The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (28 page)

To knit up their knaveries in short (which in sooth is the hangman's office and none's else), having picked up their crumbs thus prettily well in the country, they draw after a time a little nearer and nearer to London; and at length into London they filch themselves privily – but how? Not in the heart of the City will they presume at first dash to hang out their rat-banners, but in the skirts and outshifts
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steal out a sign over a cobbler's stall, like aqua vitae sellers, and stocking menders.

Many poor people they win to believe in them, who have not a barrelled herring or a piece of poor-john that looks ill on it, but they will bring the water that he was steeped in unto them in an urinal, and crave their judgement whether he be rotten, or merchant and chapmanable,
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or no. The bruit
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of their cunning thus travelling from ale-house to ale-house at length is transported in the great hilts of one or other country serving-man's sword to some good tavern or ordinary;
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where it is no sooner alive, but it is greedily snatched up by some dappert Monsieur Diego, who lives by telling of news, and false dice, and it may be hath a pretty insight into the cards also, together with a little skill in his Jacob's staff
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and his compasses, being able at all times to discover a new passage to Virginia.

This needy gallant, with the qualities aforesaid, straight trudgeth to some nobleman's to dinner, and there enlargeth the rumour of this new physician, comments upon every glass and vial that he hath, raleth on our Galenists, and calls them dull gardeners and hay-makers in a man's belly, compares them to dogs, who when they are sick eat grass, and says they are no better than pack or malt-horses, who, if a man should knock out their brains, will not go out of the beaten highway; whereas his horse-leach will leap over the hedge and ditch of a thousand Dioscorides
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and Hippocrates,
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and give a man twenty poisons in one, but he would restore him to perfect health. With this strange tale the nobleman inflamed desires to be acquainted with him; what does me he, but goes immediately and breaks with
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this mountebank, telling him if he will divide his gains with him, he will bring him in custom with such and such states, and he shall be countenanced in the Court as he would desire. The hungry druggier, ambitious after preferment,
agrees to anything, and to Court he goes; where, being come to interview, he speaks nothing but broken English like a French doctor, pretending to have forgotten his natural tongue by travel, when he hath never been farther than either the Low Countries or Ireland, enforced thither to fly either for getting a maid with child, or marrying two wives. Sufficeth he set a good face on it, and will swear he can extract a better balsamum out of a chip than the balm of Judea; yea, all receipts and authors you can name he syllogizeth of, and makes a pish at,
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in comparison of them he hath seen and read; whose names if you ask, he claps you in the mouth with half-a-dozen spruce titles, never till he invented them heard of by any Christian. But this is most certain: if he be of any sect, he is a metal-brewing Paracelsian,
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having not passed one or two probatums
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for all diseases. Put case he be called to practise, he excuseth it by great cures he hath in hand; and will not encounter an infirmity but in the declining, that his credit may be more authentical, or else when by some secret intelligence he is throughly instructed of the whole process of his unrecoverable extremity, he comes gravely marching like a judge, and gives peremptory sentence of death; whereby he is accounted a prophet of deep prescience.

But how he comes to be the devil's secretary, all this long tale unrips not.

In secret be it spoken, he is not so great with the devil as you take it. It may be they are near akin, but yet you have many kindred that will do nothing for one another; no more will the devil for him, except it be to damn him.

This is the
Tittle est amen
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of it: that when he waxeth stale, and all his pisspots are cracked and will no longer hold water, he sets up a conjuring school and undertakes to play the bawd to Lady Fortune.

Not a thief or a cut-purse, but a man that he keeps doth associate with, and is of their fraternity; only that his master when anything is stolen may tell who it is that hath it. In petty trifles having gotten some credit, great peers entertain him for one of their privy council, and if they have any dangerous enterprise in hand, they consult with him about success.

All malcontents intending any invasive violence against their Prince and country run headlong to his oracle. Contrary factions enbosom unto him their inwardest complots, whilst he like a crafty jack-a-both-sides, as if he had a spirit still at his elbow, reciprocally embowelleth to the one what the other goes about, receiving no intelligence from any familiar, but their own mouths. I assure you most of our chief noted augurers and soothsayers in England at this day, by no other art but this gain their reputation.

