_Dryden_.
_The first physicians by debauch were made;
Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade.
By chace our long liv'd fathers earn'd their food;
Toil strung the nerves, and purifi'd the blood;
But we their sons, a pamper'd race of men,
Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten.
Better to hunt in fields for health unbought,
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.
The wise for cure on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend._ X.
No. 117. SATURDAY, JULY 14.
_Ipsi sibi somnia fingunt._
VIRG. Ecl. viii. ver. 108.
Their own imaginations they deceive.
There are some opinions in which a man should stand neuter, without
engaging his assent to one side or the other. Such a hovering faith as
this, which refuses to settle upon any determination, is absolutely
necessary in a mind that is careful to avoid errors and prepossessions.
When the arguments press equally on both sides in matters that are
indifferent to us, the safest method is to give up ourselves to neither.
It is with this temper of mind that I consider the subject of
witchcraft. When I hear the relations that are made from all parts of
the world, not only from _Norway_ and _Lapland_, from the
_East_ and _West Indies_, but from every particular nation in
_Europe_, I cannot forbear thinking that there is such an
intercourse and commerce with evil spirits, as that which we express by
the name of witchcraft. But when I consider that the ignorant and
credulous parts of the world abound most in these relations, and that
the persons among us, who are supposed to engage in such an infernal
commerce, are people of a weak understanding and crazed imagination, and
at the same time reflect upon the many impostures and delusions of this
nature that have been detected in all ages, I endeavour to suspend my
belief till I hear more certain accounts than any which have yet come to
my knowledge. In short, when I consider the question whether there are
such persons in the world as those we call witches, my mind is divided
between the two opposite opinions; or rather, (to speak my thoughts
freely) I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as
witchcraft; but, at the same time, can give no credit to any particular
instance of it.
I am engaged in this speculation by some occurrences that I met with
yesterday, which I shall give my reader an account of at large. As I was
walking with my friend Sir ROGER by the side of one of his woods, an old
woman applied herself to me for my charity. Her dress and figure put me
in mind of the following description in _Otway_.
_In a close lane as I pursu'd my journey,
I spy'd a wrinkled_ Hag, _with age grown double,
Picking dry sticks, and mumbling to herself.
Her eyes with scalding rheum were gall'd and red;
Cold palsy shook her head; her hands seem'd withered;
And on her crooked shoulders had she wrapped
The tatter'd remnants of an old strip'd hanging,
Which serv'd to keep her carcase from the cold:
So there was nothing of a piece about her.
Her lower weeds were all o'er coarsly patch'd
With different-coloured rags, black, red, white, yellow,
And seem'd to speak variety of wretchedness._
As I was musing on this description, and comparing it with the object
before me, the Knight told me, that this very old woman had the
reputation of a witch all over the country, that her lips were observed
to be always in motion, and that there was not a switch about her house
which her neighbours did not believe had carried her several hundreds of
miles. If she chanced to stumble, they always found sticks or straws
that lay in the figure of a cross before her. If she made any mistake at
church, and cried _Amen_ in a wrong place, they never failed to
conclude that she was saying her prayers backwards. There was not a maid
in the parish that would take a pin of her, though she should offer a
bag of money with it. She goes by the name of _Moll White_, and has
made the country ring with several imaginary exploits which are palmed
upon her. If the dairy-maid does not make the butter come so soon as she
would have it, _Moll White_ is at the bottom of the churn. If a
horse sweats in the stable, _Moll White_ has been upon his back. If
a hare makes an unexpected escape from the hounds, the huntsman curses
_Moll White_. 'Nay' (says Sir ROGER) 'I have known the master of
the pack, upon such an occasion, send one of his servants to see if
_Moll White_ had been out that morning.'
