CHAPTER VI

LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE

One name so far dominates the prose literature of the last years of

Elizabeth, and that of the whole reign of James, that it has probably alone

secured attention in the general memory, except such as may be given to the

purple patches (of the true Tyrian dye, but not extremely numerous) which

decorate here and there the somewhat featureless expanse of Sir Walter

Raleigh's _History of the World_. That name, it is scarcely necessary to

say, is the name of Francis Bacon. Bacon's eventful life, his much debated

character, his philosophical and scientific position, are all matters

beyond our subject. But as it is of the first importance in studying that

subject to keep dates and circumstances generally, if not minutely, in

view, it may be well to give a brief summary of his career. He was born in

1561, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper; he went very young to

Cambridge, and though early put to the study of the law, discovered an

equally early bent in another direction. He was unfortunate in not

obtaining the patronage then necessary to all men not of independent

fortune. Though Elizabeth was personally familiar with him, she gave him

nothing of importance--whether owing to the jealousy of his uncle and

cousin, Burleigh and Robert Cecil, is a point not quite certain. The

patronage of Essex did him very little good, and drew him into the worst

action of his life. But after Elizabeth's death, and when a man of middle

age, he at last began to mount the ladder, and came with some rapidity to

the summit of his profession, being made Lord Chancellor, and created Baron

Verulam and Viscount St. Alban. The title Lord Bacon he never bore in

strictness, but it has been consecrated by the use of many generations, and

it is perhaps pedantry to object to it. Entangled as a courtier in the

rising hatred of the Court felt by the popular party, exposed by his own

carelessness, if not by actual venality in office, to the attacks of his

enemies, and weakly supported, if supported at all, by the favourite

Buckingham (who seems to have thought that Bacon took too much upon himself

in state affairs), he lost, in 1621, all his places and emoluments, and was

heavily fined. The retirement of his last few years produced much literary

fruit, and he died (his death being caused or hastened by an injudicious

experiment) in 1626.

Great as is the place that Bacon occupies in English literature, he

occupies it, as it were, _malgre lui_. Unlike almost all the greatest men

of his own and even of the preceding generation, he seems to have thought

little of the capacities, and less of the chances of the English language.

He held (and, unluckily for him, expressed his opinion in writing) that

"these modern languages will at one time or the other play the bankrupt

with books," and even when he wrote in the despised vernacular he took care

to translate his work, or have it translated, into Latin in order to

forestall the oblivion he dreaded. Nor is this his only phrase of contempt

towards his mother-tongue--the tongue which in his own lifetime served as a

vehicle to a literature compared with which the whole literary achievement

of Latin antiquity is but a neat school exercise, and which in every point

but accomplished precision of form may challenge comparison with Greek

itself. This insensibility of Bacon's is characteristic enough, and might,

if this were the place for any such subtlety, be connected with the other

defects of his strangely blended character--his pusillanimity, his lack of

passion (let any one read the Essay on Love, and remember that some

persons, not always inmates of lunatic asylums, have held that Bacon wrote

the plays of Shakespere), his love of empty pomp and display, and so

forth.

But the English language which he thus despised had a noble and worthy

revenge on Bacon. Of his Latin works hardly anything but the _Novum

Organum_ is now read even for scholastic purposes, and it is not certain

that, but for the saving influences of academical study and prescription,

even that might not slip out of the knowledge of all but specialists. But

with the wider and wider spread and study of English the _Essays_ and _The

Advancement of Learning_ are read ever more and more, and the only reason

that _The History of Henry VII._, _The New Atlantis_, and the _Sylva

Sylvarum_ do not receive equal attention, lies in the comparative

obsoleteness of their matter, combined with the fact that the matter is the

chief thing on which attention is bestowed in them. Even in the two works

noted, the _Essays_ and _The Advancement_, which can go both together in a

small volume, Bacon shows himself at his very greatest in all respects, and

(ignorant or careless as he was of the fact) as one of the greatest writers

of English prose before the accession of Charles I.

The characteristics of style in these two works are by no means the same;

but between them they represent fairly enough the characteristics of all

Bacon's English prose. It might indeed be desirable in studying it to add

to them the _Henry the Seventh_, which is a model of clear historical

narration, not exactly picturesque, but never dull; and though not exactly

erudite, yet by no means wanting in erudition, and exhibiting conclusions

which, after two centuries and a half of record-grubbing, have not been

seriously impugned or greatly altered by any modern historian. In this

book, which was written late, Bacon had, of course, the advantage of his

long previous training in the actual politics of a school not very greatly

altered since the time he was describing, but this does not diminish the

credit due to him for formal excellence.

The _Essays_--which Bacon issued for the first time, to the number of ten,

in 1597, when he was, comparatively speaking, a young man, which he

reissued largely augmented in 1612, and yet again just before his death, in

their final and fullest condition--are not so much in the modern sense

essays as collections of thoughts more or less connected. We have, indeed,

the genesis of them in the very interesting commonplace book called the

_Promus_ [butler or storekeeper] _of Elegancies_, the publication of which,

as a whole, was for some reason or other not undertaken by Mr. Spedding,

and is due to Mrs. Henry Pott. Here we have the quaint, but never merely

quaint, analogies, the apt quotations, the singular flashes of reflection

and illustration, which characterise Bacon, in their most unformed and

new-born condition. In the _Essays_ they are worked together, but still

sententiously, and evidently with no attempt at sustained and fluent

connection of style. That Montaigne must have had some influence on Bacon

is, of course, certain; though few things can be more unlike than the curt

severity of the scheme of the English essays and the interminable

diffuseness of the French. Yet here and there are passages in Montaigne

which might almost be the work of a French Bacon, and in Bacon passages

which might easily be the work of an English Montaigne. In both there is

the same odd mixture of dignity and familiarity--the familiarity

predominating in Montaigne, the dignity in Bacon--and in both there is the

union of a rich fancy and a profound interest in ethical questions, with a

curious absence of passion and enthusiasm--a touch, as it may almost be

called, of Philistinism, which in Bacon's case contrasts most strangely

with his frequently gorgeous language, and the evident richness of his

imagination, or at least his fancy.

The scheme and manner of these essays naturally induced a sententious and

almost undeveloped manner of writing. An extraordinary number of separate

phrases and sentences, which have become the common property of all who use

the language, and are probably most often used without any clear idea of

their author, may be disinterred from them, as well as many striking images

and pregnant thoughts, which have had less general currency. But the

compression of them (which is often so great that they might be printed

sentence by sentence like verses of the Bible) prevents the author from

displaying his command of a consecutive, elaborated, and harmonised style.

What command he had of that style may be found, without looking far, in the

_Henry the Seventh_, in the _Atlantis_, and in various minor works, some

originally written in Latin and translated, such as the magnificent passage

which Dean Church has selected as describing the purpose and crown of the

Baconian system. In such passages the purely oratorical faculty which he

undoubtedly had (though like all the earlier oratory of England, with rare

exceptions, its examples remain a mere tradition, and hardly even that)

displays itself; and one cannot help regretting that, instead of going into

the law, where he never attained to much technical excellence, and where

his mere promotion was at first slow, and was no sooner quickened than it

brought him into difficulties and dangers, he had not sought the safer and

calmer haven of the Church, where he would have been more at leisure to

"take all knowledge to be his province;" would have been less tempted to

engage in the treacherous, and to him always but half-congenial, business

of politics, and would have forestalled, and perhaps excelled, Jeremy

Taylor as a sacred orator. If Bacon be Jeremy's inferior in exuberant

gorgeousness, he is very much his superior in order and proportion, and

quite his equal in sudden flashes of a quaint but illuminative rhetoric.

For after all that has been said of Bacon and his philosophy, he was a

rhetorician rather than a philosopher. Half the puzzlement which has arisen

in the efforts to get something exact out of the stately periods and

splendid promises of the _Novum Organum_ and its companions has arisen from

oversight of this eminently rhetorical character; and this character is the

chief property of his style. It may seem presumptuous to extend the charges

of want of depth which were formulated by good authorities in law and

physics against Bacon in his own day, yet he is everywhere "not deep." He

is stimulating beyond the recorded power of any other man except Socrates;

he is inexhaustible in analogy and illustration, full of wise saws, and of

instances as well ancient as modern. But he is by no means an accurate

expositor, still less a powerful reasoner, and his style is exactly suited

to his mental gifts; now luminously fluent, now pregnantly brief; here just

obscure enough to kindle the reader's desire of penetrating the obscurity,

there flashing with ornament which perhaps serves to conceal a flaw in the

reasoning, but which certainly serves to allure and retain the attention of

the student. All these characteristics are the characteristics rather of

the great orator than of the great philosopher. His constant practice in

every kind of literary composition, and in the meditative thought which

constant literary composition perhaps sometimes tempts its practitioners to

dispense with, enabled him to write on a vast variety of subjects, and in

many different styles. But of these it will always be found that two were

most familiar to him, the short sententious apothegm, parallel, or image,

which suggests and stimulates even when it does not instruct, and the

half-hortatory half-descriptive _discours d'ouverture_, where the writer is

the unwearied panegyrist of promised lands not perhaps to be identified

with great ease on any chart.[38]

[38] Of Bacon in prose, as of Spenser, Shakespere, and Milton in verse, it

does not seem necessary to give extracts, and for the same reason.

A parallel in the Plutarchian manner between Bacon and Raleigh would in

many ways be pleasant, but only one point of it concerns us here,--that

both had been happier and perhaps had done greater things had they been

simple men of letters. Unlike Bacon, who, though he wrote fair verse, shows

no poetical bent, Raleigh was _homo utriusque linguae_, and his works in

verse, unequal as they are, occasionally touch the loftiest summits of

poetry. It is very much the same in his prose. His minor books, mostly

written hurriedly, and for a purpose, have hardly any share of the graces

of style; and his masterpiece, the famous _History of the World_, is made

up of short passages of the most extraordinary beauty, and long stretches

of monotonous narration and digression, showing not much grace of style,

and absolutely no sense of proportion or skill in arrangement. The

contrast is so strange that some have sought to see in the undoubted facts

that Raleigh, in his tedious prison labours, had assistants and helpers

(Ben Jonson among others), a reason for the superior excellence of such set

pieces as the Preface, the Epilogue, and others, which are scattered about

the course of the work. But independently of the other fact that excellence

of the most diverse kind meets us at every turn, though it also deserts us

at every turn, in Raleigh's varied literary work, and that it would be

absurd to attribute all these passages to some "affable familiar ghost,"

there is the additional difficulty that in none of his reported helpers'

own work do the peculiar graces of the purple passages of the _History_

occur. The immortal descant on mortality with which the book closes, and

which is one of the highest achievements of English prose, is not in the

least like Jonson, not in the least like Selden, not in the least like any

one of whose connection with Raleigh there is record. Donne might have

written it; but there is not the smallest reason for supposing that he did,

and many for being certain that he did not. Therefore, it is only fair to

give Raleigh himself the credit for this and all other passages of the

kind. Their character and, at the same time, their comparative rarity are

both easily explicable. They are all obviously struck off in moments of

excitement--moments when the writer's variable and fanciful temperament was

heated to flashing-point and gave off almost spontaneously these lightnings

of prose as it gave, on other occasions, such lightnings of poetry as _The

Faerie Queene_ sonnet, as "the Lie," and as the other strange jewels (cats'

eyes and opals, rather than pearls or diamonds), which are strung along

with very many common pebbles on Raleigh's poetical necklace. In style they

anticipate Browne (who probably learnt not a little from them) more than

any other writer; and they cannot fairly be said to have been anticipated

by any Englishman. The low and stately music of their cadences is a thing,

except in Browne, almost unique, and it is not easy to trace it to any

peculiar mannerism of vocabulary or of the arrangement of words. But

Raleigh's usual style differs very little from that of other men of his

day, who kept clear at once of euphuism and burlesque. Being chiefly

narrative, it is rather plainer than Hooker, who has some few points of

resemblance with Raleigh, but considerably freer from the vices of

desultoriness and awkward syntax, than most writers of the day except

Hooker. But its most interesting characteristic to the student of

literature must always be the way in which it leads up to, without in the

least foretelling, the bursts of eloquence already referred to. Even

Milton's alternations of splendid imagery with dull and scurrilous

invective, are hardly so strange as Raleigh's changes from jog-trot

commonplace to almost inspired declamation, if only for the reason that

they are much more intelligible. It must also be mentioned that Raleigh,

like Milton, seems to have had little or no humour.

