LABORIOUS in some degree is the enterprise which the title of this Section will indicate before it shall be ended. Perchance we shall have no myths to perplex us, but the demands of sober history are often more inexorable than those flexible boundaries within which the imagination may disport amid facts and fictions.
Better, as I trust, to set this period of sixty-three years before the mind, it may be well to take it in three divisions: 1st, the twenty-one years before Alciatus appeared, to conquer for himself a kingdom, and to reign king of Emblematists for about a century and a half; 2nd, the twenty-one years from the appearance of the first edition of Alciat’s Emblems in 1522 at Milan, until Hans Holbein the younger had introduced the Images and Epigrams of Death, and La Perriere and Corrozet, the one his Theatre of good Contrivances in one hundred Emblems, and the other his Hecatomgraphie, or descriptions of one hundred figures; 3rd, the twenty-one years up to Shakespeare’s birth, distinguished towards its close chiefly by the Italian writers on Imprese, Paolo Giovio, Vincenzo Cartari, Girolamo Ruscelli, and Gabriel Symeoni.
Stulte̦ gustationis scapha.
Badius, 1502.
I.—A Fool-freighted Ship was the title of almost the last book of the fifteenth century,—by a similar title is the Emblem-book called which was launched at the beginning of the sixteenth century; it is, “Jodoci Badii ascēsii Stultifere̦ nauicule̦ seu scaphe̦ Fatuarum mulierum: circa sensus quinq̃ exteriores fraude nauigantium,”—The Fool-freighted little ships of Josse Badius ascensius, or the skiffs of Silly women in delusion sailing about the five outward senses,—“printed by honest John Prusz, a citizen of Strasburg, in the year of Salvation M.CCCCC.II.” There was an earlier edition in 1500,—but almost exactly the same. From that before us we give a specimen of the work, The Skiff of Foolish Tasting. A discourse follows, with quotations from Aulus Gellius, Saint Jerome, Virgil, Ezekiel, Epicurus, Seneca, Horace, and Juvenal; and the discourse is crowned by twenty-four lines of Latin elegiacs, entitled “Celeusma Gustationis fatue̦,”—The Oarsman’s cry for silly Tasting,—thus exhorting—
“Slothful chieftains of the gullet!
Offspring of Sardanapálus!
In sweet sleep no longer lull it,—
Rouse ye, lest good cheer should fail us.