CHAPTER CXVI.

DR. SOUTHEY. JOHN BUNYAN. BARTHOLOMÆUS SCHERÆUS. TERTULLIAN. DOMENICO BERNINO. PETRARCH. JEREMY TAYLOR. HARTLEY COLERIDGE. DIEGO DE SAN PEDRO, AND ADAM LITTLETON.

Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray;
Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may.
        Titty, Tiffin, keep it stiff in!
        Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky!
        Liard, Robin, you must bob in!
Round, around, around, about, about!
All good come running in, all ill keep out.
                                                            MIDDLETON.

Nine years after the convention of Cintra a representation was made to the Laureate in favour of some artillery horses employed in Sir Arthur Wellesley's army. They were cast-off Irish cavalry, and their efficiency had been called in question; indeed it had been affirmed that they were good for nothing; attestations to disprove this were produced, and the Laureate was requested to set this matter right in his History of the Peninsular War. The good-natured historian has given accordingly a note to the subject, saying that he thought himself bound to notice the representation were it only for the singularity of the case. If Dr. Southey thought it became him for that reason and for truth's sake, to speak a good word of some poor horses who had long ago been worked to death and left to the dogs and wolves by the way side, much more may I feel myself bound for the sake of Dr. Dove to vindicate the daughter of his old schoolmaster from a splenetic accusation brought against her by her husband. The reader who knows what the Doctor's feelings were with regard to Mr. Guy, and what mine are for the Doctor, would I am sure excuse me even if on such an occasion I had travelled out of the record.

Gent when he penned that peevish page seems to have thought with Tom Otter, that a wife is a very scurvy clogdogdo! And with John Bunyan that “Women, whenever they would perk it and lord it over their husbands, ought to remember that both by creation and transgression they are made to be in subjection to them.” “Such a thing,” says the Arch-tinker, “may happen, as that the woman, not the man, may be in the right, (I mean when both are godly) but ordinarily it is otherwise!”

Authors of a higher class than the York printer and topographist have complained of their wives. We read in Burton that Bartholomæus Scheræus, Professor of Hebrew at Wittenberg, whom he calls “that famous Poet Laureate,” said in the introduction to a work of his upon the Psalms, he should have finished it long before, but amongst many miseries which almost broke his back (his words were inter alia dura et tristia, quæ misero mihi pene tergum fregerunt,) he was yoked to a worse than Xantippe. A like lamentation is made more oddly and with less excuse, by Domenico Bernino, the author of a large history of All Heresies, which he dedicated to Clement XI. Tertullian, he says, being ill advised in his youth, and deceived by that shadow of repose which the conjugal state offers to the travellers in this miserable world, threw himself into the troubled sea of matrimony. And no sooner had he taken a wife, than being made wise by his own misfortunes, he composed his laborious treatise de molestiis nuptiarum, concerning the troubles of marriage, finding in this employment the only relief from those continual miseries, to which, he adds, we who now write may bear our present and too faithful testimony,—delle quali Noi ancora che queste cose scriviamo, siamo per lui testimonio pur troppo vero e presente.

The Historian of Heresy and the Hebrew Professor might have learnt a lesson from Petrarch's Dialogue de importunâ Uxore, in that work of his de Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ. When DOLOR complains of having a bad wife, RATIO reminds him that he might blame his ill fortune for any other calamity, but this he had brought upon himself and the only remedy was patience.

Est mala crux, conjux mala; crux tamen illa ferenda est
    Quâ nemo nisi Mors te relevare potest.

“It is the unhappy chance of many,” says Jeremy Taylor, “that finding many inconveniences upon the mountains of single life, they descend into the valleys of marriage to refresh their troubles, and there they enter into fetters, and are bound to sorrow by the cords of a man's or woman's peevishness; and the worst of the evil is, they are to thank their own follies, for they fell into the snare by entering an improper way.” To complain of the consequences, which are indeed the proper punishment, is to commit a second folly by proclaiming the first, and the second deserves the ridicule it is sure to meet with. Hartley Coleridge has well said, that there must always be something defective in the moral feelings or very unfortunate in the circumstances of a man who makes the public his confidant!

If Thomas Gent had read Lord Berners' Castle of Love, which might easily, rare as it has now become, have fallen in his way a hundred years ago, he would there have seen fifteen reasons why men do wrong when they speak ill of women, and twenty reasons why they ought to speak well of them. All lovers of our old literature know how greatly we are beholden to John Bouchier, Knight, Lord Berners, who when Deputy General of the Kings Town of Calais and Marches of the same, employed his leisure in translating books out of French into English. But he must have been one of those persons who with a great appetite for books have no discriminating taste, or he would not have translated Arthur of Little Britain, when Gyron le Courtoys and Meliadus were not extant in his own language; nor would he, even at the instance of Lady Elizabeth Carew, if he had known a good book from a bad one, have englished from its French version the Carcel de Amor, which Diego de San Pedro composed at the request of the Alcayde de los Donzelles, D. Diego Hernandez, and of other Knights and Courtiers.

