1Warton’s “Second Dissertation on the Introduction of Learning into England.”2Lenglet du Fresnoy—Preface to his edition of the “Roman de la Rose.”3Much curious matter will be found in the rare volume of Fauchet “Recueil de l’Origine de la Langue et Poesie Françoise Ryme et Romans plus les Noms et Summaire des Œuvres, de cxxvii. Poètes François, vivant avant l’anMCCC.;” liv. i. ch. vii., 1610, 4to.4See “Two Inquiries respecting the Early Use of Rhyme,” by Sharon Turner, Esq.—Archæologia,vol. xiv. The subject further enlarged, “On the Origin and Progress of Rhyme in the Middle Ages.”—Hist. of England, iv. 386.5The second book the Chinese children read is a collection conveyed inrhyming lines.—Davis on the Chinese.
1Warton’s “Second Dissertation on the Introduction of Learning into England.”
2Lenglet du Fresnoy—Preface to his edition of the “Roman de la Rose.”
3Much curious matter will be found in the rare volume of Fauchet “Recueil de l’Origine de la Langue et Poesie Françoise Ryme et Romans plus les Noms et Summaire des Œuvres, de cxxvii. Poètes François, vivant avant l’anMCCC.;” liv. i. ch. vii., 1610, 4to.
4See “Two Inquiries respecting the Early Use of Rhyme,” by Sharon Turner, Esq.—Archæologia,vol. xiv. The subject further enlarged, “On the Origin and Progress of Rhyme in the Middle Ages.”—Hist. of England, iv. 386.
5The second book the Chinese children read is a collection conveyed inrhyming lines.—Davis on the Chinese.
RHYMING DICTIONARIES.
Ifour poets in rhyme dared to disclose one of the grand mysteries of their art, they would confess that, to find rhymes for their lines is a difficulty which, however overcome, after all has botched many a fine verse; the second line has often altered the original conception of the preceding one. The finest poems in the language, if critically examined, would show abundant evidence of this difficultynot overcome. This difficulty seems to have occurred to our earliest critics, forGascoigne, in his “Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making Verse or Rhyme in English”—andWebbe, in his “Discourse,” repeats the precept—would initiate the young poet in the art of rhyme-finding: the simplicity of the critic equals the depth of his artifice.
“When you have one versewell settledanddecently ordered, which you may dispose at your pleasure to end it withwhat word you will; then whatsoever the word is, you may speedily run over the other words which are answerable thereunto (for more readiness through all the letters alphabetically),1whereof you may choose that which willbest fit the senseof your matter in that place; as, for example, if your last word end in book, you may straightway in your mind run them over thus—book, cook, crook, hook, look, nook, pook, &c. &c. Now it istwenty to one but always one of these shall jump with your former word and matter in good sense.”
The poet inrhymehas therefore in his favour “twenty to one” of a chance that his second line may “jump” with his former one. We were not aware that the odds were so favourable, even when we look over the finished poetry of Pope, who has written so much, or of Gray, who has written so little. Boileau tells us he always chose a rhyme for his second line before he wrote out his first, that by this means he might secure the integrity of thesense; and this he called “the difficult art of rhyming.” These are mysteries which only confirm the hazard which rhymers incur; and, on the whole, though we do marvellously escape, the poet at every rhyming line still stands in peril.
This torture of rhyme-finding seems to have occasioned a general affliction among modern poets; and an unhappy substitute was early found in arranging collections of rhymes, and which subsequently led to a monstrous device. In Goujet’s “Bibliothèque Française,” vol. iii., will be found a catalogue of these rhyming dictionaries: the earliest of the French was published in 1572. Indeed, some of these French critics looked upon these rhyming dictionaries as part of the art of poetry, recommending pocket editions for those who in their walks were apt to poetise, as if finding a rhyme would prompt a thought.
Among these early attempts is an extravagant one by Paul Boyer. It is a kind of encyclopædia, in which all the names are arranged by their terminations, so that it furnishes a dictionary of rhymes.
The demand for rhymes seems to have continued; for in 1660, D’Ablancourt Fremont published aDictionnaire, which was enlarged by Richelet in 1667. It seems we were not idle in threading rhymes in our own country, for Poole, in 1657, in his “Parnassus,” furnishes a collection of rhymes; and he has had his followers. But the perfect absurdity or curiosity of a rhyming lexicographer appears in one of Walker’s Dictionaries of the English Language. As he was a skilful philologist, he has contrived to make it useful for orthography and pronunciation. He advances it as on a plan “not hitherto attempted;” and his volume on the whole, as Moreri observes of Boyer’s, is a thing “plaisant à considérer.”
A dictionary of rhymes is as miserable a contrivance to assist a verse as counting the syllables by the finger is to regulate the measure; in the case of rhyme it is sense which should regulate the verse, and in that of metre it is the ear alone which can give it melody.
1Here is the first idea of “A Dictionary of Rhymes,” which has inspired so many unhappy bards.
1Here is the first idea of “A Dictionary of Rhymes,” which has inspired so many unhappy bards.
THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE.
Amongthe arts of English poesie, the most ample and most curious is an anonymous work.1The history of an anonymous book is sometimes liable to the most contradictory evidence. The present, first printed in 1589, we learn from the work itself, was in hand as early as in 1553. The author inscribed the volume to Queen Elizabeth, and the courtly critic has often adroitly addressed “the most beautiful, or rather the beauty, of queens;” and to illustrate that figure which he terms “the gorgeous,” has preserved for us some of her regal verses.
