Certain wives of London trades-
men sign a letter begging the king and parliament to stop the war.
men sign a letter begging the king and parliament to stop the war.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v07
Nor
could Richard Bernard, though a lucid and scholarly thinker,
resist the conclusion of many confessions and condemnations. In
>
1 See bibliography and a Collection of Rare and Curious Tracts relating to Witch
craft, 1838. For reprint of Thomas Potts's account of the famous trial of the
Lancashire witches, 1613, see Chetham Soc. , vol. vi, 1835.
2 Discovery of. . . Ignorant Practicers of Physice, 1612.
3 The water test consisted in plunging the suspected person into a pond ; if really
a witch, who had renounced her baptism, the water would refuse to take her in and
she would float. See chap. XVI.
+ See chap. x.
• A Discourse of Witch-craft as it was acted in the family of Mr Edw. Fairfar. . . in
1621.
4
## p. 375 (#391) ############################################
Witch-hunting
375
6
his Guide to Grand Jury Men (1627), he restates the arguments
of the demonologists, from Sprenger to Cotta, and elaborates them
with all the thoroughness of conviction. And yet Bernard is fully
conscious of a vast error due to incredulity and inexperience.
In the First Booke, he quotes the Bible to prove how much of
supposed witchcraft is either mental disease or mere self-deception;
and, towards the end of his work, he declares that the rumours
of magic are often the vain conceits of the addle-headed, or of
silly fooles or of prattling gossips or of superstitiously fearful;
or of fansieful melancholicks or of discomposed and crased wits. '
Thus, though Bernard had all the knowledge and penetra-
tion necessary to refute these superstitions, he was too closely in
touch with his age to see differently from his fellows. The evil
had, indeed, reached its climax. Just as the anarchy of the
reformation had made men feel that all the army of Satan was
let loose among them, so, now, in the time of civil war and hatred,
each faction imputed such diabolic criminality to its opponents
that the devil's presence was expected everywhere. The vampires
and jackals of society began to trade on this obsession. Not only
were such lying pamphlets published as A Most certain true and
strange discovery of a witch being overtaken as she was standing
on a small plank board and as sailing it over the river of Newbury,
1643, but 'gul-gropers,' 'falconers,’ ‘ranck-riders' and 'ring-fallers'
found that witch-hunting was more profitable than coney-catching,
with the added luxury of abiding by the law. Children, who had
always figured largely in the felony of the age, made a profession
of feigning the symptoms of the bewitched. Such juvenile
perjurers as the 'Boy of Bilson' and the 'Boy of Battlesdon'
foamed at the mouth and fell into trances in the presence of
certain old women? Matthew Hopkins, a monster of impudence
and iniquity, actually styled himself the Witch-finder General'
and manipulated the panic of his age so successfully that parlia-
ment commissioned him to perform a circuit for the detection
of witches, paying twenty shillings for each conviction. Again,
literature, for want of wider scope, came under this contagion.
Hopkins produced in 1647 The Discovery of Witches; in answer
to severall Queries ; a catechism in which he explains the
symptoms of witchery and his methods of investigation. Yet this
6
6
See vol. II, chap. v, p. 111.
• See Wonderful News from the North, 1650 ; these and other reports of witch trials
have been collected and discussed by Wallace Notenstein in History of English Witch-
craft from 1558 to 1718, published by the American Historical Association, 1911.
## p. 376 (#392) ############################################
376 The Advent of Modern Thought
manifesto is less fantastic than some books thick with academic
learning. Among the rest, John Stearne’s A Confirmation and
Discovery of Witch-Craft (1648) is unique. Though written in
a spirit of impartial enquiry, the treatise contains perhaps the
most bizarre collection of witch confessions in the world.
If intellectual progress can be compared to a journey, the
Caroline age represents that stage in which pilgrims, having lost
the track amid dangers and difficulties, turn backwards and search
frantically for it along the earlier parts of the route. In this
retrogression, the study of witchcraft led thinkers to investigate
other forms of magic and occultism which might quietly have
passed out of memory, especially astrology and alchemy.
From prehistoric times, it had been natural for man to regard
all he sees and hears as connected with or like to himself. This
sense of sympathy with creation had been developed by the
thinkers of different countries till, in Pythagorism, it reached the
doctrine of the 'harmony of the spheres. ' Aristotle had taken
a hint from this theory, in explaining the human body to be an
aggregate of parts, so closely correlated that no unit could
be affected without disturbing the rest. Later, the Stoics, imbued
with eastern cosmic theories, had applied this physiological con-
ception to the world as a whole. As in the human microcosm, so
in the universal macrocosm, there was a constant play of inter-
action among the component parts. When this creed had been
established, it was inevitable that the stars, with their mysterious
motions and strange persistent brightness, should be considered to
hare a special influence over events on earth, and men believed
that the course of mundane affairs could be predicted by studying
these heavenly manifestations. Thus, judicial astrology' came to
be recognised as one of the seven liberal arts. Throughout the
Middle Ages and renascence it was occasionally banned, on the
authority of St Augustine, as heresy against the doctrine of free-
will", but would have been quietly abandoned in favour of astro-
nomy, if men had not either clung to it for want of confidence in the
new culture of their age or else attacked it as being a snare of the
devil. In 1601, John Chamber produced A Treatise against judi-
cial Astrologie. He begins his treatise with a wearisome array of
theological quotations and interpretations, as was inevitable in
1 E. g. John of Salisbury declared astrology to be the beginning of idolatry, Pico
della Mirandola and Savonarola rejected the superstition, and Erasmus ridiculed it in
Encomium Moriae.
## p. 377 (#393) ############################################
Astrology
377
3
9
attacking what Aristotle was considered to have taught and Abraham
was supposed to have practised. He does not deny that astrology
may contain the truth, but he realises that men have not knowledge
enough to find it. On the one hand, the influence of the stars cannot
be calculated, because many exist about which we know nothing ;
and, on the other hand, we cannot discern the critical moments of
life at which the horoscope should be taken. Such events as being
born or falling sick are astrologically unimportant; they are
merely results ; the causes, which really prove the turning points
in life, are too obscure to be timed? Yet this scholar, who studied
astronomy and understood causation, supports Sprenger's conten-
tion that, if astrologers sometimes prophesy truly, it is because
they are witches and in league with the devil. Sir Christopher
Heydon answered this book with an elaborate treatise in which
we still meet the picturesque fantasies of the Middle Ages,
asking Chamber whether it is likely that the stars 'onely be-
spangle Heaven like vaine ornaments while the basest weede
under his feete' has medical power. But, in less than ten years,
Chamber's friend George Carleton, bishop of Chichester, com-
posed, and ultimately printed in 1624, AETPOAOTOMANIA :
the madness of astrologers, a voluminous rejoinder, which con-
demns astrology as being no part of mathematics or natural
philosophy because it proceedeth not by demonstration from
certaine known Principles. ' But, though Carleton exacts a
scientific basis for any system of speculation worthy of credence,
yet he, too, is haunted by fear of the foul fiend. This excessive
desire to know the future is not merely human folly; it is in-
spired by the devil.
Since medieval philosophers had learnt to regard creation as
an aggregate of parts which influence one another, like the organs
of a single body, their aim had always been to discover the innate
sympathies and antipathies of things. When they had gained
control over these tendencies, alchemists hoped to be able to
remodel nature; especially by producing gold and silver out of
inferior metals. These aspirations had not been definitely dis-
proved, and now began to influence religious idealists, who
could find only schism and controversy in the worship of the
1 Chap. VI.
9 Malleus Malef. pt. I, Q. XVI.
* A Defense of Judiciall Astrologie in answer to a treatise lately published by M. John
Chamber, 1603. Among tbe Sa ville MSS at the Bodleian is Chamber's answer :
Confutation of astrological Demonology in the Devil's School. The dedication is dated
2 February 1603/4. Apparently it was never published. See D. of N. B.
## p. 378 (#394) ############################################
378 The Advent of Modern Thought
church. Dissatisfied with what they held to be the sensuous
materialism of Roman worship, these purists declared themselves
Lutherans, but, instinctively in love with pantheism and the
mysteries of intuitive knowledge, they became disciples of Para-
celsus and convinced themselves that they had found out the
secret of all knowledge in a system of magic which penetrated
the interior constitution of things. Yearning vaguely for a more
spiritual conception of life, they professed to be engaged in the
alchemical reconstruction of the world, by curing disease and
creating precious metals. Their love of mysticism was gratified
by uniting all such enthusiasts into a secret society to carry out
the magnum opus under the symbol of the Rosy Cross.
Whether Rosicrucianism be of prehistoric antiquity or not, it
reached England from Germany at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century. The mystery surrounding this brotherhood and
the strange symbolism of their doctrine provoked much misrepre-
sentation, but, as most errors vaguely represent some intellectual
movement, so Rosicrucianism, though retrograde and chimerical,
is a recognition of the immaterial world and an assertion of man's
supremacy over it. With this germ of progress, the fraternity did
not lack apologists among men who could find no saner scope for
their spiritual longings. Robert Fludd mournfully reviews the
ineffectiveness and confusion of modern science, calling on his
contemporaries to turn again and study the occult meanings of
ancient philosophy. John Heydon sought to discover the secret
of healing in the forces of nature, and has left a description
of the Rosicrucian kingdom copied from the renascence Utopians
and almost suggestive of Erewhon. Thomas Vaughan, though
disclaiming all connection with the brotherhood, was yet im-
bued with the same spirit. For him, the coming of Elias meant
the advent of the heavenly alchemist who should transform the
universe into the pure gold of the spiritual city of God. For a
while, these doctrines helped to disseminate a purer, nobler con-
ception, both of God and man, and thus played a part in the change
which came over the nation in the sixties. But such a sect could
end, eventually, only in teaching self-justification and substituting
what is vague and allegorical for practical Christianity. Like the
witch terror, astrology and other relics of the Middle Ages,
hermetic and cabalistic sciences were destined to be discredited
though not effaced-in the spiritual and intellectual revolution
which they contributed, in some measure, to bring about.
