The Mixed Assembly.
Flea-Bitten synod, an assembly brewed
Of clerks and elders ana, like the rude
Chaos of Presbyt'ry, where laymen guide
With the tame woolpack clergy by their side.
Who asked the banns 'twixt these discoloured mates?
A strange grotesco this; the Church and states,
Most divine tick-tack, in a piebald crew,
To serve as table-men of divers hue!
She, that conceived an Ethiopian heir
10By picture, when the parents both were fair,
At sight of you had born a dappled son,
You checkering her imagination.
Had Jacob's flock but seen you sit, the dams
Had brought forth speckled and ring-streakéd lambs.
Like an impropriator's motley kind
Whose scarlet coat is with a cassock lined;
Like the lay-thief in a canonic weed,
Sure of his clergy ere he did the deed;
Like Royston crows, who are (as I may say)
20Friars of both the Orders, Black and Gray;
So mixed they are, one knows not whether 's thicker,
A layer of burgess, or a layer of vicar.
Have they usurped what Royal Judah had,
And now must Levi too part stakes with Gad?
The sceptre and the crosier are the crutches,
Which, if not trusted in their pious clutches,
Will fail the cripple State. And were 't not pity
But both should serve the yardwand of the City?
That Isaac might stroke his beard and sit
30Judge of εἰς Ἅιδον and elegerit?
Oh that they were in chalk and charcoal drawn!
The miscellany-satyr and the faun
And all th' adulteries of twisted nature
But faintly represent this riddling feature;
Whose members being not tallies, they'll not own
Their fellows at the Resurrection.
Strange scarlet doctors these! They'll pass in story
For sinners half refined in Purgatory,
Or parboiled lobsters, where there jointly rules
40The fading sables and the coming gules.
The flea that Falstaff damned thus lewdly shows
Tormented in the flames of Bardolph's nose.
Like him that wore the dialogue of cloaks
This shoulder John-a-Stiles, that John-a-Nokes;
Like Jews and Christians in a ship together
With an old neck-verse to distinguish either;
Like their intended discipline to boot,
Or whatsoe'er hath neither head nor foot;
Such may their stript-stuff-hangings seem to be,
50Sacrilege matched with codpiece simony.
Be sick and dream a little, you may then
Fancy these linsey-woolsey vestry-men.
Forbear, good Pembroke, be not over-daring.
Such company may chance to spoil thy swearing,
And thy drum-major oaths, of bulk unruly,
May dwindle to a feeble 'By my truly'!
He that the noble Percy's blood inherits,
Will he strike up a Hotspur of the spirits?
He'll fright the Obadiahs out of tune
60With his uncircumciséd Algernoon;
A name so stubborn, 'tis not to be scanned
By him in Gath with the six-fingered hand.
See, they obey the magic of my words!
Presto! they're gone, and now the House of Lords
Looks like the withered face of an old hag,
But with three teeth like to a triple gag.
A jig! a jig! and in this antic dance
Fielding and Doxie Marshall first advance.
Twisse blows the Scotch-pipes, and the loving brace
70Puts on the traces and treads cinque-a-pace.
Then Saye and Sele must his old hamstrings supple,
And he and rumpled Palmer make a couple.
Palmer 's a fruitful girl if he'll unfold her;
The midwife may find work about her shoulder.
Kimbolton, that rebellious Boanerges,
Must be content to saddle Dr. Burges.
If Burges get a clap, 'tis ne'er the worse,
But the fifth time of his compurgators.
Noll Bowles is coy; good sadness, cannot dance
80But in obedience to the ordinance.
Here Wharton wheels about till mumping Lidy,
Like the full moon, hath made his lordship giddy.
Pym and the members must their giblets levy
T' encounter Madam Smec, that single bevy.
If they two truck together, 'twill not be
A child-birth, but a gaol-delivery.
Thus every Ghibelline hath got his Guelph
But Selden,—he 's a galliard by himself;
And well may be; there 's more divines in him
90Than in all this, their Jewish Sanhedrim:
Whose canons in the forge shall then bear date
When mules their cousin-germans generate.
Thus Moses' law is violated now;
The ox and ass go yoked in the same plough.
Resign thy coach-box, Twisse; Brooke's preacher he
Would sort the beasts with more conformity.
Water and earth make but one globe; a Roundhead
Is clergy-lay, party-per-pale compounded.
The Mixed Assembly (1647.) This was the famous 'Westminster' Assembly which met in July, 1643—a hodge-podge of half a score peers, a score of commoners, and about four times as many divines as laymen. Tanner MS. 465, of the Bodleian, has a poor copy of this poem; but some transpositions and omissions suggest that it preserves an earlier draft. Lines 63-6 follow 52; 71-8, 81-2, are omitted.
1 Flea-bitten] As of a horse—the laymen appearing like specks on the body of clergy.
2 ana] Usually interpreted in the apothecary's sense, 'in equal quantities', written so in prescriptions and said to be from the Greek—ἀνά being thus used.
6, 7 'Church and State's, Most divine' MS.
19 In a fable a Royston crow (the town being on the way to Cambridge had probably a bad reputation for fleecing the guileless undergraduate) advised an innocent of his kind to drop a shellfish from a height on rocks where the Royston bird was waiting and secured the meat.
28 1677 changes 'But' to 'That'.
29 1677 inserts 'go' before 'stroke'. But Cleveland probably scanned 'I-sa-ac'. The reference is to Isaac Pennington: cf. The Rebel Scot, l. 79.
30 The phrase is of course Homeric (sc. δόμους) and with its companion combines the idea of an ecclesiastical condemnation ('delivering over to Satan') and a civil execution, a writ of elegit.
32 faun] All old editions, I think, and Mr. Berdan, 'fawn'. But the animal (always now indicated by that spelling) is not of a 'twisted nature', the half-god is.
40 One of those that taught Dryden something.
41 Cleveland, like most Royalists and their master, was evidently sound on Shakespeare. A copy of 1677 in my possession has a manuscript list of references on the fly-leaf.
46 'neck-verse'] = for benefit of clergy.
49 'Stript', 1647, 1651, 1653, is evidently 'striped', and is printed 'strip'd' in 1677.
53 Philip Herbert, fourth Earl of Pembroke, though a patron of literature and the arts, was a man of bad character and a virulent Roundhead.
55 'thy' 1677: 'these' 1647, 1651, 1653.
of bulk unruly] if Vulcan rule you MS.
59 1647, 1651 'Obadiahs': 1653 and its group 'Obadiah': 1677 'Obadiah's'.
60 Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland—who repented too late of his rebellion and tried to prevent the consequences—seems to have joined the Roundheads out of pique (his pride was notorious) at neglect of his suggestions and interference with his powers as Lord High Admiral). By putting the fleet into the hands of the Parliament he did the King perhaps more hurt than any other single person at the beginning of the war. 'Algernoon' 1647, 1651: later texts spoil the point of the next line by using the conventional form.
68 Fielding] Basil, the degenerate son of the first Earl of Denbigh. He actually served in the Parliamentary Army, but like Northumberland, who did not go that length, repented too late.
Doxie Marshall] The Stephen Marshall of Smectymnuus and the 'Geneva Bull' of The Rebel Scot, l. 21; exactly why 'Doxie' I do not know. Possibly 'prostitute' from his eager Presbyterianism. It is odd that Anne and Rebecca Marshall, two famous actresses of the Restoration to whom the term might be applied with some direct justification, used to be counted his daughters, though this is now denied.
69 Twisse] William (1578-1646), the Prolocutor of the Assembly.
71 Saye and Sele] William Fiennes, first Viscount (1582-1662). Of very bad reputation as a slippery customer.
72 rumpled] Mr. Berdan 'rumbled', on what authority and with what meaning I do not know. 'Rumpled', which is in 1647, 1651, 1653, and 1677, no doubt refers to the untidy bands, &c. of a slovenly priest. Herbert Palmer (1604-1647) was a man of good family but a bitter Puritan. He was first Fellow and then President of Queens' College, Cambridge, where Cleveland doubtless knew him. The odd description reads like that of a sort of deformed dwarf.
75 Kimbolton] Edward, Lord (1602-1671), just about to become the well-known Earl of Manchester of the Rebellion. Like Northumberland and Denbigh, he repented, but only after he had been not too politely shelved for Fairfax and Cromwell.
76 Cleveland would have been delighted had he known the fate of Cornelius Burges (1589?-1665), of whom he evidently had a pretty bad idea. Burges, a Wadham and Lincoln man, was one of the leaders of the Puritans among the London clergy, and a great favourite with the House of Commons in the Long Parliament. He wanted to suppress cathedrals; and, being a practical man and preacher at Wells during the Commonwealth, did his best by buying the deanery and part of the estates. Wherefore he was promptly and properly ruined by the Restoration, and died in well-deserved poverty. He was vice-president of the Westminster Assembly.
79 Oliver Bowles, a Puritan divine. 1653 omits the comma after 'sadness' found in 1651,—a neat punctuation, meaning 'in good sadness, he cannot dance'. Phrases like 'in good truth', 'in good sadnesse' were the utmost licence of speech which the Puritans permitted themselves.
