The title of the book which Mrs. Pepys read aloud to her husband, and which is a book that a lady might well blush to read either aloud or to herself, runs as follows:—‘The Honour of the Merchant Taylors; wherein is set forth, the noble arts, valiant deeds, and heroic performances of Merchant Taylors in former ages; their honourable loves and knightly adventures, their combating of foreign enemies, and glorious successes in honour of the English nation; together with their pious acts and large benevolences, their building of publick structures, especially that of Blackwell Hall, to be a market-place for the selling of woollen cloaths. Written by William Winstanley. London, 1668, 8vo. With the head of Sir Ralph Blackwell, with a gold chain, arms of London on the right, and of the Merchant Taylors on the left.’
Just twenty years later another volume was printed with nearly a similar title. The alleged object was to give a biography of the renowned tailor and soldier, Sir John Hawkwood; and for this reason we will give the later work priority of notice. There will be amusement, if not instruction, in remarking how exquisitely our ancestors wrote biographical works in the days of dark King James.
This black-letter biography describes Hawkwood as a modest tailor lad who fell honestly in love with his master’s daughter, Dorinda. But Dorinda had a soul above buttons, and having given up her heart unasked to Impolite, a young, foolish heir, she cut the thread of Hawkwood’s desire with the shears of cruelty, and tore away from his protestations in a heat that even the paternal goose had never known.
Hawkwood, for a gallant man, committed an ungallant action; he discovered the lover of Dorinda by reading the correspondence locked up in the lady’s cabinet, and he avenged himself by writing a note in the lady’s name which brought poor Impolite to a meeting, whereat he was seized and led to a madhouse as incurably insane through the sweet passion of love.
The victim was subjected to a treatment which would undoubtedly have rendered a sane man mad, but he prattled so respectfully of medicines to the doctor, that the latter dismissed him as “cured.” In the meantime Dorinda refused to ratify her bond with a discharged lunatic; and the uncle of Impolite, a sort of melodramatic Gaspero, hired two ruffians, Bragwell and Daniel, to mutilate Hawkwood, as a punishment for his having been the cause of the breaking off of the match.
These gentlemen fell upon the bold young tailor as, “ever frolic and gay,” he was returning from Green-Goose Fair, held at Bow, on St. Wilielmus’s day, “so much honoured by the tailors as their patron.” But the ruffians found a Tartar, and Hawkwood incontinently slew both. The gallant apprentice, having slept upon the matter, resolved to go abroad, in order to avoid unpleasant inquiries; and having composed a score of execrable verses to his mistress, wherein he committed worse murder upon the Muses than before upon the ruffians, and having thrust the same under the bedroom-door of the cruel Dorinda, he went his solitary way with a heavy heart and a small bundle under his arm.
Winstanley, the author of this delectable bit of historical romance, exhibits a merry trait of originality by suddenly announcing that the murdered ruffians were, after all, like our friend Mr. John Robinson in the song, “not dead at all;” and delicately does he narrate how those respectable individuals, by coming to themselves, found that they were in the very worst possible society. Forthwith they slew a sheep, and having cut out the heart thereof, they exhibited the same to Gaspero, as the heart of the valiant tailor, and received from their employer not only their wages of sin, but an invitation to stay and dine and spend the night at his house.
The ruffians having been soon after got out of the way, Gaspero took to seeing ghosts and other unpleasant things, by way of showing his remorse for having been accessory to the murder of a tailor. But in the meantime his supposed victim was mirthfully passing from inn to inn; and as those establishments were ever furnished with a haunted room, it was his humour to sleep in the same, and lay the ghosts and other spirits which he found there.
Soon, weary of this life ashore, Hawkwood took to the sea, accompanied by Lovewell, another young tailor, and another victim of the gentle vision, who had unsuccessfully endeavoured to sun himself in a Lamira’s eyes. At the conclusion of the voyage, the adventurous youths landed in Ireland, and became ’squires of dames, taking up their quarrels, fighting in their behalf against any odds, and performing wonderful actions, such as could only have been imagined by the most unscrupulous of liars. When Pelion has been mounted upon Ossa, and the heap of mendacity is reared to a sufficiently stupendous height, the author grows tired of romantic fibbing, and descends to the lie commonplace. He brings his heroes to England, and with them two pages, who had joined their slim selves to the heroic tailor-knights’ fortunes; and who of course turn out, as is perfectly natural, to be Dorinda and Lamira in disguise. Then, at the end of the first act of the drama, there is a double wedding, a dance of characters, and an elaborate detail of after circumstances which I will not pause to relate.