1 See Waite, A. E. , The Real History of the Rosicrucians, 1887.
## p. 379 (#395) ############################################
Broadsides
379
This revolution, the advent of modern thought, took place as
soon as the people had cultivated the habit of looking at a
question from more than one point of view. The Baconians and
a few of the Theophrastians had acquired this impartiality and
reflective scepticism from the study of the classics or of Montaigne ;
but the people were already absorbed in a controversy which
appealed to their medieval instinct of unquestioning self-sacrifice
in a cause. At an earlier epoch, this obstinacy and prejudice would
have been a permanent obstacle to intellectual progress. For-
tunately, the seventeenth century was not only an age of factions ;
it was an age which kept a diary. Every outburst of folly or
hatred was printed on the impulse of the moment and scattered
through the streets. Aggregates of people are proverbially irre-
.
sponsible ; but, in this case, the national conscience was gradually
confronted with an incriminating record which with other in-
fluences shamed the people into a united effort towards progress.
The history of this mental awakening is the history of the
broadside. Ever since Tudor times, the people had been ac-
customed to see their thoughts and feelings reflected in penny
flysheets? But, despite its universality of range and immense
popularity, this fugitive literature was still an undeveloped genre.
The effusions which caught the passing attention of 'prentices,
housewives and tradesmen, at street corners and in city squares,
were addressed to narrow, preoccupied intelligences and could
never rise to the level of literature. But London was swarming
with young men of wealth or birth who, as an outcome of
feudalism, believed that only the king had a right to rule and
that gentlemen should be above every profession except that of
fighting for him. These 'Hotspurres of the Time,' as a puritan
writer calls them, amid the disorder and dissipation of London
life, claimed an interest in the literature of the moment. Even
the scapegoat of the Gull's Hornebooke5 was fashionable enough to
compose poems and criticise plays. But, though these 'roaring
boys,' 'hectors' and 'cavaliers' cultivated the clinches and con-
ceits then in vogue, much as they did extravagance of dress,
they found that the recognised vehicles of preciousness, such as
character sketches and epigrams, were too restricted, and, at the
same time, too laboured a field, to suit their full-blooded, though
desultory, attention to the arts. They required a genre which
>
E. g. Earle and Stephens.
3 Ante, vol. iv, chap. Xvi, pp. 362-3.
" Ante, vol. iv, p. 356.
2 Ante, vol. II, chap. v, p. 96.
• Ante, vol. iv, p. 355.
## p. 380 (#396) ############################################
380 The Advent of Modern Thought
would give full vent to their recklessness and animal spirits, and
they found this mode of expression partly in jest-books, but much
more in street ballads, which breathed the very essence of old
London and, almost imperceptibly, had blended with their revels
through the city.
Thus began the first stage in the development of the street
ballad. Cavaliers brought into it their dare-devil joviality and
carelessness and the wider interests of their active lives. At the
same time, the simplicity of ballad metre, adapted to a catch
melody, and the break between each stanza, precluded complexity
of thought or accumulations of periphrases. Old types of humour
still survive, such as mock testaments and burlesque laudations ;
but they take the form of rollicking songs made up of ingenious
conceits. Permanent comic characters like the miller, the tinker
.
or the beggar reappear in the shape of lyricised monologues”.
Drinking songs are plentiful, as in olden times. But, though we
still find coarse merriment over red noses and claret-coloured
complexions, though Walter Mapes's humorous touches of ancient
and ecclesiastical lore are quite discarded, and wine-generally in
opposition to plebeian beer—is frankly prized for its generous heat
and exhilaration, yet the cavaliers also sing of it as the spur to
heroic action and a solace in trouble or captivity. Besides wine,
these songs discuss women. Some recount lawless and ungallant
adventures reminiscent of the Fabliaux and jest-books; others
remain frankly goliardic in their cynical invective against marriage
or in their satire on female vanity, lust and caprice ; some others
are pervaded by the grossest sensuality. Yet, even here, the new
influence is easily recognisable. Many of these effusions are full
of the courtier's cult of the fair sex, which, though fulsome and
extravagant, was introducing new words and expressions into the
language. Even the common paramour is sometimes encircled by
a halo of poetic phraseology which hides her baseness, while other
poems, in the new atmosphere of action, breathe a manly inde-
pendence and contempt of uxorious servitude. But the elevation
of the popular song is most noticeable when it treats, in clear,
simple verse, the more serious subjects which these cavaliers
understood only too well, such as the power of money, the in-
justice of fortune or the tyranny of the sword.
For discussion of these types see ante, vol. n, chap. v, pp. 85–95, and
bibliography, pp. 482-490.
? For the development of . scoundrel verse,' see Chandler, F. W. , The Literature
of Roguery, vol. I, chap. III, sect. iv.
9
## p. 381 (#397) ############################################
Street Ballads and Pamphlets
381
By the
>
Thus, the metres and diction of popular catch-pennies had
risen to the level of educated and experienced men.
third decade of the seventeenth century, these fugitive fly-
sheets had also been called upon to serve the purpose of the
political rancour and indignation which retarded intellectual
progress and plunged England into civil war.
Once again,
the pamphleteers and ballad-mongers of the time had recourse
to old forms of literature to convey their sarcasm and in-
nuendo. For instance, one lampoon on Buckingham's expedition
to France, with the refrain 'The cleane contrary way,' is copied
from the Cujus contrarium verum est of medieval satire, and
two more, in imitation of Lucian or Dekker', are dialogues be-
tween Charon and the murdered duke. Another pamphlet,
travestying the title of a newspaper as Mercurius Diabolicus or
Hell's Intelligencer, shows us the devil, in answer to a citizen's
question, recounting the pressure of work in hell since parlia-
ment came into power; and, in 1660, when that body dissolved
itself and a general desire for the restoration of the king was
felt, a ballad News from Hell or the Relation of a Vision,
represents the devil's amazement and incredulity that England,
lately ‘His sweet darling dear,' was now proving false to her
allegiance to hell. Others, such as Heraclitus' Dream (1642),
representing the shepherd (i. e. the church) shorn by his sheep,
are copied from medieval dream-visions.
The monologue was further developed and reached a high level
of satire in such pieces as Truth Flatters Not (1647), in which,
after pope, priest and prelate have betrayed their worldly am-
bition and duplicity, each in a soliloquy, Truth censures them all
in a closing speech. Or, in Three Speeches (1642), satirising the
narrowness and self-satisfied philistinism of the commercial class,
as exemplified by 'Master Warden's' political oration to his
fellows; his wife's comments on the discourse to her friends
and the chambermaid's views on affairs in general and especially
on papistry. The old dramatic broadside is still found in A coffin
for King Charles ; a Crowne for Cromwell; a Pit for the People
(1649).
Other forms of popular literature were at once adapted to the
factious feelings of the people. In Mercurius Melancholicus, or
1
Ante, vol. II, chap. XVI, p. 386.
· The idea of a visit to hell is almost continuous in literature since Homeric times,
and had been used by Jacobean writers, especially by Dekker, T. , in Newes from Hell,
1606; see ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, p. 353, and bibliography under Dekker, T. , pp. 526, 527.
IV
## p. 382 (#398) ############################################
382
The Advent of Modern Thought
.
Newes from Westminster (1647), the old idea of a dozen arrant
fooles and knaves' is still preserved. Mock testaments were used
by both parties as at the time of the reformation', much like the
more modern 'burning in effigy,' to vilify not only persons but
causes. In the new spirit of the times, they became more like
allegories than mere lampoons. For instance, A True Inventory
of the goods and chattels of Superstition (1642) tells how Super-
stition, of the parish of Blind Devotion in the county of Corrupt
Doctrine and in the kingdom of Idolatry, bequeaths his goods and
chattels. Puritans, especially familists, constantly resorted to
their Bible to heap obloquy on the worldliness and licence of the
cavaliers. In the Dammee? Cavaliers Warning piece (1643), they
construed Obadiah's tirade against the Idumeans into a censure
of the royalist party; The Debauched Cavalier, or the English
Midianite (1642) is an attempt to discover, in the lives of king
Charles and his supporters, the enormities with which Israel's
enemy was credited: The Downefall of Dagon (1643) is the
demolition of the cross in Cheapside. The dialogue had, for cen-
turies, been a familiar form of discussion and satire, so now, many
puritan pamphlets are modelled on the catechism. Some are
serious booklets, such as The Souldiers Catechism (1644), in which
a Christian's right to take up arms in defence of religious and
civil freedom and his duty as a true warrior are taught by question
and answer. But there still lingered among the people the medieval
tendency to travesty sacred formulas, and this love of parody led
pamphleteers to vent their irony in mock catechisms as well as in
mock testaments. The most abject self-incriminations are put into
their opponents' mouths? A subtler and more mordant irony per-
vades The City Dames Petition in the behalfe of the long afflicted,
but well affected cavaliers (1647).
Certain wives of London trades-
men sign a letter begging the king and parliament to stop the war.
The document explains that the good women-true descendants of
the Wife of Bath, Maid Emlyn and Jill of Brainford—who mind
their husbands’ shops, sorely miss not only the custom, but, also, the
courtship of those gallant exquisites whose breath was 'as sweet
as amber' and whose essences made the dames' establishments as
-
1 Cf. The Wyll of the Devyll, ante, vol. , chap. v, p. 86.
. As the puritan strictly excluded oaths from his conversation, the cavalier
cultivated them. His “Damn’ was almost proverbial and is the theme of the
vindictive ballad A total Rout, or a brief discovery of a Pack of Knaves and Drabs
(1653).
