It is now, however, too late to hesitate in fixing on the true parent of these twin-productions; twins they are, though in the intellectual state twins are not born on the same day. These productions are marked by the same strong features; their limbs are fashioned alike; and their affinity betrays itself, even in their tones. The author could not always escape from adopting a peculiar phraseology, or identical expressions, which unavoidably associate the later with the earlier work, the same in style, in manner, and in plan. Imitation is out of the question where there is identity. One pen composed these works, as they did thirty more.
The English writings of the Jesuit Parsons have attracted the notice of some of our philological critics. Parsons may be ranked among the earliest writers of our vernacular diction in its purity and pristine vigour, without ornament or polish. It is, we presume, Saxon English, unblemished by an exotic phrase. It is remarkable that our author, who passed the best part of his days abroad, and who had perfectly acquired the Spanish and the Italian languages, and slightly the French, yet appears to have preserved our colloquial English, from the vicissitudes of those fashionable novelties which deform the long unsettled Elizabethan prose. To the elevation of Hooker his imagination could never have ascended; but in clear conceptions and natural expressions no one was his superior. His English writings have not a sentence which to this day is either obsolete or obscure. Swift would not have disdained his idiomatic energy. Parsons was admirably adapted to be a libeller or a polemic.
[1] At Rome there was “The English Hospital,” founded by two of the kings of our Saxon Heptarchy; a thousand years had consecrated that small domicile for the English native; but now the emigrants, and not the pilgrims, of England claimed an abode beneath the papal eye. It had been a refuge to the fugitives from the days of Henry the Eighth; subsequently this English Hospital, under the auspices of Cardinal Allen, assumed the higher title of “The English College at Rome,” and the Jesuit Parsons closed his days as its rector without attaining to the cardinalship.
[2] The seminarists were universally revered as candidates of martyrdom.—See Baronius, “Martyrol.” Rome, 29 Dec. St. Philip Neri, who lived in the neighbourhood of the English Seminary in Rome, would frequently stand near the door of the house to view the students going to the public schools. This saint used to bow to them, and salute them with the words—“Salvete flores martyrum.”—Plowden’s “Remarks on Missions of Gregorio Panzani,” Liege, 1794, p. 97.
[3] As Roman Catholics usually interpolate history with miracles, so we find one here; being assured that the judge, while passing sentence on Campian, drawing off his glove, found his hand stained with blood, which he could not wash away, as he showed to several about him who can witness of it.—Lansdowne MSS., 982, fo. 21.
[4] “Hist. Soc. Jesu.” Pars quinta, Tomus posterior. Auctore Jos. Juvencio, 1710.
[5] This remarkable incident, in keeping with the rest, was discovered by Dr. Bliss in a manuscript note on “Leicester’s Ghost,” as communicated by the page to the writer from his own personal observations.—“Athenæ Oxon.,” ii. col. 74.
If this voracious Apicius did not die of a surfeit, the fever might have been caught from the cordial. The marriage of the Master of the Horse seems to wind up the story.
[6] See the subsequent article on “Spenser.”