The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 written by Charles Lamb

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* * * * *

FRANCIS BEAUMONT.--JOHN FLETCHER.

_Maid's Tragedy_.--One characteristic of the excellent old poets is,
their being able to bestow grace upon subjects which naturally do not
seem susceptible of any. I will mention two instances. Zelmane in the
Arcadia of Sidney, and Helena in the All's Well that Ends Well of
Shakspeare. What can be more unpromising, at first sight, than the
idea of a young man disguising himself in woman's attire, and passing
himself off for a woman among women; and that for a long space of
time? Yet Sir Philip has preserved so matchless a decorum, that
neither does Pyrocles' manhood suffer any stain for the effeminacy of
Zelmane, nor is the respect due to the princesses at all diminished
when the deception comes to be known. In the sweetly-constituted mind
of Sir Philip Sidney, it seems as if no ugly thought or unhandsome
meditation could find a harbor. He turned all that he touched into
images of honor and virtue. Helena in Shakspeare is a young woman
seeking a man in marriage. The ordinary rules of courtship are
reversed, the habitual feelings are crossed. Yet with such exquisite
address this dangerous subject is handled, that Helena's forwardness
loses her no honor; delicacy dispenses with its laws in her favor,
and nature, in her single case, seems content to suffer a sweet
violation. Aspatia, in the Maid's Tragedy, is a character equally
difficult with Helena, of being managed with grace. She too is a
slighted woman, refused by the man who had once engaged to marry her.
Yet it is artfully contrived, that while we pity we respect her, and
she descends without degradation. Such wonders true poetry and
passion can do, to confer dignity upon subjects which do not seem
capable of it. But Aspatia must not be compared at all points with
Helena; she does not so absolutely predominate over her situation but
she suffers some diminution, some abatement of the full lustre of the
female character, which Helena never does. Her character has many
degrees of sweetness, some of delicacy; but it has weakness, which,
if we do not despise, we are sorry for. After all, Beaumont and
Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Shakspeares and Sidneys.

_Philaster_.--The character of Bellario must have been extremely
popular in its day. For many years after the date of Philaster's
first exhibition on the stage, scarce a play can be found without one
of these women-pages in it, following in the train of some
pre-engaged lover, calling on the gods to bless her happy rival (his
mistress), whom no doubt she secretly curses in her heart, giving
rise to many pretty _equivoques_ by the way on the confusion of sex,
and either made happy at last by some surprising turn of fate, or
dismissed with the joint pity of the lovers and the audience. Donne
has a copy of verses to his mistress, dissuading her from a
resolution, which she seems to have taken up from some of these
scenical representations, of following him abroad as a page. It is so
earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense, in wit, and pathos,
that it deserves to be read as a solemn close in future to all such
sickly fancies as he there deprecates.

* * * * *

JOHN FLETCHER.

_Thierry and Theodoret_.--The scene where Ordella offers her life a
sacrifice, that the king of France may not be childless, I have
always considered as the finest in all Fletcher, and Ordella to be
the most perfect notion of the female heroic character, next to
Calantha in the Broken Heart. She is a piece of sainted nature. Yet,
noble as the whole passage is, it must be confessed that the manner
of it, compared with Shakspeare's finest scenes, is faint and
languid. Its motion is circular, not progressive. Each line revolves
on itself in a sort of separate orbit. They do not join into one
another like a running-hand. Fletcher's ideas moved slow; his
versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops at every turn; he
lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to
image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. Shakspeare
mingles everything, runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and
metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched
and clamorous for disclosure. Another striking difference between
Fletcher and Shakspeare is the fondness of the former for unnatural
and violent situations. He seems to have thought that nothing great
could be produced in an ordinary way. The chief incidents in some of
his most admired tragedies show this.[1] Shakspeare had nothing of
this contortion in his mind, none of that craving after violent
situations, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I
think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The wit of
Fletcher is excellent,[2] like his serious scenes, but there is
something strained and far-fetched in both. He is too mistrustful of
Nature, he always goes a little on one side of her.--Shakspeare chose
her without a reserve: and had riches, power, understanding, and
length of days, with her for a dowry.

[Footnote 1: Wife for a Month, Cupid's Revenge, Double Marriage, &c.]