The opening and closing passages of the _History_ are almost universally

known; a quainter, less splendid, but equally characteristic one may be

given here though Mr. Arber has already extracted it:--

"The four complexions resemble the four elements; and the seven

ages of man, the seven planets. Whereof our infancy is compared

to the moon; in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants.

"The second age, to Mercury; wherein we are taught and

instructed.

"Our third age, to Venus; the days of Love, Desire and Vanity.

"The fourth, to the Sun; the strong, flourishing and beautiful

age of man's life.

"The fifth, to Mars; in which we seek honour and victory; and in

which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends.

"The sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter; in which we begin to take

account of our times, judge of ourselves, and grow to the

perfection of our understanding.

"The last and seventh, to Saturn; wherein our days are sad and

overcast; and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience,

and by the loss which can never be repaired, that, of all our

vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth. Our

attendants are sicknesses and variable infirmities: and by how

much the more we are accompanied with plenty, by so much the more

greedily is our end desired. Whom, when Time hath made unsociable

to others, we become a burden to ourselves: being of no other use

than to hold the riches we have from our successors. In this time

it is, when we, for the most part (and never before) prepare for

our Eternal Habitation, which we pass on unto with many sighs,

groans and sad thoughts: and in the end (by the workmanship of

Death) finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life. Towards

which we always travel, both sleeping and waking. Neither have

those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to

hold us any one day by the glorious promise of entertainments:

but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on

directly to the House of Death, whose doors lie open at all

hours, and to all persons."

But great as are Bacon and Raleigh, they cannot approach, as writers of

prose, the company of scholarly divines who produced--what is probably the

greatest prose work in any language--the Authorised Version of the Bible in

English. Now that there is at any rate some fear of this masterpiece

ceasing to be what it has been for three centuries--the school and training

ground of every man and woman of English speech in the noblest uses of

English tongue--every one who values that mother tongue is more especially

bound to put on record his own allegiance to it. The work of the Company

appears to have been loyally performed in common; and it is curious that

such an unmatched result should have been the result of labours thus

combined, and not, as far as is known, controlled by any one guiding

spirit. Among the translators were many excellent writers,--an advantage

which they possessed in a much higher degree than their revisers in the

nineteenth century, of whom few would be mentioned among the best living

writers of English by any competent authority. But, at the same time, no

known translator under James has left anything which at all equals in

strictly literary merit the Authorised Version, as it still is and as long

may it be. The fact is, however, less mysterious after a little examination

than it may seem at first sight. Putting aside all questions as to the

intrinsic value of the subject-matter as out of our province, it will be

generally admitted that the translators had in the greater part of the Old

Testament, in a large part of the Apocrypha, and in no small part of the

New Testament, matter as distinguished from form, of very high literary

value to begin with in their originals. In the second place, they had, in

the Septuagint and in the Vulgate, versions also of no small literary

merit to help them. In the third place, they had in the earlier English

versions excellent quarries of suitable English terms, if not very

accomplished models of style. These, however, were not in any way

advantages peculiar to themselves. The advantages which, in a manner at

least, were peculiar to themselves may be divided into two classes. They

were in the very centre of the great literary ferment of which in this

volume I am striving to give a history as little inadequate as possible.

They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms and

uncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racy

of the soil, and free from that burden of hackneyed and outworn literary

platitudes and commonplaces with which centuries of voluminous literary

production have vitiated and loaded the English of our own day. They were

not afraid of Latinising, but they had an ample stock of the pure

vernacular to draw on. These things may be classed together. On the other

side, but equally healthful, may be put the fact that the style and

structure of the originals and earlier versions, and especially that verse

division which has been now so unwisely abandoned, served as safeguards

against the besetting sin of all prose writers of their time, the habit of

indulging in long wandering sentences, in paragraphs destitute of

proportion and of grace, destitute even of ordinary manageableness and

shape. The verses saved them from that once for all; while on the other

hand their own taste, and the help given by the structure of the original

in some cases, prevented them from losing sight of the wood for the trees,

and omitting to consider the relation of verse to verse, as well as the

antiphony of the clauses within the verse. Men without literary faculty

might no doubt have gone wrong; but these were men of great literary

faculty, whose chief liabilities to error were guarded against precisely by

the very conditions in which they found their work. The hour had come

exactly, and so for once had the men.

The result of their labours is so universally known that it is not

necessary to say very much about it; but the mere fact of the universal

knowledge carries with it a possibility of under-valuation. In another

place, dealing with the general subject of English prose style, I have

selected the sixth and seventh verses of the eighth chapter of Solomon's

Song as the best example known to me of absolutely perfect English

prose--harmonious, modulated, yet in no sense trespassing the limits of

prose and becoming poetry. I have in the same place selected, as a

companion passage from a very different original, the Charity passage of

the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which has been so miserably and

wantonly mangled and spoilt by the bad taste and ignorance of the late

revisers. I am tempted to dwell on this because it is very germane to our

subject. One of the blunders which spoils this passage in the Revised

Version is the pedantic substitution of "mirror" for "glass," it having

apparently occurred to some wiseacre that glass was not known to the

ancients, or at least used for mirrors. Had this wiseacre had the slightest

knowledge of English literature, a single title of Gascoigne's, "The Steel

Glass," would have dispensed him at once from any attempt at emendation;

but this is ever and always the way of the sciolist. Fortunately such a

national possession as the original Authorised Version, when once

multiplied and dispersed by the press, is out of reach of vandalism. The

improved version, constructed on very much the same principle as Davenant's

or Ravenscroft's improvements on Shakespere, may be ordered to be read in

churches, and substituted for purposes of taking oaths. But the original

(as it may be called in no burlesque sense such as that of a famous story)

will always be the text resorted to by scholars and men of letters for

purposes of reading, and will remain the authentic lexicon, the recognised

source of English words and constructions of the best period. The days of

creation; the narratives of Joseph and his brethren, of Ruth, of the final

defeat of Ahab, of the discomfiture of the Assyrian host of Sennacherib;

the moral discourses of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Book of

Wisdom; the poems of the Psalms and the prophets; the visions of the

Revelation,--a hundred other passages which it is unnecessary to

catalogue,--will always be the _ne plus ultra_ of English composition in

their several kinds, and the storehouse from which generation after

generation of writers, sometimes actually hostile to religion and often

indifferent to it, will draw the materials, and not unfrequently the actual

form of their most impassioned and elaborate passages. Revision after

revision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarrassed

phantoms of ephemeral fashion in scholarship, may sink into the Great

Mother of Dead Dogs after setting right a tense here, and there

transferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. But

the work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of these

futile exercitations. All the elements, all the circumstances of a

translation as perfect as can be accomplished in any circumstances and with

any elements, were then present, and the workers were worthy of the work.

The plays of Shakespere and the English Bible are, and will ever be, the

twin monuments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection of

English, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of the

language, at the time when it had lost none of its pristine vigour, and had

put on enough but not too much of the adornments and the limitations of

what may be called literary civilisation.

The boundary between the prose of this period and that which we shall treat

later as "Caroline" is not very clearly fixed. Some men, such as Hall and

Donne, whose poetical work runs parallel to that in prose which we are now

noticing, come as prose writers rather under the later date; others who

continued to write till long after Elizabeth's death, and even after that

of James, seem, by their general complexion, to belong chiefly to the

earlier day. The first of these is Ben Jonson, whose high reputation in

other ways has somewhat unduly damaged, or at least obscured, his merits as

a prose writer. His two chief works in this kind are his _English Grammar_,

in which a sound knowledge of the rules of English writing is discovered,

and the quaintly named _Explorata_ or _Discoveries_ and _Timber_--a

collection of notes varying from a mere aphorism to a respectable essay.

In these latter a singular power of writing prose appears. The book was not

published till after Ben's death, and is thought to have been in part at

least written during the last years of his life. But there can be no

greater contrast than exists between the prose style usual at that time--a

_style tourmente_, choked with quotation, twisted in every direction by

allusion and conceit, and marred by perpetual confusions of English with

classical grammar--and the straightforward, vigorous English of these

_Discoveries_. They come, in character as in time, midway between Hooker

and Dryden, and they incline rather to the more than to the less modern

form. Here is found the prose character of Shakespere which, if less

magniloquent than that in verse, has a greater touch of sheer sincerity.

Here, too, is an admirable short tractate on Style which exemplifies what

it preaches; and a large number of other excellent things. Some, it is

true, are set down in a shorthand fashion as if (which doubtless they were)

they were commonplace-book notes for working up in due season. But others

and perhaps the majority (they all Baconian-wise have Latin titles, though

only one or two have the text in Latin) are written with complete attention

to literary presentment; seldom though sometimes relapsing into loose

construction of sentences and paragraphs, the besetting sin of the day, and

often presenting, as in the following, a model of sententious but not dry

form:--

"We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of

difficulty. It is a false quarrel against nature that she helps

understanding but in a few, when the most part of mankind are

inclined by her thither, if they would take the pains; no less

than birds to fly, horses to run, etc., which if they lose it is

through their own sluggishness, and by that means become her

prodigies, not her children. I confess nature in children is more

patient of labour in study than in age; for the sense of the

pain, the judgment of the labour is absent, they do not measure

what they have done. And it is the thought and consideration that

affects us more than the weariness itself. Plato was not content

with the learning that Athens could give him, but sailed into

Italy, for Pythagoras' knowledge: and yet not thinking himself

sufficiently informed, went into Egypt, to the priests, and

learned their mysteries. He laboured, so must we. Many things may

be learned together and performed in one point of time; as

musicians exercise their memory, their voice, their fingers, and

sometimes their head and feet at once. And so a preacher, in the

invention of matter, election of words, composition of gesture,

look, pronunciation, motion, useth all these faculties at once:

and if we can express this variety together, why should not

divers studies, at divers hours, delight, when the variety is

able alone to refresh and repair us? As when a man is weary of

writing, to read; and then again of reading, to write. Wherein,

howsoever we do many things, yet are we (in a sort) still fresh

to what we begin; we are recreated with change as the stomach is

with meats. But some will say, this variety breeds confusion, and

makes that either we lose all or hold no more than the last. Why

do we not then persuade husbandmen that they should not till

land, help it with marle, lime, and compost? plant hop gardens,

prune trees, look to beehives, rear sheep, and all other cattle

at once? It is easier to do many things and continue, than to do

one thing long."

