To the right honourable Lord Henry Wriothesley,
　　　　　　Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield.


Ingenuous1 honourable Lord, I know not what blind custom
methodical antiquity hath thrust upon us, to dedicate such
books as we publish to one great man or other, in which respect,
lest any man should challenge these my papers as goods uncustomed,
and so extend upon them as forfeit to contempt, to the seal of
your excellent censure, lo, here I present them to be seen and
allowed. Prize them as high or as low as you list; if you set
any price on them, I hold my labour well satisfied. Long have I
desired to approve my wit unto you. My reverent dutiful thoughts
(even from their infancy) have been retainers to your glory. Now
at last I have enforced an opportunity to plead my devoted mind.
　　　　All that in this fantastical treatise I can promise is some
reasonable conveyance of history, and variety of mirth. By divers
of my good friends have I been dealt with to employ my dull pen in
this kind, it being a clean different vein from other my former
courses of writing. How well or ill I have done in it I am ignorant
(the eye that sees round about itself, sees not into itself); only
your Honour’s applauding encouragement hath power to make me ar-
rogant. Incomprehensible is the height of your spirit, both in heroical
resolution and matters of conceit.2 Unreprievably perisheth that book
whatsoever to waste-paper which on the diamond rock of your judgement
disasterly chanceth to be shipwrecked. A dear lover and cherisher you
are, as well of the lovers of poets as of poets themselves. Amongst
their sacred number I dare not ascribe myself, though now and then I
speak English; that small brain I have to no further use I convert,
save to be kind to my friends and fatal to my enemies. A new brain,
a new wit, a new style, a new soul will I get me, to canonize your name
to posterity, if in this my first attempt I be not taxed of presumption.
　　　　Of your gracious favour I despair not, for I am not altogether
fame's outcast. This handful of leaves I offer to your view, to the
leaves on trees I compare, which as they cannot grow of themselves
except they have some branches or boughs to cleave to, and with whose
juice and sap they be evermore recreated and nourished, so except these
unpolished leaves of mine have some branch of nobility whereon to
depend and cleave, and with the vigorous nutriment of whose authorized
commendation they may be continually fostered and refreshed, never will
they grow to the world’s good liking, but forthwith fade and die on
the first hour of their birth. Your Lordship is the large spreading
branch of renown from whence these my idle leaves seek to derive their
whole nourishing; it resteth you either scornfully shake them off as
worm-eaten and worthless, or in pity preserve them and cherish them for
some little summer fruit you hope to find amongst them.

Your Honour’s in all humble service,
Tho: Nashe.



　　　　The Induction to the Dapper Monsieur Pages of the Court.

Gallant squires, have amongst you; at mumchance3 I mean not, for so I
might chance come too short commons, but at novus, nova, novum,4 which
is in English, news of the maker. A proper fellow-page of yours called
Jack Wilton by me commends him unto you, and hath bequeathed for waste-
paper here amongst you certain pages of his misfortunes. In any case,
keep them preciously as a privy token of his goodwill towards you. If
there be some better than other, he craves you would honour them in
their death so much as to dry and kindle tobacco with them; for a need
he permits you to wrap velvet pantofles in them also, so they be not
woe-begone at the heels, or weather-beaten, like a black head with
grey hairs, or mangy at the toes, like an ape about the mouth. But
as you love good-fellowship and ames-ace,5 rather turn them to stop
mustard-pots than the grocers should have one patch of them to wrap
mace6 in; a strong, hot, costly spice it is, which above all things
he hates. To any use about meat and drink put them to and spare not,
for they cannot do their country better service. Printers are mad
whoresons; allow them some of them for napkins.
　　　　Just a little nearer to the matter and the purpose. Memorandum:
every one of you, after the perusing of this pamphlet, is to provide
him a case of poniards, that if you come in company with any man
which shall dispraise it or speak against it, you may straight cry Sic
respondeo, and give him the stockado. It stands not with your honours
(I assure ye) to have a gentleman and a page abused in his absence.
Secondly, whereas you were wont to swear men on a pantofle7 to be
true to your puissant order, you shall swear them on nothing but this
chronicle of the king of pages henceforward. Thirdly, it shall be
lawful for any whatsoever to play with false dice in a corner on the
cover of this foresaid Acts and Monuments. None of the fraternity of
the Minorites shall refuse it for a pawn in the times of famine and
necessity. Every stationer’s stall they pass by, whether by day or
by night, they shall put off their hats to, and make a low leg, in
regard their grand printed capitano is there entombed. It shall be
flat treason for any of this forementioned catalogue of the point-
trussers once to name him within forty foot of an ale-house; marry,
the tavern is honourable. Many special grave articles more had I to
give you in charge, which your wisdoms waiting together at the bottom
of the great chamber stairs, or sitting in a porch (your parliament
house) may better consider of than I can deliver; only let this
suffice for a taste to the text, and a bit to pull on a good wit
with, as a rasher on the coals is to pull on a cup of wine.
　　　　Hey-pass, come aloft; every man of you take your places, and
hear Jack Wilton tell his own tale.



The Unfortunate Traveller
or
The Life of Jack Wilton.
Qui audiunt audita dicunt.
Tho. Nashe.
London.
Printed by T. Scarlet for C. Burby, & are to be sold at his
shop adjoining to the Exchange.
1594.