3 Cavaliers' Catechisme, or the Reformed Protestant catechising the anti-christian
Papist, 1643.
4
## p. 383 (#399) ############################################
Cavalier and Roundhead Satirists
383
'fragrant as the spring's first flowers. ' The royalist party met their
opponents with the same weapons. They refuted puritan calumny
and asserted their faith in the divine right of kings by such
manifestoes as The Cavaliers Catechisme and confession of his
faith (1646), while they vented their scorn and hatred of the
parliament by representing it at prayer for release from its own
imputed sins in The Parliaments Letanie (1647). Even amid the
bitterness of defeat, the cavalier gaiety lives in these litanies ; in
one of them', supplications to avoid such afflictions as usurers,
parliamentary government and Oliver Cromwell are offered up in
rollicking verses suggestive of a drinking song.
Controversialists tended to ridicule their antagonists under
some typical name or character. Thus, we find the presbyterian
party frequently attacked under the name of Jack Presbyter or
Sir John Presbyter, just as, when the republican party rallied at
the time of the Rump, their opponents alluded to them by their
own battle-cry “The Cause? ' But, more often, the Londoner's
interest in notorieties, which had already, in less troublous times,
made household words of such characters as Hobson and Tarlton,
now created a demand for allusions to individuals. Thus, satirists
were led to cultivate the art of personal caricature and ridicule
which was soon to become the chief excellence of political songs.
There are sarcasms on prince Rupert's dog, Oliver Cromwell's nose*
and Ireton's effeminate chin. But many pamphleteers still utilised
the decasyllabic couplet which Hall and Marston had established
as the recognised vehicle of personal invective. These satirists
improved on the confused and obscure diction of their models,
but they cramped themselves in a style too staid and monotonous
for the whimsical vein of the true lampoonist. They were more
successful in the formal epigrams and elegies which appeared in
multitudes, especially to lament the death of Essex in 1646, of
Charles in 1649 and of Gloucester5 in 1660.
As the civil war was, in some respects, a struggle between
systems and institutions, many pamphleteers cared less about
· The Cavaliers Letanie lately composed by a well willer to his Majesty's person and
all his most Loyull Subjects, 1648.
? E. g. Prynne's The Republican and others spurious good Old Cause briefly and
truely anatomised, 1659.
* See ante, vol. iv, chap. Xvi, p. 360.
* E. g. A Case for Nol Cromwells Nose and the Cure of Tim Fairfax's Gout, 1648,
and The Blazing-Star, or, Nolls Nose Newly Revived and taken out of his Tomb. By
Collonel Baker, 1660.
6 See Catalogue of the Thomason Tracts, 1908, B. M.
## p. 384 (#400) ############################################
384 The Advent of Modern Thought
individuals than classes, and resorted to character sketches as the
handiest weapon for type satire. The Theophrastians' had taught
succeeding generations how to create a lifelike word-picture out
of all that was ridiculous or objectionable in any social type.
When mutual opposition made the puritan more rigidly correct
and the cavalier more aggressively self-assertive, there were
endless opportunities for crisp, concentrated portraiture. And yet,
only a few sketches, such as the versified A Puritane set forth in
his lively colours . . . with the Character of an Holy Sister
(1642) or the trenchant study The Drunkard's Character (1646)
or T. Ford's collection of clear-cut portraits entitled Times
anatomised (1647) or John Wilson's picture of purity and single-
heartedness, A New Anatomie or character of a Christian,
or a Roundhead (1645), preserved the statuesque outline of the
genre. In the heat of political conflict, men cannot detach their
minds from episodes and side issues; they need to argue over
isolated questions, and, thus, the bulk of political character
sketches digress into particulars till many of them become little
else than manifestoes or 'queries. ' John Cleiveland, who begins
his portraits with Overburian flashes of wit and fantasy, soon
forgets himself and his subject in bitter criticisms of his opponents,
in one character sketchº exclaiming: ‘But I have not Inke enough
to cure all the Tetters and Ring-worms of the State. ' So com-
pletely is the style absorbed in the heat and the haste of civil
feud, that some so-called 'characters' merely retain the title,
presumably because of its popularity.
These many types of literature were employed by pamphleteers
because the spirit of conflict was still that of the sixteenth century.
In the Middle Ages and at the renascence, controversy appealed
to men’s passions rather than to their intellect. The issues were
generally so simple that combatants had not any need to argue
deeply; but the cause lay so near their hearts that they could not
keep from obloquy. Hence, they invented a whole literature of
vituperation, so that the same insults could be repeated again and
again in new ways. The seventeenth century inherited this
armoury of invective and also their ancestors' single-hearted
eagerness to use it. Yet a large proportion of broadsides have no
peculiarity of form or style and, so far as genre is concerned,
remain street ballads. After this reversion to simplicity comes the
beginning of a great change. Even before the king's standard
? Ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, pp. 335, 342
* The Character of a London Diurnall, 1644.
7
## p. 385 (#401) ############################################
Civil War Pamphleteers 385
was raised, there were a number of level-headed democrats like
the author of The present estate of Christendome (1642) who takes
a statesmanlike view of the unrest pervading Europe and suggests
practical remedies for each country including his own. But, when -
hostilities had once broken out, the sentiments of the common
people also became more complex. A national controversy was
an interchange of assertions; but, for the average man, the civil
war was a game of chess", in which not only his opinions but
his sympathies, ideals and, perhaps, life and property, were the
pawns. Hence, while some pamphleteers were irrevocably com-
mitted to the support of one faction, others found their partisanship
distracted by all manner of calculations, conjectures and conflicting
emotions, and their broadsides became reviews of the situation?
Parodies, epigrams, testaments and portraits were not of any
service to such commentators. While Corantos, Mercuries
and Diurnalls were developing into newspapers, they wrote
their leading articles—for such is the character of these
ballads in the form of street verse, because the people, from
force of habit, still looked to this type for an expression
of their own opinions. But their work, nevertheless, is new in
spirit.
The comments and arguments of these broadsides are not
original or profound; but they show that a large proportion of the
people had become reflective. Not only ballads, but pamphlets
and tracts now adopt a more thoughtful tone and we enter on the
third stage in the development of flysheet literature. When
bloodshed had begun, the ordinary citizen also realised that civil
war was far worse than the victory of either party, and tracts
began to appear such as England's Miserie, if not prevented
by the speedie remedie of a happy union between His Majestie
and His Parliament (1642). Or, again, the leaders in the
struggle were bitterly and unjustly satirised for preventing peace
in Mr Hampden's Speech occasioned upon the Londoner's
Petition for Peace (1642) or in The Sense of the House (1643),
which put into the mouths of orators selfish and inept reasons for
continuing the war. R. W. , who had already upheld the parlia-
mentarian cause in several pamphlets, now brought the wisdom
1 The Game of Chesse, a metaphoricall Discourse showing the present estate of This
Kingdome (1643).
? See many of the pieces in Rump: or an exact collection of the choycest Poems and
Songs relating to the Late Times. By the most Eminent Wits, from anno 1639 to anno
1661. 1662. Facsimile rpt n. d.
E, L. VII. OH. XVI,
25
## p. 386 (#402) ############################################
386 The Aavent of Modern Thought
and experience of antiquity to bear on the question of actual
fighting. In The Character of Warre (1643), he discusses its
justification but observes that none delight in the sound of the
warlike Drums or in the Alarmes of Warr; but onely they who
never tasted the bitternesse thereof. ' The author of a weird
fantasy entitled A Winter Dreame (1649), describes in rhythmic
and harmonious prose how he seemed to visit the different
countries of Europe distracted by war, ending with England, the
most stricken of all. Protests are also heard on behalf of the
simpler joys of peace, but none set forth this new spirit of common
humanity more effectively than The Virgins Complaint for the
Losse of their sweethearts occasioned by these present wars (1643).
From the strenuous days of Elizabeth, the great personalities of
history had appealed to men's imagination; and now, in the excite-
ment of war, people found themselves even more in sympathy with
bygone days. The Penitent Traytor (1647), representing the con-
fession of a Devonshire gentleman condemned for treason against
Henry III, is only one of many ballads which brought the past into
touch with the emotions of the present. But the middle classes
were now beginning to think, and to turn to history for guidance
in perplexity? Thus, even at the outset of the struggle, they
welcomed such pamphlets as Some wiser than Some; or A Display
of the Times past and present, with some probable conjecture of
the times to come (1643). A growing spirit of protest against excess
runs all through this period of anarchy. In 1641, the jangle of
conflicting creeds was exposed in A Discovery of 29 Sects here in
London, and, again, in 1646, by Thomas Edwards's Gangraena.
But, among other such censures, none illustrates better the new
temper of the times than H. B. 's The Craftsmans Craft, or the
Wiles of the Discoverer (1649), which revolts not against the
number of sects but against the spirit of calumny in which they
carried on their controversies. As the fortune of war varied from
week to week, the evil effect of mendacious and inflammatory
news-sheets became only too evident. The maker of broadsides
had been an object of censure since Elizabethan times, and, just
before the outbreak of the war, an act suppressing unlicensed
printers was made the occasion for a malicious dialogue on this
needy brood? . In 1642, a Theophrastian character sketch describes
1 Cf. Morall Discourses and Essayes by T. C. , 1655. See, also, Expedients for
Publique Peace, 1660.
2 The Downefall of temporizing poets, unlicensed printers, upstart booksellers, trotting
Mercuries and bawling Hawkers, 1641.