No other single writer until we come to the pamphleteers deserves separate

or substantive mention; but in many divisions of literature there were

practitioners who, if they have not kept much notoriety as masters of

style, were well thought of even in that respect in their day, and were

long authorities in point of matter. The regular theological treatises of

the time present nothing equal to Hooker, who in part overlapped it, though

the Jesuit Parsons has some name for vigorous writing. In history, Knolles,

the historian of the Turks, and Sandys, the Eastern traveller and sacred

poet, bear the bell for style among their fellows, such as Hayward, Camden,

Spelman, Speed, and Stow. Daniel the poet, a very good prose writer in his

way, was also a historian of England, but his chief prose work was his

_Defence of Rhyme_. He had companions in the critical task; but it is

curious and by no means uninstructive to notice, that the immense creative

production of the time seems to have to a great extent smothered the

theoretic and critical tendency which, as yet not resulting in actual

performance, betrayed itself at the beginning of the period in Webbe and

Puttenham, in Harvey and Sidney. The example of Eden in collecting and

Englishing travels and voyages was followed by several writers, of whom

two, successively working and residing, the elder at Oxford, and the

younger at Cambridge, made the two greatest collections of the kind in the

language for interest of matter, if not for perfection of style. These

were Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, a venerable pair. The perhaps

overpraised, but still excellent Characters of the unfortunate Sir Thomas

Overbury and the prose works, such as the _Counterblast_ and _Demonology_,

of James I., are books whose authors have made them more famous than their

intrinsic merits warrant, and in the various collections of "works" of the

day, older and newer, we shall find examples nearly as miscellaneous as

those of the class of writers now to be noticed. Of all this miscellaneous

work it is impossible to give examples, but one critical passage from

Daniel, and one descriptive from Hakluyt may serve:--

"Methinks we should not so soon yield up our consents captive to

the authority of antiquity, unless we saw more reason; all our

understandings are not to be built by the square of Greece and

Italy. We are the children of nature as well as they, we are not

so placed out of the way of judgment but that the same sun of

discretion shineth upon us; we have our portion of the same

virtues, as well as of the same vices, et Catilinam quocunque in

populo videas, quocunque sub axe. Time and the turn of things

bring about these faculties according to the present estimation;

and, res temporibus, non tempore rebus servire opportet. So that

we must never rebel against use; quem penes arbitrium est, et vis

et norma loquendi. It is not the observing of trochaics nor their

iambics, that will make our writings aught the wiser: all their

poesy and all their philosophy is nothing, unless we bring the

discerning light of conceit with us to apply it to use. It is not

books, but only that great book of the world, and the

all-overspreading grace of Heaven that makes men truly judicial.

Nor can it but touch of arrogant ignorance to hold this or that

nation barbarous, these or those times gross, considering how

this manifold creature man, wheresoever he stand in the world,

hath always some disposition of worth, entertains the order of

society, affects that which is most in use, and is eminent in

some one thing or other that fits his humour or the times. The

Grecians held all other nations barbarous but themselves; yet

Pyrrhus, when he saw the well ordered marching of the Romans,

which made them see their presumptuous error, could say it was no

barbarous manner of proceeding. The Goths, Vandals, and

Longobards, whose coming down like an inundation overwhelmed, as

they say, all the glory of learning in Europe, have yet left us

still their laws and customs, as the originals of most of the

provincial constitutions of Christendom; which, well considered

with their other courses of government, may serve to clear them

from this imputation of ignorance. And though the vanquished

never speak well of the conqueror, yet even through the unsound

coverings of malediction appear these monuments of truth, as

argue well their worth, and proves them not without judgment,

though without Greek and Latin."

* * * * *

"To speak somewhat of these islands, being called, in old time,

_Insulae fortunae_, by the means of the flourishing thereof. The

fruitfulness of them doth surely exceed far all other that I have

heard of. For they make wine better then any in Spain: and they

have grapes of such bigness that they may be compared to damsons,

and in taste inferior to none. For sugar, suckets, raisons of the

sun, and many other fruits, abundance: for rosin, and raw silk,

there is great store. They want neither corn, pullets, cattle,

nor yet wild fowl.

"They have many camels also: which, being young, are eaten of the

people for victuals; and being old, they are used for carriage of

necessities. Whose property is, as he is taught, to kneel at the

taking of his load, and the unlading again; of understanding very

good, but of shape very deformed; with a little belly; long

misshapen legs; and feet very broad of flesh, without a hoof, all

whole saving the great toe; a back bearing up like a molehill, a

large and thin neck, with a little head, with a bunch of hard

flesh which Nature hath given him in his breast to lean upon.

This beast liveth hardly, and is contented with straw and

stubble; but of strong force, being well able to carry five

hundredweight.

"In one of these islands called Ferro, there is, by the reports

of the inhabitants, a certain tree which raineth continually; by

the dropping whereof the inhabitants and cattle are satisfied

with water: for other water have they none in all the island. And

it raineth in such abundance that it were incredible unto a man

to believe such a virtue to be in a tree; but it is known to be a

Divine matter, and a thing ordained by God: at Whose power

therein, we ought not to marvel, seeing He did, by His Providence

(as we read in the Scriptures) when the Children of Israel were

going into the Land of Promise, feed them with manna from heaven,

for the space of forty years. Of these trees aforesaid, we saw in

Guinea many; being of great height, dropping continually; but not

so abundantly as the other, because the leaves are narrower and

are like the leaves of a pear tree. About these islands are

certain flitting islands, which have been oftentimes seen; and

when men approach near them, they vanished: as the like hath been

of these now known (by the report of the inhabitants) which were

not found but of a long time, one after the other; and,

therefore, it should seem he is not yet born, to whom God hath

appointed the finding of them.

"In this island of Teneriff, there is a hill called the Pike,

because it is piked; which is, in height, by their report, twenty

leagues: having, both winter and summer, abundance of snow on the

top of it. This Pike may be seen, in a clear day, fifty leagues

off; but it sheweth as though it were a black cloud a great

height in the element. I have heard of none to be compared with

this in height; but in the Indies I have seen many, and, in my

judgment, not inferior to the Pike: and so the Spaniards write."

One of the most remarkable developments of English prose at the time, and

one which has until very recently been almost inaccessible, except in a few

examples, to the student who has not the command of large libraries, while

even by such students it has seldom been thoroughly examined, is the

abundant and very miscellaneous collection of what are called, for want of

a better name, Pamphlets. The term is not too happy, but there is no other

(except the still less happy Miscellany) which describes the thing. It

consists of a vast mass of purely popular literature, seldom written with

any other aim than that of the modern journalist. That is to say, it was

written to meet a current demand, to deal with subjects for one reason or

other interesting at the moment, and, as a matter of course, to bring in

some profit to the writer. These pamphlets are thus as destitute of any

logical community of subject as the articles which compose a modern

newspaper--a production the absence of which they no doubt supplied, and of

which they were in a way the forerunners. Attempts to classify their

subjects could only end in a hopeless cross division. They are religious

very often; political very seldom (for the fate of the luckless Stubbes in

his dealings with the French marriage was not suited to attract);

politico-religious in at least the instance of one famous group, the

so-called Martin Marprelate Controversy; moral constantly; in very many,

especially the earlier instances, narrative, and following to a large

extent in the steps of Lyly and Sidney; besides a large class of curious

tracts dealing with the manners, and usually the bad side of the manners,

of the town. Of the vast miscellaneous mass of these works by single

unimportant or unknown authors it is almost impossible to give any account

here, though valuable instances will be found of them in Mr. Arber's

_English Garner_. But the works of the six most important individual

writers of them--Greene, Nash, Harvey, Dekker, Lodge, Breton (to whom

might be added the verse-pamphleteer, but in no sense poet, Rowlands)--are

luckily now accessible as wholes, Lodge and Rowlands having been published,

or at least privately printed for subscribers, by the Hunterian Club of

Glasgow, and the other five by the prolific industry of Dr. Grosart. The

reprints of Petheram and of Mr. Arber, with new editions of Lyly and

others, have made most of the Marprelate tracts accessible. Some notice of

these collections will not only give a fair idea of the entire

miscellaneous prose of the Elizabethan period, but will also fill a

distinct gap in most histories of it. It will not be necessary to enter

into much personal detail about their authors, for most of them have been

noticed already in other capacities, and of Breton and Rowlands very little

indeed is known. Greene and Lodge stand apart from their fellows in this

respect, that their work is, in some respects at any rate, much more like

literature and less like journalism, though by an odd and apparently

perverse chance, this difference has rather hurt than saved it in the

estimation of posterity. For the kind of literature which both wrote in

this way has gone out of fashion, and its purely literary graces are barely

sufficient to save it from the point of view of form; while the bitter

personalities of Nash, and the quaint adaptations of bygone satire to

contemporary London life in which Dekker excelled, have a certain lasting

interest of matter. On the other hand, the two companions of Marlowe have

the advantage (which they little anticipated, and would perhaps less have

relished) of surviving as illustrations of Shakespere, of the Shakescene

who, decking himself out in their feathers, has by that act rescued

_Pandosto_ and _Euphues' Golden Legacy_ from oblivion by associating them

with the immortality of _As You Like It_ and _The Winter's Tale_.

Owing to the different forms in which this fleeting and unequal work has

been reprinted, it is not very easy to decide off-hand on the relative bulk

of the authors' works. But the palm in this respect must be divided between

Robert Greene and Nicholas Breton, the former of whom fills eleven volumes

of loosely-printed crown octavo, and the latter (in prose only) a thick

quarto of very small and closely-printed double columns. Greene, who began

his work early under the immediate inspiration first of his travels and

then of Lyly's _Euphues_, started, as early as 1583, with _Mamillia, a

Looking-Glass for the Ladies of England_, which, both in general character

and in peculiarities of style, is an obvious copy of _Euphues_. _The Mirror

of Modesty_ is more of a lay sermon, based on the story of Susanna. _The

Tritameron of Love_ is a dialogue without action, but _Arbasto, or the

Anatomie of Fortune_ returns to the novel form, as does _The Card of

Fancy_. _Planetomachia_ is a collection of stories, illustrating the

popular astrological notions, with an introduction on astrology generally.

_Penelope's Web_ is another collection of stories, but _The Spanish

Masquerado_ is one of the most interesting of the series. Written just at

the time of the Armada, it is pure journalism--a _livre de circonstance_

composed to catch the popular temper with aid of a certain actual

knowledge, and a fair amount of reading. Then Greene returned to euphuism

in _Menaphon_, and in _Euphues, his Censure to Philautus_; nor are

_Perimedes the Blacksmith_ and _Tully's Love_ much out of the same line.

_The Royal Exchange_ again deviates, being a very quaint collection,

quaintly arranged, of moral maxims, apophthegms, short stories, etc., for

the use of the citizens. Next, the author began the curious series, at

first perhaps not very sincere, but certainly becoming so at last, of

half-personal reminiscences and regrets, less pointed and well arranged

than Villon's, but remarkably similar. The first and longest of these was

_Greene's Never too Late_, with its second part _Francesco's Fortunes_.

