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Literary Ridicule Illustrated By Some Account Of A Literary Satire |
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Title: Literary Ridicule Illustrated By Some Account Of A Literary Satire Author: Isaac Disraeli [More Titles by Disraeli] RIDICULE may be considered as a species of eloquence; it has all its vehemence, all its exaggeration, all its power of diminution; it is irresistible! Its business is not with truth, but with its appearance; and it is this similitude, in perpetual comparison with the original, which, raising contempt, produces the ridiculous. There is nothing real in ridicule; the more exquisite, the more it borrows from the imagination. When directed towards an individual, by preserving a unity of character in all its parts, it produces a fictitious personage, so modelled on the prototype, that we know not to distinguish the true one from the false. Even with an intimate knowledge of the real object, the ambiguous image slides into our mind, for we are at least as much influenced in our opinions by our imagination as by our judgment. Hence some great characters have come down to us spotted with the taints of indelible wit; and a satirist of this class, sporting with distant resemblances and fanciful analogies, has made the fictitious accompany for ever the real character. Piqued with Akenside for some reflections against Scotland, Smollett has exhibited a man of great genius and virtue as a most ludicrous personage; and who can discriminate, in the ridiculous physician in "Peregrine Pickle," what is real from what is fictitious?[1] The banterers and ridiculers possess this provoking advantage over sturdy honesty or nervous sensibility--their amusing fictions affect the world more than the plain tale that would put them down. They excite our risible emotions, while they are reducing their adversary to contempt--otherwise they would not be distinguished from gross slanderers. When the wit has gained over the laughers on his side, he has struck a blow which puts his adversary hors de combat. A grave reply can never wound ridicule, which, assuming all forms, has really none. Witty calumny and licentious raillery are airy nothings that float about us, invulnerable from their very nature, like those chimeras of hell which the sword of Æneas could not pierce--yet these shadows of truth, these false images, these fictitious realities, have made heroism tremble, turned the eloquence of wisdom into folly, and bowed down the spirit of honour itself. Not that the legitimate use of RIDICULE is denied: the wisest men have been some of the most exquisite ridiculers; from Socrates to the Fathers, and from the Fathers to Erasmus, and from Erasmus to Butler and Swift. Ridicule is more efficacious than argument; when that keen instrument cuts what cannot be untied. "The Rehearsal" wrote down the unnatural taste for the rhyming heroic tragedies, and brought the nation back from sound to sense, from rant to passion. More important events may be traced in the history of Ridicule. When a certain set of intemperate Puritans, in the reign of Elizabeth, the ridiculous reformists of abuses in Church and State, congregated themselves under the literary nom de guerre of Martin Mar-prelate, a stream of libels ran throughout the nation. The grave discourses of the archbishop and the prelates could never silence the hardy and concealed libellers. They employed a moveable printing-press, and the publishers perpetually shifting their place, long escaped detection. They declared their works were "printed in Europe, not far from some of the bouncing priests;" or they were "printed over sea, in Europe, within two furlongs of a bouncing priest, at the cost and charges of Martin Mar-prelate, gent." It was then that TOM NASH, whom I am about to introduce to the reader's more familiar acquaintance, the most exquisite banterer of that age of genius, turned on them their own weapons, and annihilated them into silence when they found themselves paid in their own base coin. He rebounded their popular ribaldry on themselves, with such replies as "Pap with a hatchet, or a fig for my godson; or, crack me this nut. To be sold, at the sign of the Crab-tree Cudgel, in Thwack-coat lane."