Yet notwithstanding this votive gift to royalty, the printer has formally dedicated the volume to Lord Burleigh, acknowledging that “this book came into my hands withits bare title without any author’s name.” The author himself could not have been at all concerned in delivering this work to the press, for having addressed the volume to the queen, he would never have sought for a patron in the minister.
This ambiguous author remained unknown after the publication, for Sir John Harrington, who lived in the circle of the court, designates him as “the unknownGodfather, that, this last year save one (1589), set forth a book called ‘The Arte of English Poesie.’” About twelve years afterwards, Carew, in his “Survey of Cornwall,” appears to have been the first who disclosed the writer’s name as “Master Puttenham;” but this was so little known among literary men, that three years later, in 1605, Camden only alludes to the writer as “thegentlemanwho proves that poets are the first politicians, the first philosophers, and the first historiographers.” Eleven years after, Edmund Bolton, in his “Hypercritica,” notices “this work (as the fame is) of one of Queen Elizabeth’s pensioners, Puttenham.” The qualifying parenthesis “asthe fame is,” leaves the whole evidence in a very ticklish condition.
Who was Puttenham? A name unknown, and whose writings are unnoticed by any contemporary. Even the baptismal name of this writer has been subject to contradiction.2
In the work itself the writer has interspersed many allusions to himself, from his nursery to his court-days. His nurse, a right-lined ancestor of the garrulous nurse of the Capulets, had exercised his prurient faculties in expounding an indecent riddle,3which our mature critic still deemed “pretty;” but, according to one of his rhetorical technical terms, “it holds too much of thecachemphatonorfoule speech, and may be drawn unto a reprobate sense.” Our author was a travelled gentleman, and by his residence at various courts, seems to have been connected with thecorps diplomatique, for he had been present on some remarkable occasions at foreign courts, which we discover bycoeval anecdotes of persons and places. One passage relating to himself requires attention. Alluding to the polished hypocrisy practised in courts, he observes:—“These and many such like disgustings we find in men’s behaviour, and specially in the courtiers of foreign countries,where in my youth I was brought up, and very well observed their manner of life and conversation; for ofmine own country I have not made so great experience.”
This seems as ambiguous as any part of our author’s history, for at eighteen years of age he had addressed Edward the Sixth by “Our Eclogue of Elpine.” When he tells us that “he had not had so great experience of his own country as of others,” we may be surprised, for no contemporary writer has displayed such intimacy with the court anecdotes of England, which have studded many of his pages. Neither does the style, which bears no mark of foreign idiom, nor the collected matter of his art of poetry, which discovers a minute acquaintance with every species of English composition, preserving for us much fragmentary poetry, at all betray a stranger’s absence from home. But, what seems more extraordinary, the writer frequently alludes to learned disquisitions, critical treatises, and to dramatic compositions of his own—to “our comedy” and to “our enterlude,” and has frequent illustrations drawn from poems of all sorts and measures of his own growth. It is one of the singularities of this unknown person that his writings were numerous, and that no contemporary has ever mentioned the name of Puttenham. How are we to reconcile these discrepancies, and how account for these numberless vernacular compositions, with the condition of one who was “brought up abroad,” and who had such “little experience of his own country?” We appear to read a work composed by different persons.
The same anomalous character is attached to the work as we have discovered concerning the writer.
This “Arte of English Poesie,” which Warton observes “remained long as a rule of criticism,” and still may be consulted for its comprehensive system, its variety of poetic topics, and its contemporary historical anecdotes, is the work of a scholar, and evidently of a courtier. His scholastic learning furnished the terms of his numerous figures of rhetoric, each of which is illustrated by examplesdrawn from English literature; but aware that this uncouth nomenclature might deter, as he says, “the sort of readers to whom I write, too scholastical for ourMakers,” as he classically calls our poets, “and more fit for clerks than for courtiers, for whose instruction this travail is taken,” our logician was cast into the dilemma of inventing English descriptions for these Greek rhetorical figures. We had no English name—“the rule might be set down, but there was no convenient name to hold it in memory.”
To familiarise the technical terms of rhetoric by substituting English descriptive ones, led to a ludicrous result. The Greek term ofhisteron proteronwas baptised thepreposterous; these are words misplaced, or, as our writer calls it, “in English proverb, the cart before the horse,” as one describing his landing on a strange coast said thuspreposterously, that is, placing before what should follow—
When we had climb’d the cliff, and were ashore.
When we had climb’d the cliff, and were ashore.
instead of
When we had come ashore, and climb’d the cliff.
When we had come ashore, and climb’d the cliff.
