This he pictures in a strange engraving prefixed to his book, and representing a crowned figure, whose description will be found in the note, p. 440. It is remarkable that when Hobbes adopted the principle that the ecclesiastical should be united with the sovereign power, he was then actually producing that portentous change which had terrified Luther and Calvin; who, even in their day, were alarmed by a new kind of political Antichrist; that “Cæsarean Popery” which Stubbe so much dreaded, and which I have here noticed, p. 358. Luther predicted that as the pope had at times seized on the political sword, so this “Cæsarean Popery,” under the pretence of policy, would grasp the ecclesiastical crosier, to form a political church. The curious reader is referred to Wolfius Lectionum Memorabilium et reconditarum, vol. ii. cent. x. p. 987. Calvin, in his commentary on Amos, has also a remarkable passage on this political church, animadverting on Amaziah, the priest, who would have proved the Bethel worship warrantable, because settled by the royal authority: “It is the king’s chapel.” Amos, vii. 13. Thus Amaziah, adds Calvin, assigns the king a double function, and maintains it is in his power to transform religion into what shape he pleases, while he charges Amos with disturbing the public repose, and encroaching on the royal prerogative. Calvin zealously reprobates the conduct of those inconsiderate persons, “who give the civil magistrate a sovereignty in religion, and dissolve the Church into the State.” The supremacy in Church and State, conferred on Henry VIII., was the real cause of these alarms; but the passage of domination raged not less fiercely in Calvin than in Henry VIII.; in the enemy of kings than in kings themselves. Were the forms of religion more celestial from the sanguinary hands of that tyrannical reformer than from those of the reforming tyrant? The system of our philosopher was, to lay all the wild spirits which have haunted us in the chimerical shapes of nonconformity. I have often thought, after much observation on our Church history since the Reformation, that the devotional feelings have not been so much concerned in this bitter opposition to the National Church as the rage of dominion, the spirit of vanity, the sullen pride of sectarism, and the delusions of madness.
Hobbes himself tells us that “some bishops are content to hold their authority from the king’s letters patents; others will needs have somewhat more they know not what of divine rights, &c., not acknowledging the power of the king. It is a relic still remaining of the venom of popish ambition, lurking in that seditious distinction and division between the power spiritual and civil. The safety of the State does not depend on the safety of the clergy, but on the entireness of the sovereign power.”—Considerations upon the Reputation, &c., of Mr. Hobbes, p. 44.
This royal observation is recorded in the “Sorberiana.” Sorbiere gleaned the anecdote during his residence in England. By the “Aubrey Papers,” which have been published since I composed this article, I find that Charles II. was greatly delighted by the wit and repartees of Hobbes, who was at once bold and happy in making his stand amidst the court wits. The king, whenever he saw Hobbes, who had the privilege of being admitted into the royal presence, would exclaim, “Here comes the bear to be baited.” This did not allude to his native roughness, but the force of his resistance when attacked.
See “Mr. Hobbes’s State of Nature considered, in a Dialogue between Philautus and Timothy.” The second dialogue is not contained in the eleventh edition of Eachard’s Works, 1705, which, however, was long after his death, so careless were the publishers of those days of their authors’ works. The literary bookseller, Tom Davies, who ruined himself by giving good editions of our old authors, has preserved it in his own.
Men of very opposite principles, but aiming at the same purpose, are reduced to a dilemma, by the spirit of party in controversy. Sir Robert Filmer, who wrote against “The Anarchy of a Limited Monarchy,” and “Patriarcha,” to re-establish absolute power, derived it from the scriptural accounts of the patriarchal state. But Sir Robert and Hobbes, though alike the advocates for supremacy of power, were as opposite as possible on theological points. Filmer had the same work to perform, but he did not like the instruments of his fellow-labourer. His manner of proceeding with Hobbes shows his dilemma: he refutes the doctrine of the “Leviathan,” while he confesses that Hobbes is right in the main. The philosopher’s reasonings stand on quite another foundation than the scriptural authorities deduced by Filmer. The result therefore is, that Sir Robert had the trouble to confute the very thing he afterwards had to establish!
