ANTHONY PURVER, THE SHOEMAKER WHO REVISED THE BIBLE.
Another curious instance of extensive reading and remarkable linguistic talent, somewhat similar to that of Dr. Partridge and the learned shoemaker of Norwich, is that of Anthony Purver. He was born at Up Hurstbourne in Hampshire in 1702. His parents were poor, and put their boy apprentice to the art and mystery of making and mending boots and shoes. When his “time was out,” he betook himself to the leisurely and healthy employment of keeping sheep, and began to study. His special line in after-life was decided by his meeting with a tract which pointed out some errors of translation in the authorized version of the Bible. This led him to resolve that he would read the Scriptures in the original Hebrew and Greek. Taking lessons from a Jew, Purver soon learned to read Hebrew. After this he took up Greek and Latin, until he could read with ease in either language. “On settling as a schoolmaster at Andover,“ we are told,[129] ”he undertook the extraordinary labor of translating the Bible into English, which work he actually accomplished, and it was printed at the expense of Dr. Fothergill in two vols. folio. This learned shoemaker, shepherd, and schoolmaster deeply felt the need of the great work which has been accomplished in our own day by the united scholarship of England and America. In his own way he completed the Herculean task single-handed; and if his translation was not of any general and practical utility, it none the less deserves mention as a monument of self-acquired learning and honorable industry. Purver died in 1777, at the age of seventy-five.
[POETS OF THE COBBLER’S STALL.]
In coming to speak of the poets of the cobbler’s stall, the task of selection is found to be by no means an easy one. It is hard enough to tell where to begin; it is harder still to know where to leave off. “This brooding fraternity” of shoemakers, it is said, “has produced more rhymers than any other of the handicrafts.”[130]
“Crispin’s sons
Have from uncounted time with ale and buns
Cherish’d the gift of song, which sorrow quells;
And working single in their low-built cells,
Oft cheat the tedium of a winter’s night
With anthems.”[131]
In the days of the revival of learning and the reformation of religion in England, shoemakers had their share in the mental and moral awakening. Many of them turned poets, and essayed to write ballads and songs, of which we have a sample in Deloney’s “Delightful, Princely, and Entertaining History of the Gentle Craft.”[132] Such a spirited songster as Richard Rigby, “a brother of the craft,” who undertook to show in his “Song of Praise to the Gentle Craft” how “royal princes, sons of kings, lords, and great commanders have been shoemakers of old, to the honor of the ancient trade,” also deserves to be mentioned. This song, beginning
“I sing in praise of shoemakers,
Whose honor no person can stain,”[133]
is no mean performance; its historic allusions may not be unimpeachable, but its poetic ring is genuine. Scores of pieces of a similar character have issued from the cobbler’s room, and either perished, like many another ballad and song of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or found their way into odd corners of our literature, where they are buried almost beyond hope of resurrection.
Speaking of men who have aspired to be poets and have published their productions, one is fain to begin with a name which, if it could be proved to belong to the gentle craft, would certainly have to stand at the head of the long list of poetical shoemakers—the Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Dekker, who wrote “one of the most light-hearted of merry comedies,” The Shoomaker’s Holyday. One of the most prominent characters in the play is Sir Simon Eyre, the reputed builder of Leadenhall Market, London, and Lord Mayor of the city.[134] Of this worthy, who lived in the time of Henry VI., Rigby, in his “Song in Praise of the Gentle Craft,” says—
“Sir Simon, Lord Mayor of fair London,
He was a shoemaker by trade.”
It is hard to think that the writer of The Shoomaker’s Holyday, in which the ways of shoemakers and the details of the craft are described with all the ease and exactitude of familiarity, was not a brother of the craft.[135] When the famous quarrel arose between the quondam friends and coworkers, Ben Jonson and Dekker, Jonson in his Poetaster satirized the author of The Shoomaker’s Holyday under the name of Crispinus. This epithet may be simply an allusion to the subject of Dekker’s well-known comedy; but may it not also be regarded as a veritable “cut at a cobbler?”