direct, now retrograde, now _in apogæo_, then in _perigæo_, now swift,
then slow; occidental, oriental, they turn round, jump and trace
[symbol for venus] and [symbol for mercury] about the Sun, with those
thirty-three _Maculæ_ or Burbonian planets, _circa Solem saltantes
cytharedum_, saith Fromundus. Four Medicean stars dance about Jupiter,
two Austrian about Saturn, &c. and all belike to the music of the
spheres.”

Sir Thomas Browne had probably this passage in his mind, when he said
“acquaint thyself with the _choragium_ of the stars.”

“The whole matter of the Universe and all the parts thereof,” says
Henry More, “are ever upon motion, and in such a dance as whose traces
backwards and forwards take a vast compass; and what seems to have
made the longest stand, must again move, according to the modulations
and accents of that Music, that is indeed out of the hearing of the
acutest ears, but yet perceptible by the purest minds, and the
sharpest wits. The truth whereof none would dare to oppose, if the
breath of the gainsayer could but tell its own story, and declare
through how many Stars and Vortices it has been strained, before the
particles thereof met, to be abused to the framing of so rash a
contradiction.”

CHAPTER CXC.

DANCING PROSCRIBED BY THE METHODISTS. ADAM CLARKE. BURCHELL'S REMARKS
ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF THIS PRACTICE. HOW IT IS REGARDED IN THE
COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY.

_Non vi par adunque che habbiamo ragionato a bastanza di questo? A
bastanza parmi, rispose il Signor Gasparo; pur desidero io d'intendere
qualche particolarità anchor._

IL CORTEGIANO.

The Methodist Preachers in the first Conference (that is Convocation
or Yearly Meeting) after Mr. Wesley's death, past a law for the public
over which their authority extends, or in their own language made a
rule, that “schoolmasters and schoolmistresses who received
dancing-masters into their schools, and parents also who employed
dancing-masters for their children, should be no longer members of the
Methodist Society.” Many arguments were urged against this rule, and
therefore it was defended in the Magazine which is the authorized
organ of the Conference, by the most learned and the most judicious of
their members, Adam Clarke. There was however a sad want of judgement
in some of the arguments which he employed. He quoted the injunction
of St. Paul, “whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of
the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him,” and he
applied the text thus. Can any person, can any Christian _dance_ in
the name of the Lord Jesus? Or, through him, give thanks to God the
Father for such an employment?

Another text also appeared to him decisive against dancing and its
inseparable concomitants; “woe unto them who chaunt unto the sound of
the viol, and invent unto themselves instruments of music, as did
David.” The original word which we translate _chaunt_, signifies
according to him, _to quaver, to divide, to articulate,_ and may, he
says, as well be applied to the management of the feet, as to the
modulations of the voice. This interpretation is supported by the
Septuagint, and by the Arabic version; but suppose it be disputed, he
says, “yet this much will not be denied, that the text is pointedly
enough against that without which dancing cannot well be carried on, I
mean, instrumental music.” He might have read in Burton that “nothing
was so familiar in France as for citizens wives, and maids to dance a
round in the streets, and often too for want of better instruments to
make good music of their own voices and dance after it.” Ben Jonson
says truly “that measure is the soul of a dance, and Tune the
tickle-foot thereof,” but in case of need, the mouth can supply its
own music.

It is true the Scripture says “there is a time to dance;” but this he
explains as simply meaning “that human life is a variegated scene.”
Simple readers must they be who can simply understand it thus, to the
exclusion of the literal sense. Adam Clarke has not remembered here
that the Psalms enjoin us to praise the Lord with tabret and harp and
lute, the strings and the pipe, and the trumpet and the loud cymbals,
and to praise his name in the dance, and that David danced before the
Ark. And though he might argue that Jewish observances are no longer
binding, and that some things which were _permitted_ under the Jewish
dispensation are no longer lawful, he certainly would not have
maintained that any thing which was _enjoined_ among its religious
solemnities, can now in itself be sinful.

I grant, he says, “that a number of motions and steps, circumscribed
by a certain given space, and changed in certain quantities of time,
may be destitute of physical and moral evil. But it is not against
these things abstractedly that I speak. It is against their
concomitant and consequent circumstances; the undue, the improper
mixture of the sexes; the occasions and opportunities afforded of
bringing forth those fruits of death which destroy their own souls,
and bring the hoary heads of their too indulgent parents with sorrow
to the grave.”

So good a man as Adam Clarke is not to be suspected of acting like an
Advocate here, and adducing arguments which he knew to be fallacious,
in support of a cause not tenable by fair reasoning. And how so wise a
man could have reasoned so weakly, is explained by a passage in his
most interesting and most valuable autobiography. “_Malâ ave_, when
about twelve or thirteen years of age, I learned to _dance_. I long
resisted all solicitations to this employment, but at last I suffered
myself to be overcome; and learnt, and profited beyond most of my
fellows. I grew passionately fond of it, would scarcely walk but in
_measured time_, and was continually _tripping_, moving and
_shuffling_, in all times and places. I began now to value myself,
which, as far as I can recollect, I had never thought of before; I
grew impatient of control, was fond of company, wished to mingle more
than I had ever done with young people; I got also a passion for
_better clothing_, than that which fell to my lot in life, was
discontented when I found a neighbour's son _dressed better_ than
myself. I lost the spirit of _subordination_, and did not _love work_,
imbibed a spirit of _idleness_, and in short, drunk in all the
brain-sickening effluvia of _pleasure_; dancing and company took the
place of _reading_ and _study_; and the authority of my parents was
feared indeed, but not respected; and few serious impressions could
prevail in a mind imbued now with frivolity, and the love of pleasure;
yet I entered into no disreputable assembly, and in no one case, ever
kept any improper company; I formed no illegal connection, nor
associated with any whose characters were either tarnished or
suspicious. Nevertheless _dancing_ was to me a _perverting influence_,
an _unmixed moral evil_; for although by the mercy of God, it led me
not to depravity of manners, it greatly weakened the _moral
principle_, drowned the voice of a well instructed conscience, and was
the first cause of impelling me _to seek my happiness in this life_.
Every thing yielded to the disposition it had produced, and every
thing was absorbed by it. I have it justly in abhorrence for the moral
injury it did me; and I can testify, (as far as my own observations
have extended, and they have had a pretty wide range,) I have known it
to produce the same evil in others that it produced in me. I consider
it therefore as a branch of that _worldly education_, which leads from
heaven to earth, from things spiritual to things sensual, and from God
to Satan. Let them plead for it who will; I know it to be _evil_, and
that _only_. They who bring up their children in this way, or send
them to these schools where _dancing_ is taught, are consecrating them
to the service of Moloch, and cultivating the passions, so as to cause
them to bring forth the weeds of a fallen nature, with an additional
rankness, deep rooted inveteracy, and inexhaustible fertility. _Nemo
sobrius saltat_, ‘no man in his senses will dance,’ said Cicero, a
heathen; shame on those Christians who advocate a cause by which many
_sons_ have become profligate, and many _daughters_ have been ruined.”
Such was the experience of Adam Clarke in _dancing_, and such was his
opinion of the practice.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is old Fuller's observation, that “people over
strait-laced in one part will hardly fail to grow awry in another.”
Over against the observations of Adam Clarke may be set the following,
from the life of that excellent man—Sir William Jones. “Nor was he so
indifferent to slighter accomplishments as not to avail himself of the
instructions of a celebrated dancing master at Aix-la-Chapelle. He had
before taken lessons from Gallini in that trifling art.”—Carey's Lives
of English Poets. Sir William Jones, p. 359.]

An opinion not less unfavourable is expressed in homely old verse by
the translator of the Ship of Fools, Alexander Barclay.

  Than it in the earth no game is more damnable;
    It seemeth no peace, but battle openly,
  They that it use of minds seem unstable,
    As mad folk running with clamour, shout and cry
    What place is void of this furious folly?
  None; so that I doubt within a while
  These fools the holy Church shall defile.

  Of people what sort or order may we find,
    Rich or poor, high or low of name
  But by their foolishness and wanton mind,
    Of each sort some are given unto the same.
    The priests and clerks to dance have no shame.
  The friar or monk, in his frock and cowl,
  Must dance in his dortour, leaping to play the fool.

  To it comes children, maids, and wives,
    And flattering young men to see to have their prey;
  The hand-in-hand great falsehood oft contrives.
    The old quean also this madness will assay;
    And the old dotard, though he scantly may
  For age and lameness stir either foot or hand,
  Yet playeth he the fool, with others in the band.

  Then leap they about as folk past their mind,
    With madness amazed running in compace;
  He most is commended that can most lewdness find,
    Or can most quickly run about the place,
    There are all manners used that lack grace,
  Moving their bodies in signs full of shame,
  Which doth their hearts to sin right sore inflame.

  Do away your dances, ye people much unwise!
    Desist your foolish pleasure of travayle!
  It is methinks an unwise use and guise
    To take such labour and pain without avayle.
    And who that suspecteth his maid or wives tayle,
  Let him not suffer them in the dance to be;
    For in that game though size or cinque them fayle
  The dice oft runneth upon the chance of three.

The principle upon which such reasoning rests is one against which the
Doctor expressed a strong opinion, whenever he heard it introduced.
Nothing, he thought, could be more unreasonable than that the use of
what is no ways hurtful or unlawful in itself, should be prohibited
because it was liable to abuse. If that principle be once admitted,
where is it to stop? There was a Persian tyrant, who having committed
some horrible atrocity in one of his fits of drunkenness, ordered all
the wine in his dominions to be spilt as soon as he became sober, and
was conscious of what he had done; and in this he acted rightly, under
a sense of duty as well as remorse, for it was enjoining obedience to
a law of his religion, and enforcing it in a manner the most
effectual. But a Christian government which because drunkenness is a
common sin shall prohibit all spirituous liquors, would by so doing
subject the far greater and better part of the community to an unjust
and hurtful privation, thus punishing the sober, the inoffensive and
the industrious, for the sake of the idle, the worthless and the
profligate.

Jones of Nayland regarded these things with no puritanical feeling.
“In joy, and thanksgiving,” says that good and true minister of the
Church of England, “the tongue is not content with speaking, it must
evoke and utter a song, while the feet are also disposed to dance to
the measures of music, as was the custom in sacred celebrities of old
among the people of God, before the World and its vanities had
engrossed to themselves all the expressions of mirth and festivity.
They have now left nothing of that kind to religion; which must sit by
in gloomy solemnity, and see the World with the Flesh and the Devil
assume to themselves the sole power of distributing social happiness.”

“Dancing,” says Mr. Burchell, “appears to have been in all ages of the
world, and perhaps in all nations, a custom so natural, so pleasing,
and even useful, that we may readily conclude it will continue to
exist as long as mankind shall continue to people the earth. We see it
practised as much by the savage as by the civilized, as much by the
lowest, as by the highest classes of society; and as it is a
recreation purely corporeal, and perfectly independent of mental
qualification, or refinement, all are equally fitted for enjoying it:
it is this probably which has occasioned it to become universal. All
attempts therefore at rendering any exertion of the mind necessary to
its performance, are an unnatural distortion of its proper and
original features. Grace and ease of motion are the extent of its
perfection; because these are the natural perfections of the human
body. Every circumstance and object by which man is surrounded may be
viewed in a philosophical light; and thus viewed, dancing appears to
be a recreative mode of exercising the body and keeping it in health,
the means of shaking off spleen, and of expanding one of the best
characters of the heart,—the social feeling. When it does not affect
this, the fault is not in the dance, but in the dancer; a perverse
mind makes all things like itself. Dancing and music, which appears to
be of equal antiquity, and equally general among mankind, are
connected together only by a community of purpose: what one is for the
body, the other is for the mind.”

The Doctor had come to a conclusion not unlike this traveller's
concerning dancing,—he believed it to be a manifestation of that
instinct by which the young are excited to wholesome exercise, and by
which in riper years harmless employment is afforded for superfluous
strength and restless activity. The delight which girls as well as
boys take in riotous sports were proof enough, he said, that Nature
had not given so universal an inclination without some wise purpose.
An infant of six months will ply its arms and legs in the cradle, with
all its might and main, for joy,—this being the mode of dancing at
that stage of life. Nay, he said, he could produce grave authorities
on which casuists would pronounce that a probable belief might be
sustained, to prove that it is an innate propensity and of all
propensities the one which has been developed in the earliest part of
mortal existence; for it is recorded of certain Saints, that on
certain holidays, dedicated either to the mystery, or to the heavenly
patron under whose particular patronage they were placed, they danced
before they were born, a sure token or presage of their future
holiness and canonization, and a not less certain proof that the love
of dancing is an innate principle.

  Lovest thou Music?
                Oh, 'tis sweet!
  What's dancing?
                E'en the mirth of feet.[2]

[Footnote 2: From a Masque quoted by D'ISRAELI.]

CHAPTER CXCI.

A SERIOUS WORD IN SAD APOLOGY FOR ONE OF THE MANY FOOLISH WAYS IN
WHICH TIME IS MIS-SPENT.

  Time as he passes us, has a dove's wing,
  Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound;
  But the World's Time, is Time in masquerade!
  Their's, should I paint him, has his pinions fledged,
  With motley plumes; and where the peacock shews
  His azure eyes, is tinctured black and red
  With spots quadrangular of diamond form,
  Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife,
  And spades, the emblem of untimely graves.

COWPER.