_Greene's Metamorphosis_ is Euphuist once more, and _Greene's Mourning

Garment_ and _Greene's Farewell to Folly_ are the same, with a touch of

personality. Then he diverged into the still more curious series on

"conny-catching"--rooking, gulling, cheating, as we should call it. There

are five or six of these tracts, and though there is not a little

bookmaking in them, they are unquestionably full of instruction as to the

ways of the time. _Philomela_ returns once more to euphuism, but Greene is

soon back again with _A Quip for an Upstart Courtier_, a piece of social

satire, flying rather higher than his previous attempts. The zigzag is kept

up in _Orpharion_, the last printed (at least in the only edition now

known) of the author's works during his lifetime. Not till after his death

did the best known and most personal of all his works appear, the famous

_Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance_, in which the

"Shakescene" passage and the exhortation to his friends to repentance

occur. Two more tracts in something the same style--_Greene's Repentance_

and _Greene's Vision_--followed. Their genuineness has been questioned, but

seems to be fairly certain.

This full list--to which must be added the already mentioned _Pandosto, the

Triumph of Time_, or _Dorastus and Fawnia_, and the translated _Debate

between Folly and Love_--of a certainly not scanty life-work (Greene died

when he was quite a young man, and wrote plays besides) has been given,

because it is not only the earliest, but perhaps the most characteristic of

the whole. Despite the apparently unsuitable forms, it is evident that the

writer is striving, without knowing it, at what we call journalism. But

fashion and the absence of models cramp and distort his work. Its main

features are to be found in the personal and satirical pieces, in the vivid

and direct humanity of some touches in the euphuist tract-romances, in the

delightful snatches of verse which intersperse and relieve the

heterogeneous erudition, the clumsy dialogue, and the rococo style. The two

following extracts give, the first a specimen of Greene's ornate and

Euphuist style from _Orpharion_, the second a passage from his

autobiographical or semi-autobiographical confessions in the _Groat's

Worth_:--

"I am Lydia that renowned Princess, whose never matched beauty

seemed like the gorgeous pomp of Phoebus, too bright for the day:

rung so strongly out of the trump of Fame as it filled every ear

with wonder: Daughter to Astolpho, the King of Lydia: who thought

himself not so fortunate for his diadem, sith other kings could

boast of crowns, nor for his great possessions, although endued

with large territories, as happy that he had a daughter whose

excellency in favour stained Venus, whose austere chastity set

Diana to silence with a blush. Know whatsoever thou art that

standest attentive to my tale, that the ruddiest rose in all

Damasco, the whitest lilies in the creeks of Danuby, might not if

they had united their native colours, but have bashed at the

vermilion stain, flourish'd upon the pure crystal of my face: the

Marguerites of the western Indies, counted more bright and rich

than that which Cleopatra quaffed to Anthony, the coral highest

in his pride upon the Afric shores, might well be graced to

resemble my teeth and lips, but never honoured to overreach my

pureness. Remaining thus the mirror of the world, and nature's

strangest miracle, there arrived in our Court a Thracian knight,

of personage tall, proportioned in most exquisite form, his face

but too fair for his qualities, for he was a brave and a resolute

soldier. This cavalier coming amongst divers others to see the

royalty of the state of Lydia, no sooner had a glance of my

beauty, but he set down his staff, resolving either to perish in

so sweet a labyrinth, or in time happily to stumble out with

Theseus. He had not stayed long in my father's court, but he

shewed such knightly deeds of chivalry amongst the nobility,

lightened with the extraordinary sparks of a courageous mind,

that not only he was liked and loved of all the chief peers of

the realms, but the report of his valour coming to my father's

ears, he was highly honoured of him, and placed in short time as

General of his warlike forces by land. Resting in this estimation

with the king, preferment was no means to quiet his mind, for

love had wounded so deep, as honour by no means might remedy,

that as the elephants can hardly be haled from the sight of the

waste, or the roe buck from gazing at red cloth, so there was no

object that could so much allure the wavering eyes of this

Thracian called Acestes, as the surpassing beauty of the Princess

Lydia, yea, so deeply he doted, that as the Chameleon gorgeth

herself with gazing into the air, so he fed his fancy with

staring on the heavenly face of his Goddess, so long dallying in

the flame, that he scorched his wings and in time consumed his

whole body. Being thus passionate, having none so familiar as he

durst make his confidant he fell thus to debate with himself."

* * * * *

"On the other side of the hedge sat one that heard his sorrow,

who getting over, came towards him, and brake off his passion.

When he approached, he saluted Roberto in this sort: Gentleman,

quoth he (for so you seem) I have by chance heard you discourse

some part of your grief; which appeareth to be more than you will

discover, or I can conceit. But if you vouchsafe such simple

comfort as my ability will yield, assure yourself, that I will

endeavour to do the best, that either may procure your profit, or

bring you pleasure: the rather, for that I suppose you are a

scholar, and pity it is men of learning should live in lack.

"Roberto wondering to hear such good words, for that this iron

age affords few that esteem of virtue; returned him thankful

gratulations and (urged by necessity) uttered his present grief,

beseeching his advice how he might be employed. 'Why, easily,'

quoth he, 'and greatly to your benefit: for men of my profession

get by scholars their whole living.' 'What is your profession?'

said Roberto. 'Truly, sir,' said he, 'I am a player.' 'A player!'

quoth Roberto. 'I took you rather for a gentleman of great

living, for if by outward habit men should be censured, I tell

you, you would be taken for a substantial man.' 'So am I, where I

dwell' (quoth the player) 'reputed able, at my proper cost, to

build a windmill. What though the world once went hard with me,

when I was fain to carry my playing fardel a foot-back; _Tempora

mutantur_, I know you know the meaning of it better than I, but I

thus construe it; it is otherwise now; for my very share in

playing apparel will not be sold for two hundred pounds.' 'Truly'

(said Roberto) 'it is strange that you should so prosper in that

vain practise, for that it seems to me your voice is nothing

gracious.' 'Nay, then,' said the player, 'I mislike your

judgment: why, I am as famous for Delphrigas, and the King of

Fairies, as ever was any of my time. The twelve labours of

Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage, and placed three

scenes of the devil on the highway to heaven.' 'Have ye so?'

(said Roberto) 'then I pray you, pardon me.' 'Nay more' (quoth

the player) 'I can serve to make a pretty speech, for I was a

country author, passing at a moral, for it was I that penn'd the

moral of man's wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seven years'

space was absolute interpreter of the puppets. But now my

Almanach is out of date.

The people make no estimation

Of morals teaching education.

Was not this pretty for a plain rhyme extempore? if ye will ye

shall have more.' 'Nay, it is enough,' said Roberto, 'but how

mean you to use me?' 'Why, sir, in making plays,' said the other,

'for which you shall be well paid, if you will take the pains.'"

These same characteristics, though without the prevailing and in part

obviously sincere melancholy which marks Greene's regrets, also distinguish

Lodge's prose work to such an extent that remarks on the two might

sometimes be made simply interchangeable. But fortune was kinder to Lodge

than to his friend and collaborator. Nor does he seem to have had any

occasion to "tread the burning marl" in company with conny-catchers and

their associates. Lodge began with critical and polemical work--an academic

if not very urbane reply to Stephen Gosson's _School of Abuse_; but in the

_Alarum against Usurers_, which resembles and even preceded Greene's

similar work, he took to the satirical-story-form. Indeed, the connection

between Lodge and Greene was so close, and the difficulty of ascertaining

the exact dates of their compositions is so great, that it is impossible to

be sure which was the precise forerunner. Certainly if Lodge set Greene an

example in the _Alarum against Usurers_, he followed Greene's lead in

_Forbonius and Prisceria_ some years afterwards, having written it on

shipboard in a venture against the Spaniards. Lodge produced much the most

famous book of the euphuist school, next to _Euphues_ itself, as well as

the best known of this pamphlet series, in _Rosalynde_ or _Euphues' Golden

Legacy_, from which Shakespere took the story of _As You Like It_, and of

which an example follows:--

"'Ah Phoebe,' quoth he, 'whereof art thou made, that thou

regardest not thy malady? Am I so hateful an object, that thine

eyes condemn me for an abject? or so base, that thy desires

cannot stoop so low as to lend me a gracious look? My passions

are many, my loves more, my thoughts loyalty, and my fancy faith:

all devoted in humble devoir to the service of Phoebe; and shall

I reap no reward for such fealties? The swain's daily labours is

quit with the evening's hire, the ploughman's toil is eased with

the hope of corn, what the ox sweats out at the plough he

fatteneth at the crib: but unfortunate Montanus[39] hath no salve

for his sorrows, nor any hope of recompense for the hazard of his

perplexed passions. If Phoebe, time may plead the proof of my

truth, twice seven winters have I loved fair Phoebe: if constancy

be a cause to further my suit, Montanus' thoughts have been

sealed in the sweet of Phoebe's excellence, as far from change as

she from love: if outward passions may discover inward

affections, the furrows in my face may discover the sorrows of my

heart, and the map of my looks the grief of my mind. Thou seest

(Phoebe) the tears of despair have made my cheeks full of

wrinkles, and my scalding sighs have made the air echo her pity

conceived in my plaints; Philomel hearing my passions, hath left

her mournful tunes to listen to the discourse of miseries. I have

portrayed in every tree the beauty of my mistress, and the

despair of my loves. What is it in the woods cannot witness my

woes? and who is it would not pity my plaints? only Phoebe. And

why? Because I am Montanus, and she Phoebe: I a worthless swain,

and she the most excellent of all fairies. Beautiful Phoebe! oh

might I say pitiful, then happy were I though I tasted but one

minute of that good hap. Measure Montanus, not by his fortunes,

but by his loves, and balance not his wealth but his desires, and

lend but one gracious look to cure a heap of disquieted cares: if

not, ah if Phoebe cannot love, let a storm of frowns end the

discontent of my thoughts, and so let me perish in my desires,

because they are above my deserts: only at my death this favour

cannot be denied me, that all shall say Montanus died for love of

hard hearted Phoebe.' At these words she filled her face full of

frowns and made him this short and sharp reply.

"'Importunate shepherd, whose loves are lawless because restless:

are thy passions so extreme, that thou canst not conceal them

with patience? or art thou so folly-sick, that thou must needs be

fancy-sick, and in thy affection tied to such an exigent as none

serves but Phoebe? Well, sir, if your market can be made nowhere

else, home again, for your mart is at the fairest. Phoebe is no

lettuce for your lips, and her grapes hang so high, that gaze at

them you may, but touch them you cannot. Yet Montanus I speak not

this in pride, but in disdain: not that I scorn thee, but that I

hate love: for I count it as great honour to triumph over fancy

as over fortune. Rest thee content therefore Montanus, cease from

thy loves, and bridle thy looks, quench the sparkles before they

grow to a farther flame; for in loving me, thou shalt but live by

loss, and what thou utterest in words are all written in the

wind. Wert thou (Montanus) as fair as Paris, as hardy as Hector,

as constant as Troilus, as loving as Leander, Phoebe could not

love, because she cannot love at all: and therefore if thou

pursue me with Phoebus, I must flie with Daphne.'"

[39] The Silvius, it may be just necessary to observe, of _As You Like It_.

This book seems to have been very successful, and Lodge began to write

pamphlets vigorously, sometimes taking up the social satire, sometimes the

moral treatise, sometimes (and then most happily) the euphuist romance,

salted with charming poems. His last prose work in this kind (he wrote

other things later) was the pretty and prettily-named _Margarite of

America_, in 1596.

The names of Nash and Harvey are intertwined even more closely than those

of Greene and Lodge; but the conjunction is not a grasp of friendship but a

grip of hatred--a wrestle, not an embrace. The fact of the quarrel has

attracted rather disproportionate attention from the days of Isaac Disraeli

onwards; and its original cause is still extremely obscure and very

unimportant. By some it is connected, causally as well as accidentally,

with the Martin Marprelate business; by some with the fact that Harvey

belonged to the inner Sidneian clique, Nash to the outer ring of

professional journalists and Bohemians. It at any rate produced some

remarkable varieties of the pamphlet, and demonstrated the keen interest

which the world takes in the proceedings of any couple of literary men who

choose to abuse and befoul one another. Harvey, though no mean scholar,

was in mere writing no match for Nash; and his chief answer to the latter,

_Pierce's Supererogation_, is about as rambling, incoherent, and

ineffective a combination of pedantry and insolence as need be wished for.

It has some not uninteresting, though usually very obscure, hints on

literary matters. Besides this, Harvey wrote letters to Spenser with their

well-known criticism and recommendation of classical forms, and _Foure

Letters Touching Robert Greene and Others: with the Trimming of Thomas

Nash, Gentleman_. A sample of him, not in his abusive-dull, but in his

scholarly-dull manner, may be given:--

"Mine own rules and precepts of art, I believe will fall out not

greatly repugnant, though peradventure somewhat different: and

yet I am not so resolute, but I can be content to reserve the

copying out and publishing thereof, until I have a little better

consulted with my pillow, and taken some further advice of Madame

Sperienza. In the mean time, take this for a general caveat, and

say I have revealed one great mystery unto you: I am of opinion,

there is no one more regular and justifiable direction, either

for the assured and infallible certainty of our English

artificial prosody particularly, or generally to bring our

language into art, and to frame a grammar or rhetoric thereof;

than first of all universally to agree upon one and the same

orthography in all points conformable and proportionate to our

common natural prosody: whether Sir Thomas Smithies in that

respect be the most perfit, as surely it must needs be very good;

or else some other of profounder learning and longer experience,

than Sir Thomas was, shewing by necessary demonstration, wherein

he is defective, will undertake shortly to supply his wants and

make him more absolute. Myself dare not hope to hop after him,

till I see something or other, to or fro, publicly and

authentically established, as it were by a general council, or

Act of Parliament: and then peradventure, standing upon firmer

ground, for company sake, I may adventure to do as others do.

_Interim_, credit me, I dare give no precepts, nor set down any

certain general art: and yet see my boldness, I am not greatly

squeamish of my _Particular Examples_, whereas he that can but

reasonably skill of the one, will give easily a shrewd guess at

the other: considering that the one fetcheth his original and

offspring from the other. In which respect, to say troth, we

beginners have the start, and advantage of our followers, who are

to frame and conform both their examples and precepts, according

to precedent which they have of us: as no doubt Homer or some

other in Greek, and Ennius, or I know not who else in Latin, did

prejudice, and overrule those that followed them, as well for

the quantities of syllables, as number of feet, and the like:

their only examples going for current payment, and standing

instead of laws, and rules with the posterity."

In Harvey, more perhaps than anywhere else in prose, appears the abusive

exaggeration, not humorous or Rabelaisian, but simply rancorous and dull,

which mars so much Elizabethan work. In order not to fall into the same

error ourselves, we must abstain from repeating the very strong language

which has sometimes been applied to his treatment of dead men, and such

dead men as Greene and Marlowe, for apparently no other fault than their

being friends of his enemy Nash. It is sufficient to say that Harvey had

all the worst traits of "donnishness," without having apparently any notion

of that dignity which sometimes half excuses the don. He was emphatically

of Mr. Carlyle's "acrid-quack" genus.

Thomas Nash will himself hardly escape the charge of acridity, but only

injustice or want of discernment will call him a quack. Unlike Harvey, but

like Greene and Lodge, he was a verse as well as a prose writer. But his

verse is in comparison unimportant. Nor was he tempted to intersperse

specimens of it in his prose work. The absolutely best part of that

work--the Anti-Martinist pamphlets to be noticed presently--is only

attributed to him conjecturally, though the grounds of attribution are very

strong. But his characteristics are fully evident in his undoubted

productions. The first of these in pamphlet form is the very odd thing

called _Pierce Penniless_ [the name by which Nash became known], _his

Supplication to the Devil_. It is a kind of rambling condemnation of

luxury, for the most part delivered in the form of burlesque exhortation,

which the mediaeval _sermons joyeux_ had made familiar in all European

countries. Probably some allusions in this refer to Harvey, whose

pragmatical pedantry may have in many ways annoyed Nash, a Cambridge man

like himself. At any rate the two soon plunged into a regular battle, the

documents of which on Nash's side are, first a prognostication, something

in the style of Rabelais, then a formal confutation of the _Four Letters_,

and then the famous lampoon entitled _Have with you to Saffron Walden_

[Harvey's birthplace], of which here is a specimen:--

"His father he undid to furnish him to the Court once more, where

presenting himself in all the colours of the rainbow, and a pair

of moustaches like a black horse tail tied up in a knot, with two

tufts sticking out on each side, he was asked by no mean

personage, _Unde haec insania_? whence proceedeth this folly or

madness? and he replied with that weather-beaten piece of a verse

out of the Grammar, _Semel insanivimus omnes_, once in our days

there is none of us but have played the idiots; and so was he

counted and bade stand by for a Nodgscomb. He that most

patronized him, prying more searchingly into him, and finding

that he was more meet to make sport with than any way deeply to

be employed, with fair words shook him off, and told him he was

fitter for the University, than for the Court or his turn, and so

bade God prosper his studies, and sent for another Secretary to

Oxford.

"Readers, be merry; for in me there shall want nothing I can do

to make you merry. You see I have brought the Doctor out of

request at Court, and it shall cost me a fall, but I will get him

hooted out of the University too, ere I give him over. What will

you give me when I bring him upon the Stage in one of the

principalest Colleges in Cambridge? Lay any wager with me, and I

will; or if you lay no wager at all, I'll fetch him aloft in

Pedantius, that exquisite Comedy in Trinity College; where under

the chief part, from which it took his name, as namely the

concise and firking finicaldo fine School master, he was full

drawn and delineated from the sole of his foot to the crown of

his head. The just manner of his phrase in his Orations and

Disputations they stuffed his mouth with, and no Buffianism

throughout his whole books, but they bolstered out his part with;

as those ragged remnants in his four familiar epistles 'twixt him

and _Senior Immerito, raptim scripta, noste manum et stylum_,

with innumerable other of his rabble-routs: and scoffing his

_Musarum Lachrymae_ with _Flebo amorem meum etiam musarum

lachrymis_; which, to give it his due, was a more collachrymate

wretched Treatise than my _Piers Penniless_, being the pitifulest

pangs that ever any man's Muse breathed forth. I leave out half;

not the carrying up of his gown, his nice gait on his pantoffles,

or the affected accent of his speech, but they personated. And if

I should reveal all, I think they borrowed his gown to play the

part in, the more to flout him. Let him deny this (and not damn

himself) for his life if he can. Let him deny that there was a

Shew made at Clare Hall of him and his two brothers, called,

"_Tarra, rantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum

Tri-Harveyorum Tri-harmonia_

Let him deny that there was another Shew made of the little

Minnow his brother, _Dodrans Dick_, at Peter-house called,

"_Duns furens._ Dick Harvey in a frensy.

Whereupon Dick came and broke the College glass windows; and

Doctor Perne (being then either for himself or deputy

Vice-Chancellor) caused him to be fetched in, and set in the

Stocks till the Shew was ended, and a great part of the night

after."

_The Terrors of the Night_, a discourse of apparitions, for once, among

these oddly-named pieces, tells a plain story. Its successor, _Christ's

Tears over Jerusalem_, Nash's longest book, is one of those rather

enigmatical expressions of repentance for loose life which were so common

at the time, and which, according to the charity of the reader, may be

attributed to real feeling, to a temporary access of _Katzen-jammer_, or to

downright hypocrisy, bent only on manufacturing profitable "copy," and

varying its style to catch different tastes. The most unfavourable

hypothesis is probably unjust, and a certain tone of sincerity also runs

through the next book, _The Unfortunate Traveller_, in which Nash, like

many others, inveighs against the practice of sending young Englishmen to

be corrupted abroad. It is noteworthy that this (the place of which in the

history of the novel has been rather exaggerated) is the oldest authority

for the romance of Surrey and Geraldine; but it is uncertain whether this

was pure invention on Nash's part or not. Nash's _Lenten Stuff_ is very

interesting, being a panegyric on Great Yarmouth and its famous staple

commodity (though Nash was actually born at Lowestoft).

In Nash's work we find a style both of treatment and language entirely

different from anything of Greene's or Lodge's. He has no euphuism, his

forte being either extravagant burlesque (in which the influence of

Rabelais is pretty directly perceptible, while he himself acknowledges

indebtedness to some other sources, such as Bullen or Bullein, a dialogue

writer of the preceding generation), or else personal attack, boisterous

and unscrupulous, but often most vigorous and effective. Diffuseness and

want of keeping to the point too frequently mar Nash's work; but when he

shakes himself free from them, and goes straight for his enemy or his

subject, he is a singularly forcible writer. In his case more than in any

of the others, the journalist born out of due time is perceptible. He had

perhaps not much original message for the world. But he had eminently the

trick both of damaging controversial argument made light to catch the

popular taste, and of easy discussion or narrative. The chief defects of

his work would probably have disappeared of themselves if he had had to

write not pamphlets, but articles. He did, however, what he could; and he

is worthy of a place in the history of literature if only for the sake of

_Have with you to Saffron Walden_--the best example of its own kind to be

found before the end of the seventeenth century, if not the beginning of

the eighteenth.

