and let the sun shine as gloriously as it may on the golden vanes, or the
arms recently quartered over the gateway, or the embayed window, and on
the happy pair that haply is toying at it; nevertheless, thou mayest say
that of a certainty the same fabric hath seen much sorrow within its
chambers, and heard many wailings; and each time this was the heaviest
stroke of all. Funerals have passed along through the stout-hearted
knights upon the wainscot, and amidst the laughing nymphs upon the arras.
Old servants have shaken their heads, as if somebody had deceived them,
when they found that beauty and nobility could perish.
“Edmund! the things that are too true pass by us as if they were not true
at all; and when they have singled us out, then only do they strike us.
Thou and I must go too. Perhaps the next year may blow us away with its
fallen leaves.” {217}
SPENSER.
“For you, my lord, many years (I trust) are waiting; I never shall see
those fallen leaves. No leaf, no bud will spring upon the earth before I
sink into her breast for ever.”
ESSEX.
“Thou, who art wiser than most men, shouldst bear with patience,
equanimity, and courage, what is common to all.”
SPENSER.
“Enough! enough! enough! Have all men seen their infant burnt to ashes
before their eyes?”
MEMORANDUM BY EPHRAIM BARNETT.
WRITTEN UPON THE INNER COVER.
STUDYING the benefit and advantage of such as by God’s blessing may come
after me, and willing to shew them the highways of Providence from the
narrow by-lane in the which it hath been his pleasure to station me, and
being now advanced full-nigh unto the close and consummation of my
earthly pilgrimage, methinks I cannot do better, at this juncture, than
preserve the looser and lesser records of those who have gone before me
in the same, with higher heel-piece to their shoe and more polished
scallop to their beaver. And here, beforehand, let us think gravely and
religiously on what the pagans, in their blindness, did call fortune,
making a goddess of her, and saying,—
“One body she lifts up so high
And suddenly, she makes him cry
And scream as any wench might do
That you should play the rogue unto.
And the same Lady Light sees good
To drop another in the mud,
Against all hope and likelihood.” {221}
My kinsman, Jacob Eldridge, having been taught by me, among other useful
things, to write a fair and laudable hand, was recommended and introduced
by our worthy townsman, Master Thomas Greene, unto the Earl of Essex, to
keep his accounts, and to write down sundry matters from his dictation,
even letters occasionally. For although our nobility, very unlike the
French, not only can read and write, but often do, yet some from
generosity, and some from dignity, keep in their employment what those
who are illiterate, and would not appear so, call an _amanuensis_,
thereby meaning _secretary_ or _scribe_. Now it happened that our
gracious queen’s highness was desirous of knowing all that could be known
about the Rebellion in Ireland; and hearing but little truth from her
nobility in that country, even the fathers in God inclining more unto
court favour than will be readily believed of spiritual lords, and
moulding their ductile depositions on the pasteboard of their temporal
mistress, until she was angry at seeing the lawn-sleeves so besmirched
from wrist to elbow, she herself did say unto the Earl of Essex,—
“Essex! these fellows lie! I am inclined to unfrock and scourge them
sorely for their leasings. Of that anon. Find out, if you can, somebody
who hath his wit and his honesty about him at the same time. I know that
when one of these paniers is full the other is apt to be empty, and that
men walk crookedly for want of balance. No matter—we must search and
find. Persuade—thou canst persuade, Essex!—say any thing, do any thing.
We must talk gold and give—iron. Dost understand me?”
The earl did kiss the jewels upon the dread fingers, for only the last
joint of each is visible; and surely no mortal was ever so foolhardy as
to take such a monstrous liberty as touching it, except in spirit! On
the next day there did arrive many fugitives from Ireland; and among the
rest was Master Edmund Spenser, known even in those parts for his rich
vein of poetry, in which he is declared by our best judges to excel the
noblest of the ancients, and to leave all the moderns at his feet.
Whether he notified his arrival unto the earl, or whether fame brought
the notice thereof unto his lordship, Jacob knoweth not. But early in
the morrow did the earl send for Jacob, and say unto him,—
“Eldridge! thou must write fairly and clearly out, and in somewhat large
letters, and in lines somewhat wide apart, all that thou hearest of the
conversation I shall hold with a gentleman from Ireland. Take this gilt
and illumined vellum, and albeit the civet make thee sick fifty times,
write upon it all that passes! Come not out of the closet until the
gentleman hath gone homeward. The queen requireth much exactness; and
this is equally a man of genius, a man of business, and a man of worth.
I expect from him not only what is true, but what is the most important
and necessary to understand rightly and completely; and nobody in
existence is more capable of giving me both information and advice.
Perhaps if he thought another were within hearing he would be offended or
over-cautious. His delicacy and mine are warranted safe and sound by the
observance of those commands which I am delivering unto thee.”
