A FRAGMENT OF
JOSEPH HALL'S
MUNDUS ALTER ET IDEM
(THE OTHER-AND SAME WORLD)
TRANSLATED BY
Dr. WILLIAM KING.
INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.
Joseph Hall was born at Bristow Park, by Ashby-de-la-Zouch, in the year 1574, and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1597 he published three books, and in 1598 three more books, of Satires, "Virgidemiarum, Six Bookes." These satires, with others published about the same time by Marlowe and Marston, were burnt by order of Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had no relish for that kind of writing. Nine years later, in the year 1607, at the age of thirty-two, Hall published the satire now to be described. He was a witty and an earnest man, who rose to honour in the Church, became successively Bishop of Exeter and of Norwich; as Bishop of Norwich was in controversy with John Milton on Church Discipline; suffered patiently imprisonment and persecution from the Puritans; and closed an honourable life of more than fourscore years in 1656. He has been called by some the Christian Seneca.
His early work, the "Mundus Alter et Idem," represents an ideal world divided into regions answering to man's chief weaknesses or vices. He gave with it a map of its Crapulia, Latronia, &c., fully peopled, with a neighbouring land in which there are no signs of settlement, Terra Sancta, ignota etiam adhuc, the Holy Land, even yet unknown.
Joseph Hall's new world is also figured as an Austral Continent. They are good travellers, he says, who tell what they have seen in known lands, but he is a better who not only travels but is himself the maker of the lands he travels through. He chose his day, and went aboard the good ship Phantasy, quitted harbour, sailed away, reached in two years the Fortunate Isles, and, leaving the shores of Africa behind him, came in sight of the black headland of Crapulia.