Thehipallagehe callsthe changeling, when changing the place of words changes the sense; as in the phrase “come dine with me, and stay not,” turned into “come stay with me, and dine not.” This change of sense into nonsense he called “the changeling,” in allusion to the nursery legend when fairies steal the fairest child, and substitute an ill-favoured one. This at least is a most fanciful account of nonsense! I will give the technical terms of satire; they display a refinement of conception which we hardly expected from the native effusions of the wits of that day.Ironia, he calls thedry-mock;sarcasmus, thebitter taunt; the Greek termasteismushe callsthe merry scoff—it is the jest which offends not the hearer. When we mock scornfully comes themicterismus, thefleering frumpe, as he who said to one to whom he gave no credit, “No doubt, sir, of that!” Theantiphrasis, or thebroad flout, when we deride by flat contradiction, antithetically calling a dwarf a giant; or addressing a black woman, “In sooth ye are a fair one!” Thecharientismusisthe privy nippe, when you mock a man in asottovoce; and thehyperbole, as the Greeks term the figure, and the Latinsdementiens, our vernacular critic, for its immoderate excess, describes as “the over-reacher, or the loud liar.” The rhetorical figures of our critic exceed a hundred in number, if Octavius Gilchrist has counted rightly, all which are ingeniously illustrated by fragments of our own literature, and often by poetical and historical anecdotes by no means common and stale. We must appreciate this treasure of our own antiquity, though we may smile when we learn that while we speak or write, however naturally, we are in fact violating, or illustrating, this heap of rhetorical figures, without whose aid unconsciously ourfleering frumpes, ourmerry scoffs, and ourprivy nippes, have been intelligible all our days.
In the more elevated spirit of this work, the writer opens by defining the poet, after the Greek, to be “a maker” or creator, drawing the verse and the matter from his native invention,—unlike thetranslator, who therefore may be said to be a versifier, and not a poet. This canon of criticism might have been secure from the malignity of hypercriticism. It happened, however, that in the year following that in which “The Art of Poetry” was published, Sir John Harrington put forth his translation of Ariosto, and, presuming that none but a poet could translate a poet, he caught fire at the solemn exclusion. The vindictive “versifier” invented a merciless annihilation both of the critic and his “Art,” by very unfair means; for he proved that the critic himself was a most detestable poet, and consequently the very existence of “The Art” itself was a nullity! “All the receipts of poetry prescribed,” proceeds the enraged translator of Ariosto, “I learn out of this very book, never breed excellent poets. For though the poor gentleman laboureth to make poetry an art, he proveth nothing more plainly than that it is agiftand not anart, because making himself and many others so cunning in the art, yet he sheweth himself so slender a gift in it.”
Was this critic qualified by nature and art to arbitrate on the destinies of the Muses? Were his taste and sensibility commensurate with that learning which dictated with authority, and that ingenuity which reared into a system the diversified materials of his critical fabric? Wehesitate to allow the claims of a critic whose trivial taste values “the courtly trifles,” which he calls “pretty devices,” among the inventions of poesy; we are startled by his elaborate exhibition of “geometrical figures in verse,” his delight in egg or oval poems, tapering at the ends and round in the middle, and his columnar verse, whose pillars, shaft, and capital, can be equally read upwards and downwards. This critic, too, has betrayed his utter penury of invention in “parcels of his own poetry,” obscure conceits in barbarous rhymes; by his intolerable “triumphals,” poetical speeches for recitation; and a series of what he calls “partheniades, or new year’s gifts,”—bloated eruptions of those hyperbolical adulations which the maiden queen could endure, but which bear the traces of the poetaster holding some appointment at court.
When the verse flowed beyond the mechanism of his rule of scanning, and the true touch of nature beyond the sympathy of his own emotions, the rhetorician showed the ear of Midas. He condemns the following lines as “going like a minstrel’s music in a metre of eleven, very harshly in my ear, whether it be for lack of good rime or of good reason, or of both, I wot not.” And he exemplifies this lack of “good rime and good reason, or both,” by this exquisitely tender apostrophe of a mother to her infant:
Now suck, child, and sleep, child, thy mother’s own joy,Her only sweet comfort to drown all annoy;For beauty, surpassing the azured sky,I love thee, my darling, as ball of mine eye.
Now suck, child, and sleep, child, thy mother’s own joy,
Her only sweet comfort to drown all annoy;
For beauty, surpassing the azured sky,
I love thee, my darling, as ball of mine eye.
Such a stanza indeed may disappoint the reader when he finds that we are left without any more.
In the history of this ambiguous book, and its anonymous author, I discover so many discrepancies and singularities, such elaborate poetical erudition, combined with such ineptitude of poetic taste, that I am inclined to think that the more excellent parts could never have been composed by the courtly trifler. It is remarkable that this curious Art of English Poetry was ascribed toSidney; and Wanley, in his catalogue of the Harley Library, assigns this volume to Spenser.4I lay no stress on thesingular expression of Sir John Harrington, applied to the present writer, as “the unknowngodfather,” which seems to indicate that the presumed writer had named an offspring without being the parent. Nor will I venture to suggest that this work may at all have been connected with that treatise of “the English poets,” which Spenser, we know, had lost and never recovered. The poet lived ten years after the present publication, and it does not appear that he ever claimed this work. Manuscripts, however, we may observe, strangely wandered about the world in that day, and such literary foundlings often fell into the hands of the charitable. In that day of modest publication, some were not always solicitous to claim their own; and there are even instances of the original author, residing at a distance from the metropolis, who did not always discover that his own work had long passed through the press; so narrow then was the sphere of publication, and so partial was all literary communication.