About that time that the terror of the world and fever quartan of
the French, Henry the Eighth (the only true subject of chronicles)
advanced his standard against the two hundred and fifty towers of
Tournay and Terouanne,8 and had the Emperor and all the nobility of
Flanders, Holland & Brabant as mercenary attendants on his full-sailed
fortune, I, Jack Wilton (a gentleman at least) was a certain kind
of an appendix or page belonging or appertaining in or unto the
confines of the English court, where what my credit was, a number
of my creditors that I cozened can testify; Coelum petimus stultitia,9
which of us all is not a sinner? Be it known to as many as will pay
money enough to peruse my story, that I followed the court or the
camp, or the camp and the court, when Terouanne lost her maidenhead,
and opened her gates to more than Jane Tross10 did. There did I (soft,
let me drink before I go any further) reign sole king of the cans
and blackjacks, prince of the pygmies, county palatine of clean
straw and provant, and, to conclude, lord high regent of rashers of
the coals and red herring cobs.11 Paulo maiora canamus.12 Well, to the
purpose. What stratagemical acts and monuments do you think an
egregious infant of my years might enact? You will say it were
sufficient if he slur a die,13 pawn his master to the utmost penny,
and minister the oath of the pantofle artificially. These are signs
of good education, I must confess, and arguments of In grace and
virtue to proceed. Oh, but Aliquid latet quod non patet,14 there’s
a further path I must trace;
　　　　Examples confirm; list, lordings, to my proceedings.
　　　　Whosoever is acquainted with the state of a camp understands
that in it be many quarters, and yet not so many as on London bridge.
In those quarters are many companies; much company, much kna-
very, as true as that old adage, Much courtesy, much subtlety.
Those companies, like a great deal of corn, do yield some chaff;
the corn are cormorants, the chaff are good-fellows, which are
quickly blown to nothing with bearing a light heart in a light purse.
Amongst this chaff was I winnowing my wits to live merrily, and
by my troth, so I did; the prince could but command men spend their
blood in his service; I could make them spend all the money they had
for my pleasure. But poverty in the end parts friends; though I was
prince of their purses, and exacted of my unthrift subjects as much
liquid allegiance as any Kaiser in the world could do, yet where it
is not to be had, the king must lose his right; want cannot be with-
stood; men can do no more than they can do. What remained then
but the fox’s case must help, when the lion’s skin is out at the
elbows?
　　　　There was a lord in the camp, let him be a Lord of Misrule if
you will, for he kept a plain ale-house without welt or guard of any
ivy-bush,15 and sold cider and cheese by pint and by pound to all
that came (at the very name of cider I can but sigh, there is so
much of it in Rhenish wine now-a-days). Well, Tendit ad sydera
virtus,16 there’s great virtue belongs (I can tell you) to a cup
of cider, and very good men have sold it, and at sea it is Aqua
coelestis,17 but that’s neither here nor there; if it had no other
patron but this peer of quartpots to authorize it, it were sufficient.
This great lord, this worthy lord, this noble lord, thought no scorn
(Lord, have mercy upon us) to have his great velvet breeches larded
with the droppings of this dainty liquor, and yet he was an old servitor,
a cavalier of an ancient house, as might appear by the arms of his
ancestors, drawn very amiably in chalk on the inside of his tent door.
　　　　He and no other was the man I chose out to damn with a lewd
moneyless device, for coming to him on a day as he was counting his
barrels and setting the price in chalk on the head of them, I did my
duty very devoutly, and told his aly Honour I had matters of some
secrecy to impart unto him, if it pleased him to grant me private
audience. With me, young Wilton, qd. he; marry, and shalt. Bring us
a pint of cider of a fresh tap into the Three Cups here, wash the
pot; so into a back room he led me, where after he had spit on his
finger, and picked off two or three motes18 off his old moth-eaten
velvet cap, and sponged and wrung all the rheumatic drivel from
his ill-favoured goat’s beard, he bade me declare my mind, and
thereupon he drank to me on the same. I up with a long circumstance,
alias a cunning shift of the seventeens, and discoursed unto him
what entire affection I had borne him time out of mind, partly
for the high descent and lineage from whence he sprung, and partly
for the tender care and provident respect he had of poor soldiers,
that, whereas the vastity of that place (which afforded them no
indifferent supply of drink or of victuals) might humble them to
some extremity, and so weaken their hands, he vouchsafed in his
own person to be a victualler to the camp (a rare example of
magnificence and honourable courtesy), and diligently provided
that without far travel every man might for his money have cider
and cheese his belly-ful; nor did he sell his cheese by the wey19
only, or his cider by the great, but abased himself with his own
hands to take a shoemaker’s knife (a homely instrument for such
a high personage to touch), and cut it out equally, like a true
justiciary, in little pennyworths that it would do a man good
for to look upon. So likewise of his cider, the poor man might
have his moderate draught of it (as there is a moderation in all
things) as well for his doit20 or his dandiprat21 as the rich man for
his half-sou or his denier. Not so much, quoth I, but this tapster’s
linen apron, which you wear to protect your apparel from the
imperfections of the spigot, most amply bewrays your lowly mind.
I speak it with tears, too few such noblemen have we that will
draw drink in linen aprons. Why, you are every child’s fellow;
any man that comes under the name of a soldier and a good-fellow,
you will sit and bear company to the last pot, yea, and you take
in as good part the homely phrase of Mine host, here’s to you,
as if one saluted you by all the titles of your barony. These
considerations, I say, which the world suffers to slip by in the
channel of forgetfulness, have moved me, in ardent zeal of your
welfare, to forewarn you of some dangers that have beset you and
your barrels.
　　　　At the name of dangers he start up, and bounced with his
fist on the board so hard that his tapster, overhearing him,
cried, Anon, anon, sir, by and by, and came and made a low leg
and asked him what he lacked. He was ready to have stricken his
tapster for interrupting him in attention of this his so much
desired relation, but for fear of displeasing me he moderated
his fury, and only sending for the other fresh pint, willed him
look to the bar, & come when he is called, with a devil’s name.
Well at his earnest importunity, after I had moistened my lips
to make my lie run glib to his journey’s end, forward I went
as followeth.
　　　　It chanced me the other night, amongst other pages, to
attend where the King, with his lords and many chief leaders,
sat in council; there, amongst sundry serious matters that were
debated, and intelligences from the enemy given up, it was privily
informed (no villains to these privy informers) that you, even
you that I now speak to, had . (O, would I had no tongue to tell
the rest; by this drink it grieves me so I am not able to repeat
it.
　　　　Now was my drunken lord ready to hang himself for the end
of the full point, and over my neck he throws himself very lubberly,
and entreated me, as I was a proper young gentleman, and ever
looked for pleasure at his hands, soon to rid him out of this hell
of suspense, and resolve him of the rest; then fell he on his knees,
wrung his hands, and I think, on my conscience, wept out all the cider
that he had drunk in a week before; to move me to have pity on him
he rose and put his rusty ring on my finger, gave me his greasy purse
with that single money that was in it, promised to make me his heir,
and a thousand more favours, if I would expire the misery of his
unspeakable tormenting uncertainty. I being by nature inclined to
mercy (for indeed I knew two or three good wenches of that name),
bade him harden his ears, and not make his eyes abortive before
their time, and he should have the inside of my breast turned
outward, hear such a tale as would tempt the utmost strength of
life to attend it and not die in the midst of it.
　　　　Why (quoth I), myself that am but a poor childish well-willer
of yours, with the very thought that a man of your desert and state
by a number of peasants and varlets should be so injuriously abused
in hugger-mugger,22 have wept all my urine upwards. The wheel under
our city bridge carries not so much water over the city as my brain
hath welled forth gushing streams of sorrow; I have wept so
immoderately and lavishly that I thought verily my palate had been
turned to Pissing Conduit23 in London. My eyes have been drunk,
outrageously drunk, with giving but ordinary intercourse, through
their sea-circled islands, to my distilling dreariment. What shall
I say? That which malice hath said is the mere overthrow and murder
of your days. Change not your colour; none can slander a clear
conscience to itself; receive all your fraught of misfortune at once.
　　　　It is buzzed in the King’s head that you are a secret friend
to the enemy, and under pretence of getting a licence to furnish
the camp with cider and suchlike provant, you have furnished the
enemy, and in empty barrels sent letters of discovery and corn
innumerable.
　　　　I might well have left here, for by this time his white liver
had mixed itself with the white of his eye, and both were turned
upwards, as if they had offered themselves a fair white for death
to shoot at. The troth was, I was very loath mine host and I should
part with dry lips, wherefore the best means that I could imagine
to wake him out of his trance was to cry loud in his ear, Ho, host,
what’s to pay; will no man look to the reckoning here? And in plain
verity, it took expected effect, for with the noise he started and
bustled, like a man that had been scared with fire out of his sleep,
and ran hastily to his tapster, and all-to-belaboured him about the
ears for letting gentlemen call so long and not look in to them.
Presently he remembered himself, and had like to fall into his
memento24 again, but that I met him half-way, and asked his Lordship
what he meant to slip his neck out of the collar so suddenly, and,
being revived, strike his tapster so hastily.
　　　　Oh (quoth he), I am bought and sold for doing my country such
good service as I have done. They are afraid of me because my good
deeds have brought me into such estimation with the commonalty. I
see, I see, it is not for the lamb to live with the wolf.
　　　　The world is well amended (thought I) with your cidership;
such another forty years’ nap together as Epimenides25 had would
make you a perfect wise man.
　　　　Answer me (quoth he), my wise young Wilton; is it true that
I am thus underhand dead and buried by these bad tongues?
　　　　Nay (quoth I), you shall pardon me, for I have spoken too
much already; no definitive sentence of death shall march out of
my well-meaning lips; they have but lately sucked milk, and shall
they so suddenly change their food, and seek after blood?
　　　　Oh, but (quoth he), a man’s friend is his friend; fill the
other pint, tapster; what said the King? Did he believe it when
he heard it? I pray thee, say; I swear by my nobility, none
in the world shall ever be made privy that I received any light
of this matter by thee.
　　　　That firm affiance (quoth I) had I in you before, or else
I would never have gone so far over the shoes to pluck you out
of the mire. Not to make many words (since you will needs know),
the King says flatly you are a miser and a snudge,26 and he never
hoped better of you.
　　　　Nay, then (quoth he), questionless some planet that loves
not cider hath conspired against me.
　　　　Moreover, which is worse, the King hath vowed to give
Terouanne one hot breakfast only with the bungs that he will
pluck out of your barrels. I cannot stay at this time to report
each circumstance that passed, but the only counsel that my
long-cherished kind inclination can possibly contrive, is now
in your old days to be liberal; such victuals or provision as
you have, presently distribute it frankly amongst poor soldiers;
I would let them burst their bellies with cider, and bathe in
it, before I would run into my prince’s ill opinion for a whole
sea of it. The hunter pursuing the beaver for his stones, he
bites them off, and leaves them behind for him to gather up,
whereby he lives quiet. If greedy hunters and hungry tale-
tellers pursue you, it is for a little pelf that you have;
cast it behind you, neglect it, let them have it, lest it
breed a farther inconvenience. Credit my advice, you shall
find it prophetical; and thus have I discharged the part of
a poor friend.
　　　　With some few like phrases of ceremony, your Honour’s
poor suppliant and so forth, and Farewell, my good youth, I
thank thee and will remember thee, we parted.
　　　　But the next day I think we had a dole of cider, cider
in bowls, in scuppets,27 in helmets, and, to conclude, if a man
would have filled his boots full, there he might have had it;
provant thrust itself into poor soldiers’ pockets, whether
they would or no. We made five peals of shot into the town
together of nothing but spigots and faucets28 of discarded
emptybarrels; every underfoot soldier had a distenanted tun,
as Diogenes had his tub, to sleep in. I myself got as many
confiscated tapsters’ aprons as made me a tent as big as
any ordinary commander’s in the field .But in conclusion,
my well-beloved baron of double beer got him humbly on his
mary-bones29 to the King, and complained he was old and
stricken in years, and had never an heir to cast at a dog,
wherefore if it might please his Majesty to take his lands
into his hands, and allow him some reasonable pension to
live, he should be marvelously well pleased; as for wars,
he was weary of them, yet as long as his Highness ventured
his own person, he would not flinch a foot, but make his
withered body a buckler to bear off any blow advanced
against him.
　　　　The King, marvelling at this alteration of his cider
merchant (for so he often pleasantly termed him), with a
little farther talk, bolted out the whole complotment. Then
was I pitifully whipped for my holiday lie, though they
made themselves merry with it many a winter’s evening
after.
　　　　For all this, his good ass-headed Honour, mine host,
persevered in his former request to the King to accept his
lands, and allow him a beadsmanry30 or out-brothership of
brachet,31 which through his vehement instancy took effect,
and the King jestingly said, since he would needs have it so,
he would distrain on part of his land for impost of cider,
which he was behind with.
　　　　This was one of my famous achievements, insomuch as
I never light upon the like famous fool, but I have done a
thousand better jests, if they had been booked in order as
they were begotten. It is pity posterity should be deprived
of such precious records, and yet there is no remedy, and
yet there is too, for when all fails, welfare a good memory.
Gentle readers (look you be gentle now, since I have called
you so), as freely as my knavery was mine own, it shall be
yours to use in the way of honesty.
　　　　Even in this expedition of Terouanne (for the King
stood not long a-thrumming of buttons there), it happened
me fall in (I would it had fallen out otherwise, for his sake)
with an ugly mechanical32 captain. You must think in an army,
where truncheons are in their state-house, it is a flat stab
once to name a captain without cap in hand. Well, suppose he
was a captain, and had never a good cap of his own, but I was
fain to lend him one of my Lord’s cast velvet caps, and a
weather-beaten feather wherewith he threatened his soldiers
afar off, as Jupiter is said, with the shaking of his hair, to make
heaven and earth to quake. Suppose out of the parings33 of a
pair of false dice I apparelled both him and myself many a time
and oft, and surely, not to slander the devil, if any man ever
deserved the golden dice34 the king of the Parthians sent
to Demetrius, it was I; I had the right vein of sucking up a
die twixt the dints of my fingers; not a crevice in my hand
but could swallow a quarter-trey35 for a need; in the line of
life many a dead lift did there lurk, but it was nothing towards
the maintenance of a family. This Monsieur Capitano eat up
the cream of my earnings, and Crede mihi, res est ingeniosa
dare,36 any man is a fine fellow as long as he hath any money
in his purse. That money is like the marigold, which opens and
shuts with the sun; if fortune smileth or one be in favour, it
floweth; if the evening of age comes on, or he falls into dis-
grace, it fadeth and is not to be found. I was my craft’s mas-
ter, though I was but young, and could as soon decline Nom-
inatiuo hic asinus 37 as a greater clerk, wherefore I thought
it not convenient my soldado should have my purse any longer
for his drum to play upon, but I would give him Jack Drum’s
entertainment,38 and send him packing.
　　　　This was my plot: I knew a piece of service of intelligence
which was presently to be done that required a man with all his
five senses to effect it, and would overthrow any fool that
should undertake it; to this service did I animate and egg my
foresaid costs and changes, alias, Seignior Velvet-cap, whose
head was not encumbered with too much forecast, and coming
to him in his cabin about dinner-time, where I found him very
devoutly paring of his nails for want of other repast, I entertain-
ed him with this solemn oration:
　　　　Captain, you perceive how near both of us are driven; the
dice of late are grown as melancholy as a dog; highmen and lowmen
both prosper alike, langrets,39 fulhams,40 and all the whole fellowship
of them will not afford a man his dinner; some other means must be
invented to prevent imminent extremity. My state, you are not
ignorant, depends on trencher-service; your advancement must be
derived from the valour of your arm. In the delays of siege, desert
hardly gets a day of hearing; ‘tis gowns must direct and guns enact
all the wars that is to be made against walls. Resteth no way for
you to climb suddenly but by doing some rare stratagem, the like
not before heard of, and fitly at this time occasion is offered.
