The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (60 page)

But in his grammar years (take me thus far with you) he was a very graceless litigious youth, and one that would pick quarrels with old Gulielmus Lily's
Syntaxis
and
Prosodia
⁸
every hour of the day. A desperate stabber with pen-knives,
and whom he could not overcome in disputation he would be sure to break his head with his pen and ink-horn. His father prophesied by that his venturous manhood and valour, he would prove another Saint Thomas à Beckett to the Church. But his mother doubted him much, by reason of certain strange dreams she had when she was first quick with child of him, which well she hoped were but idle swimming fancies of no consequence, till, being advised by a cunning man (her friend, that was very far in her books), one time she slept in a sheep's skin all night, to the intent to dream true; another time under a laurel tree; a third time on the bare ground stark naked, and last on a dead man's tomb or grave-stone in the church in a hot summer's afternoon, when, no barrel better herring,
⁹
she sped even as she did before.

For first she dreamed her womb was turned to such another hollow vessel full of disquiet fiends as Solomon's brazen bowl,
¹⁰
wherein were shut so many thousands of devils; which, deep hidden under ground, long after the Babylonians, digging for metals, chanced to light upon, and, mistaking it for treasure, break it ope very greedily, when, as out of Pandora's box of maladies, which Epimetheus opened, all manner of evils flew into the world, so all manner of devils then broke loose amongst human kind. Therein her drowsy divination not much deceived her; for never were Empedocles' devils
¹¹
so tossed from the air into the sea, and from the sea to the earth, and from the earth to the air again exhaled by the sun, or driven up by winds and tempests, as his discontented poverty (more disquiet than the Irish seas) hath driven him from one profession to another. Divinity, the heaven of all arts, for a while drew his thoughts unto it, but shortly after, the world, the flesh and the devil withdrew him from that, and needs he would be of a more gentelman-like lusty cut; whereupon he fell to a moral epistling and poetry. He fell, I may well say, and
made the price of wit and poetry fall with him, when he first began to be a fripler
¹²
or broker in that trade. Yea, from the air he fell to the sea (that my comparison may hold in every point), which is, he would needs cross the seas
¹³
to fetch home two pennyworth of Tuscanism.
¹⁴
From the sea to the earth again he was tossed,
videlicet
¹⁵
shortly after he became a roguish commenter upon earthquakes,
¹⁶
as by the famous epistles (by his own mouth only made famous) may more largely appear.
Ultima linea rerum
,
¹⁷
his final entrancing from the earth to the skies, was his key-cold defence of the clergy in the tractate of Pap-hatchet,
¹⁸
intermingled, like a small fleet of galleys, in the huge Armada against me.

The second dream his mother had was that she was delivered of a caliver
¹⁹
or hand-gun, which in the discharging burst. I pray God, with all my heart, that this caliver or cavalier of poetry, this hand-gun or elder-gun,
²⁰
that shoots nothing but pellets of chewed paper, in the discharging burst not.

A third time in her sleep she apprehended and imagined that out of her belly there grew a rare garden bed, overrun with garish weeds innumerable, which had only one slip in it of herb-of-grace, not budding at the top neither, but, like the flower narcissus, having flowers only at the root; whereby she augured and conjectured, however he made some show of grace in his youth, when he came to the top or heighth of his best proof he would be found a barren stalk
without fruit At the same time (over and above) she thought that, instead of a boy (which she desired), she was delivered and brought to bed of one of these kestrel birds called a windfucker. Whether it be verifiable or only probably surmised, I am uncertain; but constantly up and down it is bruited
²¹
how he pissed ink as soon as ever he was born, and that the first clout he fouled was a sheet of paper, whence some mad wits given to descant, even as Herodotus held that the Ethiopians' seed of generation was as black as ink, so haply they unhappily would conclude, an incubus in the likeness of an ink-bottle had carnal copulation with his mother when he was begotten…

I have a tale at my tongue's end, if I can happen upon it, of his hobby-horse revelling and domineering at Audley End, when the Queen was there; to which place Gabriel, to do his country more worship and glory, came ruffling it out, huffty-tuffty,
²²
in his suit of velvet…