One more mystery is involved in the authorship of this remarkable work: first printed in 1589, we gather from the book itself that it was in hand at least as early as in 1553. This glorious retention of a work during nearly forty years, would be a literary virtue with which we cannot honour the trifler who complacently alludes to so many of his own writings which no one else has noticed, and unluckily for himself has furnished for us so many “parcels of his poetry,” to exemplify “the art.”
If we resolve the enigma, by acknowledging that this learned and curious writer has not been the only critic who has proved himself to be the most woful of poetasters, this decision will not account for the mysterious silence of the writer in allowing an elaborate volume, the work of a great portion of a life, to be cast out into the world unnamed and unowned.
I find it less difficult to imagine that some stray manuscript,possibly from the relics ofSidney, or perhaps the lost one ofSpenser, might have fallen into the hands of some courtly critic, or “the Gentleman Pensioner,” who inlaid it with many of his own trivialities: the discrepancy in the ingenuity of the writing with the genius of the writer in this combination of learning and ineptitude would thus be accounted for; at present it may well provoke our scepticism.
1“The Arte of English Poesie, contrived in three bookes—the first of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of Ornament,” 1589, 4to.2Ames appears first to have called himWebsterPuttenham. Possibly Ames might have noted down the name from Carew, as Master Puttenham, which by an error of the pen, or the printer, was transformed into the remarkable Christian name ofWebster. I cannot otherwise account for this misnomer. Steevens, in an indistinct reference to a manuscript, revealed it to beGeorge; and probably was led to that opinion by the knowledge of a manuscript work in the Harleian Collection by a George Puttenham. It is a defence of Elizabeth in the matter of the Scottish Queen. Ellis, our poetic antiquary, has distinguished our author as “Webster,aliasGeorge.” All this taken for granted, the last editor, probably in the course of his professional pursuits, falls on a nuncupative will, dated 1590, of aGeorgePuttenham; already persuaded that such a name appertained to the author of the “Art of English Poetry,” he ventured to corroborate what yet remained to be ascertained. All that he could draw from the nuncupative will of thisGeorgePuttenham is, that he “left all his goods, movable and immovable, moneys, and bonds,” to Mary Symes, a favourite female servant; but he infers that “he probably was our author.” Yet, at the same time, there turned up another will of oneRichardPuttenham, “a prisoner in her Majesty’s Bench.”Richard, therefore, may have as valid pretensions to “The Arte of English Poesie,” asGeorge, and neither may be the author. This matter is trivial, and hardly worth an inquiry.Haslewood, laborious but unfortunately uneducated, is the editor of an elegant reprint of this “Arte of English Poesie.” A modern reader may therefore find an easy access to a valuable volume which had been long locked up in the antiquary’s closet.3See page 157 of “The Arte of English Poesie.”4The following letter is an evidence of the uncertain accounts respecting this author among the most knowing literary historians. Here, too, we find that Webster, or George, or Richard, is changed into Jo!—“What authority Mr. Wood has for Jo. Puttenham’s being the author of the ‘Art of English Poetry’ I do not know. Mr. Wanley, in his ‘Catalogue of the Harley Library,’ says thathe had been told that Edmund Spenser was the author of that book, which came out anonymous. But Sir John Harrington, in his preface to ‘Orlando Furioso,’ gives so hard a censure of that book, that Spenser could not possibly be the author.”—“Letter fromThomas Bakerto the Hon. James West,” printed in the “European Magazine,” April, 1788.
1“The Arte of English Poesie, contrived in three bookes—the first of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of Ornament,” 1589, 4to.
2Ames appears first to have called himWebsterPuttenham. Possibly Ames might have noted down the name from Carew, as Master Puttenham, which by an error of the pen, or the printer, was transformed into the remarkable Christian name ofWebster. I cannot otherwise account for this misnomer. Steevens, in an indistinct reference to a manuscript, revealed it to beGeorge; and probably was led to that opinion by the knowledge of a manuscript work in the Harleian Collection by a George Puttenham. It is a defence of Elizabeth in the matter of the Scottish Queen. Ellis, our poetic antiquary, has distinguished our author as “Webster,aliasGeorge.” All this taken for granted, the last editor, probably in the course of his professional pursuits, falls on a nuncupative will, dated 1590, of aGeorgePuttenham; already persuaded that such a name appertained to the author of the “Art of English Poetry,” he ventured to corroborate what yet remained to be ascertained. All that he could draw from the nuncupative will of thisGeorgePuttenham is, that he “left all his goods, movable and immovable, moneys, and bonds,” to Mary Symes, a favourite female servant; but he infers that “he probably was our author.” Yet, at the same time, there turned up another will of oneRichardPuttenham, “a prisoner in her Majesty’s Bench.”Richard, therefore, may have as valid pretensions to “The Arte of English Poesie,” asGeorge, and neither may be the author. This matter is trivial, and hardly worth an inquiry.
Haslewood, laborious but unfortunately uneducated, is the editor of an elegant reprint of this “Arte of English Poesie.” A modern reader may therefore find an easy access to a valuable volume which had been long locked up in the antiquary’s closet.
3See page 157 of “The Arte of English Poesie.”