## p. 387 (#403) ############################################
Social Pamphleteers 387
a
the ballad-monger's fiery nose and wretched drunken rimes, full
of libels and lying rumours? There is a mellower spirit in The
Great Assizes holden in Parnassus, at which the scholars of the
renascence acting as judges, the great English poets (including
Drayton, Shakespeare and Massinger) as jury, with Ben Jonson as
keeper of the 'Trophonian Denne' and John Taylor as crier of the
court, arraign these new-fledged periodicals for perverting the
truth, defiling literature, seducing readers from more serious
books and disseminating poisonous doctrines. The proceedings
are narrated in smooth decasyllabic verse, with many sly touches
of humour.
With all its errors and excesses, the great rebellion was, for
many men, a crusade against the vices of feudalism. Reforming
zeal was in the air, and, during the civil war and the protectorate,
earnest men were busy investigating social and administrative
abuses which had not been direct issues of the struggle. Contro-
versies which seem to arise in puritan bigotry, disclose a thought-
fulness and sanity quite foreign to Elizabethan exposures. The
hatred of elaborate dress, which began with the fanaticism of the
Adamites, gradually changed into a respect for the dignity of the
human form. Broadsides ridiculed fashions because they were
incongruous, and John Bulwer, in his Anthropometamorphosis
(1653), collected all the stories, ancient and modern, of savages'
adornments and mutilations, to show how men disgrace what was
made in God's image. A hatred of gluttony runs through the
paper war waged against Christmas celebrations. Puritan distrust
of women had started again the time-honoured controversy as to
feminine character; but now the dispute broadened into moral
councils on love or marriage and is free from pruriency. The
most revolting coarseness is still found, but only in diatribes
against prostitution. The greater number of pamphlets merely
ridicule the inconstancy, vanity or caprice of women. Many are
cast into the form of dialogues and epistles. And, although
humorists, in this age of constitutional anomalies, found piquancy
in picturing female parliaments and commonwealths in which
women assert their independence, the satire has lost the venom
of the preceding age.
Other pamphleteers turned their attention to abuses in the
administration of justice. The system of imprisonment for debt
had already been attacked as early as 1618 by Mynshul's curious
1 A True description of the Pot-Companion Poet, Who is the Founder of all the Base
and libelous Pamphlets lately spread abroad.
25--2
## p. 388 (#404) ############################################
388 The Advent of Modern Thought
5
Characters of a Prison"; and, in 1622, the remarkable A Petition
to the King's most Excellent Majestie had urged the injustice of
imprisoning a man because of his financial losses and the folly of
depriving the state of serviceable citizens, besides eloquently
describing the mental anguish and moral degradation of gaol life.
These evils became tenfold more apparent during the disasters
and disorganisation of the civil war. One writer2 tells how the
minor officials of the court gain access to the ear of the judge and
use their influence to further their own ends; another describes
the mercenary character of lawyers and their devices for delaying
judgment, thereby filling their own pockets; another protests
against the tyranny and exaction of gaolers. The turns of fortune,
in these insecure times, had brought many law-abiding and edu-
cated men to prison, who beguiled their weariness and sorrow by
writing. Thus, quite a literature of gaol-birds sprang up, one of
the best productions being Sir Francis Wortley's spirited ballad
on the incarcerated royalists in 1647. When the protectorate was
established, men hoped that peace would leave the government
leisure to rectify these and other abuses. Pamphlets and flysheets
on legal and prison reform now became even more numerous; and,
though these writers have neither the style nor the vigour of earlier
times, they nearly all show a sense of human rights and a practical
insight into the far-reaching effects of social evils, very different
from the narrow violence of Jacobean and Caroline pamphleteers.
Everywhere, the people seemed to feel the need of reconciliation
and fellowship. In 1647, The Cavaliers' Diurnall written by
Adventure replaced real news or invective by playful sarcasm
and literary trifling, suggestive of the Addisonian circle. Even in
A Relation of the Ten grand, infamous Traytors, who for their
murder and detestable villany against our late soveraigne Lord
King Charles the First (1660), the horror of regicide is almost
lost sight of in the cultivation of style.
Tolerance, reasonableness and sympathy were by no means
strangers to English literature; they had graced the works of
scholars and courtiers; they had shed their charm over the drama.
But it was not till the end of the civil war that the middle classes,
>
i Ante, vol. iv, chap. xvi, p. 350.
2 The Courts of Justice Corrected and Amended, or The Corrupt Lawyer Untrust,
Lash'd and quasht, 1642.
3 A Looking glasse for all proud, ambitious, covetous and corrupt Lawyers, 1646.
4 Liberty vindicated against slavery, 1646.
A Loyall Song, of the Royall Feast kept by the Prisoners in the Towre . . . (On the
occasion of a present of two brace of bucks from the king).
5
## p. 389 (#405) ############################################
The Coffee-houses
389
6
as a whole, began to outgrow medieval habits of thought and
expression and to cultivate modern 'civilitie. ' As we have seen,
this advance was partly due to reaction of sentiment, but, even
more, to a certain change in the people's mode of life. The
citizens of old London were gregarious, and, as the civil war had
been a conflict of opinions no less than of arms, they had developed
the necessity for discussion. Being careful both of their health
and of their purse, they did not like to meet in taverns, but
began to frequent coffee-houses, because a cup of the newly-
imported Turkish beverage cost only one penny and was supposed
to cure minor ailments? . As early as 1659, Miles's coffee-house
in Palace yard was the meeting place of James Harrington's
club, the 'Rota,' a debating society for the discussion of political
problems. By 1662, the Latine coffee-house, near the stocks, was
the resort of doctors and scholars, and we learn from the amusing
verses of News from the Coffee-house (1667), that, in some places,
the conversation turned on city fashions and foibles as well as on
affairs of state. In 1675, the author of The Coffee-houses Vin-
dicated expresses the true power of these resorts, when he asks
Now whither shall a person, wearied with hard study, or the laborious
turmoils of a tedious day, repair to refresh himself? or where can young
gentlemen, or shop-keepers, more innocently and advantageously spend an
hour or two in the evening, than at a coffee-house? . . . To read men is
acknowledged more useful than books; but where is there a better library for
that study, generally than here; among such a variety of humours, all ex-
pressing themselves on divers subjects according to their respective abilities ?
Thus, the middle classes had at last found a field in which it
was possible to realise Montaigne's and Cornwallis'ss ideal of
observing human nature, and a literature at once sprang up to
satisfy this new-born curiosity in the humours of coffee-house life.
The Character of a Coffee-house (1673) brilliantly describes, in
true Overburian style, the amateur politicians grouped round
some self-constituted authority and introduces a scathing portrait
of the ‘Town-wit,' the descendant of Dekker’s Gull, who interrupts
citizens' discussions with his obscenity and profane language;
1 See A Cup of Coffee, or Coffee in its Colours, 1663, and A Brief Description of the
Excellent Virtues of that sober and wholesome drink called Coffee and its Incomparable
effects in preventing or curing most diseases incident to Humane Bodies, 1674.
? See The Rota: or the Model of a Free State, or Equal Commonwealth; once pro-
posed and debated in brief and to be again more at large proposed to and debated by
a free and open society of ingenious Gentlemen. And The Censure of the Rota upon
Mr Milton's Book entitled The Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth.
Both in 1660.
Ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, p. 344.
3
## p. 390 (#406) ############################################
390 The Advent
of Advent Modern
of Modern Thought
and, in 1677, a volume of conversational anecdotes collected at
these rendezvous was published by Roger L'Estrange! As the
coffee-houses had a mixed clientèle in which republican equality
was the order of the day, the consequent freedom of conversation
and unrestrained display of personality offered a new field for the
writer of dialogues. This genre had already become, in the hands
of such writers as Gifford, king James, Walton and especially
Nicholas Breton, a recognised means of conveying ideas to the
people, and their followers began by choosing coffee-houses merely
to give an attractive background to the discussions. The Coffee
Scuffle (1662), caricaturing a learned argument between a domi-
neering pedant and a man of the world, shows that literary
burlesque could at length find more subtle and refined material
than in the days of Barnabees Journal and Moriomachia, while
two other pamphlets3 turn an essay on popery into a lifelike
discussion between a voluble captain and a supercilious young
lawyer who meet at one of these houses. In these and other
productions of like nature, the arguers begin to be more important
than the argument. The street, the tavern and the home had for
centuries displayed the boorishness or brutality of men; but the
coffee-house revealed oddities of thought and manner far more
interesting to the modern observer. These quaint ideas and
touches of eccentricity were only to be brought out in conversa-
tion, and so the dialogue gradually became a study of character
culminating in some of Addison's charming sketches.
This friendly interest in the peculiarities of character increased
the abhorrence with which men viewed the revilings of the age
of the civil war. The age was bent on mutual respect and con-
sideration. So they turned to the study of letter writing to
cultivate a more suave spirit of intercourse. Davies describes
'the gentler art' as 'the cement of all society, the foundation
and Superstructure of all Friendship and conversation. It is
true that epistolary correspondence had been recognised as a
literary type since the renascence had brought men into touch
with Cicero, Seneca and Guevara, and that, as early as 1586,
6
3
1 Coffee-house Jests. By the author of The Oxford Jests [i. e. W. Hickes).
? See Rules and Orders of the Coffee-house, attached to A Brief Description, 1674.
A Coffee-House Dialogue, 1679, and A Continuation of the Coffee-House Dialogue,
1680.
* See J. Pettus's prefatory letter to Lovedays Letters Domestic and Forreine, edited
by his brother in 1659.