[2] Not less biting was his "Almond for a Parrot, or an Alms for Martin." Nash first silenced Martin Mar-prelate, and the government afterwards hanged him; Nash might be vain of the greater honour. A ridiculer then is the best champion to meet another ridiculer; their scurrilities magically undo each other. But the abuse of ridicule is not one of the least calamities of literature, when it withers genius, and gibbets whom it ought to enshrine. Never let us forget that Socrates before his judges asserted that "his persecution originated in the licensed raillery of Aristophanes, which had so unduly influenced the popular mind during several years!" And thus a fictitious Socrates, not the great moralist, was condemned. Armed with the most licentious ridicule, the Aretine of our own country and times has proved that its chief magistrate was not protected by the shield of domestic and public virtues; a false and distorted image of an intelligent monarch could cozen the gross many, and aid the purposes of the subtle few. There is a plague-spot in ridicule, and the man who is touched with it can be sent forth as the jest of his country. The literary reign of Elizabeth, so fertile in every kind of genius, exhibits a remarkable instance, in the controversy between the witty Tom Nash and the learned Gabriel Harvey. It will illustrate the nature of the fictions of ridicule, expose the materials of which its shafts are composed, and the secret arts by which ridicule can level a character which seems to be placed above it. GABRIEL HARVEY was an author of considerable rank, but with two learned brothers, as Wood tells us, "had the ill luck to fall into the hands of that noted and restless buffoon, Tom Nash." Harvey is not unknown to the lover of poetry, from his connexion with Spenser, who loved and revered him. He is the Hobynol whose poem is prefixed to the "Faery Queen," who introduced Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney: and, besides his intimacy with the literary characters of his times, he was a Doctor of Laws, an erudite scholar, and distinguished as a poet. Such a man could hardly be contemptible; and yet, when some little peculiarities become aggravated, and his works are touched by the caustic of the most adroit banterer of that age of wit, no character has descended to us with such grotesque deformity, exhibited in so ludicrous an attitude. Harvey was a pedant, but pedantry was part of the erudition of an age when our national literature was passing from its infancy; he introduced hexameter verses into our language, and pompously laid claim to an invention which, designed for the reformation of English verse, was practised till it was found sufficiently ridiculous. His style was infected with his pedantic taste; and the hard outline of his satirical humour betrays the scholastic cynic, not the airy and fluent wit. He had, perhaps, the foibles of a man who was clearing himself from obscurity; he prided himself on his family alliances, while he fastidiously looked askance on the trade of his father--a rope-manufacturer. He was somewhat rich in his apparel, according to the rank in society he held; and, hungering after the notice of his friends, they fed him on soft sonnet and relishing dedication, till Harvey ventured to publish a collection of panegyrics on himself--and thus gravely stepped into a niche erected to Vanity. At length he and his two brothers--one a divine and the other a physician--became students of astronomy; then an astronomer usually ended in an almanac-maker, and above all, in an astrologer--an avocation which tempted a man to become a prophet. Their "sharp and learned judgment on earthquakes" drove the people out of their senses (says Wood); but when nothing happened of their predictions, the brothers received a severe castigation from those great enemies of prophets, the wits. The buffoon, Tarleton, celebrated for his extempore humour, jested on them at the theatre;[3] Elderton, a drunken ballad-maker, "consumed his ale-crammed nose to nothing in bear-bating them with bundles of ballads."[4] One on the earthquake commenced with "Quake! quake! quake!" They made the people laugh at their false terrors, or, as Nash humorously describes their fanciful panic, "when they sweated and were not a haire the worse." Thus were the three learned brothers beset by all the town-wits; Gabriel had the hardihood, with all undue gravity, to charge pell-mell among the whole knighthood of drollery; a circumstance probably alluded to by Spenser, in a sonnet addressed to Harvey--
This extraordinary circumstance accounts for the excessive rarity of Harvey's "Foure Letters, 1592," and that literary scourge of Nash's, "Have with you to Saffron-Walden (Harvey's residence), or Gabriel Harvey's Hunt is vp, 1596;" pamphlets now as costly as if they consisted of leaves of gold.[8] Nash, who, in his other works, writes in a style as flowing as Addison's, with hardly an obsolete vestige, has rather injured this literary invective by the evident burlesque he affects of Harvey's pedantic idiom; and for this Mr. Malone has hastily censured him, without recollecting the aim of this modern Lucian.