The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (9 page)

The Pride of the Frenchman

The Frenchman (not altered from his own nature) is wholly compact of deceivable courtship, and for the most part
loves none but himself and his pleasure; yet though he be the most
Grand Signeur
of them all, he will say,
A vostre service et commendemente Mounseur
, to the meanest vassal he meets. He thinks he doth a great favour to that gentle-man or follower of his to whom he talks sitting on his close stool; and with that favour, I have heard, the queen mother wonted to grace the noblemen of France. And a great man of their nation coming in time past over into England, and being here very honourably received, he, in requital of his admirable entertainment, on an evening going to the privy, (as it were to honour extraordinarily our English lords appointed to attend him), gave one the candle, another his girdle, and another the paper; but they, not acquainted with this new kind of gracing, accompanying him to the privy door, set down the trash and so left him; which he, considering what inestimable kindness he extended to them therein more than usual, took very heinously.

The Pride of the Dane

The most gross and senseless proud dolts (in a different kind from all these) are the Danes, who stand so much upon their unwieldy burly-boned soldiery that they account of no man that hath not a battle-axe at his girdle to hough
¹³⁷
dogs with, or wears not a cock's feather in a red thrummed
¹³⁸
hat like a cavalier. Briefly, he is the best fool braggart under heaven. For besides nature hath lent him a flabberkin
¹³⁹
face, like one of the four winds, and cheeks that sag like a woman's dugs over his chin-bone, his apparel is so puffed up with bladders of taffety, and his back like beef stuffed with parsley, so drawn out with ribbons and devices, and blistered with light sarsenet
¹⁴⁰
bastings, that you would think him nothing but a swarm of butterflies if
you saw him afar off.
*
Thus walks he up and down in his majesty, taking a yard of ground at every step, and stamps the earth so terrible, as if he meant to knock up a spirit, when, foul drunken bezzle,
¹⁴¹
if an Englishman set his little finger to him, he falls like a hog's-trough that is set on one end. Therefore I am the more vehement against them, because they are an arrogant, ass-headed people, that naturally hate learning and all them that love it. Yea, and for they would utterly root it out from among them, they have withdrawn all rewards from the professors thereof. Not Barbary itself is half so barbarous as they are.

The Danes Enemies to all Learning: No Rewards Amongst them for Desert

First, whereas the hope of honour maketh a soldier in England; bishoprics, deaneries, prebendaries, and other private dignities animate our divines to such excellence; the civil lawyers have their degrees and consistories of honour by themselves, equal in place with knights and esquires; the common lawyers (suppose in the beginning they are but husbandmen's sons) come in time to be chief fathers of the land, and many of them not the meanest of the Privy Council: there, the soldier may fight himself out of his skin and do more exploits than he hath doits
¹⁴²
in his purse, before from a common mercenary he come to be corporal of the mould-cheese, or the lieutenant get a captainship. None but the son of a corporal must be a corporal, nor any be captain but the lawful begotten of a captain's body. Bishoprics, deaneries, prebendaries, why, they know no such functions; a sort of ragged ministers they have, of whom they count as basely as water-bearers. If
any of their noblemen refrain three hours in his lifetime from drinking, to study the laws, he may perhaps have a little more government put into his hands than another; but otherwise, burgomasters and gentlemen bear all the sway of both swords, spiritual and temporal. It is death there for any but a husbandman to marry a husbandman's daughter, or a gentleman's child to join with any but the son of a gentleman. Marry, this, the King may well banish, but he cannot put a gentleman unto death in any cause whatsoever, which makes them stand upon it so proudly as they do. For fashion sake some will put their children to school, but they set them not to it till they are fourteen year old; so that you shall see a great boy with a beard learn his ABC and sit weeping under the rod when he is thirty years old.

What it is to Make Men Labour Without Hope

I will not stand to infer what a prejudice it is to the thrift of a flourishing state, to poison the growth of glory by giving it nought but the puddle water of penury to drink; to clip the wings of a high-towering falcon, who, whereas she wont in her feathered youthfulness, to look with an amiable eye upon her gray breast, and her speckled side sails, all sinewed with silver quills, and to drive whole armies of fearful fowl before her to her master's table; now she sits sadly on the ground, picking of worms, mourning the cruelty of those ungentlemanlike idle hands, that dismembered the beauty of her train.