It happened that no information was given in this conference relating to
the movements or designs of the rebels. So that Master Jacob Eldridge
was left possessor of the costly vellum, which, now Master Spenser is
departed this life, I keep as a memorial of him, albeit oftener than once
I have taken pounce box and penknife in hand, in order to make it a fit
and proper vehicle for my own very best writing. But I pretermitted it,
finding that my hand is no longer the hand it was, or rather that the
breed of geese is very much degenerated, and that their quills, like
men’s manners, are grown softer and flaccider. Where it will end God
only knows; I shall not live to see it.
Alas, poor Jacob Eldridge! he little thought that within twelve months
his glorious master, and the scarcely less glorious poet, would be no
more! In the third week of the following year was Master Edmund buried
at the charges of the earl; and within these few days hath this lofty
nobleman bowed his head under the axe of God’s displeasure,—such being
our gracious queen’s. My kinsman Jacob sent unto me by the Alcester
drover, old Clem Fisher, this, among other papers, fearing the wrath of
that offended highness which allowed not her own sweet disposition to
question or thwart the will divine. Jacob did likewise tell me in his
letter that he was sure I should be happy to hear the success of William
Shakspeare, our townsman. And in truth right glad was I to hear of it,
being a principal in bringing it about, as those several sheets will shew
which have the broken tile laid upon them to keep them down compactly.
Jacob’s words are these:—
“Now I speak of poets, you will be in a maze at hearing that our townsman
hath written a power of matter for the playhouse. Neither he nor the
booksellers think it quite good enough to print; but I do assure you, on
the faith of a Christian, it is not bad; and there is rare fun in the
last thing of his about Venus, where a Jew, one Shiloh, is choused out of
his money and his revenge. However, the best critics and the greatest
lords find fault, and very justly, in the words,—
“‘Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the
same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?’
“Surely, this is very unchristianlike. Nay, for supposition sake,
suppose it to be true, was it his business to tell the people so? Was it
his duty to ring the crier’s bell and cry to them, _The sorry Jews are
quite as much men as you are_? The impudentest thing (excepting some
bauderies) that ever came from the stage! The church, luckily, has let
him alone for the present; and the queen winks upon it. The best defence
he can make for himself is that it comes from the mouth of a Jew, who
says many other things as abominable. Master Greene may overrate him;
but Master Greene declares that if William goes on improving and taking
his advice, it will be desperate hard work in another seven years to find
so many as half a dozen chaps equal to him within the liberties. Master
Greene and myself took him with us to see the burial of Master Edmund
Spenser in Westminster Abbey, on the 19th of January last. The
halberdmen pushed us back as having no business there. Master Greene
told them he belonged to the queen’s company of players. William
Shakspeare could have said the same, but did not. And I, fearing that
Master Greene and he might be halberded back into the crowd, shewed the
badge of the Earl of Essex. Whereupon did the serjeant ground his
halberd, and say unto me,—
“‘That badge commands admittance everywhere; your folk likewise may come
in.’
“Master Greene was red-hot angry, and told me he would bring him before
the _council_.
“William smiled, and Master Greene said,—
“‘Why! would not you, if you were in my place?’
“He replied,—
“‘I am an half inclined to do worse,—to bring him before the _audience_
some spare hour.’
“At the close of the burial-service all the poets of the age threw their
pens into the grave, together with the pieces they had composed in praise
or lamentation of the deceased. William Shakspeare was the only poet who
abstained from throwing in either pen or poem,—at which no one marvelled,
he being of low estate, and the others not having yet taken him by the
hand. Yet many authors recognised him, not indeed as author, but as
player; and one, civiller than the rest, came up unto him triumphantly,
his eyes sparkling with glee and satisfaction, and said, consolatorily,—
“‘In due time, my honest friend, you may be admitted to do as much for
one of us.’
“‘After such encouragement,’ replied our townsman, ‘I am bound in duty to
give you the preference, should I indeed be worthy.’
“‘This was the only smart thing he uttered all the remainder of the day;
during the whole of it he appeared to be half-lost, I know not whether in
melancholy or in meditation, and soon left us.”
Here endeth all that my kinsman Jacob wrote about William Shakspeare,
saving and excepting his excuse for having written so much. The rest of
his letter was on a matter of wider and weightier import, namely, on the
price of Cotteswolde cheese at Evesham fair. And yet, although ingenious
men be not among the necessaries of life, there is something in them that
makes us curious in regard to their goings and doings. It were to be
wished that some of them had attempted to be better accountants; and
others do appear to have laid aside the copybook full early in the day.