It may be curious to some of my readers to preserve that part of Hobbes’s Letter to Anthony Wood, in the rare tract of his “Latin Life,” in which, with great calmness, the philosopher has painfully collated the odious interpolations. All that was written in favour of the morals of Hobbes—of the esteem in which foreigners held him—of the royal patronage, &c., were maliciously erased. Hobbes thus notices the amendments of Bishop Fell:—
“Nimirum ubi mihi tu ingenium attribuis Sobrium, ille, deleto Sobrio, substituit Acri.
“Ubi tu scripseras Libellum scripsit de Cive, interposuit ille inter Libellum et de Cive, rebus permiscendis natum, de Cive, quod ita manifestè falsum est, &c.
“Quod, ubi tu de libro meo Leviathan scripsisti, primò, quod esset, Vicinis gentibus notissimus interposuit ille, publico damno. Ubi tu scripseras, scripsit librum, interposuit ille monstrosissimum.”
A noble confidence in his own genius and celebrity breaks out in this Epistle to Wood. “In leaving out all that you have said of my character and reputation, the dean has injured you, but cannot injure me; for long since has my fame winged its way to a station from which it can never descend.” One is surprised to find such a Miltonic spirit in the contracted soul of Hobbes, who in his own system might have cynically ridiculed the passion for fame, which, however, no man felt more than himself. In his controversy with Bishop Bramhall (whose book he was cautious not to answer till ten years after it was published, and his adversary was no more, pretending he had never heard of it till then!) he breaks out with the same feeling:—“What my works are, he was no fit judge; but now he has provoked me, I will say thus much of them, that neither he, if he had lived, could—nor I, if I would, can—extinguish the light which is set up in the world by the greatest part of them.”
It is curious to observe that an idea occurred to Hobbes, which some authors have attempted lately to put into practice against their critics—to prosecute them in a court of law; but the knowledge of mankind was one of the liveliest faculties of Hobbes’s mind; he knew well to what account common minds place the injured feelings of authorship; yet were a jury of literary men to sit in judgment, we might have a good deal of business in the court for a long time; the critics and the authors would finally have a very useful body of reports and pleadings to appeal to; and the public would be highly entertained and greatly instructed. On this attack of Bishop Fell, Hobbes says—“I might perhaps have an action on the case against him, if it were worth my while; but juries seldom consider the Quarrels of Authors as of much moment.”
Bayle has conjured up an amusing theory of apparitions, to show that Hobbes might fear that a certain combination of atoms agitating his brain might so disorder his mind that it would expose him to spectral visions; and being very timorous, and distrusting his imagination, he was averse to be left alone. Apparitions happen frequently in dreams, and they may happen, even to an incredulous man, when awake, for reading and hearing of them would revive their images—these images, adds Bayle, might play him some unlucky trick! We are here astonished at the ingenuity of a disciple of Pyrrho, who in his inquiries, after having exhausted all human evidence, seems to have demonstrated what he hesitates to believe! Perhaps the truth was, that the sceptical Bayle had not entirely freed himself from the traditions which were then still floating from the fireside to the philosopher’s closet: he points his pen, as Æneas brandished his sword at the Gorgons and Chimeras that darkened the entrance of Hell; wanting the admonitions of the sibyl, he would have rushed in—
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Et frustra ferro diverberet umbras. |
The papers of Aubrey confirm my suggestion. I shall give the words—“There was a report, and surely true, that in parliament, not long after the king was settled, some of the bishops made a motion to have the good old gentleman burned for a heretique; which he hearing, feared that his papers might be searched by their order, and he told me he had burned part of them.”—p. 612. When Aubrey requested Waller to write verses on Hobbes, the poet said that he was afraid of the Churchmen. Aubrey tells us—“I have often heard him say that he was not afraid of Sprights, but afraid of being knocked on the head for five or ten pounds which rogues might think he had in his chamber.” This reason given by Hobbes for his frequent alarms was an evasive reply for too curious and talkative an inquirer. Hobbes has not concealed the cause of his terror in his metrical life—
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“Tunc venit in mentem mihi Dorislaus et Ascham, |
Dr. Dorislaus and Ascham had fallen under the daggers of proscription. [The former was assassinated in Holland, whither he had fled for safety.]