81 Philip, fourth Lord Wharton (1613-1696) took the anti-Royalist side very early, but cut a very poor figure at Edgehill and abandoned active service. He did not figure under the Commonwealth, but was a zealous Whig after the Restoration, and a prominent Williamite in the last years of his long life. Who 'Lidy' (1653) or 'Lidie' (1677) was seems unknown. Professor Firth suggests a misprint for 'Sidie,' i.e. Sidrach Simpson (1600?-1655), a busy London Puritan and member of the Assembly. Another ingenious suggestion made to me is that 'mumping Lid[d]y' may be one of the queer dance-names of the period, or actually a woman, Wharton being no enemy to the sex. But I do not know that there was such a dance, and as all the other pairs are males, being members of the Assembly, it would be odd if there were an exception here. For 'Here' 1647, 1651 read 'Her'.
88 The exceptional position of Selden is well hit off here. His character and his earning were just able to neutralize, though not to overcome, the curse of Laodicea.
95 'Brooke' is Robert Brooke, second Lord Brooke, cousin and successor of Fulke Greville—the 'fanatic Brooke' who had his 'guerdon meet' by being shot in his attack on Lichfield Cathedral. Mercurius Anti-Britannicus, 1645, p. 23, has:
Like my Lord Brooke's Coachman
Preaching out of a tub.
(I owe this citation to Mr. Simpson.)
The King's Disguise.
And why a tenant to this vile disguise
Which who but sees, blasphemes thee with his eyes?
My twins of light within their penthouse shrink,
And hold it their allegiance now to wink.
O, for a state-distinction to arraign
Charles of high treason 'gainst my Sovereign!
What an usurper to his prince is wont,
Cloister and shave him, he himself hath don' 't.
His muffled feature speaks him a recluse—
10His ruins prove him a religious house!
The sun hath mewed his beams from off his lamp
And majesty defaced the royal stamp.
Is 't not enough thy dignity 's in thrall,
But thou'lt transmute it in thy shape and all,
As if thy blacks were of too faint a dye
Without the tincture of tautology?
Flay an Egyptian for his cassock skin,
Spun of his country's darkness, line 't within
With Presbyterian budge, that drowsy trance,
20The Synod's sable, foggy Ignorance;
Nor bodily nor ghostly negro could
Roughcast thy figure in a sadder mould.
This privy-chamber of thy shape would be
But the close mourner of thy Royalty.
Then, break the circle of thy tailor's spell,
A pearl within a rugged oyster's shell.
Heaven, which the minster of thy person owns,
Will fine thee for dilapidations.
Like to a martyred abbey's coarser doom,
30Devoutly altered to a pigeon-room;
Or like a college by the changeling rabble,
Manchester's elves, transformed into a stable;
Or if there be a profanation higher;
Such is the sacrilege of thine attire,
By which thou'rt half deposed.—Thou look'st like one
Whose looks are under sequestration;
Whose renegado form at the first glance
Shows like the Self-denying Ordinance;
Angel of light, and darkness too, (I doubt)
40Inspired within and yet possessed without;
Majestic twilight in the state of grace,
Yet with an excommunicated face.
Charles and his mask are of a different mint;
A psalm of mercy in a miscreant print.
The sun wears midnight, day is beetle-browed,
And lightning is in kelder of a cloud.
O the accursed stenography of fate!
The princely eagle shrunk into a bat!
What charm, what magic vapour can it be
50That checks his rays to this apostasy?
It is no subtile film of tiffany air,
No cobweb vizard such as ladies wear,
When they are veiled on purpose to be seen,
Doubling their lustre by their vanquished screen.
No, the false scabbard of a prince is tough
And three-piled darkness, like the smoky slough
Of an imprisoned flame; 'tis Faux in grain;
Dark lantern to our bright meridian.
Hell belched the damp; the Warwick Castle vote
60Rang Britain's curfew, so our light went out.
[A black offender, should he wear his sin
For penance, could not have a darker skin.]
His visage is not legible; the letters
Like a lord's name writ in fantastic fetters;
Clothes where a Switzer might be buried quick;
Sure they would fit the body politic;
False beard enough to fit a stage's plot
(For that 's the ambush of their wit, God wot),
Nay, all his properties so strange appear,
70Y' are not i' th' presence though the King be there.
A libel is his dress, a garb uncouth,
Such as the Hue and Cry once purged at mouth.
Scribbling assassinate! Thy lines attest
An earmark due, Cub of the Blatant Beast;
Whose breath, before 'tis syllabled for worse,
Is blasphemy unfledged, a callow curse.
The Laplanders, when they would sell a wind
Wafting to hell, bag up thy phrase and bind
It to the bark, which at the voyage end
80Shifts poop and breeds the colic in the Fiend.
But I'll not dub thee with a glorious scar
Nor sink thy sculler with a man-of-war.
The black-mouthed Si quis and this slandering suit
Both do alike in picture execute.
But since w' are all called Papists, why not date
Devotion to the rags thus consecrate?
As temples use to have their porches wrought
With sphinxes, creatures of an antic draught,
And puzzling portraitures to show that there
90Riddles inhabited; the like is here.
But pardon, Sir, since I presume to be
Clerk of this closet to your Majesty.
Methinks in this your dark mysterious dress
I see the Gospel couched in parables.
At my next view my purblind fancy ripes
And shows Religion in its dusky types;
Such a text royal, so obscure a shade
Was Solomon in Proverbs all arrayed.
Come, all the brats of this expounding age
100To whom the spirit is in pupilage,
You that damn more than ever Samson slew,
And with his engine, the same jaw-bone too!
How is 't he 'scapes your inquisition free
Since bound up in the Bible's livery?
Hence, Cabinet-intruders! Pick-locks, hence!
You, that dim jewels with your Bristol sense:
And characters, like witches, so torment
Till they confess a guilt though innocent!
Keys for this coffer you can never get;
110None but St. Peter's opes this cabinet,
This cabinet, whose aspect would benight
Critic spectators with redundant light.
A Prince most seen is least. What Scriptures call
The Revelation, is most mystical.
Mount then, thou Shadow Royal, and with haste
Advance thy morning-star, Charles, overcast.
May thy strange journey contradictions twist
And force fair weather from a Scottish mist.
Heaven's confessors are posed, those star-eyed sages,
120T' interpret an eclipse thus riding stages.
Thus Israel-like he travels with a cloud,
Both as a conduct to him and a shroud.
But oh, he goes to Gibeon and renews
A league with mouldy bread and clouted shoes!
The Kings Disguise.] That assumed on the fatal journey from Oxford to the camp of the Scots. (First printed as a quarto pamphlet of four leaves; Thomason bought his copy on 21 January, 1647; reprinted in the 1647 Poems. Vaughan wrote a poem on the same subject about the same time.)
1 a tenant to] so coffin'd in 1677.
2 Which] That 1677.
4: 1677 omits 'now', rather to one's surprise, as the value 'allegi-ance' is of the first rather than of the second half of the century. It is therefore probably right.
14 transmute] transcribe 1677. The two readings obviously pertain to two different senses of 'blacks'—'clothes' and 'ink'.
17 for] from 1647 (pamphlet).
18 line 't] lin'de 1647 (pamphlet).
19 The 1677 'Vindicators' had forgotten 'budge' in the sense of 'fur' (perhaps they were too loyal to read Milton) and made it 'badge'.
20 1651, 1653 'Synod', with no hyphen but perhaps meant for a compound. The genitive is perhaps better. The comma at 'sable', which Mr. Berdan omits, is important.
21-2 The error of those who say that such a rhyme points to the pronunciation of the l in words like 'could' is sufficiently shown by the fact that 'coud' is frequent. It is, of course, a mere eye-rhyme, like many of Spenser's earlier. 'No bodily' 1647 (pamphlet).
23 shape] garb 1677.
24 of] to 1677.
25 'Twill break' 1647, 1653. tailor's] jailor's 1647, 1651, 1653.
29 1653, but obviously by a mere misprint, 'courser'.
31 1647, 1651, 1653 'the college'. It is said that the definite article usually at this time designates 'the College of Physicians'. But, as Mr. Berdan well observes, 'the case was unfortunately too common to admit of identification'. Cleveland's restless wit was not idle in calling 'Manchester's elves'—the Parliamentary troops—'changelings'. The soldier ought to be a King's man: and indeed pretended to be.
32 1647 (pamphlet) 'reformed'.
40 This and l. 47 are examples of the Drydenian line before Dryden, so frequent in Cleveland.
46 = 'The unborn child of a cloud'.
47 Alliteration, and some plausibility of verse, seduced 1677 into 'of State', but I think 'fate' is better.
50 checks] shrinks 1647, 1651, 1653.
55-6 1647, 1651, 1653 read
Nor the false scabbard of a Prince's tough
Metal and three-piled darkness like the slough.
Some fight might be made for 'Metal', but 'Nor' is indefensible. I am half inclined to transfer it above to l. 52 and take 'No' thence. The text, which is 1677, is I suppose a correction. Both 1647 texts mark 'slough' with an asterisk, and have a marginal note 'A damp in coal-pits usual'.
57 I cannot understand what Mr. Berdan—who prints 'Fawkes'—means by saying it is not authorized by any edition, whereas his own apparatus gives 'Faux' in every one. It is a mere question of spelling. 'Three-piled darkness' equally surrounds to me his further remark that he 'adopted it as the only reading approximating sense; treason in grain'. The metaphor of the dark lantern cloaked is surely clear enough; and this 'in grain' is one of the innumerable passages showing the rashness of invariably interpreting 'in grain' as = 'with the grain of the cochineal insect'. Beyond all doubt it has the simple sense of penitus, 'inward'.
58 bright] high 1647, 1653.
59 the Warwick Castle vote] The Resolution of the Commons on May 6, 1646, that the King, after the Scots sold him, should be lodged in Warwick Castle.
