Memorabilia: Recollections, Historical, Biographical, and Antiquarian

Among the curiosities in the British Museum are shewn two helmets; the one Roman, found in the ground on which the battle of Cannæ was fought, 216 years before Christ, and the other made of feathers, brought from one of the South Sea Islands, by Captain Cook. On comparing these helmets, the shape will be found exactly similar, though the latter was made by an uncivilized people living at the distance of more than 2000 years since the battle of Cannæ was fought, and who had never even heard of the Roman name.

A second coincidence is found in the same collection. Two breast-plates are shewn to the visitors, exactly corresponding in uniformity of shape, though made of different materials, the one taken from the bosom of an Egyptian Mummy, which had been dissected, if I may be allowed to use the term, in the Museum, and the other brought by Captain Cook, among various other curiosities, from the South Sea Islands.

A third coincidence is the mode of cookery practised by the South Sea Islanders as described by Captain Cook, especially in roasting their hogs. This is by means of hot stones placed in a hole dug in the ground. In Ossian’s Poems the reader will find that the Caledonians of that time made use of the same method in cooking their hogs for the table.

The extinction of the Roman Empire in the West, about the year 476, by Odoacer, King of Italy, was attended by one of the most memorable coincidences in the history of mankind. The patrician Orestes had married the daughter of Count Romulus, of Petovio in Noricum; the name of Augustus, notwithstanding the jealousy of power, was known at Aquileia as a familial surname; and the appellations of the two great founders, the first of the city of Rome, and the second of the Roman monarchy, were strangely united in the last of their successors. The son of Orestes succeeded to the throne of the Western Empire, and assumed and disgraced the names of Romulus Augustus; the first was corrupted into Momyllus by the Greeks, and the second has been changed by the Latins into the contemptible diminutive Augustulus. The life of this inoffensive youth, the last Sovereign of the Roman Empire in the West, was spared by the generous clemency of Odoacer, who dismissed him, with his whole family, from the imperial palace, fixed his annual allowance at 6000 pieces of Gold, and assigned the castle of Lucullus, in Campania, for the place of his exile or retirement.