　　　　There is a feat the King is desirous to have wrought on some
great man of the enemy’s side; marry, it requireth not so much
resolution as discretion to bring it to pass, and yet resolution
enough should be shown in it too, being so full of hazardous
jeopardy as it is. Hark in your ear, thus it is: without more
drumbling41 or pausing, if you will undertake it, and work it
through-stitch42 (as you may, ere the King hath determined which
way to go about it), I warrant you are made while you live,
you need not care which way your staff falls; if it prove not
so, then cut off my head.
　　　　Oh, my auditors, had you seen him how he stretched out his
limbs, scratched his scabbed elbows at this speech, how he set
his cap over his eyebrows like a politician, and then folded
his arms one in another, and nodded with the head, as who would
say, Let the French beware, for they shall find me a devil. If
(I say) you had seen but half the actions that he used, of
shrugging up his shoulders, smiling scornfully, playing with
his fingers on his buttons, and biting the lip, you would have
laughed your face and your knees together. The iron being hot,
I thought to lay on load, for in any case I would not have his
humour cool. As before I laid open unto him the brief sum of the
service, so now I began to urge the honourableness of it, and what
a rare thing it was to be a right politician, how much esteemed of
kings and princes, and how divers of mean parentage have come to
be monarchs by it. Then I discoursed of the qualities and properties
of him in every respect, how, like the wolf, he must draw the
breath from a man long before he be seen; how, like a hare, he
must sleep with his eyes open; how, as the eagle in his flying
casts dust in the eyes of crows and other fowls for to blind
them, so he must cast dust in the eyes of his enemies, delude
their sight by one means or other, that they dive not into
his subtleties; how he must be familiar with all, and trust
none; drink, carouse and lecher with him out of whom he hopes to
wring any matter; swear and forswear, rather than be suspected,
and, in a word, have the art of dissembling at his fingers' ends
as perfect as any courtier.
　　　　Perhaps (quoth I) you may have some few greasy cavaliers
that will seek to dissuade you from it, and they will not stick
to stand on their three-halfpenny honour, swearing and staring
that a man were better be a hangman than an intelligencer, and
call him a sneaking eavesdropper, a scraping hedge-creeper, and
a piperly pickthank,43 but you must not be discouraged by their
talk, for the most part of these beggarly contemners of wit are
huge burly-boned butchers like Ajax, good for nothing but to
strike right-down blows on a wedge with a cleaving beetle, or
stand hammering all day upon bars of iron. The whelps of a bear
never grow but sleeping, and these bearwards, having big limbs,
shall be preferred though they do nothing. You have read stories
(I’ll be sworn he never looked in book in his life); how many
of the Roman worthies were there that have gone as spials into
their enemies’ camp? Ulysses, Nestor, Diomed went as spies
together in the night into the tents of Rhaesus, and intercepted
Dolon, the spy of the Trojans; never any discredited the trade
of intelligencers but Judas, and he hanged himself. Danger will
put wit into any man. Architas made a wooden dove to fly, by which
proportion I see no reason that the veriest block in the world
should despair of anything. Though nature be contrary inclined,
it may be altered; yet usually those whom she denies her ordinary
gifts in one thing, she doubles them in another. That which the
ass wants in wit, he hath in honesty; whoever saw him kick or
winch,44 or use any jade’s tricks; though he live an hundred years,
you shall never hear that he breaks pasture. Amongst men, he that
hath not a good wit, lightly45 hath a good iron memory, and he that
hath neither of both, hath some bones to carry burdens. Blind men
have better noses than other men; the bull’s horns serve him as
well as hands to fight withal; the lion’s paws are as good to him
as a pole-axe to knock down any that resist him; the boar’s tushes
serve him in better stead than a sword and buckler; what need the
snail care for eyes when he feels the way with his two horns as well
as if he were as quick-sighted as a decipherer? There is a fish that,
having no wings, supports herself in the air with her fins. Admit
that you had neither wit nor capacity, as sure, in my judgement,
there is none equal unto you in idiotism, yet if you have simplicity
and secrecy, serpents themselves will think you a serpent, for what
serpent is there but hides his sting, and yet, whatsoever be wanting,
a good plausible tongue in such a man of employment can hardly be
spared, which, as the forenamed serpent with his winding tail fetcheth
in those that come near him, so with a ravishing tale it gathers all
men’s hearts unto him ,which if he have not, let him never look to
engender by the mouth, as ravens and doves do, that is, mount or be
great by undermining. Sir, I am ascertained that all these imperfections
I speak of in you have their natural resiance.46 I see in your face that
you were born, with the swallow, to feed flying, to get much treasure
and honour by travel. None so fit as you for so important an enterprise;
our vulgar politicians are but flies swimming on the stream of subtlety
superficially in comparison of your singularity; their blind narrow
eyes cannot pierce into the profundity of hypocrisy; you alone, with
Palamede,47 can pry into Ulysses’ mad counterfeiting, you can discern
Achilles from a chambermaid,48 though he be decked with his spindle and
distaff; as Jove dining with Lycaon could not be beguiled with human
flesh dressed like meat,49 so no human brain may go beyond you, none
beguile you; you gull all, all fear you, love you, stoop to you. Therefore,
good sir, be ruled by me; stoop your fortune so low as to bequeath your-
self wholly to this business.
　　　　This silver-sounding tale made such sugared harmony in his ears
that with the sweet meditation what a more than miraculous politician
he should be, and what kingly promotion should come tumbling on him
thereby, he could have found in his heart to have packed up his pipes
and to have gone to heaven without a bate;50 yea, he was more inflamed
and ravished with it than a young man call Taurimontanus was with the
Phrygian melody, who was so incensed and fired therewith that he would
needs run presently upon it, and set a courtesan’s house on fire than
had angered him.
　　　　No remedy there was but I must help to furnish him with money;
I did so, as who will not make his enemy a bridge of gold to fly by?
Very earnestly he conjured me to make no man living privy to his
departure, in regard of his place and charge, and on his honour
assured me his return should be very short and successful. Aye, aye,
shorter by the neck (thought I); in the meantime let this be thy
posy:51 I live in hope to scape the rope.
　　　　Gone he is; God send him good shipping to Wapping, and by this
time, if you will, let him be a pitiful poor fellow, and undone forever;
for mine own part, if he had been mine own brother I could have done
no more for him than I did, for straight after his back was turned, I
went in all love and kindness to the marshal general of the field, and
certified him that such a man was lately fled to the enemy, and got his
place begged for another immediately. What became of him after, you
shall hear. To the enemy he went, and offered his service, railing
egregiously against the King of England; he swore, as he was a
gentleman and a soldier, he would be revenged on him, and let but the
King of France follow his counsel, he would drive him from Terouanne
walls yet ere three days to an end. All these were good humours, but
the tragedy followeth. The French King, hearing of such a prating
fellow that was come, desired to see him, but yet he feared treason,
willing one of his minions to take upon him his person, and he would
stand by as a private person while he was examined. Why should I use
any idle delays? In was Captain Gog’s Wounds brought, after he was
throughly searched; not a louse in his doublet was let pass but was
asked Quevela?52 and charged to stand in the King’s name; the moulds
of his buttons they turned out to see if they were not bullets covered
over with thread; the codpiece in his devil’s breeches53 (for they were
then in fashion), they said plainly was a case for a pistol; if he had
had ever a hobnail in his shoes it had hanged him, and he should ne-
ver have known who had harmed him, but as luck was, he had no mite
of any metal about him, he took part with none of the four ages,
neither the golden age, the silver age, the brazen, nor the iron age;
only his purse was aged in emptiness, and I think verily a Puritan,
for it kept itself from any pollution of crosses.54 Standing before the
supposed king, he was asked what he was, and wherefore he came. To
which in a glorious bragging humour he answered that he was a gentleman,
a captain commander, a chief leader, that came from the King of England
upon discontentment. Questioned of the particular cause, he had not a
word to bless himself with, yet fain he would have patched out a polt-
foot tale,55 but (God knows) it had not one true leg to stand on.
　　　　Then began he to smell on the villain so rammishly 56 that none
there but was ready to rent him in pieces, yet the minion king kept in his
choler, and propounded unto him further, what of the King of England's
secrets (so advantageable) he was privy to, as might remove him from
the siege of Terouanne in three days. He said divers, divers matters
which asked longer conference, but in good honesty they were lies which
he had not yet stamped.57 Hereat the true King stepped forth, and com-
manded to lay hands on the lozel,58 and that he should be tortured to
confess the truth, for he was a spy and nothing else.
　　　　He no sooner saw the wheel and the torments set before him but he
cried out like a rascal, and said he was a poor captain in the English
camp, suborned by one Jack Wilton (a nobleman’s page), and no other,
to come and kill the French King in a bravery59 and return, and that he
had no other intention in the world.
　　　　 This confession could not choose but move them all to laughter in
that he made it as light a matter to kill their king and come back, as
to go to Islington and eat a mess of cream and come home again; nay,
and besides, he protested that he had no other intention, as if that
were not enough to hang him.
　　　　Adam never fell till God made fools; all this could not keep his
joints from ransacking on the wheel, for they vowed either to make him
a confessor or a martyr with a trice; when still he sung all one song,
they told the King he was a fool, and that some shrewd head had knavishly
wrought on him, wherefore it should stand with his honour to whip him out
of the camp and send him home. That persuasion took place, and soundly
was he lashed out of their liberties, and sent home by a herald with this
message, that so the King his master hoped to whip home all the English
fools very shortly; answer was returned that that shortly was a long lie,
and they were shrewd fools that should drive the Frenchman out of his
kingdom, and make him glad, with Corinthian Dionysius,60 to play the
schoolmaster.
　　　　The herald being dismissed, our afflicted intelligencer was called
coram nobis;61 how he sped, judge you, but something he was adjudged too.
The sparrow for his lechery liveth but a year; he for his treachery was
turned on the toe,62 Plura dolor prohibet.63 Here let me triumph awhile,
and ruminate a line or two on the excellence of my wit, but I will not
breathe neither, till I have disfraughted all my knavery.
　　　　Another Switzer captain that was far gone for want of the wench I
led astray most notoriously, for he being a monstrous unthrift of battle-
axes (as one that cared not in his anger to bid fly out scuttles to five
score of them), and a notable emboweller of quartpots, I came disguised
unto him in the form of a half-crown wench, my gown and attire according
to the custom then in request. Iwis I had my curtseys in cue, or in quart-
pot rather, for they dived into the very entrails of the dust, and I
simpered with my countenance like a porridge-pot on the fire when it first
begins to seethe. The sobriety of the circumstance is, that after he had
courted me and all, and given me the earnest-penny of impiety, some six
crowns at the least for an antepast64 to iniquity, I feigned an impregnable
excuse to be gone, and never came at him after.
　　　　 Yet left I not here, but committed a little more scutchery.65 A comp-
any of coistrel66 clerks (who were in band with Satan, and not of any soldier's
collar nor hatband), pinched a number of good minds to Godward of their
provant.67 They would not let a dram of dead-pay68 overslip them; they would
not lend a groat of the week to come, to him that had spent his money
before this week was done. They outfaced the greatest and most
magnanimous servitors in their sincere and finigraphical69 clean shirts and
cuffs. A louse (that was any gentleman’s companion) they thought scorn
of; their near-bitten beards must in a devil’s name be dewed every day
with rose-water; hogs could have ne’er a hair on their backs, for making
them rubbing-brushes to rouse their crab-lice. They would in no wise
permit that the motes in the sunbeams should be full-mouthed beholders
of their clean finified70 apparel; their shoes shined as bright as a slike-
stone;71 their hands troubled and foiled72 more water with washing than
the camel doth, that never drinks till the whole stream be troubled. Sum-
marily, never any were so fantastical the one half as they.
　　　　My masters, you may conceive of me what you list, but I think
confidently I was ordained God’s scourge from above for their dainty
finicality. The hour of their punishment could no longer be prorogued,73
but vengeance must have at them at all adventures.74 So it was that the
most of these above-named goose-quill braggadocios75 were mere cowards
and cravens, and durst not so much as throw a penful of ink into the en-
emy’s face, if proof were made; wherefore on the experience of their
pusillanimity I thought to raise the foundation of my roguery.
　　　　What did I now but one day made a false alarum in the quarter where
they lay, to try how they would stand to their tackling, and with a pitiful
outcry warned them to fly, for there was treason afoot, they were environed
and beset. Upon the first watchword of treason that was given, I think they
betook them to their heels very stoutly; left their pen and inkhorns and paper
behind them for spoil, resigned their desks, with the money that was in them,
to the mercy of the vanquisher, and in fine, left me and my fellows (their
foolcatchers) lords of the field; how we dealt with them, their disburdened
desks can best tell, but this I am assured, we fared the better for it a
fortnight of fasting-days after. I must not place a volume in the precincts
of a pamphlet; sleep an hour or two, and dream that Tournay and Terouanne
is won, that the King is shipped again into England,76 and that I am close at
hard-meat77 at Windsor or at Hampton Court. What, will you in your indifferent
opinions allow me for my travel no more signory over the pages than I had
before? Yes, whether you will part with so much probable friendly suppose or
no, I’ll have it in spite of your hearts. For your instruction and godly
consolation, be informed that at that time I was no common squire, no
undertrodden torch-bearer; I had my feather in my cap as big as a flag in
the foretop; my French doublet, gelt78 in the belly as though (like a pig ready
to be spitted) all my guts had been plucked out; a pair of side paned hose79
that hung down like two scales filled with Holland cheeses; my long stock that
sat close to my dock,80 and smothered not a scab or a lecherous hairy sinew
on the calf of the leg; my rapier pendant like a round stick fastened in the
tacklings for skippers the better to climb by; my cape-cloak of black cloth,
overspreading my back like a thornback, or an elephant’s ear, that hangs on
his shoulders like a country huswife’s barnskin81 which she thirls her
spindle on; and, in consummation of my curiosity, my hands without gloves,
all a more82 French, and a black budge edging of a beard on the upper lip,
and the like sable auglet83 of excrements in the rising of the angle84 of my
chin. I was the first that brought in the order of passing into the court
which I derived from the common word Qui passa? and the heralds' phrase of
arms passant, thinking in sincerity he was not a gentleman, nor his arms
current, who was not first passed by the pages. If any prentice or other
came into the court that was not a gentleman, I thought it was an indignity
to the pre-eminence of the court to include such a one, and could not be
salved except we gave him arms passant, to make him a gentleman.
　　　　Besides, in Spain none pass any far way but he must be examined
what he is, and give threepence for his pass.
　　　　In which regard it was considered of by the common table of the cup-
bearers what a perilsome thing it was to let any stranger or outdweller
approach so near the precincts of the prince as the great chamber without
examining what he was, and giving him his pass, whereupon we established
the like order, but took no money of them as they did; only for a sign that
he had not passed our hands unexamined, we set a red mark on their ears,
and so let them walk as authentical.
　　　　I must not discover what ungodly dealing we had with the black-jacks,85
or how oft I was crowned king of the drunkards with a court cup; let me
quietly descend to the waning of my youthful days, and tell a little of the
sweating-sickness,86 that made me in a cold sweat take my heels and run
out of England.
　　　　This sweating-sickness was a disease that a man then might catch,
and never go to a hothouse. Many masters desire to have such servants as
would work till they sweat again, but in those days he that sweat never
wrought again. That scripture then was not thought so necessary which
says, Earn thy living with the sweat of thy brows, for then they earned
their dying with the sweat of their brows. It was enough if a fat man did
but truss his points, to turn him over the perch;87 Mother Cornelius’ tub,88