It is said that Hobbes completely recanted all his opinions; and proceeded so far as to declare that the opinions he had published in his “Leviathan,” were not his real sentiments, and that he neither maintained them in public nor in private. Wood gives this title to a work of his—“An Apology for Himself and his Writings,” but without date. Some have suspected that this Apology, if it ever existed, was not his own composition. Yet why not? Hobbes, no doubt, thought that “The Leviathan” would outlast any recantation; and, after all, that a recantation is by no means a refutation!—recantations usually prove the force of authority, rather than the force of conviction. I am much pleased with a Dr. Pocklington, who hit the etymology of the word recantation with the spirit. Accused and censured, for a penance he was to make a recantation, which he began thus:—“If canto be to sing, recanto is to sing again:” so that he re-chanted his offensive principles by his recantation!
I suspect that the apology Wood alludes to was only a republication of Hobbes’s Address to the King, prefixed to the “Seven Philosophical Problems,” 1662, where he openly disavows his opinions, and makes an apology for the “Leviathan.” It is curious enough to observe how he acts in this dilemma. It was necessary to give up his opinions to the clergy, but still to prove they were of an innocent nature. He therefore acknowledges that “his theological notions are not his opinions, but propounded with submission to the power ecclesiastical, never afterwards having maintained them in writing or discourse.” Yet, to show the king that the regal power incurred no great risk in them, he laid down one principle, which could not have been unpleasing to Charles II. He asserts, truly, that he never wrote against episcopacy; “yet he is called an Atheist, or man of no religion, because he has made the authority of the Church depend wholly upon the regal power, which, I hope, your majesty will think is neither Atheism nor Heresy.” Hobbes considered the religion of his country as a subject of law, and not philosophy. He was not for separating the Church from the State; but, on the contrary, for joining them more closely. The bishops ought not to have been his enemies; and many were not.
In the MS. collection of the French contemporary, who personally knew him, we find a remarkable confession of Hobbes. He said of himself that “he sometimes made openings to let in light, but that he could not discover his thoughts but by half-views: like those who throw open the window for a short time, but soon closing it, from the dread of the storm.” “Il disoit qu’il faisoit quelquefois des ouvertures, mais qu’il ne pouvoit découvrir ses pensées qu’à-demi; qu’il imitoit ceux qui ouvrent la fenêtre pendant quelques momens, mais qui la referment promptement de peur de l’orage.”—Lantiniana MSS., quoted by Joly in his volume of “Remarques sur Bayle.”
Could one imagine that the very head and foot of the stupendous “Leviathan” bear the marks of the little artifices practised for self by its author? This grave work is dedicated to Francis Godolphin, a person whom its author had never seen, merely to remind him of a certain legacy which that person’s brother had left to our philosopher. If read with this fact before us, we may detect the concealed claim to the legacy, which it seems was necessary to conceal from the Parliament, as Francis Godolphin resided in England. It must be confessed this was a miserable motive for dedicating a system of philosophy which was addressed to all mankind. It discovers little dignity. This secret history we owe to Lord Clarendon, in his “Survey of the Leviathan,” who adds another. The postscript to the “Leviathan,” which is only in the English edition, was designed as an easy summary of the principles: and his lordship adds, as a sly address to Cromwell, that he might be induced to be master of them at once, and “as a pawn of his new subject’s allegiance.” It is possible that Hobbes might have anticipated the sovereign power which the general was on the point of assuming in the protectorship. It was natural enough, that Hobbes should deny this suggestion.
