The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (59 page)

He made no account of winning credit by his works, as thou dost; thou dost no good works, but thinks to be famoused by a strong faith of thy own worthiness. His only
care was to have a spell in his purse to conjure up a good cup of wine with at all times.

For the lousy circumstance of his poverty before his death, and sending that miserable writ to his wife, it cannot be but thou liest, learned Gabriel.

I and one of my fellows, William Monox (hast thou never heard of him and his great dagger?), were in company with him a month before he died, at that fatal banquet of rhenish wine and pickled herring (if thou wilt needs have it so), and then the inventory of his apparel came to more than three shillings (though thou sayest the contrary). I know a broker in a spruce leather jerkin with a great number of gold rings on his fingers and a bunch of keys at his girdle 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 grave goose-turd 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;
⁵
there's a great many ropes go to ten shillings. If you want a greasy pair of silk stockings also, to show yourself in at the Court, they are there to be had too amongst his moveables.
Frustra fit per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora
: it is policy to take a rich pennyworth whiles it is offered.

Strange News or The Four Letters Confuted
(M., I,
287
–
8
).

ATHEISTS

M
OST
of them, because they cannot grossly palpabrize
¹
or feel God with their bodily fingers, confidently and grossly discard Him. ‘Those that come to God must believe that God is, and that He is a rewarder of them that seek Him' (Hebrews
11
). They, coming against God, believe that He is not, and that those prosper best, and are best rewarded, that set Him at naught. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork; one generation telleth another of the wonders He hath done' (Psalm
18
). Yet will not these faithless contradictors suffer any glory to be ascribed to Him. Stoutly they refragate
²
and withstand, that the firmament is not His handiwork, nor will they credit one generation telling another of His wonders. They follow the pironicks,
³
whose position and opinion it is that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians are able to show antiquities thousands
⁴
before Adam.

With Cornelius Tacitus, they make Moses a wise provident man, well seen in the Egyptian learning, but deny he had any divine assistance in the greatest of his miracles. The water, they say, which he struck out of a rock in the wilderness, was not by any supernatural work of GOD, but by watching to what part the wild-asses repaired for drink.

With Albumazar, they hold that his leading the children of Israel over the Red Sea was no more but observing the influence of stars and waning season of the moon that
withdraweth the tides. They seek not to know God in His works, or in His son Christ Jesus, but by His substance, His form, or the place wherein He doth exist. Because some late writers
⁵
of our side have sought to discredit the story of Judith, of Susannah and Daniel, and of Bell and the Dragon, they think they may thrust all the rest of the Bible in like manner into the Jewish Thalmud, and tax it for a fabulous legend.

Christ's Tears over Jerusalem
(M., II,
115
–
16
).

FROST-BITTEN INTELLECT

I am at my wits' end, when I view how coldly, in comparison of other countrymen, our Englishmen write. How in their books of confutation they show no wit or courage as well as learning. In all other things Englishmen are the stoutest of all others, but being scholars and living in their own native soil, their brains are so pestered with full platters that they have no room to bestir them. Fie, fie, shall we, because we have lead and tin mines in England, have lead and tin muses? For shame, bury not your spirits in beef-pots. Let not the Italians call you dull-headed
tramontani
.
⁶
So many dunces in Cambridge and Oxford are entertained as chief members into societies, under pretence, though they have no great learning, yet there is in them zeal and religion, that scarce the least hope is left us we should have any hereafter but blocks and images to confute blocks and images. That of Terence is oraculized:
Patres aequum censere nos adolescentulos ilico a pueris fieri senes
⁷
(‘Our fathers are now grown to such austerity as they would have us straight of children to become old men'). They will allow no time for a grey beard to grow in. If at the first peeping out of the shell a young student sets not a grave face on it, or seems not mortifiedly religious (have he never so good a wit, be he never so fine a scholar), he is cast off
and discouraged. They set not before their eyes how all were not called at the first hour of the day, for then had none of us ever been called. That not the first son that promised his father to go into the vineyard went, but he that refused and said he would not, went That those blossoms which peep forth in the beginning of the spring are frost-bitten and die ere they can come to be fruit. That religion which is soon ripe is soon rotten.