why it was like hell; he that came into it never came out of it.
　　　　Cooks that stand continually basting their faces before the fire were
now all cashiered with this sweat into kitchen-stuff; their hall fell into
the King’s hands for want of one of the trade to uphold it.
　　　　Felt-makers and furriers, what the one with the hot steam of their
wool new taken out of the pan, and the other with the contagious heat of
their slaughter-budge89 and cony-skins,90 died more thick than of the pest-
ilence; I have seen an old woman at that season, having three chins, wipe
them all away one after another as they melted to water, and left herself no-
thing of a mouth but an upper chap. Look how in May or the heat of summer
we lay butter in water for fear it should melt away, so then were men fain to
wet their clothes in water as dyers do, and hide themselves in wells from
the heat of the sun.
　　　　Then happy was he that was an ass, for nothing will kill an ass but
cold, and none died but with extreme heat. The fishes called sea-stars, that
burn one another by excessive heat, were not so contagious as one man
that had the sweat was to another. Masons paid nothing for hair to mix
their lime, nor glovers to stuff their balls with, for then they had it for
nothing; it dropped off men’s heads and beards faster than any barber
could shave it. O, if hair breeches had then been in fashion, what a fine
world had it been for tailors, and so it was a fine world for tailors
nevertheless, for he that could make a garment slightest and thinnest
carried it away. Cutters, I can tell you, then stood upon it to have their
trade one of the twelve companies, for who was it then that would not have
his doublet cut to the skin, and his shirt cut into it, too, to make it
more cold. It was as much as a man’s life was worth, once to name a frieze
jerkin; it was high treason for a fat gross man to come within five miles
of the court. I hear where they died up all in one family, and not a mother's
child escaped, insomuch as they had but an Irish rug locked up in a press,
and not laid upon any bed neither. If those that were sick of this malady
slept of it, they never waked more. Physicians with their simples91 in this
case waxed simple fellows, and knew not which way to bestir them.
　　　　Galen92 might go shoe the gander93 for any good he could do; his
secretaries had so long called him divine that now he had lost all his
virtue upon earth. Hippocrates94 might well help almanac-makers, but
here he had not a word to say; a man might sooner catch the sweat
with plodding over him to no end than cure the sweat with any of his
impotent principles. Paracelsus,95 with his spirit of the buttery,96 and
his spirits of minerals, could not so much as say, God amend him, to the
matter. Plus erat in artifice quam arte,97 There was more infection in
the physician himself than his art could cure. This mortality first began
amongst old men, for they, taking a pride to have their breasts loose
basted with tedious beards, kept their houses so hot with their hairy
excrements that not so much but their very walls sweat out saltpetre
with the smothering perplexity; nay, a number of them had marvelous
hot breaths, which sticking in the briers of their bushy beards, could
not choose but (as close air long imprisoned) engender corruption.
　　　　Wiser was our Brother Banks98 of these latter days, who made his
juggling horse a cut, for fear if at any time he should foist,99 the stink
sticking in his thick bushy tail might be noisome to his auditors. Should
I tell you how many pursuivants with red noses, and sergeants with
precious faces,100 shrunk away in this sweat, you would not believe me.
Even as the salamander with his very sight blasteth apples on the trees,
so a pursuivant or a sergeant at this present, with the very reflex of
his fiery faces,101 was able to spoil a man afar off. In some places of the
world there is no shadow of the sun; Diebus illis,102 if it had been so in
England, the generation of Brute103 had died all and some. To knit up
this description in a pursenet,104 so fervent and scorching was the burning
air which enclosed them that the most blessed man then alive would
have thought that God had done fairly by him if he had turned him to
a goat, for goats take breath not at the mouth or nose only, but at the
ears also.
　　　　Take breath how they would, I vowed to tarry no longer among
them. As at Terouanne I was a demi-soldier in jest, so now I became a
martialist in earnest. Over sea with my implements I got me, where
hearing the King of France and the Switzers were together by the
ears, I made towards them as fast as I could, thinking to thrust myself
into that faction that was strongest. It was my good luck or my ill (I
know not which) to come just to the fighting of the battle, where I
saw a wonderful spectacle of bloodshed on both sides; here unwieldy
Switzers wallowing in their gore like an ox in his dung, there the
sprightly French sprawling and turning on the stained grass like a roach
new taken out of the stream; all the ground was strewed as thick with
battle-axes as the carpenter’s yard with chips; the plain appeared like
a quagmire, overspread as it was with trampled dead bodies. In one
place might you behold a heap of dead murdered men overwhelmed with
a falling steed instead of a tombstone, in another place a bundle of bodies
fettered together in their own bowels, and as the tyrant Roman emperors
used to tie condemnedliving caitiffs face to face to dead corses, so were
the half living here mixed with squeezed carcasses long putrified. Any
man might give arms that was an actor in that battle, for there were
more arms and legs scattered in the field that day than will be gathered
up till doomsday. The French King himself in this conflict was much
distressed, the brains of his own men sprinkled in his face; thrice was
his courser slain under him, and thrice was he struck on the breast
with a spear, but in the end, by the help of the Venetians, the Helvetians
or Switzers were subdued, and he crowned a victor, the peace concluded,
and the city of Millane105 surrendered unto him as a pledge of reconciliation.
　　　　That war thus blown over, and the several bands dissolved, like a crow
that still follows aloof where there is carrion, I flew me over to Munster106
in Germany, which an Anabaptistical brother named John Leyden kept at that
instant against the Emperor and the Duke of Saxony. Here I was in good hope
to set up my staff for some reasonable time, deeming that no city would
drive it to a siege except they were able to hold out, and prettily well had
these Munsterians held out, for they kept the Emperor and the Duke of
Saxony play for the space of a year, and longer would have done but that
Dame Famine came amongst them, whereupon they were forced by
messengers to agree upon a day of fight when, according to their
Anabaptistical error they might all be new christened in their own blood.
　　　　 That day come, flourishing entered John Leyden, the botcher, into
the field, with a scarf made of lists like a bow-case, a cross on his breast
like a thread bottom, a round twilted tailor’s cushion buckled like a tankard-
bearer’s device on his shoulders for a target, the pike whereof was a pack-
needle, a tough prentice’s club for his spear, a great brewer's cow107 on his
back for a corslet,108 and on his head, for a helmet, a huge high shoe with
the bottom turned upwards, embossed as full of hobnails as ever it might stick.
His men were all base handicrafts, as cobblers and curriers109 and tinkers,
whereof some had bars of iron, some hatchets, some cool-staves,110 some
dung-forks, some spades, some mattocks, some wood-knives, some addises111
for their weapons; he that was best provided had but a piece of rusty brown-
bill bravely fringed with cobwebs to fight for him. Perchance here and there
you might see a fellow that had a canker-eaten skull112 on his head which
served him and his ancestors for a chamber-pot two hundred years, and
another that had bent a couple of iron dripping-pans armour-wise to
fence his back and his belly, another that had thrust a pair of dry old
boots as a breast-plate before his belly of his doublet because he would
not be dangerously hurt, another that had twilted113 all his truss full of
counters, thinking if the enemy should take him, he would mistake them
for gold, and so save his life for his money. Very devout asses they were,
for all they were so dunstically114 set forth, and such as thought they
knew as much of God’s mind as richer men; why, inspiration was their
ordinary familiar,115 and buzzed in their ears like a bee in a box every
hour what news from heaven, hell, and the land of whipperginnie;116
displease them who durst, he should have his mittimus117 to damnation
ex tempore;118 they would vaunt there was not a pea’s difference be-
twixt them and the apostles: they were as poor as they, of as base trades
as they, and no more inspired than they, and with God there is no respect
of persons, only herein may seem some little diversity to lurk, that Peter
wore a sword, and they count it flat hell-fire for any man to wear a dagger;
nay, so grounded and gravelled119 were they in this opinion, that now when
they should come to battle, there’s never a one of them would bring a
blade (no, not an onion blade) about him, to die for it. It was not lawful,
said they, for any man to draw the sword but the magistrate, and in
fidelity (which I had well-nigh forgot), Jack Leyden, their magistrate,
had the image or likeness of a piece of a rusty sword, like a lusty lad,
by his side; now I remember me, it was but a foil neither, and he wore
it to show that he should have the foil of his enemies, which might
have been an oracle for his two-hand interpretation. Quid plura?120 His
battle is pitched; by pitched I do not mean set in order, for that was
far from their order, only as sailors do, pitch their apparel to make it
storm-proof, so had most of them pitched their patched clothes to
make them impierceable, a nearer way than to be at the charges of
armour by half. And in another sort he might be said to have pitched
the field, for he had pitched, or rather set up, his rest whether to
fly if they were discomfited.
　　　　Peace, peace, there in the belfry; service begins. Upon their knees
before they join falls John Leyden and his fraternity very devoutly; they
pray, they howl, they expostulate with God to grant them victory, and use
such unspeakable vehemence a man would think them the only well-bent
men under heaven. Wherein let me dilate a little more gravely than the
nature of this history requires, or will be expected of so young a prac-
titioner in divinity, that not those that intermissively121 cry, Lord open
unto us, Lord open unto us, enter first into the kingdom, that not the
greatest professors have the greatest portion in grace, that all is not
gold that glisters. When Christ said the kingdom of heaven must suffer
violence, He meant not the violence of long babbling prayers, nor the
violence of tedious invective sermons without wit, but the violence
of faith, the violence of good works, the violence of patient suffering.
The ignorant snatch the kingdom of heaven to themselves with greediness,
when we with all our learning sink into hell.
　　　　Where did Peter and John, in the third of the Acts, find the lame
cripple but in the gate of the temple called beautiful? In the beautifullest
gates of our temple, in the forefront of professors, are many lame cripples,
lame in life, lame in good works, lame in everything, yet will they always
sit at the gates of the temples; none be more forward than they to enter
into matters of reformation, yet none more behindhand to enter into the
true temple of the Lord by the gates of good life.
　　　　You may object that those which I speak against are more diligent in
reading the scriptures, more careful to resort unto sermons, more sober in
their looks, more modest in their attire, than any else. But I pray you, let
me answer you, doth not Christ say that before the latter day the sun shall
be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood? Whereof what may the
meaning be, but that the glorious sun of the gospel shall be eclipsed with
the dim cloud of dissimulation, that that which is the brightest planet of
salvation shall be a means of error and darkness, and the moon shall be
turned into blood, those that shine fairest, make the simplest show, seem
most to favour religion, shall rent out the bowels of the church, be turned
into blood, and all this shall come to pass before the notable day of the
Lord whereof this age is the eve?
　　　　Let me use a more familiar example, since the heat of a great
number outraged so excessively. Did not the devil lead Christ to the
pinnacle or highest place of the temple to tempt him? If he led Christ,
he will lead a whole army of hypocrites to the top or highest part of the
temple, the highest step of religion and holiness, to seduce them and
subvert them. I say unto you that which this, our tempted Saviour, with
many other words, besought his disciples, Save yourselves from this
forward generation; verily, verily, the servant is not greater than his
master, Verily, verily, sinful men are not holier than holy Jesus, their
maker. That holy Jesus again repeats this holy sentence, Remember the
words I said unto you: the servant is not holier nor greater than his
master, as if he should say, Remember then, imprint in your memory;
your pride and singularity will make you forget them; the effects of
them many years hence will come to pass. Whosoever will seek to save
his soul shall lose it; whosoever seeks by headlong means to enter into
heaven, and disannul God's ordinance, shall, with the giants122 that thought
to scale heaven in contempt of Jupiter, be overwhelmed with Mount Ossa
and Pelion, and dwell with the devil in eternal desolation.
　　　　Though the high priest’s office was expired when Paul said unto
one of them, God rebuke thee, thou painted supulchre, yet when a stander-
by reproved him, saying, Revilest thou the high priest?, he repented and
asked forgiveness.
　　　　That which I suppose, I do not grant; the lawfulness of the authority
they opposed themselves against is sufficiently proved; far be it my under-
age arguments should intrude themselves as a green weak prop to support
so high a building. Let it suffice, if you know Christ, you know his Father
also; if you know Christianity, you know the Fathers of the Church also.
But a great number of you, with Philip, have been long with Christ, and
have not known him, have long professed yourselves Christians, and have
not known his true ministers; you follow the French and Scottish fashion
and faction, and in all points are like the Switzers, Qui quaerunt cum qua
gente cadunt,123 that seek with what nation they may first miscarry.
　　　　In the days of Nero there was an odd fellow that had found out an
exquisite way to make glass as hammer-proof as gold; shall I say that the
like experiment he made upon glass we have practised on the gospel? Aye,
confidently will I: we have found out a sleight to hammer it to any heresy
whatsoever. But those furnaces of falsehood and hammer-heads of heresy
must be dissolved and broken as his was, or else I fear me the false
glittering glass of innovation will be better esteemed of than the ancient
gold of the gospel.
　　　　The fault of faults is this, that your dead-born faith is begotten by
too too infant fathers. Cato,124 one of the wisest men in Roman histories
canonized, was not born till his father was fourscore years old; none can
be a perfect father of faith, and beget men aright unto God, but those that
are aged in experience, have many years imprinted in their mild conversa-
tion, and have, with Zacheus, sold all their possessions of vanities to enjoy
the sweet fellowship, not of the human, but spiritual Messias.
　　　　Ministers and pastors, sell away your sects and schisms to the decrepit
churches in contention beyond sea; they have been so long inured to war,
both about matters of religion and regiment, that now they have no peace
of mind but in troubling all other men’s peace. Because the poverty of their
provinces will allow them no proportionable maintenance for higher callings
of ecclesiastical magistrates, they would reduce us to the precedent of their
rebellious persecuted beggary, much like the sect of philosophers called
Cynics, who, when they saw they were born to no lands or possessions,
nor had any possible means to support their estates, but they must live
despised and in misery, do what they could, they plotted and consulted
with themselves how to make their poverty better esteemed of than rich
dominion and sovereignty. The upshot of their plotting and consultation
was this, that they would live to themselves, scorning the very breath or
company of all men; they professed (according to the rate of their lands)
voluntary poverty, thin fare, and lying hard, contemning and inveighing against
all those as brute beasts whatsoever whom the world had given any
reputation for riches or prosperity. Diogenes was one of the first and
foremost of the ringleaders of this rusty morosity, and he, for all his
nice dogged disposition and blunt deriding of worldly dross and the gross
felicity of fools, was taken notwithstanding a little after very fairly
a-coining money in his cell; so fares it up and down with our cynical
reformed foreign churches: they will digest no grapes of great bishoprics,
forsooth, because they cannot tell how to come by them; they must shape
their coats, good men, according to their cloth, and do as they may, not
as they would, yet they must give us leave here in England that are their
honest neighbours, if we have more cloth than they, to make our garment
somewhat larger.
　　　　What was the foundation or groundwork of this dismal declining
of Munster but the banishing of their bishop, their confiscating and
casting lots for church livings, as the soldiers cast lots for Christ's
garments, and, in short terms, their making the house of God a den of
thieves? The house of God a number of hungry church-robbers in these
days have made a den of thieves. Thieves spend loosely what they have
gotten lightly; sacrilege is no sure inheritance; Dionysius was ne'er
the richer for robbing of Jupiter of his golden coat; he was driven in
the end to play the schoolmaster at Corinth. The name of religion, be
it good or bad that is ruinated, God never suffers unrevenged; I’ll
say of it as Ovid said of eunuchs:

　　　　　　　　　Qui primus pueris genitalia membra recidit,
　　　　　　　　　Vulnera quae fecit debuit ipse pati.

　　　　　　　　　Who first deprived young boys of their best part,
　　　　　　　　　With selfsame wounds he gave he ought to smart.125

So would he that first gelt126 religion of church livings had been first
gelt himself, or never lived; Cardinal Wolsey is the man I aim at, Qui
in suas poenas ingeniosus erat,127 first gave others a light to his own
overthrow. How it prospered with him and his instruments that after
wrought for themselves, chronicles largely report, though not apply,
and some parcel of their punishment yet unpaid I do not doubt but will
be required of their posterity.
　　　　To go forward with my story of the overthrow of that usurper, John
Leyden: he and all his army, as I said before, falling prostrate on their
faces and fervently given over to prayer, determined never to cease or
leave soliciting of God till he had showed them from heaven some manifest
miracle of success.
　　　　Note that it was a general received tradition both with John Leyden
and all the crew of Cnipperdollings and Muncers,128 if God at any time at
their vehement outcries and clamours did not condescend to their requests,
to rail on him and curse him to his face, to dispute with him and argue
him of injustice for not being so good as his word with them, and to
urge his many promises in the scripture against him, so that they did
not serve God simply, but that he should serve their turns, and after
that tenure are many content to serve as bondmen to save the danger of
hanging, but he that serves God aright, whose upright conscience hath
for his mot, Amor est mihi cause sequendi,129 I serve because I love, he
says, Ego te potius, Domine, quam tua dona sequar,130 I’ll rather follow
thee, O Lord, for thine own sake, than for any covetous respect of that
thou canst do for me.
　　　　Christ would have no followers but such as forsook all and follow
him, such as forsake all their own desires, such as abandon all
expectations of reward in this world, such as neglected and contemned
their lives, their wives and children, in comparison of him, and were
content to take up their cross and follow him.
　　　　These Anabaptists had not yet forsook all and followed Christ,
they had not forsook their own desires of revenge and innovation, they
had not abandoned their expectation of the spoil of their enemies, they
regarded their lives, they looked after their wives and children, they
took not up their crosses of humility and followed him, but would cross
him, upbraid him, and set him at naught if he assured not by some sign
their prayers and supplications. Deteriora sequuntur,131 they followed God
as daring him; God heard their prayers, Quod petitur poena est,132 it was
their speedy punishment that they prayed for. Lo, according to the sum
of their impudent supplications, a sign in the heavens appeared, the
glorious sign of the rainbow, which agreed just with the sign of their
ensign, that was a rainbow likewise.
　　　　Whereupon, assuring themselves of victory (Miseri quod volunt,
facile credunt,133 That which wretches would have, they easily believe),
with shouts and clamours they presently ran headlong on their well
deserved confusion. Pitiful and lamentable was their unpitied and well
performed slaughter. To see even a bear (which is the most cruelest
of all beasts) too too bloodily overmatched, and deformedly rent in
pieces by an unconscionable number of curs, it would move compassion
against kind, and make those that (beholding him at the stake yet
uncoped with) wish him a suitable death to his ugly shape, now to
recall their hard-hearted wishes, and moan him suffering as a mild
beast in comparison of the foul-mouthed mastiffs, his butchers; even
such compassion did those overmatched ungracious Munsterians obtain
of many indifferent eyes, who now thought them (suffering) to be sheep
brought innocent to the shambles, whenas before they deemed them as
a number of wolves up in arms against the shepherds.
　　　　The Emperials themselves that were their executioners (like a
father that weeps when he beats his child, yet still weeps and still
beats) not without much ruth and sorrow prosecuted that lamentable
massacre, yet drums and trumpets sounding nothing but stern revenge
in their ears made them so eager that their hands had no leisure to
ask counsel of their effeminate eyes; their swords, their pikes,
their bills, their bows, their calivers slew, empierced, knocked
down, shot through and overthrew as many men every minute of the
battle as there falls ears of corn before the scythe at one blow,
yet all their weapons so slaying, empiercing, knocking down, shooting
through, overthrowing, dis-soul-joined not half so many as the hailing
thunder of the great ordinance; so ordinary at every footstep was
the imbruement of iron in blood that one could hardly discern heads
from bullets, or clottered hair from mangled flesh hung with gore.
　　　　This tale must at one time or other give up the ghost, and as
good now as stay longer; I would gladly rid my hands of it cleanly
if I could tell how, for what with talking of cobblers, tinkers,
rope-makers, botchers, and dirt-daubers, the mark is clean out of
my muse’s mouth, and I am as it were more than duncified twixt
divinity and poetry. What is there more as touching this tragedy
that you would be resolved of? Nay, quickly, for now is my pen on
foot again. How John Leyden died, is that it? He died like dog; he
was hanged and the halter paid for. For his companions, do they trouble
you? I can tell you they troubled some men before, for they were all
killed, and none escaped, no, not so much as one to tell the tale of
the rainbow. Hear what it is to be Anabaptists, to be Puritans, to
be villains; you may be counted illuminate botchers134 for awhile,
but your end will be, Good people, pray for us.
　　　　With the tragical catastrophe of this Munsterian conflict did I
cashier the new vocation of my cavaliership. There was no more
honourable wars in Christendom towards, wherefore, after I had learned
to be half an hour in bidding a man bonjour in German sunonimas,135 I
travelled along the country towards England as fast as I could.
　　　　What with wagons and bare ten toes having attained to Middelburg
(good Lord, see the changing chances of us knights-errant infants136),
I met with the right honourable Lord Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,137
my late master. Jesu, I was persuaded I should not be more glad to
see heaven than I was to see him. O, it was a right noble lord,
liberality itself (if in this iron age there were any such creature
as liberality left on the earth), a prince in content because a poet
without peer.
　　　　Destiny never defames herself but when she lets an excellent
poet die; if there be any spark of Adam’s paradised perfection yet
embered up in the breasts of mortal men, certainly God hath bestowed
that, his perfectest image, on poets. None come so near to God in wit,
none more contemn the world; Vatis auarus non temere est animus, saith
Horace, versus amat, hoc studet unum, Seldom have you seen any poet
possessed with avarice, only verses he loves, nothing else he delights
in, and as they contemn the world, so contrarily of the mechanical
world are none more contemned. Despised they are of the world, because
they are not of the world; their thoughts are exalted above the world
of ignorance and all earthly conceits.
　　　　As sweet angelical choristers, they are continually conversant in
the heaven of arts; heaven itself is but the highest height of knowledge;
he that knows himself, and all things else, knows the means to be happy;
happy, thrice happy, are they whom God hath doubled his spirit upon,
and given a double soul unto to be poets.
　　　　My heroical master exceeded in this supernatural kind of wit; he
entertained no gross earthly spirit of avarice, nor weak womanly spirit
of pusillanimity and fear that are feigned to be of the water, but
admirable, airy and fiery spirits, full of freedom, magnaminity and
bountihood. Let me not speak any more of his accomplishments, for fear
I spend all my spirits in praising him, and leave myself no vigour or
wit or effects of a soul to go forward with my history.
　　　　Having thus met him I so much adored, no interpleading was there
of opposite occasions, but back I must return and bear half stakes with
him in the lottery of travel. I was not altogether unwilling to walk
along with such a good purse-bearer, yet musing what changeable humour
had so suddenly seduced him from his native soil to seek out needless
perils in those parts beyond sea, one night very boldly I demanded of
him the reason that moved him thereto.
　　　　Ah, quoth he, my little page, full little canst thou perceive how
far metamorphosed I am from myself, since I last saw thee. There is a
little god called love that will not be worshipped of any leaden brains,
one that proclaims himself sole king and emperor of piercing eyes and
chief sovereign of soft hearts; he it is that, exercising his empire
in my eyes, hath exorcised and clean conjured me from my content.
　　　　Thou knowest stately Geraldine,138 too stately I fear for me to do
homage to her statue or shrine; she it is that is come out of Italy to
bewitch all the wise men of England; upon Queen Catherine dowager139
she waits, that hath a dowry of beauty sufficient to make her wooed of
the greatest kings in Christendom. Her high-exalted sunbeams have set
the phoenix nest of my breast on fire, and I myself have brought Arabian
spiceries of sweet passions and praises to furnish out the funeral flame
of my folly. Those who were condemned to be smothered to death by
sinking down into the soft bottom of an highbuilt bed of roses, never
died so sweet a death as I should die if her rose-coloured disdain were
my death's-man.140
　　　　Oh, thrice imperial Hampton Court, Cupid’s enchanted castle, the
place where I first saw the perfect omnipotence of the Almighty expressed
in mortality, ‘tis thou alone that, tithing all other men solace in thy
pleasant situation, affordest me nothing but an excellent-begotten sorrow
out of the chief treasury of all thy recreations.
　　　　Dear Wilton, understand that there it was where I first set eye on
my more than celestial Geraldine. Seeing her, I admired her; all the whole
receptacle of my sight was unhabited with her rare worth. Long suit and
uncessant protestations got me the grace to be entertained. Did never
unloving servant so prentice-like obey his never-pleased mistress as I
did her. My life, my wealth, my friends had all their destiny depending
on her command.
　　　　Upon a time I was determined to travel; the fame of Italy, and an
especial affection I had unto poetry, my second mistress, for which Italy
was so famous, had wholly ravished me unto it. There was no dehortment141
from it, but needs thither I would, wherefore, coming to my mistress as
she was then walking with other ladies of estate in Paradise at Hampton
Court, I most humbly besought her of favour that she would give me so
much gracious leave to absent myself from her service as to travel a
year or two into Italy. She very discreetly answered me that if my love
were so hot as I had often avouched, I did very well to apply the plaster
of absence unto it, for absence, as they say, causeth forgetfulness, yet
nevertheless since it is Italy, my native country, you are so desirous
to see, I am the more willing to make my will yours. I, pete Italiam,
go and seek Italy with Aeneas, but be more true than Aeneas; I hope
that kind wit-cherishing climate will work no change in so witty a
breast. No country of mine shall it be more, if it conspire with thee
in any new love against me. One charge I will give thee, and let it be
rather a request than charge: when thou comest to Florence (the fair
city from whence I fetched the pride of my birth), by an open challenge
defend my beauty against all comers.
　　　　Thou hast that honourable carriage in arms that it shall be no
discredit for me to bequeath all the glory of my beauty to thy well-
governed arm. Fain would I be known where I was born, fain would I have
thee known where fame sits in her chiefest theatre. Farewell, forget
me not; continued deserts will eternize me unto thee, thy wishes shall
be expired when thy travel shall be once ended.
　　　　Here did tears step out before words, and intercepted the course
of my kind-conceived speech, even as wind is allayed with rain; with heart-
scalding sighs I confirmed her parting request, and vowed myself hers
while living heat allowed me to be mine own; Hinc illae lachrimae,142 here
hence proceedeth the whole cause of my peregrination.
　　　　Not a little was I delighted with this unexpected love-story,
especially from a mouth out of which was naught wont to march but stern
precepts of gravity and modesty. I swear unto you, I thought his company
the better by a thousand crowns because he had discarded those nice
terms of chastity and continency. Now I beseech God love me so well as
I love a plain-dealing man; earth is earth, flesh is flesh, earth will
to earth, and flesh unto flesh; frail earth, frail flesh, who can keep
you from the work of your creation?
　　　　Dismissing this fruitless annotation pro et contra, towards Venice
we progressed, and took Rotterdam in our way, that was clean out of our
way; there we met with aged learning’s chief ornament, that abundant
and super-ingenious clerk, Erasmus, as also with merry Sir Thomas More,143
our countryman, who was come purposely over a little before us to visit
the said grave father Erasmus; what talk, what conference we had then
it were here superfluous to rehearse, but this I can assure you, Erasmus
in all his speeches seemed so much to mislike the indiscretion of princes
in preferring of parasites and fools that he decreed with himself to
swim with the stream, and write a book forthwith in commendation of folly.144
Quick-witted Sir Thomas More travelled in a clean contrary province, for
he seeing most commonwealths corrupted by ill custom, and that principalities
were nothing but great piracies, which, gotten by violence and murder were
maintained by private undermining and bloodshed, that in the chiefest
flourishing kingdoms there was no equal or well-divided weal one with
another, but a manifest conspiracy of rich men against poor men, procuring
their own unlawful commodities under the name and interest of the
commonwealth, he concluded with himself to lay down a perfect plot of
a commonwealth or government, which he would entitle his Utopia.145
　　　　So left we them to prosecute their discontented studies, and made
our next journey to Wittenberg.
　　　　At the very point of our entrance into Wittenberg, we were spectators
of a very solemn scholastical entertainment of the Duke of Saxony thither.
Whom, because he was the chief patron of their university, and had took
Luther’s part in banishing the Mass and all like papal jurisdiction out
of their town, they crouched to extremely. The chief ceremonies of their