This account raised my curiosity so far, that I begged my friend Sir
ROGER to go with me into her hovel, which stood in a solitary corner
under the side of the wood. Upon our first entering Sir ROGER winked to
me, and pointed at something that stood behind the door, which, upon
looking that way I found to be an old broomstaff. At the same time he
whispered me in the ear to take notice of a tabby cat that sat in the
chimney-corner, which, as the old Knight told me, lay under as bad a
report as _Moll White_ herself; for, besides that _Moll_ is
said often to accompany her in the same shape, the cat is reported to
have spoken twice or thrice in her life, and to have played several
pranks above the capacity of an ordinary cat.
I was secretly concerned to see human nature in so much wretchedness and
disgrace, but at the same time could not forbear smiling to hear Sir
ROGER, who is a little puzzled about the old woman, advising her as a
justice of peace to avoid all communication with the Devil, and never to
hurt any of her neighbour's cattle. We concluded our visit with a
bounty, which was very acceptable.
In our return home Sir ROGER told me, that old _Moll_ had been
often brought before him for making children spit pins, and giving maids
the nightmare; and that the country people would be tossing her into a
pond, and trying experiments with her every day, if it was not for him
and his chaplain.
I have since found, upon inquiry, that Sir ROGER was several times
staggered with the reports that had been brought him concerning this old
woman, and would frequently have bound her over to the county-sessions,
had not his chaplain with much ado persuaded him to the contrary.
I have been the more particular in this account, because I hear there is
scarce a village in _England_ that has not a _Moll White_ in
it. When an old woman begins to dote, and grow chargeable to a parish,
she is generally turned into a witch, and fills the whole country with
extravagant fancies, imaginary distempers, and terrifying dreams. In the
mean time, the poor wretch that is the innocent occasion of so many
evils begins to be frighted at herself, and sometimes confesses secret
commerce and familiarities that her imagination forms in a delirious old
age. This frequently cuts off charity from the greatest objects of
compassion, and inspires people with a malevolence towards those poor
decrepid parts of our species, in whom human nature is defaced by
infirmity and dotage. L.
No. 118. MONDAY, JULY 16.
_Haeret lateri lethalis arundo._
VIRG. AEn. iv. ver. 73.
The fatal dart
Sticks in his side, and rankles in his heart.
DRYDEN
This agreeable seat is surrounded with so many pleasing walks, which are
struck out of a wood, in the midst of which the house stands, that one
can hardly ever be weary of rambling from one labyrinth of delight to
another. To one used to live in a city the charms of the country are so
exquisite, that the mind is lost in a certain transport which raises us
above ordinary life, and is yet not strong enough to be inconsistent
with tranquillity. This state of mind was I in, ravished with the murmur
of waters, the whisper of breezes, the singing of birds; and whether I
looked up to the heavens, down to the earth, or turned on the prospects
around me, still struck with new sense of pleasure; when I found by the
voice of my friend, who walked by me, that we had insensibly strolled
into the grove sacred to the widow. 'This woman', says he, 'is of all
others the most unintelligible; she either designs to marry, or she does
not. What is the most perplexing of all, is, that she doth not either
say to her lovers she has any resolution against that condition of life
in general, or that she banishes them; but, conscious of her own merit,
she permits their addresses, without fear of any ill consequence, or
want of respect, from their rage or despair. She has that in her aspect,
against which it is impossible to offend. A man whose thoughts are
constantly bent upon so agreeable an object, must be excused if the
ordinary occurrences in conversation are below his attention. I call her
indeed perverse; but, alas! why do I call her so? Because her superior
merit is such, that I cannot approach her without awe, that my heart is
checked by too much esteem: I am angry that her charms are not more
acceptable, that I am more inclined to worship than salute her: How
often have I wished her unhappy, that I might have an opportunity of
serving her? and how often troubled in that very imagination, at giving
her the pain of being obliged? Well, I have led a miserable life in
secret upon her account; but fancy she would have condescended to have
some regard for me, if it had not been for that watchful animal her
confident.