There did this our Talatamtana or Doctor Hum
²³
thrust himself into the thickest ranks of the noblemen and gallants, and whatsoever they were arguing of, he would not miss to catch hold of, or strike in at the one end, and take the theme out of their mouths, or it should go hard. In self-same order was he at his pretty toys
²⁴
and amorous glances and purposes with the damsels, and putting bawdy riddles unto them. In fine, some disputations there were, and he made an oration before the Maids of Honour, and not before Her Majesty as heretofore
²⁵
I misinformedly set down… . The process of that oration was of the same woof and thread with the beginning, demurely and maidenly scoffing, and blushingly wantoning and making love to those soft-skinned souls and sweet nymphs of Helicon, betwixt a kind of careless rude ruffianism and curious finical
²⁶
compliment, both which he more expressed
by his countenance than any good jests that he uttered. This finished (though not for the finishing or pronouncing of this) by some better friends than he was worthy of, and that afterward found him unworthy of the graces they had bestowed upon him, he was brought to kiss the Queen's hand, and it pleased Her Highness to say (as in my former books I have cited) that he looked something like an Italian.

No other incitement he needed to rouse his plumes, prick up his ears, and run away with the bridle betwixt his teeth, and take it upon him (of his own original engrafted disposition thereto he wanting no aptness); but now he was an insulting monarch above Monarcho,
²⁷
the Italian that ware crowns on his shoes, and quite renounced his natural English accents and gestures and wrested himself wholly to the Italian punctilios,
²⁸
speaking our homely island tongue strangely, as if he were but a raw practitioner in it, and but ten days before had entertained a school-master to teach him to pronounce it…

His father he undid to furnish him to the Court once more, where presenting himself in all the colours of the rainbow, and a pair of moustaches like a black horse-tail tied up in a knot, with two tufts sticking out on each side, he was asked by no mean personage
Unde haec insania
? (‘Whence proceedeth this folly or madness?'), and he replied with that weather-beaten piece of a verse out of the Grammar,
Semel insanivimus omnes
(‘Once in our days there is none of us but have played the idiots'). And so he was counted, and bad stand-by for a nodgscombe.
²⁹
He
³⁰
that most patronized him, prying more searchingly into him, and finding that he was more meet to make sport with than any way deeply to be employed, with fair words shook him off, and told him he was fitter for the university than
for the Court or his turn, and so bad God prosper his studies, and sent for another secretary to Oxford…

A gentleman, a friend of mine that was no stranger to such bandyings as had passed betwixt us, was desirous to see how he looked since my strappadoing and torturing him; in which spleen
³¹
he went and enquired for him. Answer was made he was but new-risen, and if it would please him to stay he would come down to him anon. Two hours good by the clock he attended his pleasure, whiles he (as some of his fellow inmates have since related unto me) stood acting by the glass all his gestures he was to use all the day after, and currying
³²
and smudging
³³
and pranking
³⁴
himself unmeasurably.
Post varios casus
,
³⁵
his case of tooth-pikes, his comb-case, his case of head-brushes and beard-brushes run over, and
tot discrimina rerum
,
³⁶
rubbing-cloths of all kinds; down he came, and after
bazelos manus
,
³⁷
with amplifications and compliments he belaboured him till his ears tingled and his feet ached again. Never was man so surfeited and over-gorged with English as he cloyed him with his generous spirits, renumeration of gratuities, stopping the posterns of ingratitude, bearing the lancer too severe into his imperfections, and traversing the ample forest of interlocutions. The gentleman swore to me that upon his first apparition, till he disclosed himself, he took him for an usher of a dancing-school; neither doth he greatly differ from it, for no usher of a dancing-school was ever such a
Bassia Dona
or
Bassia de umbra des los pedes
,
³⁸
a kisser of the shadow of your feet's shadow, as he is. I have perused verses of his, written under his own hand to Sir Philip Sidney, wherein he courted him as he were another
Cyparissus
³⁹
or Ganymede. The last Gordian true-love's knot or knitting-up of them is this:

Sum iecur ex quo te primum Sydnee vidi
,
   
Os oculosque regit, cogit amare iecur
.
⁴⁰

‘All liver am I, Sidney, since I saw thee;
My mouth, eyes, rules it, and to love doth draw me.'