61-2 Not in 1647, 1651, 1653 and its group, but added in 1677.
63 1647, 1651, 1653 'Thy visage'.
67 1677 has the very considerable and not at once acceptable alteration of 'thatch a poet's plot'. But it may have been Cleveland.
72 1647, 1651, again give an asterisked note, 'Britanicus', showing the definite, not general, reference of 'Hue and Cry'. It seems that Mercurius Britannicus did issue a 'Hue and Cry' after the King, for which the editor, Captain Audley, was put in the Gate-house till he apologized.
75 1651 'wreath', corrupted into 'wrath' in 1653.
76 Blount stupidly thought 'callow' to mean 'lewd or wicked', as if 'unfledged' did not ratify the usual sense.
80 breeds] brings 1647, 1651.
83 Si quis] The first words of a formal inquiry as to disqualifications in a candidate for orders, &c. It would apply to the Hue and Cry itself.
85 It being a favourite Puritan trick to identify 'Royalist' with 'Papist'. 'Date' apparently in the sense of 'begin', which it usually has only as neuter.
89 puzzling] 1677 and its followers 'purling', with no sense.
95 1677 'The second view' and 'wipes'.
106 Bristol] as of diamonds.
109 coffer] cipher 1677, &c.
110 opes] ope 1677.
116 'Charles' 1677: 1647, 1651, 1653, by a clear error 'Charles's'.
120 'T' interpret an' 1647 (pamphlet): 'To interpret an' 1647 (Poems) 1653, 1677. 1651 omits 'To' and reads the 'an' which seems bad in metre and meaning alike.
The Rebel Scot.
How, Providence? and yet a Scottish crew?
Then Madam Nature wears black patches too!
What? shall our nation be in bondage thus
Unto a land that truckles under us?
Ring the bells backward! I am all on fire.
Not all the buckets in a country quire
Shall quench my rage. A poet should be feared,
When angry, like a comet's flaming beard.
And where 's the stoic can his wrath appease,
10To see his country sick of Pym's disease?
By Scotch invasion to be made a prey
To such pigwiggin myrmidons as they?
But that there 's charm in verse, I would not quote
The name of Scot without an antidote;
Unless my head were red, that I might brew
Invention there that might be poison too.
Were I a drowsy judge whose dismal note
Disgorgeth halters as a juggler's throat
Doth ribbons; could I in Sir Emp'ric's tone
20Speak pills in phrase and quack destruction;
Or roar like Marshall, that Geneva bull,
Hell and damnation a pulpit full;
Yet to express a Scot, to play that prize,
Not all those mouth-grenadoes can suffice.
Before a Scot can properly be curst,
I must like Hocus swallow daggers first.
Come, keen iambics, with your badger's feet
And badger-like bite till your teeth do meet.
Help, ye tart satirists, to imp my rage
30With all the scorpions that should whip this age.
Scots are like witches; do but whet your pen,
Scratch till the blood come, they'll not hurt you then.
Now, as the martyrs were enforced to take
The shapes of beasts, like hypocrites, at stake,
I'll bait my Scot so, yet not cheat your eyes;
A Scot within a beast is no disguise.
No more let Ireland brag her harmless nation
Fosters no venom since the Scot's plantation:
Nor can ours feigned antiquity maintain;
40Since they came in, England hath wolves again.
The Scot that kept the Tower might have shown,
Within the grate of his own breast alone,
The leopard and the panther, and engrossed
What all those wild collegiates had cost
The honest high-shoes in their termly fees;
First to the salvage lawyer, next to these.
Nature herself doth Scotchmen beasts confess,
Making their country such a wilderness:
A land that brings in question and suspense
50God's omnipresence, but that Charles came thence,
But that Montrose and Crawford's loyal band
Atoned their sins and christ'ned half the land.
Nor is it all the nation hath these spots;
There is a Church as well as Kirk of Scots.
As in a picture where the squinting paint
Shows fiend on this side, and on that side saint.
He, that saw Hell in 's melancholy dream
And in the twilight of his fancy's theme,
Scared from his sins, repented in a fright,
60Had he viewed Scotland, had turned proselyte.
A land where one may pray with cursed intent,
'Oh may they never suffer banishment!'
Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom;
Not forced him wander but confined him home!
Like Jews they spread and as infection fly,
As if the Devil had ubiquity.
Hence 'tis they live at rovers and defy
This or that place, rags of geography.
They're citizens o' th' world; they're all in all;
70Scotland's a nation epidemical.
And yet they ramble not to learn the mode,
How to be dressed, or how to lisp abroad;
To return knowing in the Spanish shrug,
Or which of the Dutch States a double jug
Resembles most in belly or in beard,
(The card by which the mariners are steered).
No, the Scots-errant fight and fight to eat,
Their Ostrich stomachs make their swords their meat.
Nature with Scots as tooth-drawers hath dealt
80Who use to hang their teeth upon their belt.
Yet wonder not at this their happy choice,
The serpent 's fatal still to Paradise.
Sure, England hath the hemorrhoids, and these
On the north postern of the patient seize
Like leeches; thus they physically thirst
After our blood, but in the cure shall burst!
Let them not think to make us run o' th' score
To purchase villenage, as once before
When an act passed to stroke them on the head,
90Call them good subjects, buy them gingerbread.
Not gold, nor acts of grace, 'tis steel must tame
The stubborn Scot; a Prince that would reclaim
Rebels by yielding, doth like him, or worse,
Who saddled his own back to shame his horse.
Was it for this you left your leaner soil,
Thus to lard Israel with Egypt's spoil?
They are the Gospel's life-guard; but for them,
The garrison of New Jerusalem,
What would the brethren do? The Cause! The Cause!
100Sack-possets and the fundamental laws!
Lord! what a godly thing is want of shirts!
How a Scotch stomach and no meat converts!
They wanted food and raiment, so they took
Religion for their seamstress and their cook.
Unmask them well; their honours and estate,
As well as conscience, are sophisticate.
Shrive but their titles and their money poise,
A laird and twenty pence pronounced with noise,
When construed, but for a plain yeoman go,
110And a good sober two-pence; and well so.
Hence then, you proud impostors; get you gone,
You Picts in gentry and devotion;
You scandal to the stock of verse, a race
Able to bring the gibbet in disgrace.
Hyperbolus by suffering did traduce
The ostracism and shamed it out of use.
The Indian, that Heaven did forswear
Because he heard some Spaniards were there,
Had he but known what Scots in Hell had been,
120He would Erasmus-like have hung between.
My Muse hath done. A voider for the nonce!
I wrong the Devil should I pick their bones;
That dish is his; for, when the Scots decease,
Hell, like their nation, feeds on barnacles.
A Scot, when from the gallow-tree got loose,
Drops into Styx and turns a Solan goose.
The Rebel Scot.] This famous piece is said to be the only one of Cleveland's poems which is in every edition. In 1677 it is accompanied by a Latin version (of very little merit, and probably if not certainly by 'another hand') which I do not give. A poor copy is in Tanner MS. 465 of the Bodleian, at fol. 92, with the title 'A curse on the Scots'. The piece is hot enough, and no wonder; but it would no doubt have been hotter if it had been written later, when Cleveland was actually gagged by Leven's dismissal of him. It is not unnoteworthy that the library of the University of Edinburgh contains not a single one of the numerous seventeenth-century editions of Cleveland. Years afterwards, when a Douglas had chequered the disgrace of 'the Dutch in the Medway' by a brave death, Marvell, who probably knew our poet, composed for 'Cleveland's Ghost' a half palinode, half continuation, entitled 'The Loyal Scot'.
10 It would seem that Pym had not yet gone to his account, as he died on December 6, 1643, after getting Parliament to accept the Covenant and the Scots to invade England.
12 The early texts have Drayton's name correctly: 1677 makes it 'Pigwidgin'.
15 It seems hardly necessary to remind the reader of the well-known habit of painting Judas's hair red.
19 could ... tone] or in the Empiric's misty tone MS.
21 Stephen Marshall, the 'Smec.' man and a mighty cushion-thumper (who denounced the 'Curse of Meroz' on all who came not to destroy those in any degree opposed to the Parliament), actually preached Pym's funeral sermon.
22 'Damnati-on'. But MS. reads 'a whole pulpit full'.
28 1653 has the obvious blunder of 'feet' repeated for 'teeth'. The first 'feet' is itself less obvious, but I suppose the strong claw and grip of the badger's are meant. Some, however, refer it to the supposed lop-sidedness or inequality of badgers' feet, answering to the ⏑— of the iamb. I never knew but one badger, who lived in St. Clement's, Oxford, and belonged (surreptitiously) to Merton College. I did not notice his feet.
32 The more usual reproach was the other way—that 'the Scot would not fight till he saw his own blood'.
38 1677, less well, 'that Scot'.
39 'ours ... maintain' 1647, 1651, 1653: 'our ... obtain' 1677.
41 The Scot] Sir William Balfour, a favoured servant of the King, who deserted to the other side.
44 A difficulty has been made about 'collegiate', but there is surely none. The word (or 'collegian') is old slang, and hardly slang for 'jail-bird'. The double use of the Tower as a prison and a menagerie should of course be remembered.
45 high-shoes] Country folk in boots.
termly] = 'when they came up to business'.
51 Crawford] Ludovic, sixteenth Earl, who fought bravely all through the Rebellion, served after the downfall in France and Spain, and died, it is not accurately known when or where, but about 1652.