You all know that man, insomuch as he is the image of God, delighteth in honour and worship, and all Holy Writ warrants that delight, so it be not derogatory to any part of God's own worship; now take away that delight, a discontented idleness overtakes him. For his hire, any handy-craftman, be he carpenter, joiner, or painter, will ploddingly do his day labour. But to add credit and fame to his workmanship, or to win a mastery to himself above all other, he will make a further assay in his trade than ever
hitherto he did. He will have a thousand flourishes, which before he never thought upon, and in one day rid more out of hand than erst he did in ten. So in arms, so in arts; if titles of fame and glory be proposed to forward minds, or that sovereignty, whose sweetness they have not yet felt, be set in likely view for them to soar to, they will make a ladder of cord of the links of their brains, but they will fasten their hands, as well as their eyes, on the imaginative bliss which they already enjoy by admiration. Experience reproves me for a fool for dilating on so manifest a case.

The Danes are bursten-bellied sots, that are to be confuted with nothing but tankards or quart pots, and Ovid might as well have read his verses to the Getes
¹⁴³
that understood him not, as a man talk reason to them that have no ears but their mouths, nor sense but of that which they swallow down their throats.
*
God so love me as I love the quick-witted Italians, and therefore love them the more, because they mortally detest this surly, swinish generation.

I need not fetch colours from other countries to paint the ugly visage of Pride, since her picture is set forth in so many painted faces here at home. What drugs, what sorceries, what oils, what waters, what ointments, do our curious dames use to enlarge their withered
†
beauties! Their lips are as lavishly red, as if they used to kiss an ochreman
¹⁴⁴
every morning, and their cheeks sugar-candied and cherry-blushed so sweetly, after the colour of a new Lord Mayor's posts, as if the pageant of their wedlock holiday were hard at the door; so that if a painter were to draw any of their counterfeits on a table he needs no more but wet his pencil, and dab it on their cheeks, and he shall have vermilion and white enough to furnish out his work, though he leave his tar-box at home behind him. Wise was that sin-washing poet that made
The Ballad of Blue Starch
and Poking Sticks
,
¹⁴⁵
for indeed the lawn of licentiousness hath consumed all the wheat of hospitality.
¹⁴⁶
It is said, Laurence Lucifer,
¹⁴⁷
that you went up and down London crying then like a lantern-and-candle man.
¹⁴⁸
I marvel no laundress would give you the washing and starching of your face for your labour, for God knows it is as black as the Black Prince.

It is suspected that you have been a great tobacco-taker in your youth, which causeth it to come so to pass; but Dame Nature, your nurse, was partly in fault, else she might have remedied it. She should have nointed your face overnight with
lac virginis
,
¹⁴⁹
which baking upon it in bed till the morning, she might have peeled off the scale like the skin of a custard, and making a posset of verjuice
¹⁵⁰
mixed with the oil of Tartary and camphor, bathed it in it a quarter of an hour, and you had been as fair as the flour of the frying pan. I warrant we have old hacksters in this great grandmother of corporations, Madame Troynovant,
¹⁵¹
that have not backbited any of their neighbours with the tooth of envy this twenty year, in the wrinkles of whose face ye may hide false dice, and play at cherry-pit in the dint of their cheeks: yet these aged mothers of iniquity will have their deformities new plastered over, and wear nosegays of yellow hair on their furies' foreheads, when age hath written, ‘Ho, God be here,' on their bald, burnt-parchment pates. Pish, pish, what talk you of old age or bald pates? Men and women that have gone under the South Pole must lay off their furred night-caps
¹⁵²
in spite of their teeth, and become yeomen of the vinegar bottle. A close periwig hides all the sins of an old whore-master; but the
Cucullus
non facit monachum
,
¹⁵³
‘tis not their new bonnets will keep them from the old boneache. Ware when a man's sins are written on his eyebrows, and that there is not a hairbreadth betwixt them and the falling sickness. The times are dangerous, and this is an iron age, or rather no iron age (for swords and bucklers
¹⁵⁴
go to pawn apace in Long Lane),
¹⁵⁵
but a tin age, for tin and pewter are more esteemed than Latin.
¹⁵⁶
You that be wise, despise it, abhor it, neglect it, for what should a man care for gold that cannot get it?

