[390] Alluding, no doubt, to the price of seats at some of the minor theatres.

[391] It was the fashion with the poets connected with the theatre to wear long hair. Nashe censures Greene "for his fond (foolish) disguising of a Master of Arts (which was Greene's degree) with ruffianly hair."—ED.

[392] Alluding to the trial of the Poetasters, which takes place before Augustus and his poetical jury of Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, &c., in Ben's play.

[393] Decker alludes here to the bastard of Burgundy, who considered himself unmatchable, till he was overthrown in Smithfield by Woodville, Earl Rivers.

[394] Horace acknowledges he played Zulziman at Paris-garden. "Sir Vaughan: Then, master Horace, you played the part of an honest man—"

Tucca exclaims: "Death of Hercules! he could never play that part well in 's life!"

[395] Among those arts of imitation which man has derived from the practice of animals, naturalists assure us that he owes the use of clysters to the Egyptian Ibis. There are some who pretend this medicinal invention comes from the stork. The French are more like Ibises than we are: ils se donnent des lavements eux-memes. But as it is rather uncertain what the Egyptian Ibis is; whether, as translated in Leviticus xi. 17, the cormorant, or a species of stork, or only "a great owl," as we find in Calmet; it would be safest to attribute the invention to the unknown bird. I recollect, in Wickliffe's version of the Pentateuch, which I once saw in MS. in the possession of my valued friend Mr. Douce, that that venerable translator interpolates a little, to tell us that the Ibis "giveth to herself a purge."



JONSON AND DECKER.

BEN JONSON appears to have carried his military spirit into the literary republic—his gross convivialities, with anecdotes of the prevalent taste in that age for drinking-bouts—his "Poetaster" a sort of Dunciad, besides a personal attack on the frequenters of the theatres, with anecdotes—his Apologetical Dialogue, which was not allowed to be repeated—characters of DECKER and of MARSTON—DECKER'S Satiromastix, a parody on JONSON'S "Poetaster"—BEN exhibited under the character of "Horace Junior"—specimens of that literary satire; its dignified remonstrance, and the honourable applause bestowed on the great bard—some foibles in the literary habits of BEN, alluded to by DECKER—JONSON'S noble reply to his detractors and rivals.

This quarrel is a splendid instance how genius of the first order, lavishing its satirical powers on a number of contemporaries, may discover, among the crowd, some individual who may return with a right aim the weapon he has himself used, and who will not want for encouragement to attack the common assailant: the greater genius is thus mortified by a victory conceded to the inferior, which he himself had taught the meaner one to obtain over him.

JONSON, in his earliest productions, "Every Man in his Humour," and "Every Man out of his Humour," usurped that dictatorship, in the Literary Republic, which he so sturdily and invariably maintained, though long and hardily disputed. No bard has more courageously foretold that posterity would be interested in his labours; and often with very dignified feelings he casts this declaration into the teeth of his adversaries: but a bitter contempt for his brothers and his contemporaries was not less vehement than his affections for those who crowded under his wing. To his "sons" and his admirers he was warmly attached, and no poet has left behind him, in MS., so many testimonies of personal fondness, in the inscriptions and addresses, in the copies of his works which he presented to friends: of these I have seen more than one fervent and impressive.

DRUMMOND of Hawthornden, who perhaps carelessly and imperfectly minuted down the heads of their literary conference on the chief authors of the age, exposes the severity of criticism which Ben exercised on some spirits as noble as his own. The genius of Jonson was rough, hardy, and invincible, of which the frequent excess degenerated into ferocity; and by some traditional tales, this ferocity was still inflamed by large potations: for Drummond informs us, "Drink was the element in which he lived."[388] Old Ben had given, on two occasions, some remarkable proofs of his personal intrepidity. When a soldier, in the face of both armies, he had fought single-handed with his antagonist, had slain him, and carried off his arms as trophies. Another time he killed his man in a duel. Jonson appears to have carried the same military spirit into the Literary Republic.

Such a genius would become more tyrannical by success, and naturally provoked opposition, from the proneness of mankind to mortify usurped greatness, when they can securely do it. The man who hissed the poet's play had no idea that he might himself become one of the dramatic personages. Ben then produced his "Poetaster," which has been called the Dunciad of those times; but it is a Dunciad without notes. The personages themselves are now only known by their general resemblance to nature, with the exception of two characters, those of Crispinus and Demetrius.[389]

In "The Poetaster," Ben, with flames too long smothered, burst over the heads of all rivals and detractors. His enemies seem to have been among all classes; personages recognised on the scene as soon as viewed; poetical, military, legal, and histrionic. It raised a host in arms. Jonson wrote an apologetical epilogue, breathing a firm spirit, worthy of himself; but its dignity was too haughty to be endured by contemporaries, whom genius must soothe by equality. This apologetical dialogue was never allowed to be repeated; now we may do it with pleasure. Writings, like pictures, require a particular light and distance to be correctly judged and inspected, without any personal inconvenience.

One of the dramatic personages in this epilogue inquires

I never saw the play breed all this tumult. What was there in it could so deeply offend, And stir so many hornets?

The author replies:

——————I never writ that piece More innocent, or empty of offence; Some salt it had, but neither tooth nor gall. ——————Why, they say you tax'd The law and lawyers, captains, and the players, By their particular names. ——————It is not so: I used no names. My books have still been taught To spare the persons, and to speak the vices.

And he proceeds to tell us, that to obviate this accusation he had placed his scenes in the age of Augustus.

To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest Of those great master-spirits, did not want Detractors then, or practisers against them: And by this line, although no parallel, I hoped at last they would sit down and blush.

But instead of their "sitting down and blushing," we find—

That they fly buzzing round about my nostrils; And, like so many screaming grasshoppers Held by the wings, fill every ear with noise.

Names were certainly not necessary to portraits, where every day the originals were standing by their side. This is the studied pleading of a poet, who knows he is concealing the truth.

There is a passage in the play itself where Jonson gives the true cause of "the tumult" raised against him. Picturing himself under the character of his favourite Horace, he makes the enemies of Horace thus describe him, still, however, preserving the high tone of poetical superiority.

"Alas, sir, Horace is a mere sponge. Nothing but humours and observations he goes up and down sucking from every society, and when he comes home squeezes himself dry again. He will pen all he knows. He will sooner lose his best friend than his least jest. What he once drops upon paper against a man, lives eternally to upbraid him."

Such is the true picture of a town-wit's life! The age of Augustus was much less present to Jonson than his own; and Ovid, Tibullus, and Horace were not the personages he cared so much about, as "that society in which," it was said, "he went up and down sucking in and squeezing himself dry:" the formal lawyers, who were cold to his genius; the sharking captains, who would not draw to save their own swords, and would cheat "their friend, or their friend's friend," while they would bully down Ben's genius; and the little sycophant histrionic, "the twopenny[390] tear-mouth, copper-laced scoundrel, stiff-toe, who used to travel with pumps full of gravel after a blind jade and a hamper, and stalk upon boards and barrel-heads to an old crackt trumpet;" and who all now made a party with some rival of Jonson.

All these personages will account for "the tumult" which excites the innocent astonishment of our author. These only resisted him by "filling every ear with noise." But one of the "screaming grasshoppers held by the wings," boldly turned on the holder with a scorpion's bite; and Decker, who had been lashed in "The Poetaster," produced his "Satiromastix, or the untrussing of the humorous Poet." Decker was a subordinate author, indeed; but, what must have been very galling to Jonson, who was the aggressor, indignation proved such an inspirer, that Decker seemed to have caught some portion of Jonson's own genius, who had the art of making even Decker popular; while he discovered that his own laurel-wreath had been dexterously changed by the "Satiromastix" into a garland of "stinging nettles."

In "The Poetaster," Crispinus is the picture of one of those impertinent fellows who resolve to become poets, having an equal aptitude to become anything that is in fashionable request. When Hermogenes, the finest singer in Rome, refused to sing, Crispinus gladly seizes the occasion, and whispers the lady near him—"Entreat the ladies to entreat me to sing, I beseech you." This character is marked by a ludicrous peculiarity which, turning on an individual characteristic, must have assisted the audience in the true application. Probably Decker had some remarkable head of hair,[391] and that his locks hung not like "the curls of Hyperion;" for the jeweller's wife admiring among the company the persons of Ovid, Tibullus, &c., Crispinus acquaints her that they were poets, and, since she admires them, promises to become a poet himself. The simple lady further inquires, "if, when he is a poet, his looks will change? and particularly if his hair will change, and be like those gentlemen's?" "A man," observes Crispinus, "may be a poet, and yet not change his hair." "Well!" exclaims the simple jeweller's wife, "we shall see your cunning; yet if you can change your hair, I pray do it."

In two elaborate scenes, poor Decker stands for a full-length. Resolved to be a poet, he haunts the company of Horace: he meets him in the street, and discovers all the variety of his nothingness: he is a student, a stoic, an architect: everything by turns, "and nothing long." Horace impatiently attempts to escape from him, but Crispinus foils him at all points. This affectionate admirer is even willing to go over the world with him. He proposes an ingenious project, if Horace will introduce him to Maecenas. Crispinus offers to become "his assistant," assuring him that "he would be content with the next place, not envying thy reputation with thy patron;" and he thinks that Horace and himself "would soon lift out of favour Virgil, Varius, and the best of them, and enjoy them wholly to ourselves." The restlessness of Horace to extricate himself from this "Hydra of Discourse," the passing friends whom he calls on to assist him, and the glue-like pertinacity of Crispinus, are richly coloured.

A ludicrous and exquisitely satirical scene occurs at the trial of Crispinus and his colleagues. Jonson has here introduced an invention, which a more recent satirist so happily applied to our modern Lexiphanes, Dr. Johnson, for his immeasurable polysyllables. Horace is allowed by Augustus to make Crispinus swallow a certain pill; the light vomit discharges a great quantity of hard matter, to clear

His brain and stomach of their tumorous heats.

These consist of certain affectations in style, and adulteration of words, which offended the Horatian taste: "the basin" is called quickly for and Crispinus gets rid easily of some, but others were of more difficult passage:—

'Magnificate!' that came up somewhat hard!

