Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century

by Unknown

THE CHARACTER OF A DIURNAL-MAKER.

A diurnal-maker is the sub-almoner of history, Queen Mab's register, one whom, by the same figure that a north country pedlar is a merchantman, you may style an author. It is like overreach of language, when every thin tinder-cloaked quack must be called a doctor; when a clumsy cobbler usurps the attribute of our English peers, and is vamped a translator. List him a writer and you smother Geoffrey in swabber-slops; the very name of dabbler oversets him; he is swallowed up in the phrase, like Sir S.L. [Samuel Luke] in a great saddle, nothing to be seen but the giddy feather in his crown. They call him a Mercury, but he becomes the epithet like the little negro mounted upon an elephant, just such another blot rampant. He has not stuffings sufficient for the reproach of a scribbler, but it hangs about him like an old wife's skin when the flesh hath forsaken her, lank and loose. He defames a good title as well as most of our modern noblemen; those wens of greatness, the body politic's most peccant humours blistered into lords. He hath so raw-boned a being that however you render him he rubs it out and makes rags of the expression. The silly countryman who, seeing an ape in a scarlet coat, blessed his young worship, and gave his landlord joy of the hopes of his house, did not slander his complement with worse application than he that names this shred an historian. To call him an historian is to knight a mandrake; 'tis to view him through a perspective, and by that gross hyperbole to give the reputation of an engineer to a maker of mousetraps. Such an historian would hardly pass muster with a Scotch stationer in a sieveful of ballads and godly books. He would not serve for the breast-plate of a begging Grecian. The most cramped compendium that the age hath seen since all learning hath been almost torn into ends, outstrips him by the head. I have heard of puppets that could prattle in a play, but never saw of their writings before. There goes a report of the Holland women that together with their children they are delivered of a Sooterkin, not unlike to a rat, which some imagine to be the offspring of the stoves. I know not what Ignis fatuus adulterates the press, but it seems much after that fashion, else how could this vermin think to be a twin to a legitimate writer; when those weekly fragments shall pass for history, let the poor man's box be entitled the exchequer, and the alms-basket a magazine. Not a worm that gnaws on the dull scalp of voluminous Holinshed, but at every meal devoured more chronicle than his tribe amounts to. A marginal note of W. P. would serve for a winding-sheet for that man's works, like thick-skinned fruits are all rind, fit for nothing but the author's fate, to be pared in a pillory.

The cook who served up the dwarf in a pie (to continue the frolic) might have lapped up such an historian as this in the bill of fare. He is the first tincture and rudiment of a writer, dipped as yet in the preparative blue, like an almanac well-willer. He is the cadet of a pamphleteer, the pedee of a romancer; he is the embryo of a history slinked before maturity. How should he record the issues of time who is himself an abortive? I will not say but that he may pass for an historian in Garbier's academy; he is much of the size of those knotgrass professors. What a pitiful seminary was there projected; yet suitable enough to the present universities, those dry nurses which the providence of the age has so fully reformed that they are turned reformadoes. But that's no matter, the meaner the better. It is a maxim observable in these days, that the only way to win the game is to play petty Johns. Of this number is the esquire of the quill, for he hath the grudging of history and some yawnings accordingly. Writing is a disease in him and holds like a quotidian, so 'tis his infirmity that makes him an author, as Mahomet was beholding to the falling sickness to vouch him a prophet. That nice artificer who filed a chain so thin and light that a flea could trail it (as if he had worked shorthand, and taught his tools to cypher), did but contrive an emblem for this skipjack and his slight productions.

Methinks the Turk should licence diurnals because he prohibits learning and books. A library of diurnals is a wardrobe of frippery; 'tis a just idea of a Limbo of the infants. I saw one once that could write with his toes, by the same token I could have wished he had worn his copies for socks; 'tis he without doubt from whom the diurnals derive their pedigree, and they have a birthright accordingly, being shuffled out at the bed's feet of history. To what infinite numbers an historian would multiply should he crumble into elves of this profession? To supply this smallness they are fain to join forces, so they are not singly but as the custom is in a croaking committee. They tug at the pen like slaves at the oar, a whole bank together; they write in the posture that the Swedes gave fire in, over one another's heads. It is said there is more of them go to a suit of clothes than to a Britannicus; in this polygamy the clothes breed and cannot determine whose issue is lawfully begotten.

And here I think it were not amiss to take a particular how he is accoutred, and so do by him as he in his Siquis for the wall-eyed mare, or the crop flea-bitten, give you the marks of the beast. I begin with his head, which is ever in clouts, as if the nightcap should make affidavit that the brain was pregnant. To what purpose doth the Pia Mater lie in so dully in her white formalities; sure she hath had hard labour, for the brows have squeezed for it, as you may perceive by his buttered bon-grace that film of a demicastor; 'tis so thin and unctuous that the sunbeams mistake it for a vapour, and are like to cap him; so it is right heliotrope, it creaks in the shine and flaps in the shade; whatever it be I wish it were able to call in his ears. There's no proportion between that head and appurtenances; those of all lungs are no more fit for that small noddle of the circumcision than brass bosses for a Geneva Bible. In what a puzzling neutrality is the poor soul that moves betwixt two such ponderous biases? His collar is edged with a piece of peeping linen, by which he means a band; 'tis the forlorn of his shirt crawling out of his neck; indeed it were time that his shirt were jogging, for it has served an apprenticeship, and (as apprentices use) it hath learned its trade too, to which effect 'tis marching to the papermill, and the next week sets up for itself in the shape of a pamphlet. His gloves are the shavings of his hands, for he casts his skin like a cancelled parchment. The itch represents the broken seals. His boots are the legacies of two black jacks, and till he pawned the silver that the jacks were tipped with it was a pretty mode of boot-hose-tops. For the rest of his habit he is a perfect seaman, a kind of tarpaulin, he being hanged about with his coarse composition, those pole-davie papers.

But I must draw to an end, for every character is an anatomy lecture, and it fares with me in this of the diurnal-maker, as with him that reads on a begged malefactor, my subject smells before I have gone through with him; for a parting blow then. The word historian imports a sage and solemn author, one that curls his brow with a sullen gravity, like a bull-necked Presbyter since the army hath got him off his jurisdiction, who, Presbyter like, sweeps his breast with a reverend beard, full of native moss-troopers; not such a squirting scribe as this that's troubled with the rickets, and makes pennyworths of history. The college-treasury that never had in bank above a Harry-groat, shut up there in a melancholy solitude, like one that is kept to keep possession, had as good evidence to show for his title as he for an historian; so, if he will needs be an historian, he is not cited in the sterling acceptation, but after the rate of bluecaps' reckoning, an historian Scot. Now a Scotchman's tongue runs high fullams. There is a cheat in his idiom, for the sense ebbs from the bold expression, like the citizen's gallon, which the drawer interprets but half a pint. In sum, a diurnal-maker is the anti-mark of an historian, he differs from him as a drill from a man, or (if you had rather have it in the saints' gibberish) as a hinter doth from a holder-forth.