A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 15

Thomas Nash will himself hardly escape the charge of acridity, but only injustice or want of discernment will call him a quack. Unlike Harvey, but like Greene and Lodge, he was a verse as well as a prose writer. But his verse is in comparison unimportant. Nor was he tempted to intersperse specimens of it in his prose work. The absolutely best part of that work--the Anti-Martinist pamphlets to be noticed presently--is only attributed to him conjecturally, though the grounds of attribution are very strong. But his characteristics are fully evident in his undoubted productions. The first of these in pamphlet form is the very odd thing called _Pierce Penniless_ [the name by which Nash became known], _his Supplication to the Devil_. It is a kind of rambling condemnation of luxury, for the most part delivered in the form of burlesque exhortation, which the mediaeval _sermons joyeux_ had made familiar in all European countries. Probably some allusions in this refer to Harvey, whose pragmatical pedantry may have in many ways annoyed Nash, a Cambridge man like himself. At any rate the two soon plunged into a regular battle, the doc.u.ments of which on Nash's side are, first a prognostication, something in the style of Rabelais, then a formal confutation of the _Four Letters_, and then the famous lampoon ent.i.tled _Have with you to Saffron Walden_ [Harvey's birthplace], of which here is a specimen:--

"His father he undid to furnish him to the Court once more, where presenting himself in all the colours of the rainbow, and a pair of moustaches like a black horse tail tied up in a knot, with two tufts sticking out on each side, he was asked by no mean personage, _Unde haec insania_? whence proceedeth this folly or madness? and he replied with that weather-beaten piece of a verse out of the Grammar, _Semel insanivimus omnes_, once in our days there is none of us but have played the idiots; and so was he counted and bade stand by for a Nodgs...o...b.. He that most patronized him, prying more searchingly into him, and finding that he was more meet to make sport with than any way deeply to be employed, with fair words shook him off, and told him he was fitter for the University, than for the Court or his turn, and so bade G.o.d prosper his studies, and sent for another Secretary to Oxford.

"Readers, be merry; for in me there shall want nothing I can do to make you merry. You see I have brought the Doctor out of request at Court, and it shall cost me a fall, but I will get him hooted out of the University too, ere I give him over. What will you give me when I bring him upon the Stage in one of the princ.i.p.alest Colleges in Cambridge? Lay any wager with me, and I will; or if you lay no wager at all, I'll fetch him aloft in Pedantius, that exquisite Comedy in Trinity College; where under the chief part, from which it took his name, as namely the concise and firking finicaldo fine School master, he was full drawn and delineated from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. The just manner of his phrase in his Orations and Disputations they stuffed his mouth with, and no Buffianism throughout his whole books, but they bolstered out his part with; as those ragged remnants in his four familiar epistles 'twixt him and _Senior Immerito, raptim scripta, noste manum et stylum_, with innumerable other of his rabble-routs: and scoffing his _Musarum Lachrymae_ with _Flebo amorem meum etiam musarum lachrymis_; which, to give it his due, was a more collachrymate wretched Treatise than my _Piers Penniless_, being the pitifulest pangs that ever any man's Muse breathed forth. I leave out half; not the carrying up of his gown, his nice gait on his pantoffles, or the affected accent of his speech, but they personated. And if I should reveal all, I think they borrowed his gown to play the part in, the more to flout him. Let him deny this (and not d.a.m.n himself) for his life if he can. Let him deny that there was a Shew made at Clare Hall of him and his two brothers, called,

"_Tarra, rantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum Tri-Harveyorum Tri-harmonia_

Let him deny that there was another Shew made of the little Minnow his brother, _Dodrans d.i.c.k_, at Peter-house called,

"_Duns furens._ d.i.c.k Harvey in a frensy.

Whereupon d.i.c.k came and broke the College gla.s.s windows; and Doctor Perne (being then either for himself or deputy Vice-Chancellor) caused him to be fetched in, and set in the Stocks till the Shew was ended, and a great part of the night after."

_The Terrors of the Night_, a discourse of apparitions, for once, among these oddly-named pieces, tells a plain story. Its successor, _Christ's Tears over Jerusalem_, Nash's longest book, is one of those rather enigmatical expressions of repentance for loose life which were so common at the time, and which, according to the charity of the reader, may be attributed to real feeling, to a temporary access of _Katzen-jammer_, or to downright hypocrisy, bent only on manufacturing profitable "copy," and varying its style to catch different tastes. The most unfavourable hypothesis is probably unjust, and a certain tone of sincerity also runs through the next book, _The Unfortunate Traveller_, in which Nash, like many others, inveighs against the practice of sending young Englishmen to be corrupted abroad. It is noteworthy that this (the place of which in the history of the novel has been rather exaggerated) is the oldest authority for the romance of Surrey and Geraldine; but it is uncertain whether this was pure invention on Nash's part or not. Nash's _Lenten Stuff_ is very interesting, being a panegyric on Great Yarmouth and its famous staple commodity (though Nash was actually born at Lowestoft).

