MR. BEMERTON'S SECOND BED BOOK SOLACES ME WITH THE ODD AND HUMANE
HUMOURS OF STUARTS AND TUDORS
John Aubrey, whose _Brief Lives_ Mr. Bemerton has sent me with a
strong recommendation, and to whom I turned that night, is a man
after my own heart. He had an eye for character, if you like, and
his interest in the picturesque foible was at least as great as his
interest in virtue. To read his concise little summaries of
Elizabethan and Stuart personalities is to be made free of a most
conversible company very near real life.
He knows his value as a kind of footpage to the Muse of Biography.
He admits it in the following passage:--"About 1676 or 5, as I was
walking through Newgate-street, I sawe Dame Venetia's bust standing
at a stall at the Golden Crosse, a brazier's shop. I perfectly
remembered it, but the fire had gott-off the guilding: but taking
notice of it to one that was with me, I could never see it afterwards
exposed to the street. They melted it downe. _How these curiosities
would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them
downe!_" The italics are mine.
Then again in the following passage in the notes on John
Hoskyns:--"He lies buried under an altar monument on the north side
of the choirs of Dowre Abbey in Herefordshire. (In this abbey church
of Dowre are two _frustums_ or remaynders of mayled and crosse-legged
monuments, one sayd to be of a Lord Chandois, th'other the lord of
Ewyas-lacy. A little before I sawe them a mower had taken one of the
armes to whett his syth.)" That is the seeing eye.
All sorts and conditions of men, provided they had some merit or
station, appear in his pages, just as in my Chinese book; but Aubrey
kept a special corner for mathematicians and merry ladies. His chief
mathematician and perhaps greatest hero was Hobbes of _The
Leviathan_; but there are many others. Here, for example, is the
description of one:--"He is of little stature, perfect; black haire,
of a delicate moyst curle; darke eie, but of great vivacity of
spirit. He is of a soft temper, of great temperance (_amat Venerem
aliquantum_), of a prodigious invention, and will be acquainted
(familiarly) with nobody." Who was that? A thousand guesses. I
will tell you. Do you remember at the beginning of atlases a map of
the world with the hemispheres flattened out, entitled Mercator's
projection? Well, that is a description of Mercator--Mr. Nicholas
Mercator. Philip Melancthon, says Aubrey, was Mercator's
great-grandmother's brother.
For the merrier ladies, Aubrey's own pages must be consulted, since
one may no longer write all one would; but here is his account of the
wife of the great Falkland:--"At length, when she [Letice Cary] could
not prevaile on him [her husband], she would say that, 'I warrant
you, for all this, I will obtaine it of my lord; _it will cost me but
the expence of a few teares_.'"
Aubrey's pen now and then could etch almost like Rembrandt. Here is
Sir John Birkenhead:--"He was exceedingly confident, witty, and very
grateful to his benefactors, would lye damnably. He was of middling
stature, great goggli eies, not of a sweet aspect"; and Sir John
Denham's eye is made again to shine too, though it has been shut
these many years:--"His eie was a kind of light goose grey, not big;
but it had a strange piercingness, not as to shining and glory, but
(like a Thomas) when he conversed with you he look't into your very
thoughts." It was Sir John Denham (author of _Cooper's Hill_) who
wrote to King Charles II. begging for George Wither's life to be
spared, because "whilest G.W. lived he (Denham) should not be the
worst poet in England."
Aubrey indeed had a special gift for the salient trait. Thus, of my
dear Thomas Fuller, of the _Worthies_, he writes:--"He was of a
middle stature; strong sett; curled haire; a very working head, in so
much that, walking and meditating before dinner, he would eate-up a
penny loafe, not knowing that he did it." That tells more than
chapters might.
Whether or not Aubrey told the truth, we shall, I suppose, never
know, but he reads like fact. One sees, at any rate, that he wanted
the truth; other things did not interest him. His account of Milton
may be taken as an example. One did not quite expect it, and yet one
believes it:--"His harmonicall and ingeniose soul did lodge in a
beautifull and well-proportioned body.... He had abroun hayre. His
complexion exceeding faire--he was so faire that they called him _the
lady of Christ's College_. Ovall face. His eie a darke gray. He
had a delicate tuneable voice, and had good skill. His father
instructed him. He had an organ in his howse; he played on that
most. Of a very cheerfull humour. He would be chearfull even in his
gowte-fitts, and sing." One does not think of the blind Milton as
cheerfully singing; and yet I believe it if Aubrey says so.