Crispinus. 'O barmy froth——'

Augustus. What's that?

Crispinus. 'Inflate!—Turgidous!—and Ventositous'—

Horace. 'Barmy froth, inflate, turgidous, and ventosity are come up.'

Tibullus. O terrible windy words!

Gallus. A sign of a windy brain.

But all was not yet over: "Prorumpt" made a terrible rumbling, as if his spirit was to have gone with it; and there were others which required all the kind assistance of the Horatian "light vomit." This satirical scene closes with some literary admonitions from the grave Virgil, who details to Crispinus the wholesome diet to be observed after his surfeits, which have filled

His blood and brain thus full of crudities.

Virgil's counsels to the vicious neologist, who debases the purity of English diction by affecting new words or phrases, may too frequently be applied.

You must not hunt for wild outlandish terms To stuff out a peculiar dialect; But let your matter run before your words. And if at any time you chance to meet Some Gallo-Belgick phrase, you shall not straight Rack your poor verse to give it entertainment, But let it pass; and do not think yourself Much damnified, if you do leave it out When not the sense could well receive it.

Virgil adds something which breathes all the haughty spirit of Ben: he commands Crispinus:

——————Henceforth, learn To bear yourself more humbly, nor to swell Or breathe your insolent and idle spite On him whose laughter can your worst affright:

and dismisses him

To some dark place, removed from company; He will talk idly else after his physic.

"The Satiromastix" may be considered as a parody on "The Poetaster." Jonson, with classical taste, had raised his scene in the court of Augustus: Decker, with great unhappiness, places it in that of William Rufus. The interest of the piece arises from the dexterity with which Decker has accommodated those very characters which Jonson has satirised in his "Poetaster." This gratified those who came every day to the theatre, delighted to take this mimetic revenge on the arch bard.

In Decker's prefatory address "To the World," he observes, "Horace haled his Poetasters to the bar;[392] the Poetasters untrussed Horace: Horace made himself believe that his Burgonian wit[393] might desperately challenge all comers, and that none durst take up the foils against him." But Decker is the Earl Rivers! He had been blamed for the personal attacks on Jonson; for "whipping his fortunes and condition of life; where the more noble reprehension had been of his mind's deformity:" but for this he retorts on Ben. Some censured Decker for barrenness of invention, in bringing on those characters in his own play whom Jonson had stigmatised; but "it was not improper," he says, "to set the same dog upon Horace, whom Horace had set to worry others." Decker warmly concludes with defying the Jonsonians.

"Let that mad dog Detraction bite till his teeth be worn to the stumps; Envy, feed thy snakes so fat with poison till they burst; World, let all thy adders shoot out their Hydra-headed forked stings! I thank thee, thou true Venusian Horace, for these good words thou givest me. Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo."

The whole address is spirited. Decker was a very popular writer, whose numerous tracts exhibit to posterity a more detailed narrative of the manners of the town in the Elizabethan age than is elsewhere to be found.

In Decker's Satiromastix, Horace junior is first exhibited in his study, rehearsing to himself an ode: suddenly the Pindaric rapture is interrupted by the want of a rhyme; this is satirically applied to an unlucky line of Ben's own. One of his "sons," Asinius Bubo, who is blindly worshipping his great idol, or "his Ningle," as he calls him, amid his admiration of Horace, perpetually breaks out into digressive accounts of what sort of a man his friends take him to be. For one, Horace in wrath prepares an epigram: and for Crispinus and Fannius, brother bards, who threaten "they'll bring your life and death on the stage, as a bricklayer in a play," he says, "I can bring a prepared troop of gallants, who, for my sake, shall distaste every unsalted line in their fly-blown comedies." "Ay," replies Asinius, "and all men of my rank!" Crispinus, Horace calls "a light voluptuous reveller," and Fannius "the slightest cobweb-lawn piece of a poet." Both enter, and Horace receives them with all friendship.

The scene is here conducted not without skill. Horace complains that

————————When I dip my pen In distill'd roses, and do strive to drain Out of mine ink all gall— Mine enemies, with sharp and searching eyes, Look through and through me. And when my lines are measured out as straight As even parallels, 'tis strange, that still, Still some imagine that they're drawn awry. The error is not mine, but in their eye, That cannot take proportions.

To the querulous satirist, Crispinus replies with dignified gravity—

Horace! to stand within the shot of galling tongues Proves not your guilt; for, could we write on paper Made of these turning leaves of heaven, the clouds, Or speak with angels' tongues, yet wise men know That some would shake the head, though saints should sing; Some snakes must hiss, because they're born with stings. ——————Be not you grieved If that which you mould fair, upright, and smooth, Be screw'd awry, made crooked, lame, and vile, By racking comments.— So to be bit it rankles not, for Innocence May with a feather brush off the foul wrong. But when your dastard wit will strike at men In corners, and in riddles fold the vices Of your best friends, you must not take to heart If they take off all gilding from their pills, And only offer you the bitter core.—

At this the galled Horace winces. Crispinus continues, that it is in vain Horace swears, that

———————He puts on The office of an executioner, Only to strike off the swoln head of sin, Where'er you find it standing. Say you swear, And make damnation, parcel of your oath, That when your lashing jests make all men bleed, Yet you whip none—court, city, country, friends, Foes, all must smart alike.—

Fannius, too, joins, and shows Ben the absurd oaths he takes, when he swears to all parties, that he does not mean them. How, then, of five hundred and four, five hundred

Should all point with their fingers in one instant, At one and the same man?

Horace is awkwardly placed between these two friendly remonstrants, to whom he promises perpetual love.

Captain Tucca, a dramatic personage in Jonson's Poetaster, and a copy of his own Bobadil, whose original the poet had found at "Powles," the fashionable lounge of that day, is here continued with the same spirit; and as that character permitted from the extravagance of its ribaldry, it is now made the vehicle for those more personal retorts, exhibiting the secret history of Ben, which perhaps twitted the great bard more than the keenest wit, or the most solemn admonition which Decker could ever attain. Jonson had cruelly touched on Decker being out at elbows, and made himself too merry with the histrionic tribe: he, who was himself a poet, and had been a Thespian! The blustering captain thus attacks the great wit:—"Do'st stare, my Saracen's head at Newgate? I'll march through thy Dunkirk guts, for shooting jests at me." He insists that as Horace, "that sly knave, whose shoulders were once seen lapp'd in a player's old cast cloak," and who had reflected on Crispinus's satin doublet being ravelled out; that he should wear one of Crispinus's "old cast sattin suits," and that Fannius should write a couple of scenes for his own "strong garlic comedies," and Horace should swear that they were his own—he would easily bear "the guilt of conscience." "Thy Muse is but a hagler, and wears clothes upon best be trust (a humorous Deckerian phrase)—thou'rt great in somebody's books for this!" Did it become Jonson to gibe at the histrionic tribe, who is himself accused of "treading the stage, as if he were treading mortar."[394] He once put up—"a supplication to be a poor journeyman player, and hadst been still so, but that thou couldst not set a good face upon't. Thou hast forget how thou ambled'st in leather-pilch, by a play-waggon in the highway; and took'st mad Jeronimo's part, to get service among the mimics," &c.

Ben's person was, indeed, not gracious in the playfulness of love or fancy. A female, here, thus delineates Ben:—

"That same Horace has the most ungodly face, by my fan; it looks for all the world like a rotten russet-apple, when 'tis bruised. It's better than a spoonful of cinnamon-water next my heart, for me to hear him speak; he sounds it so i' th' nose, and talks and rants like the poor fellows under Ludgate—to see his face make faces, when he reads his songs and sonnets."

Again, we have Ben's face compared with that of his favourite, Horace's—"You staring Leviathan! look on the sweet visage of Horace; look, parboil'd face, look—he has not his face punchtfull of eyelet-holes, like the cover of a warming-pan."

Joseph Warton has oddly remarked that most of our poets were handsome men. Jonson, however, was not poetical on that score; though his bust is said to resemble Menander's.

Such are some of the personalities with which Decker recriminated.

Horace is thrown into many ludicrous situations. He is told that "admonition is good meat." Various persons bring forward their accusations; and Horace replies that they envy him,

Because I hold more worthy company.

The greatness of Ben's genius is by no means denied by his rivals; and Decker makes Fannius reply, with noble feelings, and in an elevated strain of poetry:—

Good Horace, no! my cheeks do blush for thine, As often as thou speakst so; where one true And nobly virtuous spirit, for thy best part Loves thee, I wish one, ten; even from my heart! I make account, I put up as deep share In any good man's love, which thy worth earns, As thou thyself; we envy not to see Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesy. No, here the gall lies;—We, that know what stuff Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk On which thy learning grows, and can give life To thy, once dying, baseness; yet must we Dance anticke on your paper—. But were thy warp'd soul put in a new mould, I'd wear thee as a jewel set in gold.

To which one adds, that "jewels, master Horace, must be hanged, you know." This "Whip of Men," with Asinius his admirer, are brought to court, transformed into satyrs, and bound together: "not lawrefied, but nettle-fied;" crowned with a wreath of nettles.

With stinging-nettles crown his stinging wit.

Horace is called on to swear, after Asinius had sworn to give up his "Ningle."

"Now, master Horace, you must be a more horrible swearer; for your oath must be, like your wits, of many colours; and like a broker's book, of many parcels."

Horace offers to swear till his hairs stand up on end, to be rid of this sting. "Oh, this sting!" alluding to the nettles. "'Tis not your sting of conscience, is it?" asks one. In the inventory of his oaths, there is poignant satire, with strong humour; and it probably exhibits some foibles in the literary habits of our bard.