In Nash's work we find a style both of treatment and language entirely different from anything of Greene's or Lodge's. He has no euphuism, his forte being either extravagant burlesque (in which the influence of Rabelais is pretty directly perceptible, while he himself acknowledges indebtedness to some other sources, such as Bullen or Bullein, a dialogue writer of the preceding generation), or else personal attack, boisterous and unscrupulous, but often most vigorous and effective. Diffuseness and want of keeping to the point too frequently mar Nash's work; but when he shakes himself free from them, and goes straight for his enemy or his subject, he is a singularly forcible writer. In his case more than in any of the others, the journalist born out of due time is perceptible. He had perhaps not much original message for the world. But he had eminently the trick both of damaging controversial argument made light to catch the popular taste, and of easy discussion or narrative. The chief defects of his work would probably have disappeared of themselves if he had had to write not pamphlets, but articles. He did, however, what he could; and he is worthy of a place in the history of literature if only for the sake of _Have with you to Saffron Walden_--the best example of its own kind to be found before the end of the seventeenth century, if not the beginning of the eighteenth.

Thomas Dekker was much less of a born prose writer than his half-namesake, Nash. His best work, unlike Nash's, was done in verse, and, while he was far Nash's superior, not merely in poetical expression but in creative grasp of character, he was entirely dest.i.tute of Nash's incisive and direct faculty of invective. Nevertheless his work, too, is memorable among the prose work of the time, and for special reasons. His first pamphlet (according to the peculiarity already noted in Rowlands's case) is not prose at all, but verse--yet not the verse of which Dekker had real mastery, being a very lamentable ballad of the destruction of Jerusalem, ent.i.tled _Canaan's Calamity_ (1598). The next, _The Wonderful Year_, is the account of London in plague time, and has at least the interest of being comparable with, and perhaps that of having to some extent inspired, Defoe's famous performance. Then, and of the same date, follows a very curious piece, the foreign origin of which has not been so generally noticed as that of Dekker's most famous prose production. _The Bachelor's Banquet_ is in effect only a free rendering of the immortal fifteenth century satire, a.s.signed on no very solid evidence to Antoine de la Salle, the _Quinze Joyes de Mariage_, the resemblance being kept down to the recurrence at the end of each section of the same phrase, "in Lob's pound," which reproduces the less grotesque "dans la na.s.se" of the original. But here, as later, the skill with which Dekker adapts and brings in telling circ.u.mstances appropriate to his own day deserves every acknowledgment. _Dekker's Dreame_ is chiefly verse and chiefly pious; and then at a date somewhat later than that of our present period, but connected with it by the fact of authors.h.i.+p, begins a very interesting series of pieces, more vivid if somewhat less well written than Greene's, and connected with his "conny-catching" course. _The Bellman of London_, _Lanthorn and Candlelight_, _A Strange Horse-Race_, _The Seven Deadly Sins of London_, _News from h.e.l.l_, _The Double P.P._, and _The Gull's Hornbook_, are all pamphlets of this cla.s.s; the chief interest resting in _News from h.e.l.l_ (which, according to the author's scheme, connects itself with Nash's _Pierce Penniless_, and is the devil's answer thereto) and _The Gull's Hornbook_ (1609). This last, the best known of Dekker's work, is an Englis.h.i.+ng of the no less famous _Grobia.n.u.s_ of Frederick Dedekind, and the same skill of adaptation which was noticed in _The Bachelor's Banquet_ is observable here. The spirit of these works seems to have been so popular that Dekker kept it up in _The Dead Term_ [long vacation], _Work for Armourers_ (which, however, is less particular and connects itself with Nash's sententious work), _The Raven's Almanack_, and _A Rod for Runaways_ (1625). _The Four Birds of Noah's Ark_, which Dr. Grosart prints last, is of a totally different character, being purely a book of piety. It is thus inferior in interest to the series dealing with the low life of London, which contains most curious studies of the ancient order of ragam.u.f.fins (as a modern satirist has pleasantly called them), and bears altogether marks of greater sincerity than the parallel studies of other writers. For about Dekker, hack and penny-a-liner as he undoubtedly was, there was a simplicity, a truth to nature, and at the same time a faculty of dramatic presentation in which Greene, Lodge, and Nash were wholly wanting; and his prose pamphlets smack of these good gifts in their measure as much as _The Honest Wh.o.r.e_. Indeed, on the whole, he seems to be the most trustworthy of these chroniclers of the English picaroons; and one feels disposed to believe that if the things which he tells did not actually happen, something very like them was probably happening every day in London during the time of "Eliza and our James." For the time of Eliza and our James was by no means a wholly heroic period, and it only loses, not gains, by the fiction that every man of letters was a Spenser and every man of affairs a Sidney or even a Raleigh. Extracts from _The Seven Deadly Sins_ and _The Gull's Hornbook_ may be given:--