52 A fine line. 1677 does not improve it by reading 'their land'.
63-4 The central and most often quoted couplet.
65-6 follow 70 in the MS.
67 at rovers] Common for shooting not at a definite mark, but at large.
70 epidemical] In the proper sense of 'travelling from country to country', not doubtless without the transferred one of a 'travelling plague'.
74 States] not the Provinces; but the representative Hogan Mogans themselves.
78 'Ostrich' in 1677: 1647, 1651, and 1653 the older 'estrich'.
80 hang] string 1677.
81 'But why should we be made your frantic choice?' MS.
82 'England too hath emerods' MS.
83 1651, 1653 have a middle form between 'emerod' and 'hemorrhoid'—'Hemeroids'. 1647 'Hemerods'.
84 1647, 1651, 1653 and its group, oddly, 'posture'.
89 The Parliamentary bribe or Danegelt of 1641.
95 'left' 1653, &c., 1677: 'gave' 1647, 1651. The MS. reads 'But they may justly quit their leaner soil. 'Tis to lard ...'
101 1651, 1653 'goodly', but here, I think, the old is not the better.
107 'money' 1647, 1651, 1653: 'moneys' 1677.
108 1647, 1653, &c. 'pound', wrongly. Twenty Scots pence = not quite two-pence English. Therefore 'well so'.
118 1641, 1651, and 1653 'the Spaniards', but 'some' (1677) is more pointed.
120 Erasmus] Regarded as neither Papist nor Protestant?
Cleveland never wrote anything else of this force and fire: and it, or parts of it, were constantly revived when the occasion presented itself.
The Scots' Apostasy.
Is 't come to this? What? shall the cheeks of Fame,
Stretched with the breath of learned Loudoun's name,
Be flagged again? And that great piece of sense,
As rich in loyalty as eloquence,
Brought to the test, be found a trick of state?
Like chemists' tinctures, proved adulterate?
The Devil sure such language did achieve
To cheat our unforewarned Grandam Eve,
As this impostor found out to besot
10Th' experienced English to believe a Scot!
Who reconciled the Covenant's doubtful sense,
The Commons' argument, or the City's pence?
Or did you doubt persistence in one good
Would spoil the fabric of your brotherhood,
Projected first in such a forge of sin,
Was fit for the grand Devil's hammering?
Or was 't ambition that this damned fact
Should tell the world you know the sins you act?
The infamy this super-treason brings
20Blasts more than murders of your sixty kings;
A crime so black, as being advis'dly done,
Those hold with this no competition.
Kings only suffered then; in this doth lie
Th' assassination of Monarchy.
Beyond this sin no one step can be trod,
If not t' attempt deposing of your God.
Oh, were you so engaged that we might see
Heaven's angry lightning 'bout your ears to flee
Till you were shrivelled to dust, and your cold Land
30Parched to a drought beyond the Lybian sand!
But 'tis reserved! Till Heaven plague you worse,
Be objects of an epidemic curse.
First, may your brethren, to whose viler ends
Your power hath bawded, cease to count you friends,
And, prompted by the dictate of their reason,
Reproach the traitors though they hug the treason:
And may their jealousies increase and breed
Till they confine your steps beyond the Tweed:
In foreign nations may your loath'd name be
40A stigmatizing brand of infamy,
Till forced by general hate you cease to roam
The world, and for a plague go live at home;
Till you resume your poverty and be
Reduced to beg where none can be so free
To grant: and may your scabby Land be all
Translated to a general hospital:
Let not the sun afford one gentle ray
To give you comfort of a summer's day;
But, as a guerdon for your traitorous war,
50Live cherished only by the Northern Star:
No stranger deign to visit your rude coast,
And be to all but banished men as lost:
And such, in heightening of the infliction due,
Let provoked princes send them all to you:
Your State a chaos be where not the Law,
But power, your lives and liberties may awe:
No subject 'mongst you keep a quiet breast,
But each man strive through blood to be the best;
Till, for those miseries on us you've brought,
60By your own sword our just revenge be wrought.
To sum up all—let your religion be,
As your allegiance, masked hypocrisy,
Until, when Charles shall be composed in dust,
Perfumed with epithets of good and just,
HE saved, incenséd Heaven may have forgot
T' afford one act of mercy to a Scot,
Unless that Scot deny himself and do
(What's easier far) renounce his Nation too.
The Scots' Apostasy was first printed as a broadside in 1646, and assigned at the time to Cleveland by Thomas Old. It was included in 1651, but not admitted by the 'Vindicators' in 1677. But it is in all the central group of editions except Cleaveland Revived, where absence is usually a strong proof of genuineness; and it is extremely like him. Mr. Berdan has admitted it, and so do I. Professor Case has noted a catalogue entry of The Scot's Constancy, an answer to J. C's. [al. Or an Answer to Cleveland's] Scots' Apostasy (G. R. Bastick) [al. Robin Bostock], London April 1647. The 'J. C's' is of course pertinent.
2 John Campbell (1598-1633), from 1620 Baron Loudoun in his wife's right, was, after taking a violent part on the Covenant side in the earlier Scotch-English war, instrumental in concluding peace; and was made in 1641 Chancellor of Scotland and Earl of Loudoun.
4 as] 'and' 1653.
9 'imposture' 1651, 1653.
20 The celebrated and grisly collection of Scottish monarchs in Holyrood was not yet in existence; for its imaginative creator only painted it in 1684, and there are 106, not sixty. But the remoteness of Scottish pedigrees was popularly known: and if it be not true that all Scottish kings were murdered, not a few had been.
24 'Assassination' is valued at six syllables.
28 'to' 1651, &c.: 'into' 1646.
31 Till] and tell 1646, 1651.
34 'count you' 1646, 1651, 1653, &c.: 'be your' 1687. This prayer, at any rate, was heard pretty soon.
38 'steps' 1651, &c.: 'ships' 1646.
42 'go', misprinted 'to' in 1653, &c.
67-8 Not in 1646.
Rupertismus.
O that I could but vote myself a poet,
Or had the legislative knack to do it!
Or, like the doctors militant, could get
Dubbed at adventure Verser Banneret!
Or had I Cacus' trick to make my rhymes
Their own antipodes, and track the times!
'Faces about,' says the remonstrant spirit,
'Allegiance is malignant, treason merit.'
Huntingdon colt, that posed the sage recorder,
10Might be a sturgeon now and pass by order.
Had I but Elsing's gift (that splay-mouthed brother
That declares one way and yet means another),
Could I thus write asquint, then, Sir, long since
You had been sung a great and glorious Prince!
I had observed the language of these days,
Blasphemed you, and then periwigged the phrase
With humble service and such other fustian,
Bells which ring backward in this great combustion.
I had reviled you, and without offence;
20The literal and equitable sense
Would make it good. When all fails, that will do 't;
Sure that distinction cleft the Devil's foot!
This were my dialect, would your Highness please
To read me but with Hebrew spectacles;
Interpret counter what is cross rehearsed;
Libels are commendations when reversed.
Just as an optic glass contracts the sight
At one end, but when turned doth multiply 't.
But you're enchanted, Sir, you're doubly free
30From the great guns and squibbing poetry,
Whom neither bilbo nor invention pierces,
Proof even 'gainst th' artillery of verses.
Strange that the Muses cannot wound your mail!
If not their art, yet let their sex prevail.
At that known leaguer, where the bonny Besses
Supplied the bow-strings with their twisted tresses,
Your spells could ne'er have fenced you, every arrow
Had lanced your noble breast and drunk the marrow.
For beauty, like white powder, makes no noise
40And yet the silent hypocrite destroys.
Then use the Nuns of Helicon with pity
Lest Wharton tell his gossips of the City
That you kill women too, nay maids, and such
Their general wants militia to touch.
Impotent Essex! Is it not a shame
Our Commonwealth, like to a Turkish dame,
Should have an eunuch guardian? May she be
Ravished by Charles, rather than saved by thee!
But why, my Muse, like a green-sickness girl,
50Feed'st thou on coals and dirt? A gelding earl
Gives no more relish to thy female palate
Than to that ass did once the thistle sallet.
Then quit the barren theme and all at once,
Thou and thy sisters like bright Amazons,
Give Rupert an alarum. Rupert! one
Whose name is wit's superfetation,
Makes fancy, like eternity's round womb,
Unite all valour, present, past, to come!
He who the old philosophy controls
60That voted down plurality of souls!
He breathes a Grand Committee; all that were
The wonders of their age constellate here.
And as the elder sisters, Growth and Sense,
Souls paramount themselves, in man commence
But faculties of reasons queen; no more
Are they to him (who was complete before),
Ingredients of his virtue. Thread the beads
Of Caesar's acts, great Pompey's and the Swede's,
And 'tis a bracelet fit for Rupert's hand,
70By which that vast triumvirate is spanned.
Here, here is palmistry; here you may read
How long the world shall live and when 't shall bleed.
What every man winds up, that Rupert hath,
For Nature raised him of the Public Faith;
Pandora's brother, to make up whose store
The gods were fain to run upon the score.
Such was the painter's brief for Venus' face;
Item, an eye from Jane; a lip from Grace.
Let Isaac and his cits flay off the plate
80That tips their antlers, for the calf of state;
Let the zeal-twanging nose, that wants a ridge,
Snuffling devoutly, drop his silver bridge;
Yes, and the gossip spoon augment the sum
Although poor Caleb lose his christendom;
Rupert outweighs that in his sterling self
Which their self-want pays in commuting pelf.