entertainment were these: first, the heads of their university (they were
great heads, of certainty) met him in their hooded hypocrisy and doctorly
acccoutrements, secundum formam statuti;146 where by the orator of the
university, whose pickerdevant 147 was very plentifully besprinkled with
rose water, a very learned or rather ruthful oration was delivered (for it
rained all the while) signifying thus much, that it was all by patch and
by piecemeal stolen out of Tully, and he must pardon them, though in
emptying their phrase-books the world emptied his entrails, for they did
it not in any　ostentation of wit (which God knows they had not) but to
show the extraordinary　goodwill they bare the Duke (to have him stand in
the rain till he was through wet); a　thousand quemadmodums and quapro-
pters 148 he came over him with; every sentence he　concluded with Esse
posse videatur;149 through all the Nine Worthies150 he ran with praising　and
comparing him; Nestor's years he assured him of under the broad seal of
their supplications, and with that crow-trodden151 verse in Virgil, Dum iuga
montis aper,152 he packed up his pipes and cried Dixi.153
　　　　That pageant overpassed, there rushed upon him a miserable
rabblement of junior graduates that all cried upon him mightily in their
gibberish like a company of beggars, God save your Grace, God save your
Grace, Jesus preserve your Highness, though it be but for an hour.
　　　　Some three-halfpenny worth of Latin there also had he thrown at
his face, but it was choice stuff, I can tell you, as there is a choice
even amongst rags gathered up from the dunghill. At the town’s end met
him the burghers and dunstical incorporationers154 of Wittenberg in their
distinguished liveries, their distinguished livery faces, I mean, for
they were most of them hot-livered drunkards, and had all the coat
colours of sanguine, purple, crimson, copper, carnation that were to
be had in their countenances. Filthy knaves, no cost had they bestowed
on the town for his welcome, saving new painted their houghs155 and
boozing-houses, which commonly are fairer than their churches, and over
their gates set the town arms carousing a whole health to the Duke’s
arms, which sounded gulping after this sort, Vanhotten, slotten, irk bloshen
glotten gelderslike: whatever the words were, the sense was this: Good
drink is a medicine for all diseases.
　　　　A bursten-belly ink-horn orator called Vanderhulke156 they picked out
to present him with an oration, one that had a sulphurous big-swollen
large face like a Saracen, eyes like two Kentish oysters, a mouth that
opened as wide every time he spake as one of those old knit trap doors,
a beard as though it had been made of a bird’s nest plucked in pieces,
which consisteth of straw, hair and dirt mixed together. He was apparelled
in black leather new liquored, & a short gown without any gathering in
the back, faced before and behind with a boisterous bearskin, and a red
night-cap on his head. To this purport and effect was this brocking157
double beer oration.
　　　　Right noble Duke (ideo nobilis quasi no bilis, for you have no bile
or choler in you), know that our present incorporation of Wittenberg,
by me the tongueman of their thankfulness, a townsman by birth, a free
German by nature, an orator by art, and a scrivener by education, in all
obedience & chastity, most bountifully bid you welcome to Wittenberg.
Welcome, said I? O orificial rhetoric, wipe thy everlasting mouth, and
afford me a more Indian metaphor than that for the brave princely blood
of a Saxon. Oratory, uncask the bard hutch of thy compliments, and with
the triumphantest trope in thy treasury do trewage unto him. What impotent
speech with his eight parts may not specify, this unestimable gift, holding
his peace, shall as it were (with tears I speak it) do, whereby as it may
seem or appear to manifest or declare, and yet it is, and yet it is not,
and yet it may be a diminutive oblation meritorious to your high pusillan-
imity and indignity. Why should I go gadding and fizgigging158 after firking
flantado amphibologies?159 Wit is wit, and goodwill is goodwill. With
all the wit I have, I here, according to the premises, offer up unto you
the city’s general goodwill, which is a gilded can, in manner and form
following, for you and the heirs of your body lawfully begotten to drink
healths in. The scholastical squitter-books160 clout you up canopies and
foot-cloths of verses. We that are good-fellows, and live as merry as cup
and can, will not verse upon you as they do, but must do as we can, and
entertain you if it be but with a plain empty can. He hath learning enough
that hath learned to drink to his first man.
　　　　Gentle Duke, without paradox be it spoken, thy horses at our own
proper costs and charges shall knead up to the knees all the while thou
art here in spruce beer and Lubeck liquor. Not a dog thou bringest with
thee but shall be banqueted with Rhenish wine and sturgeon. On our shoulders
we wear no lambskin or miniver like these academics, yet we can drink to
the confusion of thy enemies. Good lamb’s-wool have we for their lambskins
and for their miniver, large minerals in our coffers. Mechanical men they
call us, and not amiss, for most of us, being Maechi,161 that is, cuckolds and
whoremasters, fetch our antiquity from the temple of Mecca, where Mahomet
was hung up. Three parts of the world, America, Afric and Asia, are of this,
our mechanic religion. Nero, when he cried, O quantus artifex pereo,162
professed himself of our freedom, insomuch as artifex is a citizen or
craftsman, as well as carnifex a scholar or hangman. Pass on by leave into
the precincts of our abomination. Bonny Duke, frolic in our bower, and
persuade thyself that even as garlic hath three properties, to make a man
wink, drink and stink, so we will wink on thy imperfections, drink to thy
favourites, and all thy foes shall stink before us. So be it. Farewell.
　　　　The Duke laughed not a little at this ridiculous oration, but that
very night as great an ironical occasion was ministered, for he was bidden
to one of the chief schools to a comedy handled by scholars. Acolastus, the
Prodigal Child,163 was the name of it, which was so filthily acted, so leathernly
set forth, as would have moved laughter in Heraclitus. One, as if he had been
planing a clay floor, stampingly trod the stage so hard with his feet that
I thought verily he had resolved to do the carpenter that set it up some utter
shame. Another flung his arms like cudgels at a pear-tree, insomuch as it was
mightily dreaded that he would strike the candles that hung above their heads
out of their sockets, and leave them all dark. Another did nothing but wink
and make faces. There was a parasite, and he with clapping his hands and
thripping164 his fingers seemed to dance an antic to and fro. The only thing
they did well was the prodigal child’s hunger, most of their scholars being
hungerly kept, and surely you would have said they had been brought up in
hogs' academy to learn to eat acorns if you had seen how sedulously they fell
to them. Not a jest had they to keep their auditors from sleeping but of swill
and draff; yea, now and then the servant put his hand into the dish before
his master, and almost choked himself, eating slovenly and ravenously to
cause sport.
　　　　The next day they had solemn disputations, where Luther and Carolosta-
dius scolded level-coil.165 A mass of words I wot well they heaped up against
the Mass and the Pope, but farther particulars of their disputations I remember
not. I thought verily they would have worried one another with words, they
were so earnest and vehement. Luther had the louder voice; Carolostadius went
beyond him in beating and bouncing with his fists. Quae supra nos, nihil ad
nos;166 they uttered nothing to make a man laugh, therefore I will leave them.
Marry, their outward gestures would now and then afford a man a morsel of
mirth; of those two I mean not so much as of all the other train of opponents
and respondents. One pecked with his forefinger at every half-syllable he
brought forth, and nodded with his nose like an old singing man teaching a
young chorister to keep time. Another would be sure to wipe his mouth with
his handkerchief at the end of every full point, and ever when he thought he
had cast a figure so curiously167 as he dived over head and ears into his auditors’
admiration, he would take occasion to stroke up his hair, and twine up his
mustachios twice or thrice over, while they might have leisure to applaud
him. A third wavered and waggled his head like a proud horse playing with his
bridle, or as I have seen some fantastical swimmer at every stroke train his
chin sidelong over his left shoulder. A fourth sweat and foamed at the mouth
for very anger his adversary had denied that part of the syllogism which he
was not prepared to answer .A fifth spread his arms like an usher that goes
before to make room, and thripped with his finger and his thumb when he thought
he had tickled it with a conclusion. A sixth hung down his countenance like a
sheep, and stutted and slavered very pitifully when his invention was stepped
aside out of the way. A seventh gasped for wind, and groaned in his pronunciation
as if he were hard bound with some bad argument. Gross plodders they were all,
that had some learning and reading, but no wit to make use of it. They imagined
the Duke took the greatest pleasure and contentment under heaven to hear them
speak Latin, and as long as they talked nothing but Tully, he was bound to attend
them. A most vain thing it is in many universities at this day, that they count
him excellent eloquent who stealeth not whole phrases but whole pages out of
Tully. If of a number of shreds of his sentences he can shape an oration, from
all the world he carries it away,168 although in truth it be no more than a fool's
coat of many colours. No invention or matter have they of their own, but tack
up a style of his stale gallimaufries. The leaden-headed Germans first began
this, and we Englishmen have surfeited of their absurd imitation. I pity Nizolius,169
that had nothing to do but pick thread-ends out of an old overworn garment.
　　　　This is but by the way; we must look back to our disputants. One amongst
the rest, thinking to be more conceited170 than his fellows, seeing the Duke have
a dog he loved well, which sat by him on the tarras,171 converted all his oration
to him, and not a hair of his tail but he combed out with comparisons ; so to
have courted him if he were a bitch had been very suspicious.Another commented
and descanted on the Duke’s staff, new tipping it with many quaint epithets.
Some cast his nativity, and promised him he should not die until the day of
judgement. Omitting further superfluities of this stamp, in this general
assembly we found intermixed that abundant scholar Cornelius Agrippa.172 At
that time he bare the fame to be the greatest conjurer in Christendom. Scoto,173
that did the juggling tricks before the Queen, never came near him one quarter
in magic reputation. The doctors of Wittenberg, doting on the rumour that
went of him, desired him before the Duke and them to do something extraordinary
memorable.
　　　　One requested to see pleasant Plautus, and that he would show them in
what habit he went, and with what countenance he looked when he ground corn
in the mill. Another had half a month's mind174 to Ovid and his hook-nose.
Erasmus, who was not wanting in that honourable meeting, requested to see
Tully in that same grace and majesty he pleaded his oration pro Roscio Amerino,175
affirming that till in person he beheld his importunity of pleading, he would
in no wise be persuaded that any man could carry away a manifest case with
rhetoric so strangely. To Erasmus' petition he easily condescended, and
willing the doctors at such an hour to hold their convocation, and every
one to keep him in his place without moving, at the time prefixed in entered
Tully, ascended his pleading-place, and declaimed verbatim the forenamed
oration, but with such astonishing amazement, with such fervent exaltation
of spirit, with such soul-stirring gestures, that all his auditors were
ready to install his guilty client for a god.
　　　　Great was the concourse of glory Agrippa drew to him with this one
feat. And indeed he was so cloyed with men which came to behold him that
he was fain, sooner than he would, to return to the Emperor’s court from
whence he came, and leave Wittenberg before he would. With him we travelled
along, having purchased his acquaintance a little before. By the way as we
went, my master and I agreed to change names. It was concluded betwixt us
that I should be the Earl of Surrey, and he my man, only because in his
own person, which he would not have reproached, he meant to take more
liberty of behaviour; as for my carriage, he knew he was to tune it at
a key, either high or low, as he list.
　　　　To the Emperor’s court we came, where our entertainment was every
way plentiful; carouses we had in whole gallons instead of quart-pots. Not
a health was given us but contained well near a hogshead.176 The customs
of the country we were eager to be instructed in, but nothing we could
learn but this, that ever at the Emperor’s coronation there is an ox
roasted with a stag in the belly, and that stag in his belly hath a kid,
and that kid is stuffed full of birds. Some courtiers, to weary out time,
would tell us further tales of Cornelius Agrippa, and how when Sir Thomas
More, our countryman, was there, he showed him the whole destruction of
Troy in a dream. How the Lord Cromwell, being the King’s embassador there,
in like case in a perspective glass he set before his eyes King Henry the
Eighth with all his lords on hunting in his forest at Windsor, and when he
came into his study and was very urgent to be partaker of some rare experiment
that he might report when he came into England, he willed him amongst two
thousand great books to take down which he list, and begin to read one line
in any place, and without book he would rehearse twenty leaves following.
Cromwell did so, and in many books tried him, when in everything he exceeded
his promise and conquered his expectation. To Charles the Fifth, then Emperor,
they reported how he showed the nine worthies, David, Solomon, Gideon and
the rest, in that similitude and likeness that they lived upon earth. My
master and I, having by the highway side gotten some reasonable familiarity
with him, upon this access of miracles imputed to him, resolved to request
him something in our own behalfs. I, because I was his suborned lord and
master, desired him to see the lively image of Geraldine, his love, in the
glass, and what at that instant she did, and with whom she was talking. He
showed her us without any more ado, sick weeping on her bed, and resolved
all into devout religion for the absence of her lord. At the sight thereof,
he could in no wise refrain, though he had took upon him the condition of
a servant, but he must forthwith frame this extemporal ditty.177