He swears "Not to hang himself, even if he thought any man could write plays as well as himself; not to bombast out a new play with the old linings of jests stolen from the Temple's Revels; not to sit in a gallery, when your comedies have entered their actions, and there make vile and bad faces at every line, to make men have an eye to you, and to make players afraid; not to venture on the stage, when your play is ended, and exchange courtesies and compliments with gallants to make all the house rise and cry—'That's Horace that's he that pens and purges humours.' When you bid all your friends to the marriage of a poor couple, that is to say, your Wits and Necessities—alias, a poet's Whitsun-ale—you shall swear that, within three days after, you shall not abroad, in bookbinders' shops, brag that your viceroys, or tributary-kings, have done homage to you, or paid quarterage. Moreover, when a knight gives you his passport to travel in and out to his company, and gives you money for God's sake—you will swear not to make scald and wry-mouthed jests upon his knighthood. When your plays are misliked at court, you shall not cry Mew! like a puss-cat, and say, you are glad you write out of the courtier's element; and in brief, when you sup in taverns, amongst your betters, you shall swear not to dip your manners in too much sauce; nor, at table, to fling epigrams or play-speeches about you."

The king observes, that

——————————He whose pen Draws both corrupt and clear blood from all men Careless what vein he pricks; let him not rave When his own sides are struck; blows, blows do crave.

Such were the bitter apples which Jonson, still in his youth, plucked from the tree of his broad satire, that branched over all ranks in society. That even his intrepidity and hardiness felt the incessant attacks he had raised about him, appears from the close of the Apologetical Epilogueto "The Poetaster;" where, though he replies with all the consciousness of genius, and all its haughtiness, he closes with a determination to give over the composition of comedies! This, however, like all the vows of a poet, was soon broken; and his masterpieces were subsequently produced.

Friend. Will you not answer then the libels?

Author. No.

Friend. Nor the Untrussers.

Author. Neither.

Friend. You are undone, then.

Author. With whom?

Friend. The world.

Author. The bawd!

Friend. It will be taken to be stupidity or tameness in you.

Author. But they that have incensed me, can in soul Acquit me of that guilt. They know I dare To spurn or baffle them; or squirt their eyes With ink or urine: or I could do worse, Arm'd with Archilochus' fury, write iambicks, Would make the desperate lashers hang themselves.—

His Friend tells him that he is accused that "all his writing is mere railing;" which Jonson nobly compares to "the salt in the old comedy;" that they say, that he is slow, and "scarce brings forth a play a year."

Author. ——————'Tis true, I would they could not say that I did that.

He is angry that their

——————Base and beggarly conceits Should carry it, by the multitude of voices, Against the most abstracted work, opposed To the stufft nostrils of the drunken rout.—

And then exclaims with admirable enthusiasm—

O this would make a learn'd and liberal soul To rive his stained quill up to the back, And damn his long-watch'd labours to the fire; Things, that were born, when none but the still night, And the dumb candle, saw his pinching throes.

And again, alluding to these mimics—

This 'tis that strikes me silent, seals my lips, And apts me rather to sleep out my time, Than I would waste it in contemned strifes With these vile Ibides, these unclean birds, That make their mouths their clysters, and still purge From their hot entrails.[395] But I leave the monsters To their own fate. And since the Comic Muse Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try If Tragedy have a more kind aspect. Leave me! There's something come into my thought That must and shall be sung, high and aloof, Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull ass's hoof.

Friend. I reverence these raptures, and obey them.

Such was the noble strain in which Jonson replied to his detractors in the town and to his rivals about him. Yet this poem, composed with all the dignity and force of the bard, was not suffered to be repeated. It was stopped by authority. But Jonson, in preserving it in his works, sends it "TO POSTERITY, that it may make a difference between their manners that provoked me then, and mine that neglected them ever."

FOOTNOTES:

[396] This work was not given to the public till 1724, a small quarto, with a fine portrait of Brooke. More than a century had elapsed since its forcible suppression. Anstis printed it from the fair MS. which Brooke had left behind him. The author's paternal affection seemed fondly to imagine its child might be worthy of posterity, though calumniated by its contemporaries.

[397] "Verum enimvero de his et hoc genere hominum ne verbum amplius addam, tabellam tamen summi illius artificis Apellis, cum colorum vivacitate depingere non possim, verbis leviter adumbrabo et proponam, ut Antiphilus noster, suique similes, et qui calumniis credunt, hanc, et in hac seipsos semel simulque intueantur.

"Ad dextram sedet quidam, quia credulus, auribus praelongis insignis, quales fere illae Midae feruntur. Manum porrigit procul accedenti Calumniae. Circumstant eum mulierculae duae, Ignorantia ac Suspicio. Adit aliunde propius Calumnia eximie compta, vultu ipso et gestu corporis efferens rabiem, et iram aestuanti conceptam pectore prae se ferens: sinistra facem tenens flammantem, dextra secum adolescentem capillis arreptum, manus ad superos tendentem, obtestantemque immortalium deorum fidem, trahit. Anteit vir pallidus, in specium impurus, acie oculorum minime hebeti, caeterum plane iis similis, qui gravi aliquo morbo contabuerunt. Hic livor est, ut facile conjicias. Quin, et mulierculae aliquot Insidiae et Fallaciae ut comites Calumniam comitantur. Harum est munus, dominam hortari, instruere, comere, et subornare. A tergo, habitu lugubri, pullato, laceroque Poenitentia subsequitur, quae capite in tergum deflexo, cum lachrymis, ac pudore procul venientem Veritatem agnoscit, et excipit."

[398] A Fletcher is a maker of bows and arrows.—ASH.

[399] Brooke died at the old mansion opposite the Roman town of Reculver in Kent. The house is still known as Brooke-farm; and the original gateway of decorative brickwork still exists. He was buried in Reculver Church, now destroyed, where a mural monument was erected to his memory, having a rhyming inscription, which told the reader:—

"Fifteenth October he was last alive, One thousand six hundred and twenty-five, Seaventy-three years bore he fortune's harms, And forty-five an officer of armes."

Brooke was originally a painter-stainer. His enmity to Camden appears to have originated in the appointment of the latter to the office of Clarencieux on the death of Richard Lee; he believing himself to be qualified for the place by greater knowledge, and by his long connexion with the College of Arms. His mode of righting himself lacked judgment, and he was twice suspended from his office, and was even attempted to be expelled therefrom.—ED.

[400] In Anstis's edition of "A Second Discoverie of Errors in the Much-commended 'Britannia,' &c.," 1724, the reader will find all the passages in the "Britannia" of the edition of 1594 to which Brooke made exceptions, placed column-wise with the following edition of it in 1600. It is, as Anstis observes, a debt to truth, without making any reflections.

[401] There is a sensible observation in the old "Biographia Britannica" on Brooke. "From the splenetic attack originally made by Rafe Brooke upon the 'Britannia' arose very great advantages to the public, by the shifting and bringing to light as good, perhaps a better and more authentic account of our nobility, than had been given at that time of those in any other country of Europe."—p. 1135.



CAMDEN AND BROOKE.

Literary, like political history, is interested in the cause of an obscure individual, when deprived of his just rights—character of CAMDEN—BROOKE'S "Discovery of Errors" in the "Britannia"—his work disturbed in the printing—afterwards enlarged, but never suffered to be published—whether BROOKE'S motive was personal rancour!—the persecuted author becomes vindictive—his keen reply to CAMDEN—CAMDEN'S beautiful picture of calumny—BROOKE furnishes a humorous companion-piece—CAMDEN'S want of magnanimity and justice—when great authors are allowed to suppress the works of their adversary, the public receives the injury and the insult.

In the literary as well as the political commonwealth, the cause of an obscure individual violently deprived of his just rights is a common one. We protest against the power of genius itself, when it strangles rather than wrestles with its adversary, or combats in mail against a naked man. The general interests of literature are involved by the illegitimate suppression of a work, of which the purpose is to correct another, whatever may be the invective which accompanies the correction: nor are we always to assign to malignant motives even this spirit of invective, which, though it betrays a contracted genius, may also show the earnestness of an honest one.

The quarrel between CAMDEN, the great author of the "Britannia," and BROOKE, the "York Herald," may illustrate these principles. It has hitherto been told to the shame of the inferior genius; but the history of Brooke was imperfectly known to his contemporaries. Crushed by oppression, his tale was marred in the telling. A century sometimes passes away before the world can discover the truth even of a private history.

Brooke is aspersed as a man of the meanest talents, insensible to the genius of Camden, rankling with envy at his fame, and correcting the "Britannia" out of mere spite.

When the history of Brooke is known, and his labours fairly estimated, we shall blame him much less than he has been blamed; and censure Camden, who has escaped all censure, and whose conduct, in the present instance, was destitute of magnanimity and justice.

The character of the author of "Britannia" is great, and this error of his feelings, now first laid to his charge, may be attributed as much to the weakness of the age as to his own extreme timidity, and perhaps to a little pride. Conscious as was Camden of enlarged views, we can easily pardon him for the contempt he felt, when he compared them with the subordinate ones of his cynical adversary.

Camden possessed one of those strongly directed minds which early in life plan some vast labour, while their imagination and their industry feed on it for many successive years; and they shed the flower and sweetness of their lives in the preparation of a work which at its maturity excites the gratitude of their nation. His passion for our national antiquities discovered itself even in his school-days, grew up with him at the University; and, when afterwards engaged in his public duties as master at Westminster school, he there composed his "Britannia," "at spare hours, and on festival days." To the perpetual care of his work, he voluntarily sacrificed all other views in life, and even drew himself away from domestic pleasures; for he refused marriage and preferments, which might interrupt his beloved studies! The work at length produced, received all the admiration due to so great an enterprise; and even foreigners, as the work was composed in the universal language of learning, could sympathise with Britons, when they contemplated the stupendous labour. Camden was honoured by the titles (for the very names of illustrious genius become such), of the Varro, the Strabo, and the Pausanias of Britain.

While all Europe admired the "Britannia," a cynical genius, whose mind seemed bounded by his confined studies, detected one error amidst the noble views the mighty volume embraced; the single one perhaps he could perceive, and for which he stood indebted to his office as "York Herald." Camden, in an appendage to the end of each county, had committed numerous genealogical errors, which he afterwards affected, in his defence, to consider as trivial matters in so great a history, and treats his adversary with all the contempt and bitterness he could inflict on him; but Ralph Brooke entertained very high notions of the importance of heraldical studies, and conceived that the "Schoolmaster" Camden, as he considered him, had encroached on the rights and honours of his College of Heralds. When particular objects engage our studies, we are apt to raise them in the scale of excellence to a degree disproportioned to their real value; and are thus liable to incur ridicule. But it should be considered that many useful students are not philosophers, and the pursuits of their lives are never ridiculous to them. It is not the interest of the public to degrade this class too low. Every species of study contributes to the perfection of human knowledge, by that universal bond which connects them all in a philosophical mind.