Pardon, great Sir, for that ignoble crew
Gains when made bankrupt in the scales with you.
As he, who in his character of Light
90Styled it God's shadow, made it far more bright
By an eclipse so glorious (light is dim
And a black nothing when compared to Him),
So 'tis illustrious to be Rupert's foil
And a just trophy to be made his spoil.
I'll pin my faith on the Diurnal's sleeve
Hereafter, and the Guildhall creed believe;
The conquests which the Common Council hears
With their wide listening mouth from the great Peers
That ran away in triumph. Such a foe
100Can make them victors in their overthrow;
Where providence and valour meet in one,
Courage so poised with circumspection
That he revives the quarrel once again
Of the soul's throne; whether in heart, or brain,
And leaves it a drawn match; whose fervour can
Hatch him whom Nature poached but half a man;
His trumpet, like the angel's at the last,
Makes the soul rise by a miraculous blast.
Was the Mount Athos carved in shape of man
110As 'twas designed by th' Macedonian
(Whose right hand should a populous land contain,
The left should be a channel to the main),
His spirit would inform th' amphibious figure
And, strait-laced, sweat for a dominion bigger.
The terror of whose name can out of seven,
Like Falstaff's buckram men, make fly eleven.
Thus some grow rich by breaking. Vipers thus,
By being slain, are made more numerous.
No wonder they'll confess no loss of men,
120For Rupert knocks 'em till they gig again.
They fear the giblets of his train, they fear
Even his dog, that four-legged cavalier;
He that devours the scraps that Lunsford makes;
Whose picture feeds upon a child in steaks;
Who, name but Charles, he comes aloft for him,
But holds up his malignant leg at Pym.
'Gainst whom they have these articles in souse:
First, that he barks against the sense o' th' House;
Resolved delinquent, to the Tower straight,
130Either to th' Lions' or the Bishop's Grate:
Next, for his ceremonious wag o' th' tail.
(But there the sisterhood will be his bail,
At least the Countess will, Lust's Amsterdam,
That lets in all religions of the game.)
Thirdly, he smells intelligence; that 's better
And cheaper too than Pym's from his own letter,
Who 's doubly paid (Fortune or we the blinder!)
For making plots and then for fox the finder:
Lastly, he is a devil without doubt,
140For, when he would lie down, he wheels about,
Makes circles, and is couchant in a ring;
And therefore score up one for conjuring.
'What canst thou say, thou wretch!' 'O quarter, quarter!
I'm but an instrument, a mere Sir Arthur.
If I must hang, O let not our fates vary,
Whose office 'tis alike to fetch and carry!'
No hopes of a reprieve; the mutinous stir
That strung the Jesuit will dispatch a cur.
'Were I a devil as the rabble fears,
150I see the House would try me by my peers!'
There, Jowler, there! Ah, Jowler! 'st, 'tis nought!
Whate'er the accusers cry, they're at a fault:
And Glyn and Maynard have no more to say
Than when the glorious Strafford stood at bay.
Thus libels but annexed to him, we see,
Enjoy a copyhold of victory.
Saint Peter's shadow healed; Rupert's is such
'Twould find Saint Peter's work and wound as much.
He gags their guns, defeats their dire intent;
160The cannons do but lisp and compliment.
Sure, Jove descended in a leaden shower
To get this Perseus; hence the fatal power
Of shot is strangled. Bullets thus allied
Fear to commit an act of parricide.
Go on, brave Prince, and make the world confess
Thou art the greater world and that the less.
Scatter th' accumulative king; untruss
That five-fold fiend, the State's Smectymnuus,
Who place religion in their vellum ears
170As in their phylacters the Jews did theirs.
England's a paradise (and a modest word)
Since guarded by a cherub's flaming sword.
Your name can scare an atheist to his prayers,
And cure the chincough better than the bears.
Old Sibyl charms the toothache with you; Nurse
Makes you still children; and the ponderous curse
The clowns salute with is derived from you,
'Now, Rupert take thee, rogue, how dost thou do?'
In fine the name of Rupert thunders so,
180Kimbolton's but a rumbling wheelbarrow.
Rupertismus] 'To P. Rupert' in the 1647 texts (Bodley and Case copies). The odd title Rupertismus was first given in 1651. This poem expresses the earlier and more sanguine Cavalier temper, when things on the whole went well. Rupert's admirable quality as an officer naturally made him a sort of Cavalier cynosure and (with his being half a foreigner) a bugbear to the Roundheads; while neither party had yet found out his fatal defects as a general. Hence 'Rupertismus' not ill described the humour of both sides. The dog who figures so largely was a real dog (said of course to be a familiar spirit), and Professor Firth tells me that he has a pamphlet (1642) entitled Observations upon P. R.'s white dog called Boy, carefully taken by T. B., with a picture of the animal. It was replied to by The Parliament's Unspotted Bitch next year.
1, 2 The 'legislative knack' to vote oneself everything good and perfect has always been a gift of Houses of Commons. It was rather shrewd of Cleveland to formulate it so early and so well.
4 Bannerets being properly dubbed on the field of battle. 'Adventure' 1677: 'Adventures' 1647, 1651, 1687: 'adventurers' 1653 and its group.
5 Cacus' trick] of dragging his cattle by the tails.
7 spirit] A word their abuse of which was constantly thrown in the face of the Puritans till Swift's thrice rectified vitriol almost destroyed the abuse itself.
8 malignant] in the technical Roundhead sense.
9 The gibe at Huntingdon, clear enough from the passage, is one of many old local insults. I can remember when it was a little unsafe, in one of the Channel islands, to speak of a donkey. This particular jest recurs in Pepys (May 22, 1677), who was in a way a Huntingdon man.
11 Elsing] Clerk to the House of Commons.
13 'thus' 1677: 'but' 1647 and the earlier texts. write] 1653, 'right'—evidently one of the numerous mistakes due to dictating copy.
14 'The Prince' was a title which Rupert monopolized early and kept till his death.
15 'these' 1677: 'the' 1647, 1651, 1653, 1687.
20 1677 'th' equitable'.
24 The rhyme of '-cles' to an ee syllable occurs in Dryden.
31 'Who' 1653 and its group.
35 Carthage. Rupert's devotion to ladies was lifelong.
39 'White' or noiseless powder was a constant object of research.
45 Essex was twice divorced on the ground mentioned, and his efficiency in the field was not to be much greater than that in the chamber.
53 1677, &c., 'his barren theme'.
65 1654 'faculty'. 1677 'Reason Queen'. I am not sure which is right.
66-7 So punctuated in 1677. Earlier texts and 1687 'who were to him complete before. Ingredients of his virtue thread' ... 1677 reads 'virtues'.
68 'the Swede': of course Gustavus Adolphus.
73 1647, 1651, 1653 'Whatever'.
74 1677, apparently alone, 'on the'].
78 1653, evidently by slip, 'for Jane'.
79 1647, 1651, 1653 'Cit'z' (not quite bad for 'citizens) and 'flea of the place'. 'Flea' for 'flay' is not uncommon: the rest is absurd. 'Isaac' was Isaac Pennington, father of that Judith whose obliging disposition Mr. Pepys has commemorated.
80 'Antlets', which occurs in all, is not impossible for 'antlers' (the everlastingly ridiculed citizen 'horns'). But 1647, 1651, 1653 forgot the Golden Calf altogether in their endeavour to provide a rhyme for their own misprint (l. 79) by reading 'Stace'.
83 'Gossip's' (1651, 1677) is not wanted and hisses unnecessarily.
86 'self-wants' 1647, 1651, 1653, 1687. 1677, most improbably, 'committee'. The whole passage refers to the subscriptions of plate and money in lieu of personal service which Pennington, as Lord Mayor, promised 'on the Public Faith'. Rupert's self outweighs all this vicarious performance.
89 'whom' 1653, 1654.
92 to] with 1677.
95 Diurnal] Which Cleveland satirized in his first published (prose) work.
98 As Wharton at Edgehill. 'Mouths' 1647, 1687.
100 them] men 1677.
109 Was the] 'Twas the 1647, 1651, 1653: Was that 1677. 'Was' = 'if it were'.
110 designed] 1647, 1651, 1653 'defin'd', with a clear f, not long s.
113 would] 1647, 1651, 1653 might.
114 The text is 1677, which, however, reads (with the usual want of strait-lacedness) 'straight'. 1651, 1653, have 'Yet' for 'And', which is corrected in some of their own group, and 'sweats'.
117 some] Like Mr. Badman a little later.
120 gig] = 'spin like a top'. Dryden uses the word in the same sense and almost in the same phrase in the Prologue to Amphitryon, l. 21: v. sup.,[ p. 17].
121 giblets] Apparently in the sense of 'offal', 'refuse'.
123 Lunsford] Sir Thomas, 1610?-1653. The absurd legends about this Cavalier's 'child-eating' are referred to in, originally, Hudibras and in Lacy's Old Troop, and at second-hand (probably from the text also, though it is not quoted) in the notes to Scott's Woodstock. 1651 and 1653 have 'which' for second 'that'.
124 steaks] All old editions 'stakes'—a very common spelling, which Mr. Berdan keeps. As he modernizes the rest, his readers may be under the impression that the ogre impaled the infants before devouring them, which was not, I think, alleged by the most savoury professor on the Roundhead side.
127 souse] = 'pickle'. 'they have these' 1677: 'they've several' 1647, 1651: 'they have several' 1653.
130 Bishop's] 1677, 1687 editions have the apostrophe. Laud is probably referred to in 'Bishop's'. The force of all this, and its application to other times, are admirable.
