Tom Coryat, the "single-soled, single-souled and single-shirted
observer of Odcombe," having finally bored his neighbours in the
country past bearing, was volleyed off upon a tempest of their yawns
to London. Exactly when that was I can't find out, but I suppose it to
have been in the region of 1605.
In London he set up for a wit, was enrolled in "The Right Worshipful
Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen," who met at "The Sign of the
Mere-maide in Bread Streete"; had John Donne and Ben Jonson among his
convives, and may well have seen Shakespeare and heard him talk, if
he did talk. How he appeared himself we can only guess, but I conceive
his position in the society to have been that of Polonius in the
convocation of politic worms, as one, namely, where he was eaten
rather than eating. That, if it was so, may have determined him to
make a name for himself by what was his strongest part, namely, his
feet.
In 1608 he, the "Odcombian leg-stretcher," did indeed travel "for five
months, mostly on foot, from his native place of Odcombe in Somerset,
through France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia, Helvetia, some parts of High
Germany, and the Netherlands, making in the whole 1975 miles." He
started on the 14th May and was in London again on the 3rd October,
and if indeed he did travel mostly on foot, I call it a very
creditable performance. The result was a book more talked of than
read. "Coryat's Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months' travels
... newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in his county of
Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling
members of this Kingdom." So runs the text of a Palladian title-page,
surrounded by emblems of adventure which support a _vera effigies_ of
Tom himself. He shows there as a beady-eyed bonhomme of thirty-five
or so, with a Jacobean beard, and his hair brushed back and worn long,
like that of our present-day young men.
The book published, the Sireniacal Gentlemen took off their coats and
took up their battledores. Their gibes and quirks are all printed in
my edition, and are better reading than the book itself. Coryat was a
cockscomb and scorned a straight sentence. A rule of his was: "Never
use one adjective if three will do." So far as I know he was the first
Englishman who travelled for the fun or the glory of the thing, unless
Fynes Moryson anticipated him in those also, as he certainly did in
travelling and writing about it. But I think it more probable that
Moryson went abroad to improve his mind. I don't think Coryat had any
notion of that. Foppery may have moved him, vanity perhaps; in any
case there can be no comparison between them. Moryson is thorough,
Coryat is not. Moryson is often dull, Coryat seldom. Moryson was
a student, Coryat a cockscomb. Moryson was a plain man, Coryat a
euphuist of the first water. I haven't the least doubt but that
Shakespeare met him at the Mermaid--he called himself a friend of
Ben Jonson's--and took the best of him. You will find him in _Love's
Labour's Lost_ as well as in _All's Well_. For a foretaste of his
quality take a small portion of his first sentence, the whole of which
fills a page: "I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in
the morning, the fourteenth of May 1608, and arrived at Calais ...
about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the
exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my
tumultuous stomach...." There is more about it, but that will do.
Shakespeare can never have missed such a man as that.
Coryat's abiding sensation throughout his travels was astonishment,
not at the things which he saw, but rather that he from Odcombe in
Somerset should be seeing them. He can never get over it. Here am I,
Odcombian Tom, face to face with Amiens Cathedral, with the tombs of
the kings at Saint Denis, at Fountaine Beleau cheek by jowl with Henri
IV., crossing in a litter the "stupendious" Mont Cenis, pacing the
Duomo of Milan, disputing with a Turk in Lyons, with a Jew in Padua,
to the detriment of their religions, "swimming" in a gondola on the
Grand Canal: here I am, and now what about it? There is always an
imported flavour of Odcombe about it. He brings it with him and
sprinkles it like scent. He is careful at every stage of his journey
to give you the mileage from his own door; his measure of a city's
quality is its worth to him as a gift were Odcombe the alternative.
Few cities indeed survive the test. Mantua stood a fair chance. "That
most sweet Paradise, that _domicilium Venerum et Charitum_," did
so ravish his senses and tickle his spirits, he says, that he would
desire to live there and spend the remainder of his days "in some
divine meditations among the sacred Muses," but for two things, "their
grosse idolatry and superstitious ceremonies, which I detest, and the
love of Odcombe in Somersetshire, which is so deare unto me that I
preferre the very smoak thereof before the fire of all other places
under the sunne." So much for Mantua; but Venice, before whose
"incomparable and most decantated majestie" his pen faints--Venice
beats Odcombe, or something very much like it. He decides that should
"foure of the richest mannors of Somersetshire" have been offered
him if he would have undertaken not to see Venice, he would have gone
without the manors. Odcombe, you see, is not put in question here. He
was afraid to risk it.
