Curiosities of Literature Volume Ii Part 54

[Footnote 177: "The Academy of Armory," Book ii. c. 3, p. 161. This is a singular work, where the writer has contrived to turn the barren subjects of heraldry into an entertaining Encyclopaedia, containing much curious knowledge on almost every subject; but this folio more particularly exhibits the most copious vocabulary of old English terms.

It has been said that there are not more than twelve copies extant of this very rare work, which is probably not true. [It is certainly not correct; the work is, however, rare and valuable.]]

[Footnote 178: In that curious source of our domestic history, the "English Villanies" of Decker, we find a lively description of the "Abram cove," or Abram man, the impostor who personated a Tom o' Bedlam.

He was terribly disguised with his grotesque rags, his staff, his knotted hair, and with the more disgusting contrivances to excite pity, still practised among a cla.s.s of our mendicants, who, in their cant language, are still said "to sham Abraham." This impostor was, therefore, as suited his purpose and the place, capable of working on the sympathy, by uttering a silly _maunding_, or demanding of charity, or terrifying the easy fears of women, children, and domestics, as he wandered up and down the country: they refused nothing to a being who was as terrific to them as "Robin Good-fellow," or "Raw-head and b.l.o.o.d.y-bones." Thus, as Edgar expresses it, "sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers," the gestures of this impostor were "a counterfeit puppet-play: they came with a hollow noise, whooping, leaping, gambolling, wildly dancing, with a fierce or distracted look."

These st.u.r.dy mendicants were called "Tom of Bedlam's band of mad-caps,"

or "Poor Tom's flock of wild geese." Decker has preserved their "Maund,"

or begging--"Good wors.h.i.+p master, bestow your reward on a poor man that hath been in Bedlam without Bishopsgate, three years, four months, and nine days, and bestow one piece of small silver towards his fees, which he is indebted there, of 3_l._ 13_s._ 7_d._" (or to such effect).

Or, "Now dame, well and wisely, what will you give poor Tom? One pound of your sheep's-feathers to make poor Tom a blanket? or one cutting of your sow's side, no bigger than my arm; or one piece of your salt meat to make poor Tom a sharing-horn; or one cross of your small silver, towards a pair of shoes; well and wisely, give poor Tom an old sheet to keep him from the cold; or an old doublet and jerkin of my master's; well and wisely, G.o.d save the king and his council." Such is a history drawn from the very archives of mendicity and imposture; and written perhaps as far back as the reign of James the First: but which prevailed in that of Elizabeth, as Shakspeare has so finely shown in his Edgar.

This _Maund_, and these a.s.sumed manners and _costume_, I should not have preserved from their utter penury, but such was the rude material which Shakspeare has worked up into that most fanciful and richest vein of native poetry, which pervades the character of the wandering Edgar, tormented by "the foul fiend" when he

---- bethought To take the basest and most poorest shape That ever penury, in contempt of man, Brought near to beast.

And the poet proceeds with a minute picture of "Bedlam beggars." See _Lear_, Act ii. Sc. 3.]

[Footnote 179: Aubrey's information is perfectly correct; for those impostors who a.s.sumed the character of Tom o' Bedlams for their own nefarious purposes used to have a mark burnt in their arms, which they showed as the mark of Bedlam. "The English Villanies" of Decker, c 17.

1648.]

[Footnote 180: I discovered the present in a very scarce collection, ent.i.tled "Wit and Drollery," 1661; an edition, however, which is not the earliest of this once fas.h.i.+onable miscellany.]

[Footnote 181: Harman, in his curious "Caveat, a warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called Vagabones," 1566, describes the "Abraham Man"

as a pretended lunatic, who wandered the country over, soliciting food or charity at farm-houses, or frightening and bullying the peasantry for the same. They described themselves as cruelly treated in Bedlam, and nearly in the words of Shakspeare's Edgar.]

[Footnote 182: Dr. James, the translator of "Pauli's Treatise on Tea,"

1746, says: "According to the Chinese, tea produces an appet.i.te after hunger and thirst are satisfied; therefore, the drinking of it is to be abstained from." He concludes his treatise by saying: "As Hippocrates spared no pains to remove and root out the Athenian plague, so have I used the utmost of my endeavours to destroy the raging epidemical madness of importing tea into Europe from China."]