[9] The delicacy of irony; the sous-entendu, that subtlety of indicating what is not told; all that poignant satire, which is the keener for its polish, were not practised by our first vehement satirists; but a bantering masculine humour, a style stamped in the heat of fancy, with all the life-touches of strong individuality, characterise these licentious wits. They wrote then as the old fabliers told their tales, naming everything by its name; our refinement cannot approve, but it cannot diminish their real nature, and among our elaborate graces, their naïveté must be still wanting. In this literary satire NASH has interwoven a kind of ludicrous biography of Harvey; and seems to have anticipated the character of Martinus Scriblerus. I leave the grosser parts of this invective untouched; for my business is not with slander, but with ridicule. Nash opens as a skilful lampooner; he knew well that ridicule, without the appearance of truth, was letting fly an arrow upwards, touching no one. Nash accounts for his protracted silence by adroitly declaring that he had taken these two or three years to get perfect intelligence of Harvey's "Life and conversation; one true point whereof well sat downe will more excruciate him than knocking him about the ears with his own style in a hundred sheets of paper." And with great humour says-- "As long as it is since he writ against me, so long have I given him a lease of his life, and he hath only held it by my mercy; and now let him thank his friends for this heavy load of disgrace I lay upon him, since I do it but to show my sufficiency; and they urging what a triumph he had over me, hath made me ransack my standish more than I would." In the history of such a literary hero as Gabriel, the birth has ever been attended by portents. Gabriel's mother "dreamt a dream," that she was delivered "of an immense elder gun that can shoot nothing but pellets of chewed paper; and thought, instead of a boy, she was brought to bed of one of those kistrell birds called a wind-sucker." At the moment of his birth came into the world "a calf with a double tongue, and eares longer than any ass's, with his feet turned backwards." Facetious analogies of Gabriel's literary genius! He then paints to the life the grotesque portrait of Harvey; so that the man himself stands alive before us. "He was of an adust swarth choleric dye, like restie bacon, or a dried scate-fish; his skin riddled and crumpled like a piece of burnt parchment, with channels and creases in his face, and wrinkles and frets of old age." Nash dexterously attributes this premature old age to his own talents; exulting humorously-- "I have brought him low, and shrewdly broken him; look on his head, and you shall find a gray haire for euerie line I have writ against him; and you shall haue all his beard white too by the time he hath read ouer this booke." To give a finishing to the portrait, and to reach the climax of personal contempt, he paints the sordid misery in which he lived at Saffron-Walden:--"Enduring more hardness than a camell, who will liue four dayes without water, and feedes on nothing but thistles and wormwood, as he feeds on his estate on trotters, sheep porknells, and buttered rootes, in an hexameter meditation." In his Venetian velvet and pantofles of pride, we are told-- "He looks, indeed, like a case of tooth-pickes, or a lute-pin stuck in a suit of apparell. An Vsher of a dancing-schoole, he is such a basia de vmbra de vmbra de los pedes; a kisser of the shadow of your feetes shadow he is!" This is, doubtless, a portrait resembling the original, with its Cervantic touches; Nash would not have risked what the eyes of his readers would instantly have proved to be fictitious; and, in fact, though the Grangerites know of no portrait of Gabriel Harvey, they will find a woodcut of him by the side of this description; it is, indeed, in a most pitiable attitude, expressing that gripe of criticism which seized on Gabriel "upon the news of the going in hand of my booke." The ponderosity and prolixity of Gabriel's "period of a mile," are described with a facetious extravagance, which may be given as a specimen of the eloquence of ridicule. Harvey entitled his various pamphlets "Letters." "More letters yet from the doctor? Out upon it, here's a packet of epistling, as bigge as a packe of woollen cloth, or a stack of salt fish. Carrier, didst thou bring it by wayne, or by horsebacke? By wayne, sir, and it hath crackt me three axle-trees.--Heavie newes! Take them again! I will never open them.--My cart (quoth he, deep-sighing,) hath cryde creake under them fortie times euerie furlong; wherefore if you be a good man rather make mud-walls with them, mend highways, or damme up quagmires with them. "When I came to unrip and unbumbast[10] this Gargantuan bag pudding, and found nothing in it but dogs tripes, swines livers, oxe galls, and sheepes guts, I was in a bitterer chafe than anie cooke at a long sermon, when his meat burnes. "O 'tis an vnsconscionable vast gor-bellied volume, bigger bulkt than a Dutch hoy, and more cumbersome than a payre of Switzer's galeaze breeches."[11] And in the same ludicrous style he writes-- "One epistle thereof to John Wolfe (Harvey's printer) I took and weighed in an ironmonger's scale, and it counter poyseth a cade[12] of herrings with three Holland cheeses. It was rumoured about the Court that the guard meant to trie masteries with it before the Queene, and instead of throwing the sledge, or the hammer, to hurle it foorth at the armes end for a wager. "Sixe and thirtie sheets it comprehendeth, which with him is but sixe and thirtie full points (periods); for he makes no more difference 'twixt a sheet of paper and a full pointe, than there is 'twixt two black puddings for a pennie, and a pennie for a pair of black puddings. Yet these are but the shortest prouerbes of his wit, for he never bids a man good morrow, but he makes a speech as long as a proclamation, nor drinkes to anie, but he reads a lecture of three howers long, de Arte bibendi. O 'tis a precious apothegmatical pedant." It was the foible of Harvey to wish to conceal the humble avocation of his father: this forms a perpetual source of the bitterness or the pleasantry of Nash, who, indeed, calls his pamphlet "a full answer to the eldest son of the halter maker," which, he says, "is death to Gabriel to remember; wherefore from time to time he doth nothing but turmoile his thoughts how to invent new pedigrees, and what great nobleman's bastard he was likely to be, not whose sonne he is reputed to be. Yet he would not have a shoo to put on his foote if his father had not traffiqued with the hangman.--Harvey nor his brothers cannot bear to be called the sonnes of a rope-maker, which, by his private confession to some of my friends, was the only thing that most set him afire against me. Turne over his two bookes he hath published against me, wherein he hath clapt paper God's plentie, if that could press a man to death, and see if, in the waye of answer, or otherwise, he once mentioned the word rope-maker, or come within forty foot of it; except in one place of his first booke, where he nameth it not neither, but goes thus cleanly to worke:--'and may not a good sonne have a reprobate for his father?' a periphrase of a rope-maker, which, if I should shryue myself, I never heard before." According to Nash, Gabriel took his oath before a justice, that his father was an honest man, and kept his sons at the Universities a long time. "I confirmed it, and added, Ay! which is more, three proud sonnes, that when they met the hangman, their father's best customer, would not put off their hats to him--" Such repeated raillery on this foible of Harvey touched him more to the quick, and more raised the public laugh, than any other point of attack; for it was merited. Another foible was, perhaps, the finical richness of Harvey's dress, adopting the Italian fashions on his return from Italy, "when he made no bones of taking the wall of Sir Philip Sidney, in his black Venetian velvet."[13] On this the fertile invention of Nash raises a scandalous anecdote concerning Gabriel's wardrobe; "a tale of his hobby-horse reuelling and domineering at Audley-end, when the Queen was there; to which place Gabriel came ruffling it out, hufty tufty, in his suit of veluet--" which he had "untrussed, and pelted the outside from the lining of an old velvet saddle he had borrowed!" "The rotten mould of that worm-eaten relique, he means, when he dies, to hang over his tomb for a monument."[14] Harvey was proud of his refined skill in "Tuscan authors," and too fond of their worse conceits. Nash alludes to his travels in Italy, "to fetch him twopenny worth of Tuscanism, quite renouncing his natural English accents and gestures, wrested himself wholly to the Italian punctilios, painting himself like a courtezan, till the Queen declared, 'he looked something like an Italian!' At which he roused his plumes, pricked his ears, and run away with the bridle betwixt his teeth." These were malicious tales, to make his adversary contemptible, whenever the merry wits at court were willing to sharpen themselves on him. One of the most difficult points of attack was to break through that bastion of sonnets and panegyrics with which Harvey had fortified himself by the aid of his friends, against the assaults of Nash. Harvey had been commended by the learned and the ingenious. Our Lucian, with his usual adroitness, since he could not deny Harvey's intimacy with Spenser and Sidney, gets rid of their suffrages by this malicious sarcasm: "It is a miserable thing for a man to be said to have had friends, and now to have neer a one left!" As for the others, whom Harvey calls "his gentle and liberall friends," Nash boldly caricatures the grotesque crew, as "tender itchie brained infants, that cared not what they did, so they might come in print; worthless whippets, and jack-straws, who meeter it in his commendation, whom he would compare with the highest." The works of these young writers he describes by an image exquisitely ludicrous and satirical:-- "These mushrumpes, who pester the world with their pamphlets, are like those barbarous people in the hot countries, who, when they have bread to make, doe no more than clap the dowe upon a post on the outside of their houses, and there leave it to the sun to bake; so their indigested conceipts, far rawer than anie dowe, at all adventures upon the post they clap, pluck them