Thomas Dekker was much less of a born prose writer than his half-namesake,

Nash. His best work, unlike Nash's, was done in verse, and, while he was

far Nash's superior, not merely in poetical expression but in creative

grasp of character, he was entirely destitute of Nash's incisive and direct

faculty of invective. Nevertheless his work, too, is memorable among the

prose work of the time, and for special reasons. His first pamphlet

(according to the peculiarity already noted in Rowlands's case) is not

prose at all, but verse--yet not the verse of which Dekker had real

mastery, being a very lamentable ballad of the destruction of Jerusalem,

entitled _Canaan's Calamity_ (1598). The next, _The Wonderful Year_, is the

account of London in plague time, and has at least the interest of being

comparable with, and perhaps that of having to some extent inspired,

Defoe's famous performance. Then, and of the same date, follows a very

curious piece, the foreign origin of which has not been so generally

noticed as that of Dekker's most famous prose production. _The Bachelor's

Banquet_ is in effect only a free rendering of the immortal fifteenth

century satire, assigned on no very solid evidence to Antoine de la Salle,

the _Quinze Joyes de Mariage_, the resemblance being kept down to the

recurrence at the end of each section of the same phrase, "in Lob's

pound," which reproduces the less grotesque "dans la nasse" of the

original. But here, as later, the skill with which Dekker adapts and brings

in telling circumstances appropriate to his own day deserves every

acknowledgment. _Dekker's Dreame_ is chiefly verse and chiefly pious; and

then at a date somewhat later than that of our present period, but

connected with it by the fact of authorship, begins a very interesting

series of pieces, more vivid if somewhat less well written than Greene's,

and connected with his "conny-catching" course. _The Bellman of London_,

_Lanthorn and Candlelight_, _A Strange Horse-Race_, _The Seven Deadly Sins

of London_, _News from Hell_, _The Double P.P._, and _The Gull's Hornbook_,

are all pamphlets of this class; the chief interest resting in _News from

Hell_ (which, according to the author's scheme, connects itself with Nash's

_Pierce Penniless_, and is the devil's answer thereto) and _The Gull's

Hornbook_ (1609). This last, the best known of Dekker's work, is an

Englishing of the no less famous _Grobianus_ of Frederick Dedekind, and the

same skill of adaptation which was noticed in _The Bachelor's Banquet_ is

observable here. The spirit of these works seems to have been so popular

that Dekker kept it up in _The Dead Term_ [long vacation], _Work for

Armourers_ (which, however, is less particular and connects itself with

Nash's sententious work), _The Raven's Almanack_, and _A Rod for Runaways_

(1625). _The Four Birds of Noah's Ark_, which Dr. Grosart prints last, is

of a totally different character, being purely a book of piety. It is thus

inferior in interest to the series dealing with the low life of London,

which contains most curious studies of the ancient order of ragamuffins (as

a modern satirist has pleasantly called them), and bears altogether marks

of greater sincerity than the parallel studies of other writers. For about

Dekker, hack and penny-a-liner as he undoubtedly was, there was a

simplicity, a truth to nature, and at the same time a faculty of dramatic

presentation in which Greene, Lodge, and Nash were wholly wanting; and his

prose pamphlets smack of these good gifts in their measure as much as _The

Honest Whore_. Indeed, on the whole, he seems to be the most trustworthy

of these chroniclers of the English picaroons; and one feels disposed to

believe that if the things which he tells did not actually happen,

something very like them was probably happening every day in London during

the time of "Eliza and our James." For the time of Eliza and our James was

by no means a wholly heroic period, and it only loses, not gains, by the

fiction that every man of letters was a Spenser and every man of affairs a

Sidney or even a Raleigh. Extracts from _The Seven Deadly Sins_ and _The

Gull's Hornbook_ may be given:--

"O Candle-light! and art thou one of the cursed crew? hast thou

been set at the table of Princes and Noblemen? have all sorts of

people done reverence unto thee, and stood bare so soon as ever

they have seen thee? have thieves, traitors, and murderers been

afraid to come in thy presence, because they knew thee just, and

that thou wouldest discover them? And art thou now a harbourer of

all kinds of vices? nay, dost thou play the capital Vice thyself?

Hast thou had so many learned Lectures read before thee, and is

the light of thy understanding now clean put out, and have so

many profound scholars profited by thee? hast thou done such good

to Universities, been such a guide to the lame, and seen the

doing of so many good works, yet dost thou now look dimly, and

with a dull eye, upon all goodness? What comfort have sick men

taken (in weary and irksome nights) but only in thee? thou hast

been their physician and apothecary, and when the relish of

nothing could please them, the very shadow of thee hath been to

them a restorative consolation. The nurse hath stilled her

wayward infant, shewing it but to thee: What gladness hast thou

put into mariners' bosoms when thou hast met them on the sea!

What joy into the faint and benighted traveller when he has met

thee on the land! How many poor handicraftsmen by thee have

earned the best part of their living! And art thou now become a

companion for drunkards, for leachers, and for prodigals? Art

thou turned reprobate? thou wilt burn for it in hell. And so

odious is this thy apostasy, and hiding thyself from the light of

the truth, that at thy death and going out of the world, even

they that love thee best will tread thee under their feet: yea, I

that have thus played the herald, and proclaimed thy good parts,

will now play the crier and call thee into open court, to arraign

thee for thy misdemeanours."

* * * * *

"For do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so

inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an

hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is

it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot be at

quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the

other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death,

that we owe the better tributary, half of our life to him: and

there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is that golden

chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of

want? of wounds? of cares? of great men's oppressions? of

captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much

pleasure as kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate

Ambrosia? can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too

little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but

indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no, look upon Endymion,

the moon's minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and

was not a hair the worse for it. Can lying abed till noon (being

not the three score and fifteenth thousand part of his nap) be

hurtful?

"Besides, by the opinion of all philosophers and physicians, it

is not good to trust the air with our bodies till the sun with

his flame-coloured wings hath fanned away the misty smoke of the

morning, and refined that thick tobacco-breath which the

rheumatic night throws abroad of purpose to put out the eye of

the element: which work questionless cannot be perfectly finished

till the sun's car-horses stand prancing on the very top of

highest noon: so that then (and not till then) is the most

healthful hour to be stirring. Do you require examples to

persuade you? At what time do Lords and Ladies use to rise but

then? Your simpering merchants' wives are the fairest lyers in

the world: and is not eleven o'clock their common hour? they find

(no doubt) unspeakable sweetness in such lying, else they would

not day by day put it so in practice. In a word, mid-day slumbers

are golden; they make the body fat, the skin fair, the flesh

plump, delicate and tender; they set a russet colour on the

cheeks of young women, and make lusty courage to rise up in men;

they make us thrifty, both in sparing victuals (for breakfasts

thereby are saved from the hell-mouth of the belly) and in

preserving apparel; for while we warm us in our beds our clothes

are not worn.

"The casements of thine eyes being then at this commendable time

of the day newly set open, choose rather to have thy wind-pipe

cut in pieces than to salute any man. Bid not good-morrow so much

as to thy father, though he be an emperor. An idle ceremony it is

and can do him little good; to thyself it may bring much harm:

for if he be a wise man that knows how to hold his peace, of

necessity must he be counted a fool that cannot keep his tongue."

The voluminous work in pamphlet kind of Nicholas Breton, still more the

verse efforts closely akin to it of Samuel Rowlands, John Davies of

Hereford and some others, must be passed over with very brief notice. Dr.

Grosart's elaborate edition of the first-named has given a vast mass of

matter very interesting to the student of literature, but which cannot be

honestly recommended to the general reader. Breton, whose long life and

perpetual literary activity fill up great part of our whole period, was an

Essex gentleman of a good family (a fact which he never forgot), and

apparently for some time a dependent of the well-known Countess of

Pembroke, Sidney's sister. A much older man than most of the great wits of

Elizabeth's reign, he also survived most of them, and his publications, if

not his composition, cover a full half century, though he was _nel mezzo

del cammin_ at the date of the earliest. He was probably born some years

before the middle of the sixteenth century, and certainly did not die

before the first year of Charles I. If we could take as his the charming

lullaby of _The Arbour of Amorous Devices_ he would stand (if only as a

kind of "single-speech") high as a poet. But I fear that Dr. Grosart's

attribution of it to him is based on little external and refuted by all

internal evidence. His best certain thing is the pretty "Phillida and

Corydon" idyll, which may be found in _England's Helicon_ or in Mr. Ward's

_Poets_. But I own that I can never read this latter without thinking of

two lines of Fulke Greville's in the same metre and on no very different

theme--

"O'er enamelled meads they went,

Quiet she, he passion-rent,"

which are simply worth all the works of Breton, prose and verse, unless we

count the _Lullaby_, put together. In the _mots rayonnants_, the _mots de

lumiere_, he is sadly deficient. But his work (which is nearly as plentiful

in verse as in prose) is, as has been said, very interesting to the

literary student, because it shows better perhaps than anything else the

style of literature which a man, disdaining to condescend to burlesque or

bawdry, not gifted with any extraordinary talent, either at prose or verse,

but possessed of a certain literary faculty, could then produce with a fair

chance of being published and bought. It cannot be said that the result

shows great daintiness in Breton's public. The verse, with an improvement

in sweetness and fluency, is very much of the doggerel style which was

prevalent before Spenser; and the prose, though showing considerable

faculty, if not of invention, yet of adroit imitation of previously

invented styles, is devoid of distinction and point. There are, however,

exercises after Breton's own fashion in almost every popular style of the

time--euphuist romances, moral treatises, packets of letters, collections

of jests and short tales, purely religious tractates, characters (after the

style later illustrated by Overbury and Earle), dialogues, maxims, pictures

of manners, collections of notes about foreign countries,--in fact, the

whole farrago of the modern periodical. The pervading characteristics are

Breton's invariable modesty, his pious and, if I may be permitted to use

the word, gentlemanly spirit, and a fashion of writing which, if not very

pointed, picturesque, or epigrammatic, is clear, easy, and on the whole

rather superior, in observance of the laws of grammar and arrangement, to

the work of men of much greater note in his day.

The verse pamphlets of Rowlands (whom I have not studied as thoroughly as

most others), Davies, and many less voluminous men, are placed here with

all due apology for the liberty. They are seldom or never of much formal

merit, but they are interesting, first, because they testify to the hold

which the mediaeval conception of verse, as a general literary medium as

suitable as prose and more attractive, had upon men even at this late time;

and secondly, because, like the purely prose pamphlets, they are full of

information as to the manners of the time. For Rowlands I may refer to Mr.

Gosse's essay. John Davies of Hereford, the writing-master, though he has

been carefully edited for students, and is by no means unworthy of study,

has had less benefit of exposition to the general reader. He was not a

genius, but he is a good example of the rather dull man who, despite the

disfavour of circumstance, contrives by much assiduity and ingenious

following of models to attain a certain position in literature. There are

John Davieses of Hereford in every age, but since the invention and filing

of newspapers their individuality has been not a little merged. The

anonymous journalist of our days is simply to the historian such and such

a paper, volume so-and-so, page so much, column this or that. The good John

Davies, living in another age, still stands as _nominis umbra_, but with a

not inconsiderable body of work to throw the shadow.

One of the most remarkable, and certainly one of not the least interesting

developments of the Elizabethan pamphlet remains to be noticed. This is the

celebrated series of "Martin Marprelate" tracts, with the replies which

they called forth. Indeed the popularity of this series may be said to have

given a great impulse to the whole pamphleteering system. It is somewhat

unfortunate that this interesting subject has never been taken up in full

by a dispassionate historian of literature, sufficiently versed in politics

and in theology. In mid-nineteenth century most, but by no means all of the

more notable tracts were reprinted by John Petheram, a London bookseller,

whose productions have since been issued under the well-known imprint of

John Russell Smith, the publisher of the _Library of Old Authors_. This

gave occasion to a review in _The Christian Remembrancer_, afterwards

enlarged and printed as a book by Mr. Maskell, a High Churchman who

subsequently seceded to the Church of Rome. This latter accident has rather

unfavourably and unfairly affected later judgments of his work, which,

however, is certainly not free from party bias. It has scarcely been less

unlucky that the chief recent dealers with the matter, Professor Arber (who

projected a valuable reprint of the whole series in his _English Scholars'