Brooke prepared "A Discovery of Certain Errors in the Much-commended Britannia." When we consider Brooke's character, as headstrong with heraldry as Don Quixote's with romances of chivalry, we need not attribute his motives (as Camden himself, with the partial feelings of an author, does, and subsequent writers echo) to his envy at Camden's promotion to be Clarencieux King of Arms; for it appears that Brooke began his work before this promotion. The indecent excesses of his pen, with the malicious charges of plagiarism he brings against Camden for the use he made of Leland's collections, only show the insensibility of the mere heraldist to the nobler genius of the historian. Yet Brooke had no ordinary talents: his work is still valuable for his own peculiar researches; but his naive shrewdness, his pointed precision, the bitter invective, and the caustic humour of his cynical pen, give an air of originality, if not of genius, which no one has dared to notice. Brooke's first work against Camden was violently disturbed in its progress, and hurried, in a mutilated state, into the world, without licence or a publisher's name. Thus impeded, and finally crushed, the howl of persecution followed his name; and subsequent writers servilely traced his character from their partial predecessors.

But Brooke, though denied the fair freedom of the press, and a victim to the powerful connexions of Camden, calmly pursued his silent labour with great magnanimity. He wrote his "Second Discovery of Errors," an enlargement of the first. This he carefully finished for the press, but could never get published. The secret history of the controversy may be found there.[396]

Brooke had been loudly accused of indulging a personal rancour against Camden, and the motive of his work was attributed to envy of his great reputation; a charge constantly repeated.

Yet this does not appear, for when Brooke first began his "Discovery of Errors," he did not design its publication; for he liberally offered Camden his Observations and Collections. They were fastidiously, perhaps haughtily, rejected; on this pernicious and false principle, that to correct his errors in genealogy might discredit the whole work. On which absurdity Brooke shrewdly remarks—"As if healing the sores would have maimed the body." He speaks with more humility on this occasion than an insulted, yet a skilful writer, was likely to do, who had his labours considered, as he says, "worthy neither of thanks nor acceptance."

"The rat is not so contemptible but he may help the lion, at a pinch, out of those nets wherein his strength is hampered; and the words of an inferior may often carry matter in them to admonish his superior of some important consideration; and surely, of what account soever I might have seemed to this learned man, yet, in respect to my profession and courteous offer, (I being an officer-of-arms, and he then but a schoolmaster), might well have vouchsafed the perusal of my notes."

When he published, our herald stated the reasons of writing against Camden with good-humour, and rallies him on his "incongruity in his principles of heraldry—for which I challenge him!—for depriving some nobles of issue to succeed them, who had issue, of whom are descended many worthy families: denying barons and earls that were, and making barons and earls of others that were not; mistaking the son for the father, and the father for the son; affirming legitimate children to be illegitimate, and illegitimate to be legitimate; and framing incestuous and unnatural marriages, making the father to marry the son's wife, and the son his own mother."

He treats Camden with the respect due to his genius, while he judiciously distinguishes where the greatest ought to know when to yield.

"The most abstruse arts I profess not, but yield the palm and victory to mine adversary, that great learned Mr. Camden, with whom, yet, a long experimented navigator may contend about his chart and compass, about havens, creeks, and sounds; so I, an ancient herald, a little dispute, without imputation of audacity, concerning the honour of arms, and the truth of honourable descents."

Brooke had seen, as he observes, in four editions of the "Britannia," a continued race of errors, in false descents, &c., and he continues, with a witty allusion:—

"Perceiving that even the brains of many learned men beyond the seas had misconceived and miscarried in the travail and birth of their relations, being gotten, as it were, with child (as Diomedes's mares) by the blasts of his erroneous puffs; I could not but a little question the original father of their absurdities, being so far blown, with the trumpet of his learning and fame, into foreign lands."

He proceeds with instances of several great authors on the Continent having been misled by the statements of Camden.

Thus largely have I quoted from Brooke, to show, that at first he never appears to have been influenced by the mean envy, or the personal rancour, of which he is constantly accused. As he proceeded in his work, which occupied him several years, his reproaches are whetted with a keener edge, and his accusations are less generous. But to what are we to attribute this? To the contempt and persecution Brooke so long endured from Camden: these acted on his vexed and degraded spirit, till it burst into the excesses of a man heated with injured feelings.

When Camden took his station in the Herald's College with Brooke, whose offers of his notes he had refused to accept, they soon found what it was for two authors to live under the same roof, who were impatient to write against each other. The cynical York, at first, would twit the new king-of-arms, perpetually affirming that "his predecessor was a more able herald than any who lived in this age:" a truth, indeed, acknowledged by Dugdale. On this occasion, once the king-of-arms gave malicious York "the lie!" reminding the crabbed herald of "his own learning; who, as a scholar, was famous through all the provinces of Christendom." "So that (adds Brooke) now I learnt, that before him, when we speak in commendation of any other, to say, I must always except Plato." Camden would allow of no private communication between them; and in Sermonibus Convivalibus, in his table-talk, "the heat and height of his spirit" often scorched the contemned Yorkist, whose rejected "Discovery of Errors" had no doubt been too frequently enlarged, after such rough convivialities. Brooke now resolved to print; but, in printing the work, the press was disturbed, and his house was entered by "this learned man, his friends, and the stationers." The latter were alarmed for the sale of the "Britannia," which might have been injured by this rude attack. The work was therefore printed in an unfinished state: part was intercepted; and the author stopped, by authority, from proceeding any further. Some imperfect copies got abroad.

The treatment the exasperated Brooke now incurred was more provoking than Camden's refusal of his notes, and the haughtiness of his "Sermonibus Convivalibus." The imperfect work was, however, laid before the public, so that Camden could not refuse to notice its grievous charges. He composed an angry reply in Latin, addressed ad Lectorem! and never mentioning Brooke by name, contemptuously alludes to him only by a Quidam and Iste (a certain person, and He!)—"He considers me (cries the mortified Brooke, in his second suppressed work) as an Individuum vagum, and makes me but a Quidam in his pamphlet, standing before him as a schoolboy, while he whips me. Why does he reply in Latin to an English accusation? He would disguise himself in his school-rhetoric; wherein, like the cuttle-fish, being stricken, he thinks to hide and shift himself away in the ink of his rhetoric. I will clear the waters again."

He fastens on Camden's former occupation, virulently accusing him of the manners of a pedagogue:—"A man may perceive an immoderate and eager desire of vainglory growing in hand, ever since he used to teach and correct children for these things, according to the opinion of some, in mores et naturam abeunt." He complains of "the school-hyperboles" which Camden exhausts on him, among which Brooke is compared to "the strumpet Leontion," who wrote against "the divine Theophrastus." To this Brooke keenly replies:

"Surely, had Theophrastus dealt with women's matters, a woman, though mean, might in reason have contended with him. A king must be content to be laughed at if he come into Apelles's shop, and dispute about colours and portraiture. I am not ambitious nor envious to carp at matters of higher learning than matters of heraldry, which I profess: that is the slipper, wherein I know a slip when I find it. But see your cunning; you can, with the blur of your pen, dipped in copperas and gall, make me learned and unlearned; nay, you can almost change my sex, and make me a whore, like Leontion; and, taking your silver pen again, make yourself the divine Theophrastus."

At the close of Camden's answer, he introduced the allegorical picture of Calumny, that elegant invention of the Grecian fancy of Apelles, painted by him when suffering under the false accusations of a rival. The picture is described by Lucian; but it has received many happy touches from the classical hand of the master of Westminster School. As a literary satire, he applies it with great dignity. I give here a translation, but I preserve the original Latin in the note as Camden's reply to Brooke is not easily to be procured.

"But though I am not disposed to waste more words on these, and this sort of men, yet I cannot resist the temptation of adding a slight sketch, for I cannot give that vivacity of colouring of the picture of the great artist Apelles that our Antiphilus and the like, whose ears are ever open to calumny, may, in contemplating it, find a reflection of themselves.

"On the right hand sits a man, who, to show his credulity, is remarkable for his prodigious ears, similar to those of Midas. He extends his hand to greet Calumny, who is approaching him. The two diminutive females around him are Ignorance and Suspicion. Opposite to them, Calumny advances, betraying in her countenance and gesture the savage rage and anger working in her tempestuous breast: her left hand holds a flaming torch; while with her right she drags by the hair a youth, who, stretching his uplifted hands to Heaven, is calling on the immortal powers to bear testimony to his innocence. She is preceded by a man of a pallid and impure appearance, seemingly wasting away under some severe disease, except that his eye sparkles, and has not the dulness usual to such. That Envy is here meant, you readily conjecture. Some diminutive females, frauds and deceits, attend her as companions, whose office is to encourage and instruct, and studiously to adorn their mistress. In the background, Repentance, sadly arrayed in a mournful, worn-out, and ragged garment, who, with averted head, with tears and shame, acknowledges and prepares to receive Truth, approaching from a distance."[397]

This elegant picture, so happily introduced into a piece of literary controversy, appears to have only slightly affected the mind of Brooke, which was probably of too stout a grain to take the folds of Grecian drapery. Instead of sympathising with its elegance, he breaks out into a horse-laugh; and, what is quite unexpected among such grave inquiries into a ludicrous tale in verse, which, though it has not Grecian fancy, has broad English humour, where he maliciously insinuates that Camden had appropriated to his own use, or "new-coated his 'Britannia'" with Leland's MSS., and disguised what he had stolen.