Christ's Tears over Jerusalem
(M., II,
122
–
3
).

GORGEOUS LADIES OF THE COURT

Just to dinner they will arise, and after dinner go to bed again, and lie until supper. Yea, sometimes, by no sickness occasioned, they will lie in bed three days together, provided every morning before four o'clock they have their broths and their cullises
⁸
with pearl and gold sodden in them. If haply they break their hours and rise more early to go abanqueting, they stand practising half a day with their looking-glasses, how to pierce and to glance and to look alluringly amiable. Their feet are not so well framed to the measures as are their eyes to move and bewitch. Even as angels are painted in church-windows with glorious golden fronts beset with sunbeams, so beset they their foreheads on either side with glorious borrowed gleamy bushes; which, rightly interpreted, should signify beauty to sell, since a bush
⁹
is not else hanged forth but to invite men to buy. And in Italy, where they set any beast to sale, they crown his head with garlands, and bedeck it with gaudy blossoms, as full as ever it may stick.

Their heads, with their top and top-gallant lawn baby-caps and snow-resembled silver curlings, they make a plain puppet stage of. Their breasts they embusk up on high, and their round roseate buds immodestly lay forth, to show at their hands there is fruit to be hoped. In their curious antic-woven garments, they imitate and mock the worms
and adders that must eat them. They show the swellings of their mind in the swellings and plumpings out of their apparel. Gorgeous ladies of the Court, never was I admitted so near any of you as to see how you torture poor old Time with sponging, pinning and pouncing;
¹⁰
but they say, his sickle you have burst in twain to make your periwigs more elevated arches of.

I dare not meddle with ye, since the philosopher
¹¹
that too intentively gazed on the stars stumbled and fell into a ditch; and many gazing too immoderately on our earthly stars fall in the end into the ditch of all uncleanness. Only this humble caveat let me give you by the way, that you look the devil come not to you in the likeness of a tailor or painter; that however you disguise your bodies, you lay not on your colours so thick that they sink into your souls. That your skins being too white without, your souls be not all black within.

It is not your pinches,
¹²
your purls,
¹³
your flowery jaggings,
¹⁴
superfluous interlacings, and puffings up, that can any way offend God, but the puffings up of your souls which therein you express. For as the biting of a bullet is not that which poisons the bullet, but the lying of the gunpowder in the dint of the biting, so it is not the wearing of costly burnished apparel that shall be objected unto you for sin, but the pride of your hearts, which, like the moth, lies closely shrouded amongst the thrids of that apparel. Nothing else is garish apparel but Pride's ulcer broken forth. How will you attire yourselves, what gown, what head-tire will you put on, when you shall live in hell amongst hags and devils?

As many jags, blisters and scars shall toads, cankers and serpents make on your pure skins in the grave, as now you have cuts, jags or raisings upon your garments. In the marrow of your bones snakes shall breed. Your mornlike crystal
countenances shall be netted over and, masker-like, cawlvizarded with crawling venomous worms. Your orient teeth toads shall steal into their heads for pearl; of the jelly of your decayed eyes shall they engender them young. In their hollow caves (their transplendent juice so pollutionately employed) shelly snails shall keep house.

Christ's Tears over Jerusalem
(M., II,
137
–
9
).

STEWS AND STRUMPETS

London, what are thy suburbs but licensed stews? Can it be so many brothel-houses of salary sensuality and six-penny whoredom (the next door to the magistrates) should be set up and maintained, if bribes did not bestir them? I accuse none, but certainly justice somewhere is corrupted. Whole hospitals of ten-times-a-day dishonested strumpets have we cloistered together. Night and day the entrance unto them is as free as to a tavern. Not one of them but hath a hundred retainers. Prentices and poor servants they encourage to rob their masters. Gentlemen's purses and pockets they will dive into and pick, even whiles they are dallying with them.