[Footnote 183: _Edinburgh Review_, 1816, p. 117.]

[Footnote 184: Modern collectors have gone beyond this, and exhibited "Elizabethan tea-pots," which are just as likely to be true. There is no clear proof of the use of tea in England before the middle of the seventeenth century. This ante-dating of curiosities is the weakness of collectors.]

[Footnote 185: Aubrey, speaking of this house, then in other hands, says that Bowman's Coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, established 1652, was the first opened in London. About four years afterwards, James Farr, a barber, opened another in Fleet-street, by the Inner Temple gate.

Hatton, in his "New View of London," 1708, says it is "now the Rainbow,"

and he narrates how Farr "was presented by the Inquest of St.

Dunstan's-in-the-West, for making and selling a sort of liquor called coffee, as a great nuisance and prejudice to the neighbourhood." The words of the presentment are, that "in making the same he annoyeth his neighbours by evill smells." Hatton adds, with _navete_, "Who would then have thought London would ever have had near 3000 such nuisances, and that coffee would have been (as now) so much drank by the best of quality and physicians." It is, however, proper to note that coffee-houses had been opened in Oxford at an earlier date. Anthony Wood informs us that one Jacob, a Jew, opened a coffee-house in the parish of St. Peter-in-the-East, at Oxford, as early as 1650.]

[Footnote 186: This witty poet was not without a degree of prescience; the luxury of eating spiders has never indeed become "modish," but Mons.

Lalande, the French astronomer, and one or two humble imitators of the modern philosopher, have shown this triumph over vulgar prejudices, and were epicures of this stamp.]

[Footnote 187: "Not only tea, which we have from the East, but also chocolate, which is imported from the West Indies, _begins to be famous_."--Dr. James's "Treatise on Tobacco, Tea, Coffee, and Chocolate." 1746.]

[Footnote 188: Gerbier was in Antwerp at Rubens' death, and sent over an inventory of his pictures and effects for the king's selection.]

[Footnote 189: Sloane MSS. 5176, letter 367.]

[Footnote 190: See Gregorio Panzani's Memoirs of his agency in England.

This work long lay in ma.n.u.script, and was only known to us in the Catholic Dodd's "Church History," by partial extracts. It was at length translated from the Italian MS. and published by the Rev. Joseph Berington; a curious piece of our own secret history.]

[Footnote 191: Hume's "History of England," vii. 842. His authority is the "Parl. Hist." xix. 88.]

[Footnote 192: Whitelocke's "Memorials."]

[Footnote 193: Harl. MSS. 4898.]

[Footnote 194: One of these pictures, "A Concert," is now in our National Gallery.]

[Footnote 195: They were secured by Cromwell, who had intended to reproduce the designs at the tapestry-factory established in Mortlake, but the troubles of the kingdom hindered it. Charles II. very nearly sold them to France; Lord Danby intercepted the sale; when they were packed away in boxes, until the time of William III., who built the gallery at Hampton Court expressly for their exhibition.]

[Footnote 196: This picture is now one of the ornaments of Windsor Castle.]

[Footnote 197: These would appear to be copies of Andrea Mantegna's "Triumphs of Julius Caesar," the cartoons of which are still in the galleries of Hampton Court.]

[Footnote 198: Some may be curious to learn the price of gold and silver about 1650. It appears by this ma.n.u.script inventory that the silver sold at 4s. 11d. per oz. and gold at 3 10s.; so that the value of these metals has little varied during the last century and a half.]

[Footnote 199: This poem is omitted in the great edition of the king's works, published after the Restoration; and was given by Burnet from a ma.n.u.script of his "Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton;" but it had been previously published in Perrenchief's "Life of Charles the First." It has been suspected that this poem is a pious fraud, and put forth in the king's name--as likewise was the "Eikon Basilike." One point I have since ascertained is, that Charles did write verses, as rugged as some of these. And in respect to the book, notwithstanding the artifice and the interpolations of Gauden, I believe that there are some pa.s.sages which Charles only could have written.]