[Footnote 2: Wit without Money, and his comedies generally.]

_Faithful Shepherdess_.--If all the parts of this delightful pastoral
had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric
intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with Comus or the
Arcadia, to have been put into the hands of boys and virgins, to have
made matter for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander.
But a spot is on the face of this Diana. Nothing short of infatuation
could have driven Fletcher upon mixing with this "blessedness" such
an ugly deformity as Chloe, the wanton shepherdess! If Chloe was
meant to set off Clorin by contrast, Fletcher should have known that
such weeds by juxtaposition do not set off, but kill sweet flowers.

* * * * *

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS DECKER.

_The Virgin Martyr_.--This play has some beauties of so very high an
order, that with all my respect for Massinger, I do not think he had
poetical enthusiasm capable of rising up to them. His associate
Decker who wrote Old Fortunatus, had poetry enough for anything. The
very impurities which obtrude themselves among the sweet pieties of
this play, like Satan among the Sons of Heaven, have a strength of
contrast, a raciness, and a glow, in them, which are beyond
Massinger. They are to the religion of the rest what Caliban is to
Miranda.

* * * * *

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS MIDDLETON.--WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_Old Law_.--There is an exquisiteness of moral sensibility, making
one's eyes to gush out tears of delight, and a poetical strangeness
in the circumstances of this sweet tragicomedy, which are unlike
anything in the dramas which Massinger wrote alone. The pathos is of
a subtler edge. Middleton and Rowley, who assisted in it, had both of
them finer geniuses than their associate.

* * * * *

JAMES SHIRLEY

Claims a place amongst the worthies of this period, not so much for
any transcendent talent in himself, as that he was the last of a
great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set
of moral feelings and notions in common. A new language, and quite a
new turn of tragic and comic interest, came in with the Restoration.

* * * * *

SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER,

THE CHURCH HISTORIAN.

The writings of Fuller are usually designated by the title of quaint,
and with sufficient reason; for such was his natural bias to
conceits, that I doubt not upon most occasions it would have been
going out of his way to have expressed himself out of them. But his
wit is not always a _lumen siccum_, a dry faculty of surprising; on
the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in human
feeling and passion. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its
eager liveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the
narrator happily blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled.

As his works are now scarcely perused but by antiquaries, I thought
it might not be unacceptable to my readers to present them with some
specimens of his manner, in single thoughts and phrases; and in some
few passages of greater length, chiefly of a narrative description. I
shall arrange them as I casually find them in my book of extracts,
without being solicitous to specify the particular work from which
they are taken.

_Pyramids_.--"The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have
forgotten the names of their founders."

_Virtue in a Short Person_.--"His soul had but a short diocese to
visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing
thereof."

_Intellect in a very Tall One_.--"Ofttimes such who are built four
stories high, are observed to have little in their cockloft."

_Naturals_.--"Their heads sometimes so little, that there is no room
for wit; sometimes so long, that there is no wit for so much room."

_Negroes_.--"The image of God cut in ebony."

_School-Divinity_.--"At the first it will be as welcome to thee as a
prison, and their very solutions will seem knots unto thee."

_Mr. Perkins the Divine_.--"He had a capacious head, with angles
winding and roomy enough to lodge all controversial intricacies."

_The same_.--"He would pronounce the word _Damn_ with such an
emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors' ears a good while
after."

_Judges in Capital Cases_.--"O let him take heed how he strikes that
hath a dead hand."

_Memory_.--"Philosophers place it in the rear of the head, and it
seems the mine of memory lies there, because there men naturally dig
for it, scratching it when they are at a loss."

_Fancy_.--"It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul;
for while the Understanding and the Will are kept, as it were, _in
libera custodia_ to their objects of _verum et bonum_, the Fancy is
free from all engagements: it digs without spade, sails without ship,
flies without wings, builds without charges, fights without
bloodshed; in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference
of the world; by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating
things in an instant; and things divorced in Nature are married in
Fancy as in a lawless place."

_Infants_.--"Some, admiring what motives to mirth infants meet with
in their silent and solitary smiles, have resolved, how truly I know
not, that then they converse with angels; as indeed such cannot among
mortals find any fitter companions."

