Now the Plague, in that year of 1682, was not so remote a memory but that people lived in a constant terror of its recrudescence. Pandects, treatises, expositions, containing diagnoses, palladiums and schemes of quarantine, all based on the most orthodox superstitions, did not cease to pour from the press, to the eternal confusion of an age which was yet far from realizing the pious schism of the aide-toi. What, then, as might be supposed, was the effect on it, when a clergyman of the Establishment was seen to enter the arena as a declared dissenter from the fata obstant of popular bigotry?
For a time Godsport, startled and scandalized, watched aloof the paper warfare; and it was not until after the appearance of the Doctor’s tract, “De omni re Scibili”—wherein he sought, boldly and definitely, and withal with a characteristic humour, to lay the responsibility for pestilence, not upon the Almighty’s shoulders, but, literally, at the doors of men, at their face-to-face proximity, and at “the Castynge of Noisome filth in their neare neighbourhood”—that it brought down its official hand with a weight and suddenness which shook St. Ascham’s to its roots. In brief, there was flung at the delinquent one morning his formal citation to the Sessions Court, there to answer upon certain charges of having “in divers Tracts, Opuscules and Levrets, sought insidiously to ingrafte the minds of his Majesty’s liege subjects with such impudent heresies as that it is in the power of man to limit the visitations of God—a very pestilent doctrine, and one arrogating to His servants the Almighty’s high and beneficent prerogatives; inasmuch as Plague and Fire and other His scourges, being sacriligeously wrested from His graspe, the world would waxe blown with overlife, till it crawled upon the face of the heavens like a gross putrid cheese.”
Under this bolt from the blue the liberal minds of grandsire and child sank amazed for the moment, only to rally to a consciousness of the necessity for immediate action.
“Up, wench!” cried the Doctor, “and saddle our Pinwire. I will go lay my case instanter before the Bishop.”
“Alas, dearest!” answered the weeping girl, “you forget; he is this long while bedridden.”
Her imagination, which had been wont secretly to fondle the idea of her grandfather’s enlightened piety rewarded with a bishopric, pictured it in a moment turned to his confusion, and himself, perhaps, through the misrepresentations of a blockhead Corporation, disgraced and beggared in his old age. But, though she knew the Churchman, she had not calculated the rousing effects of criticism on the author.
“Then,” roared he, “I will seek the fount itself of reason and justice. It was a good treatise, a well-argued treatise; and the King shall decide upon the practical merits of his own English.”
“The King!” she cried, clasping her hands.
“The King,” he answered. “Know you not that he moves daily between Southampton, where he lies, and Winchester, where he builds? We will go to Winchester. Nay, we, child; blubber not; for who knows but that, the shepherd being withdrawn, the wolves might think to practise on the lamb.”
He checked himself, and hung his head.