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CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
CONTENTS
ARACHNE AND MELISSA.
IN ALL SHADES.
THE MODERN PRIZE SYSTEM.
TREASURE TROVE.
WONDERS OF MEMORY.
A TRICK AT THE HELM.
CHINA GRASS-CLOTH.
THE POET’S TREASURES.
No. 129.—Vol. III.
Price 1½d.
SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1886.
ARACHNE AND MELISSA.
When Anne was queen and ‘Mrs Freeman’ washer mistress, two ladies known to fame as Arachneand Melissa came one day before the readingpublic. Those who are up in the literature ofthe time will remember their portraits, whichexpressed two well-defined and persistent typesof humanity—those who get good from everythinglike Melissa, and those who draw only evillike Arachne. Now, each of these ladies has leftbehind her a long train of descendants—a wide-spreadinggens, as the old Romans would have said—inthe people who prefer to drink vinegar outof a leaden cup or wine out of a golden; who areto their surroundings as frost or as dew; who seethe trodden backward path and the unsurmountedhills in front through spectacles tinted in blackor in rose-colour; and who sing their Psalmof Life in the minor key, discordantly, or inthe major, with full harmonies. These are thedescendants of the Arachne (spider-born) andMelissa (honey-maker) who, in Queen Anne’stime, sucked poison or gathered honey; and wemeet them at all four corners of our way.
The Arachnides are for the most part characterisedby a strange and chilling silence, when afew words would remove a painful impressionor enlighten a dangerous ignorance. When theydo speak, their words fall like vocal icicles whichfreeze and cut at the same time; and they contriveto make their good advice more painful thanother people’s rebukes, and to give their informationthe form of a sarcastic reproach in that youdid not know it all before. Their presence insociety reminds one of the winter whose ‘Breathwas a chain which without a sound, The earth andthe air and the water bound.’ Where they are,freedom flags and gaiety declines; and only themost robust of those moral pachyderms who opposetheir thick insensitiveness to all outside influenceswhatsoever, can withstand the lethal effect of theArachnides. Their small pale eyes wither; theirpinched lips paralyse; their very smiles are thefracture of a crystal more than the visible sign ofa living, friendly heart; and they are the veritable‘freezing mixtures’ of life. They take strong and