Prynne seldom dined: every three or four hours he munched a manchet, and
refreshed his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant;
and when “he was put into this road of writing,” as Anthony à Wood
telleth, he fixed on “a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his
eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light;” and
then, hunger nor thirst did he experience, save that of his voluminous
pages. Prynne has written a library, amounting, perhaps, to nearly two
hundred books. Our unlucky author, whose life was involved in
authorship, and his happiness, no doubt, in the habitual exuberance of
his pen, seems to have considered the being debarred from pen, ink, and
books, during his imprisonment, as an act more barbarous than the loss
of his ears. The extraordinary perseverance of Prynne in this fever of
the pen appears in the following title of one of his extraordinary
volumes, “Comfortable Cordials against discomfortable Fears of
Imprisonment; containing some Latin Verses Sentences, and Texts of
Scripture, _written by Mr. Wm. Prynne on his Chamber Walls_, in the
Tower of London, during his Imprisonment there; translated by him into
English Verse, 1641.” Prynne literally verified Pope’s description:--
“Is there, who, locked from ink and paper, scrawls,
With desperate charcoal round his darkened walls.”
We have also a catalogue of printed books, written by Wm. Prynne, Esq.,
of Lincoln’s Inn, in these classes,
BEFORE, }
DURING, } _his imprisonment_,
and }
SINCE }
with this motto, “Jucundi acti labores,” 1643. The secret history of
this voluminous author concludes with a characteristic event: a
contemporary who saw Prynne in the pillory at Cheapside, informs us,
that while he stood there they “burnt his huge volumes under his nose,
which had almost suffocated him.”
* * * * *