4The following letter is an evidence of the uncertain accounts respecting this author among the most knowing literary historians. Here, too, we find that Webster, or George, or Richard, is changed into Jo!—
“What authority Mr. Wood has for Jo. Puttenham’s being the author of the ‘Art of English Poetry’ I do not know. Mr. Wanley, in his ‘Catalogue of the Harley Library,’ says thathe had been told that Edmund Spenser was the author of that book, which came out anonymous. But Sir John Harrington, in his preface to ‘Orlando Furioso,’ gives so hard a censure of that book, that Spenser could not possibly be the author.”—“Letter fromThomas Bakerto the Hon. James West,” printed in the “European Magazine,” April, 1788.
THE DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT.
A singlevolume sent forth from the privacy of a retired student, by its silent influence may mark an epoch in the history of the human mind among a people.
Such a volume was “The Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot,” a singular work which may justly claim the honour in this country of opening that glorious career which is dear to humanity and fatal to imposture.
Witchcraft and magic, and some similar subjects, through a countless succession of ages, consigned the human intellect to darkness and to chains. In this country these conspiracies against mankind were made venerable by our laws and consecrated by erring piety. They were long the artifices of malignant factions, who found it mutually convenient to destroy each other by the condemnation of crimes which could never be either proved or disproved. The sorcerers and witches under the Church of Rome were usually the heretics; and our Henry the Eighth, who was a Protestant pope, transferred the grasp of power to the civil law, and an Act of Parliament of the Reformation made witchcraft felony. Dr. Bulleyn, a celebrated physician and a reformer, who lived through the gloomy reign of Philip and Mary, bitterly laments “that while so many blessed men are burned, witches should walk at large.” When the Act fell into disuse, Elizabeth was reminded, by petitions from the laity and by preaching from the clergy, that “witches and sorcerers were wonderfully increasing, and that her Majesty’s subjects pined away until death.” Witchcraft was again confirmed to be felony.
The learned and others were fostering the traditions of the people about spirits, the incubus, and the succubus, the assemblies of witches, and the sabbaths of Satan. Some constructed their theories to explain the inexplicable; and too many, by torture, extorted their presumed facts and delusive confessions. The sage doated—the legal functionaries were only sanguinary executioners; andthe merciful, with the kindest intentions, were practising every sort of cruelty, by what was termed trials to save the accused. The history of these dismal follies belongs even to a late period of the civilization of Christian Europe! An enlightened physician of Germany had raised his voice in defence of the victims who were suffering under the imputation of Sorcery;1not denying the Satanic potency, he maintained that the devil was very well able to execute his own malignant purposes without the aid of such miserable agents. It required a protracted century ere Balthaser Bekker’s “World Bewitched” could deprive Satan himself of his personality, indeed of his very existence. But it was a subject to be tenderly touched; superstition was a sacred thing, and too often riveted with theology; and though the learned Wierus had thus guarded his system, to a distant day he encountered the polemical divines. One of his fiercest assailants was a layman, the learned Bodin, he who has composed so admirable a treatise on Government, now deeply plunged into the “Demonomanie des Sorciers.” The volume of Wierus, he tells us, “made his hair stand on end.” “Shall we,” he cries, “credit a little physician” before all the philosophers of the world, and the laws of God which condemn sorcerers?
While Wierus and Bodin had been thus employed, an Englishman, Reginald Scot, in the serene retreat of a studious life, was silently labouring on the development of this great moral conquest over the prejudices of Europe. Reginald Scot, who passed his life in the occupation of his studies, seems to have concentrated them on this great subject, for he has left no other work, except an esteemed tract on the cultivation of the hop—the vine of his Kentish county. Although he took no degree at college, his erudition was not the less extensive, as appears by his critical knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek. But it was chiefly by his miscellaneous reading, where nothing seems to have escaped his insatiable curiosity on the extraordinary subjects which he ventured to scrutinise with such minute attention, that he was enabled to complete one of the most curious investigations of the age. AnthonyWood, in his peculiar style, tells us that “Scot gave himself up solely tosolid reading, and to the perusal ofobscure authorsthat had by the generality of the learned been neglected.” This is a curious description of the early state of our vernacular literature, and of those students who, watchful over the spirit of the times, sought a familiar acquaintance with the opinions of their contemporaries. All writers were condemned as “obscure” who stood out of the pale of classical antiquity; and plain Anthony, who rarely dipped into the writings of Greece and Rome, but was an incessant lover of the miscellaneous writers of modern date, distinguishes his favourites as “solid reading.” In the days of Reginald Scot our scholars never ventured to quote other authority than some ancient; but the poets from Homer to Ovid, the historians from Tacitus to Valerius Maximus, and the essayists from Plutarch to Aulus Gellius, could not always supply arguments and knowledge for an age and on topics which had nothing in common with their own.
With more elevated views than Wierus, Scot denied the power of sorcerers, because it attributed to them an omnipotence which can only be the attribute of divine power. Our philosopher could publish only half the truth. “My question is not, as many fondly suppose, whether there be witches or not, but whether they can do such miraculous works as are imputed unto them.” He thus adroitly eludes an argument which the public mind was not yet capable of comprehending. The “Discoverer” had to encounter a fierce host in shaking the predominant creed. The passions of mankind were enlisted against the zealous antagonist of an ancient European prejudice; the vital interests of priestly exorcists were at stake. To doubt of a supernatural agency seemed to some to be casting a suspicion over miracles and mysteries. The most ticklish point was the difficulty of explaining Scriptural phrases, which Reginald Scot denied related to witches, in the ordinary sense attached to these miserable women; the Hebrew term merely designating a female who practised the arts of “a poisoner,” or “a cozener or cheat.” The whole scene of the witch of Endor seems to have racked the “Discoverer’s” invention through several chapters, to unveil the preparatory management of such incantations,by the ventriloquising Pythonissa, and her confederate, some lusty priest. All these Scot presumes to trace in the obscure and interrupted narrative of the Israelitish Macbeth, who, in his despair, hastened by night to listen to his approaching fate, which hardly required the gift of prophecy to predict.
