Shakespeare might hear of it at Stratford, and talk of the prisoner
as he strolled with some friend on the banks of Avon. A greater than
Shakespeare--as most men thought in those days--Ben Jonson himself,
might talk the matter over "at those lyric feasts, Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the triple Tun"; for had not he himself languished in a
worse dungeon and under a heavier charge than Wither? To be
seven-and-twenty, to be in trouble with the Government about one's
verses, and to have other young poets, in a ferment of enthusiasm,
clinging like swallows to the prison-bars--how delicious a torment!
And to know that it will soon be over, and that the sweet, pure
meadows lie just outside the reek of Southwark, that summer lingers
still and that shepherds pipe and play, that Fame is sitting by her
cheerful fountain with a garland for the weary head, and that lasses,
"who more excell Than the sweet-voic'd Philomel," are ready to cluster
round the Interesting captive, and lead him away in daisy-chains--what
could be more consolatory! And we close the little dainty volume, with
its delicate perfume of friendship and poetry and hope.
DEATH'S DUEL
DEATH'S DVELL; _or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying
Life, and living Death of the Body. Delivered in a Sermon at White
Hall, before the King's Maiesty, in the beginning of Lent_, 1630. _By
that late learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne, Dr. in Divinity, &
Deane of S. Pauls, London. Being his last Sermon, and called by his
Maiesties houshold The Doctor's owne Funerall Sermon. London, Printed
by Thomas Harper, for Richard Redmer and Benjamin Fisher, and are to
be sold at the signe of the Talbot in Alders-gate street. MDCXXXII_.
The value of this tiny quarto with the enormous title depends
entirely, so far as the collector is concerned, on whether or no it
possesses the frontispiece. So many people, not having the fear of
books before their eyes, have divorced the latter from the former,
that a perfect copy of _Death's Duel_ is quite a capture over which
the young bibliophile may venture to glory; but let him not fancy that
he has a prize if his copy does not possess the portrait-plate. One
has but to glance for a moment at this frontispiece to see that there
is here something very much out of the common. It is engraved in the
best seventeenth-century style, and represents, apparently, the head
and bust of a dead man wrapped in a winding-sheet. The eyes are shut,
the mouth is drawn, and nothing was ever seen more ghastly.
Yet it is not really the picture of a dead man: it represents the
result of one of the grimmest freaks that ever entered into a pious
mind. In the early part of March 1630 (1631), the great Dr. Donne,
Dean of St. Paul's, being desperately ill, and not likely to recover,
called a wood-carver in to the Deanery, and ordered a small urn, just
large enough to hold his feet, and a board as long as his body, to be
produced. When these articles were ready, they were brought into his
study, which was first warmed, and then the old man stripped off his
clothes, wrapped himself in a winding-sheet which was open only so far
as to reveal the face and beard, and then stood upright in the little
wooden urn, supported by leaning against the board. His limbs were
arranged like those of dead persons, and when his eyes had been
closed, a painter was introduced into the room and desired to make a
full-length and full-size picture of this terrific object, this solemn
theatrical presentment of life in death. The frontispiece of _Death's
Duel_ gives a reproduction of the upper part of this picture. It
was said to be a remarkably truthful portrait of the great poet and
divine, and it certainly agrees in all its proportions with the
accredited portrait of Donne as a young man.
It appears (for Walton's account is not precise) that it was after
standing for this grim picture, but before its being finished, that
the Dean preached his last sermon, that which is here printed. He had
come up from Essex in great physical weakness in order not to miss his
appointment to preach in his cathedral before the King on the first
Friday in Lent. He entered the pulpit with so emaciated a frame and a
face so pale and haggard, and spoke with a voice so faint and hollow,
that at the end the King himself turned to one of his suite, and
whispered, "The Dean has preached his own funeral sermon!" So, indeed,
it proved to be; for he presently withdrew to his bed, and summoned
his friends around to take a solemn farewell. He died very gradually
after about a fortnight, his last words being, not in distress or
anguish, but as it would seem in visionary rapture: "I were miserable
if I might not die." All this fortnight and to the moment of
his death, the terrible life-sized portrait of himself in his
winding-sheet stood near his bedside, where it could be the "hourly
object" of his attention. So one of the greatest Churchmen of the
seventeenth century, and one of the greatest, if the most eccentric,
of its lyrical poets passed away in the very pomp of death, on the
31st of March, 1631.
