Poetry was the vehicle that conveyed all your scandal to the town, and I being conversant about the skirts of that art, my scandal must dwell chiefly thereabouts; not omitting that scantling of general scandal of the town, that is come to my knowledge; for you must know, since your death, and your successor Summerton’s madness, lampoon has felt a very sensible decay, and seldom is there any attempt at it, and when there is, ’tis very heavy and dull, cursed verse, or worse prose: so gone is the brisk spirit of verse, that us’d to watch the follies and vice of the men and women of figure, that they could not start new ones faster than lampoons expos’d them. This deficiency of satire is not from a scarcity of vices, which abound more than ever, or follies more numerous than in your time, but from a meer impotence of malice, which tho’ as general as ever, confines itself to discourse; and railing is its utmost effort, defaming over one bottle, those they caress over another. Every man abuses his friend behind his back, and no man ever takes notice of it, but does the same thing in his turn: And for sincerity, women have as much: the women grow greater hypocrites than ever, lewder in their chamber practice, and more formal in publick; they rail at the vices they indulge; they forsake publick diversions, as plays, &c. to gain the reputation of virtue, to give a greater loose to the domestick diversions of a bottle and gallant; and hypocrisy heightens their pleasures. The mode now is not as of old, in all amorous encounters, every man to his woman, but like nuns in a cloyster, every female has her privado of her own sex; and the honester part of men, must either fall in with the modish vice, or live chastly; to both which I find a great many extreamly averse. There has a terrible enemy arose to the stage, an abdicate divine, who when he had escaped the pillory for sedition, and reforming the state, set up for the reformation of the stage. The event was admirable, fanaticks presented the nonjuror, and misers and extortioners gave him bountiful rewards: one grave citizen, that had found the character too often on the stage, and famous for the ruin of some hundreds of poor under-tradesmen’s families, laid out threescore pounds in the impression, to distribute among the saints, that are zealous for God and mammon at the same time: Bullies and republicans quarrell’d for the passive obedience spark; grave divines extoll’d his wit, and atheists his religion; the fanaticks his honesty, the hypocrite his zeal, and the ladies were of his side, because he was for submitting to force. There is yet a greater mischief befall’n the stage; here are societies set up for reformation of manners; troops of informers, who are maintain’d by perjury, serve God for gain, and ferret out whores for subsistence. This noble society consists of divines of both churches, fanatick as well as orthodox saints and sinners, knights of the post, and knights of the elbow, and they are not more unanimous against immorality in their informations, than for it in their practice; they avoid no sins in themselves, and will suffer none in any one else. The fanaticks, that never preached up morality in their pulpits, or knew it in their dealings, would seem to promote it in the ungodly. The churchmen, that would enjoy the pleasure of sinners, and the reputation of saints, are for punishing whores and drinking in all but themselves. In short, the motive that carries the Popish apostles to the richer continents, makes these gentlemen so busy in our reformation money. Nay, reformation is grown a staple commodity, and the dealers in it are suddenly to be made into a corporation, and their privileges peculiar are to be perjury without punishment, and lying with impunity. The whores have a tax laid on them towards their maintenance, in which they share with captain W——, and the justices of the peace; for New-Prison knows them in all their turns, and twenty or thirty shillings gives them a license for whoring, till next pay-day; so that the effect of their punishment only raising the price of the sin, and the vices of the nation maintain the informers. Drinking, swearing and whoring are the manufactures they deal in; for should they stretch their zeal to cozening, cheating, injury, extortion, oppression, defamation, secret adulteries, and fornication, and a thousand other of these more crying immoralities, the city would rise against these invaders of their liberties, and the cuckolds one and all, for their own and their wives sakes, rise against the reformers. These worthy gentlemen, for promoting the interest of the Crown Office, and some such honest place, pick harmless words out of plays, to indict the players and squeeze twenty pound a week out of them, if they can, for their exposing pride, vanity, hypocrisy, usury, oppression, cheating, and the other darling vices of the master reformers, who owe them a grudge, not to be appeas’d without considerable offerings; for money in these cases wipes off all defects.
There are other matters of smaller importance, I shall refer to my next, as who kisses who in our dominions; that hypocrisy has infected the stage too, where whores with great bellies would thrust themselves off for virgins, and bully the audience out of their sight and understanding; where maids can talk bawdy for wit, and footmen pass on quality for gentlemen; fools sit as judges on wit, and the ignorant on men of learning; where the motto is Vivitur Ingenio, the dull rogues have the management and the profits; where farce is a darling, and good sense and good writing not understood: and this brings to my mind a thing I lately heard from a false smatterer in poetry behind the scenes, and which if you see Ben. Johnson, I desire you to communicate to him. A new author, says one, that has wrote a taking play, is writing a treatise of Comedy, in which he mauls the learned rogues, the writers, to some purpose; he shews what a coxcomb Aristotle was, and what a company of senseless pedants the Scaligers, Rapins, Vossi, &c. are; proves that no good play can be regular, and that all rules are as ridiculous as useless. He tells us, Aristotle knew nothing of poetry, (for he knew nothing of his fragments so extoll’d by Scaliger) and that common sense and nature was not the same in Athens as in Drury-lane; that uniformity and coherence was green-sleeves and pudding-pies, and that irregularity and nonsense were the chief perfections of the drama. That the Silent Woman, by consequence was before the Trip to the Jubilee, and the Ambitious Step-Mother, better than the Orphan; that hiccius doctius was Arabick, and that Bonnyclabber is the black broth of the Lacedæmonians; and thus he runs on with paradoxes as new as unintelligible; but this noble treatise being yet in embryo, you may expect a farther account of it in the next, from,
Sir,
Your obliged humble Servant,
Will. Pierre.
Antiochus to Lewis XIV. By Mr. Henry Baker.
Dear Brother,
YOU will be surpriz’d, I know, to receive this letter from a stranger; and of all the damn’d, perhaps, I am the only man from whom you least of all expect any news; because I have always passed for so impious and cruel a prince, and my name has given people such horrid ideas of me, that they think me insensible of pity, as having never practised any in my life-time.
When I sat upon the throne of Syria, having no more religion than your Most Christian Majesty, I stifled all the dictates of my conscience, pillaged the temple of the Jews, caroused with their blood, and running from one crime to another, drew infinite desolations every where after me. But after I had exercised my tyranny on the innocent posterity of several great kings, and left a thousand monuments of my barbarity, I found to my sorrow, that I was mortal, and obliged to submit to that fare, whose attacks feeble nature cannot resist. I then fell into an abyss, which is enlightened only by those flames which will for ever roast such monsters as we; and where I was loaded with heavier irons than any I had plagu’d poor mortals with above. To welcome me into this place of horror, and refresh me after my voyage, I was plung’d into a bath of fire and brimstone, cupp’d by a Master-devil, rubb’d, scrubb’d, &c. by a parcel of smoaking, grinning hobgobblins, and afterwards presented with a musical entertainment of groans, howling, and gnashing of teeth. I soon began to play my part in this hideous consort, where despair beat the measure; and because my pains were infinitely greater than those of others, I immediately asked the reason of my torments, and was told it was for having hindered the peopling of Hell, by the multitude of martyrs my long persecutions had made, and of which you cannot be ignorant, if you delight in useful reading. Since I have been in this empire of sorrow, where I found the Pharaohs, Ahabs, Jezebels, Athaliahs, Nebuchadnezzars, &c. and where I have seen arrive the Neroes, Dioclesians, Decii,[1] Philips of Austria, [2] Charles of Valois, whose names would fill a volume; the recruits of Loyola arrive every day in search of their captain, but in some confusion, for fear of meeting Clement and Ravillac, who never cease cursing them. Your apartments, Most Christian Hero, has been some fifty years a rearing, but now they redouble their care, your coming being daily expected; I give you timely notice of it, that you may take your measures accordingly. Perhaps you will be offended at this familiarity, and tell me no man can deserve hell for fighting against hereticks, under the command of an infallible general; but if you know the present state of those miter’d leaders, it would not a little terrify you. Lucifer has turned them into several shapes, and peopl’d his back yard with them; the place ’tis true, is not so delightful as your Menagerie and Trianon at Versailles, but much excels it in variety and number of monsters. Your cell is in the same yard, that you may be near your good friends, who advis’d you to make the habitation of the shades a desart; for which the prince of darkness hates you mortally, and designs you something worse than a fistula, or the bull of Phalaris. Your ingenious emissaries, Marillac, la Rapine, and la Chaise, will meet in the squadrons of Pluto with more invenom’d dragoons, than those they let loose against their poor countrymen in France: ’twill be their employment to keep this Menagerie clean, whose stench would otherwise poison the rest of hell. That renegado Pelisson too makes so odious a figure here, that he frights the boldest of our jaylors; and his eyes, red with crying for his sins, which were so much the greater, because they were voluntary, make him asham’d to look anyone in the face. Our learned think him profoundly ignorant; yet you must be the Trajan of that Pliny, for he is now writing your history in such a terrible manner, that it will but little resemble that which your pensionary wits are composing. The voyage having made him lose some part of his memory, and forget the particulars of your virtues; he will therefore take me for his model, and draw my life under your name. Tho’ your dear [3] Dulcinea, whose head he dresses like a girl’s, at the age of threescore and ten, makes the court of Proserpine rejoice before-hand; yet the deformed [4] author of the comical romance, cannot laugh, as facetious as he is; I will tell you no more, because some may think I give this counsel out of my private interest; for having been always ambitious, it would doubtless grieve me to see a more wicked and cruel tyrant than myself; but on the faith and word of one that endures the sharpest of torments, ’tis pure compassion.
I am Yours, &c.