Calamities And Quarrels Of Authors Part 17

To such an extreme point of egotism was a modest and respectable author most cruelly driven by the callous playfulness of a poetical critic, who himself had no sympathy for poetry of any quality or any species, and whose sole art consisted in turning about the canting dictionary of criticism. Had Homer been a modern candidate for poetical honours, from him Homer had not been distinguished, even from the mediocrity of Scott of Amwell, whose poetical merits are not, however, slight. In his Ambean eclogues he may be distinguished as the poet of botanists.

FOOTNOTES:

[99] So sensible was even the calm Newton to critical attacks, that Whiston tells us he lost his favour, which he had enjoyed for twenty years, for contradicting Newton in his old age; for no man was of "a more fearful temper." Whiston declares that he would not have thought proper to have published his work against Newton's "Chronology" in his lifetime, "because I knew his temper so well, that I should have expected it would have killed him; as Dr. Bentley, Bishop Stillingfleet's chaplain, told me, that he believed Mr. Locke's thorough confutation of the Bishop's metaphysics about the Trinity hastened his end." Pope writhed in his chair from the light shafts which Cibber darted on him; yet they were not tipped with the poison of the Java-tree. Dr. Hawkesworth, _died of criticism_.--Singing-birds cannot live in a storm.

[100] In one of his own publications he quotes, with great self-complacency, the following lines on himself:--

"The wits who drink water and suck sugar-candy, Impute the strong spirit of Kenrick to brandy: They are not so much out; the matter in short is, He sips _aqua-vitae_ and spits _aqua-fortis_."

[101] Dr. Kenrick's character and career is thus summed up in the "Biographia Dramatica:"--"This author, with singular abilities, was neither happy or successful. Few persons were ever less respected by the world; still fewer have created so many enemies, or dropped into the grave so little regretted by their contemporaries. He was seldom without an enemy to attack or defend himself from." He was the son of a London citizen, and is said to have served an apprenticeship to a bra.s.s-rule maker. One of his best known literary works was a comedy called _Falstaff's Wedding_, which met with considerable success upon the stage, although its author ventured on the difficult task of adopting Shakespeare's characters, and putting new words into the mouth of the immortal Sir John and his satellites.--ED.

A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR WITHOUT JUDGMENT.

Vast erudition, without the tact of good sense, in a voluminous author, what a calamity! for to such a mind no subject can present itself on which he is unprepared to write, and none at the same time on which he can ever write reasonably. The name and the works of WILLIAM PRYNNE have often come under the eye of the reader; but it is even now difficult to discover his real character; for Prynne stood so completely insulated amid all parties, that he was ridiculed by his friends, and execrated by his enemies. The exuberance of his fertile pen, the strangeness and the manner of his subjects, and his pertinacity in voluminous publication, are known, and are nearly unparalleled in literary history.

Could the man himself be separated from the author, Prynne would not appear ridiculous; but the unlucky author of nearly two hundred works,[102] and who, as Wood quaintly computes, "must have written a sheet every day of his life, reckoning from the time that he came to the use of reason and the state of man," has involved his life in his authorship; the greatness of his character loses itself in his voluminous works; and whatever Prynne may have been in his own age, and remains to posterity, he was fated to endure all the calamities of an author who has strained learning into absurdity, and abused zealous industry by chimerical speculation.

Yet his activity, and the firmness and intrepidity of his character in public life, were as ardent as they were in his study--his soul was Roman; and Eachard says, that Charles II., who could not but admire his earnest honesty, his copious learning, and the public persecutions he suffered, and the ten imprisonments he endured, inflicted by all parties, dignified him with the t.i.tle of "the Cato of the Age;" and one of his own party facetiously described him as "William the Conqueror," a t.i.tle he had most hardly earned by his inflexible and invincible nature. Twice he had been cropped of his ears; for at the first time the executioner having spared the two fragments, the inhuman judge on his second trial discovering them with astonishment, ordered them to be most unmercifully cropped--then he was burned on his cheek, and ruinously fined and imprisoned in a remote solitude,[103]--but had they torn him limb by limb, Prynne had been in his mind a very polypus, which, cut into pieces, still loses none of its individuality.