5 Dedic. to Boswell, G. , in Letters of Affaires, Love and Courtship. Written to
Several persons of Honour and Quality: By. . .
could Richard Bernard, though a lucid and scholarly thinker,
resist the conclusion of many confessions and condemnations. In
>
1 See bibliography and a Collection of Rare and Curious Tracts relating to Witch
craft, 1838. For reprint of Thomas Potts's account of the famous trial of the
Lancashire witches, 1613, see Chetham Soc. , vol. vi, 1835.
2 Discovery of. . . Ignorant Practicers of Physice, 1612.
3 The water test consisted in plunging the suspected person into a pond ; if really
a witch, who had renounced her baptism, the water would refuse to take her in and
she would float. See chap. XVI.
+ See chap. x.
• A Discourse of Witch-craft as it was acted in the family of Mr Edw. Fairfar. . . in
1621.
4
## p. 375 (#391) ############################################
Witch-hunting
375
6
his Guide to Grand Jury Men (1627), he restates the arguments
of the demonologists, from Sprenger to Cotta, and elaborates them
with all the thoroughness of conviction. And yet Bernard is fully
conscious of a vast error due to incredulity and inexperience.
In the First Booke, he quotes the Bible to prove how much of
supposed witchcraft is either mental disease or mere self-deception;
and, towards the end of his work, he declares that the rumours
of magic are often the vain conceits of the addle-headed, or of
silly fooles or of prattling gossips or of superstitiously fearful;
or of fansieful melancholicks or of discomposed and crased wits. '
Thus, though Bernard had all the knowledge and penetra-
tion necessary to refute these superstitions, he was too closely in
touch with his age to see differently from his fellows. The evil
had, indeed, reached its climax. Just as the anarchy of the
reformation had made men feel that all the army of Satan was
let loose among them, so, now, in the time of civil war and hatred,
each faction imputed such diabolic criminality to its opponents
that the devil's presence was expected everywhere. The vampires
and jackals of society began to trade on this obsession. Not only
were such lying pamphlets published as A Most certain true and
strange discovery of a witch being overtaken as she was standing
on a small plank board and as sailing it over the river of Newbury,
1643, but 'gul-gropers,' 'falconers,’ ‘ranck-riders' and 'ring-fallers'
found that witch-hunting was more profitable than coney-catching,
with the added luxury of abiding by the law. Children, who had
always figured largely in the felony of the age, made a profession
of feigning the symptoms of the bewitched. Such juvenile
perjurers as the 'Boy of Bilson' and the 'Boy of Battlesdon'
foamed at the mouth and fell into trances in the presence of
certain old women? Matthew Hopkins, a monster of impudence
and iniquity, actually styled himself the Witch-finder General'
and manipulated the panic of his age so successfully that parlia-
ment commissioned him to perform a circuit for the detection
of witches, paying twenty shillings for each conviction. Again,
literature, for want of wider scope, came under this contagion.
Hopkins produced in 1647 The Discovery of Witches; in answer
to severall Queries ; a catechism in which he explains the
symptoms of witchery and his methods of investigation. Yet this
6
6
See vol. II, chap. v, p. 111.
• See Wonderful News from the North, 1650 ; these and other reports of witch trials
have been collected and discussed by Wallace Notenstein in History of English Witch-
craft from 1558 to 1718, published by the American Historical Association, 1911.
## p. 376 (#392) ############################################
376 The Advent of Modern Thought
manifesto is less fantastic than some books thick with academic
learning. Among the rest, John Stearne’s A Confirmation and
Discovery of Witch-Craft (1648) is unique. Though written in
a spirit of impartial enquiry, the treatise contains perhaps the
most bizarre collection of witch confessions in the world.
If intellectual progress can be compared to a journey, the
Caroline age represents that stage in which pilgrims, having lost
the track amid dangers and difficulties, turn backwards and search
frantically for it along the earlier parts of the route. In this
retrogression, the study of witchcraft led thinkers to investigate
other forms of magic and occultism which might quietly have
passed out of memory, especially astrology and alchemy.
From prehistoric times, it had been natural for man to regard
all he sees and hears as connected with or like to himself. This
sense of sympathy with creation had been developed by the
thinkers of different countries till, in Pythagorism, it reached the
doctrine of the 'harmony of the spheres. ' Aristotle had taken
a hint from this theory, in explaining the human body to be an
aggregate of parts, so closely correlated that no unit could
be affected without disturbing the rest. Later, the Stoics, imbued
with eastern cosmic theories, had applied this physiological con-
ception to the world as a whole. As in the human microcosm, so
in the universal macrocosm, there was a constant play of inter-
action among the component parts. When this creed had been
established, it was inevitable that the stars, with their mysterious
motions and strange persistent brightness, should be considered to
hare a special influence over events on earth, and men believed
that the course of mundane affairs could be predicted by studying
these heavenly manifestations. Thus, judicial astrology' came to
be recognised as one of the seven liberal arts. Throughout the
Middle Ages and renascence it was occasionally banned, on the
authority of St Augustine, as heresy against the doctrine of free-
will", but would have been quietly abandoned in favour of astro-
nomy, if men had not either clung to it for want of confidence in the
new culture of their age or else attacked it as being a snare of the
devil. In 1601, John Chamber produced A Treatise against judi-
cial Astrologie. He begins his treatise with a wearisome array of
theological quotations and interpretations, as was inevitable in
1 E. g. John of Salisbury declared astrology to be the beginning of idolatry, Pico
della Mirandola and Savonarola rejected the superstition, and Erasmus ridiculed it in
Encomium Moriae.
## p. 377 (#393) ############################################
Astrology
377
3
9
attacking what Aristotle was considered to have taught and Abraham
was supposed to have practised. He does not deny that astrology
may contain the truth, but he realises that men have not knowledge
enough to find it. On the one hand, the influence of the stars cannot
be calculated, because many exist about which we know nothing ;
and, on the other hand, we cannot discern the critical moments of
life at which the horoscope should be taken. Such events as being
born or falling sick are astrologically unimportant; they are
merely results ; the causes, which really prove the turning points
in life, are too obscure to be timed? Yet this scholar, who studied
astronomy and understood causation, supports Sprenger's conten-
tion that, if astrologers sometimes prophesy truly, it is because
they are witches and in league with the devil. Sir Christopher
Heydon answered this book with an elaborate treatise in which
we still meet the picturesque fantasies of the Middle Ages,
asking Chamber whether it is likely that the stars 'onely be-
spangle Heaven like vaine ornaments while the basest weede
under his feete' has medical power. But, in less than ten years,
Chamber's friend George Carleton, bishop of Chichester, com-
posed, and ultimately printed in 1624, AETPOAOTOMANIA :
the madness of astrologers, a voluminous rejoinder, which con-
demns astrology as being no part of mathematics or natural
philosophy because it proceedeth not by demonstration from
certaine known Principles. ' But, though Carleton exacts a
scientific basis for any system of speculation worthy of credence,
yet he, too, is haunted by fear of the foul fiend. This excessive
desire to know the future is not merely human folly; it is in-
spired by the devil.
Since medieval philosophers had learnt to regard creation as
an aggregate of parts which influence one another, like the organs
of a single body, their aim had always been to discover the innate
sympathies and antipathies of things. When they had gained
control over these tendencies, alchemists hoped to be able to
remodel nature; especially by producing gold and silver out of
inferior metals. These aspirations had not been definitely dis-
proved, and now began to influence religious idealists, who
could find only schism and controversy in the worship of the
1 Chap. VI.
9 Malleus Malef. pt. I, Q. XVI.
* A Defense of Judiciall Astrologie in answer to a treatise lately published by M. John
Chamber, 1603. Among tbe Sa ville MSS at the Bodleian is Chamber's answer :
Confutation of astrological Demonology in the Devil's School. The dedication is dated
2 February 1603/4. Apparently it was never published. See D. of N. B.
## p. 378 (#394) ############################################
378 The Advent of Modern Thought
church. Dissatisfied with what they held to be the sensuous
materialism of Roman worship, these purists declared themselves
Lutherans, but, instinctively in love with pantheism and the
mysteries of intuitive knowledge, they became disciples of Para-
celsus and convinced themselves that they had found out the
secret of all knowledge in a system of magic which penetrated
the interior constitution of things. Yearning vaguely for a more
spiritual conception of life, they professed to be engaged in the
alchemical reconstruction of the world, by curing disease and
creating precious metals. Their love of mysticism was gratified
by uniting all such enthusiasts into a secret society to carry out
the magnum opus under the symbol of the Rosy Cross.
Whether Rosicrucianism be of prehistoric antiquity or not, it
reached England from Germany at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century. The mystery surrounding this brotherhood and
the strange symbolism of their doctrine provoked much misrepre-
sentation, but, as most errors vaguely represent some intellectual
movement, so Rosicrucianism, though retrograde and chimerical,
is a recognition of the immaterial world and an assertion of man's
supremacy over it. With this germ of progress, the fraternity did
not lack apologists among men who could find no saner scope for
their spiritual longings. Robert Fludd mournfully reviews the
ineffectiveness and confusion of modern science, calling on his
contemporaries to turn again and study the occult meanings of
ancient philosophy. John Heydon sought to discover the secret
of healing in the forces of nature, and has left a description
of the Rosicrucian kingdom copied from the renascence Utopians
and almost suggestive of Erewhon. Thomas Vaughan, though
disclaiming all connection with the brotherhood, was yet im-
bued with the same spirit. For him, the coming of Elias meant
the advent of the heavenly alchemist who should transform the
universe into the pure gold of the spiritual city of God. For a
while, these doctrines helped to disseminate a purer, nobler con-
ception, both of God and man, and thus played a part in the change
which came over the nation in the sixties. But such a sect could
end, eventually, only in teaching self-justification and substituting
what is vague and allegorical for practical Christianity. Like the
witch terror, astrology and other relics of the Middle Ages,
hermetic and cabalistic sciences were destined to be discredited
though not effaced-in the spiritual and intellectual revolution
which they contributed, in some measure, to bring about.
