THE CHARACTER OF A LONDON DIURNAL.
A diurnal is a puny chronicle, scarce pin-feathered with the wings of time. It is a history in sippets: the English Iliads in a nutshell: the apocryphal Parliament's book of Maccabees in single sheets. It would tire a Welshman to reckon up how many aps 'tis removed from an annal; for it is of that extract, only of the younger house, like a shrimp to a lobster. The original sinner in this kind was Dutch, Gallo-Belgicus the protoplast, and the modern Mercuries but Hans-en-kelders. The Countess of Zealand was brought to bed of an almanac, as many children as days in the year. It may be the legislative lady is of that lineage, so she spawns the diurnals, and they at Westminster take them in adoption by the names of Scoticus, Civicus, Britannicus. In the frontispiece of the old Beldam diurnal, like the contents of the chapter, sitteth the House of Commons judging the twelve tribes of Israel. You may call them the kingdom's anatomy before the weekly calendar; for such is a diurnal, the day of the month with what weather in the commonwealth. It is taken for the pulse of the body politic, and the empiric divines of the assembly, those spiritual dragooners, thumb it accordingly. Indeed it is a pretty synopsis, and those grave rabbis (though in the point of Divinity) trade in no larger authors. The country-carrier, when he buys it for the vicar, miscalls it the urinal; yet properly enough, for it casts the water of the state ever since it staled blood. It differs from an Aulicus, as the devil and his exorcist, or as a black witch doth from a white one, whose office is to unravel her enchantments.
It begins usually with an Ordinance, which is a law still born, dropped before quickened by the royal assent. 'Tis one of the parliament's bye-blows, acts only being legitimate, and hath no more sire than a Spanish jennet that is begotten by the wind.
Thus their militia, like its patron Mars, is the issue only of the mother, without the concourse of royal Jupiter: yet law it is, if they vote it, in defiance to their fundamentals; like the old sexton, who swore his clock went true, whatever the sun said to the contrary.
The next ingredient of a diurnal is plots, horrible plots, which with wonderful sagacity it hunts dry-Coot, while they are yet in their causes, before materia prima can put on her smock. How many such fits of the mother have troubled the kingdom; and for all Sir W.E. [William Earle] looks like a man-midwife, not yet delivered of so much as a cushion? But actors must have properties; and since the stages were voted down the only playhouse is at Westminster.
Suitable to their plots are their informers, skippers, and tailors, spaniels both for the land and water. Good conscionable intelligence! For however Pym's bill may inflame the reckoning, the honest vermin have not so much for lying as the public faith.
Thus a zealous botcher in Moorfields, while he was contriving some quirpocut of Church-Government, by the help of his outlying ears and the Otacousticon of the spirit, discovered such a plot, that Selden intends to combat antiquity, and maintain it was a tailor's goose that preserved the capital.
I wonder my Lord of Canterbury is not once more all to be traitored, for dealing with the lions to settle the Commission of Array in the Tower. It would do well to cramp the articles dormant, besides the opportunity of reforming these beasts of the prerogative, and changing their profaner names of Harry and Charles into Nehemiah and Eleazar.
Suppose a corn-cutter being to give little Isaac a cast of his office should fall to paring his brows (mistaking the one end for the other, because he branches at both), this would be a plot, and the next diurnal would furnish you with this scale of votes:--
Resolved upon the question, That this act of the corn-cutter was an absolute invasion of the city's charter in the representative forehead of Isaac.
Resolved, That the evil counsellors about the corn-cutter are popishly affected and enemies to the State.
Resolved, That there be a public thanksgiving for the great deliverance of Isaac's brow-antlers; and a solemn covenant drawn up to defy the corn-cutter and all his works.
Thus the Quixotes of this age fight with the windmills of their own heads, quell monsters of their own creation, make plots, and then discover them; as who fitter to unkennel the fox than the terrier that is part of him?
In the third place march their adventures; the Roundheads' legends, the rebels' romance; stories of a larger size than the ears of their sect, able to strangle the belief of a Solifidian.
I'll present them in their order. And first as a whiffler before the show enter Stamford, one that trod the stage with the first, traversed the ground, made a leg and exit. The country people took him for one that by order of the Houses was to dance a morrice through the west of England. Well, he's a nimble gentleman; set him upon Banks his horse in a saddle rampant, and it is a great question which part of the Centaur shows better tricks.