'Of all persons under the sun' (continued he, calling me by my name)' be
sure to set a mark upon confidents: They are of all people the most
impertinent. What is most pleasant to observe in them, is, that they
assume to themselves the merit of the persons whom they have in their
custody. _Orestilla_ is a great fortune, and in wonderful danger of
surprises, therefore full of suspicions of the least indifferent thing,
particularly careful of new acquaintance, and of growing too familiar
with the old. _Themista_, her favourite woman, is every whit as
careful of whom she speaks to, and what she says. Let the ward be a
beauty, her confident shall treat you with an air of distance; let her
be a fortune, and she assumes the suspicious behaviour of her friend and
patroness. Thus it is that very many of our unmarried women of
distinction, are to all intents and purposes married, except the
consideration of different sexes. They are directly under the conduct of
their whisperer; and think they are in a state of freedom, while they
can prate with one of these attendants of all men in general, and still
avoid the man they most like. You do not see one heiress in a hundred
whose fate does not turn upon this circumstance of chusing a confident.
Thus it is that the lady is addressed to, presented and flattered, only
by proxy, in her woman. In my case, how is it possible that--' Sir
ROGER was proceeding in his harangue, when we heard the voice of one
speaking very importunately, and repeating these words, 'What, not one
smile?' We followed the sound till we came to a close thicket, on the
other side of which we saw a young woman sitting as it were in a
personated sullenness, just over a transparent fountain. Opposite to her
stood Mr. _William_, Sir ROGER's master of the game. The Knight
whispered me, 'Hist! these are lovers.' The huntsman looking earnestly
at the shadow of the young maiden in the stream, 'Oh thou dear picture,
if thou couldst remain there in the absence of that fair creature whom
you represent in the water, how willingly could I stand here satisfied
for ever, without troubling my dear _Betty_ herself with any
mention of her unfortunate _William_, whom she is angry with: But
alas! when she pleases to be gone, thou wilt also vanish--yet let me
talk to thee while thou dost stay. Tell my dearest _Betty_ thou
dost not more depend upon her, than does her _William_: Her absence
will make away with me as well as thee. If she offers to remove thee, I
will jump into these waves to lay hold on thee; herself, her own dear
person, I must never embrace again.--Still do you hear me without one
smile--It is too much to bear--' He had no sooner spoke these words, but
he made an offer of throwing himself into the water: At which his
mistress started up, and at the next instant he jumped across the
fountain and met her in an embrace. She, half recovering from her
fright, said, in the most charming voice imaginable, and with a tone of
complaint, 'I thought how well you would drown yourself. No, no, you
won't drown yourself till you have taken your leave of _Susan
Holiday_.' The huntsman, with a tenderness that spoke the most
passionate love, and with his cheek close to hers, whispered the softest
vows of fidelity in her ear, and cried, 'Don't, my dear, believe a word
_Kate Willow_ says; she is spiteful, and makes stories because she
loves to hear me talk to herself for your sake.' 'Look you there,' quoth
Sir ROGER, 'do you see there, all mischief comes from confidents! But
let us not interrupt them; the maid is honest, and the man dares not be
otherwise, for he knows I loved her father: I will interpose in this
matter, and hasten the wedding. _Kate Willow_ is a witty
mischievous wench in the neighbourhood, who was a beauty, and makes me
hope I shall see the perverse widow in her condition. She was so
flippant with her answers to all the honest fellows that came near her,
and so very vain of her beauty, that she has valued herself upon her
charms till they are ceased. She therefore now makes it her business to
prevent other young women from being more discreet than she was herself:
However, the saucy thing said the other day well enough,
"Sir ROGER and I must make a match, for we are both despised by those we
loved." The hussy has a great deal of power wherever she comes, and has
her share of cunning.
'However, when I reflect upon this woman, I do not know whether in the
main I am the worse for having loved her: Whenever she is recalled to my
imagination my youth returns, and I feel a forgotten warmth in my veins.