_Music_.--"Such is the sociableness of music, it conforms itself to
all companies both in mirth and mourning; complying to improve that
passion with which it finds the auditors most affected. In a word, it
is an invention which might have beseemed a son of Seth to have been
the father thereof: though better it was that Cain's great-grandchild
should have the credit first to find it, than the world the
unhappiness longer to have wanted it."

_St. Monica_.--"Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts
as harbingers to heaven, and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness
through the chinks of her sickness-broken body."[1]

[Footnote 1:

"The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Lets in new lights through chinks which time has made."
WALLER.]

_Mortality_.--"To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the
body, no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul."

_Virgin_.--"No lordling husband shall at the same time command her
presence and distance; to be always near in constant attendance, and
always to stand aloof in awful observance."

_Elder Brother_.--"Is one who made haste to come into the world to
bring his parents the first news of male posterity, and is well
rewarded for his tidings."

_Bishop Fletcher_.--"His pride was rather on him than in him, as only
gait and gesture deep, not sinking to his heart, though causelessly
condemned for a proud man, as who was a _good hypocrite_, and far
more humble than he appeared."

_Masters of Colleges_.--"A little allay of dulness in a Master of a
College makes him fitter to manage secular affairs."

_The Good Yeoman_.--"Is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see
refined."

_Good Parent_.--"For his love, therein like a well-drawn picture, he
eyes all his children alike."

_Deformity in Children_.--"This partiality is tyranny, when parents
despise those that are deformed; _enough to break those whom God had
bowed before_."

_Good Master_.--"In correcting his servant he becomes not a slave to
his own passion. Not cruelly making new _indentures_ of the flesh of
his apprentice. He is tender of his servant in sickness and age. If
crippled in his service, his house is his hospital. Yet how many
throw away those dry bones, out of the which themselves have sucked
the marrow!"

_Good Widow_.--"If she can speak but little good of him [her dead
husband] she speaks but little of him. So handsomely folding up her
discourse, that his virtues are shown outwards, and his vices wrapt
up in silence; as counting it barbarism to throw dirt on his memory,
who hath mould cast on his body."

_Horses_.--"These are men's wings, wherewith they make such speed. A
generous creature a horse is, sensible in some sort of honor; and
made most handsome by that which deforms men most--pride."

_Martyrdom_.--"Heart of oak hath sometimes warped a little in the
scorching heat of persecution. Their want of true courage herein
cannot be excused. Yet many censure them for surrendering up their
forts after a long siege, who would have yielded up their own at the
first summons.--Oh! there is more required to make one valiant, than
to call Cranmer or Jewel coward; as if the fire in Smithfield had
been no hotter than what is painted in the Book of Martyrs."

_Text of St. Paul_.--"St. Paul saith, Let not the sun go down on your
wrath, to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy
revengeful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's meaning rather than
his words, with all possible speed to depose our passion; not
understanding him so literally, that we may take leave to be angry
till sunset: then might our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in
Greenland, where the day lasts above a quarter of a year, have
plentiful scope for revenge."[1]

[Footnote 1: This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one
would have thought of deducing,--setting up an absurdum on purpose to
hunt it down,--placing guards as it were at the very outposts of
possibility,--gravely giving out laws to insanity and prescribing
moral fences to distempered intellects, could never have entered into
a head less entertainingly constructed than that of Fuller or Sir
Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of this
passage most aptly imitates.]

_Bishop Brownrig_.--"He carried learning enough _in numerato_ about
him in his pockets for any discourse, and had much more at home in
his chests for any serious dispute."

_Modest Want_.--"Those that with diligence fight against poverty,
though neither conquer till death makes it a drawn battle, expect not
but prevent their craving of thee: for God forbid the heavens should
never rain, till the earth first opens her mouth; seeing _some
grounds will sooner burn than chap_."

_Death-bed Temptations_.--"The devil is most busy on the last day of
his term; and a tenant to be ousted cares not what mischief he doth."

_Conversation_.--"Seeing we are civilized Englishmen, let us not be
naked savages in our talk."

_Wounded Soldier_.--"Halting is the stateliest march of a soldier;
and 'tis a brave sight to see the flesh of an ancient as torn as his
colors."