Our “Discoverer” prepared his readers for a revolution in their opinions. It appears that in his day, notwithstanding some fairies still lurking in the bye-corners of our poets, the whole fairy creed had in fact passed away. He appeals to this native mythology, now utterly exploded, as an evidence of popular infatuation; and our philosopher observes that he cannot hope that the partial reader should look with impartial eyes on this book; it were labour lost to ask for this, for, he adds, “I should no more prevail therein than ifa hundred years since I should have entreated your predecessorsto believe that Robin Goodfellow, that great but antient bull-beggar, had been but a cousening merchant, and no devil indeed.” This was a philosophical parallelism; and the corollary pinched the present generation concerning their witches, they who were now holding their fathers dotards for their belief in fairies.
The volume abounds with many strange incidents, which its singular subject involved. The solitary witch of the homestead was not the poetic witch uttering her incantations at her mystic cauldron. Her homely feats are familiar, but the revelations of the impostures are not. “The devils and spirits,” the powers of the kingdom of darkness, are more fantastic. These raw materials have been woven in the rich looms of Shakspeare and Goethe. Our author included in his volume a complete treatise of legerdemain, or the conjuring art. To convince the people that many acts may appear miraculous without the intervention of a miracle, he ingeniously initiated himself into the deceptious practices of the juggler; but he dreaded lest the spectators of his dexterity should depose against his own witchcraft, and “the Familiar,” his confederate. Our seer, to save himself from fire or water, has not only minutely explained these “deceitful arts,” but cautiously accompanied them by woodcuts of the magical instruments used on these occasions. At the time, these were surprising revelations. The sagacity of our author anticipatedthe fate of his work. It appears to have shaken the credulity of a very few reflecting magistrates; yet such scholars as Sir Thomas Smith, the great political writer, when he retired from public life, as a justice of peace, was active in punishing witches. But the book was denounced by the divines.
When Reginald Scot’s work was translated into Dutch, we learn from an arch-enemy of philosophy, the intolerant Calvinistical polemic, Voetius, that “this book was an inexhaustible source, whence not a few learned and unlearned persons in the Netherlands have begun to doubt, and grow sceptics and libertines with regard to witchcraft. Our country is infected with libertines and half libertines, and they have proceeded to such a pitch of ignorance, that this set of new Sadducees laugh at all the operations and apparitions of the devils as phantoms and fables of old women, and timorous superstition.” The work was more successful abroad than at home; and, indeed, how often have the benefactors of mankind experienced that the voice of foreigners is the voice of posterity! They decide without prepossessions.
TheFIRSTedition of the “Discoverie of Witchcraft,” 1584, is of extreme rarity, the copies having been burned by the order of James, on his accession to the English throne, in compliance with the act of parliament of 1603, which ratified a belief in witchcraft throughout the three kingdoms; but the author had not survived to see that day. This awful prejudice broke out afresh under the fanatical government, and gave rise to an infamous class of men who were called “witch-finders.” When a reward was publicly offered, there seemed to be no end in finding witches. It was probably this great evil which reminded the people of Scot, whose work was reprinted in 1651, but the public so eagerly required another edition, that it was again republished in 1665. The fact was, that justices, judges, and juries, had so little improved by thesecondedition, that many had kept with great care their note-books of “Examinations of Witches,” and were discovering “hellish knots of them.” It was only in the preceding year that Sir Matthew Hale had left for execution two female victims, without even summing up the evidence, solely resting on the fact that “there were witches,”for which assumption he appealed “to the Scriptures,” and he added, to “the wisdom of all nations!” What is not less remarkable in this trial, the illustrious corrector of “vulgar errors,” Sir Thomas Browne, in his medical character examining the accused person, who was liable to fainting fits, acknowledged that the fits were natural and common; but the philosopher was so prepossessed that the woman was a witch, that he pronounced against her, alleging this mystical explanation of “the subtleties of the devil,” who had taken this opportunity of her natural fits to be “co-operating with her malice!” What a demonstration that superstition holds its mastery even over the philosophic intellect!
The popular prejudice was confirmed by narratives of witchcraft, by Joseph Glanvil, one of the early founders of the Royal Society; by the visionary learning of the platonic Dr. More; and by the theological dogmatism of Meric Casaubon. Dr. More was desirous that every parish should keep a register of all authentic histories of apparitions and witchcraft: and Glanvil was so staunch a believer, that he considered that the strong unbelief in some persons was an evidence of what they denied; for that so confident an opinion could not be held but by some kind of witchcraft and fascination in the senses. All these, and such as these, treat with extreme contempt and cover with obloquy “the Father of the modern Witch-advocates,” “the Gallant of the Old Hags!” This was our Reginald Scot.