They may very well pick men's purses, like the unskil-fer cozening kind of alchemists, with their artificial and ceremonial magic, but no effect shall they achieve thereby, though they would hang themselves. The reason is, the devil of late is grown a puritan and cannot away with
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any ceremonies; he sees all princes have left off their states, and he leaves off his state too and will not be invocated with such solemnity as he was wont.

Private and disguised, he passeth to and fro, and is in a thousand places in an hour.

Fair words cannot any longer beguile him, for not a cue
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of courtesy will he do any man, except it be upon a flat bill of sale, and so he chaffers with wizards and witches every hour.

Now the world is almost at an end, he hath left form and is all for matter; and like an embroiderer or a tailor, he maketh haste of work against a good time, which is the Day of Judgment Therefore, you goodmen exorcisers, his old
acquaintance, must pardon him, though (as heretofore) he stay not to dwell upon compliments.

In diebus illis
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when Corineus
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and Gogmagog
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were litde boys, I will not gainsay but he was wont to jest and sport with country people, and play the Goodfellow amongst kitchen-wenches, sitting in an evening by the fireside making of possets, and come a-wooing to them in the likeness of a cooper, or a curmudgeonly purchaser; and sometimes he would dress himself like a barber, and wash and shave all those that lay in such a chamber. Otherwhile, like a stale cutter of Queen-hive,
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he would jusde men in their own houses, pluck them out of bed by the heels, and dance in chains from one chamber to another. Now there is no goodness in him but miserableness and covetousness.

Sooner he will pare his nails cleanly than cause a man to dream of a pot of gold, or a money-bag that is hid in the eaves of a thatched house.

(Here is to be noted, that it is a blessed thing but to dream of gold, though a man never have it.)

Such a dream is not altogether ridiculous or impertinent, for it keeps flesh and blood from despair. All other are but as dust we raise by our steps, which awhile mounteth aloft and annoyeth our eye-sight, but presently disperseth and vanisheth.

Señor Satan, when he was a young stripling and had not yet gotten perfect audacity to set upon us in the daytime, was a sly politician in dreams; but those days are gone with him, and now that he is thoroughly steeled in his scutchery,
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he plays above-board boldly, and sweeps more stakes than ever he did before.

I have rid a false gallop these three or four pages. Now I care not if I breathe me and walk soberly and demurely half-a-dozen turns, like a grave citizen going about to take the air.

To make a shaft or a bolt
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of this drumbling
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subject of dreams, from whence I have been tossed off and on I know not how, this is my definitive verdict: that one may as well by the smoke that comes out of a kitchen guess what meat is there a-broach, as by paraphrasing on smoky dreams preominate of future events. Thus far notwithstanding I'll go with them: physicians by dreams may better discern the distemperature of their pale clients, than either by urine or ordure.

He that is inclining to a burning fever shall dream of frays, lightning and thunder, of skirmishing with the devil and a hundred such-like. He that is spiced with the gout or the dropsy frequently dreameth of fetters and manacles and being put on the bilbows, that his legs are turned to marble or adamant, and his feet, like the giants that scaled heaven, kept under with Mount Ossa and Pelion and erstwhile that they are fast locked in quagmires. I have heard aged mumping
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beldams as they sat warming their knees over a coal scratch over the argument very curiously, and they would bid young folks beware on what day they pared their nails, tell what luck everyone should have by the day of the week he was born on; show how many years a man should live by the number of wrinkles on his forehead, and stand descanting not a little of the difference in fortune when they are turned upward and when they are bent downward; ‘him that had a wart on his chin', they would confidently ascertain he should ‘have no need of any of his kin'; marry, they would likewise distinguish between the standing of the wart on the right side and on the left. When I was a little child, I was a great auditor of theirs, and had all their witchcrafts at my fingers' ends, as perfect as good-morrow and good-even.