_Wat Tyler_.--"A _misogrammatist_; if a good Greek word may be given
to so barbarous a rebel."

_Heralds_.--"Heralds new mould men's names--taking from them, adding
to them, melting out all the liquid letters, torturing mutes to make
them speak, and making vowels dumb,--to bring it to a fallacious
_homonomy_ at the last, that their names may be the same with those
noble houses they pretend to."

_Antiquarian Diligence_.--"It is most worthy observation, with what
diligence he [Camden] inquired after ancient places, making hue and
cry after many a city which was run away, and by certain marks and
tokens pursuing to find it; as by the situation on the Roman
highways, by just distance from other ancient cities, by some
affinity of name, by tradition of the inhabitants, by Roman coins
digged up, and by some appearance of ruins. A broken urn is a whole
evidence; or an old gate still surviving, out of which the city is
run out. Besides, commonly some new spruce town not far off is grown
out of the ashes thereof, which yet hath so much natural affection as
dutifully to own those reverend ruins for her mother."

_Henry de Essex_.--"He is too well known in our English Chronicles,
being Baron of Raleigh, in Essex, and Hereditary Standard Bearer of
England. It happened in the reign of this king [Henry II.] there was
a fierce battle fought in Flintshire, at Coleshall, between the
English and Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex _animum et signum
simul abjecit_, betwixt traitor and coward, cast away both his
courage and banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of
English. But he that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny
the doing of so foul a fact; until he was challenged in combat by
Robert de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome
in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was confiscated to the
king, and he himself, _partly thrust, partly going into a convent,
hid his head in a cowl, under which, betwixt shame and sanctity, he
blushed out the remainder of his life_."[1]--_Worthies_, article
_Bedfordshire_.

[Footnote 1: The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have
been pronounced impossible. It has given an interest, and a holy
character to coward infamy. Nothing can be more beautiful than the
concluding account of the last days, and expiatory retirement, of
poor Henry de Essex. The address with which the whole of this little
story is told is most consummate; the charm of it seems to consist in
a perpetual balance of antithesis not too violently opposed, and the
consequent activity of mind in which the reader is kept:--"Betwixt
traitor and coward"--"baseness to do, boldness to deny"--"partly
thrust, partly going, into a convent"--"betwixt shame and sanctity."
The reader by this artifice is taken into a kind of partnership with
the writer,--his judgment is exercised in settling the
preponderance,--he feels as if he were consulted as to the issue. But
the modern historian flings at once the dead weight of his own
judgment into the scale, and settles the matter.]

_Sir Edward Harwood, Knt._--"I have read of a bird, which hath a face
like, and yet will prey upon, a man: who coming to the water to
drink, and finding there by reflection, that he had killed one like
himself, pineth away by degrees, and never afterwards enjoyeth
itself.[1] Such is in some sort the condition of Sir Edward. This
accident, that he had killed one in a private quarrel, put a period
to his carnal mirth, and was a covering to his eyes all the days of
his life. No possible provocations could afterwards tempt him to a
duel; and no wonder that one's conscience loathed that whereof he had
surfeited. He refused all challenges with more honor than others
accepted them; it being well known that he would set his foot as far
in the face of his enemy as any man alive."--_Worthies_, article
_Lincolnshire_.

[Footnote 1: I do not know where Fuller read of this bird; but a more
awful and affecting story, and moralizing of a story, in Natural
History, or rather in that Fabulous Natural History where poets and
mythologists found the Phoenix and the Unicorn and "other strange
fowl," is nowhere extant. It is a fable which Sir Thomas Browne, if
he had heard of it, would have exploded among his Vulgar Errors; but
the delight which he would have taken in the discussing of its
probabilities, would have shown that the _truth of the fact_, though
the avowed object of his search was not so much the motive which put
him upon the investigation, as those hidden affinities and poetical
analogies,--those _essential verities_ in the application of strange
fable, which made him linger with such reluctant delay among the last
fading lights of popular tradition; and not seldom to conjure up a
superstition, that had been long extinct, from its dusty grave, to
inter it himself with greater ceremonies and solemnities of burial.]

