The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (25 page)

[
Here the satyrs and wood-nymphs carry him out, singing as he came in
.]

THE SONG

Autumn hath all the Summer's fruitful treasure;
Gone is our sport, fled is poor Croydon's pleasure.
Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace;
Ah, but who shall hide us from the Winter's face?
Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease,
And here we lie, God knows, with little ease:
        From winter, plague and pestilence, good Lord,
         deliver us.

London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn,
Trades cry ‘Woe worth' that ever they were born,
The want of term is town and city's harm;
Close chambers we do want, to keep us warm;
Long banished must we live from our friends;
This low-built house
²⁰³
will bring us to our ends.
        From winter, plague and pestilence, good Lord,
         deliver us.

WILL SUMMERS
: How is't, how is't? You that be of the graver sort, do you think these youths worthy of a
Plaudite
for praying for the Queen and singing of the
Litany? They are poor fellows, I must needs say, and have bestowed great labour in sewing leaves, and grass, and straw, and moss upon cast suits.
²⁰⁴
You may do well to warm your hands with clapping, before you go to bed, and send them to the tavern with merry hearts. Here is a pretty boy comes with an Epilogue, to get him audacity.
²⁰⁵

[
Enter a little boy with an Epilogue
.]

I pray you sit still a little and hear him say his lesson without book. It is a good boy; be not afraid; turn thy face to my lord. Thou and I will play at pouch
²⁰⁶
tomorrow morning for a breakfast Come and sit on my knee, and m dance thee, if thou canst not endure to stand.

THE EPILOGUE

Ulysses, a dwarf, and the prolocutor for the Graecians, gave me leave, that am a pigmy, to do an embassage to you from the cranes.
²⁰⁷
Gentlemen, for kings are no better, certain humble animals called our actors commend them unto you; who, what offence they have committed I know not (except it be in purloining some hours out of time's treasury that might have been better employed), but by me, the agent for their imperfections, they humbly crave pardon, if haply some of their terms have trodden awry, or their tongues stumbled unwittingly on any man's content. In much corn is some cockle; in a heap of coin here and there a piece of copper. Wit hath his dregs as well as wine; words their waste, ink his blots, every speech his oarenthesis; poetical fury, as well crabs as sweetings for his summer fruits.
Nemo sapit omnibus horis
.
²⁰⁸
Their
folly is deceased; their fear is yet living. Nothing can kill an ass but cold; cold entertainment, discouraging scoffs, authorized disgraces, may kill a whole litter of young asses of them here at once, that have travelled thus far in impudence, only in hope to sit a-sunning in your smiles. The Romans dedicated a temple to the fever quartane, thinking it some great god, because it shook them so; and another to ill-fortune
in Exquilliis
, a mountain in Rome, that it should not plague them at cards and dice. Your Graces' frowns are to them shaking fevers, your least disfavours the greatest ill-fortune that may betide them. They can build no temples; but themselves and their best endeavours, with all prostrate reverence, they here dedicate and offer up wholly to your service.
Sic bonus, O, Faelixque tuis
.
²⁰⁹
To make the gods merry, the celestial clown Vulcan tuned his polt-foot
²¹⁰
to the measures of Apollo's lute, and danced a limping galliard in Jove's starry hall. To make you merry, that are the gods of art and guides unto heaven, a number of rude Vulcans, unwieldy speakers, hammer-headed clowns (for so it pleaseth them in modesty to name themselves) have set their deformities to view, as it were in a dance here before you. Bear with their wants, lull melancholy asleep with their absurdities, and expect hereafter better fruits of their industry. Little creatures often terrify great beasts; the elephant flieth from a ram, the lion from a cock and from fire, the crocodile from all sea-fish, the whale from the noise of parched bones; light toys chase great cares. The great fool Toy hath marred the play: goodnight, gentlemen; I go.

[
Let him be carried away
.]