Hunting, gaming and dancing are three propensities to which men are
inclined equally in the savage and in the civilized,—in all stages of
society from the rudest to the most refined, and in all its grades;
the Doctor used to say they might be called semi-intellectual. The
uses of hunting are obvious wherever there are wild animals which may
be killed for food, or beasts of prey which for our own security it is
expedient to destroy.

Indeed because hunting, hawking and fishing (all which according to
Gwillim and Plato are comprised in the term Venation) tend to the
providing of sustenance for man, Farnesius doth therefore account them
all a species of agriculture. The great heraldic author approves of
this comprehensive classification. But because the more heroic hunting
in which danger is incurred from the strength and ferocity of the
animals pursued, hath a resemblance of military practice, he delivers
his opinion that “this noble kind of venation is privileged from the
title of an Illiberal Art, being a princely and generous exercise; and
those only, who use it for a trade of life, to make sure thereof, are
to be marshalled in the rank of mechanics and illiberal artizans.” The
Doctor admired the refinement of these authors, but he thought that
neither lawful sporting, nor poaching could conveniently be
denominated agricultural pursuits.

He found it not so easy to connect the love of gaming with any
beneficial effect; some kind of mental emotion however, he argued, was
required for rendering life bearable by creatures with whom sleep is
not so compleatly an act of volition, that like dogs they can lie down
and fall asleep when they like. For those persons therefore who are
disposed either by education, capacity, or inclination to make any
worthier exertion of their intellectual faculties, gaming, though
infinitely dangerous as a passion, may be useful as a pastime. It has
indeed a strong tendency to assume a dangerous type, and to induce as
furious an excitement as drunkenness in its most ferocious form, but
among the great card-playing public of all nations, long experience
has produced an effect in mitigating it analogous to what the practice
of inoculation has effected upon the small-pox. Vaccination would have
afforded our philosopher a better illustration if it had been brought
into notice during his life.

Pope has assigned to those women who neither toil or spin, “an old age
of cards,” after “a youth of pleasure.” This perhaps is not now so
generally the course of female life, in a certain class and under
certain circumstances, as it was in his days and in the Doctor's. The
Doctor, certainly was of opinion that if the senescent spinsters and
dowagers within the circle of his little world, had not their cards as
duly as their food, many of them would have taken to something worse
in their stead. They would have sought for the excitement which they
now found at the whist or quadrille table, from the bottle, or at the
Methodist Meeting. In some way or other, spiritual or spirituous they
must have had it;[1] and the more scandalous of these ways was not
always that which would occasion the greatest domestic discomfort, or
lead to the most injurious consequences. Others would have applied to
him for relief from maladies which by whatever names they might be
called, were neither more nor less than the effect of that _tædium
vitæ_ which besets those who having no necessary employment have not
devised any for themselves. And when he regarded the question in this
light he almost doubted whether the invention of cards had not been
more beneficial than injurious to mankind.

[Footnote 1: It happened during one of the lamented Southey's visits
here at the Vicarage, West-Tarring, that a cargo of spirits was run
close by. His remark was—“Better spirituous smuggling than spiritual
pride.”]

It was not with an unkind or uncharitable feeling, still less with a
contemptuous one that Anne Seward mentioning the death of a lady “long
invalid and far advanced in life,” described her as “a civil social
being, whose care was never to offend; who had the spirit of a
gentlewoman in never doing a mean thing, whose mite was never withheld
from the poor; and whose inferiority of understanding and knowledge
found sanctuary at the card-table, that universal leveller of
intellectual distinctions.” Let not such persons be despised in the
pride of intellect! Let them not be condemned in the pride of self
righteousness!

“Our law,” says the Puritan Matthew Mead, “supposes all to be of some
calling, not only men but women, and the young ladies too; and
therefore it calls them during their virgin state spinsters. But alas,
the viciousness and degeneracy of this age hath forfeited the title.
Many can _card_, but few can spin; and therefore you may write them
_carders_, _dancers_, _painters_, _ranters_, _spenders_, rather than
spinsters. Industry is worn out by pride and delicacy; the comb and
the looking-glass possess the place and the hours of the spindle and
the distaff; and their great business is to curl the locks, instead of
twisting wool and flax. So that both male and females are prepared for
all ill impressions by the mischief of an idle education.”

“There is something strange in it,” says Sterne, “that life should
appear so short _in the gross_, and yet so long _in the detail_.
Misery may make it so, you'll say;—but we will exclude it,—and still
you'll find, though we all complain of the shortness of life what
numbers there are who seem quite overstocked with the days and hours
of it, and are constantly sending out into the highways and streets of
the city, to compel guests to come in, and take it off their hands: to
do this with ingenuity and forecast, is not one of the least arts and
business of life itself; and they who cannot succeed in it, carry as
many marks of distress about them, as bankruptcy itself could wear. Be
as careless as we may, we shall not always have the power,—nor shall
we always be in a temper to let the account run thus. When the blood
is cooled, and the spirits which have hurried us on through half our
days before we have numbered one of them, are beginning to
retire;—then wisdom will press a moment to be heard,—afflictions, or a
bed of sickness will find their hours of persuasion:—and should they
fail, there is something yet behind:—old age will overtake us at the
last, and with its trembling hand, hold up the glass to us.”

CHAPTER CXCII.

MORE OF THE DOCTOR'S PHILOSOPHY, WHICH WILL AND WILL NOT BE LIKED BY
THE LADIES, AND SOME OF THE AUTHOR'S WHICH WILL AND WILL NOT BY THE
GENTLEMEN. THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO COUNT CASTIGLIONE, AND TO SIR
JOHN CHEKE.

              _Ou tend l'auteur à cette heure?
   Que fait-il? Revient-il? Va-t-il? Ou s'il demeure?_

                        L'AUTEUR.

  _Non, je ne reviens pas, car je n'ai pas été;
   Je ne vais pas aussi, car je suis arrété;
   Et ne demeure point, car, tout de ce pas même
   Je pretens m'en aller._

MOLIERE.

The passage with which the preceding Chapter is concluded, is
extracted from Sterne's Sermons, one of those discourses in which he
tried the experiment of adapting the style of Tristram Shandy to the
pulpit;—an experiment which proved as unsuccessful as it deserved to
be. Gray however thought these sermons were in the style which in his
opinion was most proper for the pulpit, and that they showed “a very
strong imagination and a sensible head. But you see him, he adds,
often tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his
perriwig in the face of his audience.”

The extract which has been set before the reader is one of those
passages which bear out Gray's judgement; it is of a good kind, and in
its kind so good, that I would not weaken its effect, by inserting too
near it the following Epigram from an old Magazine, addressed to a
lady passionately fond of cards.

  Thou, whom at length incessant gaming dubs,
  Thrice honourable title! Queen of Clubs,
  Say what vast joys each winning card imparts,
  And that, too justly, called the King of Hearts.
  Say, when you mourn of cash and jewels spoil'd,
  May not the thief be Knave of Diamonds stil'd?
  One friend, howe'er, when deep remorse invades,
  Awaits thee Lady; 'tis the Ace of Spades!

It has been seen that the Doctor looked upon the love of gaming as a
propensity given us to counteract that indolence which if not thus
amused, would breed for itself both real and imaginary evils. And
dancing he thought was just as useful in counteracting the factitious
inactivity of women in their youth, as cards are for occupying the
vacuity of their minds at a later period. Of the three
semi-intellectual propensities, as he called them which men are born
with, those for hunting and gaming are useful only in proportion, as
the earth is uncultivated, and those by whom it is inhabited. In a
well ordered society there would be no gamblers, and the Nimrods of
such a society, must like the heroes in Tongataboo, be contented with
no higher sport than rat-catching: but dancing will still retain its
uses. It will always be the most graceful exercise for children at an
age when all that they do is graceful; and it will always be that
exercise which can best be regulated for them, without danger of their
exerting themselves too much, or continuing in it too long. And for
young women in a certain rank, or rather region of life,—the temperate
zone of society,—those who are above the necessity of labour, and
below the station in which they have the command of carriages and
horses,—that is for the great majority of the middle class;—it is the
only exercise which can animate them to such animal exertion as may
suffice

  “To give the blood its natural spring and play.”[1]

[Footnote 1: SOUTHEY.]

Mr. Coleridge says (in his Table Talk) “that the fondness for dancing
in English women is the reaction of their reserved manners: it is the
only way in which they can throw themselves forth in natural liberty.”
But the women are not more fond of it in this country, than they are
in France and Spain. There can be no healthier pastime for them, (as
certainly there is none so exhilarating, and exercise unless it be
exhilarating is rarely healthful)—provided,—and upon this the Doctor
always insisted,—provided it be neither carried on in hot rooms, nor
prolonged to late hours. They order these things, he used to say,
better in France; they order them better indeed anywhere than in
England, and there was a time when they were ordered better among
ourselves.

“The youth of this city,” says the honest old chronicler and historian
of the metropolis his native place, “used on holidays, after evening
prayers, to exercise their basters and bucklers, at their master's
doors; and the maidens, one of them playing on a timbrel, to dance for
garlands hanged athwart the streets, which open pastimes in my youth,
being now suppressed, worser practises within doors are to be feared.”

Every one who is conversant with the Middle Ages, and with the
literature of the reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles I. must have
perceived in how much kindlier relations the different classes of
society existed toward each other in those days than they have since
done. The very word independence had hardly found a place in the
English language, or was known only as denoting a mischievous heresy.
It is indeed, as one of our most thoughtful contemporaries has well
said, an “unscriptural word,”—and “when applied to man, it directly
contradicts the first and supreme laws of our nature; the very essence
of which is universal dependence upon God, and universal
interdependence on one another.”

The Great Rebellion dislocated the relations which had for some
centuries thus happily subsisted; and the money getting system which
has long been the moving principle of British society, has, aided by
other injurious influences, effectually prevented the recovery which
time, and the sense of mutual interest, and mutual duty, might
otherwise have brought about. It was one characteristic of those old
times, which in this respect deserve to be called good, that the
different classes participated in the enjoyments of each other. There
were the religious spectacles, which, instead of being reformed and
rendered eminently useful as they might have been, were destroyed by
the brutal spirit of puritanism. There were the Church festivals, till
that same odious spirit endeavoured to separate, and has gone far
toward separating, all festivity from religion. There were tournaments
and city pageants at which all ranks were brought together: they are
now brought together only upon the race-course. Christmas Mummers have
long ceased to be heard of. The Morris dancers have all but
disappeared even in the remotest parts of the kingdom. I know not
whether a May-pole is now to be seen. What between manufactures and
methodism England is no longer the merry England which it was once a
happiness and an honour to call our country. Akenside's words “To the
Country Gentlemen of England,” may be well remembered.

    And yet full oft your anxious tongues complain
    That lawless tumult prompts the rustic throng;
    That the rude Village-inmates now disdain
    Those homely ties which rul'd their fathers long.
    Alas, your fathers did by other arts
    Draw those kind ties around their simple hearts.
    And led in other paths their ductile will;
    By succour, faithful counsel, courteous cheer,
    Won them their ancient manners to revere,
  To prize their countries peace and heaven's due rites fulfil.

My friend saw enough of this change in its progress to excite in him
many melancholy forebodings in the latter part of his life. He knew
how much local attachment was strengthened by the recollection of
youthful sports and old customs; and he well understood how little men
can be expected to love their country, who have no particular
affection for any part of it. Holidays he knew attached people to the
Church, which enjoined their observance; but he very much doubted
whether Sunday Schools would have the same effect.

In Beaumont and Fletcher's Play of the Prophetess, the countrymen
discourse concerning the abdicated Emperor who has come to reside
among them. One says to the other,

  Do you think this great man will continue here?

the answer is

  Continue here? what else? he has bought the great farm;
  A great man[2] with a great inheritance
  And all the ground about it, all the woods too
  And stock'd it like an Emperor. Now all our sports again
  And all our merry gambols, our May Ladies,
  Our evening dances on the green, our songs,
  Our holiday good cheer; our bagpipes now, boys,
  Shall make the wanton lasses skip again,
  Our sheep-shearings and all our knacks.

[Footnote 2: Southey has inserted a query here. “Qy Manor or Mansion.”
It is usually printed as in the text.—See Act v. Sc. iii.]