Now, to show himself as good a painter as he is a herald, he propounded, at the end of his book, a table (i.e. a picture) of his own invention, being nothing comparable to "Apelles," as he himself confesseth, and we believe him; for, like the rude painter that was fain to write, 'This is a Horse,' upon his painted horse, he writes upon his picture the names of all that furious rabble therein expressed—which, for to requite him, I will return a tale of John Fletcher (some time of Oxford) and his horse. Neither can this fable be any disparagement to his table, being more ancient and authenticall, and far more conceipted than his envious picture. And thus it was:—

A TALE (NOT OF A ROASTED) BUT OF A PAINTED HORSE.

JOHN FLETCHER, famous, and a man well known, But using not his sirname's trade alone,[398] Did hackney out poor jades for common hire, Not fit for any pastime but to tire.

His conscience, once, surveying his jade's stable, Prick'd him, for keeping horses so unable. "Oh why should I," saith John, "by scholars thrive, For jades that will not carry, lead, nor drive?"

To mend the matter, out he starts, one night, And having spied a palfrey somewhat white, He takes him up, and up he mounts his back, Rides to his house, and there he turns him black;

Marks him in forehead, feet, in rump, and crest, As coursers mark those horses which are best. So neatly John had coloured every spot, That the right owner sees him, knows him not.

Had he but feather'd his new-painted breast, He would have seemed Pegasus at least. Who but John Fletcher's horse, in all the town, Amongst all hackneys, purchased this renown?

But see the luck; John Fletcher's horse, one night, By rain was wash'd again almost to white. His first right owner, seeing such a change, Thought he should know him, but his hue was strange!

But eyeing him, and spying out his steed, By flea-bit spots of his now washed weed, Seizes the horse; so Fletcher was attainted, And did confess the horse—he stole and painted.

To close with honour to Brooke; in his graver moments he warmly repels the accusation Camden raised against him, as an enemy to learning, and appeals to many learned scholars, who had tasted of his liberality at the Universities, towards their maintenance; but, in an elevated tone, he asserts his right to deliver his animadversions as York Herald.

"I know (says Brooke) the great advantage my adversary has over me, in the received opinion of the world. If some will blame me for that my writings carry some characters of spleen against him, men of pure affections, and not partial, will think reason that he should, by ill hearing, lose the pleasure he conceived by ill speaking. But since I presume not to understand above that which is meet for me to know, I must not be discouraged, nor fret myself, because of the malicious; for I find myself seated upon a rock, that is sure from tempest and waves, from whence I have a prospect into his errors and waverings. I do confess his great worth and merit, and that we Britons are in some sort beholding to him; and might have been much more, if God had lent him the grace to have played the faithful steward, in the talent committed to his trust and charge."

Such was the dignified and the intrepid reply of Ralph Brooke, a man whose name is never mentioned without an epithet of reproach; and who, in his own day, was hunted down, and not suffered, vindictive as he was no doubt, to relieve his bitter and angry spirit, by pouring it forth to the public eye.[399]

But the story is not yet closed. Camden, who wanted the magnanimity to endure with patient dignity the corrections of an inferior genius, had the wisdom, with the meanness, silently to adopt his useful corrections, but would never confess the hand which had brought them.[400]

Thus hath Ralph Brooke told his own tale undisturbed, and, after the lapse of more than a century, the press has been opened to him. Whenever a great author is suffered to gag the mouth of his adversary, Truth receives the insult. But there is another point more essential to inculcate in literary controversy. Ought we to look too scrupulously into the motives which may induce an inferior author to detect the errors of a greater? A man from no amiable motive may perform a proper action: Ritson was useful after Warton; nor have we a right to ascribe it to any concealed motives, which, after all, may be doubtful. In the present instance, our much-abused Ralph Brooke first appears to have composed his elaborate work from the most honourable motives: the offer he made of his Notes to Camden seems a sufficient evidence. The pride of a great man first led Camden into an error, and that error plunged him into all the barbarity of persecution; thus, by force, covering his folly. Brooke over-valued his studies: it is the nature of those peculiar minds adapted to excel in such contracted pursuits. He undertook an ungracious office, and he has suffered by being placed by the side of the illustrious genius with whom he has so skilfully combated in his own province; and thus he has endured contempt, without being contemptible. The public are not less the debtors to such unfortunate, yet intrepid authors.[401]

FOOTNOTES:

[396] This work was not given to the public till 1724, a small quarto, with a fine portrait of Brooke. More than a century had elapsed since its forcible suppression. Anstis printed it from the fair MS. which Brooke had left behind him. The author's paternal affection seemed fondly to imagine its child might be worthy of posterity, though calumniated by its contemporaries.

[397] "Verum enimvero de his et hoc genere hominum ne verbum amplius addam, tabellam tamen summi illius artificis Apellis, cum colorum vivacitate depingere non possim, verbis leviter adumbrabo et proponam, ut Antiphilus noster, suique similes, et qui calumniis credunt, hanc, et in hac seipsos semel simulque intueantur.

"Ad dextram sedet quidam, quia credulus, auribus praelongis insignis, quales fere illae Midae feruntur. Manum porrigit procul accedenti Calumniae. Circumstant eum mulierculae duae, Ignorantia ac Suspicio. Adit aliunde propius Calumnia eximie compta, vultu ipso et gestu corporis efferens rabiem, et iram aestuanti conceptam pectore prae se ferens: sinistra facem tenens flammantem, dextra secum adolescentem capillis arreptum, manus ad superos tendentem, obtestantemque immortalium deorum fidem, trahit. Anteit vir pallidus, in specium impurus, acie oculorum minime hebeti, caeterum plane iis similis, qui gravi aliquo morbo contabuerunt. Hic livor est, ut facile conjicias. Quin, et mulierculae aliquot Insidiae et Fallaciae ut comites Calumniam comitantur. Harum est munus, dominam hortari, instruere, comere, et subornare. A tergo, habitu lugubri, pullato, laceroque Poenitentia subsequitur, quae capite in tergum deflexo, cum lachrymis, ac pudore procul venientem Veritatem agnoscit, et excipit."

[398] A Fletcher is a maker of bows and arrows.—ASH.

[399] Brooke died at the old mansion opposite the Roman town of Reculver in Kent. The house is still known as Brooke-farm; and the original gateway of decorative brickwork still exists. He was buried in Reculver Church, now destroyed, where a mural monument was erected to his memory, having a rhyming inscription, which told the reader:—

"Fifteenth October he was last alive, One thousand six hundred and twenty-five, Seaventy-three years bore he fortune's harms, And forty-five an officer of armes."

Brooke was originally a painter-stainer. His enmity to Camden appears to have originated in the appointment of the latter to the office of Clarencieux on the death of Richard Lee; he believing himself to be qualified for the place by greater knowledge, and by his long connexion with the College of Arms. His mode of righting himself lacked judgment, and he was twice suspended from his office, and was even attempted to be expelled therefrom.—ED.

[400] In Anstis's edition of "A Second Discoverie of Errors in the Much-commended 'Britannia,' &c.," 1724, the reader will find all the passages in the "Britannia" of the edition of 1594 to which Brooke made exceptions, placed column-wise with the following edition of it in 1600. It is, as Anstis observes, a debt to truth, without making any reflections.

[401] There is a sensible observation in the old "Biographia Britannica" on Brooke. "From the splenetic attack originally made by Rafe Brooke upon the 'Britannia' arose very great advantages to the public, by the shifting and bringing to light as good, perhaps a better and more authentic account of our nobility, than had been given at that time of those in any other country of Europe."—p. 1135.



MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.

Of the two prevalent factions in the reign of Elizabeth, the Catholics and the Puritans—Elizabeth's philosophical indifference offends both—Maunsell's Catalogue omits the books of both parties—of the Puritans, "the mild and moderate, with the fierce and fiery," a great religious body covering a political one—Thomas Cartwright, the chief of the Puritans, and his rival Whitgift—attempts to make the Ecclesiastical paramount to the Civil Power—his plan in dividing the country into comitial, provincial, and national assemblies, to be concentrated under the secret head at Warwick, where Cartwright was elected "perpetual Moderator!"—after the most bitter controversies, Cartwright became very compliant to his old rival Whitgift, when Archbishop of Canterbury—of MARTIN MAR-PRELATE—his sons—specimens of their popular ridicule and invective—Cartwright approves of this mode of controversy—better counteracted by the wits than by the grave admonishers—specimens of the ANTI-MARTIN MAR-PRELATES—of the authors of these surreptitious publications.

The Reformation, or the new Religion, as it was then called, under Elizabeth, was the most philosophical she could form, and therefore the most hateful to the zealots of all parties. It was worthy of her genius, and of a better age! Her sole object was, a deliverance from the Papal usurpation. Her own supremacy maintained, she designed to be the great sovereign of a great people; and the Catholic, for some time, was called to her council-board, and entered with the Reformer into the same church. But wisdom itself is too weak to regulate human affairs, when the passions of men rise up in obstinate insurrection. Elizabeth neither won over the Reformers nor the Catholics. An excommunicating bull, precipitated by Papal Machiavelism, driving on the brutalised obedience of its slaves, separated the friends. This was a political error arising from a misconception of the weakness of our government; and when discovered as such, a tolerating dispensation was granted "till better times;" an unhealing expedient, to join again a dismembered nation! It would surprise many, were they aware how numerous were our ancient families and our eminent characters who still remained Catholics.[402] The country was then divided, and Englishmen who were heroic Romanists fell the terrible victims.

On the other side, the national evil took a new form. It is probable that the Queen, regarding the mere ceremonies of religion, now venerable with age, as matters of indifference, and her fine taste perhaps still lingering amid the solemn gorgeousness of the Roman service, and her senses and her emotions excited by the religious scenery, did not share in that abhorrence of the paintings and the images, the chant and the music, the censer and the altar, and the pomp of the prelatical habits, which was prompting many well-intentioned Reformers to reduce the ecclesiastical state into apostolical nakedness and primitive rudeness. She was slow to meet this austerity of feeling, which in this country at length extirpated those arts which exalt our nature, and for this these pious Vandals nicknamed the Queen "the untamed heifer;" and the fierce Knox expressly wrote his "First Blast Against the Monstrous Government of Women." Of these Reformers, many had imbibed the republican notions of Calvin. In their hatred of Popery, they imagined that they had not gone far enough in their wild notions of reform, for they viewed it, still shadowed out in the new hierarchy of the bishops. The fierce Calvin, in his little church at Geneva, presumed to rule a great nation on the scale of a parish institution; copying the apostolical equality at a time when the Church (say the Episcopalians) had all the weakness of infancy, and could live together in a community of all things, from a sense of their common poverty. Be this as it may, the dignified ecclesiastical order was a vulnerable institution, which could do no greater injury, and might effect as much public good as any other order in the state.[403] My business is not with this discussion. I mean to show how the republican system of these Reformers ended in a political struggle which, crushed in the reign of Elizabeth, and beaten down in that of James, so furiously triumphed under Charles. Their history exhibits the curious spectacle of a great religious body covering a political one—such as was discovered among the Jesuits, and such as may again distract the empire, in some new and unexpected shape.