off who will, and think they have made as good a batch of poetrie as may be." Of Harvey's list of friends he observes:-- "To a bead-roll of learned men and lords, he appeals, whether he be an asse or no?" Harvey had said, "Thomas Nash, from the top of his wit looking down upon simple creatures, calleth Gabriel Harvey a dunce, a foole, an ideot, a dolt, a goose cap, an asse, and so forth; for some of the residue is not to be spoken but with his owne mannerly mouth; but he should have shewed particularlie which wordes in my letters were the wordes of a dunce; which sentences the sentences of a foole; which arguments the arguments of an ideot; which opinions the opinions of a dolt; which judgments the judgments of a goose-cap; which conclusions the conclusions of an asse."[15] Thus Harvey reasons, till he becomes unreasonable; one would have imagined that the literary satires of our English Lucian had been voluminous enough, without the mathematical demonstration. The banterers seem to have put poor Harvey nearly out of his wits; he and his friends felt their blows too profoundly; they were much too thin-skinned, and the solemn air of Harvey in his graver moments at their menaces is extremely ludicrous. They frequently called him Gabrielissime Gabriel, which quintessence of himself seems to have mightily affected him. They threatened to confute his letters till eternity--which seems to have put him in despair. The following passage, descriptive of Gabriel's distresses, may excite a smile. "This grand confuter of my letters says, 'Gabriel, if there be any wit or industrie in thee, now I will dare it to the vttermost; write of what thou wilt, in what language thou wilt, and I will confute it, and answere it. Take Truth's part, and I will proouve truth to be no truth, marching ovt of thy dung-voiding mouth.' He will never leave me as long as he is able to lift a pen, ad infinitum; if I reply, he has a rejoinder; and for my brief triplication, he is prouided with a quadruplication, and so he mangles my sentences, hacks my arguments, wrenches my words, chops and changes my phrases, even to the disjoyning and dislocation of my whole meaning." Poor Harvey! he knew not that there was nothing real in ridicule, no end to its merry malice! Harvey's taste for hexameter verses, which he so unnaturally forced into our language, is admirably ridiculed. Harvey had shown his taste for these metres by a variety of poems, to whose subjects Nash thus sarcastically alludes:-- "It had grown with him into such a dictionary custom, that no may-pole in the street, no wether-cocke on anie church-steeple, no arbour, no lawrell, no yewe-tree, he would ouerskip, without hayling in this manner. After supper, if he chancst to play at cards with a queen of harts in his hands, he would run upon men's and women's hearts all the night." And he happily introduces here one of the miserable hexameter conceits of Harvey--
Harvey's "Encomium Lauri" thus ridiculously commences, What might I call this tree? A lawrell? O bonny lawrell,
The most humorous part in this Scribleriad, is a ludicrous narrative of Harvey's expedition to the metropolis, for the sole purpose of writing his "Pierce Supererogation," pitted against Nash's "Pierce's Pennilesse." The facetious Nash describes the torpor and pertinacity of his genius, by telling us he had kept Harvey at work-- "For seaven and thirtie weekes space while he lay at his printer's, Wolfe, never stirring out of doors, or being churched all that while--and that in the deadest season that might bee, hee lying in the ragingest furie of the last plague where there dyde above 1600 a weeke in London, ink-squittring and saracenically printing against mee. Three quarters of a year thus immured hee remained, with his spirits yearning empassionment, and agonised fury, thirst of revenge, neglecting soul and bodies health to compasse it--sweating and dealing upon it most intentively."[16] The narrative proceeds with the many perils which Harvey's printer encountered, by expense of diet, and printing for this bright genius and his friends, whose works "would rust and iron-spot paper to have their names breathed over it;" and that Wolfe designed "to get a privilege betimes, forbidding of all others to sell waste-paper but himselfe." The climax of the narrative, after many misfortunes, ends with Harvey being arrested by the printer, and confined to Newgate, where his sword is taken from him, to his perpetual disgrace. So much did Gabriel endure for having written a book against Tom Nash! But Harvey might deny some of these ludicrous facts.--Will he deny? cries Nash--and here he has woven every tale the most watchful malice could collect, varnished for their full effect. Then he adds, "You see I have brought the doctor out of request at court; and it shall cost me a fall, but I will get him howted out of the Vniuersitie too, ere I giue him ouer." He tells us Harvey was brought on the stage at Trinity-college, in "the exquisite comedie of Pedantius," where, under "the finical fine schoolmaster, the just manner of his phrase, they stufft his mouth with; and the whole buffianisme throughout his bookes, they bolstered out his part with--euen to the carrying of his gowne, his nice gate in his pantofles, or the affected accent of his speech--Let him deny that there was a shewe made at Clarehall of him and his brothers, called Tarrarantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum Tri-Harveyorum Tri-harmonia; and another shewe of the little minnow his brother, at Peter-house, called Duns furens, Dick Harvey in a frensie." The sequel is thus told:--"Whereupon Dick came and broke the college glass windows, and Dr. Perne caused him to be set in the stockes till the shewe was ended." This "Duns furens, Dick Harvey in a frensie," was not only the brother of one who ranked high in society and literature, but himself a learned professor. Nash brings him down to "Pigmey Dick, that lookes like a pound of goldsmith's candles, who had like to commit folly last year with a milk-maid, as a friend of his very soberly informed me. Little and little-wittied Dick, that hath vowed to live and die in defence of Brutus and his Trojans."[17] An Herculean feat of this "Duns furens," Nash tells us, was his setting Aristotle with his heels upwards on the school-gates at Cambridge, and putting ass's ears on his head, which Tom here records in perpetuam rei memoriam. But Wood, our grave and keen literary antiquary, observes-- "To let pass other matters these vain men (the wits) report of Richard Harvey, his works show him quite another person than what they make him to be." Nash then forms a ludicrous contrast between "witless Gabriel and ruffling Richard." The astronomer Richard was continually baiting the great bear in the firmament, and in his lectures set up atheistical questions, which Nash maliciously adds, "as I am afraid the earth would swallow me if I should but rehearse." And at his close, Nash bitterly regrets he has no more room; "else I should make Gabriel a fugitive out of England, being the rauenousest slouen that ever lapt porridge in noblemen's houses, where he has had already, out of two, his mittimus of Ye may be gone! for he was a sower of seditious paradoxes amongst kitchen-boys." Nash seems to have considered himself as terrible as an Archilochus, whose satires were so fatal as to induce the satirised, after having read them, to hang themselves. How ill poor Harvey passed through these wit-duels, and how profoundly the wounds inflicted on him and his brothers were felt, appears by his own confessions. In his "Foure Letters," after some curious observations on invectives and satires, from those of Archilochus, Lucian, and Aretine, to Skelton and Scoggin, and "the whole venomous and viperous brood of old and new raylers," he proceeds to blame even his beloved friend the gentle Spenser, for the severity of his "Mother Hubbard's Tale," a satire on the court. "I must needes say, Mother Hubbard in heat of choller, forgetting the pure sanguine of her Sweete Feary Queene, artfully ouershott her malcontent-selfe; as elsewhere I have specified at large, with the good leaue of vnspotted friendship.--Sallust and Clodius learned of Tully to frame artificiall declamations and patheticall invectives against Tully himselfe; if Mother Hubbard, in the vaine of Chawcer, happen to tel one canicular tale, father Elderton and his son Greene, in the vaine of Skelton or Scoggin, will counterfeit an hundred dogged fables, libles, slaunders, lies, for the whetstone. But many will sooner lose their liues than the least jott of their reputation. What mortal feudes, what cruel bloodshed, what terrible slaughterdome have been committed for the point of honour and some few courtly ceremonies." The incidents so plentifully narrated in this Lucianic biography, the very nature of this species of satire throws into doubt; yet they still seem shadowed out from some truths; but the truths who can unravel from the fictions? And thus a narrative is consigned to posterity which involves illustrious characters in an inextricable network of calumny and genius. Writers of this class alienate themselves from human kind, they break the golden bond which holds them to society; and they live among us like a polished banditti. In these copious extracts, I have not noticed the more criminal insinuations against the Harveys; I have left the grosser slanders untouched. My object has been only to trace the effects of ridicule, and to detect its artifices, by which the most dignified characters may be deeply injured at the pleasure of a Ridiculer. The wild mirth of ridicule, aggravating and taunting real imperfections, and fastening imaginary ones on the victim in idle sport or ill-humour, strikes at the most brittle thing in the world, a man's good reputation, for delicate matters which are not under the protection of the law, but in which so much of personal happiness is concerned.
