This must have been more trying to bear even than Cutter himself. Under a thin disguise, Colonel Fear-the-Lord Barebottle is none other than Praise-God Barebone, of then most recent notoriety. Cowley’s allusion to him through the medium of Jolly is not pleasant:
“Jolly. My good neighbour, I thank him, Colonel Fear-the-Lord Barebottle, a Saint and a Soap-boiler, brought it. But he’s dead, and boiling now himself, that’s the best of ’t; there’s a Cavalier’s comfort.”
Cutter turns zealot, and wears a most puritanical habit. To the colonel’s widow, Mistress Tabitha Barebottle, he says—
“Sister Barebottle, I must not be called Cutter any more: that is a name of Cavalier’s darkness; the Devil was a Cutter from the beginning: my name is now Abednego. I had a vision which whispered to me through a keyhole, ‘Go, call thyself Abednego.’”[59]
But Cutter—we beg his pardon, Abednego—was but a sorry convert. Having lapsed into a worldly mind again, he thus addresses Tabitha:
“Shall I, who am to ride the purple dromedary, go dressed like Revelation Fats, the basket-maker?—Give me the peruke, boy!”
I fancy the reader will agree with me that Cowley needed all the arguments he could urge in his preface to meet the charge of irreverence.
(b.) The Sussex Jury.
One of the strongest indictments to be found against this phase of Puritanic eccentricity is to be found in Hume’s well-known quotation from Brome’s “Travels into England”—a quotation which has caused much angry contention. The book quoted by the historian is entitled “Travels over England, Scotland, and Wales, by James Brome, M.A., Rector of Cheriton, in Kent.” Writing soon after the Restoration, Mr. Brome says (p. 279)—
“Before I leave this county (Sussex), I shall subjoin a copy of a Jury returned here in the late rebellious troublesome times, given me by the same worthy hand which the Huntingdon Jury was: and by the christian names then in fashion we may still discover the superstitious vanity of the Puritanical Precisians of that age.”