When he came home he hung up his pair of shoes in the chancel of
Odcombe Church, and they may be there to this day for all I know.
The Sireniacal Gentlemen made great sport of him.
If any aske in verse what soar I at?
My Muse replies The praise of Coryat----
so John Gyfford begins,
A work that will eternise thee till God come
And for thy sake the famous parish Odcombe----
so George Sydenham ends. Ben Jonson is not represented at the revels,
and Inigo Jones lets his high spirits run away with him beyond the
bounds of modern printing. Donne is not at his best:
Lo, here's a man worthy indeed to travell
Fat Libian plaines, strangest China's gravell;
For Europe well hath seen him stirre his stumpes,
Turning his double shoes to simple pumpes.
--the wit of which escapes me. Better is the conceit of
What had he done, had he e'er hugged th' ocean
With swimming Drake or famous Magelan,
And kiss'd that unturn'd cheeke of our old mother,
Since so our Europe's world he can discover?
The "unturn'd cheeke of our old mother!" The New World should be
pleased with that.
In 1615 he made a much further flight, and was to be heard of at "the
Court of the most Mighty Monarch, the Great Mogul," whence he wrote
to, among other people, the High Seneschal of the "Right Worshipful
Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen that meet the first Friday of
every month at the Signe of the Mere-maide in Bread-Streete." In this
particular letter he greets by name Mr. John Donne, "the author of two
most elegant Latine Bookes," Master Benjamin Jonson, the poet, at his
chamber in the Blacke Friars, Mr. Samuel Purkas, and Mr. Inigo
Jones, and signs himself "the Hierosolymitan--Syrian--Mesopotamian
--Armenian--Median--Parthian--Persian--Indian--Leggestretcher
of Odcomb in Somerset." The news he gives of "the most famigerated
Region of all the East, the ample and large India," is various and
occasionally incredible, but none the worse perhaps for that. You
must allow the leg-stretcher to be something also of a leg-puller. The
Great Mogul had elephant-fights twice a week, we learn. He might well
do so if we could believe that he maintained three thousand of them
"at an unmeasurable charge." Proceeding, nevertheless, to measure it,
Coryat finds it works out at £10,000 a day, which is pretty good even
for the Mogul. He also had a thousand wives, "whereof the chiefest
(which is his Queene) is called Normal." I like her name. Coryat
rode on an elephant, "determining one day (by God's leave) to have my
picture expressed in my next book, sitting upon an elephant." But the
voyage to the East was one too many for "the ingenious perambulator,"
and he died of a flux at Surat in December, 1617. Certain English
merchants offered him refreshments. "Sack, sack, is there any such
thing as sack? I pray you give me some sack." They did; the dysentery
was upon him at the time. Even as Sir John might have done did he, and
was buried "under a little monument." _Sic exit Coryatus_, says his
biographer.
No sooner was he dead than his fellow Sireniacks fell upon his
reputation and tore it to shreds.
He was the imp, whilst he on earth surviv'd,
From whom this West-World's pastimes were deriv'd;
He was in city, country, field and court
The well of dry-trimm'd jests, the pump of sport.
So writes the Water Poet. Another wag trounces his Crudities:
Tom Coriat, I have seen thy Crudities,
And methinks very strangely brewed it is,
With piece and patch together glued it is;
And now (like thee) ill-favour'd hued it is.
In many a line I see that lewd it is,
And therefore fit to be subdued it is--
and much more to the same effect.
Coryat's "natalitial place," as it happens, is very near to mine, and
I find something to love in a man who can never forget it. He was
a cockscomb, he was an ass; but he preferred the West of England
to Italy. He called James I., our king, the "refulgent carbuncle of
Christendom," and Prince Charles "the most glittering chrysolite of
our English diademe" Both are hard sayings.