Library_, and who prefaced it with a quite invaluable introductory sketch),

and Dr. Grosart, who also included divers Anti-Martinist tracts in his

privately printed _Works of Nashe_, are very strongly prejudiced on the

Puritan side.[40] Between these authorities the dispassionate inquirer who

attacks the texts for himself is likely to feel somewhat in the position of

a man who exposes himself to a cross fire. The Martin Marprelate

controversy, looked at without prejudice but with sufficient information,

shows itself as a very early example of the reckless violence of private

crotcheteers on the one hand, and of the rather considerable unwisdom of

the official defenders of order on the other. "Martin's" method was to a

certain extent an anticipation of the famous move by which Pascal, fifty

years later, "took theology out of the schools into drawing-rooms," except

that Martin and his adversaries transferred the venue rather to the

tap-room than to the drawing-room. The controversy between the framers of

the Church of England in its present state, and the hot gospellers who,

with Thomas Cartwright at their head, denied the proposition (not deniable

or denied now by any sane and scholarly disputant) that church discipline

and government are points left to a great extent undefined in the

Scriptures, had gone on for years before Martin appeared. Cartwright and

Whitgift had fought, with a certain advantage of warmth and eloquence on

Cartwright's side, and with an immense preponderance of logical cogency on

Whitgift's. Many minor persons had joined in the struggle, and at last a

divine, more worthy than wise, John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, had

produced on the orthodox side one of those enormous treatises (it had some

fifteen hundred quarto pages) which are usually left unread by the side

they favour, and which exasperate the side they oppose. The ordinary law of

the time, moreover, which placed large powers in the hands of the bishops,

and especially entrusted them with a rigid and complete censorship of the

press, had begun to be put in force severely against the more outspoken

partisans. Any one who will take the trouble to read the examination of

Henry Barrow, which Mr. Arber has reprinted,[41] or even the "moderate"

tracts of Nicholas Udall, which in a manner ushered in the Marprelate

controversy, will probably be more surprised at the long-suffering of the

judges than at the sufferings of their prisoners. Barrow, in a long and

patient examination before the council, of which the Bishop of London and

the Archbishop of Canterbury were members, called them to their faces the

one a "wolf," a "bloody persecutor," and an "apostate," the other "a

monster" and "the second beast that is spoken of in the Revelations." The

"moderate" Udall, after publishing a dialogue (in which an Anglican bishop

called Diotrephes is represented, among other things, as planning measures

against the Puritans in consort with a papist and an usurer), further

composed a _Demonstration of Discipline_ in which, writing, according to

Mr. Arber, "without any satire or invective," he calls the bishops merely

_qua_ bishops, "the wretched fathers of a filthy mother," with abundant

epithets to match, and rains down on every practice of the existing church

government such terms as "blasphemous," "damnable," "hellish," and the

like. To the modern reader who looks at these things with the eyes of the

present day, it may of course seem that it would have been wiser to let the

dogs bark. But that was not the principle of the time: and as Mr. Arber

most frankly admits, it was certainly not the principle of the dogs

themselves. The Puritans claimed for themselves a not less absolute right

to call in the secular arm if they could, and a much more absolute

certainty and righteousness for their tenets than the very hottest of their

adversaries.

[40] This prejudice is naturally still stronger in some American writers,

notably Dr. Dexter.

[41] Arber, _Introductory Sketch_. p. 40 _sqq._ All the quotations and

references which follow will be found in Arber's and Petheram's reprints or

in Grosart's _Nash_, vol. 1. If the works cited are not given as wholes in

them, the fact will be noted. (See also Mr. Bond's _Lyly_.)

Udall was directly, as well as indirectly, the begetter of the Martin

Marprelate controversy: though after he got into trouble in connection with

it, he made a sufficiently distinct expression of disapproval of the

Martinist methods, and it seems to have been due more to accident and his

own obstinacy than anything else that he died in prison instead of being

obliged with the honourable banishment of a Guinea chaplaincy. His printer,

Waldegrave, had had his press seized and his license withdrawn for

_Diotrephes_, and resentment at this threw what, in the existing

arrangements of censorship and the Stationers' monopoly, was a very

difficult thing to obtain--command of a practical printer--into the hands

of the malcontents. Chief among these malcontents was a certain Reverend

John Penry, a Welshman by birth, a member, as was then not uncommon, of

both universities, and the author, among other more dubious publications,

of a plea, intemperately stated in parts, but very sober and sensible at

bottom, for a change in the system of allotting and administering the

benefices of the church in Wales. Which plea, be it observed in passing,

had it been attended to, it would have been better for both the church and

state of England at this day. The pamphlet[42] contained, however, a

distinct insinuation against the Queen, of designedly keeping Wales in

ignorance and subjection--an insinuation which, in those days, was

equivalent to high treason. The book was seized, and the author imprisoned

(1587). Now when, about a year after, and in the very height of the danger

from the Armada, Waldegrave's livelihood was threatened by the proceedings

above referred to, it would appear that he obtained from the Continent, or

had previously secreted from his confiscated stock, printing tools, and

that he and Penry, at the house of Mistress Crane, at East Molesey, in

Surrey, printed a certain tract, called, for shortness, "The Epistle."[43]

This tract, of the authorship and character of which more presently,

created a great sensation. It was immediately followed, the press being

shifted for safety to the houses of divers Puritan country gentlemen, by

the promised _Epitome_. So great was the stir, that a formal answer of

great length was put forth by "T. C." (well known to be Thomas Cooper,

Bishop of Winchester), entitled, _An Admonition to the People of England_.

The Martinists, from their invisible and shifting citadel, replied with

perhaps the cleverest tract of the whole controversy, named, with

deliberate quaintness, _Hay any Work for Cooper?_[44] ("Have You any Work

for the Cooper?" said to be an actual trade London cry). Thenceforward the

_melee_ of pamphlets, answers, "replies, duplies, quadruplies," became in

small space indescribable. Petheram's prospectus of reprints (only

partially carried out) enumerates twenty-six, almost all printed in the

three years 1588-1590; Mr. Arber, including preliminary works, counts some

thirty. The perambulating press was once seized (at Newton Lane, near

Manchester), but Martin was not silenced. It is certain (though there are

no remnants extant of the matter concerned) that Martin was brought on the

stage in some form or other, and though the duration of the controversy was

as short as its character was hot, it was rather suppressed than

extinguished by the death of Udall in prison, and the execution of Penry

and Barrow in 1593.

[42] Large extracts from it are given by Arber.

[43] As the titles of these productions are highly characteristic of the

style of the controversy, and, indeed, are sometimes considerably more

poignant than the text, it may be well to give some of them in full as

follows:--

_The Epistle._--Oh read over D. John Bridges, for it is a worthy work: Or

an Epitome of the first book of that right worshipful volume, written

against the Puritans, in the defence of the noble Clergy, by as worshipful

a Priest, John Bridges, Presbyter, Priest or Elder, Doctor of Divillity

[_sic_], and Dean of Sarum, Wherein the arguments of the Puritans are

wisely presented, that when they come to answer M. Doctor, they must needs

say something that hath been spoken. Compiled for the behoof and overthrow

of the Parsons Fyckers and Currats [_sic_] that have learnt their

catechisms, and are past grace: by the reverend and worthy Martin

Marprelate, gentleman, and dedicated to the Confocation [_sic_] house. The

Epitome is not yet published, but it shall be when the Bishops are at

convenient leisure to view the same. In the mean time let them be content

with this learned Epistle. Printed, oversea, in Europe, within two furlongs

of a Bouncing Priest, at the cost and charges of M. Marprelate, gentleman.

[44] Hay any work for Cooper, or a brief pistle directed by way of an

hublication [_sic_] to the reverend bishops, counselling them if they will

needs be barrelled up for fear of smelling in the nostrils of her Majesty

and the State, that they would use the advice of Reverend Martin for the

providing of their Cooper; because the Reverend T. C. (by which mystical

letters is understood either the bouncing parson of East Meon or Tom Cokes

his chaplain), hath shewed himself in his late admonition to the people of

England to be an unskilful and beceitful [_sic_] tub-trimmer. Wherein

worthy Martin quits him like a man, I warrant you in the modest defence of

his self and his learned pistles, and makes the Cooper's hoops to fly off,

and the bishops' tubs to leak out of all cry. Penned and compiled by Martin

the metropolitan. Printed in Europe, not far from some of the bouncing

priests.

The actual authorship of the Martinist Tracts is still purely a matter of

hypothesis. Penry has been the general favourite, and perhaps the argument

from the difference of style in his known works is not quite convincing.

The American writer Dr. Dexter, a fervent admirer, as stated above, of the

Puritans, is for Barrow. Mr. Arber thinks that a gentleman of good birth

named Job Throckmorton, who was certainly concerned in the affair, was

probably the author of the more characteristic passages. Fantastic

suggestions of Jesuit attempts to distract the Anglican Church have also

been made,--attempts sufficiently refuted by the improbability of the

persons known to be concerned lending themselves to such an intrigue, for,

hotheads as Penry and the rest were, they were transparently honest. On the

side of the defence, authorship is a little better ascertained. Of Cooper's

work there is no doubt, and some purely secular men of letters were oddly

mixed up in the affair. It is all but certain that John Lyly wrote the

so-called _Pap with a Hatchet_,[45] which in deliberate oddity of phrase,

scurrility of language, and desultoriness of method outvies the wildest

Martinist outbursts. The later tract, _An Almond for a Parrot_,[46] which

deserves a very similar description, may not improbably be the same

author's; and Dr. Grosart has reasonably attributed four anti-Martinist

tracts (_A Countercuff to Martin Junior_ [_Martin Junior_ was one of the

Marprelate treatises], _Pasquil's Return_, _Martin's Month's Mind_, and

_Pasquil's Apology_), to Nash. But the discussion of such questions comes

but ill within the limits of such a book as the present.

[45] Pap with a Hatchet, alias A fig for my godson! or Crack me this nut,

or A country cuff that is a sound box of the ear for the idiot Martin for

to hold his peace, seeing the patch will take no warning. Written by one

that dares call a dog a dog, and made to prevent Martin's dog-days.

Imprinted by John-a-noke and John-a-stile for the baylive [_sic_] of

Withernam, _cum privilegio perennitatis_; and are to be sold at the sign of

the crab-tree-cudgel in Thwackcoat Lane. A sentence. Martin hangs fit for

my mowing.

[46] An Almond for a Parrot, or Cuthbert Curryknaves alms. Fit for the

knave Martin, and the rest of those impudent beggars that cannot be content

to stay their stomachs with a benefice, but they will needs break their

fasts with our bishops. _Rimarum sum plenus._ Therefore beware, gentle

reader, you catch not the hicket with laughing. Imprinted at a place, not

far from a place, by the assigns of Signior Somebody, and are to be sold at

his shop in Troubleknave Street at the sign of the Standish.

The discussion of the characteristics of the actual tracts, as they

present themselves and whosoever wrote them, is, on the other hand,

entirely within our competence. On the whole the literary merit of the

treatises has, I think, been overrated. The admirers of Martin have even

gone so far as to traverse Penry's perfectly true statement that in using

light, not to say ribald, treatment of a serious subject, he was only

following [Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde and] other Protestant writers, and

have attributed to him an almost entire originality of method, owing at

most something to the popular "gags" of the actor Richard Tarleton, then

recently dead. This is quite uncritical. An exceedingly free treatment of

sacred and serious affairs had been characteristic of the Reformers from

Luther downward, and the new Martin only introduced the variety of style

which any writer of considerable talents is sure to show. His method, at

any rate for a time, is no doubt sufficiently amusing, though it is hardly

effective. Serious arguments are mixed up with the wildest buffoonery, and

unconscious absurdities (such as a solemn charge against the unlucky Bishop

Aylmer because he used the phrase "by my faith," and enjoyed a game at

bowls) with the most venomous assertion or insinuation of really odious

offences. The official answer to the _Epistle_ and the _Epitome_ has been

praised by no less a person than Bacon[47] for its gravity of tone.

Unluckily Dr. Cooper was entirely destitute of the faculty of relieving

argument with humour. He attacks the theology of the Martinists with

learning and logic that leave nothing to desire; but unluckily he proceeds

in precisely the same style to deal laboriously with the quips assigned by

Martin to Mistress Margaret Lawson (a noted Puritan shrew of the day), and

with mere idle things like the assertion that Whitgift "carried Dr. Perne's

cloakbag." The result is that, as has been said, the rejoinder _Hay any

Work for Cooper_ shows Martin, at least at the beginning, at his very best.