"O Candle-light! and art thou one of the cursed crew? hast thou been set at the table of Princes and n.o.blemen? have all sorts of people done reverence unto thee, and stood bare so soon as ever they have seen thee? have thieves, traitors, and murderers been afraid to come in thy presence, because they knew thee just, and that thou wouldest discover them? And art thou now a harbourer of all kinds of vices? nay, dost thou play the capital Vice thyself?

Hast thou had so many learned Lectures read before thee, and is the light of thy understanding now clean put out, and have so many profound scholars profited by thee? hast thou done such good to Universities, been such a guide to the lame, and seen the doing of so many good works, yet dost thou now look dimly, and with a dull eye, upon all goodness? What comfort have sick men taken (in weary and irksome nights) but only in thee? thou hast been their physician and apothecary, and when the relish of nothing could please them, the very shadow of thee hath been to them a restorative consolation. The nurse hath stilled her wayward infant, shewing it but to thee: What gladness hast thou put into mariners' bosoms when thou hast met them on the sea!

What joy into the faint and benighted traveller when he has met thee on the land! How many poor handicraftsmen by thee have earned the best part of their living! And art thou now become a companion for drunkards, for leachers, and for prodigals? Art thou turned reprobate? thou wilt burn for it in h.e.l.l. And so odious is this thy apostasy, and hiding thyself from the light of the truth, that at thy death and going out of the world, even they that love thee best will tread thee under their feet: yea, I that have thus played the herald, and proclaimed thy good parts, will now play the crier and call thee into open court, to arraign thee for thy misdemeanours."

"For do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot be at quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death, that we owe the better tributary, half of our life to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want? of wounds? of cares? of great men's oppressions? of captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate Ambrosia? can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no, look upon Endymion, the moon's minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it. Can lying abed till noon (being not the three score and fifteenth thousand part of his nap) be hurtful?

"Besides, by the opinion of all philosophers and physicians, it is not good to trust the air with our bodies till the sun with his flame-coloured wings hath fanned away the misty smoke of the morning, and refined that thick tobacco-breath which the rheumatic night throws abroad of purpose to put out the eye of the element: which work questionless cannot be perfectly finished till the sun's car-horses stand prancing on the very top of highest noon: so that then (and not till then) is the most healthful hour to be stirring. Do you require examples to persuade you? At what time do Lords and Ladies use to rise but then? Your simpering merchants' wives are the fairest lyers in the world: and is not eleven o'clock their common hour? they find (no doubt) unspeakable sweetness in such lying, else they would not day by day put it so in practice. In a word, mid-day slumbers are golden; they make the body fat, the skin fair, the flesh plump, delicate and tender; they set a russet colour on the cheeks of young women, and make l.u.s.ty courage to rise up in men; they make us thrifty, both in sparing victuals (for breakfasts thereby are saved from the h.e.l.l-mouth of the belly) and in preserving apparel; for while we warm us in our beds our clothes are not worn.

"The cas.e.m.e.nts of thine eyes being then at this commendable time of the day newly set open, choose rather to have thy wind-pipe cut in pieces than to salute any man. Bid not good-morrow so much as to thy father, though he be an emperor. An idle ceremony it is and can do him little good; to thyself it may bring much harm: for if he be a wise man that knows how to hold his peace, of necessity must he be counted a fool that cannot keep his tongue."

The voluminous work in pamphlet kind of Nicholas Breton, still more the verse efforts closely akin to it of Samuel Rowlands, John Davies of Hereford and some others, must be pa.s.sed over with very brief notice. Dr.

