Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century

by Unknown

For similitudes, he likes the hardest and most obscure best; for as ladies wear black patches to make their complexions seem fairer than they are, so when an illustration is more obscure than the sense that went before it, it must of necessity make it appear clearer than it did, for contraries are best set off with contraries.

He has found out a way to save the expense of much wit and sense; for he will make less than some have prodigally laid out upon five or six words serve forty or fifty lines. This is a thrifty invention, and very easy, and, if it were commonly known, would much increase the trade of wit and maintain a multitude of small poets in constant employment. He has found out a new sort of poetical Georgics, a trick of sowing wit like clover-grass on barren subjects which would yield nothing before. This is very useful for the times, wherein, some men say, there is no room left for new invention. He will take three grains of wit like the elixir, and projecting it upon the iron age, turn it immediately into gold. All the business of mankind has presently vanished; the whole world has kept holiday; there have been no men but heroes and poets, no women but nymphs and shepherdesses; trees have borne fritters, and rivers flowed plum-porridge.

We read that Virgil used to make fifty or sixty verses in a morning, and afterwards reduce them to ten. This was an unthrifty vanity, and argues him as well ignorant in the husbandry of his own poetry as Seneca says he was in that of a farm; for, in plain English, it was no better than bringing a noble to nine-pence. And as such courses brought the prodigal son to eat with hogs, so they did him to feed with horses, which were not much better company, and may teach us to avoid doing the like. For certainly it is more noble to take four or five grains of sense, and, like a gold-beater, hammer them into so many leaves as will fill a whole book, than to write nothing but epitomes, which many wise men believe will be the bane and calamity of learning. When he writes he commonly steers the sense of his lines by the rhyme that is at the end of them, as butchers do calves by the tail. For when he has made one line, which is easy enough, and has found out some sturdy hard word that will but rhyme, he will hammer the sense upon it, like a piece of hot iron upon an anvil, into what form he pleases.

There is no art in the world so rich in terms as poetry; a whole dictionary is scarce able to contain them, for there is hardly a pond, a sheep-walk, or a gravel-pit in all Greece but the ancient name of it is become a term of art in poetry. By this means small poets have such a stock of able hard words lying by them, as dryads, hamadryads, Aonides, fauni, nymphae, sylvani, &c., that signify nothing at all, and such a world of pedantic terms of the same kind, as may serve to furnish all the new inventions and thorough reformations that can happen between this and Plato's great year.

When he writes he never proposes any scope or purpose to himself, but gives his genius all freedom; for as he that rides abroad for his pleasure can hardly be out of his way, so he that writes for his pleasure can seldom be beside his subject. It is an ungrateful thing to a noble wit to be confined to anything. To what purpose did the ancients feign Pegasus to have wings if he must be confined to the road and stages like a pack-horse, or be forced to be obedient to hedges and ditches? Therefore he has no respect to decorum and propriety of circumstance, for the regard of persons, times, and places is a restraint too servile to be imposed upon poetical license, like him that made Plato confess Juvenal to be a philosopher, or Persius, that calls the Athenians Quirites.

For metaphors, he uses to choose the hardest and most far-set that he can light upon. These are the jewels of eloquence, and therefore the harder they are the more precious they must be.

He'll take a scant piece of coarse sense and stretch it on the tenterhooks of half-a-score rhymes, until it crack that you may see through it and it rattle like a drumhead. When you see his verses hanged up in tobacco-shops, you may say, in defiance of the proverb, "that the weakest does not always go to the wall;" for 'tis well known the lines are strong enough, and in that sense may justly take the wall of any that have been written in our language. He seldom makes a conscience of his rhymes, but will often take the liberty to make "preach" rhyme with "cheat," "vote" with "rogue," and "committee-man" with "hang."

He'll make one word of as many joints as the tin-pudding that a juggler pulls out of his throat and chops in again. What think you of glud-fum-flam-hasta-minantes? Some of the old Latin poets bragged that their verses were tougher than brass and harder than marble; what would they have done if they had seen these? Verily they would have had more reason to wish themselves an hundred throats than they then had to pronounce them.

There are some that drive a trade in writing in praise of other writers (like rooks, that bet on gamesters' hands), not at all to celebrate the learned author's merits, as they would show but their own wits, of which he is but the subject. The lechery of this vanity has spawned more writers than the civil law. For those whose modesty must not endure to hear their own praises spoken may yet publish of themselves the most notorious vapours imaginable. For if the privilege of love be allowed--Dicere quiz puduit, scribere jussit amor--why should it not be so in self-love too? For if it be wisdom to conceal our imperfections, what is it to discover our virtues? It is not likely that Nature gave men great parts upon such terms as the fairies used to give money, to pinch and leave them if they speak of it. They say--Praise is but the shadow of virtue, and sure that virtue is very foolish that is afraid of its own shadow.

When he writes anagrams he uses to lay the outsides of his verses even (like a bricklayer) by a line of rhyme and acrostic, and fill the middle with rubbish. In this he imitates Ben Jonson, but in nothing else.