　　　　All soul, no earthly flesh, why dost thou fade?
　　　　All gold, no worthless dross, why look’st thou pale?
　　　　Sickness, how dar’st thou one so fair invade?
　　　　Too base infirmity to work her bale;
　　　　Heaven be distempered since she grieved pines,
　　　　Never be dry, these my sad plaintive lines.

　　　　Perch thou, my spirit, on her silver breasts,
　　　　And with their pain-redoubled music beatings,
　　　　Let them toss thee to world where all toil rests,
　　　　Where bliss is subject to no fears’ defeatings;
　　　　Her praise I tune whose tongue doth tune the spheres,
　　　　And gets new muses in her hearers’ ears.

　　　　Stars, fall to fetch fresh light from her rich eyes,
　　　　Her bright brow drives the sun to clouds beneath,
　　　　Her hairs’ reflex with red strakes paints the skies,
　　　　Sweet morn and evening dew flows from her breath;
　　　　Phoebe rules tides, she my tears’ tides forth draws,
　　　　In her sick-bed love sits and maketh laws.

　　　　Her dainty limbs tinsel her silk-soft sheets,
　　　　Her rose-crowned cheeks eclipse my dazzled sight,
　　　　O glass, with too much joy my thoughts thou greets,
　　　　And yet thou showest me day but by twilight;
　　　　I’ll kiss thee for the kindness I have felt,
　　　　Her lips one kiss would unto nectar melt.

　　　　Though the Emperor’s court and the extraordinary edifying company
of Cornelius Agrippa might have been arguments of weight to have arrested
us a little longer there, yet Italy still stuck as a great mote in my
master’s eye; he thought he had travelled no farther than Wales till
he had took survey of that country which was such a curious moulder of
wits.
　　　　To cut off blind ambages178 by the highway side, we made a long stride
and got to Venice in short time, where having scarce looked about us, a
precious supernatural pander, apparelled in all points like a gentleman,
and having half a dozen several languages in his purse, entertained us in
our own tongue very paraphrastically and eloquently, and maugre179 all other
pretended acquaintance, would have us in a violent kind of courtesy to be
the guests of his appointment. His name was Petro de Campo Frego, a no-
table practitioner in the policy of bawdry. The place where he brought us
was a pernicious courtesan’s house named Tabitha the temptress’s, a
wench that could set as civil a face on it as chastity's first martyr, Lucr-
etia. What will you conceit to be in any saint's house that was there to
seek? Books, pictures, beads, crucifixes, why, there was a haberdasher’s
shop of them in every chamber. I warrant you should not see one set of
her neckercher perverted or turned awry, not a piece of a hair displaced.
On her beds there was not a wrinkle of any wallowing to be found; her
pillows bare out as smooth as a groaning wife’s belly, and yet she was a
Turk and an infidel, and had more doings than all her neighbours besides.
Us for our money they used like emperors. I was master, as you heard
before, and my master, the Earl, was but as my chief man whom I made my
companion. So it happened (as iniquity will out at one time or other) that
she, perceiving my expense had no more vents than it should have, fell in
with my supposed servant, my man, and gave him half a promise of marriage
if he would help to make me away, that she and he might enjoy the jewels
and wealth that I had.
　　　　The indifficulty of the condition thus she explained unto him: her
house stood upon vaults, which in two hundred years together were never
searched; who came into her house none took notice of; his fellow-servants
that knew of his master’s abode there should be all dispatched by him, as
from his master, into sundry parts of the city about business, and when
they returned, answer should be made that he lay not there any more, but
had removed to Padua since their departure, and thither they must follow
him. Now (quoth she), if you be disposed to make him away in their absence,
you shall have my house at command. Stab, poison, or shoot him through
with a pistol, all is one; into the vault he shall be thrown when the deed
is done. On my bare honesty, it was a crafty quean, for she had enacted with
herself, if he had been my legitimate servant, as he was one that served and
supplied my necessities, when he had murdered me, to have accused him of the
murder, and made all that I had hers (as I carried all my master’s wealth,
money, jewels, rings, or bills of exchange, continually about me). He very
subtly consented to her stratagem at the first motion; kill me he would,
that heavens could not withstand, and a pistol was the predestinate engine
which must deliver the parting blow. God wot I was a raw young squire, and
my master dealt Judasly with me, for he told me but everything that she
and he agreed of. Wherefore I could not possibly prevent it, but as a man
would say, avoid it. The execution day aspired to his utmost devolution;
into my chamber came my honourable attendant with his pistol charged by
his side, very suspiciously and sullenly; Lady Tabitha and Petro de Campo
Frego, her pander, followed him at the hard heels.
　　　　At their entrance I saluted them all very familiarly and merrily,
and began to impart unto them what disquiet dreams had disturbed me the
last night. I dreamt, quoth I, that my man Brunquel180 here (for no better
name got he of me) came into my chamber with a pistol charged under his
arm to kill me, and that he was suborned by you, Mistress Tabitha, and
my very good friend, Petro de Campo Frego; God send it turn to good, for
it hath affrighted me above measure, As they were ready to enter into a
colourable181 commonplace of the deceitful frivolousness of dreams, my
trusty servant Brunquel stood quivering and quaking every joint of him, and,
as it was before compacted between us, let his pistol drop from him on the
sudden, wherewith I started out of my bed, and drew my rapier, and cried,
Murder, murder, which made goodwife Tabitha ready to bepiss her.
　　　　My servant, or my master, which you will, I took roughly by the collar,
and threatened to run him through incontinent if he confessed not the
truth. He, as it were, stricken with remorse of conscience (God be with
him, for he could counterfeit most daintily), down on his knees, asked
me forgiveness, and impeached Tabitha and Petro de Campo Frego as guilty
of subornation. I very mildly and gravely gave him audience; rail on
them I did not after his tale was ended, but said I would try what the
law could do. Conspiracy by the custom of their country was a capital
offence, and what custom or justice might afford they should be all sure
to feel. I could, quoth I, acquit myself otherwise, but it is not for a
stranger to be his own carver in revenge. Not a word more with Tabitha,
but die she would before God or the devil would have her; she sounded182
and revived, and then sounded again, and after she revived again, sighed
heavily, spoke faintly and pitifully, yea, and so pitifully as, if a man had
not known the pranks of harlots before, he would have melted into com-
miseration. Tears, sighs and doleful-tuned words could not make any
forcible claim to my stony ears; it was the glittering crowns that I
hungered and thirsted after, and with them, for all her mock holy-
day gestures, she was fain to come off before I condescended to any
bargain of silence. So it fortuned (fie upon that unfortunate word of
fortune) that this whore, this quean, this courtesan, this common of
ten thousand, so bribing me not to bewray her, had given me a great
deal of counterfeit gold which she had received of a coiner to make
away a little before. Amongst the gross sum of my bribery, I, silly
milksop, mistrusting no deceit, under an angel of light took what she
gave me, ne’er turned it over, for which (O falsehood in fair show)
my master and I had like to have been turned over.183 He that is a
knight-errant, exercised in the affairs of ladies and gentlewomen, hath
more places to send money to than the devil hath to send his spirits
to.
　　　　There was a delicate wench named Flavia Aemilia, lodging in
Saint Mark’s street at a goldsmiths’, which I would fain have had
to the grand test, to try whether she were cunning in alchemy or no.
Ay me, she was but a counterfeit slip,184 for she not only gave me the
slip, but had well-nigh made me a slip-string.185 To her I sent my gold
to beg an hour of grace; ah, graceless fornicatress, my hostess and
she were confederate, who having gotten but one piece of my ill gold
in their hands, devised the means to make me immortal. I could drink
for anger till my head ached, to think how I was abused. Shall I shame
the devil and speak the truth? To prison was I sent as principal, and
my master as accessary; nor was it to a prison neither, but to the
master of the mint’s house, who though partly our judge, and a most
severe upright justice in his own nature, extremely seemed to condole
our ignorant estate, and without all186 peradventure a present redress
he had ministered if certain of our countrymen, hearing an English earl
was apprehended for coining, had not come to visit us. An ill planet
brought them thither, for at the first glance they knew the servant
of my secrecies to be the Earl of Surrey, and I (not worthy to be
named I) an outcast of his cup or pantofles. Thence, thence sprang
the full period of our infelicity. The master of the mint, our whilom
refresher and consolation, now took part against us; he thought we
had a mint in our heads of mischievous conspiracies against their
state. Heavens bear witness with us it was not so (heavens will not
always come to witness when they are called).
　　　　To a straiter ward were we committed; that which we have
imputatively transgressed must be answered. O, the heathen hey-pass187
and the intrinsical legerdemain188 of our special approved good pander,
Petro de Campo Frego. He, although he dipped in the same dish with
us every day, seeming to labour our cause very importunately, and had
interpreted for us to the state from the beginning, yet was one of
those treacherous Brother Trulies,189 and abused us most clerkly. He
interpreted to us with a pestilence, for whereas we stood obstinately
upon it we were wrongfully detained, and that it was naught but a
malicious practice of sinful Tabitha, our late hostess, he, by a fine
cony-catching corrupt translation, made us plainly to confess, and
cried miserere ere we had need of our neck-verse.190
　　　　Detestable, detestable, that the flesh and the devil should deal
by their factors. I’ll stand to it, there is not a pander but hath
vowed paganism. The devil himself is not such a devil as he, so be
he perform his function aright. He must have the back of an ass, the
snout of an elephant, the wit of a fox, and the teeth of a wolf; he
must fawn like a spaniel, crouch like a Jew, leer like a sheep-biter.
If he be half a Puritan, and have scripture continually in his mouth,
he speeds the better. I can tell you it is a trade of great promotion,
and let none ever think to mount by service in foreign courts, or creep
near to some magnific lords, if they be not seen in this science. O,
it is the art of arts, and ten thousand times goes beyond the
intelligencer.191 None but a staid grave civil man is capable of it; he
must have exquisite courtship in him, or else he is not old who,192 he
wants the best point in his tables.
　　　　God be merciful to our pander (and that were for God to work
a miracle), he was seen in all the seven liberal deadly sciences;
not a sin but he was as absolute in as Satan himself. Satan could
never have supplanted us so as he did. I may say to you, he planted
in us the first Italianate wit that we had. During the time we lay
close and took physic in this castle of contemplation, there was a
magnifico’s wife of good calling sent to bear us company. Her
husband’s name was Castaldo; she hight193 Diamante; the cause of her
committing was an ungrounded jealous suspicion which her doting
husband had conceived of her chastity. One Isaac Medicus, a Bergamask,194
was the man he chose to make him a monster,195 who being a courtier,
and repairing to his house very often, neither for love of him nor
his wife, but only with a drift to borrow money of a pawn of wax and
parchment,196 when he saw his expectation deluded, & that Castaldo was
too chary for him to close with, he privily, with purpose of revenge,
gave out amongst his copesmates197 that he resorted to Castaldo’s
house for no other end but to cuckold him, and doubtfully he talked
that he had, and he had not, obtained his suit. Rings which he borrowed
of a light courtesan that he used to, he would fain to be taken from
her fingers, and, in sum, so handled the matter that Castaldo ex-
claimed, Out, whore! strumpet! six-penny hackster!198 Away with her
to prison!
　　　　As glad were we almost as if they had given us liberty, that for-
tune lent us such a sweet pewfellow. A pretty round-faced wench was
it, with black eyebrows, a high forehead, a little mouth, and a sharp
nose, as fat and plum, every part of her, as a plover, a skin as slick
and soft as the back of a swan; it doth me good when I remember her.
Like a bird she tripped on the ground, and bare out her belly as ma-
jestical as an estrich. With a likerish rolling eye fixed piercing on the
earth, and sometimes scornfully darted on the t'one side,199 she
figured forth a high discontented disdain, much like a prince puffing
and storming at the treason of some mighty subject fled lately out of
his power. Her very countenance repiningly wrathful, and yet clear and
unwrinkled, would have confirmed the clearness of her conscience to
the austerest judge in the world. If in anything she were culpable,
it was in being too melancholy chaste, and showing herself as covetous
of her beauty as her husband was of his bags. Many are honest because
they know not how to be dishonest: she thought there was no pleasure
in stolen bread, because there was no pleasure in an old man’s bed.
It is almost impossible that any woman should be excellently witty,
and not make the utmost penny of her beauty. This age and this country
of ours admits of some miraculous exceptions, but former times are my
constant informers. Those that have quick motions of wit have quick
motions in everything; iron only needs many strokes; only iron wits
are not won without a long siege of entreaty. Gold easily bends, the
most ingenious minds are easiest moved, Ingenium nobis molle Thalia
dedit,200 saith Sapho to Phao. Who hath no merciful mild mistress, I
will maintain hath no witty, but a clownish dull phlegmatic puppy
to his mistress.
　　　　This magnifico’s wife was a good loving soul that had metal
enough in her to make a good wit of, but being never removed from
under her mother’s and her husband’s wing, it was not moulded and
fashioned as it ought. Causeless distrust is able to drive deceit
into a simple woman’s head. I durst pawn the credit of a page, which
is worth ames-ace201 at all times, that she was immaculate honest
till she met with us in prison. Marry, what temptations she had
then, when fire and flax were put together, conceit with yourselves,
but hold my master excusable.
　　　　Alack, he was too virtuous to make her vicious; he stood upon
religion and conscience, what a heinous thing it was to subvert God's
ordinance. This was all the injury he would offer her: sometimes he
would imagine her in a melancholy humour to be his Geraldine, and
court her in terms correspondent; nay, he would swear she was his
Geraldine, and take her white hand and wipe his eyes with it, as
though the very touch of her might staunch his anguish . Now he would
kneel and kiss the ground as holy ground which she vouchsafed to bless
from barrenness by her steps.Who would have learned to write an
excellent passion might have been a perfect tragic poet had he but
attended half the extremity of his lament. Passion upon passion would
throng one on another’s neck; he would praise her beyond the moon
and stars, and that so sweetly and ravishingly as I persuade myself
he was more in love with his own curious-forming fancy than her face,
and truth it is, many become passionate lovers only to win praise to
their wits.
　　　　He praised, he prayed, he desired and besought her to pity him
that perished for her. From this his entranced mistaking ecstasy
could no man remove him. Who loveth resolutely will include everything
under the name of his love. From prose he would leap into verse, and
with these or suchlike rimes assault her:

