The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (55 page)

I had well nigh forgot a special point of my Romish history, and that is how Madame Celina Cornficia, one of the curiosest courtesans of Rome, when the fame of the king of fishes was canon-roared in her ears, she sent all her jewels to the Jewish lombard to pawn, to buy and encaptive him to her trencher, but her purveyor came a day after the fair, and as he came so he fared, for not a scrap of him but the cobs
⁴⁴⁸
of the two herrings the fisherman had eaten remained of him, and those cobs, rather than he would go home with a sleeveless
⁴⁴⁹
answer, he bought at the rate of fourscore ducats – they were rich cobs
⁴⁵⁰
you must rate them, and of them all cobbing country chuffs which make their bellies and their bags their gods are called rich cobs. Every man will not clap hands to this tale; the Norwichers imprimis, who say the first gilding of herrings was deducted from them, and after this guise they tune the accent of their speech, how that when Castor was Norwich (a town two mile beyond this Norwich, that is termed to this day Norwich Castor, and having monuments of a castle in it environing fifty acres of ground, and ringbolts in the walls
whereto ships were fastened) our Norwich now upon her legs was a poor fisher town, and the sea sprawled and springed up to her common stairs in Confur Street.

All this may pass in the Queen's peace, and no man say bo to it. But bawwaw, quoth Bagshaw,
⁴⁵¹
to that which drawlatcheth
⁴⁵²
behind, of the first taking of herrings there, and currying and gilding them amongst them whereof, if they could whisper to us any simple likelihood, or rawboned carcass of reason, more than their imaginary dream of Guilding Cross in their parish of St Saviour's (now stumped up by the roots) so named, as they would have it, of the smoky gilding of herrings there first invented, I could well have allowed of, but they must bring better cards ere they win it from Yarmouth.

As good a toy to mock an ape was it of him that showed a country fellow the Red Sea, where all the red herrings were made (as some places in the sea, where the sun is most transpiercing and beats with his rays ferventest, will look as red as blood), and the jest of a scholar in Cambridge, that standing angling on the town bridge there, as the country people on the market day passed by, secretly baited his hook with a red herring with a bell about the neck, and so conveying it into the water that no man perceived it, all on the sudden, when he had a competent throng gathered about him, up he twitched it again and laid it openly before them; whereat the gaping rural fools, driven into no less admiration than the common people about London some few years since were at the bubbling of Moorditch,
⁴⁵³
sware by their christendoms that, as many days and years as they had lived, they never saw such a miracle of a red herring taken in the fresh-water before. That greedy seagull Ignorance is apt to devour anything. For a new Messias they are ready to expect of the bedlam hatmaker's wife by London Bridge, he
that proclaims himself Elias,
⁴⁵⁴
and saith he is inspired with mutton and porridge. And with them it is current that Don Sebastian, King of Portugal (slain twenty years since with Stukeley at the Battle of Alcazar), is raised from the dead like Lazarus, and alive to be seen at Venice.
⁴⁵⁵
Let them look to themselves as they will, for I am theirs to gull them better than ever I have done. And this I am sure: I have distributed gudgeon dole
⁴⁵⁶
amongst them, as God's plenty as any stripling of my slender portion of wit, far or near. They needs will have it so, much good do it them, I cannot do withal. For if but carelessly betwixt sleeping and waking I write I know not what against plebeian publicans and sinners (no better than the sworn brothers of candlestick turners and tinkers) and leave some terms in suspense that my post-haste want of argent will not give me elbow-room enough to explain or examine as I would, out steps me an infant squib of the Inns of Court, that hath not half greased his dining cap or scarce warmed his lawyer's cushion, and he, to approve himself an extravagant statesman, catcheth hold of a rush, and absolutely concludeth it is meant of the Emperor of Russia and that it will utterly mar the traffic into that country if all the pamphlets be not called in and suppressed, wherein that libelling word is mentioned. Another, if but a head or a tail of any beast he boasts of in his crest or his scutcheon to be reckoned up by chance in a volume where a man hath just occasion to reckon up all beasts in armory,
⁴⁵⁷
he straight engageth himself by the honour of his house and his never reculed
⁴⁵⁸
sword, to thresh down the hairy roof of that brain that so seditiously mutinied against him, with the mortiferous bastinado, or cast such an uncurable Italian trench in his face, as not the basest creeper upon pattens by the highway side but shall
abhor him worse than the carrion of a dead corse, or a max hanged up in gibbets.

