Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

abound in allusions to it." In Jonson we find tobacco in every place-in Cob the waterman's house, and in the Apollo Club-room-on the stage, and at the ordinary. The world of London was then divided into two classes-the tobaccolovers and the tobacco-haters. Jonson has made Bobadill speak the exaggerated praise of the one class: "I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where neither myself nor a dozen gentlemen more of my knowledge have received the taste of any other nutriment in the world for the space of one-andtwenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only: therefore, it cannot be but 't is most divine." Cob the waterman, on the other hand, represents the denouncers of the weed: "Ods me, I marle what pleasure or felicity they have in taking this roguish tobacco! It's good for nothing but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke and embers: there were four died out of one house last week with taking of it, and two more the bell went for yesternight."

King James I., in his celebrated Counterblast to Tobacco,' is an imitator of Master Cob, for he raises a bugbear of "an unctuous and oily kind of soot found in some great tobacco-takers that after their death were opened." The King could not write down tobacco, even with Joshua Sylvester for an ally; who, in his poem entitled 'Tobacco Battered, and the Pipes Shattered,' informs us that—

"Of all the plants that Tellus' bosom yields,

In groves, glades, gardens, marshes, mountains, fields,
None so pernicious to man's life is known

As is tobacco, saving hemp alone."

Such denunciations (of the poets at least) against tobacco were probably written under as many heart-throes of real love as Charles Lamb's Farewell:

Stinking'st of the stinking kind,

Filth of the mouth, and fog of the mind;

Africa, that brags her foison,

Breeds no such prodigious poison:

Henbane, nightshade, both together,

Hemlock, aconite

Nay, rather,

Plant divine, of rarest virtue;

Blisters on the tongue would hurt you!

"Twas but in a sort I blam'd thee;

None e'er prosper'd who defam'd thee;

Irony all, and feign'd abuse,

Such as perplexed lovers use."

Old Aubrey tells us very circumstantially how "the great plant" gradually made its way amongst us; and here we leave it :—

"He (Raleigh) was the first that brought tobacco into England, and into fashion. In one part of North Wilts (Malmesbury hundred) it came first into fashion by Sir Walter Long. They had first silver pipes. The ordinary sort made use of a walnut-shell and a straw. I have heard my grandfather Lyte say that one pipe was handed from man to man round the table. Sir W. Raleigh, standing in a stand at Sir Robert Poyntz's park, at Acton, took a pipe of tobacco, which made the ladies quit it till he had done. Within these thirty-five years 't was scandalous for a divine to take tobacco. It was sold for its weight in silver. I have heard some of our old yeomen neighbours say that, when they went to Malmesbury or Chippenham market, they culled out their biggest shillings to lay

in the scales against the tobacco; now, the customs of it are the greatest his Majesty hath."

Amongst the promiscuous associates of the ordinaries and the taverns-men of quality and poets upon the town, rich citizens and swaggering adventurers—there must unquestionably have been a constant collision of manners, which was sure to end in blows and "tilting at each other's breasts." This, then, was the age for "rules to give and take the lie by." Shakspere, as well as Jonson, has ridiculed this quarrelsome spirit, whose insolence was safe up to a certain point—anything short of "the lie direct." But it was not always safe. "The retort courteous" might be often mistaken for the lie "without an if," in the heat of wine and high feeding; and then out flew the rapiers. Winstanley, in his 'Lives of the Poets, tells us a story of Thomas Randolph, the author of 'The Muse's Looking-glass,' which offers a very pretty tragi-comic illustration of this state of manners :— His extraordinary indulgence to the too liberal converse with the multitude of his applauders drew him to such an immoderate way of living that he was seldom out of gentlemen's company; and as it often happens that in drinking high quarrels arise, so there chanced some words to pass betwixt Mr. Randolph and another gentleman, which grew to be so high, that the gentleman, drawing his sword, and striking at Mr. Randolph, cut off his little finger, whereupon, in an extemporary humour, he instantly made these verses:—

66

'Arithmetic nine digits, and no more,
Admits of; then I have all my store:

But what mischance hath ta'en from my left hand,

It seems, did only for a cipher stand;

Hence, when I scan my verse, if I do miss,

I will impute the fault only to this,

A finger's loss, I speak it not in sport,
Will make a verse a foot too short.""

The law of the strong-hand was in those days ever ready to go before the slower penalties and "the rusty curb of old Father Antic"-the law of the serjeant's mace and the judge's robe. We have another characteristic story of the times in L'Estrange's papers :—

"A gentleman at a play sate by a fellow that he strongly suspected for a cutpurse, and, for the probation of him, took occasion to draw out his purse, and put it up so carelessly as it dangled down (but his eye watched it strictly with a glance), and he bent his discourse another way; which his suspected neighbour observing, upon his first fair opportunity exercised his craft, and, having got his booty, began to remove away, which the gentleman noting, instantly draws his knife, and whips off one of his ears, and vowed he would have something for his money. The cutpurse began to swear, and stamp, and threaten. Nay, go to, sirrah,' says the other; 'be quiet; I'll offer you fair: give me my purse again; here's your ear, take it, and be gone.'