[Footnote 200: This article was composed without any recollection that a part of the subject had been antic.i.p.ated by Lord Orford. In the "Anecdotes of Painting in England," many curious particulars are noticed: the story of the king's diamond seal had reached his lords.h.i.+p, and Vertue had a mutilated transcript of the inventory of the king's pictures, &c., discovered in Moorfields; for, among others, more than thirty pages at the beginning relating to the plate and jewels were missing. The ma.n.u.script in the Harleian Collection is perfect. Lord Orford has also given an interesting anecdote to show the king's discernment in the knowledge of the hands of the painters, which confirms the little anecdote I have related from the Farrars. But for a more intimate knowledge of this monarch's intercourse with artists, I beg to refer to the third volume of my "Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First," chapter the sixth, on "The Private Life of Charles the First.--Love of the Arts."]

[Footnote 201: Hume, vol. vi. p. 234. Charles seems, however, to have constantly consulted his favourite minister, the Duke of Buckingham, on the subject, though his letters express clearly his own determination.

In Harleian MSS., 6988, is a letter written to Buckingham, dated Hampton Court, 20th November, 1625, he declares, "I thought I would have cause enough in short time to put away the Monsieurs," from the quarrels they would ferment between himself and his wife, or his subjects, and begs of him to acquaint "the queen-mother (Mary de Medicis) with my intention; for this being an action that may have a show of harshness, I thought it was fit to take this way, that she to whom I have had many obligations may not take it unkindly." In another long letter, preserved among the Rawlinson MSS. in the Bodleian Library, he enters minutely into his domestic grievances--"What unkindnesses and distastes have fallen between my wife and me"--which he attributes to the "crafty counsels" of her servants. On 7th August, 1626, he writes a final letter to the duke, ordering him to send them all away, "if you can by fair means (but stick not long in disputing), otherwise force them away, driving them away like so many wild beasts, until ye have s.h.i.+pped them, and so the devil go with them."]

[Footnote 202: Lord Hardwicke's State-papers, II. 2, 3.]

[Footnote 203: Sloane MSS. 4176.]

[Footnote 204: Harl. MSS. 646.]

[Footnote 205: Amba.s.sades du Marechal de Ba.s.sompierre, vol. iii. p. 49.]

[Footnote 206: A letter from Dr. Meddus to Mr. Mead, 17th Jan. 1625.

Sloane MSS. 4177.]

[Footnote 207: Sir S. D'Ewes's "Journal of his Life," Harl. MS. 646. We have seen our puritanic antiquary describing the person of the queen with some warmth; but "he could not abstain from deep-fetched sighs, to consider that she wanted the knowledge of true religion," a circ.u.mstance that Henrietta would have as zealously regretted for Sir Symonds himself!]

[Footnote 208: A letter to Mr. Mead, July 1, 1625. Sloane MSS. 4177.]

[Footnote 209: At Hampton Court there is a curious picture of Charles and Henrietta dining in the presence. This regal honour, after its interruption during the Civil Wars, was revived in 1667 by Charles the Second, as appears by "Evelyn's Diary." "Now did his majesty again _dine in the presence_, in ancient style, with music and all the court ceremonies."]

[Footnote 210: The author of the Life of this Archbishop and Lord Keeper, a voluminous folio, but full of curious matters. Ambrose Phillips the poet abridged it.]

[Footnote 211: A letter from Mr. Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, October, 1625. Sloane MSS. 4177.]

[Footnote 212: There is a very rare print, which has commemorated this circ.u.mstance.]

[Footnote 213: Mr. Pory to Mr. Mead, July, 1626. Harl. MSS. No. 383. The answer of the king's council to the complaints of Ba.s.sompierre is both copious and detailed in vol. iii., p. 166, of the "Amba.s.sades" of this marshal.]

[Footnote 214: A letter from Mr. Pory to Mr. Mead contains a full account of this transaction. Harl. MSS. 383.]

[Footnote 215: A letter among Tanner's MS. in the Bodleian Library notes--"When they were turned away from Somerset House the pa.s.sage was somewhat rough;" and adds, "I know not what revilings took place betwixt them and the king's guard, but one of the soldiers told me that for furious speech, he would rather have taken common thieves to prison." A stanza of a popular song of the day testifies to the joy of the Commons of England on the event:--