No More Learning

The humanists of court circles discovered lessons of statecraft and
diplomacy in Machiavelli and Tacitus, examples of daring and
fortitude in Plutarch, and hints for wit and courtesy in Castiglione,
Cicero and Suetonius. Such reading started new trains of thought
1 West's edition of Earle's Microcosmography, 1897, intro. p. xxviii
See bibl.
3 Cf. Raleigh's comparison between Overbury's Country Knight and Sir Roger de
Coverley, History oj' the English Novel, 1891, chap. v.


## p. 343 (#365) ############################################

Origins of the Essay
343
on topics too fleeting and miscellaneous to be classified in a
methodical discourse. But, unsystematised reflection was not
the creation of the Jacobean age. Caxton's prefaces have the
qualifications of essays in criticism. While the form and style
of the medieval Exempla were serving as models for Tudor
jest-books, the apologue tended to expand into a discussion?
The writings of Andrew Boorde and William Bullein are full of
digressions on the occasional interests of daily life, and Nashe's
tracts were practically a patchwork of miscellaneous notes and
observations. The character sketch was far too restricted and
too polemical to gratify this aptitude for desultory comment; but
men of a more contemplative and less satiric frame of mind? began
to jot down their reflections and thoughts, after the manner of
eligious meditations. This habit of thinking on paper rapidly
assumed importance among the intellectual coteries of London;
manuscripts were passed from hand to hand, and the more finished
and methodical commonplace books even found their way into
prints, following the example of Montaigne (1580), from whom they
took the name of 'essay. The new genre entered timidly on its
career, the very title being an apology for its informality and in-
completeness4. The first essayist who anonymously put forth
Remedies against Discontentment drawen into severall discourses
from the writinges of auncient philosophers, in 1596, explains, in
an introductory address, that they were 'onely framed for mine
owne private use; and that is the reason I tooke no great paine,
to set them foorth anye better'; and then, after speaking of the
great moralists of the past, he excuses his own work by adding
From these faire flowers, which their labours have afforded mee, I
have as I passed by, gathered this small heape, and as my time and
leasure served me, distilled them and kept them as precious. ' In
the following year, Bacon produced his slim pamphlet of Essayes.
Religious Meditations. Places of perswasion and disswasion, in
which, among ‘Meditationes sacrae' and 'The Coulers of good and
evill,' we have a number of maxims and directions jotted down
under ten headings, possibly suggested by lord Burghley's Precepts
1 Vide the concluding commentary attached to some of the anecdotes in Mery Tales
and Quicke Answers.
? Cf. the Theophrastians' merciless caricature of the gallant with Cornwallis's
essay on 'Fantasticnesse. '
3 See bibl.
• Essay from low Latin exagium a trial or testing, Italian saggio, Spanish ensayo,
French essai.


## p. 344 (#366) ############################################

344 London and Popular Literature
or Directions for the well ordering and carriage of a man's life'.
Bacon's essays have a narrow but practical scope. They virtually
recognise the courtier's career as a profession, and show how
health, wealth and even learning, must be directed to the develop-
ment of the special qualities necessary for success. Nay, more, his
reflections shed light on the management of men, and penetrate
the cross purposes and conflicting judgments which make up the
atmosphere of the court. This side of human nature was already
familiar to statesmen, but it had never before been discussed in
maxims and rules which, if terse to obscurity, nevertheless reveal
the basis of egoism underlying a maze of intrigues and shifting
reputations.
But the scope and range of the essay had not yet been dis-
covered. Bacon's first series must have appealed to men as a manual
of diplomacy, a kind of Complete Courtier; and, for this reason, Sir
William Cornwallis's work has an importance which its literary
merit would not have justified. He produced in 1600 and 1601
two sets of essays, with some of the diffuseness, but none of
the charm, of Montaigne. He, too, discussed problems of high
life, especially the means by which men rise to prominence or
favour; and, in many places, he gives the same advice as his more
illustrious predecessor. But he has introduced a personal touch
(also a feature of Montaigne) which was afterwards to become
a characteristic of the essay. His reflections are sometimes pre-
faced by curious confidences and self-revelations which give them
the air of a diary. Again, his outlook is wider. The study of
Plutarch's Lives had given him an admiration for manliness, wis-
dom and heroism, and he examines modern character and enter-
prise from this point of view; thus showing how to use the past as
a commentary on the present. And, above all, he formulates the
new ideal? of gentlemanly culture: the man of no special science
but of liberal interests, who can turn all kinds of books, even
nursery rimes and street ballads, to his profit", talk of horses and
See bibl. The Precepts were not printed at this time, but Bacon may well have
seen them in MS.
This conception did not originate with Cornwallis, but is found underlying Lyly's
Euphues and Ascham's definition of evpuns in the Scholemaster, 1570. Vide Elis. Crit.
Essays, vol. 1, p. 1. Perhaps Cornwallis took the idea straight from Montaigne Or à
cet apprentissage (=à bien juger et à bien parler) tout ce qui se presente à nos yeulx sert
de livre suffisant ; la malice d'un page, la sottise d'un valet, un propos de table ce sont
autant de nouvelles matières. ' Institution des Enfants.
3. Of Discourse,' Pt. I.
• Of the Observation and Use of things,' Pt. I.
6