Elizabeth was harassed by the two factions of the intriguing Catholic and the disguised Republican. The age abounded with libels.[404] Many a Benedicite was handed to her from the Catholics; but a portentous personage, masked, stepped forth from a club of PURITANS, and terrified the nation by continued visitations, yet was never visible till the instant of his adieus—"starting like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons!"

Men echo the tone of their age, yet still the same unvarying human nature is at work; and the Puritans,[405] who in the reign of Elizabeth imagined it was impossible to go too far in the business of reform, were the spirits called Roundheads under Charles, and who have got another nickname in our days. These wanted a Reformation of a Reformation—they aimed at reform, but they designed Revolution; and they would not accept of toleration, because they had determined on predominance.[406]

Of this faction, the chief was THOMAS CARTWRIGHT, a person of great learning, and doubtless of great ambition. Early in life a disappointed man, the progress was easy to a disaffected subject. At a Philosophy Act, in the University of Cambridge, in the royal presence, the queen preferred and rewarded his opponent for the slighter and more attractive elegances in which the learned Cartwright was deficient. He felt the wound rankle in his ambitious spirit. He began, as Sir George Paul, in his "Life of Archbishop Whitgift," expresses it, "to kick against her Ecclesiastical Government." He expatriated himself several years, and returned fierce with the republican spirit he had caught among the Calvinists at Geneva, which aimed at the extirpation of the bishops. It was once more his fate to be poised against another rival, Whitgift, the Queen's Professor of Divinity. Cartwright, in some lectures, advanced his new doctrines; and these innovations soon raised a formidable party, "buzzing their conceits into the green heads of the University."[408] Whitgift regularly preached at Cartwright, but to little purpose; for when Cartwright preached at St. Mary's they were forced to take down the windows. Once our sly polemic, taking advantage of the absence of Whitgift, so powerfully operated, in three sermons on one Sunday, that in the evening his victory declared itself, by the students of Trinity College rejecting their surplices, as Papistical badges. Cartwright was now to be confuted by other means. The University refused him his degree of D.D.; condemned the lecturer to silence; and at length performed that last feeble act of power, expulsion. In a heart already alienated from the established authorities, this could only envenom a bitter spirit. Already he had felt a personal dislike to royalty, and now he had received an insult from the University: these were motives which, though concealed, could not fail to work in a courageous mind, whose new forms of religion accorded with his political feelings. The "Degrees" of the University, which he now declared to be "unlawful," were to be considered "as limbs of Antichrist." The whole hierarchy was to be exterminated for a republic of Presbyters; till, through the church, the republican, as we shall see, discovered a secret passage to the Cabinet of his Sovereign, where he had many protectors.

Such is my conception of the character of Cartwright. The reader is enabled to judge for himself by the note.[409]

But Cartwright, chilled by an imprisonment, and witnessing some of his party condemned, and some executed, after having long sustained the most elevated and rigid tone, suddenly let his alp of ice dissolve away in the gentlest thaw that ever occurred in political life. Ambitious he was, but not of martyrdom! His party appeared once formidable,[410] and his protection at Court sure. I have read several letters of the Earl of Leicester, in MS., that show he always shielded Cartwright, whenever in danger. Many of the ministers of Elizabeth were Puritans; but doubtless this was before their state policy had detected the politicians in mask. When some of his followers had dared to do what he had only thought, he appears to have forsaken them. They reproached him for this left-handed policy, some of the boldest of them declaring that they had neither acted nor written anything but what was warranted by his principles. I do not know many political ejaculations more affecting than that of Henry Barrow, said to have been a dissipated youth, when Cartwright refused, before Barrow's execution, to allow of a conference. The deluded man, after a deep sigh, said: "Shall I be thus forsaken by him? Was it not he that brought me first into these briars? and will he now leave me in the same? Was it not from him alone that I took my grounds? Or did I not, out of such premises as he pleased to give me, infer those propositions, and deduce those conclusions, for which I am now kept in these bonds?" He was soon after executed, with others.

Then occurred one of those political spectacles at which the simple-minded stare, and the politic smile; when, after the most cruel civil war of words,[411] Cartwright wrote very compliant letters to his old rival, Whitgift, now Archbishop of Canterbury; while the Archbishop was pleading with the Queen in favour of the inveterate Republican, declaring that had Cartwright not so far engaged himself in the beginning, he thought he would have been, latterly, drawn into conformity. To clear up this mysterious conduct, we must observe that Cartwright seems to have graduated his political ambition to the degree the government touched of weakness or of strength; and besides, he was now growing prudent as he was growing rich. For it seems that he who was for scrambling for the Church revenues, while telling the people of the Apostles, silver and gold they had none, was himself "feeding too fair and fat" for the meagre groaning state of a pretended reformation. He had early in life studied that part of the law by which he had learned the marketable price of landed property; and as the cask still retains its old flavour, this despiser of bishops was still making the best interest for his money by land-jobbing.[412]

One of the memorable effects of this attempted innovation was that continued stream of libels which ran throughout the nation, under the portentous name of Martin Mar-Prelate.[413] This extraordinary personage, in his collective form, for he is to be splitted into more than one, long terrified Church and State. He walked about the kingdom invisibly, dropping here a libel, and there a proclamation for sedition; but wherever Martinism was found, Martin was not. He prided himself in what he calls "Pistling the Bishops." Sometimes he hints to his pursuers how they may catch him, for he prints, "within two furlongs of a bouncing priest," or "in Europe;" while he acquaints his friends, who were so often uneasy for his safety, that "he has neither wife nor child," and prays "they may not be anxious for him, for he wishes that his head might not go to the grave in peace."—"I come, with the rope about my neck, to save you, howsoever it goeth with me." His press is interrupted, he is silent, and Lambeth seems to breathe in peace. But he has "a son; nay, five hundred sons!" and Martin Junior starts up! He inquires

"Where his father is; he who had studied the art of pistle-making? Why has he been tongue-tied these four or five months? Good Nuncles (the bishops), have you closely murthered the gentleman in some of your prisons? Have you choaked him with a fat prebend or two? I trow my father will swallow down no such pills, for he would thus soon purge away all the conscience he hath. Do you mean to have the keeping of him? What need that? he hath five hundred sons in the land. My father would be sorry to put you to any such cost as you intend to be at with him. A meaner house, and less strength than the Tower, the Fleet, or Newgate, would serve him well enough. He is not of that ambitious vein that many of his brethren the bishops are, in seeking for more costly houses than even his father built for him."

This same "Martin Junior," who, though he is but young, as he says, "has a pretty smattering gift in this pistle-making; and I fear, in a while, I shall take a pride in it." He had picked up beside a bush, where it had dropped from somebody, an imperfect paper of his father's:—

"Theses Martinianae—set forth as an after-birth of the noble gentleman himselfe, by a pretty stripling of his, Martin Junior, and dedicated by him to his good nuncka, Maister John Cankerbury (i.e. Canterbury). Printed without a sly privilege of the Cater Caps"—(i.e. the square caps the bishops wore).

But another of these five hundred sons, who declares himself to be his "reverend and elder brother, heir to the renowned Martin Mar-Prelate the Great," publishes

"The just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior; where, lest the Springall should be utterly discouraged in his good meaning, you shall finde that he is not bereaved of his due commendation."

Martin Senior, after finding fault with Martin Junior for "his rash and indiscreet headiness," notwithstanding agrees with everything he had said. He confirms all, and cheers him; but charges him,

"Should he meet their father in the street, never to ask his blessing, but walke smoothly and circumspectly; and if anie offer to talk with thee of Martin, talke thou straite of the voyage into Portugal, or of the happie death of the Duke of Guise, or some such accident; but meddle not with thy father. Only, if thou have gathered anie thing in visitation for thy father, intreate him to signify, in some secret printed pistle, where a will have it lefte. I feare least some of us should fall into John Canterburie's hand."

Such were the mysterious personages who, for a long time, haunted the palaces of the bishops and the vicarages of the clergy, disappearing at the moment they were suddenly perceived to be near. Their slanders were not only coarse buffooneries, but the hottest effusions of hatred, with an unparalleled invective of nicknames.[414] Levelled at the bishops, even the natural defects, the personal infirmities, the domestic privacies, much more the tyranny, of these now "petty popes," now "bouncing priests," now "terrible priests," were the inexhaustible subjects of these popular invectives.[415] Those "pillars of the State" were now called "its caterpillars;" and the inferior clergy, who perhaps were not always friendly to their superiors, yet dreaded this new race of innovators, were distinguished as "halting neutrals." These invectives were well farced for the gross taste of the multitude; and even the jargon of the lowest of the populace affected, and perhaps the coarse malignity of two cobblers who were connected with the party, often enlivened the satirical page. The Martin Mar-Prelate productions are not, however, effusions of genius; they were addressed to the coarser passions of mankind, their hatred and contempt. The authors were grave men, but who affected to gain over the populace with a popular familiarity.[416] In vain the startled bishops remonstrated: they were supposed to be criminals, and were little attended to as their own advocates. Besides, they were solemn admonishers, and the mob are composed of laughers and scorners.