The reader will please to observe that though all worthless books are bad, all bad books are not necessarily worthless. A work however bad, if written, as the Carcel de Amor was, early in the sixteenth century, and translated into Italian French and English, must be worth reading to any person who thinks the history of literature (and what that history includes) a worthy object of pursuit. If I had not been one of those who like Ludovicus Bosch—(my friend in the caxon)—are never weary of hunting in those woods, I could not, gentle reader, have set before you as I shall incontinently proceed to do, the fifteen above-mentioned and here following reasons, why you will commit a sin if you ever speak in disparagement of womankind.

First then, Leriano, the unhappy hero of Diego de San Pedro's tragic story, says that all things which God has made are necessarily good; women therefore being his creatures, to calumniate them is to blaspheme one of his works.

Secondly, there is no sin more hateful than ingratitude; and it is being ungrateful to the Virgin Mary if we do not honour all women for her sake.

Thirdly, it is an act of cowardice for man who is strong, to offend woman who is weak.

Fourthly, the man who speaks ill of woman brings dishonour upon himself, inasmuch as every man is of woman born.

Fifthly, such evil speaking is, for the last mentioned reason, a breach of the fifth commandment.

Sixthly, it is an obligation upon every noble man to employ himself virtuously both in word and deed; and he who speaks evil incurs the danger of infamy.

Seventhly, because all knights are bound by their order to show respect and honour to all womankind.

Eighthly, such manner of speech brings the honour of others in question.

Ninthly, and principally, it endangers the soul of the evil speaker.

Tenthly, it occasions enmities and the fatal consequences resulting therefrom.

Eleventhly, husbands by such speeches may be led to suspect their wives, to use them ill, to desert them, and peradventure to make away with them.

Twelfthly, a man thereby obtains the character of being a slanderer.

Thirteenthly, he brings himself in jeopardy with those who may think themselves bound to vindicate a lady's reputation or revenge the wrong which has been done to it.

Fourteenthly, to speak ill of women is a sin because of the beauty which distinguishes their sex, which beauty is so admirable that there is more to praise in one woman than there can be to condemn in all.

Fifteenthly, it is a sin because all the benefactors of mankind have been born of women, and therefore we are obliged to women for all the good that has ever been done in the world.

Such are the fifteen reasons which Diego de San Pedro excogitated to show that it is wrong for men to speak ill of women; and the twenty reasons which he has superinduced to prove that they are bound to speak well of them are equally cogent and not less curious. I have a reason of my own for reserving these till another opportunity. Not however to disappoint my fair readers altogether of that due praise which they have so properly expected, I will conclude the present chapter with a few flowers taken from the pulpit of my old acquaintance Adam Littleton. There is no impropriety in calling him so, though he died before my grandfathers and grandmothers were born; and when I meet him in the next world I hope to improve this one sided acquaintance by introducing myself and thanking him for his Dictionary and his Sermons.

The passage occurs in a sermon preached at the obsequies of the Right Honourable the Lady Jane Cheyne. The text was “Favour is deceitful, and Beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised:” in which proposition, says the Preacher, we have first the subject, Woman, with her qualification that fears the Lord: Secondly the predicate, she shall be praised.

“WOMAN, in the primitive design of Nature, God's master-piece, being the last work of creation, and made with a great deal of deliberation and solemnity.

“For to look upon her as a supernumerary creature, and one brought into the world by the bye, besides the Creator's first intention, upon second thoughts,—is to lay a foul imputation upon Divine Wisdom, as if it had been at a stand, and were to seek.

“Wherefore, as we use to argue that all things were made for the use and service of man, because he was made last of all; I do not see, if that argument be good, why the same consequences should not be of like force here too, that Man himself was made for the affectionate care of Woman, who was framed not only after him, but out of him too, the more to engage his tenderest and dearest respects.

“Certainly this manner of production doth plainly evince the equality of the Woman's merits and rights with Man; she being a noble cyon transplanted from his stock, and by the mystery of marriage implanted into him again, and made one with him.

“She is then equally at least partaker with him of all the advantages which appertain to human nature, and alike capable of those improvements which by the efforts of reason, and the methods of education and the instincts of the Blessed Spirit, are to be made upon it,—

“Hence it was that all Arts and Sciences, all Virtues and Graces, both divine and moral, are represented in the shape and habit of Women. Nor is there any reason for fancying Angels themselves more of our sex than of the other, since amongst them there is no such distinction, but they may as well be imagined female as male.

“Above all for Piety and Devotion, which is the top-perfection of our nature, and makes it most like angelical; as the capacity of Women is as large, so their inclinations are generally more vigorous, the natural bias and tendency of their spirits lying that way, and their softer temper more kindly receiving the supernatural impression of God's Spirit.

“This is that, if any thing, which gives their sex the pre-eminence above us men and gains them just advantages of praise; that whereas those who have only a handsome shape and good features to commend them, are adored and idolized by persons of slight apprehensions and ungoverned passions, pious and virtuous women command the veneration of the most judicious, and are deservedly admired by holy men and Angels.”

Thus saith that Adam of whom even Adam Clarke might have been proud as a namesake; and whose portrait the Gentlemen of the name of Adam who meet and dine together at a tavern in London, once a year, ought to have in their club room.