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“Adieu, both naule and bristles now for euer; The shoe and soale—ah, woe is me!—must sever. Bewaile, mine awle, thy sharpest point is gone; My bristle’s broke, and I am left alone. Farewell old shoes, thumb-stall, and clouting-leather; Martin is gone, and we undone together.” |
Nor is Newman, the other cobbler, less mortified and pathetic. “The London Corresponding Society” had a more ancient origin than that sodality was aware.
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“My hope once was, my old shoes should be sticht; My thumbs ygilt, that were before bepicht: Now Martin’s gone, and laid full deep in ground, My gentry’s lost, before it could be found.” |
Among the Martin Mar-Prelate books was one entitled “The Cobbler’s Book.” This I have not seen; but these cobblers probably picked up intelligence for these scandalous chronicles. The writers, too, condescended to intersperse the cant dialect of the populace, with which the cobblers doubtless assisted these learned men, when busied in their buffoonery. Hence all their vulgar gibberish; the Shibboleth of the numerous class of their admirers—such as, “O, whose tat?” John Kankerbury, for Canterbury; Paltri-politans, for Metropolitans; See Villains, for Civilians; and Doctor of Devility, for Divinity! and more of this stamp. Who could imagine that the writers of these scurrilities were learned men, and that their patrons were men of rank! We find two knights heavily fined for secreting these books in their cellars. But it is the nature of rebellion to unite the two extremes; for want stirs the populace to rise, and excess the higher orders. This idea is admirably expressed in one of our elder poets:—
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“Want made them murmur; for the people, who To get their bread, do wrestle with their fate, Or those, who in superfluous riot flow, Soonest rebel. Convulsions in a State, Like those which natural bodies do oppress, Rise from repletion, or from emptiness.” Aleyne’s Henry VII. |
The writer of Algernon Sidney’s Memoirs could not have known this fact, or he would not have said that “this was the first indictment of high treason upon which any man lost his life for writing anything without publishing it.”—Edit. 1751, p. 21. It is curious to have Sidney’s own opinion on this point. We discover this on his trial. He gives it, assuming one of his own noble principles, not likely to have been allowed by the wretched Tories of that day. Addressing the villanous Jeffries, the Lord Chief Justice:—“My Lord, I think it is a right of mankind, and ’tis exercised by all studious men, to write, in their own closets, what they please, for their own memory; and no man can be answerable for it, unless they publish it.” Jeffries replied:—“Pray don’t go away with that right of mankind, that it is lawful for me to write what I will in my own closet, so I do not publish it. We must not endure men to talk thus, that by the right of nature every man may contrive mischief in his own chamber, and is not to be punished till he thinks fit to be called to it.” Jeffries was a profligate sophist, but his talents were as great as his vices.
Penry’s unfinished petition, which he designed to have presented to the Queen before the trial, is a bold and energetic composition; his protestation, after the trial, a pathetic prayer! Neale has preserved both in his “History of the Puritans.” With what simplicity of eloquence he remonstrates on the temporising government of Elizabeth. He thus addresses the Queen, under the title of Madam!—“Your standing is, and has been, by the Gospel: it is little beholden to you for anything that appears. The practice of your government shows that if you could have ruled without the Gospel, it would have been doubtful whether the Gospel should be established or not; for now that you are established in your throne by the Gospel, you suffer it to reach no farther than the end of your sceptre limiteth unto it.” Of a milder, and more melancholy cast, is the touching language, when the hope of life, but not the firmness of his cause had deserted him. “I look not to live this week to an end. I never took myself for a rebuker, much less for a reformer of states and kingdoms. I never did anything in this cause for contention, vainglory, or to draw disciples after me. Great things, in this life, I never sought for: sufficiency I had, with great outward trouble; but most content I was with my lot, and content with my untimely death, though I leave behind me a friendless widow and four infants.”—Such is often the pathetic cry of the simple-hearted, who fall the victims to the political views of more designing heads.
We could hardly have imagined that this eloquent and serious young man was that Martin Mar-Prelate who so long played the political ape before the populace, with all the mummery of their low buffoonery, and even mimicking their own idioms. The populace, however, seems to have been divided in their opinions respecting the sanity of his politics, as appears by some ludicrous lines, made on Penry’s death, by a northern rhymer.