I will deal more boldly, and yet it shall be securely and in the way of honesty, to a number of God's fools that for their wealth might be deep wise men and so forth (as nowadays in the opinion of the best lawyers of England there is no wisdom without wealth, allege what you can to the contrary of all the beggarly sages of Greece), these, I say, out of some discourses of mine, which were a mingle-mangle cum purre
⁴⁵⁹
and I know not what to make of myself, have fished out such a deep politic state meaning as if I had all the secrets of court or commonwealth at my fingers' ends Talk I of a bear, ‘Oh it is such a man that emblazons him in his arms'; or of a wolf, a fox, a chamelion, any lording whom they do not affect
⁴⁶⁰
it is meant by. The great potentate, stirred up with those perverse applications, not looking into the text itself, but the ridiculous comment, or if he looks into it follows no other more charitable comment than that straight thunders out his displeasure and showers down the whole tempest of his indignation upon me, and to amend the matter, and fully absolve himself of this rash error of misconstruing, he commits it over to be prosecuted by a worse misconstruer than himself,
videlicet
his learned counsel (God forgive me if I slander them with that title of learned, for generally they are not), and they, being compounded of nothing but vociferation and clamour, rage and fly out they care not how against a man's life, his person, his parentage, two hours before they come to the point, little remembering their own privy scrapes with their laundresses or their night walks to Pancredge,
⁴⁶¹
together with the hobnailed houses of their carterly ancestry from whence they are sprung, that have cold plough-jade's buttocks time out of mind with the breath of their whistling, and with retailing their dung to manure lands and selling straw and chaff
scratched up the pence to make them gentlemen. But, Lord, how miserably do these ethnics,
⁴⁶²
when they once march to the purpose, set words on the tenters,
⁴⁶³
never reading to a period (which you shall scarce find in thirty sheets of a lawyer's declaration) whereby they might comprehend the entire sense of the writer together, but disjoint and tear every syllable betwixt their teeth severally. And if by no means they can make it odious, they will be sure to bring it in disgrace by ill-favoured mouthing and missounding it. These be those that use men's writings like brute beasts, to make them draw which way they list, as a principal agent in church controversies of this our time complaineth. I have read a tale of a poor man and an advocate, which poor man complained to the King of wrong that the advocate had done him in taking away his cow. The King made him no answer but this, that he would send for the advocate and hear what he could say. ‘Nay,' quoth the poor man, ‘if you be at that pass that you will pause to hear what he will say, I have utterly lost my cow, for he hath words enough to make fools of ten thousand.' So he that shall have his lines bandied by our usual plodders in Fitzherbert,
⁴⁶⁴
let him not care whether they be right or wrong, for they will writhe and turn them as they list, and make the author believe he meant that which he never did mean; and, for a knitting-up conclusion his credit is unreprievably lost, that on bare suspicion in such cases shall but have his name controverted amongst them. And if I should fall into their hands, I would be pressed to death for obstinate silence, and never seek to clear myself, for it is in vain, since both they will confound a man's memory with their tedious babbling, and in the first three words of his Apology, with impudent exclamations interrupt him, whenas their mercenary tongues (lie they never so loudly) without check or control must have their free passage for five hours together.

I speak of the worser sort, not of the best, whom I hold in high admiration, as well for their singular gifts of art and nature as their untainted consciences with corruption. And from some of them I avow I have heard as excellent things flow as ever I observed in Tully or Demosthenes. Those that were present at the arraignment of Lopus
⁴⁶⁵
(to insist in no other particular) hereof I am sure will bear me record. Latinless dolts, saturnine heavy-headed blunderers, my invective hath relation to, such as count all arts puppet-plays and pretty rattles to please children in comparison of their confused barbarous law, which if it were set down in any Christian language but the Gretan tongue, it would never grieve a man to study it.

Neither Ovid nor Ariosto could by any persuasions of their parents be induced to study civil law, for the harshness of it. How much more, had they been alive at this day and born in our nation, would they have consented to study this uncivil Norman hotchpotch, this sow of lead, that hath never a ring at the end to lift it up by, is without head or foot, the deformest monster that may be? I stand lawing
⁴⁶⁶
here, what with these lawyers and self-conceited misinter-preters, so long that my red herring, which was hot broiling on the coals, is waxed stark cold for want of blowing. Have with them for a riddle or two, only to set their wits a-nibbling and their jobbernowls
⁴⁶⁷
a-working, and so goodnight to their signories, but with this indictment and caution: that, though there be neither rhyme nor reason in it (as by my good will there shall not), they, according to their accustomed gentle favours, whether I will or no, shall supply it with either, and run over all the peers of the land in peevish moralizing and anatomizing of it.