The story his antagonist (Dr. Wallis) relates is perfectly in character. Hobbes, to show the Countess of Devonshire his attachment to life, declared that “were he master of all the world to dispose of, he would give it to live one day.” “But you have so many friends to oblige, had you the world to dispose of!” “Shall I be the better for that when I am dead?” “No,” repeated the sublime cynic, “I would give the whole world to live one day.” He asserted that “it was lawful to make use of ill instruments to do ourselves good,” and illustrated it thus:—“Were I cast into a deep pit, and the devil should put down his cloven foot, I would take hold of it to be drawn out by it.” It must be allowed this is a philosophy which has a chance of being long popular; but it is not that of another order of human beings! Hobbes would not, like Curtius, have leaped into a “deep pit” for his country; or, to drop the fable, have died for it in the field or on the scaffold, like the Falklands, the Sidneys, the Montroses—all the heroic brotherhood of genius! One of his last expressions, when informed of the approaches of death, was—“I shall be glad to find a hole to creep out of the world at.” Everything was seen in a little way by this great man, who, having reasoned himself into an abject being, “licked the dust” through life.
In our country, Mandeville, Swift, and Chesterfield have trod in the track of Hobbes; and in France, Helvetius, Rochefoucault in his “Maxims,” and L’Esprit more openly in his “Fausetté des Vertus Humaines.” They only degrade us—they are polished cynics! But what are we to think of the tremendous cynicism of Machiavel? That great genius eyed human nature with the ferocity of an enraged savage. Machiavel is a vindictive assassin, who delights even to turn his dagger within the mortal wound he has struck; but our Hobbes, said his friend Sorbiere, “is a gentle and skilful surgeon, who, with regret, cuts into the living flesh, to get rid of the corrupted.” It is equally to be regretted that the same system of degrading man has been adopted by some, under the mask of religion.
Yet Hobbes, perhaps, never suspected the arms he was placing in the hands of wretched men, when he furnished them with such fundamental positions as, that “Man is naturally an evil being; that he does not love his equal; and only seeks the aid of society for his own particular purposes.” He would at least have disowned some of his diabolical disciples. One of them, so late as in 1774, vented his furious philosophy in “An Essay on the Depravity and Corruption of Human Nature, wherein the Opinions of Hobbes, Mandeville, Helvetius, &c. are supported against Shaftesbury, Hume, Sterne, &c. by Thomas O’Brien M’Mahon.” This gentleman, once informed that he was born wicked, appears to have considered that wickedness was his paternal estate, to be turned to as profitable an account as he could. The titles of his chapters, serving as a string of the most extraordinary propositions, have been preserved in the “Monthly Review,” vol. lii. 77. The demonstrations in the work itself must be still more curious. In these axioms we find that “Man has an enmity to all beings; that had he power, the first victims of his revenge would be his wife, children, &c.—a sovereign, if he could reign with the unbounded authority every man longs for, free from apprehension of punishment for misrule, would slaughter all his subjects; perhaps he would not leave one of them alive at the end of his reign.” It was perfectly in character with this wretched being, after having quarrelled with human nature, that he should be still more inveterate against a small part of her family, with whom he was suffered to live on too intimate terms; for he afterwards published another extraordinary piece—“The Conduct and Good-Nature of Englishmen Exemplified in their charitable way of Characterising the Customs, Manners, &c. of Neighbouring Nations; their Equitable and Humane Mode of Governing States, &c.; their Elevated and Courteous Deportment, &c. of which their own Authors are everywhere produced as Vouchers,” 1777. One is tempted to think that this O’Brien M’Mahon, after all, is only a wag, and has copied the horrid pictures of his masters, as Hogarth did the School of Rembrandt by his “Paul before Felix, designed and scratched in the true Dutch taste.” These works seem, however, to have their use. To have carried the conclusions of the Anti-social Philosophy to as great lengths as this writer has, is to display their absurdity. But, as every rational Englishman will appeal to his own heart, in declaring the one work to be nothing but a libel on the nation; so every man, not destitute of virtuous emotions, will feel the other to be a libel on human nature itself.
Hobbes did not exaggerate the truth. Aubrey says of Cooper’s portrait of Hobbes, that “he intends to borrow the picture of his majesty, for Mr. Loggan to engrave an accurate piece by, which will sell well at home and abroad.” We have only the rare print of Hobbes by Faithorne, prefixed to a quarto edition of his Latin Life, 1682, remarkable for its expression and character. Sorbiere, returning from England, brought home a portrait of the sage, which he placed in his collection; and strangers, far and near, came to look on the physiognomy of a great and original thinker. One of the honours which men of genius receive is the homage the public pay to their images: either, like the fat monk, one of the heroes of the Epistolæ obscurorum Virorum, who, standing before a portrait of Erasmus, spit on it in utter malice; or when they are looked on in silent reverence. It is alike a tribute paid to the masters of intellect. They have had their shrines and pilgrimages.
