Lent tilting at Shrove-tide, A.D. 1660.
Among other indications of change in the public feeling, we notice a few pictures conceived in the pure spirit of gayety, designed to afford pleasure to every one, and pain to no one. Two of these are given here—Shrove-tide and Lent tilting at one another—which were thought amazingly ingenious and comic two hundred years ago. They are quite in the taste of the period that produced them. Shrove-tide, in the calendar of Rome, is the Tuesday before Lent, a day on which many people gave themselves up to revelry and feasting, in anticipation of the forty days' fast. Shrove-tide accordingly is mounted on a fat ox, and his sword is sheathed in a pig and piece of meat, with capons and bottles of wine about his body. His flag, as we learn from the explanatory verses, is "a cooke's foule apron fix'd to a broome," and his helmet "a brasse pot." Lent, on the contrary, flings to the breeze a fishing-net, carries an angling-rod for a weapon, and wears upon his head "a boyling kettle." Thus accoutred, these mortal foes approach one another, and Lent lifts up his voice and proclaims his intention:
"I now am come to mundifie and cleare
The base abuses of this last past yeare:
Thou puff-paunch'd monster (Shrovetyde), thou art he
That were ordain'd the latter end to be
Of forty-five weekes' gluttony, now past,
Which I in seaven weekes come to cleanse at last:
Your feasting I will turn to fasting dyet;
Your cookes shall have some leasure to be quiet;
Your masques, pomps, playes, and all your vaine expence,
I'll change to sorrow, and to penitence."
Shrove-tide replies valiantly to these brave words:
"What art thou, thou leane-jawde anottamie,
All spirit (for I no flesh upon thee spie);
Thou bragging peece of ayre and smoke, that prat'st,
And all good-fellowship and friendship hat'st;
You'le turn our feasts to fasts! when, can you tell?
Against your spight, we are provided well.
Thou sayst thou'lt ease the cookes!-the cookes could wish
Thee boyl'd or broyl'd with all thy frothy fish;
For one fish-dinner takes more paines and cost
Than three of flesh, bak'd, roast, or boyl'd, almost."
This we are compelled to regard as about the best fun our ancestors of 1660 were capable of achieving with pencil and pen. Nor can we claim much for their pictures which aim to satirize the vices.
The Queen of James II. and Father Petre.
"It is a foolish sheep that makes the wolf her confessor." (1685.)