Grosart's elaborate edition of the first-named has given a vast ma.s.s of matter very interesting to the student of literature, but which cannot be honestly recommended to the general reader. Breton, whose long life and perpetual literary activity fill up great part of our whole period, was an Ess.e.x gentleman of a good family (a fact which he never forgot), and apparently for some time a dependent of the well-known Countess of Pembroke, Sidney's sister. A much older man than most of the great wits of Elizabeth's reign, he also survived most of them, and his publications, if not his composition, cover a full half century, though he was _nel mezzo del cammin_ at the date of the earliest. He was probably born some years before the middle of the sixteenth century, and certainly did not die before the first year of Charles I. If we could take as his the charming lullaby of _The Arbour of Amorous Devices_ he would stand (if only as a kind of "single-speech") high as a poet. But I fear that Dr. Grosart's attribution of it to him is based on little external and refuted by all internal evidence. His best certain thing is the pretty "Phillida and Corydon" idyll, which may be found in _England's Helicon_ or in Mr. Ward's _Poets_. But I own that I can never read this latter without thinking of two lines of Fulke Greville's in the same metre and on no very different theme--

"O'er enamelled meads they went, Quiet she, he pa.s.sion-rent,"

which are simply worth all the works of Breton, prose and verse, unless we count the _Lullaby_, put together. In the _mots rayonnants_, the _mots de lumiere_, he is sadly deficient. But his work (which is nearly as plentiful in verse as in prose) is, as has been said, very interesting to the literary student, because it shows better perhaps than anything else the style of literature which a man, disdaining to condescend to burlesque or bawdry, not gifted with any extraordinary talent, either at prose or verse, but possessed of a certain literary faculty, could then produce with a fair chance of being published and bought. It cannot be said that the result shows great daintiness in Breton's public. The verse, with an improvement in sweetness and fluency, is very much of the doggerel style which was prevalent before Spenser; and the prose, though showing considerable faculty, if not of invention, yet of adroit imitation of previously invented styles, is devoid of distinction and point. There are, however, exercises after Breton's own fas.h.i.+on in almost every popular style of the time--euphuist romances, moral treatises, packets of letters, collections of jests and short tales, purely religious tractates, characters (after the style later ill.u.s.trated by Overbury and Earle), dialogues, maxims, pictures of manners, collections of notes about foreign countries,--in fact, the whole farrago of the modern periodical. The pervading characteristics are Breton's invariable modesty, his pious and, if I may be permitted to use the word, gentlemanly spirit, and a fas.h.i.+on of writing which, if not very pointed, picturesque, or epigrammatic, is clear, easy, and on the whole rather superior, in observance of the laws of grammar and arrangement, to the work of men of much greater note in his day.

The verse pamphlets of Rowlands (whom I have not studied as thoroughly as most others), Davies, and many less voluminous men, are placed here with all due apology for the liberty. They are seldom or never of much formal merit, but they are interesting, first, because they testify to the hold which the mediaeval conception of verse, as a general literary medium as suitable as prose and more attractive, had upon men even at this late time; and secondly, because, like the purely prose pamphlets, they are full of information as to the manners of the time. For Rowlands I may refer to Mr.

Gosse's essay. John Davies of Hereford, the writing-master, though he has been carefully edited for students, and is by no means unworthy of study, has had less benefit of exposition to the general reader. He was not a genius, but he is a good example of the rather dull man who, despite the disfavour of circ.u.mstance, contrives by much a.s.siduity and ingenious following of models to attain a certain position in literature. There are John Davieses of Hereford in every age, but since the invention and filing of newspapers their individuality has been not a little merged. The anonymous journalist of our days is simply to the historian such and such a paper, volume so-and-so, page so much, column this or that. The good John Davies, living in another age, still stands as _nominis umbra_, but with a not inconsiderable body of work to throw the shadow.

One of the most remarkable, and certainly one of not the least interesting developments of the Elizabethan pamphlet remains to be noticed. This is the celebrated series of "Martin Marprelate" tracts, with the replies which they called forth. Indeed the popularity of this series may be said to have given a great impulse to the whole pamphleteering system. It is somewhat unfortunate that this interesting subject has never been taken up in full by a dispa.s.sionate historian of literature, sufficiently versed in politics and in theology. In mid-nineteenth century most, but by no means all of the more notable tracts were reprinted by John Petheram, a London bookseller, whose productions have since been issued under the well-known imprint of John Russell Smith, the publisher of the _Library of Old Authors_. This gave occasion to a review in _The Christian Remembrancer_, afterwards enlarged and printed as a book by Mr. Maskell, a High Churchman who subsequently seceded to the Church of Rome. This latter accident has rather unfavourably and unfairly affected later judgments of his work, which, however, is certainly not free from party bias. It has scarcely been less unlucky that the chief recent dealers with the matter, Professor Arber (who projected a valuable reprint of the whole series in his _English Scholars'