There was something eminently calculated to arrest and move the
imagination in such an end as this, and people were eager to read the
discourse which the "sacred authority" of his Majesty himself had
styled the Dean's funeral sermon. It was therefore printed in 1632. As
sermons of the period go it is not long, yet it takes a full hour to
read it slowly aloud, and we may thus estimate the strain which it
must have given to the worn-out voice and body of the Dean to deliver
it. The present writer once heard a very eminent Churchman, who was
also a great poet, preach his last sermon, at the age of ninety. This
was the Danish bishop Grundtvig. In that case the effort of speaking,
the extraction, as it seemed, of the sepulchral voice from the
shrunken and ashen face, did not last more than ten minutes. But the
English divines of the Jacobean age, like their Scottish brethren of
to-day, were accustomed to stupendous efforts of endurance from their
very diaconate.
The sermon is one of the most "creepy" fragments of theological
literature it would be easy to find. It takes as its text the words
from the sixty-eighth Psalm: "And unto God the Lord belong the issues
of death." In long, stern sentences of sonorous magnificence, adorned
with fine similes and gorgeous words, as the funeral trappings of a
king might be with gold lace, the dying poet shrinks from no physical
horror and no ghostly terror of the great crisis which he was himself
to be the first to pass through. "That which we call life," he says,
and our blood seems to turn chilly in our veins as we listen, "is but
_Hebdomada mortium_, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of our
life spent in dying, a dying seven times over, and there is an end.
Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth
and rest die in age, and age also dies and determines all. Nor do
all these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth, arise so as a
Phoenix out of the ashes of another Phoenix formerly dead, but as a
wasp or a serpent out of a carrion or as a snake out of dung." We
can comprehend how an audience composed of men and women whose
ne'er-do-weel relatives went to the theatre to be stirred by such
tragedies as those of Marston and Cyril Tourneur would themselves
snatch a sacred pleasure from awful language of this kind in the
pulpit. There is not much that we should call doctrine, no pensive
or consolatory teaching, no appeal to souls in the modern sense. The
effect aimed at is that of horror, of solemn preparation for the
advent of death, as by one who fears, in the flutter of mortality, to
lose some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the vast crooked
scythe of the spectre. The most ingenious of poets, the most subtle of
divines, whose life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible of
his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very last
his powers of unflinching spiritual observation. The Dean of St.
Paul's, whose reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely sufficed
to shelter him from scandal on the ground of his fantastic defence of
suicide, was familiar with the idea of Death, and greeted him as a
welcome old friend whose face he was glad to look on long and closely.
The leaves at the end of this little book are filled up with two
copies of funeral verses on Dean Donne. These are unsigned, but we
know from other sources to whom to attribute them. Each is by an
eminent man. The first was written by Dr. Henry King, then the royal
chaplain, and afterward Bishop of Chichester, to whom the Dean had
left, besides a model in gold of the Synod of Dort, that painting of
himself in the winding-sheet of which we have already spoken. This
portrait Dr. King put into the hands of Nicholas Stone, the sculptor,
who made a reproduction of it in white marble, with the little urn
concealing the feet. This was placed in St. Paul's Cathedral, of which
King was chief residentiary, and may still be seen in the present
Cathedral King's elegy is very prosy in starting, but improves as it
goes along, and is most ingenious throughout. These are the words in
which he refers to the appearance of the dying preacher in the pulpit:
_Thou (like the dying Swan) didst lately sing
Thy mournful dirge in audience of the King;
When pale looks, and weak accents of thy breath
Presented so to life that piece of death,
That it was feared and prophesied by all
Thou thither cam'st to preach thy funeral_.
