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Nicholeto Chordiman Directory 10
Page 09
Palms and species like the big tree of California were growing side by side with species akin to our own common trees. But in the animal world there were many strange forms. This was the age of reptiles. They domineered on the land, in the air, and in the sea. On the land there stalked huge reptiles fifty and sixty feet long, and, when standing erect, at least thirty feet high.<15> Some of these huge creatures were carnivorous, living on other animals. Others fed on the foliage of trees. In the air, huge reptilian bats, veritable flying dragons with a spread of wings from ten to twenty feet, disported themselves.<16> In the sea there swam great reptilian whales, seals, and walruses.<17> There was a marvelous abundance of reptilian life. At the present day, there are not more than six species of reptiles in the whole world having a length of over fifteen feet, and not more than eighteen species exceeding ten feet in length. But from one limited locality, representing but one era of this age in England, there have been discovered four or five species of carnivorous reptiles twenty to fifty feet long, ten or twelve species of crocodiles, lizards, and swimming reptiles from ten to sixty feet long--besides multitudes of great flying reptiles and turtles. Doubtless similar scenes of animal life were everywhere represented.
The king was no longer excommunicate, but the kingdom was still under the interdict, and the pope had no intention of annulling it until the question of compensation for their losses was settled to the satisfaction of the bishops and others whose lands had been in the hands of the king. That was not an easy question to settle. It was not a matter of arrears of revenue merely, for John had not been content with the annual income of the lands, but he had cut down forests and raised money in other extraordinary ways to the permanent injury of the property. In the end only a comparatively small sum was paid, and in all probability a full payment would have been entirely beyond the resources of the king, but at the beginning John seems to have intended to carry out his agreement in good faith. There is no reason to doubt the statement of a chronicler of the time that on the next day after his absolution the king sent out writs to all the sheriffs, ordering them to send to St. Albans at the beginning of August the reeve and four legal men from each township of the royal domains, that by their testimony and that of his own officers the amount of these losses might be determined. This would be to all England a familiar expedient, a simple use of the jury principle, with nothing new about it except the bringing of the local juries together in one place, nor must it be regarded as in any sense a beginning of representation. It has no historic connexion with the growth of that system, and cannot possibly indicate more than that the idea of uniting local juries in one place had occurred to some one. We have no evidence that this assembly was actually held, and it is highly probable that it was not. Nor can anything more be said with certainly of writs which were issued in November of this year directing the sheriffs to send four discreet men from each county to attend a meeting of the council at Oxford. John himself was busily occupied with a plan to transport the forces he had collected into Poitou to attack the king of France there, and he appointed the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz Peter, and the Bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches, as his representatives during his absence. These two held a great council at St. Albans in August at which formal proclamation was made of the restoration of good laws and the abolition of bad ones as the king had promised, the good laws now referred to being those of Henry I; and all sheriffs and other officers were strictly enjoined to abstain from violence and injustice for the future, but no decision was reached as to the sum to be paid the clergy.
Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or even only of the present, but the singer of the future. He says in The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work--at least in so far as he understood it himself,--"Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune--the direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past--are in my opinion distasteful to the republican genius. . . . Established poems, I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men." And he says too that, "The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all." And he further says: "The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets endow'd their godlike or lordly born characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest and the best--more eligible now than any times of old were."
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