ANECDOTES OF PETER HEYLYN AND LIGHTFOOT, EXEMPLIFYING THAT GREAT
KNOWLEDGE IS NOT ALWAYS APPLICABLE TO LITTLE THINGS; AND THAT AS
CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME, SO IT MAY WITH EQUAL TRUTH SOMETIMES BE SAID
THAT KNOWLEDGE ENDS THERE.
A scholar in his study knows the stars,
Their motion and their influence, which are fix'd,
And which are wandering; can decypher seas,
And give each several land his proper bounds:
But set him to the compass he's to seek,
Where a plain pilot can direct his course
From hence unto both the Indies.
HEYWOOD.
There was a Poet who wrote a descriptive poem, and then took a journey
to see the scenes which he had described. Better late than never, he
thought; and thought wisely in so thinking. Drayton was not likely to
have acted thus upon after consideration, if in the first conception
of his subject he did not feel sufficient ardour for such an
undertaking. It would have required indeed a spirit of enterprize as
unusual in those days as it is ordinary now. Many a long day's ride
must he have taken over rough roads, and in wild countries; and many a
weary step would it have cost him, and many a poor lodging must he
have put up with at night, where he would have found poor fare, if not
cold comfort. So he thought it enough, in many if not most parts, to
travel by the map, and believed himself to have been sufficiently
“punctual and exact in giving unto every province its peculiar bounds,
in laying out their several land-marks, tracing the course of most of
the principal rivers, and setting forth the situation and estate of
the chiefest towns.”
Peter Heylyn who speaks thus of his own exactness in a work partaking
enough of the same nature as the Poly-olbion to be remembered here,
though it be in prose and upon a wider subject, tells a humourous
anecdote of himself, in the preface to his Cosmography. “He that shall
think this work imperfect,” says he, “(though I confess it to be
nothing but imperfections) for some deficiencies of this kind, may be
likened to the country fellow, (in Aristophanes, if my memory fail
not,) who picked a great quarrel with the map because he could not
find where his own farm stood. And such a country customer I did meet
with once, a servant of my elder brother, sent by him with some horses
to Oxford, to bring me and a friend of mine unto his house; who having
lost his way as we passed through the forest of Whichwood, and not
being able to recover any beaten track, did very earnestly entreat me
to lead the way, till I had brought him past the woods to the open
fields. Which when I had refused to do, as I had good reason,
alledging that I had never been there before, and therefore that I
could not tell which way to lead him; ‘that's strange!’ said he; ‘I
have heard my old master, your Father, say that you made a book of all
the world; and cannot you find your way out of the wood?’”
Peter Heylyn was one who fell on evil times, and on whom, in
consequence, evil tongues have fallen. But he was an able, honest,
brave man who “stood to his tackling when he was tasted.” And if thou
hast not read his Survey of the State of France, Reader, thou hast not
read one of our liveliest books of travels in its lighter parts; and
one of the wisest and most replete with information that ever was
written by a young man.
His more learned contemporary Lightfoot, who steered a safer but not
so straight a course, met with an adventure not unlike that of
Heylyn's in the forest; but the application which in the
cosmographist's case was ridiculously made by an ignorant and simple
man was in this instance self-originated.
Lightfoot had promised to set forth as an accompaniment to his Harmony
of the Evangelists, “A chorographical description of the land of
Canaan, and those adjoining places, that we have occasion to look upon
as we read the Gospels.”—“I went on in that work,” he says, “a good
while, and that with much cheerfulness and content; for methought a
Talmudical survey and history of the land of Canaan, (not omitting
collections to be taken up out of the Scripture, and other writers) as
it would be new and rare, so it might not prove unwelcome nor
unprofitable to those that delighted in such a subject.”—It cost him
as much pains to give the description as it would have done to travel
thither; but says one of his Editors “the unhappy chance that hindered
the publishing this elaborate piece of his, which he had brought to
pretty good perfection, was the edition of Doctor Fuller's Pisgah
Sight; great pity it was that so good a book should have done so much
harm; for that book, handling the same matters and preventing his,
stopped his resolution of letting his labors on that subject see the
light. Though he went a way altogether different from Dr. Fuller; and
so both might have shown their face together in the world; and the
younger sister, if we may make comparisons, might have proved the
fairer of the two.”
It is pleasant to see how liberally and equitably both Lightfoot and
Fuller speak upon this matter;—“But at last,” says the former, “I
understood that another workman, a far better artist than myself, had
the description of the Land of Israel, not only in hand, but even in
the press; and was so far got before me in that travel that he was
almost at his journey's end, when I was but little more than setting
out. It was grievous to me to have lost my labour, if I should now sit
down; and yet I thought it wisdom not to lose more in proceeding
farther, when one on the same subject, and of far more abilities in
it, had got the start so far before me.