The most elaborate treatise on the subject was now sent forth by John Webster; “The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft,” 1677, fo. He defends Scot and Wierus against Glanvil and Casaubon. He was a clergyman, and dares not agitate the question,an sint, whether there be witches or not; butquomodo sint, in what manner they act, and what the things are they do, or can perform. The state of the question is not simply the being of witches, orde existencia, but onlyde modo existendi. The dispute of their manner of existing necessarily supposes their existence. He has, however, detected many singular impostures, and the volume is full and curious.2
Glanvil and his “Sadducismus Triumphatus, or full evidence concerning Witches,” 1668, a book so popular that I have never met with a very fair copy, introduced with plenary evidence a minute narrative of “the Demon of Tedworth,” whose invisible drum beat every night for above a year, in the house of some reverend magistrate, who had evidently raised a spirit which he could not lay, and whose Puck-like pranks wofully deranged the whole unsuspicious family. This tale, confirmed by affidavits, but shaken by demurrers, was long an article of faith, but finished by furnishing the comedy of Addison’s “Drummer.” The controversy about witches, including that of ghosts, which were equally the incessant but volatile phantoms of their chase, now assumed a more serious aspect than ever. The illustrious Boyle, who had observed the unguarded heat with which it was pursued, vainly cautioned the parties, that even religion might suffer by weak arguments drawn from uncertain statements. Boyle had more reason to say this than one might suppose; for Dr. More, ever too vehement and too fanciful, had exclaimed in his unhappy conviction, “No bishop, no king! no spirit, no God!”3
Shadwell in his “Lancashire Witches,” resolved to advance nothing without authority, accompanies that comedy with ample notes, drawn from the writings of witch-believers. His witches, therefore, are far beneath those of Shakspeare, for they do nothing but what we are told witches do; the whole system of witchery is here exhibited. In his remarkable preface, Shadwell tells us, that if he had not represented them asrealwitches, “it would have been called atheistical by a prevailing party.”
The belief in witchcraft was maintained chiefly by that fatal error which had connected the rejection of any supernatural agency in old women with religious scepticism; and it was fostered by the statutes, which with the lawyer admitted of no doubt. “We cannot doubt of the existence of witchcraft, seeing that our law ordains it to be punished by death,” was the argument of Sir George Mackenzie, the great Scottish advocate; nor is it less sad to see suchminds as that of the great Dr. Clarke, celebrated for his logical demonstrations, thus reasoning on witchcraft, astrology, and fortune-telling; “All things of this sort, whenever they have any reality in them, are evidently diabolical; and when they have no reality, they are cheats and lying impostures.”4The great demonstrator thus confesses “the reality” of these chimeras! Another not less celebrated divine, Dr. Bentley, infers that “no English priest need affirm the existence of sorcery or witchcraft, since they now have a public law which they neither enacted nor procured, declaring these practices to be felony!”5Did the doctor know that churchmen have had no influence in creating that belief, or in enacting this statute?
The gravity of Blackstone seems strangely disturbed when as a lawyer he was compelled to acknowledge its existence. “It is a crime of which one knows not well what account to give.” The commentator on the laws of England found no other resource than to turn to Addison, whose gentle sagacity could only discover that “in general, there has been such a thing as witchcraft, though one cannot give credit to anyparticularmodern instance of it.” Not one of these writers had yet ventured to detect the hallucinations of self-credulity in the victims, and the crimes of remorseless men in their persecutors. The name and the volume of their own countryman had never reached them, who two centuries before had elucidated these chimeras.
After the statute against witchcraft had been repealed in England, we must not forget that an act of the Assembly of the Calvinistic Church of Scotland confesses “as a great national sin, the act of the British Parliament abolishing the burning and hanging of witches.”
The name of Reginald Scot does not appear in the “Biographia Britannica;” and it was only from a short notice by Bayle, that Dr. Birch, in his translation of the General Dictionary, was induced to draw up a life of our earliest philosopher. Such was the fate of this “English gentleman,” as Bayle has described him; and the philosophical reader, in what is now before him, may detect theshifting shades of truth, till it settles in its real and enduring colour; the philosopher had demonstrated a truth which it required a century and a half for the world to comprehend.
That such courageous and generous tempers as that ofReginald Scotshould fail themselves of being the spectators of that noble revolution in public opinion which was the ripening of their own solitary studies, is the mortifying tale of the benefactors of mankind.