Library_, and who prefaced it with a quite invaluable introductory sketch), and Dr. Grosart, who also included divers Anti-Martinist tracts in his privately printed _Works of Nashe_, are very strongly prejudiced on the Puritan side.[40] Between these authorities the dispa.s.sionate inquirer who attacks the texts for himself is likely to feel somewhat in the position of a man who exposes himself to a cross fire. The Martin Marprelate controversy, looked at without prejudice but with sufficient information, shows itself as a very early example of the reckless violence of private crotcheteers on the one hand, and of the rather considerable unwisdom of the official defenders of order on the other. "Martin's" method was to a certain extent an antic.i.p.ation of the famous move by which Pascal, fifty years later, "took theology out of the schools into drawing-rooms," except that Martin and his adversaries transferred the venue rather to the tap-room than to the drawing-room. The controversy between the framers of the Church of England in its present state, and the hot gospellers who, with Thomas Cartwright at their head, denied the proposition (not deniable or denied now by any sane and scholarly disputant) that church discipline and government are points left to a great extent undefined in the Scriptures, had gone on for years before Martin appeared. Cartwright and Whitgift had fought, with a certain advantage of warmth and eloquence on Cartwright's side, and with an immense preponderance of logical cogency on Whitgift's. Many minor persons had joined in the struggle, and at last a divine, more worthy than wise, John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, had produced on the orthodox side one of those enormous treatises (it had some fifteen hundred quarto pages) which are usually left unread by the side they favour, and which exasperate the side they oppose. The ordinary law of the time, moreover, which placed large powers in the hands of the bishops, and especially entrusted them with a rigid and complete censors.h.i.+p of the press, had begun to be put in force severely against the more outspoken partisans. Any one who will take the trouble to read the examination of Henry Barrow, which Mr. Arber has reprinted,[41] or even the "moderate"

tracts of Nicholas Udall, which in a manner ushered in the Marprelate controversy, will probably be more surprised at the long-suffering of the judges than at the sufferings of their prisoners. Barrow, in a long and patient examination before the council, of which the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury were members, called them to their faces the one a "wolf," a "b.l.o.o.d.y persecutor," and an "apostate," the other "a monster" and "the second beast that is spoken of in the Revelations." The "moderate" Udall, after publis.h.i.+ng a dialogue (in which an Anglican bishop called Diotrephes is represented, among other things, as planning measures against the Puritans in consort with a papist and an usurer), further composed a _Demonstration of Discipline_ in which, writing, according to Mr. Arber, "without any satire or invective," he calls the bishops merely _qua_ bishops, "the wretched fathers of a filthy mother," with abundant epithets to match, and rains down on every practice of the existing church government such terms as "blasphemous," "d.a.m.nable," "h.e.l.lish," and the like. To the modern reader who looks at these things with the eyes of the present day, it may of course seem that it would have been wiser to let the dogs bark. But that was not the principle of the time: and as Mr. Arber most frankly admits, it was certainly not the principle of the dogs themselves. The Puritans claimed for themselves a not less absolute right to call in the secular arm if they could, and a much more absolute certainty and righteousness for their tenets than the very hottest of their adversaries.

[40] This prejudice is naturally still stronger in some American writers, notably Dr. Dexter.

[41] Arber, _Introductory Sketch_. p. 40 _sqq._ All the quotations and references which follow will be found in Arber's and Petheram's reprints or in Grosart's _Nash_, vol. 1. If the works cited are not given as wholes in them, the fact will be noted. (See also Mr. Bond's _Lyly_.)

Udall was directly, as well as indirectly, the begetter of the Martin Marprelate controversy: though after he got into trouble in connection with it, he made a sufficiently distinct expression of disapproval of the Martinist methods, and it seems to have been due more to accident and his own obstinacy than anything else that he died in prison instead of being obliged with the honourable banishment of a Guinea chaplaincy. His printer, Waldegrave, had had his press seized and his license withdrawn for _Diotrephes_, and resentment at this threw what, in the existing arrangements of censors.h.i.+p and the Stationers' monopoly, was a very difficult thing to obtain--command of a practical printer--into the hands of the malcontents. Chief among these malcontents was a certain Reverend John Penry, a Welshman by birth, a member, as was then not uncommon, of both universities, and the author, among other more dubious publications, of a plea, intemperately stated in parts, but very sober and sensible at bottom, for a change in the system of allotting and administering the benefices of the church in Wales. Which plea, be it observed in pa.s.sing, had it been attended to, it would have been better for both the church and state of England at this day. The pamphlet[42] contained, however, a distinct insinuation against the Queen, of designedly keeping Wales in ignorance and subjection--an insinuation which, in those days, was equivalent to high treason. The book was seized, and the author imprisoned (1587). Now when, about a year after, and in the very height of the danger from the Armada, Waldegrave's livelihood was threatened by the proceedings above referred to, it would appear that he obtained from the Continent, or had previously secreted from his confiscated stock, printing tools, and that he and Penry, at the house of Mistress Crane, at East Molesey, in Surrey, printed a certain tract, called, for shortness, "The Epistle."[43]