“And although I supposed, and at last was assured, even by that Author
himself (my very learned and worthy friend) that we should not thrust
nor hinder one another any whit at all, though we both went at once in
the perambulation of that land, because he had not meddled with that
Rabbinic way that I had gone; yet, when I considered what it was to
glean after so clean a reaper, and how rough a Talmudical pencil would
seem after so fine a pen, I resolved to sit down, and to stir no more
in that matter, till time and occasion did show me more encouragement
thereunto, than as yet I saw. And thus was my promise fallen to the
ground, not by any carelessness or forgetfulness of mine, but by the
happy prevention of another hand, by whom the work is likely to be
better done. Yet was I unwilling to suffer my word utterly to come to
nothing at all, though I might evade my promise by this fair excuse:
but I was desirous to pay the reader something in pursuance of it,
though it were not in this very same coin, nor the very same sum, that
I had undertaken. Hereupon I turned my thoughts and my endeavours to a
description of the Temple after the same manner, and from the same
authors, that I had intended to have described the Land; and that the
rather, not only that I might do some thing towards making good my
promise; but also, that by a trial in a work of this nature of a
lesser bulk, I might take some pattern and assay how the other, which
would prove of a far larger pains and volume, would be accepted, if I
should again venture upon it.”
Lightfoot was sincere in the commendation which he bestowed upon
Fuller's diligence, and his felicitous way of writing. And Fuller on
his part rendered justice in the same spirit to Lightfoot's well known
and peculiar erudition. “Far be it from me,” he says, “that our pens
should fall out, like the herdsmen of Lot and Abraham, the land not
being able to bear them both, that they might dwell together. No such
want of room in this subject, being of such latitude and receipt, that
both we and hundreds more, busied together therein, may severally lose
ourselves in a subject of such capacity. The rather, because we
embrace several courses in this our description; it being my desire
and delight, to stick only to the written word of God, whilst my
worthy friend takes in the choicest Rabbinical and Talmudical
relations, being so well seen in these studies, that it is
questionable whether his skill or my ignorance be the greater
therein.”
Now then—(for now and then go thus lovingly together, in familiar
English—)—after these preliminaries, the learned Lightfoot, who at
seven years of age, it is said could not only read fluently the
biblical Hebrew, but readily converse in it, may tell his own story.
“Here by the way,” he says, “I cannot but mention, and I think I can
never forget, a handsome and deserved check that mine own heart,
meeting with a special occasion, did give me, upon the laying down of
the other task, and the undertaking of this, for my daring to enter
either upon the one or the other. That very day wherein I first set
pen to paper to draw up the description of the Temple, having but
immediately before laid aside my thoughts of the description of the
Land, I was necessarily called out, towards the evening, to go to view
a piece of ground of mine own, concerning which some litigiousness was
emerging, and about to grow. The field was but a mile from my constant
residence and habitation, and it had been in mine owning divers years
together; and yet till that very time, had I never seen it, nor looked
after it, nor so much as knew whereabout it lay. It was very unlikely
I should find it out myself, being so utterly ignorant of its
situation; yet because I desired to walk alone, for the enjoying of my
thoughts upon that task that I had newly taken in hand, I took some
direction which way to go, and would venture to find out the field
myself alone. I had not gone far, but I was at a loss; and whether I
went right or wrong I could not tell; and if right thither, yet I knew
not how to do so farther; and if wrong I knew not which way would
prove the right, and so in seeking my ground I had lost myself. Here
my heart could not but take me to task; and, reflecting upon what my
studies were then, and had lately been upon, it could not but call me
fool; and methought it spake as true to me, as ever it had done in all
my life,—but only when it called me sinner. A fool that was so
studious, and had been so searching about things remote, and that so
little concerned my interest,—and yet was so neglective of what was
near me, both in place, and in my particular concernment! And a fool
again, who went about to describe to others, places and buildings that
lay so many hundred miles off, as from hence to Canaan, and under so
many hundred years' ruins,—and yet was not able to know, or find the
way to a field of mine own, that lay so near me!
“I could not but acknowledge this reproof to be both seasonable, and
seasoned both with truth and reason; and it so far prevailed with me,
that it not only put me upon a resolution to lay by that work that I
had newly taken in hand that morning, but also to be wiser in my
bookishness for the time to come, than for it, and through it, to
neglect and sink my estate as I had done. And yet within a little time
after, I know not how, I was fallen to the same studies and
studiousness again,—had got my laid-up task into my hands again before
I was aware,—and was come to a determination to go on in that work,
because I had my notes and collections ready by me as materials for
it; and when that was done, then to think of the advice that my heart
had given me, and to look to mine own business.
“So I drew up the description of the Temple itself, and with it the
History of the Temple-service.”
Lightfoot's heart was wise when it admonished him of humility; but it
was full of deceit when it read him a lesson of worldly wisdom, for
which his conscience and his better mind would have said to him “Thou
Fool!” if he had followed it.