WILL SUMMERS
: Is't true, jackanapes, do you serve me so? As sure as this coat is too short for me, all the points of your hose for this are condemned to my pocket, if you and I ere play at span-counter
²¹¹
more.
Valete, spec
tatores;
²¹²
pay for this sport with a
plaudite
, and the next time the wind blows from this corner, we will make you ten times as merry.

Barbaras hic ego sum, quia non intelligor ulli
.
²¹³

FINIS

OR

A
LITTLE
to beguile time idly discontented, and satisfy some of my solitary friends here in the country, I have hastily undertook to write of the weary fancies of the night, wherein if I weary none with my weak fancies, I will hereafter lean harder on my pen and fetch the pedigree of my praise from the utmost of pains.

As touching the terrors of the night, they are as many as our sins. The night is the devil's Black Book, wherein he recordeth all our transgressions. Even as, when a condemned man is put into a dark dungeon, secluded from all comfort of light or Company, he doth nothing but despair-fy call to mind his grace less former life, and the brutish outrages and misdemeanours at have thrown him into that desolate horror; so when night in her rusty dungeon hath imprisoned our eye-sight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keepeth his audit in our sin-guilty consciences, no sense but surrenders to our memory a true bill of parcels
¹
of his detestable impieties. The table
²
of our heart is turned to an index of iniquities, and all our thoughts are nothing but texts to condemn us.

The rest we take in our beds is such another kind of rest as the weary traveller taketh in the cool soft grass in summer, who thinking there to lie at ease and refresh his tired limbs, layeth his fainting head unawares on a loathsome nest of snakes.

Well have the poets termed night the nurse of cares, the mother of despair, the daughter of hell.

Some divines have had this conceit, that God would have made all day and no night, if it had not been to put us in mind there is a hell as well as a heaven.

Such is the peace of the subjects as is the peace of the Prince under whom they are governed. As God is entitled the Father of Light, so is the devil surnamed the Prince of Darkness, which is the night. The only peace of mind that the devil hath is despair, wherefore we that live in his nightly kingdom of darkness must needs taste some disquiet.

The raven and the dove that were sent out of Noah's Ark to discover the world after the general deluge may well be an allegory of the day and the night. The day is our good angel, the dove, that returneth to our eyes with an olive branch of peace in his mouth, presenting quiet and security to our distracted souls and consciences; the night is that ill aneel the raven, which never cometh back to bring any good tidings of tranquillity: a continual messenger he is of dole and misfortune. The greatest curse
³
almost that in the scripture is threatened is that the ravens shall pick out their eyes in the valley of death. This cursed raven, the night, pecks out men's eyes in the valley of death. It hin-dreth them from looking to heaven for succour, where their Redeemer dwelleth; wherefore no doubt it is a time most fatal and unhallowed. This being proved, that the devil is a special predominant planet of the night, and that our creator for our punishment hath allotted it him as his peculiar signory and kingdom, from his inveterate envy I will amplify the ugly terrors of the night. The names importing his malice, which the scripture is plentiful of, I will here omit, lest some men should think I went about to conjure. Sufficeth us to have this heedful knowledge of him, that he is an ancient malcontent, and seeketh to make any one desperate like himself. Like a cunning fowler, to this end he
spreadeth his nets of temptation in the dark, that men might not see to avoid them. As the poet saith:

Quae nimis apparent retia vitat avis
.
⁴
(Too open nets even simple birds do shun)

Therefore in another place (which it cannot be but the devil hath read) he counseleth thus:

Noctem peccatis et fraudibus obiice nubem
.
⁵
(By night-time sin, and cloak thy fraud with clouds)

When hath the devil commonly first appeared unto any man but in the night?