1 See Waite, A. E. , The Real History of the Rosicrucians, 1887.
## p. 379 (#395) ############################################
Broadsides
379
This revolution, the advent of modern thought, took place as
soon as the people had cultivated the habit of looking at a
question from more than one point of view. The Baconians and
a few of the Theophrastians had acquired this impartiality and
reflective scepticism from the study of the classics or of Montaigne ;
but the people were already absorbed in a controversy which
appealed to their medieval instinct of unquestioning self-sacrifice
in a cause. At an earlier epoch, this obstinacy and prejudice would
have been a permanent obstacle to intellectual progress. For-
tunately, the seventeenth century was not only an age of factions ;
it was an age which kept a diary. Every outburst of folly or
hatred was printed on the impulse of the moment and scattered
through the streets. Aggregates of people are proverbially irre-
.
sponsible ; but, in this case, the national conscience was gradually
confronted with an incriminating record which with other in-
fluences shamed the people into a united effort towards progress.
The history of this mental awakening is the history of the
broadside. Ever since Tudor times, the people had been ac-
customed to see their thoughts and feelings reflected in penny
flysheets? But, despite its universality of range and immense
popularity, this fugitive literature was still an undeveloped genre.
The effusions which caught the passing attention of 'prentices,
housewives and tradesmen, at street corners and in city squares,
were addressed to narrow, preoccupied intelligences and could
never rise to the level of literature. But London was swarming
with young men of wealth or birth who, as an outcome of
feudalism, believed that only the king had a right to rule and
that gentlemen should be above every profession except that of
fighting for him. These 'Hotspurres of the Time,' as a puritan
writer calls them, amid the disorder and dissipation of London
life, claimed an interest in the literature of the moment. Even
the scapegoat of the Gull's Hornebooke5 was fashionable enough to
compose poems and criticise plays. But, though these 'roaring
boys,' 'hectors' and 'cavaliers' cultivated the clinches and con-
ceits then in vogue, much as they did extravagance of dress,
they found that the recognised vehicles of preciousness, such as
character sketches and epigrams, were too restricted, and, at the
same time, too laboured a field, to suit their full-blooded, though
desultory, attention to the arts. They required a genre which
>
E. g. Earle and Stephens.
3 Ante, vol. iv, chap. Xvi, pp. 362-3.
" Ante, vol. iv, p. 356.
2 Ante, vol. II, chap. v, p. 96.
• Ante, vol. iv, p. 355.
## p. 380 (#396) ############################################
380 The Advent of Modern Thought
would give full vent to their recklessness and animal spirits, and
they found this mode of expression partly in jest-books, but much
more in street ballads, which breathed the very essence of old
London and, almost imperceptibly, had blended with their revels
through the city.
Thus began the first stage in the development of the street
ballad. Cavaliers brought into it their dare-devil joviality and
carelessness and the wider interests of their active lives. At the
same time, the simplicity of ballad metre, adapted to a catch
melody, and the break between each stanza, precluded complexity
of thought or accumulations of periphrases. Old types of humour
still survive, such as mock testaments and burlesque laudations ;
but they take the form of rollicking songs made up of ingenious
conceits. Permanent comic characters like the miller, the tinker
.
or the beggar reappear in the shape of lyricised monologues”.
Drinking songs are plentiful, as in olden times. But, though we
still find coarse merriment over red noses and claret-coloured
complexions, though Walter Mapes's humorous touches of ancient
and ecclesiastical lore are quite discarded, and wine-generally in
opposition to plebeian beer—is frankly prized for its generous heat
and exhilaration, yet the cavaliers also sing of it as the spur to
heroic action and a solace in trouble or captivity. Besides wine,
these songs discuss women. Some recount lawless and ungallant
adventures reminiscent of the Fabliaux and jest-books; others
remain frankly goliardic in their cynical invective against marriage
or in their satire on female vanity, lust and caprice ; some others
are pervaded by the grossest sensuality. Yet, even here, the new
influence is easily recognisable. Many of these effusions are full
of the courtier's cult of the fair sex, which, though fulsome and
extravagant, was introducing new words and expressions into the
language. Even the common paramour is sometimes encircled by
a halo of poetic phraseology which hides her baseness, while other
poems, in the new atmosphere of action, breathe a manly inde-
pendence and contempt of uxorious servitude. But the elevation
of the popular song is most noticeable when it treats, in clear,
simple verse, the more serious subjects which these cavaliers
understood only too well, such as the power of money, the in-
justice of fortune or the tyranny of the sword.
For discussion of these types see ante, vol. n, chap. v, pp. 85–95, and
bibliography, pp. 482-490.
? For the development of . scoundrel verse,' see Chandler, F. W. , The Literature
of Roguery, vol. I, chap. III, sect. iv.
9
## p. 381 (#397) ############################################
Street Ballads and Pamphlets
381
By the
>
Thus, the metres and diction of popular catch-pennies had
risen to the level of educated and experienced men.
third decade of the seventeenth century, these fugitive fly-
sheets had also been called upon to serve the purpose of the
political rancour and indignation which retarded intellectual
progress and plunged England into civil war.
Once again,
the pamphleteers and ballad-mongers of the time had recourse
to old forms of literature to convey their sarcasm and in-
nuendo. For instance, one lampoon on Buckingham's expedition
to France, with the refrain 'The cleane contrary way,' is copied
from the Cujus contrarium verum est of medieval satire, and
two more, in imitation of Lucian or Dekker', are dialogues be-
tween Charon and the murdered duke. Another pamphlet,
travestying the title of a newspaper as Mercurius Diabolicus or
Hell's Intelligencer, shows us the devil, in answer to a citizen's
question, recounting the pressure of work in hell since parlia-
ment came into power; and, in 1660, when that body dissolved
itself and a general desire for the restoration of the king was
felt, a ballad News from Hell or the Relation of a Vision,
represents the devil's amazement and incredulity that England,
lately ‘His sweet darling dear,' was now proving false to her
allegiance to hell. Others, such as Heraclitus' Dream (1642),
representing the shepherd (i. e. the church) shorn by his sheep,
are copied from medieval dream-visions.
The monologue was further developed and reached a high level
of satire in such pieces as Truth Flatters Not (1647), in which,
after pope, priest and prelate have betrayed their worldly am-
bition and duplicity, each in a soliloquy, Truth censures them all
in a closing speech. Or, in Three Speeches (1642), satirising the
narrowness and self-satisfied philistinism of the commercial class,
as exemplified by 'Master Warden's' political oration to his
fellows; his wife's comments on the discourse to her friends
and the chambermaid's views on affairs in general and especially
on papistry. The old dramatic broadside is still found in A coffin
for King Charles ; a Crowne for Cromwell; a Pit for the People
(1649).
Other forms of popular literature were at once adapted to the
factious feelings of the people. In Mercurius Melancholicus, or
1
Ante, vol. II, chap. XVI, p. 386.
· The idea of a visit to hell is almost continuous in literature since Homeric times,
and had been used by Jacobean writers, especially by Dekker, T. , in Newes from Hell,
1606; see ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, p. 353, and bibliography under Dekker, T. , pp. 526, 527.
IV
## p. 382 (#398) ############################################
382
The Advent of Modern Thought
.
Newes from Westminster (1647), the old idea of a dozen arrant
fooles and knaves' is still preserved. Mock testaments were used
by both parties as at the time of the reformation', much like the
more modern 'burning in effigy,' to vilify not only persons but
causes. In the new spirit of the times, they became more like
allegories than mere lampoons. For instance, A True Inventory
of the goods and chattels of Superstition (1642) tells how Super-
stition, of the parish of Blind Devotion in the county of Corrupt
Doctrine and in the kingdom of Idolatry, bequeaths his goods and
chattels. Puritans, especially familists, constantly resorted to
their Bible to heap obloquy on the worldliness and licence of the
cavaliers. In the Dammee? Cavaliers Warning piece (1643), they
construed Obadiah's tirade against the Idumeans into a censure
of the royalist party; The Debauched Cavalier, or the English
Midianite (1642) is an attempt to discover, in the lives of king
Charles and his supporters, the enormities with which Israel's
enemy was credited: The Downefall of Dagon (1643) is the
demolition of the cross in Cheapside. The dialogue had, for cen-
turies, been a familiar form of discussion and satire, so now, many
puritan pamphlets are modelled on the catechism. Some are
serious booklets, such as The Souldiers Catechism (1644), in which
a Christian's right to take up arms in defence of religious and
civil freedom and his duty as a true warrior are taught by question
and answer. But there still lingered among the people the medieval
tendency to travesty sacred formulas, and this love of parody led
pamphleteers to vent their irony in mock catechisms as well as in
mock testaments. The most abject self-incriminations are put into
their opponents' mouths? A subtler and more mordant irony per-
vades The City Dames Petition in the behalfe of the long afflicted,
but well affected cavaliers (1647).
Certain wives of London trades-
men sign a letter begging the king and parliament to stop the war.
The document explains that the good women-true descendants of
the Wife of Bath, Maid Emlyn and Jill of Brainford—who mind
their husbands’ shops, sorely miss not only the custom, but, also, the
courtship of those gallant exquisites whose breath was 'as sweet
as amber' and whose essences made the dames' establishments as
-
1 Cf. The Wyll of the Devyll, ante, vol. , chap. v, p. 86.
. As the puritan strictly excluded oaths from his conversation, the cavalier
cultivated them. His “Damn’ was almost proverbial and is the theme of the
vindictive ballad A total Rout, or a brief discovery of a Pack of Knaves and Drabs
(1653).