There was a vote passing to translate him with all his equipage into monumental gingerbread; but it was crossed by the female committee alleging that the valour of his image would bite their children by the tongues.
This cubit and half of commander, by the help of a diurnal, routed his enemies fifty miles off. It's strange you'll say, and yet 'tis generally believed he would as soon do it at that distance as nearer hand. Sure it was his sword for which the weapon-salve was invented; that so wounding and healing (like loving correlates) might both work at the same removes. But the squib is run to the end of the rope: room for the prodigy of valour. Madam Atropos in breeches, Waller's knight-errantry; and because every mountebank must have his zany, throw him in Hazelrig to set off his story. These two, like Bel and the Dragon, are always worshipped in the same chapter; they hunt in couples, what one doth at the head, the other scores up at the heels.
Thus they kill a man over and over, as Hopkins and Sternhold murder the psalms with another of the same; one chimes all in, and then the other strikes up as the saints-bell.
I wonder for how many lives my Lord Hopton took the lease of his body.
First Stamford slew him, then Waller outkilled that half a bar; and yet it is thought the sullen corpse would scarce bleed were both these manslayers never so near it.
The same goes of a Dutch headsman, that he would do his office with so much ease and dexterity, that the head after execution should stand upon the shoulders. Pray God Sir William be not probationer for the place; for as if he had the like knack too, most of those whom the diurnal hath slain for him, to us poor mortals seem untouched.
Thus these artificers of death can kill the man without wounding the body, like lightning, that melts the sword and never singes the scabbard.
This is the William whose lady is the conqueror; this is the city's champion and the diurnal's delight; he that cuckolds the general in his commission; for he stalks with Essex, and shoots under his belly, because his Excellency himself is not charged there: yet in all this triumph there is a whip and bell; translate but the scene to Roundway Down, there Hazelrig's lobsters turned crabs and crawled backwards, there poor Sir William ran to his lady for an use of consolation.
But the diurnal is weary of the arm of flesh, and now begins an hosanna to Cromwell; one that hath beat up his drums clean through the Old Testament; you may learn the genealogy of our Saviour by the names in his regiment; the muster-master uses no other list but the first chapter of Matthew.
With what face can they object to the king the bringing in of foreigners, when themselves entertain such an army of Hebrews? This Cromwell is never so valorous as when he is making speeches for the association, which nevertheless he doth somewhat ominously with his neck awry, holding up his ear as if he expected Mahomet's pigeon to come and prompt him. He should be a bird of prey too by his bloody beak; his nose is able to try a young eagle, whether she be lawfully begotten. But all is not gold that glitters. What we wonder at in the rest of them is natural to him to kill without bloodshed, for the most of his trophies are in a church window, when a looking-glass would show him more superstition. He is so perfect a hater of images that he hath defaced God's in his own countenance. If he deals with men, 'tis when he takes them napping in an old monument; then down goes dust and ashes, and the stoutest cavalier is no better. O brave Oliver! Time's voider, subsizer to the worms, in whom death, who formerly devoured our ancestors, now chews the cud. He said grace once as if he would have fallen aboard with the Marquis of Newcastle; nay, and the diurnal gave you his bill of fare; but it proved a running banquet, as appears by the story. Believe him as he whistles to his Cambridge team of committee-men, and he doth wonders. But holy men, like the holy language, must be read backwards. They rifle colleges to promote learning, and pull down churches for edification. But sacrilege is entailed upon him. There must be a Cromwell for cathedrals as well as abbeys; a secure sin, whose offence carries its pardon in its mouth; for how shall he be hanged for church-robbery, that gives himself the benefit of the clergy?
But for all Cromwell's nose wears the dominical letter, compared to Manchester he is but like the vigils to an holy-day. This, this is the man of God, so sanctified a thunderbolt, that Burroughs (in a proportionable blasphemy to his Lord of Hosts) would style him the archangel giving battle to the devil.
Indeed, as the angels each of them makes a several species, so every one of his soldiers makes a distinct church. Had these beasts been to enter into the ark it would have puzzled Noah to have sorted them into pairs. If ever there were a rope of sand it was so many sects twisted into an association.