None of our authors have been better known, nor more highly considered, than our Hobbes, abroad. I find many curious particulars of him and his conversations recorded in French works, which are not known to the English biographers or critics. His residence at Paris occasioned this. See Ancillon’s Mélange Critique, Basle, 1698; Patin’s Letters, 61; Sorberiana; Niceron, tome iv.; Joly’s Additions to Bayle.—All these contain original notices on Hobbes.
To his Life are additions, which nothing but the self-love of the author could have imagined.
“Amicorum Elenchus.”—He might be proud of the list of foreigners and natives.
“Tractuum contra Hobbium editorum Syllabus.”
“Eorum qui in Scriptis suis Hobbio contradixerunt Indiculus.”
“Qui Hobbii meminerunt seu in bonam seu in sequiorem partem.”
“In Hobbii Defensionem.”—Hobbes died 1679, aged 91. These two editions are, 1681, 1682.
This fact has been recorded in one of the pamphlets of Richard Baxter, who, however, was no well-wisher to our philosopher. “Additional Notes on the life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale,” 1682, p. 40.
“Athen. Oxon.,” vol. ii. p. 665, ed. 1721. No one, however, knew better than Hobbes the vanity and uselessness of words: in one place he compares them to “a spider’s web; for, by contexture of words, tender and delicate wits are insnared and stopped, but strong wits break easily through them.” The pointed sentence with which Warburton closes his preface to Shakspeare, is Hobbes’s—that “words are the counters of the wise, and the money of fools.”
Aubrey has minutely preserved for us the manner in which Hobbes composed his “Leviathan:” it is very curious for literary students. “He walked much, and contemplated; and he had in the head of his cane a pen and inkhorn, and carried always a note-book in his pocket; and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise might have lost it. He had drawn the design of the book into chapters, &c., and he knew whereabouts it would come in. Thus that book was made.”—Vol. ii. p. 607. Aubrey, the little Boswell of his day, has recorded another literary peculiarity, which some authors do not assuredly sufficiently use. Hobbes said that he sometimes would set his thoughts upon researching and contemplating, always with this proviso: “that he very much and deeply considered one thing at a time—for a week, or sometimes a fortnight.”
A small annuity from the Devonshire family, and a small pension from Charles II., exceeded the wants of his philosophic life. If he chose to compute his income, Hobbes says facetiously of himself, in French sols or Spanish maravedis, he could persuade himself that Crœsus or Crassus were by no means richer than himself; and when he alludes to his property, he considers wisdom to be his real wealth:—
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“An quàm dives, id est, quàm sapiens fuerim?” |
He gave up his patrimonial estate to his brother, not wanting it himself; but he tells the tale himself, and adds, that though small in extent, it was rich in its crops. Anthony Wood, with unusual delight, opens the character of Hobbes: “Though he hath an ill name from some, and good from others, yet he was a person endowed with an excellent philosophical soul, was a contemner of riches, money, envy, the world, &c.; a severe lover of justice, and endowed with great morals; cheerful, open, and free of his discourse, yet without offence to any, which he endeavoured always to avoid.” What an enchanting picture of the old man in the green vigour of his age has Cowley sent down to us!
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“Nor can the snow which now cold age does shed |
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“Ipse meos nôsti, Verdusi candide, mores, |
Hobbes, in his metrical (by no means his poetical) life, says, the more the “Leviathan” was written against, the more it was read; and adds,
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“Firmiùs inde stetit, spero stabitque per omne |
The term arx is here peculiarly fortunate, according to the system of the author—it means a citadel or fortified place on an eminence, to which the people might fly for their common safety.
His works were much read; as appears by “The Court Burlesqued,” a satire attributed to Butler.