Of the signification of dreams, whole catalogues could I recite of theirs, which here there is no room for; but for a glance to this purpose this I remember they would very soberly affirm, that if one at supper eat birds, he should
dream of flying; if fish, of swimming; if venison, of hunting, and so for the rest; as though those birds, fish, and venison being dead and digested did fly, swim and hold their chase in their brains; or the solution of our dreams should be nought else but to express what meats we ate overnight.

From the unequal and repugnant mixture of contrarious meats, I jump with them, many of our mystic cogitations procede; and even as fire maketh iron like itself, so the fiery inflammations of our liver or stomach transform our imaginations to their analogy and likeness.

No humour in general in our bodies overflowing or abounding, but the tips of our thoughts are dipped in his tincture. And as when a man is ready to drown, he takes hold of anything that is next him, so our fluttering thoughts, when we are drowned in deadly sleep, take hold and co-essence themselves with any overboiling humour which sourceth highest in our stomachs.

What heed then is there to be had of dreams that are no more but the confused giddy action of our brains, made drunk with the inundation of humours?

Just such-like impostures as is this art of exposition of dreams are the arts of physiognomy and palmistry, wherein who beareth most palm and praise is the palpablest fool and crepundio.
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lives there any such slow, ice-brained, beef-witted gull, who by the rivelled bark or outward rind of a tree will take upon him to forespeak how long it shall stand, what mischances of worms, caterpillars, boughs breaking, frost bitings, cattle rubbing against, it shall have? As absurd is it, by the external branched seams or furrowed wrinkles in a man's face or hand, in particular or general to conjecture and foredoom of his fate.

According to every one's labour or exercise, the palm of his hand is writhen and plaited,
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and every day alters as he alters his employments or pastimes; wherefore well may we collect
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that he which hath a hand so brawned and
interlined useth such-and-such toils or recreations; but for the mind or disposition, we can no more look into through it than we can into a looking glass through the wooden case thereof.

So also our faces, which sundry times with surfeits, grief, study or intemperance are most deformedly whelked and crumpled; there is no more to be gathered by their sharp embossed joiner's antique work or ragged overhangings or pitfalls but that they have been laid up in sloven's press, and with miscarriage and misgovernment are so fretted and galled.

My own experience is but small, yet thus much I can say by his warrantize that those fatal brands of physiognomy which condemn men for fools and for idiots, and on the other side for treacherous circumventers and false brothers, have in a hundred men I know been verified in the contrary.

So Socrates, the wisest man of Greece, was censured by a wrinkle-wizard
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for the lumpishest blockhead that ever went on two legs; whom though the philosopher in pity vouchsafed with a nice distinction of art and nature to raise and recover, when he was utterly confounded with a hiss and a laughter, yet sure his insolent simplicity might lawfully have sued out his patent of exemption, for he was a forlorn creature, both in discretion and wit-craft.

Will you have the sum of all: some subtle humourist, to feed fantastic heads with innovations and novelties, first invented this trifling childish glose upon dreams and physiognomy; wherein he strove only to boast himself of a pregnant probable conceit beyond philosophy or truth.

Let but any man who is most conversant in the superstition of dreams reckon me one that hath happened just, and I'll set down a hundred out of histories that have perished to foolery.

To come to late days. Lewis the xj. dreamt that he swam in blood on the top of the Alps, which one Father Robert, a holy hermit of his time, interpreted to be present death
in his next wars against Italy, though he lived and prospered in all his enterprises a long while after.

So Charles the Fifth, sailing to the siege of Tunis, dreamt that the City met him on the sea like an Argosy, and overwhelmed his whole navy; when by Cornelius Agrippa, the great conjurer, who went along with him, it was expounded to be the overthrow of that famous expedition. And thereupon Agrippa offered the Emperor, if it pleased him to blow up the City by art magic in the air before his eyes without any farther jeopardy of war or beseiging. The Emperor utterly refused it and said since it was God's wars against an infidel, he would never borrow aid of the devil.