The other elegy is believed to have been written by a young man of
twenty-one, who was modestly and enthusiastically seeking the company
of the most famous London wits. This was Edward Hyde, thirty years
later to become Earl of Clarendon, and finally to leave behind him
manuscripts which should prove him the first great English historian.
His verses here bespeak his good intention, but no facility in
rhyming.
It was left for the riper disciples of the great divine to sing his
funerals in more effective numbers. Of the crowd of poets who attended
him with music to the grave, none expressed his merits in such
excellent verses or with so much critical judgment as Thomas Carew,
the king's sewer in ordinary. It is not so well known but that we
quote some lines from it:
_The fire
That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic choir,
Which, kindled first by thy Promethean breath,
Glow'd here awhile, lies quench'd now in thy death.
The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
O'erspread, was purg'd by thee, the lazy seeds
Of servile imitation thrown away,
And fresh invention planted; thou disdt pay
The debts of our penurious bankrupt age_.
* * * * *
_Whatsoever wrong
By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue,
Thou hast redeem'd, and opened us a mine
Of rich and pregnant fancy, drawn a line
Of masculine expression, which, had good
Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood
Our superstitious fools admire, and hold
Their lead more precious than thy burnish'd gold,
Thou hadst been their exchequer....
Let others carve the rest; it will suffice
I on thy grave this epitaph incise:--
Here lies a King, that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit;
Here lies two Flamens, and both these the best,--
Apollo's first, at last the True God's priest_.
There was no full memoir of Dr. Donne until it was the privilege of
the present writer, in 1900, to publish his Life and Letters in two
substantial volumes. Since then, in 1912, his Poetical Works have been
edited and sifted, with remarkable delicacy and judgment, by Professor
Grierson. It is now, therefore, as easy as it can be expected ever to
be to follow the career of this extraordinary man, with all its cold
and hot fits, its rage of lyrical amativeness, its Roman passion, and
the high and clouded austerity of its final Anglicanism. Donne is one
of the most fascinating, in some ways one of the most inscrutable,
figures in our literature, and we may contemplate him with instruction
from his first wild escapade into the Azores down to his voluntary
penitence in the pulpit and the winding-sheet.
GERARD'S HERBAL
THE HERBALL _or General Historie of Plantes. Gathered by John Gerarde,
of London, Master in Chirurgerie. Very much enlarged and amended by
Thomas Johnson, citizen and apothecarye of London. London, Printed by
Adam Islip, Joice Norton, and Richard Whitakers. Anno_ 1633.
The proverb says that a door must be either open or shut. The
bibliophile is apt to think that a book should be either little or
big. For my own part, I become more and more attached to "dumpy
twelves"; but that does not preclude a certain discreet fondness
for folios. If a man collects books, his library ought to contain a
Herbal; and if he has but room for one, that should be the best.
The luxurious and sufficient thing, I think, is to possess what
booksellers call "the right edition of Gerard"; that is to say, the
volume described at the head of this paper. There is no handsomer book
to be found, none more stately or imposing, than this magnificent
folio of sixteen hundred pages, with its close, elaborate letterpress,
its innumerable plates, and John Payne's fine frontispiece in
compartments, with Theophrastus and Dioscorides facing one another,
and the author below them, holding in his right hand the new-found
treasure of the potato plant.
This edition of 1633 is the final development of what had been a slow
growth. The sixteenth century witnessed a great revival, almost a
creation of the science of botany. People began to translate the great
_Materia Medica_ of the Greek physician, Dioscorides of Anazarba, and
to comment upon it. The Germans were the first to append woodcuts to
their botanical descriptions, and it is Otto Brunfelsius, in 1530, who
has the credit of being the originator of such figures. In 1554 there
was published the first great Herbal, that of Rembertus Dodonaeus,
body-physician to the Emperor Maximilian II., who wrote in Dutch. An
English translation of this, brought out in 1578, by Henry Lyte, was
the earliest important Herbal in our language. Five years later, in
1583, a certain Dr. Priest translated all the botanical works of
Dodonaeus, with much greater fulness than Lyte had done, and this
volume was the germ of Gerard's far more famous production. John
Gerard was a Cheshire man, born in 1545, who came up to London, and
practised there as a surgeon.