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“So those who wear the holy robes |
Our author, so late as in 1750, was still so commanding a genius, that his works were collected in a handsome folio; but that collection is not complete. When he could not get his works printed at home, he published them in Latin, including his mathematical works, at Amsterdam, by Blaew, 1668, 4to. His treatises, “De Cive,” and “On Human Nature,” are of perpetual value. Gassendi recommends these admirable works, and Puffendorff acknowledges the depth of his obligations. The Life of Hobbes in the “Biographia Britannica,” by Dr. Campbell, is a work of curious research.
The origin of his taste for mathematics was purely accidental: begun in love, it continued to dotage. According to Aubrey, he was forty years old when, “being in a gentleman’s library, Euclid’s Elements lay open at the 47th Propos. lib. i., which, having read, he swore ‘This is impossible!’ He read the demonstration, which referred him back to another—at length he was convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry. I have heard Mr. Hobbes say that he was wont to draw lines on his thighs and on the sheets a-bed.”
The author of the excellent Latin grammar of the English language, so useful to every student in Europe, of which work that singular patriot, Thomas Hollis, printed an edition, to present to all the learned Institutions of Europe. Henry Stubbe, the celebrated physician of Warwick, to whom the reader has been introduced, joined, for he loved a quarrel, in the present controversy, when it involved philosophical matters, siding with Hobbes, because he hated Wallis. In his “Oneirocritica, or an Exact Account of the Grammatical Parts of this Controversy,” he draws a strong character of Wallis, who was indeed a great mathematician, and one of the most extraordinary decypherers of letters; for perhaps no new system of character could be invented for which he could not make a key; by which means he had rendered the most important services to the Parliament. Stubbe quaintly describes him as “the sub-scribe to the tribe of Adoniram” (i.e. Adoniram Byfield, who, with this cant name, was scribe to the fanatical Assembly of Divines), and “as the glory and pride of the Presbyterian faction.”
Dr. Seth Ward, after the Restoration made Bishop of Salisbury, said, some years before this event was expected, that “he had rather be the author of one of Hobbes’s books than be king of England.” But afterwards he seemed not a little inclined to cry out Crucifige! He who, to one of these books, the admirable treatise on “Human Nature,” had prefixed one of the highest panegyrics Hobbes could receive!—Athen. Oxon. vol. ii. p. 647.
It is mortifying to read such language between two mathematicians, in the calm inquiries of square roots, and the finding of mean proportionals between two straight lines. I wish the example may prove a warning. Wallis thus opens on Hobbes:—“It seems, Mr. Hobbs, that you have a mind to say your lesson, and that the mathematic professors of Oxford should hear you. You are too old to learn, though you have as much need as those that be younger, and yet will think much to be whipped.
“What moved you to say your lessons in English, when the books against which you do chiefly intend them were written in Latin? Was it chiefly for the perfecting your natural rhetoric whenever you thought it convenient to repair to Billingsgate?—You found that the oyster-women could not teach you to rail in Latin. Now you can, upon all occasion, or without occasion, give the titles of fool, beast, ass, dog, &c., which I take to be but barking; and they are no better than a man might have at Billingsgate for a box o’ the ear.
“You tell us, ‘though the beasts that think our railing to be roaring have for a time admired us; yet now you have showed them our ears, they will be less affrighted.’ Sir, those persons (the professors themselves) needed not the sight of your ears, but could tell by the voice what kind of creature brayed in your books: you dared not have said this to their faces.”—He bitterly says of Hobbes, that “he is a man who is always writing what was answered before he had written.”
Found in the king’s tent at Naseby, and which were written to the queen on important political subjects, in a cypher of which they only had the key. They were afterwards published in a quarto pamphlet, and did much mischief to the royal cause.—Ed.
The strange conclusions some mathematicians have deduced from their principles concerning the real quantity of matter, and the reality of space, have been noticed by Pope, in the Dunciad:—
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“Mad Mathésis alone was unconfined, Dunciad, Book iv. ver. 31. |
When all animosities had ceased, after the death of Hobbes, I find Dr. Wallis, in a very temperate letter to Tenison, exposing the errors of Hobbes in mathematical studies; Wallis acknowledges that philology had never entered into his pursuits,—in this he had never designed to oppose his superior genius: but it was Hobbes who had too often turned his mathematical into a philological controversy. Wallis has made a just observation on the nature of mathematical truths:—“Hobbes’s argumentations are destructive in one part of what is said in another. This is more convincingly evident, and more unpardonable, in mathematics than in other discourses, which are things capable of cogent demonstration, and so evident, that though a good mathematician may be subject to commit an error, yet one who understands but little of it cannot but see a fault when it is showed him.”
