“_He read at wine, he read in bed,
He read aloud, had he the breath,
His every thought was with the dead,
And so he read himself to death._”
Any visitor to the old James the First graveyard near Peat’s Hill may
spell out this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly one of the worst recorded
of an Elizabethan, on the tomb of Wessel Caster.
This death of his, says the antiquary, occurred when he was
thirty-seven, but as this story is concerned with the night of a
certain chase through darkness, we find him still alive, still
reading. His eyes were somewhat dim, his stomach somewhat obvious--he
was a mis-built man and indolent--oh, Heavens! But an era is an era,
and in the reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of Luther, Queen of
England, no man could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm. Every
loft in Cheapside published its _Magnum Folium_ (or magazine)--of
its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on
sight as long as it “got away from those reactionary miracle plays,”
and the English Bible had run through seven “very large” printings in
as many months.
So Wessel Caxter (who in his youth had gone to sea) was now a reader
of all on which he could lay his hands--he read manuscripts in holy
friendship; he dined rotten poets; he loitered about the shops where
the _Magna Folia_ were printed, and he listened tolerantly while
the young playwrights wrangled and bickered among them-selves, and
behind each other’s backs made bitter and malicious charges of
plagiarism or anything else they could think of.
To-night he had a book, a piece of work which, though inordinately
versed, contained, he thought, some rather excellent political satire.
“The Faerie Queene” by Edmund Spenser lay before him under the
tremulous candle-light. He had ploughed through a canto; he was
beginning another: