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planetary world. From the height to which you have been lifted I could carry you downwards and show you intellectual natures even inferior to those belonging to the earth, in your own moon and in the lower planets, and I could demonstrate to you the effects of pain or moral evil in assisting in the great plan of the exaltation of spiritual natures; but I will not destroy the brightness of your present idea of the scheme of the universe by degrading pictures of the effects of bad passions and of the manner in which evil is corrected and destroyed. Your vision must end with the glorious view of the inhabitants of the cometary worlds; I cannot show you the beings of the system to which I, myself, belong, that of the sun; your organs would perish before our brightness, and I am only permitted to be present to you as a sound or intellectual voice. We are likewise in progression, but we see and know something of the plans of infinite wisdom; we feel the personal presence of that supreme Deity which you only imagine; to you belongs faith, to us knowledge; and our greatest delight results from the conviction that we are lights kindled by his light and that we belong to his substance. To obey, to love, to wonder and adore, form our relations to the infinite Intelligence. We feel his laws are those of eternal justice and that they govern all things from the most glorious intellectual natures belonging to the sun and fixed stars to the meanest spark of life animating an atom crawling in the dust of your earth. We know all things begin from and end in his everlasting essence, the cause of causes, the power of powers."

From "Consolations in Travel."

THOMAS DECKER

(c. 1570-1637)

ECKER'S prose, which is well illustrated by "The Seven Deadly

Sins of London" published in 1606, belongs to the curiosities of English literature. He represents the Seven Deadly Sins as entering London in procession and devotes an essay to each of them. Decker (spelled also "Dekker") was born in London in or about the year 1570. He belongs to the Shakespearean cycle of dramatists and has the remarkable imaginative faculty which, as it appears in the principal Elizabethan writers, differentiates that period from all that went before or that has come after it in English lit.erature.

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APISHNESS

LOTH was not so slow in his march when he entered the city, but Apishness (that was to take his turn next) was as quick. Do you not know him? It cannot be read in any Chronicle that he was ever with Henry VIII. at Boulogne, or at the winning of Turwin and Turnay: for (not to belie the sweet Gentleman) he was neither in the shell then, no nor then when Paules-steeple and the Weathercock were on fire; by which marks (without looking in his mouth) you may safely swear that he is but young, for he is a fierce, dapper fellow, more light headed than a musician; as phantastically attired as a court jester; wanton in discourse; lascivious in behavior; jocund in good company; nice in his trencher, and yet he feeds very hungrily on scraps of songs: he drinks in a Glass well, but vilely in a deep Frenchbowl: yet much about the year when Monsieur came in, was he begotten, between a French tailor and an English court seamster. This Signor Joculento (as the devil would have it) comes prancing in at Cripplegate, and he may well do it, for indeed all the parts he plays are but con'd speeches stolen from others, whose voices and actions he counterfeits, but so lamely, that all the Cripples in ten Spittle-houses show not more halting. The graver

brows were bent against him, and by the awful charms of reverend authority would have sent him down from whence he came, for they knew how smooth soever his looks were, there was a devil in his bosom. But he having the stronger faction on his side, set them in a Mutiny, Sævitque animis ignobile vulgus, the many-headed Monster fought as it had been against St. George, won the gate, and then with shouts was the Gaveston of the time brought in. But who brought him in? None but rich men's sons that were left well, and had more money given by will than they had wit how to bestow it; none but Prentices almost out of their years, and all the Tailors, Haberdashers, and Embroiderers that could be got for love or money, for these were pressed secretly to the service, by the young and wanton dames of the city, because they would not be seen to show their love to him themselves.

Man is God's Ape, and an Ape is zany to a man, doing over those tricks (especially if they be knavish) which he sees done before him: so that Apishness is nothing but counterfeiting or imitation; and this flower when it first came into the city had a pretty scent, and a delightful color, hath been let to run so high that it is now seeded, and where it falls there rises up a stinking weed.