3 Cavaliers' Catechisme, or the Reformed Protestant catechising the anti-christian
Papist, 1643.
4
## p. 383 (#399) ############################################
Cavalier and Roundhead Satirists
383
'fragrant as the spring's first flowers. ' The royalist party met their
opponents with the same weapons. They refuted puritan calumny
and asserted their faith in the divine right of kings by such
manifestoes as The Cavaliers Catechisme and confession of his
faith (1646), while they vented their scorn and hatred of the
parliament by representing it at prayer for release from its own
imputed sins in The Parliaments Letanie (1647). Even amid the
bitterness of defeat, the cavalier gaiety lives in these litanies ; in
one of them', supplications to avoid such afflictions as usurers,
parliamentary government and Oliver Cromwell are offered up in
rollicking verses suggestive of a drinking song.
Controversialists tended to ridicule their antagonists under
some typical name or character. Thus, we find the presbyterian
party frequently attacked under the name of Jack Presbyter or
Sir John Presbyter, just as, when the republican party rallied at
the time of the Rump, their opponents alluded to them by their
own battle-cry “The Cause? ' But, more often, the Londoner's
interest in notorieties, which had already, in less troublous times,
made household words of such characters as Hobson and Tarlton,
now created a demand for allusions to individuals. Thus, satirists
were led to cultivate the art of personal caricature and ridicule
which was soon to become the chief excellence of political songs.
There are sarcasms on prince Rupert's dog, Oliver Cromwell's nose*
and Ireton's effeminate chin. But many pamphleteers still utilised
the decasyllabic couplet which Hall and Marston had established
as the recognised vehicle of personal invective. These satirists
improved on the confused and obscure diction of their models,
but they cramped themselves in a style too staid and monotonous
for the whimsical vein of the true lampoonist. They were more
successful in the formal epigrams and elegies which appeared in
multitudes, especially to lament the death of Essex in 1646, of
Charles in 1649 and of Gloucester5 in 1660.
As the civil war was, in some respects, a struggle between
systems and institutions, many pamphleteers cared less about
· The Cavaliers Letanie lately composed by a well willer to his Majesty's person and
all his most Loyull Subjects, 1648.
? E. g. Prynne's The Republican and others spurious good Old Cause briefly and
truely anatomised, 1659.
* See ante, vol. iv, chap. Xvi, p. 360.
* E. g. A Case for Nol Cromwells Nose and the Cure of Tim Fairfax's Gout, 1648,
and The Blazing-Star, or, Nolls Nose Newly Revived and taken out of his Tomb. By
Collonel Baker, 1660.
6 See Catalogue of the Thomason Tracts, 1908, B. M.
## p. 384 (#400) ############################################
384 The Advent of Modern Thought
individuals than classes, and resorted to character sketches as the
handiest weapon for type satire. The Theophrastians' had taught
succeeding generations how to create a lifelike word-picture out
of all that was ridiculous or objectionable in any social type.
When mutual opposition made the puritan more rigidly correct
and the cavalier more aggressively self-assertive, there were
endless opportunities for crisp, concentrated portraiture. And yet,
only a few sketches, such as the versified A Puritane set forth in
his lively colours . . . with the Character of an Holy Sister
(1642) or the trenchant study The Drunkard's Character (1646)
or T. Ford's collection of clear-cut portraits entitled Times
anatomised (1647) or John Wilson's picture of purity and single-
heartedness, A New Anatomie or character of a Christian,
or a Roundhead (1645), preserved the statuesque outline of the
genre. In the heat of political conflict, men cannot detach their
minds from episodes and side issues; they need to argue over
isolated questions, and, thus, the bulk of political character
sketches digress into particulars till many of them become little
else than manifestoes or 'queries. ' John Cleiveland, who begins
his portraits with Overburian flashes of wit and fantasy, soon
forgets himself and his subject in bitter criticisms of his opponents,
in one character sketchº exclaiming: ‘But I have not Inke enough
to cure all the Tetters and Ring-worms of the State. ' So com-
pletely is the style absorbed in the heat and the haste of civil
feud, that some so-called 'characters' merely retain the title,
presumably because of its popularity.
These many types of literature were employed by pamphleteers
because the spirit of conflict was still that of the sixteenth century.
In the Middle Ages and at the renascence, controversy appealed
to men’s passions rather than to their intellect. The issues were
generally so simple that combatants had not any need to argue
deeply; but the cause lay so near their hearts that they could not
keep from obloquy. Hence, they invented a whole literature of
vituperation, so that the same insults could be repeated again and
again in new ways. The seventeenth century inherited this
armoury of invective and also their ancestors' single-hearted
eagerness to use it. Yet a large proportion of broadsides have no
peculiarity of form or style and, so far as genre is concerned,
remain street ballads. After this reversion to simplicity comes the
beginning of a great change. Even before the king's standard
? Ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, pp. 335, 342
* The Character of a London Diurnall, 1644.
7
## p. 385 (#401) ############################################
Civil War Pamphleteers 385
was raised, there were a number of level-headed democrats like
the author of The present estate of Christendome (1642) who takes
a statesmanlike view of the unrest pervading Europe and suggests
practical remedies for each country including his own. But, when -
hostilities had once broken out, the sentiments of the common
people also became more complex. A national controversy was
an interchange of assertions; but, for the average man, the civil
war was a game of chess", in which not only his opinions but
his sympathies, ideals and, perhaps, life and property, were the
pawns. Hence, while some pamphleteers were irrevocably com-
mitted to the support of one faction, others found their partisanship
distracted by all manner of calculations, conjectures and conflicting
emotions, and their broadsides became reviews of the situation?
Parodies, epigrams, testaments and portraits were not of any
service to such commentators. While Corantos, Mercuries
and Diurnalls were developing into newspapers, they wrote
their leading articles—for such is the character of these
ballads in the form of street verse, because the people, from
force of habit, still looked to this type for an expression
of their own opinions. But their work, nevertheless, is new in
spirit.
The comments and arguments of these broadsides are not
original or profound; but they show that a large proportion of the
people had become reflective. Not only ballads, but pamphlets
and tracts now adopt a more thoughtful tone and we enter on the
third stage in the development of flysheet literature. When
bloodshed had begun, the ordinary citizen also realised that civil
war was far worse than the victory of either party, and tracts
began to appear such as England's Miserie, if not prevented
by the speedie remedie of a happy union between His Majestie
and His Parliament (1642). Or, again, the leaders in the
struggle were bitterly and unjustly satirised for preventing peace
in Mr Hampden's Speech occasioned upon the Londoner's
Petition for Peace (1642) or in The Sense of the House (1643),
which put into the mouths of orators selfish and inept reasons for
continuing the war. R. W. , who had already upheld the parlia-
mentarian cause in several pamphlets, now brought the wisdom
1 The Game of Chesse, a metaphoricall Discourse showing the present estate of This
Kingdome (1643).
? See many of the pieces in Rump: or an exact collection of the choycest Poems and
Songs relating to the Late Times. By the most Eminent Wits, from anno 1639 to anno
1661. 1662. Facsimile rpt n. d.
E, L. VII. OH. XVI,
25
## p. 386 (#402) ############################################
386 The Aavent of Modern Thought
and experience of antiquity to bear on the question of actual
fighting. In The Character of Warre (1643), he discusses its
justification but observes that none delight in the sound of the
warlike Drums or in the Alarmes of Warr; but onely they who
never tasted the bitternesse thereof. ' The author of a weird
fantasy entitled A Winter Dreame (1649), describes in rhythmic
and harmonious prose how he seemed to visit the different
countries of Europe distracted by war, ending with England, the
most stricken of all. Protests are also heard on behalf of the
simpler joys of peace, but none set forth this new spirit of common
humanity more effectively than The Virgins Complaint for the
Losse of their sweethearts occasioned by these present wars (1643).
From the strenuous days of Elizabeth, the great personalities of
history had appealed to men's imagination; and now, in the excite-
ment of war, people found themselves even more in sympathy with
bygone days. The Penitent Traytor (1647), representing the con-
fession of a Devonshire gentleman condemned for treason against
Henry III, is only one of many ballads which brought the past into
touch with the emotions of the present. But the middle classes
were now beginning to think, and to turn to history for guidance
in perplexity? Thus, even at the outset of the struggle, they
welcomed such pamphlets as Some wiser than Some; or A Display
of the Times past and present, with some probable conjecture of
the times to come (1643). A growing spirit of protest against excess
runs all through this period of anarchy. In 1641, the jangle of
conflicting creeds was exposed in A Discovery of 29 Sects here in
London, and, again, in 1646, by Thomas Edwards's Gangraena.
But, among other such censures, none illustrates better the new
temper of the times than H. B. 's The Craftsmans Craft, or the
Wiles of the Discoverer (1649), which revolts not against the
number of sects but against the spirit of calumny in which they
carried on their controversies. As the fortune of war varied from
week to week, the evil effect of mendacious and inflammatory
news-sheets became only too evident. The maker of broadsides
had been an object of censure since Elizabethan times, and, just
before the outbreak of the war, an act suppressing unlicensed
printers was made the occasion for a malicious dialogue on this
needy brood? . In 1642, a Theophrastian character sketch describes
1 Cf. Morall Discourses and Essayes by T. C. , 1655. See, also, Expedients for
Publique Peace, 1660.
2 The Downefall of temporizing poets, unlicensed printers, upstart booksellers, trotting
Mercuries and bawling Hawkers, 1641.