[ocr errors]

The finger of Thomas Randolph and the ear of the cutpurse would be curious relics of those extra-judicial days. But the earth has hidden them, as it has hidden "the rack" and "the boot" of the sovereign justice of the same age. Jonson has a capital scene in Bartholomew Fair,' where a roguish ballad-singer roars out "a gentle admonition both to the purse-cutter and the purse-bearer," whilst his confederate picks the booby's pocket who is listening to him. The

moral with which this song concludes, to whose chorus the purse is taken and conveyed from hand to hand, is very solemn :

"But O, you vile nation of cutpurses all,

Relent and repent, and amend and be sound,

And know that you ought not, by honest men's fall,
Advance your own fortunes, to die above ground;
And though you go gay

In silks, as you may,

It is not the highway to heaven (as they say).
Repent then, repent you, for better for worse,
And kiss not the gallows for cutting a purse.

Youth, youth, thou hadst better been starv'd by thy nurse,
Than live to be hanged for cutting a purse!"

The pickpockets of modern times appear to be a degenerate race in comparison with the illustrious masters of the art of the days of Elizabeth and James. The song we have quoted records the feats of robbing a knight of good worship in Worcester gaol, a judge on the seat of judgment, and a nobleman,

"At Court, and in Christmas, before the King's face."

Such excellence was the result of long and painful study; and Fleetwood, the Recorder, in a letter to Lord Burghley, of 1585, describes an academy for thieves, where professional instruction was carried forward with that ambition for perfection which ought to be kept in view in every school of liberal arts :—

"Amongst our travels this one matter tumbled out by the way, that one Wotton, a gentleman born, and sometime a merchant-man of good credit, who, falling by time into decay, kept an alehouse at Smart's Key, near Billingsgate, and after, for some misdemeanor being put down, he reared up a new trade of life, and in the same house he procured all the cutpurses about this city to repair to his said house. There was a school-house set up to learn young boys to cut purses. There were hung up two devices-the one was a pocket, the other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain counters, and was hung about with hawks' bells, and over the top did hang a little scaring-bell; and he that could take out a counter without any noise was allowed to be a public foyster, and he that could take a piece of silver out of the purse without the noise of any of the bells, he was adjudged a judicial nipper. Note that a foyster is a pickpocket, and a nipper is termed a pickpurse, or a cutpurse."

We have read the description of a similar school in a book of the reign of George III., 'The Devil upon Two Sticks in England.' Impertinent pretenders to originality! the foundations of your science were laid in a far higher age.

If anything could exceed the glee with which the vagabonds pursued their vocation, whether they rejoiced in the name of rufflers, hookers, priggers, abrams, or any other of the three-and-twenty names recorded by Harrison, it was the hilarity with which the officers of the law hunted them out. It is not sufficient for Fleetwood, the Recorder, to sit at the justice-hall at Newgate on a Friday, and condemn "certain horse-dealers, cutpurses, and such-like, to the number of ten, whereof nine were executed upon Saturday in the morning;" but on the following Monday he must "spend the day about the searching out of sundry that were receptors of felons." On another day he says, "Abroad myself, and I took that day seventy-four rogues." Fleetwood appears to have been the very

66

Petit André of recorders. Nothing annoys him so much as a reprieve; and in truth the mode in which reprieves were obtained was not such as exactly to please a conscientious recorder who should bring to his vocation only half the gusto of Fleetwood. He writes to Burghley, "It is grown for a trade now in the court to make means for reprieves; twenty pound for a reprieve is nothing, although it be but for bare ten days." The court, however, had a politic regard to the personal safety of some of its members in thus holding the halter in check. The Recorder has a very characteristic passage upon this matter:-" Mr. Nowell, of the court, hath lately been here in London: he caused his man to give a blow unto a carman; his man hath stricken the carman with the pummel of his sword, and therewith hath broken his skull and killed him. Mr. Nowell and his man are like to be indicted; whereof I am sure to be much troubled, what with letters and his friends, and what by other means, as in the very like case heretofore I have been even with the same man." But there was money to be made in court in more ways than one. Twenty pound for a reprieve" was really nothing compared with the large prices which the greater courtiers obtained by begging lands. In the old play called Jack Drum's Entertainment' one of the characters says, "I have followed ordinaries this twelvemonths, only to find a fool that had lands, or a fellow that would talk treason, that I might beg him." Garrard, in his letters to Lord Strafford, communicates a bit of news to his patron, which not only illustrates the unprincipled avarice of the courtiers-down almost to the time when a national convulsion swept this and other abominations away with much that was good and graceful-but which story is full of a deep tragic interest. An old usurer dies in Westminster; his will is opened, and all the property-the coin, the plate, the jewels, and the bonds-all is left to his man-servant. The unhappy creature goes mad amidst his riches; and there is but one thing thought of at court for a week-who is to be successful in begging him. Elizabeth had the merit of abolishing the more hateful practice of begging concealed lands, that is such lands as at the dissolution of the monasteries had privily got into the possession of private persons. There was not a title in the kingdom that was thus safe from the rapacity of the begging courtiers. But, having lost this prey, they displayed a new ability for the discovery of treason and treasonable talk. In the Poetaster,' written in 1601, Jonson does not hesitate to speak out boldly against this abominable practice. The characters in the following dialogue are Lupus, Cæsar, Tucca, and Horace; and, as we have already mentioned, Jonson himself was designated under the name of Horace :