Nevertheless, they have their uses and their merits. Master Eldridge’s
letter is the wrapper of much wholesome food for contemplation. Although
the decease (within so brief a period) of such a poet as Master Spenser,
and such a patron as the earl, be unto us appalling, we laud and magnify
the great Disposer of events, no less for his goodness in raising the
humble than for his power in extinguishing the great. And peradventure
ye, my heirs and descendants, who shall read with due attention what my
pen now writeth, will say, with the royal Psalmist, that it inditeth of a
good matter, when it sheweth unto you that, whereas it pleased the
queen’s highness to send a great lord before the judgment-seat of Heaven,
having fitted him by means of such earthly instruments as princes in like
cases do usually employ, and deeming (no doubt) in her princely heart
that by such shrewd tonsure his head would be best fitted for a crown of
glory, and thus doing all that she did out of the purest and most
considerate love for him,—it likewise hath pleased her highness to use
her right hand as freely as her left, and to raise up a second burgess of
our town to be one of her company of players. And ye, also, by industry
and loyalty, may cheerfully hope for promotion in your callings, and come
up (some of you) as nearly to him in the presence of royalty, as he
cometh up (far off, indeed, at present) to the great and wonderful poet
who lies dead among more spices than any phœnix, and more quills than any
porcupine. If this thought may not prick and incitate you, little is to
be hoped from any gentle admonition, or any earnest expostulation, of
Your loving friend and kinsman,
E. B.
ANNO ÆT. SUÆ 74, DOM. 1599,
DECEMB. 16;
GLORIA DP. DF. ET DSS.
AMOR VERSUS VIRGINEM REGINAM!
PROTESTANTICE LOQUOR ET HONESTO SENSU:
OBTESTOR CONSCIENTIAM MEAM!
* * * * *
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
FOOTNOTES
{8a} Quicken, bring to life.
{8b} Debtors were often let out of prison at the coronation of a new
king; but creditors never paid by him.
{21a} The word here omitted is quite illegible. It appears to have some
reference to the language of the Highlanders. That it was rough and
outlandish is apparent from the reprimand of Sir Thomas.
{29a} By this deposition it would appear that Shakspeare had formed the
idea, if not the outline, of several plays already, much as he altered
them, no doubt, in after life.
{38a} The greater part of the value of the present work arises from the
certain information it affords us on the price of small needles in the
reign of Elizabeth. Fine needles in her days were made only at Liege,
and some few cities in the Netherlands, and may be reckoned among those
things which were much dearer than they are now.
{39b} Mr. Tooke had not yet published his _Pantheon_.
{44a} This was really the case within our memory.
{45a} It was formerly thought, and perhaps is thought still, that the
hand of a man recently hanged, being rubbed on the tumour of the king’s
evil, was able to cure it. The crown and the gallows divided the glory
of the sovereign remedy.
{46a} And yet he never did sail any farther than into Bohemia.
{50a} _Smock_, formerly a part of the female dress, corresponding with
_shroud_, or what we now call (or lately called) _shirt_ of the man’s.
Fox, speaking of Latimer’s burning, says, “Being slipped into his
_shroud_.”
{50b} Faith nailing the ears is a strong and sacred metaphor. The rhyme
is imperfect,—Shakspeare was not always attentive to these minor
beauties.
{53a} Shakspeare seems to have profited afterward by this metaphor, even
more perhaps than by all the direct pieces of instruction in poetry given
him so handsomely by the worthy knight. And here it may be permitted the
editor to profit also by the manuscript, correcting in Shakspeare what is
absolute nonsense as now printed:—
“_Vaulting_ ambition that o’erleaps _itself_.”
It should be its _sell_. _Sell_ is _saddle_ in Spenser and elsewhere,
from the Latin and Italian.
This emendation was shewn to the late Mr. Hazlitt, an acute man at least,
who expressed his conviction that it was the right reading, and added
somewhat more in approbation of it.
{55a} It has been suggested that this answer was borrowed from Virgil,
and goes strongly against the genuineness of the manuscript. The
Editor’s memory was upon the stretch to recollect the words; the learned
critic supplied them:—
“Solum Æneas vocat: _et vocet_, oro.”
The Editor could only reply, indeed weakly, that _calling_ and _waiting_
are not exactly the same, unless when tradesmen rap and gentlemen are
leaving town.
{66a} Here the manuscript is blotted; but the probability is that it was
_fishmonger_, rather than _ironmonger_, fishmongers having always been
notorious cheats and liars.
{70a} _On the nail_ appears to be intended to express _ready payment_.
{72a} The Cordilleras are mountains, we know, running through South
America. Perhaps a pun was intended; or possibly it might, in the age of
Elizabeth, have been a vulgar term for _hanging_, although we find no
trace of the expression in other books. We have no clue to guide us
here. It might be suggested that Shakspeare, who shines little in
geographical knowledge, fancied the Cordilleras to extend into North
America, had convicts in his time been transported to those colonies.
Certainly, many adventurers and desperate men went thither.