In the time of infidelity, when spirits were so familiar with men that they called them
Dii Penates
, their household Gods or their Lares, they never sacrificed unto them till sun-setting. The Robin Goodfellows, elves, fairies, hobgoblins of our latter age, which idolatrous former days and the fantastical world of Greece y-clepped
⁶
fawns, satyrs, dryads, and hamadryads, did most of their merry pranks in the night. Then ground they malt, and had hempen shirts for their labours, danced in rounds in green meadows, pinched maids in their sleep that swept not their houses clean, and led poor travellers out of their way notoriously.

It is not to be gainsaid but the devil can transform himself into an angel of light, appear in the day as well as in the night, but not in this subtle world of Christianity so usual as before. If he do, it is when men's minds are extraordinarily thrown down with discontent, or inly terrified with some horrible concealed murder or other heinous crime close smothered in secret. In the day he may smoothly in some mild shape insinuate, but in the night he takes upon himself like a tyrant. There is no thief that is half so hardy in the day as in the night; no more is the devil. A general principle it is, he that doth ill hateth the light.

This Machiavellian trick hath he in him worth the noting,
that those whom he dare not united or together encounter, disjoined and divided he will one by one assail in their sleep. And even as ruptures and cramps do then most torment a man when the body with any other disease is distempered, so the devil, when with any other sickness or malady the faculties of our reason are enfeebled and distempered, will be most busy to disturb us and torment us.

In the quiet silence of the night he will be sure to surprise us, when he unfallibly knows we shall be unarmed to resist, and that there will be full auditory granted him to undermine or persuade what he lists.
⁷
All that ever he can scare us with are but Seleucus' airy castles,
⁸
terrible bugbear brags, and nought else, which with the least thought of faith are quite evanished and put to flight. Neither in his own nature dare he come near us, but in the name of sin and as God's executioner. Those that catch birds imitate there voices; so will he imitate the voices of God's vengeance, to bring us like birds into the net of eternal damnation.

Children, fools, sick-men or madmen, he is most familiar with, for he still delights to work upon the advantage, and to them he boldly revealeth the whole astonishing treasury of his wonders.

It will be demanded why in the likeness of one's father or mother, or kinsfolks, he oftentimes presents himself unto us.

No other reason can be given of it but this, that in those shapes which he supposeth most familiar unto us, and that we are inclined to with a natural kind of love, we will sooner harken to him than otherwise.

Should he not disguise himself in such subtle forms of affection, we would fly from him as a serpent, and eschew him with that hatred he ought to be eschewed. If any ask why he is more conversant and busy in churchyards and places where men are buried than in any other places, it is to make us believe that the bodies and souls of the departed
rest entirely in his possession and the peculiar power of death is resigned to his disposition.
⁹
A rich man delights in nothing so much as to be uncessantly raking in his treasury, to be turning over his rusty gold every hour. The bones of the dead, the devil counts his chief treasury, and therefore is he continually raking amongst them; and the rather he doth it, that the living which hear it should be more unwilling to die, insomuch as after death their bones should take no rest.

It was said of Catiline,
Vultum gestavit in manibus
: with the turning of a hand he could turn and alter his countenance. Far more nimble and sudden is the devil in shifting his habit; his form he can change and cog
¹⁰
as quick as thought.

What do we talk of one devil? There is not a room in any man's house but is pestered and close-packed with a camp-royal of devils. Chrisostom saith the air and earth are three parts inhabited with spirits. Hereunto the philosopher alluded when he said nature made no voidness in the whole universal; for no place (be it no bigger than a pock-hole in a man's face) but is close thronged with them. Infinite millions of them will hang swarming about a worm-eaten nose.

Don Lucifer himself, their grand Capitano, asketh no better throne than a blear eye to set up his state in. Upon a hair they will sit like a nit,
¹¹
and overdredge a bald pate like a white scurf. The wrinkles in old witches visages they eat out to entrench themselves in.

If in one man a whole legion of devils have been billetted, how many hundred thousand legions retain to a term in London? If I said but to a tavern, it were an infinite thing. In Westminster Hall a man can scarce breathe for them; for in every corner they hover as thick as motes in the sun.