“Red-hot with drinking;
So full of valour that they smote the air
For breathing in their faces.”
As the preceding anecdote shows the venerable Marquess as a pathologist, so the following exhibits him in the more congenial character of a quaint theologian:—“I was walking one day with his lordship,” says the narrator, “in the private walk about the Great Tower,[281] and there we spied where a bird had made her nest, whom we disturbed from hatching her young ones, and sitting upon her eggs; which act of nature my lord compared to the manner of the creation: ‘For,’ said he, ‘God having made his nest in the world, and brought forth his young at first imperfected, did by his Spirit incubate, and by his wings of prudence spread over them, he gave them life and power; and by his word he brake the shell—et sic pullulavit mundum.’” This method of giving a quaint and solemn turn to the most familiar incidents of life was characteristic of the times, and often introduced into their homilies by the clergy, who made use of the most homely figures to illustrate some of the highest questions in theology. But from the Marquess of Worcester, then at a very advanced age, the effort to extract a moral, or to expound a scriptural text, came very gracefully; and he omits no opportunity, as we perceive, of improving others, by directing their thoughts to those passages of scripture with which his own mind was familiar. It is almost impossible, however, to resist the ludicrous ideas which religious sentiment is made to conjure up when employed by the Parliamentary leaders, and those irreverent applications of scripture which are to be found, not only in their daily conversations, but in their speeches, and even dispatches. Cant was the fashion of the day; and where a letter was not profusely interlarded with the language and figures of Holy Writ, the author was liable to be suspected of indifference or disaffection to the cause.
“An evil soul, producing holy witness,
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek——”
“And thus he clothes his naked villany
With old odd ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ.”
The Marquess’s contempt of hypocrisy and deception is exemplified in another apophthegm:—“A Roman Catholic being sorely pressed to take the oath of supremacy, and being acquainted with another gentleman, who was a Protestant, and so like unto him that you could hardly distinguish them whilst they were together, much less asunder,—this imago sui—this lifelike
The Keep Tower, from the Moat.
Raglan Castle.
resemblance—as if Nature herself had chosen him to be his representative—the right stone being pulled out, and a counterfeit set in the right ring—and what with the likeness of his countenance, and the identity of apparel, he passed for current; which jest my Roman thought so good, that he must needs brag of it to the Marquess. But my lord no way liked it; asking him—‘Would you put another upon doing that which you would not do yourself? What if the devil—you two being so like one another—should mistake you for him? I assure you he would go neare to mar the conceit.’ For, he might have added, though honesty be no Puritan, yet it will do no hurt.”
“Mine honour is my life; both grow in one;
Take honour from me, and my life’s undone.”