They agree in nothing but that they are all Adamites in understanding. It is a sign of a coward to wink and fight, yet all their valour proceeds from their ignorance.
But I wonder whence their general's purity proceeds; it is not by traduction; if he was begotten a saint it was by equivocal generation, for the devil in the father is turned monk in the son, so his godliness is of the same parentage with good laws, both extracted out of bad manners, and would he alter the Scripture as he hath attempted the creed, he might vary the text and say to corruption, Thou art my Father.
This is he that put out one of the kingdom's eyes by clouding our mother university; and (if this Scotch mist farther prevail) he will extinguish the other. He hath the like quarrel to both, because both are strung with the same optic nerve, knowing loyalty.
Barbarous rebel! who will be revenged upon all learning, because his treason is beyond the mercy of the book.
The diurnal as yet hath not talked much of his victories, but there is the more behind, for the knight must always beat the giant, that's resolved.
If anything fall out amiss which cannot be smothered, the diurnal hath a help at maw. It is but putting to sea and taking a Danish fleet, or brewing it with some success out of Ireland, and then it goes down merrily.
There are more puppets that move by the wire of a diurnal, as Brereton and Cell, two of Mars his petty-toes, such snivelling cowards that it is a favour to call them so. Was Brereton to fight with his teeth (as in all other things he resembles the beast) he would have odds of any man at the weapon. Oh, he's a terrible slaughterman at a Thanksgiving dinner. Had he been cannibal to have eaten those that he vanquished, his gut would have made him valiant.
The greatest wonder is at Fairfax, how he comes to be a babe of grace, certainly it is not in his personal, but (as the State-sophies distinguish) in his politic capacity; degenerate ab extra by the zeal of the house he sat in, as chickens are hatched at Grand Cairo by the adoption of an oven.
There is the woodmonger too, a feeble crutch to a declining cause, a new branch of the old oak of reformation.
And now I speak of reformation, vous avez, Fox the tinker, the liveliest emblem of it that may be; for what did this parliament ever go about to reform, but, tinkerwise, in mending one hole they made three?
But I have not ink enough to cure all the tetters and ring-worms of the State.
I will close up all thus. The victories of the rebels are like the magical combat of Apuleius, who thinking he had slain three of his enemies, found them at last but a triumvirate of bladders. Such, and so empty are the triumphs of a diurnal, but so many impostumated fancies, so many bladders of their own blowing.
The "Surfeit to A.B.C." in 1656, was a look of Characters. "Naps upon Parnassus'" in 1658 contained Characters of a Temporizer and an Antiquary. In the same year appeared "Satyrical Characters and Handsome Descriptions, in Letters." In 1659 there was a third edition of a satire on the English, published as "A Character of England, as it was lately presented in a Letter to a Nobleman of France" replied to in that year by "A Character of France." These suggested the production in 1659 of "A Perfect Description of the People and Country of Scotland" and, also in 1659, "A Brief Character of the Low Countries under the States, being Three Weeks' Observation of the Vices and Virtues of the Inhabitants." This was written by Owen Feltham, and added to several editions of his "Resolves." In 1660 appeared "The Character of Italy" and "The Character of Spain;" in 1661, "Essays and Characters by L. G.;" in 1662-63, "The Assembly-Man" a Character that had been written by Sir John Birkenhead in 1647. Then came, in 1665, Richard Flecknoe, to whom Dryden ascribed sovereignty as one who
"In prose and verse was owned without dispute,
Through all the realms of Nonsense absolute."
As he was equally ready in all forms of writing that his neighbours followed he, of course, wrote Characters. They were "Fifty-five Enigmatical Characters, all very exactly drawn to the Life, from several Persons, Humours, Dispositions. Pleasant and full of Delight. By R. F., Esq." The Duke of Newcastle admired, and wrote, in lines prefixed to the book--
"Flecknoe, thy characters are so full of wit
And fancy, as each word is throng'd with it.
Each line's a volume, and who reads would swear
Whole libraries were in each character.
Nor arrows in a quiver stuck, nor yet
Lights in the starry skies are thicker set,
Nor quills upon the armed porcupine,
Than wit and fancy in this work of thine."
This is one of Flecknoe's Characters:--