_Decayed Gentry_.--"It happened in the reign of King James, when
Henry Earl of Huntingdon was Lieutenant of Leicestershire, that a
laborer's son in that country was pressed into the wars; as I take
it, to go over with Count Mansfield. The old man at Leicester
requested his son might be discharged, as being the only staff of his
age, who by his industry maintained him and his mother. The Earl
demanded his name, which the man for a long time was loath to tell
(as suspecting it a fault for so poor a man to confess the truth); at
last he told his name was Hastings. 'Cousin Hastings,' said the Earl,
'we cannot all be top branches of the tree, though we all spring from
the same root; your son, my kinsman, shall not be pressed.' So good
was the meeting of modesty in a poor, with courtesy in an honorable
person, and gentry I believe in both. And I have reason to believe,
that some who justly own the surnames and blood of Bohuns, Mortimers,
and Plantagenets (though ignorant of their own extractions), are hid
in the heap of common people, where they find that under a thatched
cottage which some of their ancestors could not enjoy in a leaded
castle--contentment, with quiet and security."--_Worthies_, article
_Of Shire-Reeves or Shiriffes_.

_Tenderness of Conscience in a Tradesman_.--"Thomas Curson, born in
Allhallows, Lombard Street, armorer, dwelt without Bishopsgate. It
happened that a stage-player borrowed a rusty musket, which had lain
long leger in his shop: now though his part were comical, he
therewith acted an unexpected tragedy, killing one of the
standers-by, the gun casually going off on the stage, which he
suspected not to be charged. O the difference of divers men in the
tenderness of their consciences! some are scarce touched with a
wound, whilst others are wounded with a touch therein. This poor
armorer was highly afflicted therewith, though done against his will,
yea, without his knowledge, in his absence, by another, out of mere
chance. Hereupon he resolved to give all his estate to pious uses: no
sooner had he gotten a round sum, but presently he posted with it in
his apron to the Court of Aldermen, and was in pain till by their
direction he had settled it for the relief of poor in his own and
other parishes, and disposed of some hundreds of pounds accordingly,
as I am credibly informed by the then churchwardens of the said
parish. Thus, as he conceived himself casually (though at a great
distance) to have occasioned the death of one, he was the immediate
and direct cause of giving a comfortable living to many."

_Burning of Wickliffe's Body by Order of the Council of
Constance_.--"Hitherto [A.D. 1428] the corpse of John Wickliffe had
quietly slept in his grave about forty-one years after his death,
till his body was reduced to bones, and his bones almost to dust. For
though the earth in the chancel of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire,
where he was interred, hath not so quick a digestion with the earth
of Aceldama, to consume flesh in twenty-four hours, yet such the
appetite thereof, and all other English graves, to leave small
reversions of a body after so many years. But now such the spleen of
the Council of Constance, as they not only cursed his memory as dying
an obstinate heretic, but ordered that his bones (with this
charitable caution,--if it may be discerned from the bodies of other
faithful people) be taken out of the ground, and thrown far off from
any Christian burial. In obedience hereunto, Richard Fleming, Bishop
of Lincoln, Diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with
a quick sight, scent, at a dead carcass) to ungrave him. Accordingly
to Lutterworth they come, Sumner, Commissary, Official, Chancellor,
Proctors, Doctors, and their servants, (so that the remnant of the
body would not hold out a bone amongst so many hands,) take what was
left out of the grave, and burnt them to ashes, and cast them into
Swift, a neighboring brook, running hard by. _Thus this brook has
conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the
narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of
Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all
the world over._"[1]--Church History.

[Footnote 1: The concluding period of this most lively narrative I
will not call a conceit: it is one of the grandest conceptions I ever
met with. One feels the ashes of Wickliffe gliding away out of the
reach of the Sumners, Commissaries, Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and
all the puddering rout of executioners of the impotent rage of the
baffled Council: from Swift into Avon, from Avon into Severn, from
Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main
ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, "dispersed all
the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Caesar to the clay that
stops a beer-barrel is a no less curious pursuit of "ruined
mortality;" but it is in an inverse ratio to this: it degrades and
saddens us, for one part of our nature at least; but this expands the
whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort of ubiquity,--a
diffusion as far as the actions of its partner can have reach or
influence.

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