The Commendation of Antiquaries

Laudamus veteres, sed nostris utimur annis
¹⁵⁷

An antiquary is an honest man, for he had rather scrape a piece of copper out of the dirt, than a crown out of Plowden's
¹⁵⁸
standish. I know many wise gentlemen of this musty vocation, who, out of love with the times wherein they live, fall a-retailing of Alexander's stirrups, because, in verity, there is not such a strong piece of stretching leather made nowadays, nor iron so well tempered for any money. They will blow their nose in a box, and say it is the spittle that Diogenes spat in one's face; who, being invited to dinner to his house, that was neat and brave in all points as might be devised, and the grunting dog, somewhat troubled with the rheum (by means of his long fasting and staying for dinner more than wont) spat full in his host's face. And being asked the reason of it, said it was the foulest place he could spy out in all his house.

Let their mistress, or some other woman, give them a feather of her fan for her favour, and if one ask them what
it is they make answer, ‘A plume of the Phoenix', whereof there is but one in all the whole world. A thousand gewgaws
¹⁵⁹
and toys have they in their chambers, which they heap up together, with infinite expense, and are made believe of them that sell them that they are rare and precious things, when they have gathered them upon some dunghill, or raked them out of the kennel by chance. I know one sold an old rope with four knots on it for four pound, in that he gave it out it was the length and breadth of Christ's tomb. Let a tinker take a piece of brass worth a halfpenny, and set strange stamps on it, and I warrant he may make it worth to him of some fantastical fool, than all the kettles that ever he mended in his life. This is the disease of our newfangled humourists, that know not what to do with their wealth. It argueth a very rusty wit, so to dote on worm-eaten eld.
¹⁶⁰

The Complaint of Envy

Out upon it, how long is Pride a-dressing herself? Envy, awake, for thou must appear before Nicolao Malevolo,
¹⁶¹
great muster-master of hell. Mark you this sly mate, how smoothly he looks? The poets were ill advised, that feigned him to be a lean, gag-toothed beldam, with hollow eyes, pale cheeks, and snaky hair; for he is not only a man, but a jolly, lusty, old gentleman, that will wink, and laugh, and jest drily, as if he were the honestest of a thousand; and I warrant you shall not hear a foul word come from him in a year. I will not contradict it, but the dog may worry a sheep in the dark and thrust his neck into the collar of clemency and pity when he hath done; as who should say, ‘God forgive him, he was asleep in the shambles, when the innocent was done to death.' But openly, Envy sets a civil, fatherly countenance upon it, and hath not so much as a drop of blood in his face to attaint him of murder.

I thought it expedient in this my supplication, to place it next to Pride; for it is his adopted son. And hence comes it, that proud men repine at others' prosperity, and grieve that any should be great but themselves.
Mens cuiusque, is est quisque
;
¹⁶²
it is a proverb that is as hoary as Dutch butter. If a man will go to the devil, he may go to the devil; there are a thousand juggling tricks to be used at ‘Hey pass, come aloft;'
¹⁶³
and the world hath cords enough to truss up a calf that stands in one's way. Envy is a crocodile that weeps when he kills, and fights with none but he feeds on. This is the nature of this quick-sighted monster: he will endure any pains to endamage another, waste his body with undertaking exploits that would require ten men's strengths, rather than any should get a penny but himself, blear his eyes to stand in his neighbour's light, and, to conclude, like Atlas underprop heaven alone, rather than any should be in heaven that he liked not of, or come unto heaven by any other means but by him.

Philip of Spain as Great an Enemy to Mankind as the Devil