This affliction in my life has streaked all my conduct with a softness,
of which I should otherwise have been incapable. It is, perhaps, to this
dear image in my heart owing that I am apt to relent, that I easily
forgive, and that many desirable things are grown into my temper, which
I should not have arrived at by better motives than the thought of being
one day hers. I am pretty well satisfied such a passion as I have had is
never well cured; and, between you and me, I am often apt to imagine it
has had some whimsical effect upon my brain: For I frequently find, that
in my most serious discourse I let fall some comical familiarity of
speech, or odd phrase, that makes the company laugh; however, I cannot
but allow she is a most excellent woman. When she is in the country I
warrant she does not run into dairies, but reads upon the nature of
plants; but has a glass-hive, and comes into the garden out of books to
see them work, and observe the policies of their commonwealth. She
understands every thing. I would give ten pounds to hear her argue with
my friend Sir ANDREW FREEPORT about trade. No, no, for all she looks so
innocent as it were, take my word for it she is no fool.' T.
No. 119. TUESDAY, JULY 17.
_Urbem, quam dicunt Romam, Melibaee, putavi
Stultus ego huic nostrae similem._
VIRG. Ecl. i. v. 20.
Fool that I was, I thought imperial _Rome_
Like _Mantua_.
DRYDEN.
The first and most obvious reflexions which arise in a man who changes
the city for the country, are upon the different manners of the people
whom he meets with in those two different scenes of life. By manners I
do not mean morals, but behaviour and good-breeding, as they shew
themselves in the town and in the country.
And here, in the first place, I must observe a very great revolution
that has happened in this article of good-breeding. Several obliging
deferences, condescensions and submissions, with many outward forms and
ceremonies that accompany them, were first of all brought up among the
politer part of mankind, who lived in courts and cities, and
distinguished themselves from the rustick part of the species (who on
all occasions acted bluntly and naturally) by such a mutual complaisance
and intercourse of civilities. These forms of conversation by degrees
multiplied and grew troublesome; the modish world found too great a
constraint in them, and have therefore thrown most of them aside.
Conversation, like the _Romish_ religion, was so incumbered with
show and ceremony, that it stood in need of a reformation to retrench
its superfluities, and restore it to its natural good sense and beauty.
At present therefore an unconstrained carriage, and a certain openness
of behaviour, are the height of good-breeding. The fashionable world is
grown free and easy; our manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so
modish as an agreeable negligence. In a word, good-breeding shews itself
most where to an ordinary eye it appears the least.
If after this we look on the people of mode in the country, we find in
them the manners of the last age. They have no sooner fetched themselves
up to the fashion of the polite world, but the town has dropped them,
and are nearer to the first state of nature than to those refinements
which formerly reigned in the court, and still prevail in the country.
One may now know a man that never conversed in the world, by his excess
of good-breeding.
A polite country 'Squire shall make you as many bows in half an hour, as
would serve a courtier for a week. There is infinitely more to do about
place and precedency in a meeting of justices' wives, than in an
assembly of duchesses.
This rural politeness is very troublesome to a man of my temper, who
generally take the chair that is next me, and walk first or last, in the
front or in the rear, as chance directs. I have known my friend Sir
ROGER'S dinner almost cold before the company could adjust the
ceremonial, and be prevailed upon to sit down; and have heartily pitied
my old friend, when I have seen him forced to pick and cull his guests,
as they sat at the several parts of his table, that he might drink their
healths according to their respective ranks and qualities. Honest
_Will Wimble_, who I should have thought had been altogether
uninfected with ceremony, gives me abundance of trouble in this
particular. Though he has been fishing all the morning, he will not help
himself at dinner till I am served. When we are going out of the hall,
he runs behind me; and last night, as we were walking in the fields,
stopped short at a stile till I came up to it, and upon my making signs
to him to get over, told me, with a serious smile, that sure I believed
they had no manners in the country.