This tract, of the authors.h.i.+p and character of which more presently, created a great sensation. It was immediately followed, the press being s.h.i.+fted for safety to the houses of divers Puritan country gentlemen, by the promised _Epitome_. So great was the stir, that a formal answer of great length was put forth by "T. C." (well known to be Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester), ent.i.tled, _An Admonition to the People of England_.

The Martinists, from their invisible and s.h.i.+fting citadel, replied with perhaps the cleverest tract of the whole controversy, named, with deliberate quaintness, _Hay any Work for Cooper?_[44] ("Have You any Work for the Cooper?" said to be an actual trade London cry). Thenceforward the _melee_ of pamphlets, answers, "replies, duplies, quadruplies," became in small s.p.a.ce indescribable. Petheram's prospectus of reprints (only partially carried out) enumerates twenty-six, almost all printed in the three years 1588-1590; Mr. Arber, including preliminary works, counts some thirty. The perambulating press was once seized (at Newton Lane, near Manchester), but Martin was not silenced. It is certain (though there are no remnants extant of the matter concerned) that Martin was brought on the stage in some form or other, and though the duration of the controversy was as short as its character was hot, it was rather suppressed than extinguished by the death of Udall in prison, and the execution of Penry and Barrow in 1593.

[42] Large extracts from it are given by Arber.

[43] As the t.i.tles of these productions are highly characteristic of the style of the controversy, and, indeed, are sometimes considerably more poignant than the text, it may be well to give some of them in full as follows:--

_The Epistle._--Oh read over D. John Bridges, for it is a worthy work: Or an Epitome of the first book of that right wors.h.i.+pful volume, written against the Puritans, in the defence of the n.o.ble Clergy, by as wors.h.i.+pful a Priest, John Bridges, Presbyter, Priest or Elder, Doctor of Divillity [_sic_], and Dean of Sarum, Wherein the arguments of the Puritans are wisely presented, that when they come to answer M. Doctor, they must needs say something that hath been spoken. Compiled for the behoof and overthrow of the Parsons Fyckers and Currats [_sic_] that have learnt their catechisms, and are past grace: by the reverend and worthy Martin Marprelate, gentleman, and dedicated to the Confocation [_sic_] house. The Epitome is not yet published, but it shall be when the Bishops are at convenient leisure to view the same. In the mean time let them be content with this learned Epistle. Printed, oversea, in Europe, within two furlongs of a Bouncing Priest, at the cost and charges of M. Marprelate, gentleman.

[44] Hay any work for Cooper, or a brief pistle directed by way of an hublication [_sic_] to the reverend bishops, counselling them if they will needs be barrelled up for fear of smelling in the nostrils of her Majesty and the State, that they would use the advice of Reverend Martin for the providing of their Cooper; because the Reverend T. C. (by which mystical letters is understood either the bouncing parson of East Meon or Tom c.o.kes his chaplain), hath shewed himself in his late admonition to the people of England to be an unskilful and beceitful [_sic_] tub-trimmer. Wherein worthy Martin quits him like a man, I warrant you in the modest defence of his self and his learned pistles, and makes the Cooper's hoops to fly off, and the bishops' tubs to leak out of all cry. Penned and compiled by Martin the metropolitan. Printed in Europe, not far from some of the bouncing priests.

The actual authors.h.i.+p of the Martinist Tracts is still purely a matter of hypothesis. Penry has been the general favourite, and perhaps the argument from the difference of style in his known works is not quite convincing.