There was a herring, or there was not, for it was but a cropshin
⁴⁶⁸
one of the refuse sort of herrings, and this her
ring or this cropshin was censed and thurified
⁴⁶⁹
in the smoke and had got him a suit of durance that would last longer than one of Erra Pater's almanacs
⁴⁷⁰
or a constable's brown bill, only his head was in his tail and that made his breath so strong that no man could abide him. Well, he was a Triton of his time, and a sweet singing calendar to the state, yet not beloved of the showery Pleiades or the Colossus of the sun, however he thought himself another
tumidus Antimachus
,
⁴⁷¹
as complete an
Adelantado
⁴⁷²
as he that is known by wearing a cloak of tuftaffatie
⁴⁷³
eighteen year. And to Lady Turbot there is no demur but he would needs go a-wooing, and offered her for a dower whole hecatombs
⁴⁷⁴
and a two-hand-sword. She stared upon him with Megaera's
⁴⁷⁵
eyes, like Iris the messenger of Juno, and bad him go eat a fool's head and garlic, for she would none of him. Thereupon particularly strictly and usually he replied that though thunder ne'er lights on Phoebus' tree,
⁴⁷⁶
and Amphion, that worthy musician, was husband to Niobe, and there was no such acceptable incense to the heavens as the blood of a traitor, revenged he would be by one Chimera of imagination or other, and hamper and embrake
⁴⁷⁷
her in those mortal straits for her disdain, that, in spite of divine symmetry and miniature, into her busky grove she should let him enter, and bid adieu, sweet lord, or the cramp of death should vrest her heart-strings.

This speech was no spirable odour to the Achelous of her
audience.
⁴⁷⁸
Wherefore she charged him by the extreme lineaments of the Erimanthian bear,
⁴⁷⁹
and by the privy fistula of the Pierides,
⁴⁸⁰
to commit no more such excruciating syllables to the yielding air, for she would sooner make her a Frenchhood of a cowshard
⁴⁸¹
and a gown of spiders' webs, with the sleeves drawn out with cabbages, than be so contaminated any more with his abortive loathly motives. With this, in an Olympic rage, he calls for a clean shirt, and puts on five pair of buskins, and seeketh out eloquent Xenophon,
⁴⁸²
out of whose mouth the Muses spake, to declame in open court against her.

The action is entered the complaint of her withered brows presented, of a violent rape of his heart she is indicted and convinced. The circumstance that follows you may imagine or suppose; or, without supposing or imagining, I will tell you. The nut was cracked, the strife discussed, and the centre of her heart laid open, and to this wild of sorrows of excruciament she was confined either to be held a flat thorn-back or sharp pricking dog-fish to the weal public; or seal herself close to his seal-skinned rivelled
⁴⁸³
lips, and suffer herself as a spirit to be conjured into the hellish circle of his embraces.

It would not be, good cropshin; Madame Turbot could not away with such a dry, withered carcass to lie by her.
Currat rex, vivat lex
:
⁴⁸⁴
come what would, she would none of him. Wherefore, as a poisoner of mankind with her beauty she was adjudged to be boiled to death in hot scalding water, and to have her posterity throughly sauced and soused and pickled in barrels of brinish tears, so ruthful and dolorous that the inhabitants of Bosphorus should be laxative in deploring it. Oh, for a legion of mice-eyed decipherers and
calculators upon characters, now to augurate what I mean by this. The devil, if it stood upon his salvation, cannot do it, much less petty devils and cruel Rhadamants
⁴⁸⁵
upon earth (elsewhere in France and Italy
subintelligitur
,
⁴⁸⁶
and not in our aspicious
⁴⁸⁷
island climate), men that have no means to purchase credit with their prince, but by putting him still in fear, and beating into his opinion that they are the only preservers of his life, in sitting up night and day insifting out treasons, when they are the most traitors themselves, to his life, health and quiet, in continual com-macerating
⁴⁸⁸
him with dread and terror, when but to get a pension or bring him in their debt, next to God, for upholding his vital breath, it is neither so, nor so, but some fool, some drunken man, some mad man in an intoxicate humour hath uttered he knew not what, and they, being starved for intelligence or want of employment, take hold of it with tooth and nail, and in spite of all the waiters, will violently break into the King's chamber, and awake him at midnight to reveal it.