According to his editor and continuator, Thomas Johnson, who speaks of
Gerard with startling freedom, this excellent man was by no means well
equipped for the task of compiling a great Herbal. He knew so little
Latin, according to this too candid friend, that he imagined Leonard
Fuchsius, who was a German contemporary of his own, to be one of the
ancients. But Johnson is a little too zealous in magnifying his own
office. He brings a worse accusation against Gerard, if I understand
him rightly to charge him with using Dr. Priest's manuscript
collections after his death, without giving that physician the credit
of his labours. When Johnson made this accusation, Gerard had been
dead twenty-six years. In any case it seems certain that Gerard's
original _Herbal_, which, beyond question, surpassed all its
predecessors when it was printed in folio in 1597, was built up upon
the ground-work of Priest's translation of Dodonaeus. Nearly forty
years later, Thomas Johnson, himself a celebrated botanist, took up
the book, and spared no pains to reissue it in perfect form. The
result is the great volume before us, an elephant among books, the
noblest of all the English Herbals. Johnson was seventy-two years of
age when he got this gigantic work off his hands, and he lived eleven
years longer to enjoy his legitimate success.
The great charm of this book at the present time consists in the
copious woodcuts. Of these there are more than two thousand, each a
careful and original study from the plant itself. In the course of two
centuries and a half, with all the advance in appliances, we have not
improved a whit on the original artist of Gerard's and Johnson's time.
The drawings are all in strong outline, with very little attempt at
shading, but the characteristics of each plant are given with a truth
and a simplicity which are almost Japanese. In no case is this more
extraordinary than in that of the orchids, or "satyrions," as they
were called in the days of the old herbalist. Here, in a succession of
little figures, each not more than six inches high, the peculiarity of
every portion of a full-grown flowering specimen of each species is
given with absolute perfection, without being slurred over on the one
hand, or exaggerated on the other. For instance, the little variety
called "ladies' tresses" [_Spiranthes_], which throws a spiral head of
pale green blossoms out of dry pastures, appears here with small bells
hanging on a twisted stem, as accurately as the best photograph could
give it, although the process of woodcutting, as then practised
in England, was very rude, and although almost all other English
illustrations of the period are rough and inartistic. It is plain that
in every instance the botanist himself drew the form, with which he
was already intelligently familiar, on the block, with the living
plant lying at his side.
The plan on which the herbalist lays out his letterpress is methodical
in the extreme. He begins by describing his plant, then gives its
habitat, then discusses its nomenclature, and ends with a medical
account of its nature and virtues. It is, of course, to be expected
that we should find the line old names of plants enshrined in Gerard's
pages. For instance, he gives to the deadly nightshade the name,
which now only lingers in a corner of Devonshire, the "dwale." As an
instance of his style, I may quote a passage from what he has to say
about the virtues, or rather vices, of this plant:
"Banish it from your gardens and the use of it also, being a plant so
furious and deadly; for it bringeth such as have eaten thereof into a
dead sleep wherein many have died, as hath been often seen and proved
by experience both in England and elsewhere. But to give you an
example hereof it shall not be amiss. It came to pass that three boys
of Wisbeach, in the Isle of Ely, did eat of the pleasant and beautiful
fruit hereof, two whereof died in less than eight hours after they had
eaten of them. The third child had a quantity of honey and water mixed
together given him to drink, causing him to vomit often. God blessed
this means, and the child recovered. Banish, therefore, these
pernicious plants out of your gardens, and all places near to your
houses where children do resort."