The artificial simplicity of his distortions of Cooper's really simple

statements is not unworthy of Swift, or of the best of the more recent

practitioners of the grave and polite kind of political irony. But this is

at the beginning, and soon afterwards Martin relapses for the most part

into the alternation between serious argument which will not hold water and

grotesque buffoonery which has little to do with the matter. A passage from

the _Epistle_ lampooning Aylmer, Bishop of London, and a sample each of

_Pap with a Hatchet_ and the _Almond_, will show the general style. But the

most characteristic pieces of all are generally too coarse and too

irreverent to be quotable:--

[47] In his _Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of

England_ (Works. Folio, 1753, ii. p. 375).

[Sidenote: _I'll make you weary of it dumb John, except you leave

persecuting._]

"Well now to mine eloquence, for I can do it I tell you. Who made

the porter of his gate a dumb minister? Dumb John of London. Who

abuseth her Majesty's subjects, in urging them to subscribe

contrary to law? John of London. Who abuseth the high commission,

as much as any? John London (and D. Stanhope too). Who bound an

Essex minister, in 200_l._ to wear the surplice on Easter Day

last? John London. Who hath cut down the elms at Fulham? John

London. Who is a carnal defender of the breach of the Sabbath in

all the places of his abode? John London. Who forbiddeth men to

humble themselves in fasting and prayer before the Lord, and then

can say unto the preachers, now you were best to tell the people

that we forbid fasts? John London. Who goeth to bowls upon the

Sabbath? Dumb Dunstical John of good London hath done all this. I

will for this time leave this figure, and tell your venerable

masterdoms a tale worth the hearing: I had it at the second hand:

if he that told it me added anything, I do not commend him, but I

forgive him: The matter is this. A man dying in Fulham, made one

of the Bishop of London's men his executor. The man had

bequeathed certain legacies unto a poor shepherd in the town. The

shepherd could get nothing of the Bishop's man, and therefore

made his moan unto a gentleman of Fulham, that belongeth to the

court of requests. The gentleman's name is M. Madox. The poor

man's case came to be tried in the Court of Requests. The B. man

desired his master's help: Dumb John wrote to the masters of

requests to this effect, and I think these were his words:

"'My masters of the requests, the bearer hereof being my man,

hath a cause before you: inasmuch as I understand how the matter

standeth, I pray you let my man be discharged the court, and I

will see an agreement made. Fare you well.' The letter came to M.

D. Dale, he answered it in this sort:

"'My Lord of London, this man delivered your letter, I pray you

give him his dinner on Christmas Day for his labour, and fare you

well.'

"Dumb John not speeding this way, sent for the said M. Madox: he

came, some rough words passed on both sides, Presbyter John said,

Master Madox was very saucy, especially seeing he knew before

whom he spake: namely, the Lord of Fulham. Whereunto the

gentleman answered that he had been a poor freeholder in Fulham,

before Don John came to be L. there, hoping also to be so, when

he and all his brood (my Lady his daughter and all) should be

gone. At the hearing of this speech, the wasp got my brother by

the nose, which made him in his rage to affirm, that he would be

L. of Fulham as long as he lived in despite of all England. Nay,

soft there, quoth M. Madox, except her Majesty. I pray you, that

is my meaning, call dumb John, and I tell thee Madox that thou

art but a Jack to use me so: Master Madox replying, said that

indeed his name was John, and if every John were a Jack, he was

content to be a Jack (there he hit my L. over the thumbs). The B.

growing in choler, said that Master Madox his name did shew what

he was, for saith he, thy name is mad ox, which declareth thee to

be an unruly and mad beast. M. Madox answered again, that the B.

name, if it were descanted upon, did most significantly shew his

qualities. For said he, you are called Elmar, but you may be

better called marelm, for you have marred all the elms in Fulham:

having cut them all down. This far is my worthy story, as worthy

to be printed, as any part of Dean John's book, I am sure."

* * * * *

"To the Father and the two Sons,

HUFF, RUFF, and SNUFF,[48]

the three tame ruffians of the Church, which take pepper

in the nose, because they cannot

mar Prelates:

greeting.

"Room for a royster; so that's well said. Ach, a little farther

for a good fellow. Now have at you all my gaffers of the railing

religion, 'tis I that must take you a peg lower. I am sure you

look for more work, you shall have wood enough to cleave, make

your tongue the wedge, and your head the beetle. I'll make such a

splinter run into your wits, as shall make them rankle till you

become fools. Nay, if you shoot books like fools' bolts, I'll be

so bold as to make your judgments quiver with my thunderbolts. If

you mean to gather clouds in the Commonwealth, to threaten

tempests, for your flakes of snow, we'll pay you with stones of

hail; if with an easterly wind you bring caterpillers into the

Church, with a northern wind we'll drive barrens into your wits.

"We care not for a Scottish mist, though it wet us to the skin,

you shall be sure your cockscombs shall not be missed, but

pierced to the skulls. I profess railing, and think it as good a

cudgel for a martin, as a stone for a dog, or a whip for an ape,

or poison for a rat.

"Yet find fault with no broad terms, for I have measured yours

with mine, and I find yours broader just by the list. Say not my

speeches are light, for I have weighed yours and mine, and I find

yours lighter by twenty grains than the allowance. For number you

exceed, for you have thirty ribald words for my one, and yet you

bear a good spirit. I was loth so to write as I have done, but

that I learned, that he that drinks with cutters, must not be

without his ale daggers; nor he that buckles with Martin, without

his lavish terms.

"Who would curry an ass with an ivory comb? Give the beast

thistles for provender. I do but yet angle with a silken fly, to

see whether martins will nibble; and if I see that, why then I

have worms for the nonce, and will give them line enough like a

trout, till they swallow both hook and line, and then, Martin,

beware your gills, for I'll make you dance at the pole's end.

"I know Martin will with a trice bestride my shoulders. Well, if

he ride me, let the fool sit fast, for my wit is very hickish:

which if he spur with his copper reply, when it bleeds, it will

all to besmear their consciences.

"If a martin can play at chess, as well as his nephew the ape, he

shall know what it is for a scaddle pawn to cross a Bishop in his

own walk. Such diedappers must be taken up, else they'll not

stick to check the king. Rip up my life, discipher my name, fill

thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toad, hiss

like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen

is prepared and my mind; and if ye chance to find any worse words

than you brought, let them be put in your dad's dictionary. And

so farewell, and be hanged, and I pray God ye fare no worse.

"Yours at an hour's warning,

"DOUBLE V."

[48] Well-known stage characters in Preston's _Cambyses_.

* * * * *

"By this time I think, good-man Puritan, that thou art persuaded,

that I know as well as thy own conscience thee, namely Martin

Makebate of England, to be a most scurvy and beggarly benefactor

to obedience, and _per consequens_, to fear neither men, nor that

God Who can cast both body and soul into unquenchable fire. In

which respect I neither account you of the Church, nor esteem of

your blood, otherwise than the blood of Infidels. Talk as long as

you will of the joys of heaven, or pains of hell, and turn from

yourselves the terror of that judgment how you will, which shall

bereave blushing iniquity of the fig-leaves of hypocrisy, yet

will the eye of immortality discern of your painted pollutions,

as the ever-living food of perdition. The humours of my eyes are

the habitations of fountains, and the circumference of my heart

the enclosure of fearful contrition, when I think how many souls

at that moment shall carry the name of Martin on their foreheads

to the vale of confusion, in whose innocent blood thou swimming

to hell, shalt have the torments of ten thousand thousand sinners

at once, inflicted upon thee. There will envy, malice, and

dissimulation be ever calling for vengeance against thee, and

incite whole legions of devils to thy deathless lamentation.

Mercy will say unto thee, I know thee not, and Repentance, what

have I to do with thee? All hopes shall shake the head at thee,

and say: there goes the poison of purity, the perfection of

impiety, the serpentine seducer of simplicity. Zeal herself will

cry out upon thee, and curse the time that ever she was mashed by

thy malice, who like a blind leader of the blind, sufferedst her

to stumble at every step in Religion, and madest her seek in the

dimness of her sight, to murder her mother the Church, from whose

paps thou like an envious dog but yesterday pluckedst her.

However, proud scorner, thy whorish impudency may happen

hereafter to insist in the derision of these fearful

denunciations, and sport thy jester's pen at the speech of my

soul, yet take heed least despair be predominant in the day of

thy death, and thou instead of calling for mercy to thy Jesus,

repeat more oftener to thyself, _Sic morior damnatus ut Judas_!

And thus much, Martin, in the way of compassion, have I spoke for

thy edification, moved thereto by a brotherly commiseration,

which if thou be not too desperate in thy devilish attempts, may

reform thy heart to remorse, and thy pamphlets to some more

profitable theme of repentance."

If Martin Marprelate is compared with the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_

earlier, or the _Satire Menippee_ very little later, the want of polish and

directness about contemporary English satire will be strikingly apparent.

At the same time he does not compare badly with his own antagonists. The

divines like Cooper are, as has been said, too serious. The men of letters

like Lyly and Nash are not nearly serious enough, though some exception may

be made for Nash, especially if _Pasquil's Apology_ be his. They out-Martin

Martin himself in mere abusiveness, in deliberate quaintness of phrase, in

fantastic vapourings and promises of the dreadful things that are going to

be done to the enemy. They deal some shrewd hits at the glaring faults of

their subject, his outrageous abuse of authorities, his profanity, his

ribaldry, his irrelevance; but in point of the three last qualities there

is not much to choose between him and them. One line of counter attack they

did indeed hit upon, which was followed up for generations with no small

success against the Nonconformists, and that is the charge of hypocritical

abuse of the influence which the Nonconformist teachers early acquired over

women. The germs of the unmatched passages to this effect in _The Tale of a

Tub_ may be found in the rough horseplay of _Pap with a Hatchet_ and _An

Almond for a Parrot_. But the spirit of the whole controversy is in fact a

spirit of horseplay. Abuse takes the place of sarcasm, Rabelaisian

luxuriance of words the place of the plain hard hitting, with no flourishes

or capers, but with every blow given straight from the shoulder, which

Dryden and Halifax, Swift and Bentley, were to introduce into English

controversy a hundred years later. The peculiar exuberance of Elizabethan

literature, evident in all its departments, is nowhere more evident than in

this department of the prose pamphlet, and in no section of that department

is it more evident than in the Tracts of the Martin Marprelate Controversy.

Never perhaps were more wild and whirling words used about any exceedingly

serious and highly technical matter of discussion; and probably most

readers who have ventured into the midst of the tussle will sympathise with

the adjuration of _Plain Percivall the Peacemaker of England_ (supposed to

be Richard Harvey, brother of Gabriel, who was himself not entirely free

from suspicion of concernment in the matter), "My masters, that strive for

this supernatural art of wrangling, let all be husht and quiet a-God's

name." It is needless to say that the disputants did not comply with Plain

Percivall's request. Indeed they bestowed some of their choicest abuse on

him in return for his advice. Not even by the casting of the most

peacemaking of all dust, that of years and the grave, can it be said that

these jars at last _compacta quiescunt_. For it is difficult to find any

account of the transaction which does not break out sooner or later into

strong language.