The American writer Dr. Dexter, a fervent admirer, as stated above, of the Puritans, is for Barrow. Mr. Arber thinks that a gentleman of good birth named Job Throckmorton, who was certainly concerned in the affair, was probably the author of the more characteristic pa.s.sages. Fantastic suggestions of Jesuit attempts to distract the Anglican Church have also been made,--attempts sufficiently refuted by the improbability of the persons known to be concerned lending themselves to such an intrigue, for, hotheads as Penry and the rest were, they were transparently honest. On the side of the defence, authors.h.i.+p is a little better ascertained. Of Cooper's work there is no doubt, and some purely secular men of letters were oddly mixed up in the affair. It is all but certain that John Lyly wrote the so-called _Pap with a Hatchet_,[45] which in deliberate oddity of phrase, scurrility of language, and desultoriness of method outvies the wildest Martinist outbursts. The later tract, _An Almond for a Parrot_,[46] which deserves a very similar description, may not improbably be the same author's; and Dr. Grosart has reasonably attributed four anti-Martinist tracts (_A Countercuff to Martin Junior_ [_Martin Junior_ was one of the Marprelate treatises], _Pasquil's Return_, _Martin's Month's Mind_, and _Pasquil's Apology_), to Nash. But the discussion of such questions comes but ill within the limits of such a book as the present.

[45] Pap with a Hatchet, alias A fig for my G.o.dson! or Crack me this nut, or A country cuff that is a sound box of the ear for the idiot Martin for to hold his peace, seeing the patch will take no warning. Written by one that dares call a dog a dog, and made to prevent Martin's dog-days.

Imprinted by John-a-noke and John-a-stile for the baylive [_sic_] of Withernam, _c.u.m privilegio perennitatis_; and are to be sold at the sign of the crab-tree-cudgel in Thwackcoat Lane. A sentence. Martin hangs fit for my mowing.

[46] An Almond for a Parrot, or Cuthbert Curryknaves alms. Fit for the knave Martin, and the rest of those impudent beggars that cannot be content to stay their stomachs with a benefice, but they will needs break their fasts with our bishops. _Rimarum sum plenus._ Therefore beware, gentle reader, you catch not the hicket with laughing. Imprinted at a place, not far from a place, by the a.s.signs of Signior Somebody, and are to be sold at his shop in Troubleknave Street at the sign of the Standish.

The discussion of the characteristics of the actual tracts, as they present themselves and whosoever wrote them, is, on the other hand, entirely within our competence. On the whole the literary merit of the treatises has, I think, been overrated. The admirers of Martin have even gone so far as to traverse Penry's perfectly true statement that in using light, not to say ribald, treatment of a serious subject, he was only following [Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde and] other Protestant writers, and have attributed to him an almost entire originality of method, owing at most something to the popular "gags" of the actor Richard Tarleton, then recently dead. This is quite uncritical. An exceedingly free treatment of sacred and serious affairs had been characteristic of the Reformers from Luther downward, and the new Martin only introduced the variety of style which any writer of considerable talents is sure to show. His method, at any rate for a time, is no doubt sufficiently amusing, though it is hardly effective. Serious arguments are mixed up with the wildest buffoonery, and unconscious absurdities (such as a solemn charge against the unlucky Bishop Aylmer because he used the phrase "by my faith," and enjoyed a game at bowls) with the most venomous a.s.sertion or insinuation of really odious offences. The official answer to the _Epistle_ and the _Epitome_ has been praised by no less a person than Bacon[47] for its gravity of tone.

Unluckily Dr. Cooper was entirely dest.i.tute of the faculty of relieving argument with humour. He attacks the theology of the Martinists with learning and logic that leave nothing to desire; but unluckily he proceeds in precisely the same style to deal laboriously with the quips a.s.signed by Martin to Mistress Margaret Lawson (a noted Puritan shrew of the day), and with mere idle things like the a.s.sertion that Whitgift "carried Dr. Perne's cloakbag." The result is that, as has been said, the rejoinder _Hay any Work for Cooper_ shows Martin, at least at the beginning, at his very best.

The artificial simplicity of his distortions of Cooper's really simple statements is not unworthy of Swift, or of the best of the more recent pract.i.tioners of the grave and polite kind of political irony. But this is at the beginning, and soon afterwards Martin relapses for the most part into the alternation between serious argument which will not hold water and grotesque buffoonery which has little to do with the matter. A pa.s.sage from the _Epistle_ lampooning Aylmer, Bishop of London, and a sample each of _Pap with a Hatchet_ and the _Almond_, will show the general style. But the most characteristic pieces of all are generally too coa.r.s.e and too irreverent to be quotable:--

[47] In his _Advertis.e.m.e.nt Touching the Controversies of the Church of England_ (Works. Folio, 1753, ii. p. 375).