It is said however in the _Cortegiano, che non saria conveniente che
un gentilhuomo andasse ad honorare con la persona sua una festa di
contado, dove i spettatori, et i compagni fussero gente ignobile._
What follows is curious to the history of manners. _Disse allhor' il
S. Gasparo Pallavicino, nel paese nostro di Lombardia non s'hanno
queste rispetti: anzi molti gentil'huomini giovani trovansi, che le
feste ballano tuttol' di nel Sole co i villani, et con esti giocano a
lanciar la barra, lottare, correre et saltare; et io non credo che sia
male, perche ivi non si fa paragone della nobiltà, ma della forza, e
destrezza, nelle quai cose spesso gli huomini di villa non vaglion
meno che i nobili; et par che que quella domestichezza habbia in se
una certa liberalità amabile._—An objection is made to this; _Quel
ballar nel Sole, rispose M. Federico, a me non piace per modo alcuno;
ne so che guadagno vi si trovi. Ma chi vuol pur lottar, correr et
saltar co i villani, dee (al parer mio) farlo in modo di provarsi, et
(come si suol dir) per gentilezza, non per contender con loro, et dee
l'huomo esser quasi sicuro di vincere; altramente non vi si metta;
perche sta troppo male, et troppo è brutta cosa, et fuor de la dignità
vedere un gentilhuomo vinto da un villano, et massimamente alla lotta;
però credo io che sia ben astenersi almano in presentia di molti,
perche il guadagno nel vincere è pochissimo, et la perdita nell' esse
vinto è grandissima._

That is, in the old version of Master Thomas Hoby; “it were not meet
that a gentleman should be present in person, and a doer in such a
matter in the country, where the lookers-on and the doers were of a
base sort. Then said the Lord Gasper Pallavicino, in our country of
Lombardy these matters are not passed upon; for you shall see there
young gentlemen, upon the holydays, come dance all the day long in the
sun with them of the country, and pass the time with them in casting
the bar, in wrestling, running and leaping. And I believe it is not
ill done; for no comparison is there made of nobleness of birth, but
of force and slight; in which things many times the men of the country
are not a whit inferior to gentlemen: and it seemeth this familiar
conversation containeth in it a certain lovely freeness.” “The dancing
in the sun,” answered Sir Frederick, “can I in no case away withal;
and I cannot see what a man shall gain by it. But whoso will wrestle,
run and leap with men of the country, ought, in my judgement, to do it
after a sort; to prove himself, and (as they are wont to say) for
courtesy, not to try mastery with them. And a man ought (in a manner)
to be assured to get the upper hand, else let him not meddle withal;
for it is too ill a sight, and too foul a matter, and without
estimation, to see a gentleman overcome by a carter, and especially in
wrestling. Therefore I believe it is well done to abstain from it, at
the leastwise in the presence of many; if he be overcome, his gain is
small, and his loss in being overcome very great.”

This translation is remarkable for having a Sonnet, or more correctly
speaking, a quatorzain by Sackville prefixed to it, and at the end of
the volume a letter of Sir John Cheke's to the translator, curious for
its peculiar spelling, and for the opinion expressed in it that our
language ought as much as possible to be kept pure and unmixed.

“I have taken sum pain,” he says, “at your request, cheflie in your
preface; not in the reading of it, for that was pleasaunt unto me,
boath for the roundnes of your saienges and welspeakinges of the saam,
but in changing certein wordes which might verie wel be let aloan, but
that I am verie curious in mi freendes matters, not to determijn, but
to debaat what is best. Whearin I seek not the bestnes haplie bi
truth, but bi mijn own phansie and sheo of goodnes.

“I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and
pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges; wherein if
we take not heed bi tijm, ever borowing and never payeng, she shall be
fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tung naturallie
and praiseablie utter her meaning, when she boroweth no conterfectness
of other tunges to attire her self withall, but useth plainlie her own
with such shift as nature, craft, experiens, and folowing of other
excellent doth lead her unto; and if she went at ani tijm (as being
unperfight she must) yet let her borow with suche bashfulnes, that it
mai appear, that if either the mould of our own tung could serve us to
fascion a woord of our own, or if the old denisoned wordes could
content and ease this neede, we wold not boldly venture of unknoven
wordes. This I say, not for reproof of you, who have scarslie and
necessarily used, whear occasion serveth, a strange word so, as it
seemeth to grow out of the matter and not to be sought for; but for
mijn our defens, who might be counted overstraight a deemer of
thinges, if I gave not thys accompt to you, my freend and wijs, of mi
marring this your handiwork.

“But I am called awai. I prai you pardon mi shortnes; the rest of my
saienges should be but praise and exhortacion in this your doinges,
which at moar leisor I shold do better.

  From my house in Wood street

  the 16 of July 1557.

                      Yours assured

                             JOAN CHEEK.”

Sir John Cheke died about two months after the date of this letter:
and Hoby's translation was not published till 1561, because “there
were certain places in it, which of late years being misliked of some
that had the perusing of it, the Author thought it much better to keep
it in darkness a while, then to put it in light, imperfect, and in
piecemeal, to serve the time.” The book itself had been put in the
list of prohibited works, and it was not till 1576 that the Conte
Camillo Castiglione, the author's son, obtained permission to amend
the obnoxious passages and publish an expurgated edition.

It would have vexed Sir John if he had seen with how little care the
printer, and his loving friend Master Hoby observed his system of
orthography, in this letter. For he never used the final e unless when
it is sounded, which he denoted then by doubling it; he rejected the
y, wrote u when it was long, with a long stroke over it, doubled the
other vowels when they were long, and threw out all letters that were
not pronounced. No better system of the kind has been proposed, and
many worse. Little good would have been done by its adoption, and much
evil, if the translators of the Bible had been required to proceed
upon his principle of using no words but such as were true English of
Saxon original. His dislike of the translation for corrupting as he
thought the language into vocables of foreign growth, made him begin
to translate the New Testament in his own way. The Manuscript in his
own hand, as far as it had proceeded, is still preserved at Bene't
College,[3] and it shows that he found it impracticable to observe his
own rule. But though as a precisian he would have cramped and
impoverished the language, he has been praised for introducing a short
and expressive style, avoiding long and intricate periods, and for
bringing “fair and graceful writing into vogue;” he wrote an excellent
hand himself, and it is said that all the best scholars in those times
followed his example, “so that fair writing and good learning seemed
to commence together.”

[Footnote 3: This has been since printed with a good Glossary by the
Rev. James Goodwin, Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi Coll.
Cambridge, and is very curious. All that remains is the Gospel
according to St. Matthew. As an instance of Cheke's Englishisms I may
refer to the rendering of _προσήλυτον_ in c. xxiij. _v._ 15, by
_freschman_. Some little of the MS. is lost.—See Preface, p. 10.]

O Soul of Sir John Cheke, thou wouldst have led me out of my way, if
that had been possible,—if my ubiety did not so nearly resemble
ubiquity, that in Anywhereness and Everywhereness I know where I am,
and can never be lost till I get out of Whereness itself into Nowhere.

CHAPTER CXCIII.

MASTER THOMAS MACE, AND THE TWO HISTORIANS OF HIS SCIENCE, SIR JOHN
HAWKINS AND DR. BURNEY. SOME ACCOUNT OF THE OLD LUTANIST AND OF HIS
“MUSIC'S MONUMENT.”

  This Man of Music hath more in his head
  Than mere crotchets.

SIR W. DAVENANT.

Thou wast informed, gentle Reader, in the third Volume and at the two
hundred and sixth page of this much-hereafter-to-be-esteemed Opus,
that a _Tattle de Moy_ was a new-fashioned thing in the Year of our
Lord 1676. This was on the authority of the good old Lutanist, whom, I
then told you, I took leave of but for a while, bethinking me of
Pope's well known lines,

  But all our praises why should Lords engross?
  Rise, honest Muse! and sing the MAN OF ROSS.

And now gentle reader, seeing that whether with a consciousness of
second sight or not, Master Mace, praiseworthy as the Man of Ross, has
so clearly typified my Preludes and Voluntaries, my grave Pavines and
graver Galliards, my Corantoes and Serabands, my Chichonas, and above
all my Tattle-de-Moys, am I not bound in gratitude to revive the
memory of Master Mace; or rather to extend it and make him more fully
and more generally known than he has been made by the two historians
of his science Sir John Hawkins and Dr. Burney. It is to the honour of
both these eminent men, who have rendered such good services to that
science, and to the literature of their country, that they should have
relished the peculiarities of this simple-hearted old lutanist. But it
might have been expected from both; for Dr. Burney was as
simple-hearted himself, and as earnestly devoted to the art: and Sir
John who delighted in Ignoramus and in Izaak Walton, could not fail to
have a liking for Thomas Mace.

“Under whom he was educated,” says Sir John, “or by what means he
became possessed of so much skill in the science of music, as to be
able to furnish out matter for a folio volume, he has no where
informed us; nevertheless his book contains so many particulars
respecting himself, and so many traits of an original and singular
character, that a very good judgement may be formed both of his temper
and ability. With regard to the first, he appears to have been an
enthusiastic lover of his art; of a very devout and serious turn of
mind; and cheerful and good humoured under the infirmities of age, and
the pressure of misfortunes. As to the latter his knowledge of music
seems to have been confined to the practice of his own instrument; and
so much of the principles of the science as enabled him to compose for
it; but for his style in writing he certainly never had his fellow.”

This is not strictly just as relating either to his proficiency in
music, or his style as an author. Mace says of himself, “having said
so much concerning the lute, as also taken so much pains in laying
open all the hidden secrets thereof, it may be thought I am so great a
lover of it, that I make light esteem of any other instrument besides;
which truly I do not; but love the viol in a very high degree; yea
close unto the lute; and have done much more, and made very many more
good and able proficients upon it, than ever I have done upon the
lute. And this I shall presume to say, that if I excel in either, it
is most certainly upon the viol. And as to other instruments, I can as
truly say, I value every one that is in use, according to its due
place; as knowing and often saying, that all God's creatures are good;
and all ingenuities done by man, are signs, tokens, and testimonies of
the wisdom of God bestowed upon man.”

So also though it is true that Thomas Mace stands distinguished among
the writers on Music, yet it could be easy to find many fellows for
him as far as regards peculiarity of style. A humourist who should
collect odd books might form as numerous a library, as the man of
fastidious taste who should confine his collection to such works only
as in their respective languages were esteemed classical. “The
singularity of his style,” says Sir John, “remarkable for a profusion
of epithets and words of his own invention, and tautology without end,
is apt to disgust such as attend less to the matter than manner of his
book; but in others it has a different effect; as it exhibits, without
the least reserve all the particulars of the author's character, which
was not less amiable than singular.”—“The vein of humour that runs
through it presents a lively portraiture of a good-natured, gossipping
old man, virtuous and kind-hearted.”—The anxious “precision with which
he constantly delivers himself, is not more remarkable than his eager
desire to communicate to others all the knowledge he was possessed of,
even to the most hidden secrets.”—“The book breathes throughout a
spirit of devotion; and, agreeable to his sentiments of music is a
kind of proof that his temper was improved by the exercise of his
profession.”—There is no pursuit by which, if it be harmless in
itself, a man may not be improved in his moral as well as in his
intellectual nature, provided it be followed for its own sake: but
most assuredly there is none however intrinsically good, or beneficial
to mankind, from which he can desire any moral improvement, if his
motive be either worldly ambition, or the love of gain.—_Ἀδύνατον ἐκ
φαύλης ἀφορμῆς ἐπὶ τὸ τέλος ἐυδραμεῖν._[1]

[Footnote 1: IAMBLICHUS.]

To give an account of “Music's Monument,” which Dr. Burney calls a
matchless book, not to be forgotten among the curiosities of the
seventeenth century! will be to give the character of Thomas Mace
himself, for no author ever more compleatly embodied his own spirit in
his writings.

It is introduced with an Epistle Dedicatory, which by an easy
misrepresentation has been made to appear profane.

  To Thee, One-Only-Oneness, I direct
  My weak desires and works.
  Thou only art The Able True Protector;
  Oh be my shield, defender and director,
  Then sure we shall be safe.
  Thou know'st, O Searcher of all hearts how I,
  With right, downright, sincere sincerity,
  Have longed long to do some little good,
  (According to the best I understood)
  With thy rich talent, though by me made poor,
  For which I grieve, and will do so no more,
  By thy good Grace assisting, which I do
  Most humbly beg for. Oh, adjoin it to
  My longing ardent soul; and have respect
  To this my weak endeavour, and accept,
  In thy great mercy, both of it and me,
  Even as we dedicate ourselves to Thee.

An Epistle, in verse, follows “to all Divine Readers, especially those
of the Dissenting Ministry, or Clergy, who want not only skill, but
good will to this most excelling part of divine service, viz. singing
of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, to the praise of the Almighty,
in the public Assemblies of his Saints: and yet more particularly, to
all great and high Persons, Supervisors, Masters, or Governors of the
Church, (if any such there should be) wanting skill, or good will
thereunto.”

He says to those “high men of honour,” that

                   Example is the thing;
   There's but one way, which is yourselves to sing.
   This sure will do it; for when the vulgar see
   Such worthy presidents their leaders be,
   Who exercise therein and lead the van,
   They will be brought to't, do they what they can.
   But otherwise for want of such example,
   Tis meanly valued, and on it they trample;
   And by that great defect, so long unsought,
   Our best Church Music's well-nigh brought to nought.
                      Besides,
   No robes adorn high persons like to it;
   No ornaments for pure Divines more fit.

   That Counsel given by the Apostle Paul
   Does certainly extend to Christians all.
   Colossians the third, the sixteenth verse;
   (Turn to the place:) that text will thus rehearse,
   Let the word of Christ dwell in you plenteously,
   (What follows? Music in its excellency.)
   Admonishing yourselves, in sweet accord,
   In singing psalms with grace unto the Lord,
  _Sed sine arte_, that cannot be done,
  _Et sine arte_, better let alone.

Having thus “fronted this Book with the divine part, and preached his
little short sermon” upon the last of St. Paul, he says that his first
and chief design in writing this book was only to discover the occult
mysteries of the noble lute, and to shew the great worthiness of that
too much neglected and abused instrument, and his good will to all the
true lovers of it, in making it plain and easy, giving the true
reasons why it has been formerly a very hard instrument to play well
upon, and also why now it is become so easy and familiarly pleasant.
“And I believe,” says he, “that whosoever will but trouble himself to
read those reasons,—and join his own reason, with the reasonableness
of those reasons, will not be able to find the least reason to
contradict those reasons.”