133 The Countess—pretty clearly Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle (1599-1660)—beauty, wit, harlot, and traitress (though, too late, she repented). Amsterdam] The religious indifference of the Dutch being a common reproach. 1677 and its followers read 'with' for 'will', which would alter the sense completely.
134 1647, 1651, 1653 have 'religious' in the well-known noun sense, and it is possibly better.
144 Sir Arthur Haselrig (died 1661)—a very busy person throughout the troubles, but not considered as exactly a prime mover.
148 1677 'the cur'.
149 'rabble' is 1677 and seems good, though the earlier 'rebel' might do.
152 a fault] 1677 default—not so technical.
153 Serjeants John Glyn[ne] (1607-66) and John Maynard (1602-90) were well-known legal bandogs on the Roundhead side in the earlier stages; but both trimmed cleverly during the later, and sold themselves promptly to the Crown at the Restoration. Glynne died soon. Maynard lived to prosecute the victims of the Popish Plot, and to turn his coat once more, at nearly ninety, for William of Orange.
155 1647, 1651, 1653 'labels': 1677 'Thus libels but amount to him we see T' enjoy'.
158 1677 'St. Peter', which looks plausible, though I am not sure that it is better than the genitive. 1647, 1651, 1653 have 'yet' for 'and' as in other cases.
167 the accumulative king] Pym? who was nicknamed 'king' Pym, and if not exactly 'accumulative' (for his debts were paid by Parliament) must have been expensive and was probably rapacious. Others think it means 'the Committee', 'accumulative' being = 'cumulative' (or rather 'plural'). They quote, not without force, our poet's prose Character of a Country Committee man, 'a Committee man is a name of multitude', the phrase 'accumulative treason' occurring in the context.
175 1677 transfers 'the' to before 'Nurse'—a great loss, the unarticled and familiar 'Nurse' being far better—and reads 'Sibils charm'.
176 'and' 1653, 1677: 'nay and' 1647, 1651, 1687.
177 1677 'Clown salutes'.
Epitaph on the Earl of Strafford.
Here lies wise and valiant dust
Huddled up 'twixt fit and just;
Strafford, who was hurried hence
'Twixt treason and convenience.
He spent his time here in a mist;
A Papist, yet a Calvinist;
His Prince's nearest joy and grief
He had, yet wanted all relief;
The prop and ruin of the State;
10The People's violent love and hate;
One in extremes loved and abhorred.
Riddles lie here, or in a word,
Here lies blood; and let it lie
Speechless still and never cry.
Epitaph, &c. In the Bodleian copy of 1647 and in Professor Case's (3rd issue) and in all others except Cleaveland Revived (1659) and 1677; but in some of the earliest classed with the work of 'Uncertain Authors'. Winstanley (no very strong authority, it is true) calls it Cleveland's and 'excellent'. It is perhaps too much to say with Mr. Berdan, that it is 'unlike his manner'. There is certainly in it a manner which he does not often display, but the pity and the terror of that great tragedy might account for part of this, and the difficulty (for any Royalist) of speaking freely of it for more. It is rather fine, I think.
4 The pitiful truth could hardly be better put.
6 Obscure, but not un-Clevelandish.
7-8 Punctuation altered to get what seems the necessary sense. A comma which 1653 has at 'grief' (not to mention a full stop in the 1647 texts) obscures this, and a comma at 'wanted', which Mr. Berdan puts, does so even more. The phrase is once more fatally just and true. He enjoyed all his master's affection and received all his grief, but 'wanted' his support and relief. Professor Case, however, would cling to the stop, at least the comma, at 'grief'.
12 or] Other editions 'and'. For 'Riddles' cf. The King's Disguise, ll. 89-90.
13-14 For the third time 'he says it', and there is no more to say.—In 1653 there follows a Latin Epitaph on Strafford which has nothing to do with this. It is in some phrases enigmatic enough to be Cleveland's, but it is not certainly his, and as it is neither English nor verse we need hardly give it.
An Elegy upon the Archbishop of Canterbury.
I need no Muse to give my passion vent,
He brews his tears that studies to lament.
Verse chemically weeps; that pious rain
Distilled with art is but the sweat o' th' brain
Whoever sobbed in numbers? Can a groan
Be quavered out by soft division?
'Tis true for common formal elegies
Not Bushel's Wells can match a poet's eyes
In wanton water-works; he'll tune his tears
10From a Geneva jig up to the spheres.
But then he mourns at distance, weeps aloof.
Now that the conduit head is our own roof,
Now that the fate is public, we may call
It Britain's vespers, England's funeral.
Who hath a pencil to express the Saint
But he hath eyes too, washing off the paint?
There is no learning but what tears surround,
Like to Seth's pillars in the Deluge drowned.
There is no Church; Religion is grown
20So much of late that she 's increased to none,
Like an hydropic body, full of rheums,
First swells into a bubble, then consumes.
The Law is dead or cast into a trance,—
And by a law dough-baked, an Ordinance!
The Liturgy, whose doom was voted next,
Died as a comment upon him the text.
There's nothing lives; life is, since he is gone,
But a nocturnal lucubration.
Thus you have seen death's inventory read
30In the sum total,—Canterbury's dead;
A sight would make a Pagan to baptize
Himself a convert in his bleeding eyes;
Would thaw the rabble, that fierce beast of ours,
(That which hyena-like weeps and devours)
Tears that flow brackish from their souls within,
Not to repent, but pickle up their sin.
Meantime no squalid grief his look defiles.
He gilds his sadder fate with nobler smiles.
Thus the world's eye, with reconciléd streams,
40Shines in his showers as if he wept his beams.
How could success such villanies applaud?
The State in Strafford fell, the Church in Laud;
The twins of public rage, adjudged to die
For treasons they should act, by prophecy;
The facts were done before the laws were made;
The trump turned up after the game was played.
Be dull, great spirits, and forbear to climb,
For worth is sin and eminence a crime.
No churchman can be innocent and high.
50'Tis height makes Grantham steeple stand awry.
An Elegy, &c. (1647.) If the Strafford epitaph seemed too serious, as well as too concentrated and passionate, for Cleveland, this on Strafford's fellow worker and fellow victim may seem almost a caricature of our author's more wayward and more fantastic manner. Yet there are fine lines in it, and perhaps nowhere else do we see the Dryden fashion of verse (though not of thought) more clearly foreshadowed. It appears to come under 'Uncertain Authors' in some 1647 texts, but 1677 gives it. Title in 1647, 1651, 1653 'On the Archbishop of Canterbury' only.
4 1677 'by art'.
6 1677 'in soft'.
8 Thomas Bushel[l] or Bushnell (1594-1674) was a page of Bacon's and afterwards a great 'projector' in mining and mechanical matters generally. He dabbled largely in fancy fountains and waterworks—a queer taste of the seventeenth century in which even the sober Evelyn records his own participation.
9-10 Cf. the opening of the elegy on King, 'I like not tears in tune'.
11 1647, 1651, 1653, &c. 'when he mourns', which is hardly so good.
18 Seth's pillars] A tradition, preserved in Josephus, that the race of Seth engraved antediluvian wisdom on two pillars, one of brick, the other of stone, the latter of which outlasted the Deluge.
20 1647, 1651, 1653, &c. 'From much'.
34 1647, 1651 misprint 'Agena-like.
35 1653 misprints 'blackish'.
38 1647, 1651, 1653 'noble'.
44 1677, omitting the comma at 'act', makes something like nonsense; 'by prophecy' goes, I think, with 'adjudged to die'.
50 One would expect 'Chesterfield', for Grantham nowadays does not look very crooked—at least from the railway. But Fuller in the Worthies quotes this as a proverb. Some take it as referring to the height and slenderness of the steeple and an optical illusion. They might quote 'The high masts flickered as they lay afloat'. But few travellers had the excuse of Iphigenia.
*On I. W. A. B. of York.
Say, my young sophister, what think'st of this?
Chimera's real, Ergo falleris.
The lamb and tiger, fox and goose agree
And here concorp'rate in one prodigy.
Call an Haruspex quickly: let him get
Sulphur and torches, and a laurel wet,
To purify the place: for sure the harms
This monster will produce transcend his charms.—
'Tis Nature's masterpiece of Error, this,
10And redeems whatever she did amiss
Before, from wonder and reproach, this last
Legitimateth all her by-blows past.
Lo! here a general Metropolitan,
And arch-prelatic Presbyterian!
Behold his pious garbs, canonic face,
A zealous Episcopo-mastix Grace—
A fair blue-apron'd priest, a Lawn-sleeved brother,
One leg a pulpit holds, a tub the other.
Let 's give him a fit name now if we can,
20And make th' Apostate once more Christian.
'Proteus' we cannot call him: he put on
His change of shapes by a succession,
Nor 'the Welsh weather-cock', for that we find
At once doth only wait upon the wind.
These speak him not: but if you'll name him right,
Call him Religion's Hermaphrodite.
His head i' the sanctified mould is cast,
Yet sticks th'abominable mitre fast.
He still retains the 'Lordship' and the 'Grace',
30And yet hath got a reverend elder's place.
Such acts must needs be his, who did devise
By crying altars down to sacrifice
To private malice; where you might have seen
His conscience holocausted to his spleen.
Unhappy Church! the viper that did share
Thy greatest honours, helps to make thee bare,
And void of all thy dignities and store.