The Court-party did not succeed more happily when they persecuted Martin, broke up his presses, and imprisoned his assistants. Never did sedition travel so fast, nor conceal itself so closely; for they employed a moveable press; and, as soon as it was surmised that Martin was in Surrey, it was found he was removed to Northamptonshire, while the next account came that he was showing his head in Warwickshire. And long they invisibly conveyed themselves, till in Lancashire the snake was scotched by the Earl of Derby, with all its little brood.[417]

These pamphlets were "speedily dispersed and greedily read," not only by the people; they had readers and even patrons among persons of condition. They were found in the corners of chambers at Court; and when a prohibition issued that no person should carry about them any of the Mar-Prelate pamphlets on pain of punishment, the Earl of Essex observed to the Queen, "What then is to become of me?" drawing one of these pamphlets out of his bosom, and presenting it to her.

The Martinists were better counteracted by the Wits, in some extraordinary effusions, prodigal of humour and invective Wit and raillery were happily exercised against these masked divines: for the gaiety of the Wits was not foreign to their feelings. The Mar-Prelates showed merry faces, but it was with a sardonic grin they had swallowed the convulsing herb; they horridly laughed against their will—at bottom all was gloom and despair. The extraordinary style of their pamphlets, concocted in the basest language of the populace, might have originated less from design than from the impotence of the writers. Grave and learned persons have often found to their cost that wit and humour must spring from the soil; no art of man can plant them there. With such, this play and grace of the intellect can never be the movements of their nature, but its convulsions.

Father Martin and his two sons received "A sound boxe of the eare," in "a pistle" to "the father and the two sonnes, Huffe, Ruffe, and Snuffe, the three tame ruffians of the Church, who take pepper in the nose because they cannot marre prelates grating," when they once met with an adversary who openly declared—

"I profess rayling, and think it is as good a cudgel for a Martin as a stone for a dogge, or a whip for an ape, or poison for a rat. Who would curry an ass with an ivory comb? Give this beast thistles for provender. I doe but yet angle with a silken flie, to see whether Martins will nibble; and if I see that, why then I have wormes for the nonce, and will give them line enough, like a trowte, till they swallow both hooke and line, and then, Martin, beware your gills, for I'll make you daunce at the pole's end."

"Fill thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toade, hiss like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is prepared, and my mind; and if you chaunce to find anie worse words than you broughte, let them be put in your dad's dictionarie. Farewell, and be hanged; and I pray God you fare no worse.—Yours at an hour's warning."

This was the proper way to reply to such writers, by driving them out of the field with their own implements of warfare. "Pasquill of England"[418] admirably observed of the papers of this faction—"Doubt not but that the same reckoning in the ende will be made of you which your favourers commonly make of their old shooes—when they are past wearing, they barter them awaie for newe broomes, or carrie them forth to the dunghill and leave them there." The writers of these Martin Mar-Prelate books have been tolerably ascertained,[419] considering the secrecy with which they were printed—sometimes at night, sometimes hid in cellars, and never long in one place: besides the artifices used in their dispersion, by motley personages, held together by an invisible chain of confederacy. Conspiracy, like other misery, "acquaints a man with strange bedfellows;" and the present confederacy combined persons of the most various descriptions, and perhaps of very opposite views. I find men of learning, and of rigid lives, intimately associated with dissipated, or with too ardently-tempered youths; connected, too, with maniacs, whose lunacy had taken a revolutionary turn; and men of rank combining with old women and cobblers.[420] Such are the party-coloured apostles of insurrection! and thus their honourable and dishonourable motives lie so blended together, that the historian cannot separate them. At the moment the haughty spirit of a conspirator is striking at the head of established authority, he is himself crouching to the basest intimates; and to escape often from an ideal degradation, he can bear with a real one.

Of the heads of this party, I shall notice Penry and Udall, two self-devoted victims to Nonconformity. The most active was John Penry, or Ap Henry. He exulted that "he was born and bred in the mountains of Wales:" he had, however, studied at both our Universities. He had all the heat of his soil and of his party. He "wished that his head might not go down to the grave in peace," and was just the man to obtain his purpose. When he and his papers were at length seized, Penry pleaded that he could not be tried for sedition, professing unbounded loyalty to the Queen: such is the usual plea of even violent Reformers. Yet how could Elizabeth be the sovereign, unless she adopted the mode of government planned by these Reformers? In defence of his papers, he declared that they were only the private memorandums of a scholar, in which, during his wanderings about the kingdom, he had collected all the objections he had heard against the government. Yet these, though written down, might not be his own. He observed that they were not even English, nor intelligible to his accusers; but a few Welshisms could not save Ap Henry; and the judge, assuming the hardy position, that scribere est agere, the author found more honour conferred on his MSS. than his genius cared to receive. It was this very principle which proved so fatal, at a later period, to a more elevated politician than Penry; yet Algernon Sidney, perhaps, possessed not a spirit more Roman.[421] State necessity claimed another victim; and this ardent young man, whose execution had been at first unexpectedly postponed, was suddenly hurried from his dinner to a temporary gallows; a circumstance marked by its cruelty, but designed to prevent an expected tumult.[422]

Contrasted with this fiery Mar-Prelate was another, the learned subtile John Udall. His was the spirit which dared to do all that Penry had dared, yet conducting himself in the heat of action with the tempered wariness of age: "If they silence me as a minister," said he, "it will allow me leisure to write; and then I will give the bishops such a blow as shall make their hearts ache." It was agreed among the party neither to deny, or to confess, writing any of their books, lest among the suspected the real author might thus be discovered, or forced solemnly to deny his own work; and when the Bishop of Rochester, to catch Udall by surprise, suddenly said, "Let me ask you a question concerning your book," the wary Udall replied, "It is not yet proved to be mine!" He adroitly explained away the offending passages the lawyers picked out of his book, and in a contest between him and the judge, not only repelled him with his own arms, but when his lordship would have wrestled on points of divinity, Udall expertly perplexed the lawyer by showing he had committed an anachronism of four hundred years! He was equally acute with the witnesses; for when one deposed that he had seen a catalogue of Udall's library, in which was inserted "The Demonstration of Discipline," the anonymous book for which Udall was prosecuted; with great ingenuity he observed that this was rather an argument that he was not the author, for "scholars use not to put their own books in the catalogue of those they have in their study." We observe with astonishment the tyrannical decrees of our courts of justice, which lasted till the happy Revolution. The bench was as depraved in their notions of the rights of the subject in the reign of Elizabeth as in those of Charles II. and James II. The Court refused to hear Udall's witnesses, on this strange principle, that "witnesses in favour of the prisoner were against the queen!" To which Udall replied, "It is for the queen to hear all things when the life of any of her subjects is in question." The criminal felt what was just more than his judges; and yet the judge, though to be reprobated for his mode, calling so learned a man "Sirrah!" was right in the thing, when he declared that "you would bring the queen and the crown under your girdles." It is remarkable that Udall repeatedly employed that expression which Algernon Sidney left as his last legacy to the people, when he told them he was about to die for "that Old Cause in which I was from my youth engaged." Udall perpetually insisted on "The Cause." This was a term which served at least for a watchword: it rallied the scattered members of the republican party. The precision of the expression might have been difficult to ascertain; and, perhaps, like every popular expedient, varied with "existing circumstances." I did not, however, know it had so remote an origin as in the reign of Elizabeth; and suspect it may still be freshened up, and varnished over, for any present occasion.

The last stroke for Udall's character is the history of his condemnation. He suffered the cruel mockery of a pardon granted conditionally, by the intercession of the Scottish monarch but never signed by the Queen—and Udall mouldered away the remnant of his days in a rigid imprisonment.[423] Cartwright and Travers, the chief movers of this faction, retreated with haste and caution from the victims they had conducted to the place of execution, while they themselves sunk into a quiet forgetfulness and selfish repose.

FOOTNOTES:

[402] The Church History by Dodd, a Catholic, fills three vols. folio: it is very rare and curious. Much of our own domestic history is interwoven in that of the fugitive papists, and the materials of this work are frequently drawn from their own archives, preserved in their seminaries at Douay, Valladolid, &c., which have not been accessible to Protestant writers. Here I discovered a copious nomenclature of eminent persons, and many literary men, with many unknown facts, both of a private and public nature. It is useful, at times, to know whether an English author was a Catholic.

[403] I refer the reader to Selden's "Table Talk" for many admirable ideas on "Bishops." That enlightened genius, who was no friend to the ecclesiastical temporal power, acknowledges the absolute necessity of this order in a great government. The preservers of our literature and our morals they ought to be, and many have been. When the political reformers ejected the bishops out of the house, what did they gain? a more vulgar prating race, but even more lordly! Selden says—"The bishops being put out of the house, whom will they lay the fault upon now? When the dog is beat out of the room, where will they lay the stink?"

[404] The freedom of the press hardly subsisted in Elizabeth's reign; and yet libels abounded! A clear demonstration that nothing is really gained by those violent suppressions and expurgatory indexes which power in its usurpation may enforce. At a time when they did not dare even to publish the titles of such libels, yet were they spread about, and even hoarded. The most ancient catalogue of our vernacular literature is that by Andrew Maunsell, published in 1595. It consists of Divinity, Mathematics, Medicine, &c.; but the third part which he promised, and which to us would have been the most interesting, of "Rhetoric, History, Poetry, and Policy," never appeared. In the Preface, such was the temper of the times, and of Elizabeth, we discover that he has deprived us of a catalogue of the works alluded to in our text, for he thus distinctly points at them:—"The books written by the fugitive papistes, as also those that are written against the present government (meaning those of the Puritans), I doe not think meete for me to meddle withall." In one part of his catalogue, however, he contrived to insert the following passage; the burden of the song seems to have been chorused by the ear of our cautious Maunsell. He is noticing a Pierce Plowman in prose. "I did not see the beginning of this booke, but it ended thus:—

"God save the king, and speed the plough And send the prelats care inough, Inough, inough, inough."—p. 80.

Few of our native productions are so rare as the Martin Mar-Prelate publications. I have not found them in the public repositories of our national literature. There they have been probably rejected with indignity, though their answerers have been preserved; yet even these are almost of equal rarity and price. They were rejected in times less enlightened than the present. In a national library every book deserves preservation. By the rejection of these satires, however absurd or infamous, we have lost a link in the great chain of our National Literature and History. [Since the above was written, many have been added to our library; and the Rev. William Maskell, M.A., has published his "History of the Martin Mar-Prelate Controversy." It is a most careful summary of the writings and proceedings of all connected with this important event, and is worthy the attentive perusal of such as desire accurate information in this chapter of our Church history.]

