Page 172. Vpon Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities.
These verses were first published in 1611 with a mass of witty and scurrilous verses by all the 'wits' of the day, prefixed to Coryats Crudities hastily gobbled up in five months travells in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhaetia ... Newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe, in the County of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling members of this Kingdom. Coryat was an eccentric and a favourite butt of the wits, but was not without ability as well as enterprise. In 1612 he set out on a journey through the East which took him to Constantinople, Jerusalem, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and India. In his letters to the wits at home he sends greetings to, among others, Christopher Brooke, John Hoskins (as 'Mr. Ecquinoctial Pasticrust of the Middle Temple'), Ben Jonson, George Garrat, and 'M. John Donne, the author of two most elegant Latine Bookes, Pseudomartyr and Ignatius Conclave' He died at Surat in 1617.
l. 2. leavened spirit. This is the reading of 1611. It was altered in 1649 to 'learned', and modern editors have neglected to correct the error. A glance at the first line shows that 'leavened' is right. It is leaven which raises bread. A 'leavened spirit' is one easily puffed up by the 'love of greatness'. There is much more of satire in such an epithet than in 'learned'.
l. 17. great Lunatique, i.e. probably 'great humourist', whose moods and whims are governed by the changeful moon. See O.E.D., which quotes:
Ther (i.e. women's) hertys chaunge never ...
Ther sect ys no thing lunatyke.
Lydgate.
'By nativitie they be lunaticke ... as borne under the influence of Luna, and therefore as firme ... as melting waxe.' Greene, Mamillia.
l. 22. Munster. The Cosmographia Universalis (1541) of Sebastian Munster (1489-1552).
l. 22. Gesner. The Bibliotheca Universalis, siue Catalogus Omnium Scriptorum in Linguis Latina, Graeca, et Hebraica, 1545, by Conrad von Gesner of Zurich (1516-1565). Norton quotes from Morhof's Polyhistor: 'Conradus Gesner inter universales et perpetuos Catalogorum scriptores principatum obtinet'; and from Dr. Johnson: 'The book upon which all my fame was originally founded.'