His conduct on the last of these occasions, when sentenced to be stigmatised, and to have his ears cut close, must be noticed. Turning to the executioner, he calmly invited him to do his duty--"Come, friend, come, burn me! cut me! I fear not! I have learned to fear the fire of h.e.l.l, and not what man can do unto me; come, scar me! scar me!" In Prynne this was not ferocity, but heroism; Bastwick was intrepid out of spite, and Burton from fanaticism. The executioner had been urged not to spare his victims, and he performed his office with extraordinary severity, cruelly heating his iron twice, and cutting one of Prynne's ears so close, as to take away a piece of the cheek.

Prynne stirred not in the torture; and when it was done, smiled, observing, "The more I am beaten down, the more I am lift up." After this punishment, in going to the Tower by water, he composed the following verses on the two letters branded on his cheek, S. L., for schismatical libeller, but which Prynne chose to translate "Stigmata Laudis," the stigmas of his enemy, the Archbishop Laud.

Stigmata maxillis referens insignia LAUDIS, Exultans remeo, victima grata Deo.

The heroic man, who could endure agony and insult, and even thus commemorate his sufferings, with no unpoetical conception, almost degrades his own sublimity when the poetaster sets our teeth on edge by his verse.

Bearing Laud's stamps on my cheeks I retire Triumphing, G.o.d's sweet sacrifice by fire.

The triumph of this unconquered being was, indeed, signal. History scarcely exhibits so wonderful a reverse of fortune, and so strict a retribution, as occurred at this eventful period. He who had borne from the archbishop and the lords in the Star Chamber the most virulent invectives, wishing them at that instant seriously to consider that some who sat there on the bench might yet stand prisoners at the bar, and need the favour they now denied, at length saw the prediction completely verified. What were the feelings of Laud, when Prynne, returning from his prison of Mount Orgueil in triumph, the road strewed with boughs, amid the acclamations of the people, entered the apartment in the Tower which the venerable Laud now in his turn occupied. The unsparing Puritan sternly performed the office of rifling his papers,[104] and persecuted the helpless prelate till he led him to the block. Prynne, to use his own words, for he could be eloquent when moved by pa.s.sion, "had struck proud Canterbury to the heart; and had undermined all his prelatical designs to advance the bishops' pomp and power;"[105] Prynne triumphed--but, even this austere Puritan soon grieved over the calamities he had contributed to inflict on the nation; and, with a humane feeling, he once wished, that "when they had cut off his ears, they had cut off his head." He closed his political existence by becoming an advocate for the Restoration; but, with his accustomed want of judgment and intemperate zeal, had nearly injured the cause by his premature activity. At the Restoration some difficulty occurred to dispose of "busie Mr. Pryn,"

as Whitelocke calls him. It is said he wished to be one of the Barons of the Exchequer, but he was made the Keeper of the Records in the Tower, "purposely to employ his head from scribbling against the state and bishops;" where they put him to clear the Augean stable of our national antiquities, and see whether they could weary out his restless vigour. Prynne had, indeed, written till he found no antagonist would reply; and now he rioted in leafy folios, and proved himself to be one of the greatest paper-worms which ever crept into old books and mouldy records.[106]

The literary character of Prynne is described by the happy epithet which Anthony Wood applies to him, "Voluminous Prynne." His great characteristic is opposed to that axiom of Hesiod so often quoted, that "half is better than the whole;" a secret which the matter-of-fact men rarely discover. Wanting judgment, and the tact of good sense, these detailers have no power of selection from their stores, to make one prominent fact represent the hundred minuter ones that may follow it. Voluminously feeble, they imagine expansion is stronger than compression; and know not to generalise, while they only can deal in particulars. Prynne's speeches were just as voluminous as his writings; always deficient in judgment, and abounding in knowledge--he was always wearying others, but never could himself. He once made a speech to the House, to persuade them the king's concessions were sufficient ground for a treaty; it contains a complete narrative of all the transactions between the king, the Houses, and the army, from the beginning of the parliament; it takes up 140 octavo pages, and kept the house so long together, that the debates lasted from Monday morning till Tuesday morning!

Prynne's literary character may be ill.u.s.trated by his singular book, "Histriomastix,"--where we observe how an author's exuberant learning, like corn heaped in a granary, grows rank and musty, by a want of power to ventilate and stir about the heavy ma.s.s.

This paper-worm may first be viewed in his study, as painted by the picturesque Anthony Wood; an artist in the Flemish school:--

"His custom, when he studied, was to put on a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light, and _seldom eating any dinner_, would be every three hours maunching a roll of bread, and now and then refresh his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant;" a custom to which Butler alludes,

Thou that with ale, or viler liquors, Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, and Vicars, And force them, though it were in spite Of nature, and their stars, to write.

The "HISTRIOMASTIX, the Player's Scourge, or Actor's Tragedie," is a ponderous quarto, ascending to about 1100 pages; a Puritan's invective against plays and players, accusing them of every kind of crime, including libels against Church and State;[107] but it is more remarkable for the incalculable quotations and references foaming over the margins. Prynne scarcely ventures on the most trivial opinion, without calling to his aid whatever had been said in all nations and in all ages; and Cicero, and Master Stubbs, Petrarch and Minutius Felix, Isaiah and Froissart's Chronicle, oddly a.s.sociate in the ravings of erudition. Who, indeed, but the author "who seldom dined,"

could have quoted perhaps a thousand writers in one volume?[108] A wit of the times remarked of this _h.e.l.luo librorum_, that "Nature makes ever the dullest beasts most laborious, and the greatest feeders;" and Prynne has been reproached with a weak digestion, for "returning things unaltered, which is a symptom of a feeble stomach."

When we examine this volume, often alluded to, the birth of the monster seems prodigious and mysterious; it combines two opposite qualities; it is so elaborate in its researches among the thousand authors quoted, that these required years to acc.u.mulate, and yet the matter is often temporary, and levelled at fugitive events and particular persons; thus the very formation of this mighty volume seems paradoxical. The secret history of this book is as extraordinary as the book itself, and is a remarkable evidence how, in a work of immense erudition, the arts of a wily sage involved himself, and whoever was concerned in his book, in total ruin. The author was pilloried, fined, and imprisoned; his publisher condemned in the penalty of five hundred pounds, and barred for ever from printing and selling books, and the licenser removed and punished. Such was the fatality attending the book of a man whose literary voracity produced one of the most tremendous indigestions, in a malady of writing.

It was on examining Prynne's trial I discovered the secret history of the "Histriomastix." Prynne was seven years in writing this work, and, what is almost incredible, it was near four years pa.s.sing through the press. During that interval the eternal scribbler was daily gorging himself with voluminous food, and daily fattening his cooped-up capon.

The temporary sedition and libels were the gradual Mosaic inlayings through this shapeless ma.s.s.

It appears that the volume of 1100 quarto pages originally consisted of little more than a quire of paper; but Prynne found insuperable difficulties in procuring a licenser, even for this infant Hercules.

Dr. Goode deposed that--

"About eight years ago Mr. Prynne brought to him a quire of paper to license, which he refused; and he recollected the circ.u.mstance by having held an argument with Prynne on his severe reprehension on the unlawfulness of a man to put on women's apparel, which, the good-humoured doctor a.s.serted was not always unlawful; for suppose Mr.

Prynne yourself, as a Christian, was persecuted by pagans, think you not if you disguised yourself in your maid's apparel, you did well?

Prynne sternly answered that he thought himself bound rather to yield to death than to do so."

Another licenser, Dr. Harris, deposed, that about seven years ago--

"Mr. Prynne came to him to license a treatise concerning stage-plays; but he would not allow of the same;"--and adds, "So this man did deliver this book when it was young and tender, and would have had it then printed; but it is since grown seven times bigger, and seven times worse."

Prynne not being able to procure these licensers, had recourse to another, Buckner, chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was usual for the licenser to examine the MS. before it went to the press; but Prynne either tampered with Buckner, or so confused his intellects by keeping his multifarious volume in the press for four years; and sometimes, I suspect, by numbering folios for pages, as appears in the work, that the examination of the licenser gradually relaxed; and he declares in his defence that he had only licensed part of it. The bookseller, Sparks, was indeed a noted publisher of what was then called "Unlawful and unlicensed books;" and he had declared that it was "an excellent book, which would be called in, and then sell well."

He confesses the book had been more than three years in the press, and had cost him three hundred pounds.

The speech of Noy, the Attorney-General, conveys some notion of the work itself; sufficiently curious as giving the feelings of those times against the Puritans.

"Who he means by his _modern innovators_ in the church, and by _cringing and ducking_ to altars, a fit term to bestow on the church; he learned it of the _canters_, being used among them. The musick in the church, the charitable term he giveth it, is not to be a noise of men, but rather a _bleating of brute beasts_; choristers _bellow_ the tenor, as it were oxen; _bark_ a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs; _roar_ out a treble like a sort of bulls; _grunt_ out a ba.s.s, as it were a number of hogs. Bishops he calls the _silk and satin divines_; says Christ was a Puritan, in his Index. He falleth on those things that have not relation to stage-plays, musick in the church, dancing, new-years' gifts, &c.,--then upon altars, images, hair of men and women, bishops and bonfires. Cards and tables do offend him, and perukes do fall within the compa.s.s of his theme. His end is to persuade the people that we are returning back again to paganism, and to persuade them to go and serve G.o.d in another country, as many are gone already, and set up new laws and fancies among themselves.

Consider what may come of it!"

The decision of the Lords of the Star Chamber was dictated by pa.s.sion as much as justice. Its severity exceeded the crime of having produced an unreadable volume of indigested erudition; and the learned scribbler was too hardly used, scarcely escaping with life. Lord Cottington, amazed at the mighty volume, too bluntly affirmed that Prynne did not write this book alone; "he either a.s.sisted the devil, or was a.s.sisted by the devil." But secretary Cooke delivered a sensible and temperate speech; remarking on all its false erudition that,

"By this vast book of Mr. Prynne's, it appeareth that he hath read more than he hath studied, and studied more than he hath considered.

He calleth his book 'Histriomastix;' but therein he showeth himself like unto Ajax Anthropomastix, as the Grecians called him, the scourge of all mankind, that is, the whipper and the whip."

Such is the history of a man whose greatness of character was clouded over and lost in a fatal pa.s.sion for scribbling; such is the history of a voluminous author whose genius was such that he could write a folio much easier than a page; and "seldom dined" that he might quote "squadrons of authorities."[109]

FOOTNOTES:

[102] That all these works should not be wanting to posterity, Prynne deposited the complete collection in the library of Lincoln's-Inn, about forty volumes in folio and quarto.

Noy, the Attorney-General, Prynne's great adversary, was provoked at the society's acceptance of these ponderous volumes, and promised to send them the voluminous labours of Taylor the water-poet, to place by their side; he judged, as Wood says, that "Prynne's books were worth little or nothing; that his proofs were no arguments, and his affirmations no testimonies." But honest Anthony, in spite of his prejudices against Prynne, confesses, that though "by the generality of scholars they are looked upon to be rather rhapsodical and confused than polite or concise, yet, for antiquaries, critics, and sometimes for divines, they are useful." Such erudition as Prynne's always retains its value--the author who could quote a hundred authors on "the unloveliness of love-locks," will always make a good literary chest of drawers, well filled, for those who can make better use of their contents than himself.

[103] Prynne seems to have considered being debarred from pen, ink, and books as an act more barbarous than the loss of his ears.

See his curious book of "A New Discovery of the Prelate's Tyranny;" it is a complete collection of everything relating to Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton; three political fanatics, who seem impatiently to have courted the fate of Marsyas. Prynne, in his voluminous argument, proving the illegality of the sentences he had suffered, in his ninth point thus gives way to all the feelings of Martinus Scriblerus:--"Point 9th, that the prohibiting of me pen, ink, paper, and books, is against law." He employs an argument to prove that the abuse of any lawful thing never takes away the use of it; therefore the law does not deprive gluttons or drunkards of necessary meat and drink; this a.n.a.logy he applies to his pen, ink, and books, of which they could not deprive him, though they might punish him for their abuse. He a.s.serts that the popish prelates, in the reign of Mary, were the first who invented this new torture of depriving a scribbler of pen and ink. He quotes a long pa.s.sage from Ovid's Tristia, to prove that, though exiled to the Isle of Pontus for his wanton books of love, pen and ink were not denied him to compose new poems; that St. John, banished to the Isle of Patmos by the persecuting Domitian, still was allowed pen and ink, for there he wrote the Revelation--and he proceeds with similar facts. Prynne's books abound with uncommon facts on common topics, for he had no discernment; and he seems to have written to convince himself, and not the public.

But to show the extraordinary perseverance of Prynne in his love of scribbling, I transcribe the following t.i.tle of one of his extraordinary works. He published "Comfortable Cordial against Discomfortable Fears of Imprisonment, containing some Latin verses, sentences and texts of Scripture, _written by Mr. Wm. Prynne on his chamber-walls in_ the Tower of London during his imprisonment there; translated by him into English verse," 1641. Prynne literally verifies Pope's description--

"Is there who lock'd from ink and paper, scrawls With desperate charcoal round his darken'd walls?"

We have also a catalogue of printed books written by Wm.

Prynne, of Lincoln's-Inn, Esq., in these cla.s.ses--

Before } During } his imprisonment, with the motto _Jucundi acti labores_. 1643.

Since }