There has happened another revolution in the point of good-breeding,
which relates to the conversation among men of mode, and which I cannot
but look upon as very extraordinary. It was certainly one of the first
distinctions of a well-bred man, to express every thing that had the
most remote appearance of being obscene, in modest terms and distant
phrases; whilst the clown, who had no such delicacy of conception and
expression, clothed his _ideas_ in those plain homely terms that
are the most obvious and natural. This kind of good-manners was perhaps
carried to an excess, so as to make conversation too stiff, formal, and
precise: For which reason (as hypocrisy in one age is generally
succeeded by atheism in another) conversation is in a great measure
relapsed into the first extreme; so that at present several of our men
of the town, and particularly those who have been polished in
_France_, make use of the most coarse uncivilized words in our
language, and utter themselves often in such a manner as a clown would
blush to hear.
This infamous piece of good-breeding, which reigns among the coxcombs of
the town, has not yet made its way into the country; and as it is
impossible for such an irrational way of conversation to last long,
among a people that make any profession of religion or show of modesty,
if the country gentlemen get into it they will certainly be left in the
lurch. Their good-breeding will come too late to them, and they will be
thought a parcel of lewd clowns, while they fancy themselves talking
together like men of wit and pleasure.
As the two points of good-breeding which I have hitherto insisted upon,
regard behaviour and conversation, there is a third which turns upon
dress. In this too the country are very much behind-hand. The rural
beaux are not yet got out of the fashion that took place at the time of
the Revolution, but ride about the country in red coats and laced hats,
while the women in many parts are still trying to outvie one another in
the height of their headdresses.
But a friend of mine, who is now upon the western circuit, having
promised to give me an account of the several modes and fashions that
prevail in the different parts of the nation through which he passes, I
shall defer the enlarging upon this last topick till I have received a
letter from him, which I expect every post. L.
NO. 120. WEDNESDAY, JULY 18.
_Equidem credo, quia sit divinitus illis
Ingenium._
VIRG. Georg. i. ver. 415.
I think their breasts with heav'nly souls inspir'd.
DRYDEN.
My friend Sir ROGER is very often merry with me upon my passing so much
of my time among his poultry. He has caught me twice or thrice looking
after a bird's nest, and several times sitting an hour or two together
near an hen and chickens. He tells me he believes I am personally
acquainted with every fowl about his house; calls such a particular cock
my favourite, and frequently complains that his ducks and geese have
more of my company than himself.
I must confess I am infinitely delighted with those speculations of
nature which are to be made in a country-life; and as my reading has
very much lain among books of natural history, I cannot forbear
recollecting upon this occasion the several remarks which I have met
with in authors, and comparing them with what falls under my own
observation: The argument for providence drawn from the natural history
of animals being in my opinion demonstrative.
The make of every kind of animal is different from that of every other
kind; and yet there is not the least turn in the muscles or twist in the
fibres of any one, which does not render them more proper for that
particular animal's way of life than any other cast or texture of them
would have been.
The most violent appetites in all creatures are _Lust_ and
_Hunger_: The first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate
their kind; the latter to preserve themselves.
It is astonishing to consider the different degrees of care that descend
from the parent to the young, so far as is absolutely necessary for the
leaving a posterity. Some creatures cast their eggs as chance directs
them, and think of them no farther, as insects and several kinds of
fish; others, of a nicer frame, find out proper beds to deposite them
in, and there leave them; as the serpent, the crocodile, and ostrich:
Others hatch their eggs, and tend the birth, till it is able to shift
for itself.
What can we call the principle which directs every different kind of
bird to observe a particular plan in the structure of its nest, and
direct all the same species to work after the same model? It cannot be
_Imitation_; for, though you hatch a crow under a hen, and never
let it see any of the works of its own kind, the nest it makes shall be
the same, to the laying of a stick, with all the other nests of the same
species. It cannot be _reason_; for, were animals indued with it to
as great a degree as man, their buildings would be as different as ours,
according to the different conveniencies that they would propose to
themselves.
Is it not remarkable, that the same temper of weather, which raises this
genial warmth in animals, should cover the trees with leaves, and the
fields with grass, for their security and concealment, and produce such
infinite swarms of insects for the support and sustenance of their
respective broods?
Is it not wonderful, that the love of the parent should be so violent
while it lasts, and that it should last no longer than is necessary for
the preservation of the young?