He professed that by his directions “any person, young or old, should
be able to perform so much and so well upon it, in so much or so
little time, towards a full and satisfactory delight and pleasure,
(yea, if it were but only to play common toys, jigs or tunes,) as upon
any instrument whatever; yet with this most notable and admirable
exception, (for the respectable commendation of the lute,) that they
may, besides such ordinary and common contentments, study and practice
it all the days of their lives, and yet find new improvements, yea
doubtless if they should live unto the age of Methusalem, ten times
over; for there is no limitation to its vast bounds and bravery.” It
appears that the merit of this book in this respect is not overstated,
one of his sons attained to great proficiency on this instrument by
studying the book without any assistance from his father; and Sir John
Hawkins affirms on his own knowledge that Mr. John Immyns, lutanist to
the Chapel Royal, has the like experience of it. “This person who had
practised on sundry instruments for many years, and was able to sing
his part at sight, at the age of forty took to the lute, and by the
help of Mace's book alone, became enabled to play thorough base, and
also easy lessons on it; and by practice had rendered the tablature as
familiar to him, as the notes of the scale.”

The notation called the tablature is minutely explained in the work.
It has not the least relation to the musical character; the six
strings of the lute are represented by as many lines, “and the several
frets or stops by the letters a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, y (a preference
to i as being more conspicuous) k; the letter _a_ ever signifying the
open string in all positions.” Many persons have been good performers
on the lute, and at the same time totally ignorant of the notes of the
Gamut. His printer, he said, “had outdone all music work in this kind
ever before printed in this nation; and was indeed the only fit person
to do the like, he only having those new materials, the like to which
was never had made before in England.” They might have been more
distinct, and more consistent;—five being common English characters,
the _c_ more resembling the third letter in the Greek alphabet than
any thing else, the _b_ reversed serving for _g_, and the _d_ in like
manner for _e_.

The characters for the time of notes he compares to money, as
supposing that most people would be ready enough to count them the
better for that. Considering therefore the semi-breve as a groat, the
minim becomes two pence, the crotchet a penny, the quaver a
half-penny, and the semi-quaver a farthing. Trouble not yourself for
the demi-quaver, he says, till you have a quick hand, it being half a
semi-quaver.

But besides these, there are marks in his notation for the fifteen
graces which may be used upon the lute, though few or none used them
all. They are the Shake, the Beat, the Back-fall, the Half-fall, the
Whole-fall, the Elevation, the Single Relish, the Double Relish, the
Slur, the Slide, the Spinger, the Sting, the Tutt, the Pause and the
Soft and Loud Play, “which is as great and good a grace as any other
whatever.”

“Some,” says Master Mace, “there are, and many I have met with, who
have such a natural agility in their nerves, and aptitude to that
performance, that before they could do any thing else to purpose, they
would make a shake rarely well. And some again can scarcely ever gain
a good shake, by reason of the unaptness of their nerves to that
action, but yet otherwise come to play very well. I, for my own part,
have had occasion to break both my arms; by reason of which, I cannot
make the nerve-shake well, nor strong; yet by a certain motion of my
arm, I have gained such a contentive shake, that sometimes my scholars
will ask me, how they shall do to get the like? I have then no better
answer for them, than to tell them, they must first break their arm,
as I have done; and so possibly after that, by practice, they may get
my manner of Shake.”

Rules are given for all these graces, but observe he says “that
whatever your grace be, you must in your farewell express the true
note perfectly, or else your pretended grace, will prove a disgrace.”

“The Spinger is a grace very neat and curious, for some sort of notes,
and is done thus: After you have hit your note, you must just as you
intend to part with it, dab one of your rest fingers lightly upon the
same string, a fret or two frets below, (according to the air,) as if
you did intend to stop the string, in that place, yet so gently, that
you do not cause the string to sound, in that stop, so dab'd; but only
so that it may suddenly take away that sound which you last struck,
yet give some small tincture of a new note, but not distinctly to be
heard as a note; which grace, if well done and properly is very taking
and pleasant.”

The Sting is “another very neat and pretty grace,” it makes the sound
seem to swell with pretty unexpected humour, and gives much
contentment upon cases.

The Tut is easily done, and always with the right hand. “When you
would perform this grace, it is but to strike your letter which you
intend shall be so graced, with one of your fingers, and immediately
clap on your next striking finger upon the string which you struck; in
which doing, you suddenly take away the sound of the letter; and if
you do it clearly, it will seem to speak the word, _Tut_, so plainly,
as if it were a living creature, speakable!”

While however the pupil was intent upon exhibiting these graces, the
zealous master exhorted him not to be unmindful of his own, but to
regard his postures, for a good posture is comely, creditable and
praiseworthy, and moreover advantageous as to good performance. “Set
yourself down against a table, in as becoming a posture, as you would
choose to do for your best reputation. Sit upright and straight; then
take up your lute, and lay the body of it in your lap across. Let the
lower part of it lie upon your right thigh, the head erected against
your left shoulder and ear; lay your left hand down upon the table,
and your right arm over the lute, so that you may set your little
finger down upon the belly of the lute, just under the bridge, against
the treble, or second string: and then keep your lute stiff, and
strongly set with its lower edge against the table-edge; and so,
leaning your breast something hard against its ribs, cause it to stand
steady and strong, so that a bystander cannot easily draw it from your
breast, table, and arm. This is the most becoming, steady and
beneficial posture.”

“Your left hand thus upon the table, your lute firmly fixed, yourself
and it in your true postures,—bring up your left hand from the table,
bended, just like the balance of a hook, all excepting your thumb,
which must stand straight and span'd out; your fingers also, all
divided out from the other in an equal and handsome order; and in this
posture, place your thumb under the neck of the lute, a little above
the fret, just in the midst of the breadth of the neck; all your
four-fingers in this posture, being held close over the strings on the
other side, so that each finger may be in a readiness to stop down
upon any fret. And now in this lively and exact posture, I would have
your posture drawn, which is the most becoming posture I can direct
unto for a lutanist.”

“Know that an old lute is better than a new one.” Old instruments
indeed, are found by experience to be far the best, the reasons for
which Master Mace could no further dive into than to say, he
apprehended, “that by extreme age, the wood and those other adjuncts,
glue, parchment, paper, linings of cloth, (as some used) but above all
the varnish, are by time very much dried, limped, made gentle,
rarified, or to say better, even airified; so that that stiffness,
stubbornness, or _clunguiness_ which is natural to such bodies, are so
debilitated and made pliable, that the pores of the wood, have a more
free liberty to move, stir or secretly vibrate; by which means the air
(which is the life of all things both animate and inanimate) has a
more free and easy recourse to pass and repass, &c. Whether I have hit
upon the right cause, I know not, but sure I am that age adds goodness
to instruments.”

The Venice lutes were commonly good; and the most esteemed maker was
Laux Malles, whose name was always written in text letters. Mace had
seen two of his lutes, “pitiful, old, battered, cracked things;” yet
for one of these, which Mr. Gootiere, the famous lutanist in his time
showed him, the King paid an hundred pounds. The other belonged to Mr.
Edward Jones, one of Gootiere's scholars; and he relates this “true
story” of it; that a merchant bargained with the owner to take it with
him in his travels, on trial; if he liked it, he was on his return to
give an hundred pounds for it; otherwise he was to return it safe, and
pay twenty pounds “for his experience and use of it.”—He had often
seen lutes of three or four pounds a piece “more illustrious and
taking to a common eye.”

The best shape was the Pearl mould, both for sound and comeliness, and
convenience in holding. The best wood for the ribs was what he calls
air-wood, this was absolutely the best; English maple next. There were
very good ones however of plum, pear, yew, rosemary-air, and ash.
Ebony and ivory, though most costly and taking to a common eye were
the worst. For the belly the finest grained wood was required, free
from knots or obstructions; cypress was very good, but the best was
called Cullen's-cliff, being no other than the finest sort of fir, and
the choicest part of that fir. To try whether the bars within, to
strengthen and keep it straight and tight, were all fast, you were
gently to knock the belly all along, round about, and then in the
midst, with one of your knuckles; “if any thing be either loose in it,
or about it, you may easily perceive it, by a little fuzzing or
hizzing; but if all be sound, you shall hear nothing but a tight plump
and twanking knock.”

Among the aspersions against the lute which Master Mace indignantly
repelled, one was that it cost as much in keeping as a horse. “I do
confess,” said he, “that those who will be prodigal and extraordinary
curious, may spend as much as may maintain two or three horses, and
men to ride upon them too if they please. But he never charged more
than ten shillings for first stringing one, and five shillings a
quarter for maintaining it with strings.”

The strings were of three sorts, minikins, Venice Catlins, and Lyons,
for the basses; but the very best for the basses were called Pistoy
Basses; these, which were smooth and well-twisted strings, but hard to
come by, he supposes to be none others than thick Venice Catlins, and
commonly dyed of a deep dark red. The red strings however were
commonly rotten, so were the yellow, the green sometimes very good;
the clear blue the best. But good strings might be spoilt in a quarter
of an hour, if they were exposed to any wet, or moist air. Therefore
they were to be bound close together, and wrapt closely up either in
an oiled paper, a bladder, or a piece of sere cloth, “such as often
comes over with them,” and then to be kept in some close box, or
cupboard, but not amongst linen (for that gives moisture,) and in a
room where is usually a fire. And when at any time you open them for
your use, take heed they lie not too long open, nor in a dark window,
nor moist place; for moisture is the worst enemy to your strings.

“How to choose and find a true string, which is the most curious piece
of skill in stringing, is both a pretty curiosity to do, and also
necessary. First, draw out a length, or more; then take the end, and
measure the length it must be of, within an inch or two, (for it will
stretch so much at least in the winding up,) and hold that length in
both hands, extended to reasonable stiffness: then, with one of your
fingers strike it; giving it so much liberty in slackness as you may
see it vibrate, or open itself. If it be true, it will appear to the
eye, just as if they were two strings; but if it shows more than two,
it is false, and will sound unpleasantly upon your instrument, nor
will it ever be well in tune, either stopt or open, but snarl.” Sir
John Hawkins observes that this direction is given by Adrian Le Roy in
his instructions for the lute, and is adopted both by Mersennus and
Kircher. Indeed this experiment is the only known test of a true
string, and for that reason is practised by such as are curious at
this day.

In his directions for playing, Master Mace says, “take notice that you
strike not your strings with your nails, as some do, who maintain it
the best way of play; but I do not; and for this reason; because the
nail cannot draw so sweet a sound from the lute as the nibble end of
the flesh can do. I confess in a concert it might do well enough,
where the mellowness, (which is the most excellent satisfaction from a
lute) is lost in the crowd; but alone, I could never receive so good
content from the nail as from the flesh.”

Mace considered it to be absolutely necessary that all persons who
kept lutes should know how to repair them; for he had known a lute
“sent fifty or sixty miles to be mended of a very small mischance,
(scarce worth twelve pence for the mending) which besides the trouble
and cost of carriage, had been broken all to pieces in the return, and
so farewell lute and all the cost.” One of the necessary tools for
this work is “a little working knife, such as are most commonly made
of pieces of broken good blades, fastened into a pretty thick haft of
wood or bone, leaving the blade out about two or three inches;” “grind
it down upon the back,” he says, “to a sharp point, and set to a good
edge; it will serve you for many good uses, either in cutting,
carving, making pins, &c.”

His directions for this work are exceedingly minute; but when the lute
was in order, it was of no slight importance to keep it so, and for
this also he offers some choice observations. “You shall do well, ever
when you lay it by in the day-time, to put it into a bed that is
constantly used, between the rug and blanket, but never between the
sheets, because they may be moist.” “This is the most absolute and
best place to keep it in always.” “There are many great commodities in
so doing; it will save your strings from breaking, it will keep your
lute in good order, so that you shall have but small trouble in tuning
it; it will sound more brisk and lively, and give you pleasure in the
very handling of it; if you have any occasion extraordinary to set up
your lute at a higher pitch, you may do it safely, which otherwise you
cannot so well do, without danger to your instrument and strings: it
will be a great safety to your instrument, in keeping it from decay,
it will prevent much trouble in keeping the bars from flying loose and
the belly from sinking: and these six conveniences considered all
together, must needs create a seventh, which is, that lute-playing
must certainly be very much facilitated, and made more delightful
thereby. Only no person must be so inconsiderate as to tumble down
upon the bed whilst the lute is there, for I have known, said he,
several good lutes spoilt with such a trick.”

I will not say of the reader, who after the foregoing specimens of
Music's Monument has no liking for Master Mace and his book that he

  Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoil,

but I cannot but suspect that he has no taste for caviare, dislikes
laver, would as willingly drink new hock as old, and more willingly
the base compound which passes for champagne, than either. Nay I could
even suspect that he does not love those “three things which persons
loving, love what they ought,—the whistling of the wind, the dashing
of the waves, and the rolling of thunder:” and that he comes under the
commination of this other triad, “let no one love such as dislike the
scent of cloves, the taste of milk and the song of birds.” My Welsh
friends shall have the pleasure of reading these true sayings, in
their own ancient, venerable and rich language.

_Tri dyn o garu tri pheth à garant à ddylaint; gorddyan y gwgnt, boran
y tònau, ac angerdd y daran._

_Tri pheth ma chared neb a 'u hanghara: rhogleu y meillion, blâs
llaeth, a chân adar._

CHAPTER CXCIV.

A MUSIC LESSON FROM MASTER THOMAS MACE TO BE PLAYED BY LADY FAIR:—A
STORY, THAN WHICH THERE IS NONE PRETTIER IN THE HISTORY OF MUSIC.