1“De Prestigiis Demonum et Incantationibus ac Veneficiis,” 1564.2Webster notices the popular delusions of the country people in the following passage, in which he is speaking of a sound judgment as necessary to a competent witness:—“They ought to be of a sound judgment, and not of a vitiated and distempered phantasie, nor of a melancholic constitution; for these will take a bush to be a bugbear, and a black sheep to be a demon; the noise of the wild swans, flying high in the night, to be spirits—or, as they call them here in the north,Gabriel Ratchets; the calling of a daker hen, in the meadow, to be thewhistlers; the howling of the female fox in a gill or clough for the male, to be the cry of fairies.” “TheGabriel Ratchets,” in our author’s time, seem to have been the same with the GermanRachtvogel, orRachtraven. The word and the superstition are well known in Lancashire, though in a sense somewhat different; for theGable-Rachetsare supposed to be something like litters of puppies yelping (gabbling) in the air.Ratchis certainly a dog in general.Thewhistlersare the green or whistling plovers, which fly very high in the night uttering their characteristic note.—Whitaker’s “History of Whalley.”3In a correspondence I have read between Dr. More and one of his enthusiastic disciples, the Rev. Edmund Elys, the letters usually turn on the reality of apparitions and magical incantations; both these learned men were hunting about all their lifetimes to find a true ghost. Elys often breaks out in triumph that he has at length discovered an authentic ghost; in subsequent letters the evidence gradually diminishes, and finally the apparition and evidence vanish together. The following pious doubts, addressed to the philosophic More, may amuse the reader:—“Most honoured dear Sir,“I should be troublesome to you if I did not repress many strong inclinations to write to you, for I do not take greater comfort in anything than in the thoughts ofyouand thenotionsyou have communicated to the world.“I now entreat you to tell me one of your arguments why this act is unlawfull, viz., to inquire by this black art (as I am sure it is, though I am told some preachers allow it), whether such or such asuspected personhas stolen a thing; viz., by putting a key into the midst of a Bible, and clasping or tying the Bible on it, and then hanging the key upon some man’s finger put into the hollow of the handle; and then one of the company saying these words—Ps. 1. 19, 20, ‘When thou a thief dost see,’ &c., to these words, ‘To use that life most vile.’ If the Bible turn upon the finger (holding it by the key) when such or such a person is named, then he is judged to be the thief. Some persons that dined at the same table with me had an humour to try this trick. I declared it was verywicked, &c., but, however, they would do it. And a gentleman of great acquaintance in the world said that a learned divine asserted it was no hurt, &c. I thought it might not be a sin for me to stay in the room, after I had made that profession of my dissent, &c. They tried what would be done; and, upon the naming of one or two, the key did not move, but on the naming of one (who afterwards was known to be an accomplice in the theft) the Bible turned on the finger very plainly in the sight of divers persons, myself being one. The gentleman that was most eager to have theexperimentholds that there never were anyapparitions, &c. I told him that this was equivalent toan apparition; for here was anocular demonstrationof the existence and operation of an intelligent invisible being, &c.”4In his “Exposition of the Church Catechism.”5Remarks upon a late “Discourse of Free-Thinking,” 1743, p. 47.
1“De Prestigiis Demonum et Incantationibus ac Veneficiis,” 1564.
2Webster notices the popular delusions of the country people in the following passage, in which he is speaking of a sound judgment as necessary to a competent witness:—“They ought to be of a sound judgment, and not of a vitiated and distempered phantasie, nor of a melancholic constitution; for these will take a bush to be a bugbear, and a black sheep to be a demon; the noise of the wild swans, flying high in the night, to be spirits—or, as they call them here in the north,Gabriel Ratchets; the calling of a daker hen, in the meadow, to be thewhistlers; the howling of the female fox in a gill or clough for the male, to be the cry of fairies.” “TheGabriel Ratchets,” in our author’s time, seem to have been the same with the GermanRachtvogel, orRachtraven. The word and the superstition are well known in Lancashire, though in a sense somewhat different; for theGable-Rachetsare supposed to be something like litters of puppies yelping (gabbling) in the air.Ratchis certainly a dog in general.
Thewhistlersare the green or whistling plovers, which fly very high in the night uttering their characteristic note.—Whitaker’s “History of Whalley.”
3In a correspondence I have read between Dr. More and one of his enthusiastic disciples, the Rev. Edmund Elys, the letters usually turn on the reality of apparitions and magical incantations; both these learned men were hunting about all their lifetimes to find a true ghost. Elys often breaks out in triumph that he has at length discovered an authentic ghost; in subsequent letters the evidence gradually diminishes, and finally the apparition and evidence vanish together. The following pious doubts, addressed to the philosophic More, may amuse the reader:—
“Most honoured dear Sir,
“I should be troublesome to you if I did not repress many strong inclinations to write to you, for I do not take greater comfort in anything than in the thoughts ofyouand thenotionsyou have communicated to the world.
“I now entreat you to tell me one of your arguments why this act is unlawfull, viz., to inquire by this black art (as I am sure it is, though I am told some preachers allow it), whether such or such asuspected personhas stolen a thing; viz., by putting a key into the midst of a Bible, and clasping or tying the Bible on it, and then hanging the key upon some man’s finger put into the hollow of the handle; and then one of the company saying these words—Ps. 1. 19, 20, ‘When thou a thief dost see,’ &c., to these words, ‘To use that life most vile.’ If the Bible turn upon the finger (holding it by the key) when such or such a person is named, then he is judged to be the thief. Some persons that dined at the same table with me had an humour to try this trick. I declared it was verywicked, &c., but, however, they would do it. And a gentleman of great acquaintance in the world said that a learned divine asserted it was no hurt, &c. I thought it might not be a sin for me to stay in the room, after I had made that profession of my dissent, &c. They tried what would be done; and, upon the naming of one or two, the key did not move, but on the naming of one (who afterwards was known to be an accomplice in the theft) the Bible turned on the finger very plainly in the sight of divers persons, myself being one. The gentleman that was most eager to have theexperimentholds that there never were anyapparitions, &c. I told him that this was equivalent toan apparition; for here was anocular demonstrationof the existence and operation of an intelligent invisible being, &c.”
4In his “Exposition of the Church Catechism.”
5Remarks upon a late “Discourse of Free-Thinking,” 1743, p. 47.