sorrows of Werter,' and was reading it aloud to a,
large circle-some whistling-and others yawning; and Werter's
abrupt transitions, and exclamations, and raptures, and refinements
, read in the same loud monotonous tone, and without the
slightest respect paid to stops, had the oddest effect possible.
I was surprised to find that (except Edward's Fairy Tale)
none
of them were reading works that were at all likely to amuse
them (Smollett or Fielding, for instance), or any which might
interest them as relating to their profession, such as voyages and
travels; much less any which had the slightest reference to the
particular day. However, as most of them were reading what
they could not possibly understand, they might mistake them for
books of devotion, for anything they knew to the contrary ; or,
perhaps, they might have so much reverence for all books ill
print, as to think that, provided they did but read something, it
was doing a good work, and it did not much matter what. So
one of Congreve's fine ladies swears Mrs. Mincing, the waiting-maid, to secrecy, " upon an odd volume of Messalina's Poems."
Sir Dudley North, too, informs us (or is it his brother Roger?
but I mean the Turkey merchant)-that at Constantinople the
respect for printed books is so great, that when people are sick,
they fancy that they can be
read into health again; and if the
Koran should not be in the way, they will make a shift with a
few verses of the Bible, or a chapter or two of the Talmud, or
of any other book that comes first to hand, rather than not read
something. I think Sir Dudley says, that he himself cured an
old Turk of the toothache by administering a few pages of
' Ovid's Metamorphoses;' and in an old receipt-book, we are
directed for the cure of a double tertian fever, "to drink plentifully of
cock-broth, and sleep with
the Second Book of the, Iliad
under the pillow." If, instead of sleeping with it under the pillow, the
doctor had desired us to read the Second Book of tile
Iliad in order that we might sleep, I should have had some faith
in his prescription myself.