  What shall I say? Or shall I say no more?
  I must go on! I'm brim-full, running o'er.
  But yet I'll hold, because I judge ye wise;
  And few words unto such may well suffice.
  But much—much more than this I could declare;
  Yet for some certain reasons I'll forbear.
  But less than this I could not say; because,
  If saying less, I should neglect my cause,
  For 'tis the Doctor's cause I plead so strong for,
  And 'tis his cause compleated that I long for,
  And 'tis true doctrine certainly I preach,
  And 'tis that doctrine every priest should teach.

THOMAS MACE, TO ALL DIVINE READERS.

O Lady fair, before we say,

  Now cease my lute; this is the last
  Labour that thou and I shall waste,
  And ended is that we begun;
  My lute be still, for I have done:[1]

before we say this, O Lady fair, play I pray you the following lesson
by good Master Mace. It will put you in tune for the story “not
impertinent” concerning it, which he thought fit to relate, although,
he said, many might chuse to smile at it. You may thank Sir John
Hawkins for having rendered it from tablature into the characters of
musical notation.

[Illustration: music score.]

[Footnote 1: SIR THOMAS WYAT.]

“This Lesson,” says Master Mace, “I call my Mistress, and I shall not
think it impertinent to detain you here a little longer than ordinary
in speaking something of it, the occasion of it, and why I give it
that name. And I doubt not, but the relation I shall give may conduce
to your advantage in several respects, but chiefly in respect of
Invention.

“You must first know, That it is a lesson, though old; yet I never
knew it disrelished by any, nor is there any one lesson in this Book
of that age, as it is; yet I do esteem it (in its kind) with the best
Lesson in the Book, for several good reasons, which I shall here set
down.

“It is, this very winter, just forty years since I made it—and yet it
is new, because all like it,—and then when I was past being a suitor
to my best beloved, dearest, and sweetest living Mistress, but not
married, yet contriving the best, and readiest way towards it; And
thus it was,

“That very night, in which I was thus agitated in my mind concerning
her, my living Mistress,—she being in Yorkshire, and myself at
Cambridge, close shut up in my chamber, still and quiet, about ten or
eleven o'clock at night, musing and writing letters to her, her
Mother, and some other Friends, in summing up and determining the
whole matter concerning our Marriage. You may conceive I might have
very intent thoughts all that time, and might meet with some
difficulties, for as yet I had not gained her Mother's consent,—so
that in my writings I was sometimes put to my studyings. At which
times, my Lute lying upon my table, I sometimes took it up, and walked
about my chamber, letting my fancy drive which way it would, (for I
studied nothing, at that time, as to Music,)—yet my secret genius or
fancy, prompted my fingers, do what I could, into this very humour. So
that every time I walked, and took up my Lute, in the interim, betwixt
writing and studying, this Air would needs offer itself unto me
continually; insomuch that, at the last, (liking it well, and lest it
should be lost,) I took paper and set it down, taking no further
notice of it at that time. But afterwards it passed abroad for a very
pleasant and delightful Air amongst all. Yet I gave it no name till a
long time after, nor taking more notice of it, in any particular kind,
than of any other my Composures of that nature.

“But after I was married, and had brought my wife home to Cambridge,
it so fell out that one rainy morning I stay'd within, and in my
chamber my wife and I were all alone, she intent upon her needlework,
and I playing upon my Lute, at the table by her. She sat very still
and quiet, listening to all I played without a word a long time, till
at last, I hapned to play this lesson; which, so soon as I had once
played, she earnestly desired me to play it again, ‘for,’ said she,
‘That shall be called my Lesson.’

“From which words, so spoken, with emphasis and accent, it presently
came into my remembrance, the time when, and the occasion of its being
produced, and I returned her this answer, viz. That it may very
properly be called your Lesson, for when I composed it you were wholly
in my fancy, and the chief object and ruler of my thoughts; telling
her how, and when it was made. And therefore, ever after, I thus
called it MY MISTRESS, and most of my scholars since call it MRS.
MACE, to this day.

“Thus I have detained you (I hope not too long,) with this short
relation; nor should I have been so seemingly vain, as to have
inserted it, but that I have an intended purpose by it, to give some
advantage to the reader, and doubt not but to do it to those who will
rightly consider what here I shall further set down concerning it.

“Now in reference to the occasion of it, &c. It is worth taking
notice, That there are times and particular seasons, in which the
ablest Master of his Art, shall not be able to command his Invention
or produce things so to his content or liking, as he shall at other
times; but he shall be (as it were,) stupid, dull, and shut up, as to
any neat, spruce, or curious Invention.

“But again, at other times, he will have Inventions come flowing in
upon him, with so much ease and freedom, that his greatest trouble
will be to retain, remember, or set them down, in good order.

“Yet more particularly, as to the occasion of this Lesson, I would
have you take notice, that as it was at such a time, when I was wholly
and intimately possessed with the true and perfect idea of my living
Mistress, who was at that time, lovely, fair, comely, sweet, debonair,
uniformly-neat, and every way compleat; how could, possibly, my fancy
run upon anything at that time, but upon the very simile, form, or
likeness, of the same substantial thing.

“And that this Lesson doth represent, and shadow forth such a true
relation, as here I have made, I desire you to take notice of it, in
every particular; which I assure myself, may be of benefit to any, who
shall observe it well.

“First, therefore, observe the two first Bars of it, which will give
you the Fugue; which Fugue is maintained quite through the whole
lesson.

“Secondly, observe the Form, and Shape of the whole lesson, which
consists of two uniform, and equal strains; both strains having the
same number of Bars.

“Thirdly, observe the humour of it; which you may perceive (by the
marks and directions) is not common.

“These three terms, or things, ought to be considered in all
compositions, and performances of this nature, viz. Ayres, or the
like.

“The Fugue is lively, ayrey, neat, curious, and sweet, like my
Mistress.

“The Form is uniform, comely, substantial, grave, and lovely, like my
Mistress.

“The Humour is singularly spruce, amiable, pleasant, obliging, and
innocent, like my Mistress.

“This relation to some may seem odd, strange, humorous, and
impertinent; but to others (I presume) it may be intelligible and
useful; in that I know, by good experience, that in Music, all these
significations, (and vastly many more,) may, by an experienced and
understanding Artist, be clearly, and most significantly expressed;
yea, even as by language itself, if not much more effectually. And
also, in that I know, that as a person is affected or disposed in his
temper, or humour, by reason of what object of his mind soever, he
shall at that time produce matter, (if he be put to it,) answerable to
that temper, disposition, or humour, in which he is.

“Therefore I would give this as a caveat, or caution, to any, who do
attempt to exercise their fancies in such matters of Invention, that
they observe times, and seasons, and never force themselves to
anything, when they perceive an indisposition; but wait for a fitter,
and more hopeful season, for what comes most compleatly, comes most
familiarly, naturally, and easily, without pumping for, as we use to
say.

“Strive therefore to be in a good, cheerful, and pleasant humour
always when you would compose or invent, and then, such will your
productions be; or, to say better, chuse for your time of Study, and
Invention, if you may, that time wherein you are so disposed, as I
have declared. And doubtless, as it is in the study and productions of
Music, so must it needs be in all other studies, where the use and
exercise of fancy is requirable.

“I will therefore, take a little more pains than ordinary, to give
such directions, as you shall no ways wrong, or injure my Mistress,
but do her all the right you can, according to her true deserts.

“First, therefore, observe to play _soft_, and _loud_, as you see it
marked quite through the Lesson.

“Secondly, use _that Grace_, which I call the _Sting_, where you see
it set, and the _Spinger_ after it.

“And then, in the last four strains, observe the _Slides_, and
_Slurs_, and you cannot fail to know my _Mistress's Humour_, provided
you keep _true time_, which you must be extremely careful to do in all
lessons: FOR TIME IS THE ONE HALF OF MUSIC.

“And now, I hope I shall not be very hard put to it, to obtain my
pardon for all this trouble I have thus put you to, in the exercise of
your patience; especially from those, who are so ingenious and
good-natured, as to prize, and value, such singular and choice
endowments, as I have here made mention of in so absolute and compleat
a subject.”

MY MISTRESS OR MRS. MACE.

[Illustration: musical score.]

THOMAS MACE.

There is no prettier story in the history of Music than this; and what
a loving, loveable, happy creature must he have been who could thus in
his old age have related it!

CHAPTER CXCV.

ANOTHER LESSON WITH THE STORY AND MANNER OF ITS PRODUCTION.

  _Οὐδεὶς ἐρεῖ ποθ᾽, ὡς ὑπόβλητον λόγον,
   ———ἔλεξας, ἀλλὰ τῆς σαυτῦ φρενός._

SOPHOCLES.

Master Mace has another lesson which he calls Hab-Nab; it “has neither
fugue, nor very good form,” he says, “yet a humour, although none of
the best;” and his “story of the manner and occasion of Hab-Nab's
production,” affords a remarkable counterpart to that of his favourite
lesson.

“View every bar in it,” he says, “and you will find not any one Bar
like another, nor any affinity in the least kind betwixt strain and
strain, yet the Air pleaseth some sort of people well enough; but for
my own part, I never was pleased with it; yet because some liked it, I
retained it. Nor can I tell how it came to pass that I thus made it,
only I very well remember, the time, manner, and occasion of its
production, (which was on a sudden,) without the least premeditation,
or study, and merely accidentally; and, as we use to say, _ex
tempore_, in the _tuning of a lute_.

“And the occasion, I conceive, might possibly contribute something
towards it, which was this.

“I had, at that very instant, when I made it, an agitation in hand,
viz. The stringing up, and tuning of a Lute, for a person of an
ununiform, and inharmonical disposition, (as to Music,) yet in herself
well proportioned, comely, and handsome enough, and ingenious for
other things, but to Music very unapt, and learned it only to please
her friends, who had a great desire she should be brought to it, if
possible, but never could, to the least good purpose; so that at the
last we both grew weary; _for there is no striving against such a
stream_.

“I say, this occasion possibly might be the cause of this so
inartificial a piece, in regard that that person, at that time, was
the chief object of my mind and thoughts. I call it inartificial,
because the chief observation (as to good performance,) is wholly
wanting. Yet it is true Music, and has such a form and humour, as may
pass, and give content to many. Yet I shall never advise any to make
things thus by hab-nab,[1] without any design, as was this. And
therefore I give it that name.”

[Footnote 1: _Hab-Nab_ is a good old English word, derived from the
Anglo-Saxon. Skinner is correct enough. “Temerè, sine consilio _ab_
AS. _Habban_ Habere, _Nabban_, non Habere, addito scilicet _na_, non,
cum apostropho.” Will-nill, i.e. Will ye, or will ye not, is a
parallel form. Every one will recollect the lines of Hudibras, (Part
ii. Canto iii.)

  With that he circles draws, and squares,
  With cyphers, astral characters:
  Then looks 'em o'er to understand 'em
  Although set down, _hab nab_, at random.

Dr. Grey illustrates the expression from Don Quixote, “Let every man,”
says Sancho Pancha, “take care what he talks or how he writes of other
men, and not set down _at random_, _hab-nab_, _higgledy-piggledy_,
what comes into his noddle.” Part ii. c. iii.

On referring to the original it will be seen that the Translator has
used three words for one. “Cada uno mire como habla o' como escriba de
las presonas, y no ponga _à troche moche_ lo primero que le viene al
magin.”]

“There are abundance of such things to be met with, and from the hands
of some, who fain would pass for good composers; yet most of them may
be traced, and upon examination, their things found only to be snaps
and catches; which they,—having been long conversant in Music, and can
command an Instrument, through great and long practice, some of them
very well,—have taken here and there (hab-nab,) from several airs and
things of other men's works, and put them handsomely together, which
then pass for their own compositions.

“Yet I say, it is no affront, offence, or injury, to any Master, for
another to take his Fugue, or Point to work upon, nor dishonour for
any Artist so to do, provided he shew by his Workmanship, a different
Discourse, Form, or Humour. But it is rather a credit and a repute for
him so to do; for by his works he shall be known. It being observable,
That great Master Composers may all along be as well known by their
Compositions, or their own compositions known to be of them, as the
great and learned writers may be known by their styles and works.”

CHAPTER CXCVI.

FURTHER ACCOUNT OF MASTER THOMAS MACE,—HIS LIGHT HEART, HIS SORROWS,
AND HIS POVERTY,—POORLY, POOR MAN, HE LIVED, POORLY, POOR MAN, HE
DIED—PHINEAS FLETCHER.

  The sweet and the sour,
  The nettle and the flower,
  The thorn and the rose,
  This garland compose.

SMALL GARLAND OF PIOUS AND GODLY SONGS.

Little more is known of Thomas Mace than can be gathered from his
book. By a good portrait of him in his sixty-third year, it appears
that he was born in 1613, and by his arms that he was of gentle blood.
And as he had more subscribers to his book in York than in any other
place, (Cambridge excepted) and the name of Henry Mace, Clerk, occurs
among them, it may be presumed that he was a native of that city, or
of that county. This is the more likely, because when he was
established at Cambridge in his youth, his true love was in Yorkshire;
and at that time his travels are likely to have been confined between
the place of his birth and of his residence.

The price of his book was twelve shillings in sheets; and as he
obtained about three hundred subscribers, he considered this fair
encouragement to publish. But when the work was compleated and the
accounts cast up, he discovered that “in regard of his unexpected
great charge, besides his unconceivable care and pains to have it
compleatly done, it could not be well afforded at that price, to
render him any tolerable or reasonable requital.” He gave notice
therefore, that after it should have been published three months, the
price must be raised; “adding thus much, (as being bold to say) that
there were several pages, yea several lessons in this book, (according
to the ordinary value, esteem, or way of procuring such things) which
were every one of them of more value than the price of the whole book
by far.”