A libel, Cæsar; a dangerous, seditious libel; a libel in picture.

"Lup.
Cæsar. A libel!

Lup. Ay; I found it in this Horace his study, in Mecanas his house here; I challenge the penalty of the laws against them.

Tuc. Ay, and remember to beg their land betimes; before some of these hungry courthounds scent it out.

Cæsar. Show it to Horace: ask him if he know it.

Lup. Know it! his hand is at it, Cæsar.

Cæsar. Then 't is no libel.

Hor. It is the imperfect body of an emblem, Cæsar, I began for Mecænas.

Lup. An emblem! right: that 's Greek for a libel. Do but mark how confident he is.

Hor. A just man cannot fear, thou foolish tribune ;

Not, though the malice of traducing tongues,

The open vastness of a tyrant's ear,

The senseless rigour of the wrested laws,
Or the red eyes of strain'd authority,

Should, in a point, meet all to take his life:

His innocence is armour 'gainst all these."

Soon after the accession of James, Jonson himself went to prison for a supposed libel against the Scots, in Eastward Ho;' in the composition of which comedy he assisted Chapman and Marston. They were soon pardoned: but it was previously reported that their ears and noses were to be slit. Jonson's mother, at an entertainment which he made on his liberation, "drank to him, and showed him a paper which she designed, if the sentence had taken effect, to have mixed with his drink,—and it was strong and hasty poison." Jonson, who tells this story himself, says, "to show that she was no churl, she designed to have first drank of it herself." This is a terrible illustration of the ways of despotism. Jonson was pardoned, probably through some favouritism. Had it been otherwise, the future laureat of James would have died by poison in a wretched prison, and that poison given by his mother. Did the bricklayer's wife learn this terrible stoicism from her classical son? Fortunately there was in the world at that day, as there is now, a higher spirit to make calamity endurable than that of mere philosophy; and Jonson learnt this in sickness and old age. After he had become a favourite at court he still lost no proper occasion of lashing the rapacious courtiers. If a riot took place in a house, and manslaughter was committed, the house became a deodand to the Crown, and was begged as usual. In The Silent Woman,' first acted in 1609, one of the characters says, "O, sir, here hath like to have been murder since you went; a couple of knights fallen out about the bride's favours: we were fain to take away their weapons; your house had been begged by this time else." To the question, "For what?" comes the sarcastic answer, "For manslaughter, sir, as being accessary.”

[ocr errors]

The universal example of his age made Jonson what we should now call a court flatterer. Elizabeth-old, wrinkled, capricious, revengeful-was "the divine Cynthia." But Jonson compounded with his conscience for flattering the Queen, by satirizing her court with sufficient earnestness; and this, we dare say, was not in the least disagreeable to the Queen herself. In Cynthia's Revels' we have a very bizarre exhibition of the fantastic gallantry, the absurd coxcombities, the pretences to wit, which belonged to lords in waiting and maids of honour. Affectation here wears her insolent as well as her "sickly mien." Euphuism was not yet extinct; and so the gallant calls his mistress "my Honour," and she calls him "her Ambition." But this is small work for a satirist of Jonson's turn; and he boldly denounces "pride and ignorance" as "the two essential parts of the courtier." "The ladies and gallants lie languishing upon the rushes;" and this is a picture of the scenes in the antechambers :

"There stands a neophyte glazing of his face,
Preening his clothes, perfuming of his hair,
Against his idol enters; and repeats,
Like an imperfect prologue, at third music,
His parts of speeches, and confederate jests,
In passion to himself. Another swears
His scene of courtship over; bids, believe him,
Twenty times ere they will; anon, doth seem

:

« НазадПродовжити »