No Smithfield
¹⁵
ruffianly swashbuckler will come off with such harsh hell-raking oaths as they. Every one of them is a gentlewoman, and either the wife of two husbands, or a bed-wedded bride before she was ten years old. The speech-shunning sores and sight-irking botches of their unsatiate intemperance they will unblushingly lay forth and jestingly brag of, wherever they haunt. To church they never repair. Not in all their whole life would they hear of GOD, if it were not for their huge swearing and foreswearing by Him.

Great cunning do they ascribe to their art, as the discerning, by the very countenance, a man that hath crowns in his purse; the fine closing in with
¹⁶
the next Justice, or Alderman's deputy of the ward; the winning love of neighbours
round about to repel violence if haply their houses should be environed, or any in them prove unruly, being pilled and pould
¹⁷
too unconscionably. They forecast for backdoors, to come in and out by, undiscovered. Sliding windows also and trapdoors in floors to hide whores behind and under, with false counterfeit panes in walls, to be opened and shut like a wicket Some one gentleman generally acquainted they give his admission unto sans fee, and free privilege thenceforward in their nunnery to procure them frequentence. Awake your wits, grave authorized law-distributors, and show yourselves as insinuative-subtle in smoking this city-sodoming trade out of his starting-holes as the professors of it are in underpropping it. Either you do not or will not descend into their deep-juggling legerdemain. Any excuse or unlikely pretext goes for payment. Set up a shop of incontinency whoso will, let him have but one letter of an honest name to grace it. In such a place dwells a wise woman that tells fortunes, and she, under that shadow, hath her house never empty of forlorn unfortunate dames, married to old husbands.

Christ's Tears over Jerusalem
(M., II,
148
,
152
).

PRAYER FOR LONDON

Comfort us, Lord; we mourn, our bread is mingled with ashes and our drink with tears. With so many funerals are we oppressed that we have no leisure to weep for our sins, for howling for our sons and daughters. Oh, hear the voice of our howling, withdraw Thy hand from us, and we will draw near unto Thee.

Come, Lord Jesu, come, for as thou art Jesus, thou art pitiful. Challenge some part of our sin-procured scourge to thy cross. Let it not be said that thou but half-satisfiedst for sin. We believe thee to be an absolute satisfier for sin. As we believe, so for thy merit's sake we beseech thee let it happen unto us.

Thus ought every Christian in London, from the highest to
the lowest, to pray. From God's justice we must appeal to His mercy. As the French King, Francis the First, a woman kneeling to him for justice, said unto her: ‘Stand up, woman, for justice I owe thee; if thou begst anything, beg for mercy.' So if we beg of God for anything, let us beg for mercy, for justice He owes us. Mercy, mercy, Oh grant us, heavenly Father, for Thy mercy.

Christ's Tears over Jerusalem
(M., II,
174
–
5
).

GABRIEL HARVEY

H
IS
education will I handle next, wherein he ran through Didymus or Diomedes'
¹
six thousand books of the art of grammar, besides learned to write a fair capital roman hand that might well serve for a boon-grace
²
to such men as ride with their face towards the horse-tail, or set on the pillory for cozenage
³
or perjury. Many a copy-holder
⁴
or magistral scribe, that holds all his living by setting schoolboys copies, comes short of the like gift An old doctor of Oxford showed me Latin verses of his, in that flourishing flantitanting
⁵
gouty Omega fist,
⁶
which he presented unto him (as a bribe) to get leave to play, when he was in the height or prime of his
Puer es, cupis atque doceri
.
⁷
A good quality or qualification, I promise you truly, to keep him out of the danger of the statute gainst wilful vagabonds, rogues and beggars.