Alas! thine own son proves the forest boar,
And, like the dam-destroying cuckoo, he,
40When the thick shell of his Welsh pedigree
By thy warm fostering bounty did divide
And open—straight thence sprung forth parricide:
As if 'twas just revenge should be dispatched
In thee, by th' monster which thyself hadst hatched.
Despair not though, in Wales there may be got,
As well as Lincolnshire, an antidote
'Gainst the foul'st venom he can spit, though 's head
Were changed from subtle grey to pois'nous red.
Heaven with propitious eyes will look upon
50Our party, now the curséd thing is gone;
And chastise Rebels who nought else did miss
To fill the measure of their sins, but his—
Whose foul imparalleled apostasy,
Like to his sacred character, shall be
Indelible. When ages, then of late
More happy grown, with most impartial fate
A period to his days and time shall give,
He by such Epitaphs as this shall live.
Here York's great Metropolitan is laid,
60Who God's Anointed, and His Church, betrayed.
On I. W. A. B. of York. (1647.) This vigorous onslaught on the trimmer John Williams, Archbishop of York, who began public life as a tool of Buckingham's and ended it as a kind of tolerated half-deserter to the Parliament, was turned out by the 'Vindicators' in 1677. There may, however, have been reasons for this, other than certain spuriousness. Williams, though driven to doubtful conduct by his enmity with Laud, never called himself anything but a Royalist, was imprisoned as such, and is said to have died of grief (perhaps of compunction) at the King's execution. Also both Lake and Drake were Yorkshire men. The piece is vigorous, if not quite Clevelandish in the presence of some enjambment, and the absence of extravagant conceit.
2 falleris] In advancing the general observation that 'twy-natured is no nature'.
10 whatever] Perhaps we should read 'whatsoe'er'.
15 'garb' 1653.
16 A parody of course on Prynne's Histrio-mastix.
21 'he' = Proteus. Williams went right over.
23 Williams was very popular with his fellow provincials. He took refuge in Wales when the war broke out, and was made a sort of mediator by the Welsh after Naseby.
26 'Religion's' 1647; 'Religious' 1651, 1653.
27 1651, 1653, 'I' th'': but here, as often, the apostrophation ruins the verse.
30 'hath' 1653: 'has' 1647, 1651.
32 Williams had been chairman of the Committee 'to consider innovations' in 1641. His private malice was to Laud.
46 I am not certain of the meaning. But Lincolnshire (at least Lindsey) was strongly Royalist early in the war till Cromwell's successes at Grantham, Lea Moor, and Winceby in 1643.
53 1647, 1651 'unparalleled'.
Mark Antony.
When as the nightingale chanted her vespers,
And the wild forester couched on the ground,
Venus invited me in th' evening whispers
Unto a fragrant field with roses crowned,
Where she before had sent
My wishes' compliment;
Unto my heart's content
Played with me on the green.
Never Mark Antony
10Dallied more wantonly
With the fair Egyptian Queen.
First on her cherry cheeks I mine eyes feasted,
Thence fear of surfeiting made me retire;
Next on her warmer lips, which, when I tasted,
My duller spirits made active as fire.
Then we began to dart,
Each at another's heart,
Arrows that knew no smart,
Sweet lips and smiles between.
20Never Mark, &c.
Wanting a glass to plait her amber tresses
Which like a bracelet rich deckéd mine arm,
Gaudier than Juno wears when as she graces
Jove with embraces more stately than warm,
Then did she peep in mine
Eyes' humour crystalline;
I in her eyes was seen
As if we one had been.
Never Mark, &c.
30Mystical grammar of amorous glances;
Feeling of pulses, the physic of love;
Rhetorical courtings and musical dances;
Numbering of kisses arithmetic prove;
Eyes like astronomy;
Straight-limbed geometry;
In her art's ingeny
Our wits were sharp and keen.
Never Mark Antony
Dallied more wantonly
With the fair Egyptian Queen.
Mark Antony. The unusual prosodic interest of this piece, and its companion, has been explained in the Introduction. The pair appeared first in 1647 (3rd), where they follow The Character of a London Diurnal and precede the Poems.
14 'warmer' some copies of 1653: 1647, 1651 'warm'. Cf. 'bluer' in the 'Mock Song', l. 14 (below).
15 1677, &c. 'made me active'—a bad blunder.
35 'Straight limb' 1647.
36 'art's' is 1677 for 'heart's' in 1647, 1651, 1653. I rather prefer it, but with some doubts.
37 1677, &c. emends by substituting 'were' for 1647, 1651, 1653 'are'.
The Author's Mock Song to Mark Antony.
When as the night-raven sung Pluto's matins
And Cerberus cried three amens at a howl,
When night-wandering witches put on their pattens,
Midnight as dark as their faces are foul;
Then did the furies doom
That the nightmare was come.
Such a misshapen groom
Puts down Su. Pomfret clean.
Never did incubus
10Touch such a filthy sus
As this foul gypsy quean.
First on her gooseberry cheeks I mine eyes blasted,
Thence fear of vomiting made me retire
Unto her bluer lips, which when I tasted,
My spirits were duller than Dun in the mire.
But then her breath took place
Which went an usher's pace
And made way for her face!
You may guess what I mean.
20Never did, &c.
Like snakes engendering were platted her tresses,
Or like the slimy streaks of ropy ale;
Uglier than Envy wears, when she confesses
Her head is periwigged with adder's tail.
But as soon as she spake
I heard a harsh mandrake.
Laugh not at my mistake,
Her head is epicene.
Never did, &c.
30Mystical magic of conjuring wrinkles;
Feeling of pulses, the palmistry of hags;
Scolding out belches for rhetoric twinkles;
With three teeth in her head like to three gags;
Rainbows about her eyes
And her nose, weather-wise;
From them the almanac lies,
Frost, Pond, and Rivers clean.
Never did incubus
Touch such a filthy sus
40As this foul gypsy quean.
The Author's Mock Song. In 1647 this runs on as a continuation of 'Mark Anthony'.
1 1677 putidissime 'nightingale', as in the preceding poem. 'Night-raven' 1647, 1651, 1653 is certainly right. Mr. Berdan's copy seems to have 'But as', which I rather like; but mine has 'When'.
2 howl] hole 1647.
16 1677 'when', not impossibly.
21 platted] placed 1647.
22 1647, 1651 'the': omitted in 1653: 'to' inserted in 1677.
37 Cf. A Young Man, &c., l. 13.
How the Commencement grows new.
It is no coranto-news I undertake;
New teacher of the town I mean not to make;
No New England voyage my Muse does intend;
No new fleet, no bold fleet, nor bonny fleet send.
But, if you'll be pleased to hear out this ditty,
I'll tell you some news as true and as witty,
And how the Commencement grows new.
See how the simony doctors abound,
All crowding to throw away forty pound.
10They'll now in their wives' stammel petticoats vapour
Without any need of an argument draper.
Beholding to none, he neither beseeches
This friend for venison nor t'other for speeches,
And so the Commencement grows new.
Every twice a day teaching gaffer
Brings up his Easter-book to chaffer;
Nay, some take degrees who never had steeple,—
Whose means, like degrees, comes from placets of people.
They come to the fair and, at the first pluck,
20The toll-man Barnaby strikes 'um good luck,
And so the Commencement grows new.
The country parsons come not up
On Tuesday night in their old College to sup;
Their bellies and table-books equally full,
The next lecture-dinner their notes forth to pull;
How bravely the Margaret Professor disputed,
The homilies urged, and the school-men confuted;
And so the Commencement grows new.
The inceptor brings not his father the clown
30To look with his mouth at his grogoram gown;
With like admiration to eat roasted beef,
Which invention posed his beyond-Trent belief;
Who should he but hear our organs once sound,
Could scarce keep his hoof from Sellenger's round,
And so the Commencement grows new.
The gentleman comes not to show us his satin,
To look with some judgment at him that speaks Latin,
To be angry with him that marks not his clothes,
To answer 'O Lord, Sir' and talk play-book oaths,
40And at the next bear-baiting (full of his sack)
To tell his comrades our discipline's slack;
And so the Commencement grows new.
We have no prevaricator's wit.
Ay, marry sir, when have you had any yet?
Besides no serious Oxford man comes
To cry down the use of jesting and hums.
Our ballad (believe 't) is no stranger than true;
Mum Salter is sober, and Jack Martin too,
And so the Commencement grows new.
How the Commencement, &c., belongs to the same group as the Mark Antony poems and Square-Cap, and there is the same ambiguity between four anapaests and five iambs. You would certainly take line 1 as it stands in 1677 with ''Tis' for 'It is', and probably as it stands here, for a heroic if line 2 did not come to undeceive you. And this line 2 is bad as either.
First printed in 1653. MS. copies are found in Rawlinson MS. Poet. 147, pp. 48-9, and Tanner MS. 465, fol. 83, of the Bodleian. Neither copy is good, but each helps to restore the text (see ll. 18 and 38). The Tanner MS. also has on fol. 44 an indignant poem 'Upon Mr. Cl. who made a Song against the DDrs', beginning
Leave off, vain Satirist, and do not think,
To stain our reverend purple with thy ink.
It adds the interesting evidence that the poem became a popular song at Cambridge:
Must gitterns now and fiddles be made fit,
Be tuned and keyed to sweake [?squeak] a Johnian wit?
Must now thy poems be made fidlers' notes,
Puffed with Tobacco through their sooty throats?
. . . . . . . . . .
Are thy strong lines and mighty cart-rope things
Now spun so small, they'll twist on fiddle strings?