It might be truly said of him, that

  Poorly, poor man, he lived, poorly, poor man he died.[1]

for he never attained to any higher preferment than that of being “one
of the Clerks of Trinity College.” But it may be doubted whether any
of those who partook more largely of the endowment of that noble
establishment, enjoyed so large a portion of real happiness. We find
him in the sixty-third year of his age, and the fortieth of his
marriage, not rich, not what the world calls fortunate, but a
contented, cheerful old man; even though “Time had done to him this
wrong” that it had half deprived him of his highest gratification, for
he had become so deaf that he could not hear his own lute. When Homer
says of his own blind bard that the Muse gave him good and evil,
depriving him of his eyes, but giving him the gift of song, we
understand the compensation;

  _Τὸν πέρι Μοῦσ᾽ ἐφίλησε, δίδου δ᾽ ἀγαθόν τε κακόν τε,
   Ὀφθαλμῶν μὲν ἄμερσε, δίδου δ᾽ ἡδεῖαν ἀοιδήν·_

but what can compensate a musician for the loss of hearing! There is
no inward ear to be the bliss of solitude. He could not like
Pythagoras _ἀῤῥήτῳ τινὶ καὶ δυσεπινοήτῳ θειότητι χρώμενος_, by an
effort of ineffable and hardly conceivable divinity retire into the
depths of his own being, and there listen to that heavenly harmony of
the spheres which to him alone of all the human race was made audible;
_ἑαυτῷ γὰρ μόνῳ τῶν ἐπὶ γῆς ἀπάντων συνετὰ καὶ ἐπήκοα τὰ κοσμικὰ
φθέγματα ἐνόμιζεν ἀπ᾽ αὐτῆς τῆς φυσικῆς πηγῆς καὶ ῥίζῆς._[2] Master
Mace had no such supernatural faculty, and no such opinion of himself.
But the happy old man devises a means of overcoming to a certain
degree his defect by inventing what he called a Dyphone, or Double
Lute of fifty strings, a representation of which is given in his book,
as “the one only instrument in being of that kind, then lately
invented by himself, and made with his own hands in the year 1672.”

[Footnote 1: PHINEAS FLETCHER.]

[Footnote 2: IAMBLICHI Liber de Pythagoricâ, Vitâ c. xv.]

“The occasion of its production was my necessity; viz. my great defect
in hearing; adjoined with my unsatiable love and desire after the
Lute. It being an instrument so soft, and past my reach of hearing, I
did imagine it was possible to contrive a louder Lute, than ever any
yet had been; whereupon, after divers casts and contrivances, I
pitched upon this order, the which has (in a great degree) answered my
expectation, it being absolutely the lustiest or loudest Lute that I
ever yet heard. For although I cannot hear the least twang of any
other Lute, when I play upon it, yet I can hear this in a very good
measure, yet not so loud as to distinguish every thing I play, without
the help of my teeth, which when I lay close to the edge of it,
(there, where the lace is fixed,) I hear all I play distinctly. So
that it is to me (I thank God!) one of the principal refreshments and
contentments I enjoy in this world. What it may prove to others in its
use and service, (if any shall think fit to make the like,) I know
not, but I conceive it may be very useful, because of the several
conveniences and advantages it has of all other Lutes.”

This instrument was on the one side a theorbo, on the other lute,
having on the former part twenty-six strings, twenty-four on the
latter. It had a fuller, plumper and lustier sound, he said, than any
other lute, because the concave was almost as long again, being hollow
from neck to mouth. “This is one augmentation of sound; there is yet
another; which is from the strange and wonderful secret, which lies in
the nature of sympathy, in unities, or the uniting of harmonical
sounds, the one always augmenting the other. For let two several
instruments lie asunder at any reasonable distance, when you play upon
one, the other shall sound, provided they be both exactly tuned in
unisons to each other; otherwise not. This is known to all curious
inspectors into such mysteries. If this therefore be true, it must
needs be granted, that when the strings of these two twins,
accordingly put on, are tuned in unities and set up to a stiff lusty
pitch, they cannot but more augment and advantage one the other.”

Some allowances he begged for it, because it was a new-made instrument
and could not yet speak so well as it would do, when it came to age
and ripeness, though it already gave forth “a very free, brisk,
trouling, plump and sweet sound,” and because it was made by a hand
that never before attempted the making of any instrument. He concludes
his description of it, with what he calls a Recreative Fancy: saying,
“because it is my beloved darling, I seemed, like an old doting body,
to be fond of it; so that when I finished it, I bedecked it with these
five rhymes following, fairly written upon each belly.

“First, round the Theorboe knot, thus,

  I am of old, and of Great Britain's fame,
    Theorboe was my name.

Then next, about the French Lute knot, thus,

  I'm not so old; yet grave, and much acute;
    My name was the French lute.

Then from thence along the sides, from one knot to the other, thus,

  But since we are thus joined both in one,
    Henceforth our name shall be the Lute Dyphone.

Then again cross-wise under the Theorboe-knot, thus,

  Lo here a perfect emblem seen in me,
  Of England and of France, their unity;
  Likewise that year they did each other aid,
  I was contrived, and thus compleatly made.

viz. When they united both against the Dutch and beat them soundly,
A.D. 1672.

“Then lastly, under the French Lute knot, thus,

  Long have we been divided, now made one,
  We sang in sevenths; now in full unison.
  In this firm union, long may we agree,
  No unison is like Lute's harmony.

  Thus in its body, tis trim, spruce and fine
  But in its sp'rit, tis like a thing divine.”

Poor Mace formed the plan of a Music-room, and hoped to have erected
it himself; “but it pleased God,” says he, “to disappoint and
discourage me several ways, for such a work; as chiefly by the loss of
my hearing, and by that means the emptiness of my purse, (my meaning
may easily be guessed at,) I only wanted money enough but no good will
thereunto.” However he engraved his plan, and annexed a description of
it, “in hopes that at one time or other, there might arise some
honourable and truly nobly-spirited person, or persons, who may
consider the great good use and benefit of such a necessary
convenience, and also find in his heart to become a benefactor to such
an eminent good work,—for the promotion of the art and encouragement
of the true lovers of it; there being great need of such a thing, in
reference to the compleating and illustrating of the University
Schools.”

What he designed was a room six yards square, having on each side
three galleries for spectators, each something more than three yards
deep. These were to be one story from the ground, “both for advantage
of sound, and also to avoid the moisture of the earth, which is very
bad, both for instrument and strings;” and the building was to be “in
a clear and very delightful dry place, both free from water, the
overhanging of trees, and common noises.” The room was for the
performers, and it was to be “one step higher on the floor than the
galleries the better to convey the sound to the auditors:”—“being thus
clear and free from company, all inconvenience of talking, crowding,
sweating and blustering, &c. are taken away; the sound has its free
and uninterrupted passage; the performers are no ways hindered; and
the instruments will stand more steadily in tune, (for no lutes,
viols, pedals, harpsicons, &c. will stand in tune at such a time; no,
nor voices themselves;) For I have known,” says he, “an excellent
voice, well prepared for a solemn performance, who has been put up in
a crowd, that when he has been to perform his part, could hardly
speak, and by no other cause but the very distemper received by that
crowd and overheat.”

The twelve galleries, though but little, would hold two hundred
persons very well; and thus the uneasy and unhandsome accommodation,
which has often happened to persons of quality, being crowded up,
squeezed and sweated among persons of an inferior rank, might be
avoided, “which thing alone, having such distinct reception for
persons of different qualities, must needs be accounted a great
conveniency.” But there was a scientific convenience included in the
arrangement; for the lower walls were to be “wainscoted, hollow from
the wall, and without any kind of carved, bossed, or rugged work, so
that the sound might run glib and smooth all about, without the least
interruption. And through that wainscot there must be several
conveyances all out of the room—by grooves, or pipes to certain
auditor's seats, where the hearer, as he sate, might at a small
passage, or little hole, receive the pent-up sound, which let it be
never so weak in the music-room, he, (though at the furthest end of
the gallery) should hear as distinctly as any who were close by it.”
The inlets into these pipes should be pretty large, a foot square at
least, yet the larger the better, without all doubt, and so the
conveyance to run proportionably narrower, till it came to the ear of
the auditor, where it need not be above the wideness of one's finger
end. “It cannot,” says he, “be easily imagined, what a wonderful
advantage such a contrivance must needs be, for the exact and distinct
hearing of music; without doubt far beyond all that ever has yet been
used. For there is no instrument of touch, be it never so sweet, and
touched with the most curious hand that can be, but in the very touch,
if you be near unto it, you may perceive the touch to be heard;
especially of viols and violins: but if you be at a distance, that
harshness is lost, and conveyed unto the air, and you receive nothing
but the pure sweetness of the instrument; so as I may properly say,
you lose the body, but enjoy the soul or spirit thereof.”

Such a necessary, ample and most convenient erection would become, he
thought, any nobleman, or gentleman's house; and there might be built
together with it as convenient rooms for all services of a family, as
by any other contrivance whatever, and as magnificently stately. Were
it but once experienced, he doubted not, but that the advantages would
apparently show themselves, and be esteemed far beyond what he had
written, or that others could conceive.

The last notice which we have of good Master Mace is an advertisement,
dated London, 1690, fourteen years after the publication of his book.
Dr. Burney found it in the British Museum, in a collection of
title-pages, devices and advertisements. It is addressed “to all
Lovers of the best sort of Music.”

  Men say the times are strange;—tis true;
    'Cause many strange things hap to be.
  Let it not then seem strange to you
    That here one strange thing more you see.

That is, in Devereux Court, next the Grecian Coffee House, at the
Temple back gate, there is a deaf person teacheth music to perfection;
who by reason of his great age, viz. seventy-seven, is come to town,
with his whole stock of rich musical furniture; viz. instruments and
books, to put off, to whomsoever delights in such choice things; for
he has nothing light or vain, but all substantial and solid MUSIC.
Some particulars do here follow.

“First, There is a late invented Organ, which, for private use,
exceeds all other fashioned organs whatever; and for which,
substantial artificial reasons will be given; and, for its beauty, it
may become a nobleman's dining-room.

“Second, There belongs to it a pair of fair, large-sized consort
viols, chiefly fitted and suited for that, or consort use; and 'tis
great pity they should be parted.

“Third, There is a pedal harpsicon, (the absolute best sort of consort
harpsicon that has been invented; there being in it more than twenty
varieties, most of them to come in with the foot of the player;
without the least hindrance of play,) exceedingly pleasant.

“Fourth, Is a single harpsicon.

“Fifth. A new invented instrument, called a Dyphone, viz. a double
lute; it is both theorboe and French lute compleat; and as easy to
play upon as any other lute.

“Sixth, Several other theorboes, lutes and viols, very good.

“Seventh, Great store of choice collections of the works of the most
famous composers that have lived in these last hundred years, as
Latin, English, Italian and some French.

“Eighth, There is the publishers own Music's Monument; some few copies
thereof he has still by him to put off, it being a subscribed book,
and not exposed to common sale. All these will be sold at very easy
rates, for the reasons aforesaid; and because, indeed, he cannot stay
in town longer than four months, exactly.”

He further adds, “if any be desirous to partake of his experimental
skill in this high noble art, during his stay in town, he is ready to
assist them; and haply, they may obtain that from him, which they may
not meet withal elsewhere. He teacheth these five things; viz. the
theorboe, the French lute, and the viol, in all their excellent ways
and uses; as also composition, together with the knack of procuring
invention to young composers, (the general and greatest difficulty
they meet withal;) this last thing not being attempted by any author,
(as he knows of,) yet may be done, though some have been so wise, or
otherwise to contradict it:

  _Sed experientia docuit._

“Any of these five things may be learned so understandingly, in this
little time he stays, by such general rules as he gives, together with
Music's Monument, (written principally to such purposes,) as that any,
aptly inclined, may, for the future, teach themselves, without any
other help.”

This is the last notice of poor Mace: poor he may be called, when at
the age of seventy-seven he is found in London upon the forlorn hope
of selling his instruments and his books, and getting pupils during
this stay. It may be inferred that he had lost the son of whose
musical proficiency he formerly spoke with so much pleasure; for
otherwise this professional collection and stock in trade would hardly
have been exposed to sale, but it appears that the good old man
retained his mental faculties, and his happy and contented spirit.

Dr. Burney recommends the perusal of what he calls his matchless book
“to all who have taste for excessive simplicity and quaintness, and
can extract pleasure from the sincere and undissembled happiness of an
author, who with exalted notions of his subject and abilities,
discloses to his readers every inward working of self-approbation in
as undisguised a manner, as if he were communing with himself in all
the plenitude of mental comfort and privacy.”

CHAPTER CXCVII.

QUESTION PROPOSED, WHETHER A MAN BE MAGNIFIED OR MINIFIED BY
CONSIDERING HIMSELF UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE HEAVENLY BODIES, AND
ANSWERED WITH LEARNING AND DISCRETION.

I find by experience that Writing is like Building, wherein the
undertaker, to supply some defect, or serve some convenience which at
first he foresaw not, is usually forced to exceed his first model and
proposal, and many times to double the charge and expence of it.

DR. JOHN SCOTT.