{89a} In that age there was prevalent a sort of cholera, on which
Fracastorius, half a century before, wrote a Latin poem, employing the
graceful nymphs of Homer and Hesiod, somewhat disguised, in the drudgery
of pounding certain barks and minerals. An article in the Impeachment of
Cardinal Wolsey accuses him of breathing in the king’s face, knowing that
he was affected with this cholera. It was a great assistant to the
Reformation, by removing some of the most vigorous champions that opposed
it. In the Holy College it was followed by the _sweating sickness_,
which thinned it very sorely; and several even of God’s vicegerents were
laid under tribulation by it. Among the chambers of the Vatican it hung
for ages, and it crowned the labours of Pope Leo XII., of blessed memory,
with a crown somewhat uneasy.
{105a} Sir Thomas seems to have been jealous of these two towers,
certainly the finest in England. If Warwick Castle could borrow the
windows from Kenilworth, it would be complete. The knight is not very
courteous on its hospitality. He may, perhaps, have experienced it, as
Garrick and Quin did under the present occupant’s grandfather, on whom
the title of Earl of Warwick was conferred for the eminent services he
had rendered to his country as one of the lords of the bedchamber to his
Majesty George the Second. The verses of Garrick on his invitation and
visit are remembered by many. Quin’s are less known.
He shewed us Guy’s pot, but the soup he forgot;
Not a meal did his lordship allow,
Unless we gnaw’d o’er the blade-bone of the boar,
Or the rib of the famous _Dun Cow_.
When Nevile the great Earl of Warwick lived here,
Three oxen for breakfast were slain,
And strangers invited to sports and good cheer,
And invited again and again.
This earl is in purse or in spirit so low,
That he with no oxen will feed ’em;
And all of the former great doings we know
Is, he gives us a book and we read ’em.
GARRICK.
_Stale_ peers are but tough morsels, and ’t were well
If we had found the _fresh_ more eatable;
Garrick! I do not say ’t were well for _him_,
For we had pluck’d the plover limb from limb.
QUIN.
{106a} Another untoward blot! but leaving no doubt of the word. The
only doubt is whether he meant the _muzzle_ of the animal itself, or one
of those leathern muzzles which are often employed to coerce the violence
of ferocious animals. In besieged cities men have been reduced to such
extremities. But the _muzzle_, in this place, we suspect, would more
properly be called the _blinker_, which is often put upon bulls in
pastures when they are vicious.
{108a} This would countenance the opinion of those who are inclined to
believe that Shakspeare was a Roman Catholic. His hatred and contempt of
priests, which are demonstrated wherever he has introduced them, may have
originated from the unfairness of Silas Gough. Nothing of that kind, we
may believe, had occurred to him from friars and monks, whom he treats
respectfully and kindly, perhaps in return for some such services to
himself as Friar Lawrence had bestowed on Romeo,—or rather less; for
Shakspeare was grateful. The words quoted by him from some sermon, now
lost, prove him no friend to the filchings and swindling of popery.
{111a} It is a pity that the old divines should have indulged, as they
often did, in such images as this. Some readers in search of
argumentative subtility, some in search of sound Christianity, some in
search of pure English undefiled, have gone through with them; and their
labours (however heavy) have been well repaid.
{124a} _Tilley valley_ was the favourite adjuration of James the Second.
It appears in the comedies of Shakspeare.
{133a} _Whoreson_, if we may hazard a conjecture, means the son of a
woman of ill-repute. In this we are borne out by the context. It
appears to have escaped the commentators on Shakspeare.
_Whoreson_, a word of frequent occurrence in the comedies; more rarely
found in the tragedies. Although now obsolete, the expression proves
that there were (or were believed to be) such persons formerly.
The Editor is indebted to two learned friends for these two remarks,
which appear no less just than ingenious.
{153a} _Belly-ache_, a disorder once not uncommon in England. Even the
name is now almost forgotten; yet the elder of us may remember at least
the report of it, and some, perhaps, even the complaint itself, in our
school-days. It usually broke out about the cherry season; and in some
cases made its appearance again at the first nutting.
{157a} Sir Thomas borrowed this expression from Spenser, who thus calls
Queen Elizabeth.
{159a} Humboldt notices this.
{164a} _Pragmatical_ here means only _precise_.
{181a} It is doubtful whether Doctor Buckland will agree with Sir Thomas
that these petrifactions are ram’s-horns and lampreys.
{189a} She was then twenty-eight years of age. Sir Thomas must have
spoken of her from earlier recollections. Shakspeare was in his
twentieth year.
{193a} It is to be feared that his taste for venison outlasted that for
matrimony, spite of this vow.
{211} It was purchased by a victualler and banker, the father or
grandfather of Lord Riversdale.
{217} It happened so.
{221} The editor has been unable to discover who was the author of this
very free translation of an Ode in Horace. He is certainly happy in his
amplification of the _stridore acuto_. May it not be surmised that he
was some favourite scholar of Ephraim Barnett?