[1] Of AKENSIDE few particulars have been recorded, for the friend who best knew him was of so cold a temper with regard to public opinion, that he has not, in his account, revealed a solitary feature in the character of the poet. Yet Akenside's mind and manners were of a fine romantic cast, drawn from the moulds of classical antiquity. Such was the charm of his converse, that he even heated the cold and sluggish mind of Sir John Hawkins, who has, with unusual vivacity, described a day spent with him in the country. As I have mentioned the fictitious physician in "Peregrine Pickle," let the same page show the real one. I shall transcribe Sir John's forgotten words--omitting his "neat and elegant dinner:"--"Akenside's conversation was of the most delightful kind, learned, instructive, and, without any affectation of wit, cheerful and entertaining. One of the pleasantest days of my life I passed with him, Mr. Dyson, and another friend, at Putney--where the enlivening sunshine of a summer's day, and the view of an unclouded sky, were the least of our gratifications. In perfect good-humour with himself and all about him, he seemed to feel a joy that he lived, and poured out his gratulations to the great Dispenser of all felicity in expressions that Plato himself might have uttered on such an occasion. In conversations with select friends, and those whose studies had been nearly the same with his own, it was a usual thing with him, in libations to the memory of eminent men among the ancients, to bring their characters into view, and expatiate on those particulars of their lives that had rendered them famous." Observe the arts of the ridiculer! he seized on the romantic enthusiasm of Akenside, and turned it to the cookery of the ancients! [2] This pamphlet has been ascribed to John Lilly, but it must be confessed that its native vigour strangely contrasts with the famous Euphuism of that refined writer. [There can, however, be little doubt that he was the author of this tract, as he is alluded to more than once as such by Harvey in his "Pierce's Supererogation;"--"would that Lilly had alwaies been Euphues and never Pap-hatchet."--ED.] [3] Tarleton appears to have had considerable power of extemporising satirical rhymes on the fleeting events of his own day. A collection of his Jests was published in 1611; the following is a favourable specimen:--"There was a nobleman asked Tarleton what he thought of soldiers in time of peace. Marry, quoth he, they are like chimneys in summer."--ED. [4] A long list of Elderton's popular rhymes is given by Ritson in his "Bibliographia Poetica." One of them, on the "King of Scots and Andrew Browne," is published in Percy's "Reliques," who speaks of him as "a facetious fuddling companion, whose tippling and whose rhymes rendered him famous among his contemporaries." Ritson is more condensed and less civil in his analysis; he simply describes him as "a ballad-maker by profession, and drunkard by habit."--ED. [5] Harvey, in the title-page of his "Pierce's Supererogation," has placed an emblematic woodcut, expressive of his own confidence, and his contempt of the wits. It is a lofty palm-tree, with its durable and impenetrable trunk; at its feet lie a heap of serpents, darting their tongues, and filthy toads, in vain attempting to pierce or to pollute it. The Italian motto, wreathed among the branches of the palm, declares, Il vostro malignare non giova nulla: Your malignity avails nothing. [6] Among those Sonnets, in Harvey's "Foure Letters, and certaine Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene and other parties by him abused, 1592," there is one, which, with great originality of conception, has an equal vigour of style, and causticity of satire, on Robert Greene's death. John Harvey the physician, who was then dead, is thus made to address the town-wit, and the libeller of himself and his family. If Gabriel was the writer of this singular Sonnet, as he undoubtedly is of the verses to Spenser, subscribed Hobynol, it must be confessed he is a Poet, which he never appears in his English hexameters:--
