Vast erudition, without the tact of good sense, in a voluminous
author, what a calamity! for to such a mind no subject can present
itself on which he is unprepared to write, and none at the same time
on which he can ever write reasonably. The name and the works of
WILLIAM PRYNNE have often come under the eye of the reader; but it is
even now difficult to discover his real character; for Prynne stood so
completely insulated amid all parties, that he was ridiculed by his
friends, and execrated by his enemies. The exuberance of his fertile
pen, the strangeness and the manner of his subjects, and his
pertinacity in voluminous publication, are known, and are nearly
unparalleled in literary history.
Could the man himself be separated from the author, Prynne would not
appear ridiculous; but the unlucky author of nearly two hundred
works,[102] and who, as Wood quaintly computes, "must have written a
sheet every day of his life, reckoning from the time that he came to
the use of reason and the state of man," has involved his life in his
authorship; the greatness of his character loses itself in his
voluminous works; and whatever Prynne may have been in his own age,
and remains to posterity, he was fated to endure all the calamities of
an author who has strained learning into absurdity, and abused zealous
industry by chimerical speculation.
Yet his activity, and the firmness and intrepidity of his character
in public life, were as ardent as they were in his study--his soul
was Roman; and Eachard says, that Charles II., who could not but
admire his earnest honesty, his copious learning, and the public
persecutions he suffered, and the ten imprisonments he endured,
inflicted by all parties, dignified him with the title of "the
Cato of the Age;" and one of his own party facetiously described
him as "William the Conqueror," a title he had most hardly earned
by his inflexible and invincible nature. Twice he had been cropped of
his ears; for at the first time the executioner having spared the
two fragments, the inhuman judge on his second trial discovering them
with astonishment, ordered them to be most unmercifully cropped--then
he was burned on his cheek, and ruinously fined and imprisoned in a
remote solitude,[103]--but had they torn him limb by limb, Prynne had
been in his mind a very polypus, which, cut into pieces, still loses
none of its individuality.
His conduct on the last of these occasions, when sentenced to be
stigmatised, and to have his ears cut close, must be noticed. Turning
to the executioner, he calmly invited him to do his duty--"Come,
friend, come, burn me! cut me! I fear not! I have learned to fear the
fire of hell, and not what man can do unto me; come, scar me! scar
me!" In Prynne this was not ferocity, but heroism; Bastwick was
intrepid out of spite, and Burton from fanaticism. The executioner had
been urged not to spare his victims, and he performed his office with
extraordinary severity, cruelly heating his iron twice, and cutting
one of Prynne's ears so close, as to take away a piece of the cheek.
Prynne stirred not in the torture; and when it was done, smiled,
observing, "The more I am beaten down, the more I am lift up." After
this punishment, in going to the Tower by water, he composed the
following verses on the two letters branded on his cheek, S. L., for
schismatical libeller, but which Prynne chose to translate "Stigmata
Laudis," the stigmas of his enemy, the Archbishop Laud.
Stigmata maxillis referens insignia LAUDIS,
Exultans remeo, victima grata Deo.
The heroic man, who could endure agony and insult, and even thus
commemorate his sufferings, with no unpoetical conception, almost
degrades his own sublimity when the poetaster sets our teeth on edge
by his verse.
Bearing Laud's stamps on my cheeks I retire
Triumphing, God's sweet sacrifice by fire.
The triumph of this unconquered being was, indeed, signal. History
scarcely exhibits so wonderful a reverse of fortune, and so strict a
retribution, as occurred at this eventful period. He who had borne
from the archbishop and the lords in the Star Chamber the most
virulent invectives, wishing them at that instant seriously to
consider that some who sat there on the bench might yet stand
prisoners at the bar, and need the favour they now denied, at length
saw the prediction completely verified. What were the feelings of
Laud, when Prynne, returning from his prison of Mount Orgueil in
triumph, the road strewed with boughs, amid the acclamations of the
people, entered the apartment in the Tower which the venerable Laud
now in his turn occupied. The unsparing Puritan sternly performed the
office of rifling his papers,[104] and persecuted the helpless prelate
till he led him to the block. Prynne, to use his own words, for he
could be eloquent when moved by passion, "had struck proud Canterbury
to the heart; and had undermined all his prelatical designs to advance
the bishops' pomp and power;"[105] Prynne triumphed--but, even this
austere Puritan soon grieved over the calamities he had contributed to
inflict on the nation; and, with a humane feeling, he once wished,
that "when they had cut off his ears, they had cut off his head." He
closed his political existence by becoming an advocate for the
Restoration; but, with his accustomed want of judgment and intemperate
zeal, had nearly injured the cause by his premature activity. At the
Restoration some difficulty occurred to dispose of "busie Mr. Pryn,"
as Whitelocke calls him. It is said he wished to be one of the Barons
of the Exchequer, but he was made the Keeper of the Records in the
Tower, "purposely to employ his head from scribbling against the state
and bishops;" where they put him to clear the Augean stable of our
national antiquities, and see whether they could weary out his
restless vigour. Prynne had, indeed, written till he found no
antagonist would reply; and now he rioted in leafy folios, and proved
himself to be one of the greatest paper-worms which ever crept into
old books and mouldy records.[106]
The literary character of Prynne is described by the happy epithet which
Anthony Wood applies to him, "Voluminous Prynne." His great
characteristic is opposed to that axiom of Hesiod so often quoted, that
"half is better than the whole;" a secret which the matter-of-fact
men rarely discover. Wanting judgment, and the tact of good sense,
these detailers have no power of selection from their stores, to make
one prominent fact represent the hundred minuter ones that may follow
it. Voluminously feeble, they imagine expansion is stronger than
compression; and know not to generalise, while they only can deal in
particulars. Prynne's speeches were just as voluminous as his
writings; always deficient in judgment, and abounding in knowledge--he
was always wearying others, but never could himself. He once made a
speech to the House, to persuade them the king's concessions were
sufficient ground for a treaty; it contains a complete narrative of
all the transactions between the king, the Houses, and the army, from
the beginning of the parliament; it takes up 140 octavo pages, and kept
the house so long together, that the debates lasted from Monday
morning till Tuesday morning!
Prynne's literary character may be illustrated by his singular book,
"Histriomastix,"--where we observe how an author's exuberant learning,
like corn heaped in a granary, grows rank and musty, by a want of
power to ventilate and stir about the heavy mass.
This paper-worm may first be viewed in his study, as painted by the
picturesque Anthony Wood; an artist in the Flemish school:--
"His custom, when he studied, was to put on a long quilted cap, which
came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from
too much light, and _seldom eating any dinner_, would be every three
hours maunching a roll of bread, and now and then refresh his
exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant;" a custom to
which Butler alludes,
Thou that with ale, or viler liquors,
Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, and Vicars,
And force them, though it were in spite
Of nature, and their stars, to write.
The "HISTRIOMASTIX, the Player's Scourge, or Actor's Tragedie," is a
ponderous quarto, ascending to about 1100 pages; a Puritan's invective
against plays and players, accusing them of every kind of crime,
including libels against Church and State;[107] but it is more
remarkable for the incalculable quotations and references foaming over
the margins. Prynne scarcely ventures on the most trivial opinion,
without calling to his aid whatever had been said in all nations and
in all ages; and Cicero, and Master Stubbs, Petrarch and Minutius
Felix, Isaiah and Froissart's Chronicle, oddly associate in the
ravings of erudition. Who, indeed, but the author "who seldom dined,"
could have quoted perhaps a thousand writers in one volume?[108] A wit
of the times remarked of this _Helluo librorum_, that "Nature makes
ever the dullest beasts most laborious, and the greatest feeders;" and
Prynne has been reproached with a weak digestion, for "returning
things unaltered, which is a symptom of a feeble stomach."
When we examine this volume, often alluded to, the birth of the
monster seems prodigious and mysterious; it combines two opposite
qualities; it is so elaborate in its researches among the thousand
authors quoted, that these required years to accumulate, and yet the
matter is often temporary, and levelled at fugitive events and
particular persons; thus the very formation of this mighty volume
seems paradoxical. The secret history of this book is as extraordinary
as the book itself, and is a remarkable evidence how, in a work of
immense erudition, the arts of a wily sage involved himself, and
whoever was concerned in his book, in total ruin. The author was
pilloried, fined, and imprisoned; his publisher condemned in the
penalty of five hundred pounds, and barred for ever from printing and
selling books, and the licenser removed and punished. Such was the
fatality attending the book of a man whose literary voracity produced
one of the most tremendous indigestions, in a malady of writing.
It was on examining Prynne's trial I discovered the secret history of
the "Histriomastix." Prynne was seven years in writing this work, and,
what is almost incredible, it was near four years passing through the
press. During that interval the eternal scribbler was daily gorging
himself with voluminous food, and daily fattening his cooped-up capon.
The temporary sedition and libels were the gradual Mosaic inlayings
through this shapeless mass.
It appears that the volume of 1100 quarto pages originally consisted
of little more than a quire of paper; but Prynne found insuperable
difficulties in procuring a licenser, even for this infant Hercules.
Dr. Goode deposed that--
"About eight years ago Mr. Prynne brought to him a quire of paper to
license, which he refused; and he recollected the circumstance by
having held an argument with Prynne on his severe reprehension on the
unlawfulness of a man to put on women's apparel, which, the
good-humoured doctor asserted was not always unlawful; for suppose Mr.
Prynne yourself, as a Christian, was persecuted by pagans, think you
not if you disguised yourself in your maid's apparel, you did well?
Prynne sternly answered that he thought himself bound rather to yield
to death than to do so."