Wallis was an eminent genius in scientific pursuits. His art of decyphering letters was carried to amazing perfection; and among other phenomena he discovered was that of teaching a young man, born deaf and dumb, to speak plainly. He humorously observes, in one of his letters:—“I am now employed upon another work, as hard almost as to make Mr. Hobbes understand mathematics. It is to teach a person dumb and deaf to speak, and to understand a language.”
The gross convivialities of the times, from the age of Elizabeth, were remarkable for several circumstances. Hard-drinking was a foreign vice, imported by our military men on their return from the Netherlands: and the practice, of whose prevalence Camden complains, was even brought to a kind of science. They had a dialect peculiar to their orgies. See “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. ii. p. 294 (last edition).
Jonson’s inclinations were too well suited to the prevalent taste, and he gave as largely into it as any of his contemporaries. Tavern-habits were then those of our poets and actors. Ben’s Humours, at “the Mermaid,” and at a later period, his Leges Convivales at “the Apollo,” the club-room of “the Devil,” were doubtless one great cause of a small personal unhappiness, of which he complains, and which had a very unlucky effect in rendering a mistress so obdurate, who “through her eyes had stopt her ears.” This was, as his own verse tells us,
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“His mountain-belly and his rocky face.” |
He weighed near twenty stone, according to his own avowal—an Elephant-Cupid! One of his “Sons,” at the “Devil,” seems to think that his Catiline could not fail to be a miracle, by a certain sort of inspiration which Ben used on the occasion.
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“With strenuous sinewy words that Catiline swells, R. Baron’s Pocula Castalia, p. 113, 1650. |
Jonson, in the Bacchic phraseology of the day, was “a Canary-bird.” “He would (says Aubrey) many times exceed in drink; canary was his beloved liquor; then he would tumble home to bed; and when he had thoroughly perspired, then to study.”
Tradition, too, has sent down to us several tavern-tales of “Rare Ben.” A good-humoured one has been preserved of the first interview between Bishop Corbet, when a young man, and our great bard. It occurred at a tavern, where Corbet was sitting alone. Ben, who had probably just drank up to the pitch of good fellowship, desired the waiter to take to the gentleman “a quart of raw wine; and tell him,” he added, “I sacrifice my service to him.”—“Friend,” replied Corbet, “I thank him for his love; but tell him, from me, that he is mistaken; for sacrifices are always burned.” This pleasant allusion to the mulled wine of the time by the young wit could not fail to win the affection of the master-wit himself. Harl. MSS. 6395.
Ben is not viewed so advantageously, in an unlucky fit of ebriety recorded by Oldys, in his MS. notes on Langbaine; but his authority is not to me of a suspicious nature: he had drawn it from a MS. collection of Oldisworth’s, who appears to have been a curious collector of the history of his times. He was secretary to that strange character, Philip, Earl of Pembroke. It was the custom of those times to form collections of little traditional stories and other good things; we have had lately given to us by the Camden Society an amusing one, from the L’Estrange family, and the MS. already quoted is one of them. There could be no bad motive in recording a tale, quite innocent in itself, and which is further confirmed by Isaac Walton, who, without alluding to the tale, notices that Jonson parted from Sir Walter Raleigh and his son “not in cold blood.” Mr. Gifford, in a MS. note on this work, does not credit this story, it not being accordant with dates. Such stories may not accord with dates or persons, and yet may be founded on some substantial fact. I know of no injury to Ben’s poetical character, in showing that he was, like other men, quite incapable of taking care of himself, when he was sunk in the heavy sleep of drunkenness. It was an age when kings, as our James I. and his majesty of Denmark, were as often laid under the table as their subjects. My motive for preserving the story is the incident respecting carrying men in baskets: it was evidently a custom, which perhaps may have suggested the memorable adventure of Falstaff. It was a convenient mode of conveyance for those who were incapable of taking care of themselves before the invention of hackney coaches, which was of later date, in Charles the First’s reign.
