To let you nowe I sels goode Syder:”
the lines, like the liquors, being composed by the said John Stubbs! A giant, * well padded out, was adding some inches to his stature by a pair—
* Giants have been “At Home” not at fairs only. Og, King of
Bashan, was more than twelve English feet in height. Goliah
was about nine feet nine inches high—or eleven feet,
according to some commentators. The Emperor Maximinus is
said to have been nine feet. Turner, the naturalist,
mentions having seen on the Brazil coast a race of gigantic
savages, one of whom measured twelve feet! And Monsieur
Thevet, in his description of America, published at Paris in
1575,
declares that he saw and measured the skeleton of a South
American, which was eleven feet five inches in length. Die-
merbroeek saw at Utreeht a well-proportioned living man,
measuring eight feet six inches; and Dr. Becamus was
introduced to a youth who was nearly nine feet high; a man
almost ten feet, and a woman quite ten feet. The Patagonians
have been represented as a nation of giants. The
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society contain
accounts of skeletons dug up in England, measuring eight and
nine feet in length, which probably were Roman. In the
forty-first and forty-second volumes of the same work are
two engravings taken from an os front is and an os
bregmatis, the former of which is reckoned to have belonged
to a person between eleven and twelve feet high; the latter
to a giant of thirteen feet four inches. Walter Parsons,
porter to King James the First, was seven feet seven inches
in stature. The Chinese would have us believe that they
possess giants fifteen feet high. More of these prodigies
hereafter.
—of German hogloshes, with extra high heels; a fresh water sailor, with one eye, and one leg, had a seal that exhaled an odour “most ancient and fish-like a ballad-singer was whitening his head with chalk, * and several poor Italian boys, with tortoises, squirrels, monkeys, and white mice, were jabbering away their patois in a corner with great animation.
* Powdering the hair is supposed to have taken its rise in
modern Europe from some ballad singers at the fair of St.
Germain's in 1614, whitening their heads to make themselves
ludicrous!
One lively little fellow, the lion of the party, with brilliant black eyes, ivory teeth, and a dark brown complexion, tinged with the bright warmth of an Italian sun, who bore on his shoulder a frolicksome marmoset * that he had been teaching to leap through a hoop, amused his companions with a ditty that he had picked up on his journey hither from the pleasant valleys of his father-land.
[Original]
* The custom of bearing an ape on the shoulder at country
fairs, &c. is very ancient. Ben Jonson makes the following
allusion to it in his Masque of Gypsies:
“A gypsy in his shape,
More calls the beholder,
Than the fellow with the ape,
Or the ape on his shoulder”