Gerard has continually to stop his description that he may repeat to
his readers some anecdote which he remembers. Now it is how "Master
Cartwright, a gentleman of Gray's Inn, who was grievously wounded into
the lungs," was cured with the herb called "Saracen's Compound," "and
that, by God's permission, in short space." Now it is to tell us that
he has found yellow archangel growing under a sequestered hedge "on
the left hand as you go from the village of Hampstead, near London, to
the church," or that "this amiable and pleasant kind of primrose" (a
sort of oxlip) was first brought to light by Mr. Hesketh, "a diligent
searcher after simples," in a Yorkshire wood. While the groundlings
were crowding to see new plays by Shirley and Massinger, the editor of
this volume was examining fresh varieties of auricula in "the gardens
of Mr. Tradescant and Mr. Tuggie." It is wonderful how modern the
latter statement sounds, and how ancient the former. But the garden
seems the one spot on earth where history does not assert itself, and,
no doubt, when Nero was fiddling over the blaze of Rome, there were
florists counting the petals of rival roses at Paestum as peacefully
and conscientiously as any gardeners of to-day.
The herbalist and his editor write from personal experience, and this
gives them a great advantage in dealing with superstitions. If there
was anything which people were certain about in the early part of
the seventeenth century, it was that the mandrake only grew under a
gallows, where the dead body of a man had fallen to pieces, and that
when it was dug up it gave a great shriek, which was fatal to the
nearest living thing. Gerard contemptuously rejects all these and
other tales as "old wives' dreams." He and his servants have often
digged up mandrakes, and are not only still alive, but listened
in vain for the dreadful scream. It might be supposed that such a
statement, from so eminent an authority, would settle the point, but
we find Sir Thomas Browne, in the next generation, battling these
identical popular errors in the pages of his _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_.
In the like manner, Gerard's botanical evidence seems to have been of
no use in persuading the public that mistletoe was not generated out
of birdlime dropped by thrushes into the boughs of trees, or that its
berries were not desperately poisonous. To observe and state the truth
is not enough. The ears of those to whom it is proclaimed must be
ready to accept it.
Our good herbalist, however, cannot get through his sixteen hundred
accurate and solemn pages without one slip. After accompanying him
dutifully so far, we double up with uncontrollable laughter on p.
1587, for here begins the chapter which treats "of the Goose Tree,
Barnacle Tree, or the Tree bearing Geese." But even here the habit of
genuine observation clings to him. The picture represents a group of
stalked barnacles--those shrimps fixed by their antennae, which modern
science, I believe, calls _Lepas anatifera_; by the side of these
stands a little goose, and the suggestion of course is that the latter
has slipped out of the former, although the draughtsman has been far
too conscientious to represent the occurrence. Yet the letterpress is
confident that in the north parts of Scotland there are trees on which
grow white shells, which ripen, and then, opening, drop little living
geese into the waves below. Gerard himself avers that from Guernsey
and Jersey he brought home with him to London shells, like limpets,
containing little feathery objects, "which, _no doubt_, were the fowls
called Barnacles." It is almost needless to say that these objects
really were the plumose and flexible _cirri_ which the barnacles
throw out to catch their food with, and which lie, like a tiny
feather-brush, just within the valves of the shell, when the creature
is dead. Gerard was plainly unable to refuse credence to the mass of
evidence which presented itself to him on this subject, yet he closes
with a hint that this seems rather a "fabulous breed" of geese.
With the Barnacle Goose Tree the Herbal proper closes, in these quaint
words:
"And thus having, through God's assistance, discoursed somewhat
at large of grasses, herbs, shrubs, trees and mosses, and certain
excrescences of the earth, with other things moe, incident to the
history thereof, we conclude, and end our present volume with this
wonder of England. For the which God's name be ever honoured and
praised."
And so, at last, the Goose Tree receives the highest sanction.
PHARAMOND
PHARAMOND; or, _The History of France. A New Romance. In four
parts. Written originally in French, by the Author of Cassandra and
Cleopatra: and now elegantly rendered into English. London: Printed by
Ja: Cottrell for Samuel Speed, at the Rain-Bow in Fleetstreet, near
the Inner Temple-Gate. (Folio_.) 1662.