[405] We know them by the name of Puritans, a nickname obtained by their affecting superior sanctity; but I find them often distinguished by the more humble appellative of Precisians. As men do not leap up, but climb on rocks, it is probable they were only precise before they were pure. A satirist of their day, in "Rythmes against Martin Marre-Prelate," melts their attributes into one verse:—

"The sacred sect, and perfect pure precise."

A more laughing satirist, "Pasquill of England to Martin Junior," persists in calling them Puritans, a pruritu! for their perpetual itching, or a desire to do something. Elizabeth herself only considered them as "a troublesome sort of people:" even that great politician could not detect the political monster in a mere chrysalis of reform. I find, however, in a poet of the Elizabethan age, an evident change in the public feeling respecting the Puritans, who being always most active when the government was most in trouble, their political views were discovered. Warner, in his "Albion's England," describes them:—

"If ever England will in aught prevent her own mishap, Against these Skommes (no terme too gross) let England shut the gap; With giddie heads— Their countrie's foes they helpt, and most their country harm'd. If Hypocrites why Puritaines we term, be asked, in breefe, 'Tis but an ironised terme: good-fellow so spells theefe!"

The gentle-humoured FULLER, in his "Church History," felt a tenderness for the name of Puritan, which, after the mad follies they had played during the Commonwealth, was then held in abhorrence. He could not venture to laud the good men of that party, without employing a new term to conceal the odium. In noticing, under the date of 1563, that the bishops urged the clergy of their dioceses to press uniformity, &c., he adds—"Such as refused were branded with the name of Puritans—a name which in this nation began in this year, subject to several senses, and various in the acceptions. Puritan was taken for the opposers of hierarchy and church service, as resenting of superstition. But the nickname was quickly improved by profane mouths to abuse pious persons. We will decline the word to prevent exceptions, which, if casually slipping from our pen, the reader knoweth that only nonconformists are intended," lib. ix. p. 76. Fuller, however, divided them into classes—"the mild and moderate, and the fierce and fiery." HEYLIN, in his "History of the Presbyterians," blackens them as so many political devils; and NEALE, in his "History of the Puritans," blanches them into a sweet and almond whiteness.

Let us be thankful to these PURITANS for a political lesson. They began their quarrels on the most indifferent matters. They raised disturbances about the "Romish Rags," by which they described the decent surplice as well as the splendid scarlet chimere[407] thrown over the white linen rochet, with the square cap worn by the bishops. The scarlet robe, to please their sullen fancy, was changed into black satin; but these men soon resolved to deprive the bishops of more than a scarlet robe. The affected niceties of these PRECISIANS, dismembering our images, and scratching at our paintings, disturbed the uniformity of the religious service. A clergyman in a surplice was turned out of the church. Some wore square caps, some round, some abhorred all caps. The communion-table placed in the East was considered as an idolatrous altar, and was now dragged into the middle of the church, where, to show their contempt, it was always made the filthiest seat in the church. They used to kneel at the sacrament; now they would sit, because that was a proper attitude for a supper; then they would not sit, but stand: at length they tossed the elements about, because the bread was wafers, and not from a loaf. Among their preciseness was a qualm at baptism: the water was to be taken from a basin, and not from a fount; then they would not name their children, or if they did, they would neither have Grecian, nor Roman, nor Saxon names, but Hebrew ones, which they ludicrously translated into English, and which, as Heylin observes, "many of them when they came of age were ashamed to own"—such as "Accepted, Ashes, Fight-the-good-Fight-of-Faith, Joy-again, Kill-sin, &c."

Who could have foreseen that some pious men quarrelling about the square caps and the rochets of bishops should at length attack bishops themselves; and, by an easy transition, passing from bishops to kings, finally close in levellers!

[406] The origin of the controversy may be fixed about 1588. "A far less easy task," says the Rev. Mr. Maskell, "is it to guess at the authors. The tracts on the Mar-Prelate side have been usually attributed to Penry, Throgmorton, Udal, and Fenner. Very considerable information may be obtained about these writers in Wood's 'Athenae,' art. Penry; in Collier, Strype, and Herbert's edition of 'Arnes,' to whom I would refer. After a careful examination of these and other authorities on the subject, the question remains, in my judgment, as obscure as before; and I think that it is very far from clear that either one of the three last-named was actually concerned in the authorship of any of the pamphlets."—ED.

[407] So Heylin writes the word; but in the "Rythmes against Martin," a contemporary production, the term is Chiver. It is not in Cotgrave.

[408] In the "Just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior" (circae 1589), we are told: "There is Cartwright, too, at Warwick; he hath got him such a company of disciples, both of the worshipfull and other of the poorer sort, as wee have no cause to thank him. Never tell me that he is too grave to trouble himself with Martin's conceits. Cartwright seeks the peace of the Church no otherwise than his platform may stand." He was accused before the commissioners in 1590 of knowing who wrote and printed these squibs, which he did not deny.—ED.

[409] I give a remarkable extract from the writings of Cartwright. It will prove two points. First, that the religion of those men became a cover for a political design; which was to raise the ecclesiastical above the civil power. Just the reverse of Hobbes's after scheme; but while theorists thus differ and seem to refute one another, they in reality work for an identical purpose. Secondly, it will show the not uncommon absurdity of man; while these nonconformists were affecting to annihilate the hierarchy of England as a remains of the Romish supremacy, they themselves were designing one according to their own fresher scheme. It was to be a state or republic of Presbyters, in which all Sovereigns were to hold themselves, to use their style, as "Nourisses, or servants under the Church; the Sovereigns were to be as subjects; they were to vail their sceptres and to offer their crowns as the prophet speaketh, to lick the dust of the feet of the Church." These are Cartwright's words, in his "Defence of the Admonition." But he is still bolder, in a joint production with Travers. He insists that "the Monarchs of the World should give up their sceptres and crowns unto him (Jesus Christ) who is represented by the Officers of the Church." See "A Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline," p. 185. One would imagine he was a disguised Jesuit, and an advocate for the Pope's supremacy. But observe how these saintly Republicans would govern the State. Cartwright is explicit, and very ingenious. "The world is now deceived that thinketh that the Church must be framed according to the Commonwealth, and the Church Government according to the Civil Government, which is as much as to say, as if a man should fashion his house according to his hangings; whereas, indeed, it is clean contrary. That as the hangings are made fit for the house, so the Commonwealth must be made to agree with the Church, and the government thereof with her government; for, as the house is before the hangings, therefore the hangings, which come after, must be framed to the house, which was before; so the Church being before there was a commonwealth, and the commonwealth coming after, must be fashioned and made suitable to the Church; otherwise, God is made to give place to men, heaven to earth."—CARTWRIGHT'S Defence of the Admonition, p. 181.

Warburton's "Alliance between Church and State," which was in his time considered as a hardy paradox, is mawkish in its pretensions, compared with this sacerdotal republic. It is not wonderful that the wisest of our Sovereigns, that great politician Elizabeth, should have punished with death these democrats: but it is wonderful to discover that these inveterate enemies to the Church of Rome were only trying to transfer its absolute power into their own hands! They wanted to turn the Church into a democracy. They fascinated the people by telling them that there would be no beggars were there no bishops; that every man would be a governor by setting up a Presbytery. From the Church, I repeat, it is scarcely a single step to the Cabinet. Yet the early Puritans come down to us as persecuted saints. Doubtless, there were a few honest saints among them; but they were as mad politicians as their race afterwards proved to be, to whom they left so many fatal legacies. Cartwright uses the very language a certain cast of political reformers have recently done. He declares "An establishment may be made without the magistrate;" and told the people that "if every hair of their head was a life, it ought to be offered for such a cause." Another of this faction is for "registering the names of the fittest and hottest brethren without lingering for Parliament;" and another exults that "there are a hundred thousand hands ready." Another, that "we may overthrow the bishops and all the government in one day." Such was the style, and such the confidence in the plans which the lowest orders of revolutionists promulgated during their transient exhibition in this country. More in this strain may be found in "Maddox's Vindication Against Neale," the advocate for the Puritans, p. 255; and in an admirable letter of that great politician, Sir Francis Walsingham, who, with many others of the ministers of Elizabeth, was a favourer of the Puritans, till he detected their secret object to subvert the government. This letter is preserved in "Collier's Eccl. Hist." vol. ii. 607. They had begun to divide the whole country into classes, provincial synods, &c. They kept registers, which recorded all the heads of their debates, to be finally transmitted to the secret head of the Classis of Warwick, where Cartwright governed as the perpetual moderator! Heylin's Hist. of Presbyt. p. 277. These violent advocates for the freedom of the press had, however, an evident intention to monopolise it; for they decreed that "no book should be put in print but by consent of the Classes."—Sir G. PAUL'S Life of Whitgift, p. 65. The very Star-Chamber they justly protested against, they were for raising among themselves!

[410] Under the denomination of Barrowists and Brownists. I find Sir Walter Raleigh declaring, in the House of Commons, on a motion for reducing disloyal subjects, that "they are worthy to be rooted out of a Commonwealth." He is alarmed at the danger, "for it is to be feared that men not guilty will be included in the law about to be passed. I am sorry for it. I am afraid there is near twenty thousand of them in England; and when they be gone (that is, expelled) who shall maintain their wives and children?"—SIR SIMONDS D'EWES' Journal, p. 517.

[411] The controversies of Whitgift and Cartwright were of a nature which could never close, for toleration was a notion which never occurred to either. These rivals from early days wrote with such bitterness against each other, that at length it produced mutual reproaches. Whitgift complains to Cartwright: "If you were writing against the veriest Papist, or the ignorantest dolt, you could not be more spiteful and malicious." And Cartwright replies: "If peace had been so precious unto you as you pretend, you would not have brought so many hard words and bitter reproaches, as it were sticks and coals, to double and treble the heat of contention."