"Come, fellow Greene, come to thy gaping grave,
[8] Sir Egerton Brydges in his reprint of "Greene's Groatsworth of Wit," has given the only passage from "The Quip for an Upstart Courtier," which at all alludes to Harvey's father. He says with great justice, "there seems nothing in it sufficiently offensive to account for the violence of Harvey's anger." The Rev. A. Dyce, so well known from his varied researches in our dramatic literature, is of opinion that the offensive passage has been removed from the editions which have come down to us. Without some such key it is impossible to comprehend Harvey's implacable hatred, or the words of himself and friends when they describe Greene as an "impudent railer in an odious and desperate mood," or his satire as "spiteful and villanous abuse." The occasion of the quarrel was an attack by Richard Harvey, who had the folly to "mis-term all our poets and writers about London, piperly make-plays and make-bates," as Nash informs us; "hence Greene being chief agent to the company, for he writ more than four other, took occasion to canvass him a little,--about some seven or eight lines, which hath plucked on an invective of so many leaves."--ED. [9] Nash was a great favourite with the wits of his day. One calls him "our true English Aretine," another, "Sweet satyric Nash," a third describes his Muse as "armed with a gag-tooth (a tusk), and his pen possessed with Hercules's furies." He is well characterised in "The Return from Parnassus."
[10] Bombast was the tailors' term in the Elizabethan era for the stuffing of horsehair or wool used for the large breeches then in fashion; hence the term was applied to high-sounding phrases--"all sound and fury, signifying nothing."--ED. [11] These were the loose heavy breeches so constantly worn by Swiss soldiers as to become a national costume, and which has been handed down to us by the artists of the day in a variety of forms. They obtained the name of galeaze, from their supposed resemblance to the broad-bottomed ship called a galliass.--ED. [12] A cade is 500 herrings; a great quantity of an article of no value. [13] Harvey's love of dress, and desire to indulge it cheaply, is satirically alluded to by Nash, in confuting Harvey's assertion that Greene's wardrobe at his death was not worth more than three shillings--"I know a broker in a spruce leather jerkin shall give you thirty shillings for the doublet alone, if you can help him to it. Hark in your ear! he had a very fair cloak, with sleeves of a goose green, it would serve you as fine as may be. No more words; if you be wise, play the good husband, and listen after it, you may buy it ten shillings better cheap than it cost him. By St. Silver, it is good to be circumspect in casting for the world; there's a great many ropes go to ten shillings? If you want a greasy pair of silk stockings to shew yourself in the court, they are there to be had too, amongst his moveables."--ED. [14] This unlucky Venetian velvet coat of Harvey had also produced a "Quippe for an Vpstart Courtier, or a quaint dispute between Veluet-breeches and Cloth-breeches," which poor Harvey declares was "one of the most licentious and intolerable invectives." This blow had been struck by Greene on the "Italianated" Courtier. [15] "Pierce's Supererogation, or a new praise of the Old Asse," 1593. [16] Harvey's opponents were much nimbler penmen, and could strike off these lampoons with all the facility of writers for the stage. Thus Nash declares, in his "Have with you to Saffron Walden," that he leaves Lilly, who was also attacked, to defend himself, because "in as much time as he spends in taking tobacco one week, he can compile that would make Gabriell repent himself all his life after."--ED. [17] He had written an antiquarian work on the descent of Brutus on our island.--The party also who at the University attacked the opinions of Aristotle were nicknamed the Trojans, as determined enemies of the Greeks. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |