Mr. Collier, in his "Poetical Decameron," (Third Conversation,) notices
a tract printed in 1595, with the author's initials only, A. B.,
entitled, "The Nobleness of the Asse: a work rare, learned, and
excellent." He has selected the following pretty passage from it:--"He
[the ass] refuseth no burthen; he goes whither he is sent, without any
contradiction. He lifts not his foote against any one; he bytes not; he
is no fugitive, nor malicious affected. He doth all things in good sort,
and to his liking that hath cause to employ him. If strokes be given
him, he cares not for them; and, as out modern poet singeth,--
'Thou wouldst (perhaps) he should become thy foe,
And to that end dost beat him many times:
He cares not for himselfe, much lesse thy blow.'"[B]
Certainly Nature, foreseeing the cruel usage which this useful servant
to man should receive at man's hand, did prudently in furnishing him
with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or
a weak hand can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark
to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an
absolute insensibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a
school-boy with a tough pair of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well
fortified; and therefore the costermongers "between the years 1790 and
1800" did more politicly than piously in lifting up a part of his upper
garment. I well remember that beastly and bloody custom. I have often
longed to see one of those refiners in discipline himself at the cart's
tail, with just such a convenient spot laid bare to the tender mercies
of the whipster. But, since Nature has resumed her rights, it is to be
hoped that this patient creature does not suffer to extremities,--and
that to the savages who still belabor his poor carcass with their blows
(considering the sort of anvil they are laid upon,) he might in some
sort, if he could speak, exclaim, with the philosopher, "Lay on! you
beat but upon the case of Anaxarchus."
Contemplating this natural safeguard, this fortified exterior, it is
with pain I view the sleek, foppish, combed, and curried person of this
animal as he is transmuted and disnaturalized at watering-places, etc.,
where they affect to make a palfrey of him. Fie on all such
sophistications! It will never do, Master Groom! Something of his honest
shaggy exterior will still peep up in spite of you,--his good, rough,
native, pine-apple coating. You cannot "refine a scorpion into a fish,
though you rinse it and scour it with ever so cleanly cookery."[C]
The modern poet quoted by A. B. proceeds to celebrate a virtue for which
no one to this day had been aware that the ass was remarkable:--
"One other gift this beast hath as his owne,
Wherewith the rest could not be furnished;
On man himselfe the same was not bestowne:
To wit, on him is ne'er engendered
The hatefull vermine that doth teare the skin,
And to the bode [body] doth make his passage in."
And truly, when one thinks on the suit of impenetrable armor with which
Nature (like Vulcan to another Achilles) has provided him, these subtle
enemies to _our_ repose would have shown some dexterity in getting into
_his_ quarters. As the bogs of Ireland by tradition expel toads and
reptiles, he may well defy these small deer in his fastnesses. It seems
the latter had not arrived at the exquisite policy adopted by the human
vermin "between 1790 and 1800."
But the most singular and delightful gift of the ass, according to the
writer of this pamphlet, is his _voice_, the "goodly, sweet, and
continual brayings" of which, "whereof they forme a melodious and
proportionable kinde of musicke," seem to have affected him with no
ordinary pleasure. "Nor thinke I," he adds, "that any of our immoderate
musitians can deny but that their song is full of exceeding pleasure to
be heard; because therein is to be discerned both concord, discord,
singing in the meane, the beginning to sing in large compasse, then
following on to rise and fall, the halfe note, whole note, musicke of
five voices, firme singing by four voices, three together, or one voice
and a halfe. Then their variable contrarieties amongst them, when one
delivers forth a long tenor or a short, the pausing for time, breathing
in measure, breaking the minim or very least moment of time. Last of
all, to heare the musicke of five or six voices chaunged to so many of
asses is amongst them to heare a song of world without end."
There is no accounting for ears, or for that laudable enthusiasm with
which an author is tempted to invest a favorite subject with the most
incompatible perfections. I should otherwise, for my own taste, have
been inclined rather to have given a place to these extraordinary
musicians at that banquet of nothing-less-than-sweet sounds, imagined by
old Jeremy Collier, (Essays, 1698, part ii., On Music,) where, after
describing the inspiriting effects of martial music in a battle, he
hazards an ingenious conjecture, whether a sort of _anti-music_ might
not be invented, which should have quite the contrary effect of "sinking
the spirits, shaking the nerves, curdling the blood, and inspiring
despair and cowardice and consternation." "'T is probable," he says,
"the roaring of lions, the warbling of cats and screech-owls, together
with a mixture of the howling of dogs, judiciously imitated and
compounded, might go a great way in this invention." The dose, we
confess, is pretty potent, and skilfully enough prepared. But what shall
we say to the ass of Silenus, who, if we may trust to classic lore, by
his own proper sounds, without thanks to cat or screech-owl, dismayed
and put to rout a whole army of giants? Here was _anti-music_ with a
vengeance,--a whole _Pan-Dis-Harmonicon_ in a single lungs of leather!
But I keep you trifling too long on this asinine subject. I have already
passed the _Pons Asinorum_, and will desist, remembering the old
pedantic pun of Jem Boyer, my schoolmaster:--
"Ass _in praesenti_ seldom makes a WISE MAN _in futuro_."
* * * * *
Lamb not only had a passionate fondness for old books and old friends,
but he loved the old associations. He was no admirer of your modern
improvements. Unlike Dr. Johnson, he did not go into the "most stately
shops," but purchased his books and engravings at the stalls and from
second-hand dealers. In his eyes, the old Inner-Temple Church was a
handsomer and statelier structure than the finest Cathedral in England;
and to his ear, as well as to the ear of Will Honeycomb, the old
familiar cries of the peripatetic London merchants were more musical
than the songs of larks and nightingales. It grieved him sorely to see
an old building demolished which he had passed and repassed for years,
in his daily walks to and from his business,--or an old custom
abolished, whose observance he had witnessed when a child. "The
disappearance of the old clock from St. Dunstan's Church," says Mr.
Moxon, in his pleasant tribute to Lamb's memory in Leigh Hunt's Journal,
"drew tears from his eyes; nor could he ever pass without emotion the
place where Exeter Change once stood. The removal had spoiled a reality
in Gay. 'The passer-by,' he said, 'no longer saw the combs dangle in his
face.' This almost broke his heart." And he begins the following little
"essaykin" with a lamentation over the disappearance from the streets of
London of the tinman's old original sign, and a sigh for "the good old
modes of our ancestors."
What he says of maiden aunts and their pets is delightful, and
pleasantly reminds the reader of Addison's account of Sam Trusty's visit
to the Widow Feeble.