## p. 387 (#403) ############################################
Social Pamphleteers 387
a
the ballad-monger's fiery nose and wretched drunken rimes, full
of libels and lying rumours? There is a mellower spirit in The
Great Assizes holden in Parnassus, at which the scholars of the
renascence acting as judges, the great English poets (including
Drayton, Shakespeare and Massinger) as jury, with Ben Jonson as
keeper of the 'Trophonian Denne' and John Taylor as crier of the
court, arraign these new-fledged periodicals for perverting the
truth, defiling literature, seducing readers from more serious
books and disseminating poisonous doctrines. The proceedings
are narrated in smooth decasyllabic verse, with many sly touches
of humour.
With all its errors and excesses, the great rebellion was, for
many men, a crusade against the vices of feudalism. Reforming
zeal was in the air, and, during the civil war and the protectorate,
earnest men were busy investigating social and administrative
abuses which had not been direct issues of the struggle. Contro-
versies which seem to arise in puritan bigotry, disclose a thought-
fulness and sanity quite foreign to Elizabethan exposures. The
hatred of elaborate dress, which began with the fanaticism of the
Adamites, gradually changed into a respect for the dignity of the
human form. Broadsides ridiculed fashions because they were
incongruous, and John Bulwer, in his Anthropometamorphosis
(1653), collected all the stories, ancient and modern, of savages'
adornments and mutilations, to show how men disgrace what was
made in God's image. A hatred of gluttony runs through the
paper war waged against Christmas celebrations. Puritan distrust
of women had started again the time-honoured controversy as to
feminine character; but now the dispute broadened into moral
councils on love or marriage and is free from pruriency. The
most revolting coarseness is still found, but only in diatribes
against prostitution. The greater number of pamphlets merely
ridicule the inconstancy, vanity or caprice of women. Many are
cast into the form of dialogues and epistles. And, although
humorists, in this age of constitutional anomalies, found piquancy
in picturing female parliaments and commonwealths in which
women assert their independence, the satire has lost the venom
of the preceding age.
Other pamphleteers turned their attention to abuses in the
administration of justice. The system of imprisonment for debt
had already been attacked as early as 1618 by Mynshul's curious
1 A True description of the Pot-Companion Poet, Who is the Founder of all the Base
and libelous Pamphlets lately spread abroad.
25--2
## p. 388 (#404) ############################################
388 The Advent of Modern Thought
5
Characters of a Prison"; and, in 1622, the remarkable A Petition
to the King's most Excellent Majestie had urged the injustice of
imprisoning a man because of his financial losses and the folly of
depriving the state of serviceable citizens, besides eloquently
describing the mental anguish and moral degradation of gaol life.
These evils became tenfold more apparent during the disasters
and disorganisation of the civil war. One writer2 tells how the
minor officials of the court gain access to the ear of the judge and
use their influence to further their own ends; another describes
the mercenary character of lawyers and their devices for delaying
judgment, thereby filling their own pockets; another protests
against the tyranny and exaction of gaolers. The turns of fortune,
in these insecure times, had brought many law-abiding and edu-
cated men to prison, who beguiled their weariness and sorrow by
writing. Thus, quite a literature of gaol-birds sprang up, one of
the best productions being Sir Francis Wortley's spirited ballad
on the incarcerated royalists in 1647. When the protectorate was
established, men hoped that peace would leave the government
leisure to rectify these and other abuses. Pamphlets and flysheets
on legal and prison reform now became even more numerous; and,
though these writers have neither the style nor the vigour of earlier
times, they nearly all show a sense of human rights and a practical
insight into the far-reaching effects of social evils, very different
from the narrow violence of Jacobean and Caroline pamphleteers.
Everywhere, the people seemed to feel the need of reconciliation
and fellowship. In 1647, The Cavaliers' Diurnall written by
Adventure replaced real news or invective by playful sarcasm
and literary trifling, suggestive of the Addisonian circle. Even in
A Relation of the Ten grand, infamous Traytors, who for their
murder and detestable villany against our late soveraigne Lord
King Charles the First (1660), the horror of regicide is almost
lost sight of in the cultivation of style.
Tolerance, reasonableness and sympathy were by no means
strangers to English literature; they had graced the works of
scholars and courtiers; they had shed their charm over the drama.
But it was not till the end of the civil war that the middle classes,
>
i Ante, vol. iv, chap. xvi, p. 350.
2 The Courts of Justice Corrected and Amended, or The Corrupt Lawyer Untrust,
Lash'd and quasht, 1642.
3 A Looking glasse for all proud, ambitious, covetous and corrupt Lawyers, 1646.
4 Liberty vindicated against slavery, 1646.
A Loyall Song, of the Royall Feast kept by the Prisoners in the Towre . . . (On the
occasion of a present of two brace of bucks from the king).
5
## p. 389 (#405) ############################################
The Coffee-houses
389
6
as a whole, began to outgrow medieval habits of thought and
expression and to cultivate modern 'civilitie. ' As we have seen,
this advance was partly due to reaction of sentiment, but, even
more, to a certain change in the people's mode of life. The
citizens of old London were gregarious, and, as the civil war had
been a conflict of opinions no less than of arms, they had developed
the necessity for discussion. Being careful both of their health
and of their purse, they did not like to meet in taverns, but
began to frequent coffee-houses, because a cup of the newly-
imported Turkish beverage cost only one penny and was supposed
to cure minor ailments? . As early as 1659, Miles's coffee-house
in Palace yard was the meeting place of James Harrington's
club, the 'Rota,' a debating society for the discussion of political
problems. By 1662, the Latine coffee-house, near the stocks, was
the resort of doctors and scholars, and we learn from the amusing
verses of News from the Coffee-house (1667), that, in some places,
the conversation turned on city fashions and foibles as well as on
affairs of state. In 1675, the author of The Coffee-houses Vin-
dicated expresses the true power of these resorts, when he asks
Now whither shall a person, wearied with hard study, or the laborious
turmoils of a tedious day, repair to refresh himself? or where can young
gentlemen, or shop-keepers, more innocently and advantageously spend an
hour or two in the evening, than at a coffee-house? . . . To read men is
acknowledged more useful than books; but where is there a better library for
that study, generally than here; among such a variety of humours, all ex-
pressing themselves on divers subjects according to their respective abilities ?
Thus, the middle classes had at last found a field in which it
was possible to realise Montaigne's and Cornwallis'ss ideal of
observing human nature, and a literature at once sprang up to
satisfy this new-born curiosity in the humours of coffee-house life.
The Character of a Coffee-house (1673) brilliantly describes, in
true Overburian style, the amateur politicians grouped round
some self-constituted authority and introduces a scathing portrait
of the ‘Town-wit,' the descendant of Dekker’s Gull, who interrupts
citizens' discussions with his obscenity and profane language;
1 See A Cup of Coffee, or Coffee in its Colours, 1663, and A Brief Description of the
Excellent Virtues of that sober and wholesome drink called Coffee and its Incomparable
effects in preventing or curing most diseases incident to Humane Bodies, 1674.
? See The Rota: or the Model of a Free State, or Equal Commonwealth; once pro-
posed and debated in brief and to be again more at large proposed to and debated by
a free and open society of ingenious Gentlemen. And The Censure of the Rota upon
Mr Milton's Book entitled The Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth.
Both in 1660.
Ante, vol. iv, chap. XVI, p. 344.
3
## p. 390 (#406) ############################################
390 The Advent
of Advent Modern
of Modern Thought
and, in 1677, a volume of conversational anecdotes collected at
these rendezvous was published by Roger L'Estrange! As the
coffee-houses had a mixed clientèle in which republican equality
was the order of the day, the consequent freedom of conversation
and unrestrained display of personality offered a new field for the
writer of dialogues. This genre had already become, in the hands
of such writers as Gifford, king James, Walton and especially
Nicholas Breton, a recognised means of conveying ideas to the
people, and their followers began by choosing coffee-houses merely
to give an attractive background to the discussions. The Coffee
Scuffle (1662), caricaturing a learned argument between a domi-
neering pedant and a man of the world, shows that literary
burlesque could at length find more subtle and refined material
than in the days of Barnabees Journal and Moriomachia, while
two other pamphlets3 turn an essay on popery into a lifelike
discussion between a voluble captain and a supercilious young
lawyer who meet at one of these houses. In these and other
productions of like nature, the arguers begin to be more important
than the argument. The street, the tavern and the home had for
centuries displayed the boorishness or brutality of men; but the
coffee-house revealed oddities of thought and manner far more
interesting to the modern observer. These quaint ideas and
touches of eccentricity were only to be brought out in conversa-
tion, and so the dialogue gradually became a study of character
culminating in some of Addison's charming sketches.
This friendly interest in the peculiarities of character increased
the abhorrence with which men viewed the revilings of the age
of the civil war. The age was bent on mutual respect and con-
sideration. So they turned to the study of letter writing to
cultivate a more suave spirit of intercourse. Davies describes
'the gentler art' as 'the cement of all society, the foundation
and Superstructure of all Friendship and conversation. It is
true that epistolary correspondence had been recognised as a
literary type since the renascence had brought men into touch
with Cicero, Seneca and Guevara, and that, as early as 1586,
6
3
1 Coffee-house Jests. By the author of The Oxford Jests [i. e. W. Hickes).
? See Rules and Orders of the Coffee-house, attached to A Brief Description, 1674.
A Coffee-House Dialogue, 1679, and A Continuation of the Coffee-House Dialogue,
1680.
* See J. Pettus's prefatory letter to Lovedays Letters Domestic and Forreine, edited
by his brother in 1659.
5 Dedic. to Boswell, G. , in Letters of Affaires, Love and Courtship. Written to
Several persons of Honour and Quality: By. . .