For as man is God's ape, striving to make artificial flowers, birds, etc., like to the natural; so for the same reason are women Men's she apes, for they will not be behind them the breadth of a tailor's yard (which is nothing to speak of) in any new-fangled upstart fashion. If men get up French standing collars, women will have the French standing collar too; if doublets with little thick skirts, so short that none are able to sit upon them, women's foreparts are thick skirted too; by surfeiting upon which kind of fantastical Apishness in short time they fall into the disease of pride: Pride is infectious, and breeds prodigality; Prodigality, after it has run a little, closes up and festers, and then turns to Beggary. Witty was that painter, therefore, that when he had limned one of every Nation in their proper attires, and being at his wits' ends how to draw an Englishman, at the last (to give him a quip for his folly in apparel), drew him stark naked, with shears in his hand and cloth on his arm, because none could cut out his fashions but himself.

For an Englishman's suit is like a traitor's body that hath been hanged, drawn, and quartered, and is set up in several places:

the collar of his doublet is in France; the wing and narrow sleeve in Italy; the short waist hangs over a Dutch butcher's stall in Utrich; his huge floppes speak Spanish; Polonia gives him the boots: the block for his head alters faster than the feltmaker can fit him, and thereupon we are called in scorn Blockheads. And thus we that mock every Nation for keeping one fashion, yet steal patches from every one of them to piece out our pride, are now Laughingstocks to them, because their cut so scurvily be

comes us.

This sin of Apishness, whether it be in apparel, or in diet, is not of such long life as his fellows, and for seeing none but women and fools keep him company, the one will be ashamed of him when they begin to have wrinkles, the other when they feel their purses light. The magistrate, the wealthy commoner, and the ancient citizen disdain to come near him; we were best, therefore, take note of such things as are about him, lest on a sudden he slip out of sight.

Apishness rides in a chariot made of nothing but cages, in which are all the strangest outlandish Birds that can be gotten: the cages are stuck full of parrots' feathers; the Coachman is an Italian mountebank who drives a fawn and a lamb; for they draw the gew-gaw in Winter, when such beasts are rarest to be had; in summer, it goes alone by the motion of wheels; two pages in light-colored suits, embroidered full of butterflies, with wings that flutter up with the wind, run by him, the one being a dancing boy, the other a tumbler. His attendants are Folly, Laughter, Inconstancy, Riot, Niceness, and Vainglory: when his Court removes, he is followed by Tobacconists, Shuttlecock-makers, Feathermakers, Cobweb-lawn-weavers, Perfumers, young Country Gentlemen, and Fools. In whose Ship whilst they all are sailing, let us observe what other abuses the Verdimotes Inquest do present on the land, albeit they be never reformed, till a second Chaos is to be refined. In the meantime, In nova fert Animus.

Complete. From "The Seven Deadly

Sins of London.»

DANIEL DEFOE

(1661-1731)

EFOE's essay "Upon Projects" is a series of short essays on topics whose sole connection with each other is that they have some bearing direct or incidental on something or other which Defoe thought should be done. He treats of "Banks"> "Court Merchants," "Life Insurance," or "The Education of Women," with equal facility,—a facility which suggests the habits of the modern journalist. Defoe is entitled, indeed, to rank as the first of the great journalists of England. His paper, the London Review, published from 1704 to 1713, began as a weekly, but was issued finally as a triweekly. While it was scarcely a newspaper in the modern sense, Defoe certainly had the "journalistic instinct." "State facts » has been given as the single rule necessary for the complete education of a journalist, and Defoe, if he did not govern himself by it in his political writings, certainly accomplished the paradox of making it the rule of his fiction. In all his novels, but especially in "Robinson Crusoe," he seems to be concerned with nothing except making a simple statement of unimpugnable facts which have come within his personal knowledge. As a story-teller, he has hardly been surpassed, but as is usual with the Immortals, his popularity with posterity became possible only after he had suffered almost, if not quite, all his own generation could conveniently inflict on him. He was well acquainted with the interior of debtors' prisons, and his vigor as a political pamphleteer won him the honor of the pillory, where the London mob, instead of covering him with filth, as was their habit, protected him from insult and offered him flowers. Defoe was a martyr, however, because his intellectual activity made him so by accident, not because he had or professed to have a higher moral standard than that of his generation. He failed as a merchant for £17,000, and, after release by his creditors on a compromise, paid them in full; but as a journalist opposing a Tory administration, it is said that he did not find it incompatible with his principles to take a subsidy to be earned by "omitting objectionable matter" and "toning down” the vigor of his opposition. It is asserted, however, that he was, "according to his lights, a perfectly honest man of unaffected religiosity." He may be defined as a man of genius, with a defective

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