Is man magnified or minified by considering himself as under the
influence of the heavenly bodies,—not simply as being

  Moved round in earth's dismal course
    With rocks and stones and trees;[1]

but as affected by them in his constitution bodily and mental, and
dependent on them for weal or woe, for good or evil fortune; as
subjected, that is, according to astrological belief to

  The Stars, who, by I know not what strange right,
  Preside o'er mortals in their own despite,
  Who without reason, govern those who most,
  (How truly, judge from thence!) of reason boast;
  And by some mighty magic, yet unknown,
  Our actions guide, yet cannot guide their own.[2]

Apart from what one of our Platonic divines calls “the power of astral
necessity, and uncontrollable impressions arising from the
subordination and mental sympathy and dependence of all mundane
causes,” which is the Platonist's and Stoic's “proper notion of
fate;”[3] apart, I say, from this, and from the Calvinist's doctrine
of predestination, is it a humiliating, or an elevating consideration,
that the same celestial movements which cause the flux and reflux of
the ocean, should be felt in the pulse of a patient suffering with a
fever: and that the eternal laws which regulate the stars in their
courses, should decide the lot of an individual?

[Footnote 1: WORDSWORTH.]

[Footnote 2: CHURCHILL.]

[Footnote 3: JOHN SMITH.]

Here again a distinction must be made,—between the physical theory and
the pseudo-science. The former is but a question of more or less; for
that men are affected by atmospherical influence is proved by every
endemic disease; and invalids feel in themselves a change of weather
as decidedly as they perceive its effect upon the weather-glass, the
hygrometer, or the strings of a musical instrument. The sense of our
weakness in this respect,—of our dependence upon causes over which we
have no controul, and which in their operation and nature are
inexplicable by us, must have a humbling and therefore a beneficial
tendency in every mind disposed to goodness. It is in the order of
Providence that we should learn from sickness and adversity lessons
which health and prosperity never teach.

Some of the old theoretical physicians went far beyond this. Sachs von
Lewenheimb compared the microcosm of man with the macrocosm in which
he exists. The heart in the one, he said, is what the ocean is in the
other, the blood has its ebbing and flowing like the tide, and as the
ocean receives its impulse from the moon and the winds, the brain and
the vital spirits act in like manner upon the heart. Baillet has
noticed for censure the title of his book in his chapter _Des prejugés
des Titres des Livres_; it is _Oceanus Macro-Micro-cosmicus_. Peder
Severinsen carrying into his medical studies a fanciful habit of mind
which he might better have indulged in his younger days when he was a
Professor of Poetry, found in the little world of the human body,
antitypes of every thing in the great world, its mountains and its
vallies, its rivers and its lakes, its minerals and its vegetables,
its elements and its spheres. According to him the stars are living
creatures, subject to the same diseases as ourselves. Ours indeed are
derived from them by sympathy, or astral influence, and can be
remedied only by those medicines, the application of which is denoted
by their apparent qualities, or by the authentic signature of nature.

This fancy concerning the origin of diseases is less intelligible than
the mythology of those Rosicrucians who held that they were caused by
evil demons rulers of the respective planets, or by the Spirits of the
Firmament and the Air. A mythology this may more properly be called
than a theory; and it would belong rather to the history of Manicheism
than of medicine, were it not that in all ages fanaticism and
imposture have, in greater or less degree, connected themselves with
the art of healing.

But however dignified, or super-celestial the theoretical causes of
disease, its effect is always the same in bringing home, even to the
proudest heart, a sense of mortal weakness: whereas the belief which
places man in relation with the Stars, and links his petty concerns
and fortunes of a day with the movements of the heavenly bodies, and
the great chain of events, tends to exalt him in his own conceit. The
thriftless man in middle or low life who says, in common phrase, that
he was born under a threepenny planet, and therefore shall never be
worth a groat, finds some satisfaction in imputing his unprosperity to
the Stars, and casting upon them the blame which he ought to take upon
himself. In vain did an old Almanack-maker say to such men of the
Creator, in a better strain than was often attained by the professors
of his craft.

  He made the Stars to be an aid unto us,
  Not (as is fondly dream'd) to help undo us;
  Much less without our fault to ruinate
  By doom of irrecoverable Fate.
  And if our best endeavours use we will,
  These glorious Creatures will be helpful still
  In all our honest ways: for they do stand
  To help, not hinder us, in God's command,
  Who doth not only rule them by his powers
  But makes their glory servant unto ours.
  Be wise in Him, and if just cause there be
  The Sun and Moon shall stand and wait on thee.

On the other hand the lucky adventurer proceeds with superstitious
confidence in his Fortune; and the ambitious in many instances have
devoted themselves, or been deceived to their own destruction. It is
found accordingly that the professors of astrology generally in their
private practice addressed themselves to the cupidity or the vanity of
those by whom they were employed. Honest professors there were who
framed their schemes faithfully upon their own rules; but the greater
number were those who consulted their own advantage only, and these
men being well acquainted with human nature in its ordinary character,
always took this course.—Their character has changed as little as
human nature itself in the course of two thousand years since Ennius
expressed his contempt for them, in a passage preserved by Cicero.

  _Non habeo denique nauci Marsum augurem,
   Non vicanos haruspices, non de circo astrologos,
   Non Isiacos conjectores, non interpretes somnium.
   Non enim sunt ii aut scientiâ aut arte, divini,
   Sed superstitiosi vates, impudentesque harioli,
   Aut inertes, aut insani, aut quibus egestas imperat:
   Qui sibi semitam non sapiunt, alteri monstrant viam.
   Quibus divitias pollicentur, ab iis drachmam ipsi petunt.
   De his divitiis sibi deducant drachmam, reddant cætera._

Pompey, Crassus, and Cæsar were each assured by the Chaldeans that he
should die in his own house, in prosperity, and in a good old age.
Cicero tells us this upon his own knowledge: _Quam multa ego Pompeio,
quam multa Crasso, quam multa huic ipsi Cæsari à Chaldeis dicta
memini, neminem eorum nisi senectute, nisi domi, nisi cum claritate
esse moriturum! ut mihi permirum videatur, quemquam extare, qui etiam
nunc credat iis, quorum prædicta quotidie videat re et eventis
refelli._

And before the age of Ennius, Euripides had in the person of Tiresias
shewn how surely any such profession, if the professor believed in his
own art, must lead to martyrdom, or falsehood. When the blind old
Prophet turns away from Creon, he says, in words worthy of Milton's
favourite poet,

  _Τὰ μὲν παρ᾽ ἡμῶν πάντ᾽ ἔχεις· ἡγοῦ, τέκνον,
   Πρὸς οἶκον· ὅστις δ᾽ ἐμπύρῳ χρῆται τέχνῃ,
   Μάταιος᾽ ἢν μὲν ἐχθρὰ σημήνας τύχῃ,
   Πικρὸς καθέστηχ᾽, οἷς ἂν οἰωνοσκοπῇ,
   Ψευδῆ δ᾽ ὑπ᾽ οἴκτου τοῖσι χρωμένοις λέγων,
   Ἀδικεῖ τὰ τῶν θεῶν. Φοῖβον ἀνθρώποις μόνον
   Χρῆν θεσπιωδεῖν, ὃς δέδοικεν οὐδένα._

The sagacity of the poet will be seen by those who are versed in the
history of the Old Testament; and for those who are not versed in it,
the sooner they cease to be ignorant in what so nearly concerns them,
the better it may be for themselves.

Jeremy Taylor says that he reproves those who practised judicial
astrology, and pretended to deliver genethliacal predictions, “not
because their reason is against religion, for certainly, said he, it
cannot be; but because they have not reason enough in what they say;
they go upon weak principles which they cannot prove; they reduce them
to practice by impossible mediums; they argue about things with which
they have little conversation. Although the art may be very lawful if
the stars were upon the earth, or the men were in heaven, if they had
skill in what they profess, and reason in all their pretences, and
after all that their principles were certain, and that the stars did
really signify future events, and that those events were not overruled
by every thing in heaven and in earth, by God, and by our own will and
wisdom,—yet because here is so little reason and less certainty, and
nothing but confidence and illusion, therefore it is that religion
permits them not; and it is not the reason in this art that is against
religion, but the folly or the knavery of it; and the dangerous and
horrid consequents which they feel that run a-whoring after such idols
of imagination.”

In our days most of those persons who can afford to employ the greater
part of their thoughts upon themselves, fall at a certain age under
the influence either of a physical or a spiritual director, for
Protestantism has its _Directeurs_ as well as Popery, less to its
advantage and as little to its credit. The spiritual professors have
the most extensive practice, because they like their patients are of
all grades, and are employed quite as much among the sound as the
sick. The astrologer no longer contests the ascendancy with either.
That calling is now followed by none but such low impostors, that they
are only heard of when one of them is brought before a magistrate for
defrauding some poor credulous creature in the humblest walks of life.
So low has that cunning fallen, which in the seventeenth century
introduced its professors into the cabinets of kings, and more
powerful ministers. An astrologer was present at the birth of Louis
XIV, that he might mark with all possible precision the exact moment
of his nativity. After the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day,
Catherine de Medici, deep in blood as she was, hesitated about putting
to death the king of Navarre and the prince of Condé, and the person
of whom she took counsel was an astrologer,—had she gone to her
Confessor their death would have been certain. Cosmo Ruggieri was an
unprincipled adventurer, but on this occasion he made a pious use of
his craft, and when the Queen enquired of him what the nativities of
these Princes prognosticated, he assured her that he had calculated
them with the utmost exactness, and that according to the principles
of his art, the State had nothing to apprehend from either of them. He
let them know this as soon as he could, and told them that he had
given this answer purely from regard for them, not from any result of
his schemes, the matter being in its nature undiscoverable by
astrology.

The Imperial astrologers in China excused themselves once for a
notable failure in their art, with more notable address. The error
indeed was harmless, except in its probable consequences to
themselves; they had predicted an eclipse, and no eclipse took place.
But instead of being abashed at this proof of their incapacity the
ready rogues complimented the Emperor, and congratulated him upon so
wonderful and auspicious an event. The eclipse they said portended
evil, and therefore in regard to him the Gods had put it by.

An Asiatic Emperor who calls himself Brother to the Sun and Moon,
might well believe that his relations would go a little out of their
way to oblige him, if the Queen of Navarre could with apparent
sincerity declare her belief that special revelations are made to the
Great, as one of the privileges of their high estate, and that her
mother, that Catherine de Medici, whose name is for ever infamous, was
thus miraculously forewarned of every remarkable event that befell her
husband and her children, nor was she herself, without her share in
this privilege, though her character was not more spotless in one
point than her mother's in another. _De ces divins advertissemens_,
she says, _je ne me veux estimer digne, toutesfois pour ne me taire
comme ingrate des graces que j'ay receües de Dieu, que je dois et veux
confesser toute ma vie, pour luy en rendre grace, et que chacun le
loue aux merveilles des effets de sa puissance, bonté, et misericorde,
qu'il luy a plû faire en moy, j'advoueray n'avoir jamais esté proche
de quelques signalez accidens, ou sinistres, ou heureux, que j'en aye
eu quelque advertissement ou en songe, ou autrement; et puis bien dire
ce vers,_

  _De mon bien ou mon mal, mon esprit m'est oracle._

CHAPTER CXCVIII.

PETER HOPKINS' VIEWS OF ASTROLOGY. HIS SKILL IN CHIROMANCY, PALMISTRY,
OR MANUAL DIVINATION WISELY TEMPERED.—SPANISH PROVERB AND SONNET BY
BARTOLOME LEONARDO DE ARGENSOLA.—TIPPOO SULTAN.—MAHOMETAN
SUPERSTITION.—W. Y. PLAYTES' PROSPECTUS FOR THE HORN BOOK FOR THE
REMEMBRANCE OF THE SIGNS OF SALVATION.

  _Seguite dunque con la mente lieta,
   Seguite, Monsignor, che com' io dico,
   Presto presto sarete in su la meta._

LUDOVICO DOLCE.

Peter Hopkins had believed in astrology when he studied it in early
life with his friend Grey; his faith in it had been overthrown by
observation and reflection, and the unperceived influence of the
opinions of the learned and scientific public; but there was more
latent doubt in his incredulity than had ever lurked at the root of
his belief.

He was not less skilled in the kindred, though more trivial art of
Chiromancy, Palmistry, or Manual Divination, for the divine origin of
which a verse in the Book of Job was adduced as scriptural proof; “He
sealeth up the hand of every man, that all men may know his work.” The
text appears more chiromantical in the Vulgate. _Qui in manu omnium
hominum signa posuit._ Who has placed signs in the hand of all men.
The uses of the science were represented to be such, as to justify
this opinion of its origination: “For hereby,” says Fabian Withers,
“thou shalt perceive and see the secret works of Nature, how aptly and
necessarily she hath compounded and knit each member with other,
giving unto the hand, as unto a table, certain signs and tokens
whereby to discern and know the inward motions and affections of the
mind and heart, with the inward state of the whole body; as also our
inclination and aptness to all our external actions and doings. For
what more profitable thing may be supposed or thought, than when a man
in himself may foresee and know his proper and fatal accidents, and
thereby to embrace and follow that which is good, and to avoid and
eschew the evils which are imminent unto him, for the better
understanding and knowledge thereof?”

But cautioning his readers against the error of those who perverted
their belief in palmistry and astrology, and used it as a refuge or
sanctuary for all their evil deeds, “we ought,” said he, “to know and
understand that the Stars do not provoke or force us to anything, but
only make us apt and prone; and being so disposed, allure as it were,
and draw us forward to our natural inclination. In the which if we
follow the rule of Reason, taking it to be our only guide and
governor, they lose all the force, power and effect which they by any
means may have in and upon us: contrariwise, if we give ourselves over
to follow our own sensuality and natural dispositions, they work even
the same effect on us—that they do in brute beasts.”

Farther he admonishes all “which should read or take any fruit of his
small treatise, to use such moderation in perusing of the same that
they do not by and by take in hand to give judgement either of their
own, or other men's estates or nativities, without diligent
circumspection and taking heed; weighing and considering how many ways
a man may be deceived; as by the providence and discretion of the
person on whom he gives judgement, also, the dispensation of God, and
our fallible and uncertain speculation.” “Wherefore,” he continues,
“let all men in seeking hereby to foresee their own fortune, take heed
that by the promise of good, they be not elate, or high-minded, giving
themselves over to otiosity or idleness, and trusting altogether to
the Natural Influences; neither yet by any signs or tokens of
adversity, to be dejected or cast down, but to take and weigh all
things with such equality and moderation, directing their state of
life and living to all perfectness and goodness, that they may be
ready to embrace and follow all that which is good and profitable; and
also not only to eschew and avoid, but to withstand and set at nought
all evil and adverse fortune, whensoever it may happen unto them.”

Whoever studies the history of opinions, that is, of the aberrations,
caprices and extravagancies of the human mind, may find some
consolation in reflecting upon the practical morality which has been
preached not only by men of the most erroneous faith, but even by
fanatics, impostors and hypocrites, as if it were in the order of
Providence that there should be no poison which had not also some
medicinal virtue. The books of palmistry have been so worn by perusal
that one in decent preservation is now among the rarities of
literature; and it may be hoped that of the credulous numbers who have
pored over them, many have derived more benefit from the wholesome
lessons which were thus unexpectedly brought home to them, than they
suffered detriment from giving ear to the profession of a fallacious
art.

The lesson was so obvious that the Spaniards expressed it in one of
their pithy proverbs, _es nuestra alma en nuestra palma._ The thought
has been expanded into a sonnet by Bartolome Leonardo de Argensola, a
poet whose strains of manly morality have not been exceeded in that
language.

  _Fabio, pensar que el Padre soberano
     En esas rayas de la palma diestra
     (Que son arrugas de la piel) te muestra
   Los accidentes del discurso humano;
   Es beber con el vulgo el error vano
     De la ignorancia, su comun maestra.
     Bien te confieso, que la suerte nuestra,
   Mala, o buena, la puso en nuestra mano.
   Di, quién te estorvará el ser Rey, si vives
     Sin envidiar la suerte de los Reyes,
   Tan contento y pacifico en la tuya,
     Que estén ociosas para ti sus leyes;
   Y qualquier novedad que el Cielo influya,
     Como cosa ordinaria la recibes?_

   Fabius, to think that God hath interlined
     The human hand like some prophetic page,
   And in the wrinkles of the palm defined
     As in a map, our mortal pilgrimage,
   This is to follow, with the multitude
     Error and Ignorance, their common guides,
   Yet Heaven hath placed, for evil or for good,
     Our fate in our own hands, whate'er betides
   Being as we make it. Art thou not a king
     Thyself my friend, when envying not the lot
   Of thrones, ambition hath for thee no sting,
     Laws are to thee as they existed not,
   And in thy harmless station no event
     Can shake the calm of its assured content.

“Nature” says a Cheirologist, “was a careful workman in the creation
of the human body. She hath set in the hand of man certain signs and
tokens of the heart, brain and liver, because in them it is that the
life of man chiefly consists, but she hath not done so of the eyes,
ears, mouth, hands and feet, because those parts of the body seem
rather to be made for a comeliness or beauty, than for any necessity.”
What he meant to say was that any accident which threatened the three
vital parts was betokened in the lines of the palm, but that the same
fashioning was not necessary in relation to parts which might be
injured without inducing the loss of life. Therefore every man's palm
has in it the lines relating to the three noble parts, the more minute
lines are only found on subjects of finer texture, and if they
originally existed in husbandmen and others whose hands are rendered
callous by their employments, they are effaced.

It was only cheirologically speaking that he disparaged what sailors
in their emphatic language so truly call our precious eyes and limbs,
not that he estimated them like Tippoo Sultan, who in one of his
letters says, that if people persisted in visiting a certain person
who was under his displeasure, “their ears and noses should be
dispensed with.” This strange tyrant wrote odes in praise of himself,
and describes the effect of his just government to be such, that in
the security of his protection “the deer of the forest made their
pillow of the lion and the tyger, and their mattress of the leopard
and the panther.”

Tippoo did not consider ears and noses to be superfluities when in
that wanton wickedness which seldom fails to accompany the possession
of irresponsible power he spoke of dispensing with them. But in one
instance arms and legs were regarded as worse than superfluous. Some
years ago a man was exhibited who was born without either, and in that
condition had found a woman base enough to marry him. Having got some
money together, she one day set this wretched creature upon a
chimney-piece, from whence he could not move, and went off with
another man, stripping him of every thing that she could carry away.
The first words he uttered, when some one came into the room and took
him down, were an imprecation upon those people who had legs and arms,
because, he said they were always in mischief!

The Mahommedans believe that every man's fate is written on his
forehead, but that it can be read by those only whose eyes have been
opened. The Brahmins say that the sutures of the skull describe in
like manner the owner's destined fortune, but neither can this
mysterious writing be seen by any one during his life, nor decyphered
after his death. Both these notions are mere fancies which afford a
foundation for nothing worse than fable. Something more extraordinary
has been excogitated by W. Y. Playtes, Lecturer upon the Signs of the
light of the Understanding. He announces to mankind that the prints of
the nails of the Cross which our Lord shewed Thomas, are printed in
the roots of the nails of the hands and feet of every man that is born
into the world, for witnesses, and for leading us to believe in the
truth of all the signs, and graven images and pictures that are seen
in the Heavenly Looking Glass of Reflection, in the Sun and the Moon
and the Stars. This Theosophist has published a short Prospectus of
his intended work entitled the Horn Book for the remembrance of the
Signs of Salvation, which Horn Book is (should subscriptions be
forthcoming) to be published in one hundred and forty-four numbers,
forming twelve octavo volumes of six hundred pages each, with fifty
plates, maps and tables, and 365,000 marginal references,—being one
thousand for every day in the year. Wonder not reader at the extent of
this projected work; for, says the author, “the Cow of the Church of
Truth giveth abundance of milk, for the Babes of Knowledge.” But for
palmistry there was a plausible theory which made it applicable to the
purposes of fraud.

Among the odd persons with whom Peter Hopkins had become acquainted in
the course of his earlier pursuits, was a sincere student of the
occult sciences, who, being a more refined and curious artist,
whenever he cast the nativity of any one, took an impression from the
palm of the hand, as from an engraved plate, or block. He had thus a
fac-simile of what he wanted. According to Sir Thomas Browne, the
variety in the lines is so great, that there is almost no strict
conformity. Bewick in one of his works has in this manner printed his
own thumb. There are French deeds of the 15th century which are signed
by the imprint of five fingers dipt in ink, underwritten _Ce est la
griffe de monseigneur._[1]

[Footnote 1: The Reader, who is curious in such matters, may turn to
Ames and Herbert, (Dibdin, ii. 380.) for the hands in Holt's Lac
Puerorum, emprynted at London by Wynkyn de Worde.]

Hopkins himself did not retain any lurking inclination to believe in
this art. You could know without it, he said, whether a person were
open-handed, or close-fisted, and this was a more useful knowledge
than palmistry could give us. But the Doctor sometimes made use of it
to amuse children, and gave them at the same time playful admonition,
and wholesome encouragement.

CHAPTER CXCIX.

CONCERNING THE GREAT HONOURS TO WHICH CERTAIN HORSES HAVE ATTAINED,
AND THE ROYAL MERITS OF NOBS.

  _Siento para contarlas que me llama
   El á mi, yo á mi pluma, ella á la fama._

BALBUENA.

There have been great and good horses whose merits have been recorded
in history and in immortal song as they well deserved to be. Who has
not heard of Bucephalus? of whom Pulteney said that he questioned
whether Alexander himself had pushed his conquests half so far, if
Bucephalus had not stooped to take him on his back. Statius hath sung
of Arion who when he carried Neptune left the winds panting behind
him, and who was the best horse that ever has been heard of for taking
the water,

  _Sæpe per Ionium Libycumque natantibus ire
   Interjunctus equis, omnesque assuetus in oras
   Cæruleum deferre patrem._

   Tramp, tramp across the land he went,
       Splash, splash across the sea.

But he was a dangerous horse in a gig. Hercules found it difficult to
hold him in, and Polynices when he attempted to drive him made almost
as bad a figure as the Taylor upon his ever memorable excursion to
Brentford.

The virtues of Caligula's horse, whom that Emperor invited to sup with
him, whom he made a Priest, and whom he intended to make Consul, have
not been described by those historians who have transmitted to us the
account of his extraordinary fortune; and when we consider of what
materials, even in our days, both Priests and Senators are sometimes
made, we may be allowed to demur at any proposition which might
include an admission that dignity is to be considered an unequivocal
mark of desert. More certain it is that Borysthenes was a good horse,
for the Emperor Adrian erected a monument to his memory, and it was
recorded in his epitaph that he used to fly over the plains and
marshes and Etrurian hills, hunting Pannonian boars; he appears by his
name to have been like Nobs, of Tartaric race.

Bavieca was a holy and happy horse,—I borrow the epithets from the
Bishop of Chalons's sermon upon the Bells. Gil Diaz deserved to be
buried in the same grave with him. And there is an anonymous Horse, of
whom honorable mention is made in the Roman Catholic Breviary, for his
religious merits, because after a Pope had once ridden him, he never
would suffer himself to be unhallowed by carrying a woman on his back.
These latter are both Roman Catholic Houyhnhnms, but among the
Mahometans also, quadrupedism is not considered an obstacle to a
certain kind of canonization. Seven of the Emperor of Morocco's horses
have been Saints, or Marabouts as the Moors would call it; and some
there were who enjoyed that honour in the year 1721 when Windus was at
Mequinez. One had been thus distinguished for saving the Emperor's
life: “and if a man,” says the Traveller, “should kill one of his
children, and lay hold of this horse, he is safe. This horse has saved
the lives of some of the captives, and is fed with _cuscuru_ and
camel's milk. After the Emperor has drank, and the horse after him,
some of his favourites are suffered to drink out of the same bowl.”
This was probably the horse who had a Christian slave appointed to
hold up his tail when he was led abroad, and to carry a vessel and
towel—“for use unmeet to tell.”

I have discovered only one Houyhnhnm who was a martyr, excepting those
who are sometimes burnt with the rest of the family by Captain Rock's
people in Ireland. This was poor Morocco, the learned horse of Queen
Elizabeth's days: he and his master Banks, having been in some danger
of being put to death at Orleans, were both burnt alive by the
Inquisition at Rome, as magicians.—The word martyr is here used in its
religious acceptation: for the victims of avarice and barbarity who
are destroyed by hard driving and cruel usage are numerous enough to
make a frightful account among the sins of this nation.

Fabretti the antiquary had a horse who when he carried his master on
an antiquarian excursion, assisted him in his researches; for this
sagacious horse had been so much accustomed to stop where there were
ruins, and probably had found so much satisfaction in grazing, or
cropping the boughs among them at his pleasure, that he was become a
sort of antiquary himself; and sometimes by stopping and as it were
pointing like a setter, gave his master notice of some curious and
half-hidden objects which he might otherwise have past by unperceived.

How often has a drunken rider been carried to his own door by a
sure-footed beast, sensible enough to understand that his master was
in no condition either to guide him, or to take care of himself. How
often has a stage coach been brought safely to its inn after the
coachman had fallen from the box. Nay was there not a mare at Ennis
races in Ireland (Atalanta was her name) who having thrown her rider,
kept the course with a perfect understanding of what was expected from
her, looked back and quickened her speed as the other horses
approached her, won the race, trotted a few paces beyond the post,
then wheeled round, and came up to the scale as usual? And did not
Hurleyburley do the same thing at the Goodwood races?

That Nobs was the best horse in the world I will not affirm. Best is
indeed a bold word to whatever it be applied, and yet in the
shopkeeper's vocabulary it is at the bottom of his scale of
superlatives. A haberdasher in a certain great city is still
remembered, whose lowest priced gloves were what he called Best, but
then he had five degrees of optimism; Best, Better than Best, Best of
all, Better than Best of all, and the Real Best. It may be said of
Nobs then that he was one of the Real Best: equal to any that Spain
could have produced to compare with him, though concerning Spanish
horses, the antiquary and historian Morales, (properly and as it were
prophetically baptized Ambrosio, because his name ought ever to be in
ambrosial odour among his countrymen) concerning Spanish horses, I
say, that judicious author has said, _la estima que agora se hace en
todo el mundo de un caballo Español es la mas solemne cosa que puede
haber en animales._

Neither will I assert that there could not have been a better horse
than Nobs, because I remember how Roger Williams tells us, “one of the
chiefest Doctors of England was wont to say concerning strawberries,
that God could have made a better berry, but he never did.” Calling
this to mind, I venture to say as that chiefest Doctor might, and we
may believe would have said upon the present occasion, that a better
horse than Nobs there might have been,—but there never was.

The Duchess of Newcastle tells us that her Lord, than whom no man
could be a more competent judge, preferred barbs and Spanish to all
others, for barbs, he said, were like gentlemen in their kind, and
Spanish horses like Princes. This saying would have pleased the