[Sidenote: _I'll make you weary of it dumb John, except you leave persecuting._]

"Well now to mine eloquence, for I can do it I tell you. Who made the porter of his gate a dumb minister? Dumb John of London. Who abuseth her Majesty's subjects, in urging them to subscribe contrary to law? John of London. Who abuseth the high commission, as much as any? John London (and D. Stanhope too). Who bound an Ess.e.x minister, in 200_l._ to wear the surplice on Easter Day last? John London. Who hath cut down the elms at Fulham? John London. Who is a carnal defender of the breach of the Sabbath in all the places of his abode? John London. Who forbiddeth men to humble themselves in fasting and prayer before the Lord, and then can say unto the preachers, now you were best to tell the people that we forbid fasts? John London. Who goeth to bowls upon the Sabbath? Dumb Dunstical John of good London hath done all this. I will for this time leave this figure, and tell your venerable masterdoms a tale worth the hearing: I had it at the second hand: if he that told it me added anything, I do not commend him, but I forgive him: The matter is this. A man dying in Fulham, made one of the Bishop of London's men his executor. The man had bequeathed certain legacies unto a poor shepherd in the town. The shepherd could get nothing of the Bishop's man, and therefore made his moan unto a gentleman of Fulham, that belongeth to the court of requests. The gentleman's name is M. Madox. The poor man's case came to be tried in the Court of Requests. The B. man desired his master's help: Dumb John wrote to the masters of requests to this effect, and I think these were his words:

"'My masters of the requests, the bearer hereof being my man, hath a cause before you: inasmuch as I understand how the matter standeth, I pray you let my man be discharged the court, and I will see an agreement made. Fare you well.' The letter came to M.

D. Dale, he answered it in this sort:

"'My Lord of London, this man delivered your letter, I pray you give him his dinner on Christmas Day for his labour, and fare you well.'

"Dumb John not speeding this way, sent for the said M. Madox: he came, some rough words pa.s.sed on both sides, Presbyter John said, Master Madox was very saucy, especially seeing he knew before whom he spake: namely, the Lord of Fulham. Whereunto the gentleman answered that he had been a poor freeholder in Fulham, before Don John came to be L. there, hoping also to be so, when he and all his brood (my Lady his daughter and all) should be gone. At the hearing of this speech, the wasp got my brother by the nose, which made him in his rage to affirm, that he would be L. of Fulham as long as he lived in despite of all England. Nay, soft there, quoth M. Madox, except her Majesty. I pray you, that is my meaning, call dumb John, and I tell thee Madox that thou art but a Jack to use me so: Master Madox replying, said that indeed his name was John, and if every John were a Jack, he was content to be a Jack (there he hit my L. over the thumbs). The B.

growing in choler, said that Master Madox his name did shew what he was, for saith he, thy name is mad ox, which declareth thee to be an unruly and mad beast. M. Madox answered again, that the B.

name, if it were descanted upon, did most significantly shew his qualities. For said he, you are called Elmar, but you may be better called marelm, for you have marred all the elms in Fulham: having cut them all down. This far is my worthy story, as worthy to be printed, as any part of Dean John's book, I am sure."

"To the Father and the two Sons, HUFF, RUFF, and SNUFF,[48]

the three tame ruffians of the Church, which take pepper in the nose, because they cannot mar Prelates: greeting.

"Room for a royster; so that's well said. Ach, a little farther for a good fellow. Now have at you all my gaffers of the railing religion, 'tis I that must take you a peg lower. I am sure you look for more work, you shall have wood enough to cleave, make your tongue the wedge, and your head the beetle. I'll make such a splinter run into your wits, as shall make them rankle till you become fools. Nay, if you shoot books like fools' bolts, I'll be so bold as to make your judgments quiver with my thunderbolts. If you mean to gather clouds in the Commonwealth, to threaten tempests, for your flakes of snow, we'll pay you with stones of hail; if with an easterly wind you bring caterpillers into the Church, with a northern wind we'll drive barrens into your wits.

"We care not for a Scottish mist, though it wet us to the skin, you shall be sure your c.o.c.ks...o...b.. shall not be missed, but pierced to the skulls. I profess railing, and think it as good a cudgel for a martin, as a stone for a dog, or a whip for an ape, or poison for a rat.

"Yet find fault with no broad terms, for I have measured yours with mine, and I find yours broader just by the list. Say not my speeches are light, for I have weighed yours and mine, and I find yours lighter by twenty grains than the allowance. For number you exceed, for you have thirty ribald words for my one, and yet you bear a good spirit. I was loth so to write as I have done, but that I learned, that he that drinks with cutters, must not be without his ale daggers; nor he that buckles with Martin, without his lavish terms.