Canst thou prove Ballad-poet of the times?
Can thy proud fancy stoop to penny rimes?
(This latter information, as to MSS., is Mr. Simpson's.)
5 out] but 1653.
9 forty pound] Still the regular doctorate fee, though relatively three or four times heavier then than now.
10 stammel] Properly a stuff; but, as generally or often red in colour, the colour itself.
11 I am not certain of the meaning of this line though I could conjecture.
13 nor t'other for speeches] MS. 'that for his breeches'.
15 1677 inserts 'the' before 'teaching', but the absence of the article is much more characteristic.
18 The 'Vindicators', in the new bondage of grammar, 'come'.
Placets] both MSS.: places 1653: placers 1677. 'Placets', evidently right, would baffle a non-university printer; probably the editors of 1677 attempted to correct it, but were again baffled by the printer.
22 1677 'they do not come up'—a natural but unnecessary patching of the line.
23 old] 1677 own—less well, I think.
Both MSS. read in ll. 22-3:
The country parson cometh not up,
Till Tuesday night in his old College to sup.
26 'Margeret' 1653: Marg'ret' 1677.
29 inceptor] = 'M.A. to be'.
30 'o' of 'grog[o]ram' usually omitted, but both 1653 and 1677 have it here.
32 The North usually salting and boiling its beef?
38 Tanner MS. has the metrical punctuation 'To be'angry' found occasionally in texts of the time: 'marks' Tanner MS., all the texts have 'makes'.
40 at the next bear-baiting] in his next company MSS.
44 1653 'we' for 'you', less pointedly, I think.
45 Cleveland lived to think better of Oxford—at least to take refuge and be warmly welcomed there. There has probably been no time at which either University was not convinced that the other, whatever its merits, could not see a joke.
48 1665 (not a very good edition) and the MSS. read 'Mun', which was of course the usual short for Edmund. But 'Mum' in the context is appropriate enough and generally read.
The intense Cambridge flavour of this seems to require special comment by a Cambridge man. For the duties of the 'Prevaricator' refer to Peacock's Observations on the Statutes of the University of Cambridge, 1841 (information kindly furnished by Mr. A. J. Bartholomew).
The Hue and Cry after Sir John Presbyter.
With hair in characters and lugs in text;
With a splay mouth and a nose circumflexed;
With a set ruff of musket-bore that wears
Like cartridges or linen bandoleers
Exhausted of their sulphurous contents
In pulpit fire-works, which that bomball vents;
The Negative and Covenanting Oath,
Like two mustachoes issuing from his mouth;
The bush upon his chin like a carved story,
10In a box-knot cut by the Directory:
Madam's confession hanging at his ear,
Wire-drawn through all the questions, how and where;
Each circumstance so in the hearing felt
That when his ears are cropped he'll count them gelt;
The weeping cassock scared into a jump,
A sign the presbyter's worn to the stump,—
The presbyter, though charmed against mischance
With the divine right of an Ordinance!
If you meet any that do thus attire 'em,
20Stop them, they are the tribe of Adoniram.
What zealous frenzy did the Senate seize,
That tare the Rochet to such rags as these?
Episcopacy minced, reforming Tweed
Hath sent us runts even of her Church's breed,
Lay-interlining clergy, a device
That 's nickname to the stuff called lops and lice.
The beast at wrong end branded, you may trace
The Devil's footsteps in his cloven face;
A face of several parishes and sorts,
30Like to a sergeant shaved at Inns of Courts.
What mean the elders else, those Kirk dragoons,
Made up of ears and ruffs like ducatoons;
That hierarchy of handicrafts begun;
Those New Exchange men of religion?
Sure, they're the antick heads, which placed without
The church, do gape and disembogue a spout.
Like them above the Commons' House, have been
So long without; now both are gotten in.
Then what imperious in the bishop sounds,
40The same the Scotch executor rebounds;
This stating prelacy the classic rout
That spake it often, ere it spake it out.
(So by an abbey's skeleton of late
I heard an echo supererogate
Through imperfection, and the voice restore,
As if she had the hiccough o'er and o'er.)
'Since they our mixed diocesans combine
Thus to ride double in their discipline,
That Paul's shall to the Consistory call
50A Dean and Chapter out of Weavers' Hall,
Each at the ordinance for to assist
With the five thumbs of his groat-changing fist.
Down, Dagon-synod, with thy motley ware,
Whilst we do swagger for the Common Prayer
(That dove-like embassy that wings our sense
To Heaven's gate in shape of innocence)
Pray for the mitred authors, and defy
These demicastors of divinity!
For, when Sir John with Jack-of-all-trades joins,
60His finger 's thicker than the prelates' loins.'
The Hue and Cry. (1653.) 1 'in characters' = in shorthand: 1677 has 'character', wrongly. 'lugs' = ears. 'in text' = in capitals.
Cf. Clievelandi Vindiciae, 1677, p. 122 (Cleveland's letter on a Puritan who had deserted to the Royalists. His officer complained that he had absconded with official money): 'I doubt not, but you will pardon your Man. He hath but transcribed Rebellion, and copied out that Disloyalty in Shorthand, which you have committed in Text.'
6 bomball] A compound of 'bomb' and 'ball'.
20 Adoniram] Byfield, a clerk of the Westminster Assembly whose minutes have been published in modern times. A great ejector of the clergy, who unfortunately did not live long enough to be ejected himself.
26 This stuff does not by any means sound nice.
32 ducatoons] One would take it that the ducatoon had a back view of some one's head; but a passage of Hudibras, and Grey's note on it, have complicated the matter with a story about the Archduke Albert of Austria, which seems to have little if any relevance here.
35 antick heads] = 'gargoyles'.
41 classic] As in Milton. Nor is this the only point in which the two old Christ's men, now on such opposite sides, agree in the 'New Forcers of Conscience' and this piece.
52 1653 great-changing—a mere misprint.
54 do swagger for] 1677 most suspiciously improves to 'are champions for'.
From l. 43 onwards 1653 has the whole in italics, and it is pretty clear that after the first four lines the Echo speaks to the end. The 'Vindicators' do not seem to have seen this, though the absence of the quotes above would not prove it. Professor Case, however, thinks that 'So' refers to what precedes, and that in l. 47 and onwards the author and Echo speaks. It is possible.
The Antiplatonic.
For shame, thou everlasting wooer,
Still saying grace and never falling to her!
Love that 's in contemplation placed
Is Venus drawn but to the waist.
Unless your flame confess its gender,
And your parley cause surrender,
Y' are salamanders of a cold desire
That live untouched amidst the hottest fire.
What though she be a dame of stone,
10The widow of Pygmalion,
As hard and unrelenting she
As the new-crusted Niobe,
Or (what doth more of statue carry)
A nun of the Platonic quarry?
Love melts the rigour which the rocks have bred—
A flint will break upon a feather-bed.
For shame, you pretty female elves,
Cease for to candy up your selves;
No more, you sectaries of the game,
20No more of your calcining flame!
Women commence by Cupid's dart
As a king hunting dubs a hart.
Love's votaries enthral each other's soul,
Till both of them live but upon parole.
Virtue's no more in womankind
But the green-sickness of the mind;
Philosophy (their new delight)
A kind of charcoal appetite.
There 's no sophistry prevails
30Where all-convincing love assails,
But the disputing petticoat will warp,
As skilful gamesters are to seek at sharp.
The soldier, that man of iron,
Whom ribs of horror all environ,
That's strung with wire instead of veins,
In whose embraces you're in chains,
Let a magnetic girl appear,
Straight he turns Cupid's cuirassier.
Love storms his lips, and takes the fortress in,
40For all the bristled turnpikes of his chin.
Since love's artillery then checks
The breastworks of the firmest sex,
Come, let us in affections riot;
Th' are sickly pleasures keep a diet.
Give me a lover bold and free,
Not eunuched with formality,
Like an ambassador that beds a queen
With the nice caution of a sword between.
The Antiplatonic. (1653.) This is a sort of half-way house between Cleveland's burlesques and his serious or semi-serious poems like Fuscara. It is also nearer to Suckling and the graceful-graceless school than most of his things. It is good.
2 The alteration of 1677 'and ne'er fall to her' may be only an example of the tendency to 'regularize' (in this case by the omission of an extra foot). But I confess it seems to me better: for the slight irregularity of the construction replaces that of the line to advantage.
10 I don't know whether the conceit of 'Pygmalion's widow' returning to marble (or ivory) when her husband-lover's embraces ceased is original with Cleveland. If it is, I make him my compliment. There is at any rate no hint of it in Ovid.
18 1677 changed the good old 'for' to 'thus'.
19 sectaries of] = 'heretics in'.
20 This is good: 'calcining flame' is good.
22 'dubs' is said to mean 'stabs', as it certainly means 'strikes'; but this seems to have little or no appropriateness here and to ignore the quaint conceit of 'commence' in its academic meaning. 'Women take their degrees by Cupid's dart: as the fact of being hunted by a king ennobles a hart.' Cupid = the King of Love.
24 'parole' too has a very delectable double meaning. This poem is really full of most excellent differences.
25-9 The lesson of the unregenerate Donne and the never-regenerate Carew.
32 gamesters] = 'fencers'. to seek at sharp] = 'not good at sword-play'.
33 'The sol-di-er'. By the way, did Butler borrow this 'iron' and 'environ' rhyme from Cleveland?
43 The apostrophating mania made 1653 contract to 'let's' and spoil the verse.
44 Th'] here of course = 'they'.