Not half a year since, coming out of Lincolnshire, it was my hap to take Cambridge in my way, where I had not been in six year before, when, by wonderful destiny, who, in the same inn and very next chamber to me, parted but by a wainscot door that was nailed up, either unwitting of other, should be lodged but his Gabrielship, that, in a manner, had lived as long a pilgrim from thence as I? Every circumstance I cannot stand to reckon up, as how we came to take knowledge of one another's being there, or what a stomach I had to have scratched with him,
⁴¹
but that the nature of the place hindered me, where it is as ill as petty treason to look but awry on the sacred person of a doctor, and I had plotted my revenge otherwise; as also of a meeting or conference on his part desired, wherein all quarrels might be discussed and drawn to an atonement, but
non vult fac
,
⁴²
I had no fancy to it, for once before I had been so cozened by his colloguing,
⁴³
though personally we never met face to face, yet by trouchmen
⁴⁴
and vaunt-couriers
⁴⁵
betwixt us. Nor could it settle in my conscience to lose so much pains I had took in new-arraying and furbishing him, or that a public wrong in print was to be so slightly slubbered over in private, with ‘Come, come, give me your hand, let us be friends, and thereupon I drink to you.' And a further doubt there was if I had tasted of his beef and porridge at Trinity
Hall, as he desired (
notandum est
,
⁴⁶
for the whole fortnight together that he was in Cambridge, his commons ran in the College detriments, as the greatest courtesy he could do the house whereof he was, was to eat up their meat and never pay anything): if I had, I say, rushed in myself and two or three hungry fellows more, and cried ‘Do you want any guests? What, nothing but bare commons?', it had been a question (considering the good-will that is betwixt us) whether he would have lent me a precious dram more than ordinary to help digestion. He may be such another crafty mortaring
⁴⁷
drugger, or Italian porridge seasoner
⁴⁸
for anything I ever saw in his complexion.

The word complexion is dropped forth in good time, for to describe to you his complexion and composition entered I into this tale by the way, or tale I found in my way riding up to London. It is of an adust
⁴⁹
swarth
⁵⁰
choleric dye, like resty
⁵¹
bacon, or a dried skate-fish; so lean and so meagre that you would think (like the Turks
⁵²
) he observed four Lents in a year, or take him for the gentleman's man in
The Courtier
,
⁵³
who was so thin-cheeked and gaunt and starved, that, as he was blowing the fire with his mouth, the smoke took him up, like a light straw, and carried him to the top or funnel of the chimney, where he had flown out God knows whither, if there had not been cross-bars over-whart that stayed him. His skin riddled and crumpled like a piece of burnt parchment; and more channels and creases he hath in his face than there be fairy circles on Salisbury Plain, and wrinkles and frets of old age than characters on Christ's Sepulchre in Mount Calvary, on which everyone that comes scrapes his name and sets his mark to show that he hath been there; so that whosoever shall behold him,

Esse putet Boreae triste furentis opus
⁵⁴

will swear on a book I have brought him low and shrewdly broken him. Which more to confirm, look on his head, and you shall find a grey hair for every line I have writ against him; and you shall have all his beard white too, by that time he hath read over this book.

For his stature, he is such another pretty Jack-a-Lent
⁵⁵
as boys throw at in the street, and looks, in his black suit of velvet, like one of these jet drops which divers wear at their ears instead of a jewel. A smudge
⁵⁶
piece of a handsome fellow it hath been in his days, but now he is old and past his best, and fit for nothing but to be a nobleman's porter or a Knight of Windsor,
⁵⁷
cares have so crazed him, and disgraces to the very bones consumed him; amongst which his missing of the University Oratorship, wherein Doctor Perne
⁵⁸
besteaded
⁵⁹
him, wrought not the lightliest with him. And if none of them were, his course of life is such as would make any mar look ill on it, for he will endure more hardness than a camel, who in the burning sands will live four days without water and feeds on nothing but thistles and wormwood and suchlike; no more doth he feed on anything, when he is at Saffron Walden, but sheep's trotters, porknells,
⁶⁰
and buttered roots; and otherwhile in an hexameter meditation,
⁶¹
or when he is inventing a new part of Tully,
⁶²
or hatching such another paradox as that
of Nicholaus Copernicus
⁶³
was, who held that, the sun remains immoveable in the centre of the world and that the earth is moved about the sun, he would be so rapt that he would remain three days and neither eat nor drink, and within doors he will keep seven year together, and come not abroad so much as to church…