## p. 345 (#367) ############################################

Cornwallis and Robert Johnson 345
>
hawks to those who understand nothing deeper, and use all know-
ledge 'to looke upon man? '
This conception of the honnête homme, formulated thirty years
before Faret's L'Art de plaire à la cour (1630), is the centre of
Robert Johnson's reflections, published as Essaies or Rather Im-
perfect Offers, in 1601. Education is, for him, merely the training
for action; affability3, the art of concealing offence; wisdom*, the
secret of successful statesmanship. His work is more direct and
educative than that of Cornwallis. Frequently, he gives rules for
self-training in special excellence, notably in the essay on ex-
perience", with its examination of the historical lessons to be
learnt from Tacitus. But he never loses sight of the humanist's
ideal of culture. He argues that learning is no inconvenience to
the soldier, but renders him more virtuous; and, while Ascham,
Greene, Nashe and Hall? were anathematising foreign travel,
Johnson advocates it in an essay from which Bacon was not
ashamed to borrow.
The essay was rapidly becoming, instead of an established form
of literature, a collection of notes and maxims. David Tuvill
used it wherein to display amazing familiarity with anecdotes
of Greek and Roman worthies in two garrulously discursive and
unpractical volumes. Before long, the practice of detached com-
position became the object of parody—the surest sign of recogni-
tion—in such productions as The Penniless Parliament of
Threadbare Poets (1608). It blended with the collections of
characters. In the fourth edition of Overbury's works (1614),
a number of witty and humorous essays on countries, manners
and customs were added in the form of Newes. ' John Stephens,
in 1615, coupled his Characters with some verse essays more or
less in the manner of Persius, and some serious prose reflections
full of quaint illustrations of thought, in which he discusses the
claims and responsibilities of high-birth, the need of paternal
kindness, the sin of 'disinheritance' and the lessons of sympathy
and kindness to be learnt from others' sorrow. Geffray Mynshul
'
employed both fashionable types, though both inadequately, to
expose the rapacity of jailors in Essayes and Characters of a
Prison and Prisoners (1618); Nicholas Breton endeavoured to
1
2 E88. III.
3 Ess. X.
+ Ess. IIV.
1 Of knowledge,' Pt. 11.
5 Ess, v.
6
6 Ess. VIII, 'Of Art Military. '
? Quo vadis ? A Just Censure of Travell, 1617.
8 Essaies politicke and morall, by D. T. Gent, 1608; Essayes morall and theologicall,
1609.
. Ante, p. 340.


## p. 346 (#368) ############################################

346
London and Popular Literature
-
fuse the two types into one in Characters upon Essays (1615).
He chose the topics already discussed by the essayists—wisdom,
knowledge, resolution, truth, death, fear-and, in each case, wove
a few commonplace ideas into an embroidery of antithesis and
metaphor. Each essay begins with a conceited definition, which
is elaborated by every artifice of paraphrase, and then relinquished
with an affectation of courtly indifference. Thus, the essay, which
had originated as a record of informal meditation, would probably
have degenerated, for several decades at least, into a mere literary
toy, unless Bacon had shown its true scope and capacity.
Bacon's virtue consists in his style and sagacity, which is all
the more penetrating because confined to a certain range of ideas.
In the edition of 1597, he had refrained from the ornaments of
diction to be found in his earlier works, apparently because the
essays were intended only as private notes for the perusal of a
few friends. But, by 1612, the popularity of the genre and his own
reputation as the inventor induced him to revise the first series
and add twenty-eight new essays in a smoother, less jejune style.
By 1625, his final edition was complete. This collection contains
fifty-eight essays, written with a perfect mastery of language in
a spirit of superb confidence ?
The true importance of his style is to be found in its preg-
nancy. In an age of complicated and superficial verbiage, he
turns the licence of imaginative and allusive expression into
an instrument of accurate and chastened thought. Character
writers had introduced their portraits with a pointed or fanciful
definition. Bacon does the same, but so as to express an abstract
idea in the commonest objects of sight and experience. Thus,
Men in great place are thrice servants,' 'Fortune is like the
market,'Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set,' 'Praise is the
reflection of virtue,' 'He that hath wife and children hath given
hostages to fortune. ' These appeals for confirmation to everyday
facts run all through his essays. Selfish statesmen are compared
to ants in an orchard; men are bettered by believing in a God,
as a dog when he owns a master. Again, though he never con-
descends to convince, his oracular utterances are the fruit of
minute calculation ; and this scientific process appears in the
almost judicial balancing of pros and contras, as in the essay, 'Of
1 'I have read of many essays and a kind of charactering of them, by such, as when
I looked into the form and nature of their writing, I have been of the conceit that they
were but imitators of your breaking the ice to their inventions. ' Nicholas Breton,
dedication to Bacon in Characters upon Essays.
2 Vide S. H. Reynolds, intro. to Essays or Counsels of Francis.
6
a


## p. 347 (#369) ############################################

Bacon
347
Usury,' or in the methodical and detailed directions which he gives,
as in the essay Of Travel. ' His logical habit of mind has trans-
'
formed even the materials of pedantry. The numerous quota-
tions and illustrations drawn from the Bible, the classics and
Machiavelli, seem necessary to his argument, and his unacknow-
ledged appropriations from Montaigne strike one as mere coinci-
dences of thought. All forms of knowledge are subjected to the
elucidation of his views on life. The primum mobile of astronomy
illustrates “the motions of the greatest persons in a government,'
and the legend of Briareus is interpreted as an emblem of the
people's power
These excellencies were largely due to the fact that Bacon
regarded the popularity of the Essays as ephemeral and was
not posing for posterity? He wrote down simply the things which
interested himself. This spontaneity carried its own limitations.
Many of the essays are made up of extracts, compiled from his
other works, and woven together into a new whole. He frequently
misquotes or misrepresents his quoted authors; and, sometimes, he
does not adhere closely to the title of his essays. Besides, Bacon
led two lives, and in his views on worldly matters we have only
half the man: the side of him engaged in a struggle for advance-
ment. Hence, he regards life as a stage, and his meditations
almost always recur to the role which men play in the eyes of the
world. Adversity is discussed as a means of evoking the practice
of virtue ; friendship is viewed as a condition in which a man's
judgment may become clearer and his happiness more complete.
Even love and marriage are considered chiefly as an impediment
to the serious pursuits of life. But the greater number of his
‘Dispersed Meditations' deal with the immediate problem of
success : how far secrecy in dissembling will substitute an inborn
gift of discretion; whether boldness will counteract a reputation
for failure; in what way a knowledge of men rather than of books
can be turned to account in the intrigues of court life. These
speculations lead him into higher circles of government and
1 For list of plagiarisms vide F. A. F. Dieckow, John Florio's Englische Uebersetzung
der Essais Montaignes und Lord Bacon's, Ben Jonson's und Robert Burton's Verhältniss
zu Montaigne. It might be noticed, also, that the essay on death is largely coloured by
Lucretius, bk. III, and Erasmus, Colloquia Familiaria (Funus), while that on youth
and age is borrowed from Aristotle (Rhetoric, bk. II).
2 Vide quotations from Bacon's letters in English Men of Letters' Bacon, by
R. W. Church, 1892, chap. IX.
$ Vide S. H. Reynolds, ibid.
* J. Boudoin, in translating the Essays in 1640, entitled them L'Artisan de la
Fortune.


## p. 348 (#370) ############################################

348 London and Popular Literature
diplomacy, where, to penetrate the problems of statecraft, he
dispels the illusions of greatness. He fathoms the 'inscrutable
hearts of kings' and pictures their pitiable isolation and toilsome
existence. His book is destined for the commons of the realm ; so
the advice which he professes to give their rulers is really an
exposure (perhaps not intentional) of the machinery of government.
We have glimpses of the monarch seated at the council-board, pre-
paring his public utterances or choosing his favourites. The same
interest leads him to raise questions of public policy. In the essay
'On Superstition,' he marshals the chief accusations against the
Roman Catholic church; and, in treating of the greatness of
kingdoms, he does not ignore the bitter quarrel between the
peasantry and the gentry, Through every discussion, whether on
death and religion, or on gardens and masques, there runs that
sub-conscious ideal of versatile liberal culture out of which the
essay sprang.
Bacon proved the possibilities of this type of literature
as a repository of miscellaneous and desultory meditations. His
influence is seen in such men as Owen Felltham, who, endowed
with an interest in moral problems, and a certain mastery over
reflective prose, published essays from time to time. These, appar-
ently, were intended as exercises for confirming and strengthening
the writer in his own opinions, and show only occasional efforts at
an imitation of Bacon's gnomic style. And yet, Feltham's respect-
able, though commonplace, moralisations established the essay's
right to embrace even sacred topics ; especially are the virtuous
deeds of the ancients selected with no little intuition to illustrate
Christian ideals. Meanwhile, this art of extemporising modern
ideas out of antiquity had reached its highest pitch in the
desultory notes and reflections which Ben Jonson was making
out of his vast reading. In 1641, these were published posthu-
mously as Timber or Discoveries made upon men and matter.
Practically, all the ideas contained in this miscellany, from aphor-
istic jottings to continuous discourses, have their origin in some
other book. The influence of Velleius Paterculus, Euripides, Aulus
Gellius, Quintilian and Seneca are particularly noticeable? But
Timber is not a mere work of paraphrase and transcription.
Sometimes, several borrowed sentences are fused into one; some-
times, thoughts from different treatises are brought together or
sentences of the same treatise are arranged in a different order.
1 Vide bibl. for authorities who have investigated sources of the Discoveries, and
also cf. Wits Commonwealth


## p. 349 (#371) ############################################

Ben Jonson. Tobacco-pamphlets 349
The passages on Shakespeare and Bacon were taken from what
Seneca wrote of Haterius and Cassius Severus ; in another place,
Jonson condenses several pages of the Advancement of Learning
into one short essay. A sense of manly integrity, and a keen eye
to practical virtue and intelligence, guided this selection of the
world's wisdom, and the style has an almost colloquial simplicity
and directness far in advance of Bacon.
We have seen how social literature, under the influence of
classicism, grew into Juvenalian satire, character writing and
essays, without losing sight of contemporary interests. But city
life was too varied to find expression within the limits of any
literary canon, and Londoners continued to welcome any type of
tract which reflected their many-sided interests. No sooner had
the fashion of tobacco-smoking become prominent, than it divided
pamphleteers into two camps. Its supporters either founded their
adhesion on its alleged medical properties), or indulged their
literary gift in burlesque encomia Among others, an anony-
mous author, imitating Ovid, composed The Metamorphosis of
Tobacco, in heroic couplets of pleasing and harmonious rhythm.
He sings of the elements gathering in council to create a herb
of almost Promethean virtue, which Jupiter, fearing for his
sovereignty, banishes to an unknown land. But the graces dis-
cover the plant and remain so constant to its charms that mortals,
who would win their favour, must follow their example. On the
other hand, the growing insistence on good manners inspired
scathing criticisms on smoking as it was then practised. 'Tobac-
conists' were freely ridiculed by dramatists, character writers and
puritans. King James issued in 1604 A Counterblaste to Tobacco,
in which a sound if pedantic refutation of its alleged virtues is
followed by quaint but vigorous descriptions of the smoker's dis-
gusting habits. Among the many subsequent writers? who used
this theme as a whetstone for their wits, the most noteworthy is,
undoubtedly, Richard Brathwaite. Following the method of The
Metamorphosis, he works up the contention that smokers waste
their time into an allegorical romance, in which tobacco is traced
back to its origin as a son of Pluto, god of the nether world.
This phantasy is entitled, The Smoking Age, or, the Man in the
Mist (1617).
These ephemeral pamphlets are worth quoting, in order to
1 H. Buttes, Dyets Dry Dinner, 1599; E. Gardiner, Triall of Tobacco, 1610.
2 Vide bibl.


## p. 350 (#372) ############################################

350 London and Popular Literature
illustrate how varied, as well as elaborate, popular literature was
becoming. Even rogue-books began to multiply the artifices of
narration. E. S. produced, in 1597, the Discoverie of the Knights
of the Poste. These gentry were professional bailees, utilising the
name of some respectable citizen to stand surety for any criminal
who would make it worth their while. As the average law-breaker
was almost certain to be committed for another offence before the
year was out, this form of livelihood could be made safe by ordinary
precautions. Thus, the booklet is of very moderate interest. But
the style is significant. The Discoverie is a connected story re-
counting a journey undertaken by the author on foot from London
to Plymouth. He falls in with two fellow-travellers, and the trio
beguile the tedium of the way with anecdotes and personal remi-
niscences of the knights of the post. The narrative has all the
bye-play of a realistic novelette. Each of the author's companions
has his own individuality. Goodcoll is almost destitute, but trusts
to his witty tongue for escaping the dilemmas of impecuniosity.
Freeman has store of gold, and is so fond of good fellowship that
he not only claims the right to finance the party, but deviates from
his own course in order to enjoy their society. We visit the inns
at which they lodged, are told of what they drank at night, how
they slept and how they breakfasted. Freeman requests both
Goodcoll and the author to disburse small sums, since his own
wealth is in gold coin which he cannot realise till they come to
Exeter. But, when that city is reached, Freeman finds that his
store has vanished, and offers an explanation, which, apparently,
satisfies the two travellers, but leaves the reader dubious.
Authors who had been through prison now began to clothe
their experiences in varied forms. Luke Hutton's The Blacke
Dogge of Newgate (c. 1600) recounts the customs of that institu-
tion in a versified description of a vision, followed by a prose
dialogue which tells of the amateur thieves to be found amongst the
attendants of the prison. The Compter's Commonwealth (1617),
by William Fennor, introduces the humours and tricks of the jest-
books into the usual exposures of roguery. Geffray Mynshul, who
had left the debtor's prison with a lively recollection of its jangling
keys, fawning yet tyrannical warders, and embittered or reckless
inmates, actually endeavoured to give his friends an idea of these
miseries by describing them in essays and character sketches. But
1 Supposed by G. C. Moore Smith to be Edward Sharpham; N. & Q. no. 257,
11 July 1908.
2 For a fuller list see bibl.


## p. 351 (#373) ############################################

Dekker
351
the most important pamphleteer of Jacobean London is, undoubt-
edly, Thomas Dekker.
Apart from his dramatic work', Dekker stands alone in this
period. He is remarkable not as a satirist but as the first great
literary artist of London street life. He discovered how to describe
the city populace as a whole in its pursuits and agitations ; but, as
literature had not yet evolved a special mediumfor this por-
traiture, his gift finds expression only in a number of erratic
and ephemeral tracts. For instance, like other free lances, he
seized the obvious opportunity of producing a celebration of
Elizabeth's death and James's accession. He entitled this tract
The Wonderfull Yeare (1603). But the writer's thoughts are
soon drawn from perfunctory adulation to the more suggestive
theme of the plague which raged that year in London. We have
a picture of Death encamped like an army in the sin-polluted
suburbs. Its tents are winding-sheets, its field-marshal the plague,
its officers burning fevers, boils, blains and carbuncles; the rank
and file consist of mourners, “merrie sextons,' hungry coffin-sellers
and ‘nasty grave-makers'; the two catchpoles are fear and
trembling. The invaders storm London, massacring men, women
and children, breaking open coffers, rifling houses and ransacking
streets. There are passages of almost unparalleled horror de-
scribing the rotten coffins filling the streets with stench, or the
muck-pits full of putrid corpses, among which the worms writhe
in swarms. There is originality in this conception of death,
but much more in Dekker's description of the narrow London
streets at night time, filled with the groans or raving of sick men,
with glimpses of figures stealing out to fetch the sexton or sweating
under the load of a corpse which they must hide before 'the fatall
hand writing of death should seale up their doores. ' Then, we watch
the stampede into the country, and note the touches of meanness
and heroism which a commotion always brings to the surface. The
tract ends with the humorous side of the plague, discovered in
some witty though rather grim anecdotes, one recounting how the
death of a Londoner at a country inn threw the whole village into
>
1 He had already written eight plays single-banded and seven in collaboration,
besides historical works in conjunction with Drayton.
2 As we have seen, character writers sometimes described scenes and institutions.
But, before Donald Lapton's London and Country Carbonadoed (1632), none, apparently,
are touched with the fascination of London streets.
3 Cf. Richard Johnson, Anglorum Lachrymae ; H. Chettle, Englande's Mourning
Garment; J. Hall, The King's Prophecie or Weeping Joy; Thomas Bing, Sorrowes Joy;
8. Rowlands, God save the King.


## p. 352 (#374) ############################################

352 London and Popular Literature
6
the most grotesque disorder, until a tinker consented, for a large
sum, to bury the corpse.
One of Dekker's next productions? was an attempt-very com-
mon in this age--at appealing to the people by a denunciation of
sin. He adopted one of their popular allegories and, at the same
time, gratified their love of pageantry, in The Seven Deadly Sinnes
of London (1606), representing the triumphal entry of these into
the capital, each drawn in a symbolic chariot and each welcomed
by its special adherents. But all moral or theological sentiment is
overshadowed by the fascination of city life. The sins are no
longer those of the Roman Catholic church, but such as would
strike an observer of street scenes. We have 'Politick bank-
ruptisme,' the practice of merchants who pass through the court
to avoid paying their debts; 'Lying,' which begets the minor
cruelties and backslidings of life, notably oaths, which are 'crutches
upon which lyes go'; 'Candle light,' by which London streets
are illuminated like a theatre, so that merchants and 'prentices
alike are tempted to dissipation and thieving;. Sloth’; 'Apish-
nesse' or dandyism ; 'Shaving,' or the exaction of undue profits,
and ‘Cruelty, which is rampant in extortionate prisons, among
exorbitant creditors, merchants who take trade from their own
'prentices, relatives who abandon their own kith and kin in
plague-time, and fathers who force their daughters to uncongenial
marriages. While there is nothing profound or new in this view
of London life, the booklet abounds in good humour and felicitous
conceits. Above all, we have graphic views of the city, both in
the hurry and rush of midday traffic, and glimmering with its
taverns and gloaming alleys in the night-time.
The Seven Deadly Sinnes was a brilliant development of the
theme revived by Nashe and the author of Tom Tel-Troths Message
and his pens Complaint (1600). In the same year, Dekker
borrowed another idea from Pierce Penilesse. Nashe, in his
second edition, had promised to describe the return of the knight
of the post from hell. The hint was taken by 'an intimate and near
companion,' who produced an eminently insipid pamphlet in 1606.
Dekker followed this, in the same year, with Newes from Hell,
brought by the Divells Carrier. Again we see the skilful adapta-
tion of an ancient form of thought. Visions of heaven, purgatory
1 See bibl. for a list of Dekker's works, with notes.
2 Ante, p. 321.
3 The Return of the Knight of the Post from Hell with the Divels answere to the
Supplication of Pierce Penilesse, with some relation of the last Treasons, printed by
Jubp Windet, 1606.


## p. 353 (#375) ############################################

>
Newes from Hell
353
and hell had originated in paganism, had flourished all through
the Middle Ages in a Christian form and still retained their popu-
larity. Caxton had printed an English version of Deguileville's
Pilgrimage of the Soul and Machlinia had revived the Monk of
Evesham. The Kalendrier des Bergers, which contained a de-
scription of the punishments of the seven sins as revealed to
Lazarus, was frequently translated during the sixteenth century.
Ford, the dramatist, in one of his plays, introduces a friar who
gives a gruesome account of the tortures of hell, and The
Dead Man's Song treats the same subject in a broadside. 'St
Patrick's Purgatory' was famous all through the sixteenth
century, thanks to the disseminating influence of printing;
and Calderon, in the seventeenth, made it the subject of one
of his dramas. Burlesque versions of visions had existed since
Old English times, and continued through popular literature from
the Norman fabliaux to Rabelais. After the reformation, these
legends, like the sins, lost their theological significance, but the
people were still medieval at heart, and literary free-lances were
only too glad to avail themselves of the spell which visions still
exercised over the popular imagination. Before 1590%, some name-
less writer represented the famous Tarlton giving his impressions
of purgatory, and, in this form, conveyed social satire as well as a
collection of good stories. Tom Tell-Trothe's New-yeares Gift
(1593) contains Robin Goodfellow's account of a visit to hell,
and reproduces an oration against jealousy which he heard in those
regions. In Dekker's Nerces from Hell, we have a booklet full of
brilliant descriptions. The messenger starts for the nether world
through France and Venice, stopping only in London, where dis-
sipated youths call wildly to him through tavern windows, and he
hears one spendthrift, in a fit of inebriated veracity, curse the
wealthy merchant, his father, who left him money to waste. In
hell, he finds the sessions in progress and dead souls being tried
by a jury of their own sing. Before leaving, he catches sight
of several familiar types of London street life; notably a hollow-
eyed, wizened, old usurer, who offers to accept ‘any base drudgery'
if he can create an opportunity for making money. The tract also
illustrates the intellectual exuberance of the age, which, even in
burlesque, assimilated the imagery and sentiment of different ages
i Vide T. Wright, St Patrick's Purgatory, an essay on the legends of Purgatory,
Hell and Paradise current during the Middle Ages, 1844.
2 Pantagruel, Bk. 11, chap. 30.
3 See bibl. under Jest-books and Miscellaneous Tracts on London,
E. L. IV. CH. XVI.
23


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354 London and Popular Literature
and civilisations. Lucian, in Menippus, had pictured a visit to
the nether world, which Dekker had certainly read in John
Rastell's translation and travestied in his own fashion! . But the
place of torment-hideous, inaccessible, pestilential with 'rotten
vapors,' crawling toads and sulphurous stench-is still medieval,
and the caricature of the devil reflects the ribaldry of the fifteenth
century. In the following year, Dekker added a view of Elysium
and the description of a thunderstorm, caused by the conjurations
performed to summon up the knight of the post. On the strength
of these additions, the pamphlet was issued as a new publication
entitled A Knight's Conjuring.
It is not surprising that a pamphleteer with Dekker's curiosity
about life and his gift of realistic description should publish some
tracts on roguery, and, in 1608, he produced The Belman of
London, using the same material as his predecessors. In some
respects, the pamphlet is disappointing; it lacks the type of
anecdote which is attractive in Greene's work, and the character
drawing which enlivens the Knights of the Post. But the
setting has all Dekker's charm. The title suggests a picture of
city life; but the scene opens in the country, where the author,
after wandering among the serene pleasures of nature, finds him-
self in a disreputable farm-house, concealed in a gallery, watching
a ragged gang of diseased and misshapen vagabonds devour like
savages a steaming feast and initiate new members to their
fraternity. The squalor and wretchedness of these outcasts being
thus heightened by contrast, Dekker proceeds to tell us, as Harman
had done, of their orders, classes and practices. But the account
must be made attractive: so it is given by a ‘nymble-tongd beldam,
who seemed to have command of the place,' under the influence of
a pot of ale. We then accompany the author back to London and,
entering the city at midnight, at last encounter the bellman, whose
bell and voice are heard echoing along the shadowy silent streets.
This picturesque figure introduces an account of card-sharping,
shop-lifting and pocket-picking. The exposure is straightforward
and commonplace, but the style is embroidered with quaint and
elaborate conceits. The pamphlet enjoyed immediate recognition
and, according to Dekker, was plagiarised by The Belman's Brother.
Probably to anticipate further imitation, Dekker produced in the
same year a sequel : Lanthorne and Candle-light or the Bell-
Mans second Nights-walke, in which, after a number of picturesque
episodes, the devil decides to make a visit to London. We
i See bibl. for visions in classical literature, including Lucian,


## p. 355 (#377) ############################################

6
:
a
Rogue-pamphlets. Grobianism
355
accompany him on his rounds and see how 'Gul-gropers' cozen
young heirs out of their acres by usury, cards and dice; how
'Fawlconers' extract gratuities from country knights in return for
a counterfeit dedication in a pamphlet ; how ‘Ranckriders,' posing
as gentlemen, take up residence at an inn and, when a fictitious
summons arrives from a nobleman, borrow one of the landlord's
horses and do not return: how a 'Jacke in a boxe' borrows silver
on a money-box full of gold, for which is afterwards cleverly sub-
stituted one of similar exterior but very different contents. But
these are no longer mysterious deceptions which only a specialist
can detect. Exposures of villany were becoming more and more
exposures of human nature; they appeal to a curiosity about life
rather than to the instinct of self-defence. The best passage in the
book reves not an elaborate fraud which only technical know-
ledge could unmask, but the picture of an ostler slinking half
clothed at dead of night into the stable to steal a horse's provender.
It has already been shown how young men of wealth or birth
were attracted to London by the hope of advancing their fortunes
or of gaining experience. This class formed a new order in society,
without traditions, recognised status or code of manners. No
aggregate of human beings, with the possible exception of rogues
and vagabonds, seems to have attracted so much attention. Sir
Humphrey Gilbert? had suggested the organisation of a gentleman's
university, devoted to the cultivation of refined manners and
courtly accomplishments; the essayists had given much attention
to the pursuits of monied youth ; Peacham wrote a whole
book? on the subject; and, by 1633, Milton had constructed a
complete scheme of education, which should combine the soldier's,
courtier's and scholar's training all in one. But, at present, the
playhouses, drinking taverns and ordinaries of London were filled
with inexperienced boys, who had been taught something of their
duty to their king and country, but no other rules of deportment
in these novel situations than resenting an insult and holding
their own with their equals. New conventionalities had not yet
been evolved to meet new conditions, and public opinion was
content to condemn them as gulls, roaring boys, coxcombs, wood-
cocks, cockneys and popinjays. Social pamphleteers had satirised
them again and again ; and Dekker, while engaged on a translation
of Dedekind's Grobianus, conceived the idea of turning the
German's old-fashioned 8 satire on the boorishness suggestive of an
? See bibl.
1 Queene Elizabethes Achademy.
3 Grobianus was printed 1549. See bibl.
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356 London and Popular Literature
Eulenspiegel into a pasquil on the modern English type. Follow-
ing his model, he produced an ironical book of manners, entitled
The Guls Hornebooke (1609), which begins by closely following
the original, but gradually develops into an independent work.
The booklet surpasses other attacks on the gallants and fops of
the age, because Dekker has penetrated beneath their conduct so as
to satirise their motives. We see that the Jacobean gull's irre-
sponsible actions are entirely dominated by the desire to assert his
personality, and these efforts rendered odious by lack of breeding
and vulgarity of surroundings. Dekker sarcastically explains to
the gull how this ambition can be realised by his making himself
offensively conspicuous at places of public resort. Incidentally,
we accompany the young man of leisure through a typical day's
occupations, from the business of dressing to the stroll in St Paul's;
thence to the ordinary' for the midday meal; then to the play-
house, followed by the tavern and the nocturnal prowl through the
city. The book had no great sale, because the scenes were too
familiar, and the invective too mild; but, for the modern student,
no better picture can be found of Jacobean London, with its
literary cliques, its publicity and the scope it gave to the free play
of personality.
The public's insatiable demand for novelty reduced professional
free-lances to the most amazing shifts to win popularity. In this
respect, Dekker's A strange Horse Race (1613) is an almost unique
production. He begins with an account of Roman ‘pageants '(that
is, gladiatorial displays), dwelling particularly on the quips and
jeers with which the populace greeted the hero of a triumph.
These anecdotes introduce a popular encyclopaedia, in which the
knowledge of the day is vulgarised under the attractive conceit of
a race. Astronomy is taught under the guise of races of the
heavenly bodies, and physiology as the races in a man's body,
earth, water, air and fire all competing. Then there are races
of minerals ; lead striving to overtake tin, tin silver and silver
gold, which is the victorious metal, 'the eldest child of the sun. '
From the physical, he turns to the moral, world. Once more, we
have a pageant of the vices and virtues, but still in the form
of a race. The vices of an enriched bourgeoisie are pitted against
the old-fashioned virtues of modesty and contentment. Among
others, Blasphemous Insolency challenges Innocent Humility; the
temperate Spaniard races the English drunkard; epicures run
from a 'cry of sergeants'; the lawyer from his own conscience;
the vicar for four benefices, which he wants to enjoy at the


## p. 357 (#379) ############################################

Rowlands. Tis Merrie when Gossips meete 357
same time; and the tailor vainly strives to keep up with Pride. As
practically all the vices are beaten, the devil, out of chagrin, falls
so sick that he makes a will after the manner of the sixteenth
century mock Testaments!
Other writers were hardly less versatile than Dekker. Samuel
Rowlands attempted every type of popular literature except essays
and character sketches, which were no occupation for bread-
winners. As Drayton? , Nashes and Lodge* had attracted attention
by religious compositions, Rowlands began his career with The Be-
traying of Christ (1598). In this trifle, he produces fully-developed
that polished flow of verse which is one of his contributions to the
literature of his age. The other contribution, the witty portrayal
of the 'humours' of eccentricity and class spirit, is found in his
next production, The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-
Vaine, which appeared in 1600. Latinised verse was now the
fashion; so Rowlands gibbets the bad manners of Londoners under
personalities: first, in classical epigrams, which give admirable
glimpses of conduct, and then in satire of the school of Hall, in
which we have more detailed portraits. Among others, we see
the countryman filled with contempt for the citizen and led by
his arrogance to commit absurd blunders; the censorious spirit,
slovenly, poor and quarrelsome, pulling everyone's reputation to
pieces; and the two drunkards who strengthen each other in their
vice by enumerating the benefits of wine after the manner of
burlesque encomiums.
In 1602, Rowlands reverted to an older type in Tis Merrie
when Gossips meete. The gay gossip of the alehouse had been for
centuries a commonplace of popular literatures, and Sir John
Davies had brought something of that spirit into his 'a wife widow
and maid'in A Poetical Rapsody (1602). Rowlands's poem shows
us a middle-aged widow who has gathered from life a store of
worldly wisdom and a connoisseur's appreciation of burnt sack.
She meets two acquaintances, a wife and a maiden, who are re-
luctantly induced to join her in the private room of a tavern.
Claret is ordered, and the usual feminine conference on men
begins. The value of the poem, however, does not consist in the
egoistic views of these women, but in the dramatic development of
their characters. The widow, a judge of ales and wine, is inclined
to flaunt her independence; the wife is at first indifferent and
Ante, vol. II, chap. v, pp. 85–87 and bibl. , pp. 482-4.
? Harmonie oj the Church, 1591.
3 Clirists Teares, 1593.
• Prosopopeia, 1596.
o Ante, vol. II, p. 387; vol. II, p. 88, and bibl. , pp. 185—9.
>


## p. 358 (#380) ############################################

358 London and Popular Literature
a
preoccupied with domestic cares; the maid is timid and inclined
to be shocked. But, as the wine percolates through their veins,
they discuss old times and their present fortunes with the utmost
freedom. When the conversation turns from dances to husbands,
they talk faster and interrupt each other more frequently. Anon,
sausages and sack are called for; even the maid begins to put in
her say, while the widow talks so loudly that the eavesdropping
attendant bursts out laughing. The incensed lady delivers a
voluble and incoherent reprimand, and they stagger down the
stairs after a friendly competition as to who should pay the bill.
This brilliant sketch met with immediate popularity. Seven
editions were called for during the century, and Rowlands now
definitely abandoned standard literature. He turned his hand to
coney-catching pamphlets and, trading on Greene's reputation,
entitled his tract Greenes Ghost haunting Coniecatchers, in which
he contributes a few new facts to the subject, but, for the most part,
fills his pages with picaresque anecdotes of farcical encounters and
triumphs of mother wit. Then he combined the old idea of the
dance of death with the new taste for type satire in Looke to it
for Ile Stabbe ye (1604). Death is represented as threatening
a number of typical wrongdoers, each of whom has his malpractices
briefly characterised in two six-lined stanzas. Rowlands still writes
the same clear smooth verse; but most of the characters had been
the veriest commonplaces for a century. Yet there are a few
interesting figures grouped under the heading of death’s vengeance,
including the king who spills his subjects' blood to enhance his own
glory'; the miser, now distinguished from the usurer; the husband-
man who keeps almanacs to calculate the rainy weather and is
never happy unless the price of grain is highề; and the spendthrift,
blinded to the dangers of the future, who neglects his family but is
always 'a good fellow to his friend. ' In this poem, Death was
employed merely as a figure-head; but, two years later, he pro-
duced a poem directly on that subject. For centuries, death, in
popular imagination, had played a double part; on the one
hand, as a gruesome monarch, on the other, as an antic or jester.
Rowlands incorporates both these conceptions in the moral
dialogue A terrible Battell betweene the two consumers of the
whole world: Time and Death. Time and Death hold conference
on the worldly-minded victims whom they have struck down in their
sins, and review the brevity and temptations of life. The beginning
1 This idea is found in Erasmus: Bellum Erasmi, T. Berthelet, 1533.
2 Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour : the character of Sordido.


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Burlesques
359
of the poem has an almost Miltonic? grandeur. Then, suddenly,
the tone changes. Time comically complains that he is credited
with many of Death's escapades, and a dispute follows. Each
claims to be the greater.