Camden recommended Jonson to Sir Walter Raleigh as a tutor to his son, whose gay humours not brooking the severe studies of Jonson, took advantage of his foible, to degrade him in the eyes of his father, who, it seems, was remarkable for his abstinence from wine: though, if another tale be true, he was no common sinner in “the true Virginia.” Young Raleigh contrived to give Ben a surfeit, which threw the poet into a deep slumber; and then the pupil maliciously procured a buck-basket, and a couple of men, who carried our Ben to Sir Walter, with a message that “their young master had sent home his tutor.” There is nothing improbable in the story; for the circumstance of carrying drunken men in baskets was a usual practice. In the Harleian MS. quoted above, I find more than one instance; I will give one. An alderman, carried in a porter’s basket, at his own door, is thrown out of it in a qualmish state. The man, to frighten away the passengers, and enable the grave citizen to creep in unobserved, exclaims, that the man had the falling sickness!
These were Marston and Decker, but as is usual with these sort of caricatures, the originals sometimes mistook their likenesses. They were both town-wits, and cronies, of much the same stamp; by a careful perusal of their works, the editor of Jonson has decided that Marston was Crispinus. With him Jonson had once lived on the most friendly terms: afterwards the great poet quarrelled with both, or they with him.
Dryden, in the preface to his “Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco,” in his quarrel with Settle, which has been sufficiently narrated by Dr. Johnson, felt, when poised against this miserable rival, who had been merely set up by a party to mortify the superior genius, as Jonson had felt when pitched against Crispinus. It is thus that literary history is so interesting to authors. How often, in recording the fates of others, it reflects their own! “I knew indeed (says Dryden) that to write against him was to do him too great an honour; but I considered Ben Jonson had done it before to Decker, our author’s predecessor, whom he chastised in his Poetaster, under the character of Crispinus.” Langbaine tells us the subject of the “Satiromastix” of Decker, which I am to notice, was “the witty Ben Jonson;” and with this agree all the notices I have hitherto met with respecting “the Horace Junior” of Decker’s Satiromastix. Mr. Gilchrist has published two curious pamphlets on Jonson; and in the last, p. 56, he has shown that Decker was “the poet-ape of Jonson,” and that he avenged himself under the character of Crispinus in his “Satiromastix;” to which may be added, that the Fannius, in the same satirical comedy, is probably his friend Marston.
Jonson allowed himself great liberty in personal satire, by which, doubtless, he rung an alarum to a waspish host; he lampooned Inigo Jones, the great machinist and architect. The lampoons are printed in Jonson’s works [but not in their entirety. The great architect had sufficient court influence to procure them to be cancelled; and the character of In-and-in Medley, in “The Tale of a Tub,” has come down to us with no other satirical personal traits than a few fantastical expressions]; and I have in MS. an answer by Inigo Jones, in verse, so pitiful that I have not printed it. That he condescended to bring obscure individuals on the stage, appears by his character of Carlo Buffoon, in Every Man out of his Humour. He calls this “a second untruss,” and was censured for having drawn it from personal revenge. The Aubrey Papers, recently published have given us the character of this Carlo Buffoon, “one Charles Chester, a bold impertinent fellow; and they could never be at quiet for him; a perpetual talker, and made a noise like a drum in a room. So one time at a tavern Sir Walter Raleigh beats him, and seals up his mouth; i.e., his upper and nether beard, with hard wax.”—p. 514. Such a character was no unfitting object for dramatic satire. Mr. Gilchrist’s pamphlets defended Jonson from the frequent accusations raised against him for the freedom of his muse, in such portraits after the life. Yet even our poet himself does not deny their truth, while he excuses himself. In the dedication of “The Fox,” to the two Universities, he boldly asks, “Where have I been particular? Where personal?—Except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, buffoon, creatures (for their insolencies) worthy to be taxed.” The mere list he here furnishes us with would serve to crowd one of the “twopenny audiences” in the small theatres of that day.