Milton's friend, Andrew Marvell, comes very engagingly out of these
pages:--"He was of a middling stature, pretty strong sett, roundish
faced, cherry cheek't, hazell eie, browne haire. He was in his
conversation very modest, and of very few words; and though he loved
wine he would never drinke hard in company, and was wont to say that
_he would not play the good fellow in any man's company in whose
hands he would not trust his life_. He kept bottles of wine at his
lodgeing, and many times he would drinke liberally by himselfe to
refresh his spirits, and exalt his muse."
Aubrey on Shakespeare has one very interesting detail:--"Mr. William
Shakespear was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick.
His father was a butcher, and I have been told here before by some of
the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's
trade, but when he kill'd a calfe he would do it in a high style, and
make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this
towne that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall witt,
his acquaintance and coetanean, but dyed young." Now, the gods stand
up for butchers; but what a thing it would have been had this other
lad grown up too, and written plays too! Two Swans of Avon. For the
rest, Shakespeare "was a handsome, well-shap't man; very good
company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt."
Between Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, says Aubrey, "there was a
wonderfull consimility of phansey which caused that deareness of
friendship between them."
I find that the famous story of Sir Walter Raleigh and his son is
Aubrey's. The boy, who was a bit of a firebrand and by no means in
the paternal favour, was taken by his father, much against his will,
to dine with a great distinguished company. "He sate next to his
father, and was very demure at least halfe dinner-time. Then sayd
he, 'I, this morning, not having the feare of God before my eies but
by the instigation of the devill, went...' Sir Walter being
strangely surprized and putt out of his countenance at so great a
table, gives his son a damned blow over the face. His son, as rude
as he was, would not strike his father, but streches over the face of
the gentleman that sate next to him and sayd, 'Box about: 'twill come
to my father anon.'"
Of Nicholas Hill there is this good story, which I must remember to
tell Miss Gold:--"In his travells with his lord (I forget whether
Italy or Germany, but I think the former), a poor man begged him to
give him a penny. 'A penny!' said Mr. Hill, 'what dost say to ten
pound?' 'Ah! ten pound!' (said the beggar) 'that would make a man
happy.' N. Hill gave him immediately 10 _li_, and putt it downe upon
account,--'Item, to a beggar ten pounds, to make him happy.'"
One of Aubrey's friends--old Thomas Tyndale (whom he put into his
comedy, _The Country Revel_, as Sir Eubule Nestor)--reminds me of Mr.
Dabney. Tyndale survived long into the Stuart age from that of
Elizabeth, and he was for ever looking fondly back. Aubrey quotes
some of his lamentations:--"Our gentry forsooth in these dayes are so
effeminated that they know not how to ride on horseback.--Tho when
the gentry mett, it was not at a poor blind sordid alehouse, to
drinke up a barrell of drinke and lie drunke there two or three days
together; fall together by the eares. They mett tho in the fields,
well-appointed, with their hounds or their hawkes; kept up good
hospitality; and kept a good retinue, that would venture that bloud
and spirit that filled their vaines which their masters' tables
nourisht; kept their tenants in due respect of them. We had no
depopulacion in those dayes.
"You see in me the ruines of time. The day is almost at end with me,
and truly I am glad of it: I desire not to live in this corrupt age.
I foresawe and foretold the late changes, and now easily foresee what
will follow after. Alas! O' God's will! It was not so in Queen
Elizabeth's time: then youth had respect to old age." And so forth.
I suppose there have always been such deplorers of the present, from
the days of Cain.
I have always had a warm feeling for the author of "The Farewell to
the Fairies," certain lines of which recur so exquisitely again and
again, like a refrain in music, in Mr. Kipling's _Puck of Pook's
Hill_:--
"Farewell, rewards and fairies,
Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they;
And though they sweep their hearths no less
Than maids are wont to do,
Yet who of late for cleanliness
Finds sixpence in her shoe?"
Dan and Una knew it all by heart:--
"At morning and at evening both,
You merry were and glad,
So little care of sleep and sloth
These pretty ladies had.
When Tom came home from labour,
Or Ciss to milking rose,
Then merrily went their tabor,
And nimbly went their toes."
"Witness these rings and roundelays
Of theirs which still remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary's days,
On many a grassy plain,
But since of late Elizabeth,
And later James, came in,
They never dance on any hearth
As when the time hath bin."
Isn't it charming? Could it ever have been done better, before or
since?
"By which we note the fairies
Were of the old profession,
Their songs were Ave Mary's,
Their dances a procession;
But now, alas, they all are dead,
Or gone beyond the seas,
Or farther for religion fled,
Or else they'd take their ease."
Of Bishop Corbet, of Oxford and Norwich, who wrote that somewhere
shall we say about the year 1612--at about the time that William
Shakespeare, having finished his own dealings with the fairies,
settled down as a gentleman of leisure at New Place,
Stratford-on-Avon,--Aubrey has much to tell.
A bishop who will go to the trouble of lamenting the loss of fairies
at all is something of a _rara avis_, especially when he admits their
Romish tendencies; but to be the only begetter of such a story as
"Dymchurch Flit" (even at an interval of three hundred years), that
is the true road to gratitude.
Witty bishops are always good company--just as a joke in a serious
paper gives one more pleasure than a joke in a comic paper. In fact,
so much is this the case that a bishop to gain a reputation for wit
need not, as one too often blushingly discovers, really be witty at
all: a very thin imitation of the real thing will suffice. It is the
same with Judges: laughter holding both its sides (in parenthesis)
will pursue their mildest _faceticæ_. Richard Norwich, however, was
a true wit, although, as he lived at a time before biography was much
practised, we have few enough of his good sayings.
Whatever happened we should have the Bishop's verses; but had it not
been for John Aubrey we should know little of his spoken jests, some
of which are very modern in spirit. Here is Aubrey: "After he was
doctor of divinity, he sang ballads at the Crosse at Abingdon. On a
market-day he and some of his comrades were at the taverne by the
Crosse (which, by the way, was then the finest in England: I remember
it when I was a freshman: it was admirable curious Gothicque
architecture, and fine figures in the nitches, 'twas one of those
built by king ... for his queen). The ballad-singer complayned he
had no custome--he could not put off his ballads. The jolly Doctor
puts off his gowne, and puts on the ballad-singer's leathern jacket,
and being a handsome man, and a rare full voice, he presently vended
a great many.
"His conversation was extreme pleasant. Dr. Stubbins was one of his
cronies; he was jolly fat doctor, and a very good housekeeper. As
Dr. Corbet and he were riding in Lob Lane in wet weather ('tis an
extraordinary deepe dirty lane), the coache fell, and Corbet said
that Dr. S. was up to the elbows in mud, and he was up to the elbows
in Stubbins." Sydney Smith might have said that. I know of no
better fat-man joke, industrious as the humorists have always been on
that promising topic.
Aubrey continues: "A.D. 1628, he was made Bishop of Oxford; and I
have heard that he had an admirable grave and venerable aspect. One
time as he was confirming, the country people, pressing in to see the
ceremonie; said he, 'Beare off there, or I'll confirm ye with my
staffe!' Another time, being to lay his hand on the head of a man
very bald, he turns to his chaplaine, and said, 'Some dust,
Lushington,' to keepe his hand from slipping.
"There was a man with a great venerable beard; said the Bishop, 'You,
behind the beard.'" That is quite in a modern comedian's manner:
"You, behind the beard!"
Aubrey ends with this convivial memory: "His Chaplaine, Dr.
Lushington, was a very learned and ingenious man, and they loved one
another. The Bishop would sometimes take the key of the wine cellar,
and he and his chaplaine would go and lock themselves in and be
merry; then first he layes down his episcopal hood, 'There layes the
doctor'; then he puts off his gowne, 'There layes the bishop'; then
'twas 'Here's to thee, Corbet'; 'Here's to thee, Lushington!'
Bishops and then chaplains are not like that now; and perhaps it is
as well. But those were more spacious days. And, after all, when a
chaplain is named Lushington...!
I find one excellent and more serious saying of Corbet recorded by
another acquaintance, for I have been looking into his history. On a
public occasion--the visit of King James to Cambridge in 1614-5, the
Bishop, who was present, was much beset by his companions to indulge
his satirical vein, for the employment of which there was no lack of
material. But he refrained, saying that "he had left his malice and
judgment at home, and came there only to commend."
Next to the _Farewell_, the Bishop's prettiest verses are to his son
Vincent, on his third birthday:--
"I wish thee, Vin, before all wealth,
Both bodily and ghostly health:
Nor too much wealth, nor wit, come to thee;
So much of either may undo thee.
I wish thee learning, not for show,
Enough for to instruct, and know;
Not such as gentlemen require,
To prate at table, or at fire.
I wish thee all thy mother's graces,
Thy father's fortunes, and his places.
I wish thee friends, and one at court,
Not to build on, but support;
To keep thee, not in doing many
Oppressions, but from suffering any.
I wish thee peace in all thy ways,
Nor lazy not contentious days;
And when thy soul and body part,
As innocent as now thou art."
How many a wish in verses to a child has been falsified in this sad
world! Poor little Vincent Corbet grew into a wastrel, and after his
father's death was to be seen begging in the streets of London. The
Bishop was perhaps a wiser man than parent. Many wits are. He died
in 1635; his last words were, "Good night, Lushington."