　　　　If I must die, O let me choose my death;
　　　　Suck out my soul with kisses, cruel maid,
　　　　In thy breasts’ crystal balls embalm my breath,
　　　　Dole it all out in sighs when I am laid;
　　　　Thy lips on mine like cupping-glasses clasp,
　　　　Let our tongues meet and strive as they would sting,
　　　　Crush out my wind with one strait-girting 202 grasp,
　　　　Stabs on my heart keep time whilst thou dost sing;
　　　　Thy eyes like searing-irons burn out mine,
　　　　In thy fair tresses stifle me outright,
　　　　Like Circes change me to a loathsome swine,
　　　　So I may live forever in thy sight;
　　　　Into heaven’s joys none can profoundly see,
　　　　Except that first they meditate on thee.

　　　　Sadly and verily, if my master said true, I should, if I were a
wench, make many men quickly immortal. What is’t, what is’t for a
maid fair and fresh to spend a little lipsalve on a hungry lover? My
master beat the bush and kept a coil and prattling, but I caught the
bird;203 simplicity and plainness shall carry it away in another world. Got
wot he was Petro Desperato when I, stepping to her with a Dunstable204
tale, made up my market. A holy requiem to their souls that think to
woo a woman with riddles. I had some cunning plot, you must suppose,
to bring this about. Her husband had abused her, and it was very
necessary she should be revenged. Seldom do they prove patient martyrs
who are punished unjustly; one way or other they will cry quittance,
whatsoever it cost them.No other apt means had this poor she-captived
Cicely to work her hoddypeak205 husband a proportionable plague for his
jealousy but to give his head his full loading of infamy. She thought
she would make him complain for something, that now was so hard bound
with an heretical opinion. How I dealt with her, guess, gentle reader,
subaudi 206 that I was in prison, and she my silly jailer.
　　　　Means there was made after a month’s or two durance by M. John
Russell,207 a gentleman of King Henry the Eighth’s chamber, who then lay
ledger208 at Venice for England, that our cause should be favourably heard.
At that time was Monsieur Petro Aretino209 searcher and chief inquisitor to
the college of courtesans. Divers and sundry ways was this Aretine
beholding to the King of England, especially for by this foresaid Master
John Russell, a little before, he had sent him a pension of four hundred
crowns yearly during his life. Very forcibly was he dealt withal to
strain the utmost of his credit for our delivery out of prison. Nothing
at his hands we sought, but that the courtesan might be more narrowly
sifted and examined. Such and so extraordinary was his care and industry
herein that within few days after, Mistress Tabitha and her pander cried
Peccavi, confiteor, and we were presently discharged, they for example's
sake executed. Most honourably, after our enlargement, of the state were
we used, and had sufficient recompense for all our troubles and wrongs.
　　　　Before I go any further, let me speak a word or two of this Aretine.
It was one of the wittiest knaves that ever God made. If out of so base a
thing as ink there may be extracted a spirit, he writ with naught but the
spirit of ink, and his style was the spirituality of art’s, and nothing
else, whereas all others of his age were but the lay temporality of
ink-horn terms.210 For indeed they were mere temporizers, and no better.
His pen was sharp-pointed like a poniard; no leaf he wrote on but was
like a burning-glass to set on fire all his readers. With more than musket
shot did he charge his quill, where he meant to inveigh. No hour but sent
a whole legion of devils into some herd of swine or other. If Martial211 had
ten muses (as he saith of himself) when he but tasted a cup of wine, he
had ten score when he determined to tyrannize; ne’er a line of his but
was able to make a man drunken with admiration. His sight pierced like
lightning into the entrails of all abuses. This I must needs say, that
most of his learning he got by hearing the lectures in Florence. It is
sufficient that learning he had, and a conceit exceeding all learning,
to quintessence everything which he heard. He was no timorous servile
flatterer of the commonwealth wherein he lived. His tongue and his
invention were forborne; what they thought, they would confidently
utter. Princes he spared not, that in the least point transgressed. His
life he contemned212 in comparison of the liberty of speech. Whereas
some dull-brain maligners of his accuse him of that treatise De Tribus
Impostoribus Mundi,213 which was never contrived without a general coun-
cil of devils, I am verily persuaded it was none of his, and of my mind are
a number of the most judicial Italians. One reason is this, because it
was published forty years after his death, and he never in his lifetime
wrote anything in Latin. Certainly I have heard that one of Machiavel's
followers and disciples was the author of that book who, to avoid discredit,
filched it forth under Aretine’s name a great while after he had sealed
up his eloquent spirit in the grave. Too much gall did that wormwood of
Ghibelline wits put in his ink who engraved that rhubarb epitaph214 on
this excellent poet’s tombstone. Quite forsaken of all good angels
was he, and utterly given over to artless envy. Four universities
honoured Aretine with these rich titles, Il flagello de principi,
Il veritiero, Il divino, & L'unico Aretino.215
　　　　The French king, Frances the First, he kept in such awe that to
chain his tongue he sent him a huge chain of gold in the form of tongues
fashioned. Singularly hath he commented on the humanity of Christ.216
Besides, as Moses set forth his Genesis, so hath he set forth his
Genesis also, including the contents of the whole Bible. A notable
treatise hath he compiled called I sette Psalmi poenetentiarii.217
All the Thomases have cause to love him, because he hath dilated so
magnificently of the life of Saint Thomas.218 There is a good thing that
he hath set forth, La vita della virgine Maria,219 though it somewhat
smell of superstition, with a number more which here for tediousness
I suppress. If lascivious he were, he may answer with Ovid, Vita
verecunda est, musa iocosa mea est, My life is chaste, though wanton
be my verse. Tell me, who is travelled in histories, what good poet
is, or ever was there, who hath not had a little spice of wantonness in
his day? Even Beza220 himself, by your leave. Aretine, as long as the
world lives, shalt thou live. Tully, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca were never
such ornaments to Italy as thou hast been. I never thought of Italy
more religiously than England till I heard of thee. Peace to thy ghost,
and yet methinks so indefinite a spirit should have no peace or
intermission of pains, but be penning ditties to the archangels in
another world. Puritans, spew forth the venom of your dull inventions.
A toad swells with thick troubled poison; you swell with poisonous
perturbations; your malice hath not a clear dram of any inspired
disposition.
　　　　My principal subject plucks me by the elbow. Diamante, Castaldo
the magnifico’s wife, after my enlargement proved to be with child,
at which instant there grew an unsatiable famine in Venice, wherein,
whether it were for mere niggardise, or that Castaldo still eat out
his heart with jealousy, Saint Anne be our record, he turned up the
heels very devoutly. To Master Aretine after this, once more very
dutifully I appealed, requested him of favour, acknowledged former
gratuities; he made no more humming or halting, but, in despite of
her husband’s kinsfolks, gave her her nunc dimittis, and so
established her free of my company.
　　　　Being out, and fully possessed of her husband’s goods, she
invested me in the state of a monarch. Because the time of child-birth
drew nigh, and she could not remain in Venice but discredited, she
decreed to travel whithersoever I would conduct her. To see Italy
throughout was my proposed scope, and that way if she would travel,
have with her, I had wherewithal to relieve her.
　　　　From my master by her full-hand provokement I parted without
leave; the state of an earl he had thrust upon me before, & now I
would not bate him an ace of it. Through all the cities passed I by
no other name but the young Earl of Surrey: my pomp, my apparel,
train and expense was as magnifical. Memorandum, that Florence
being the principal scope of my master’s course, missing me, he
journeyed thither without interruption. By the way as he went, he
heard of another Earl of Surrey besides himself, which caused him
make more haste to fetch me in, whom he little dreamed of had such
art in my budget to separate the shadow from the body. Overtake me
at Florence he did, where, sitting in my pontificalibus221 with my
courtesan at supper, like Anthony and Cleopatra when they quaffed
standing bowls of wine spiced with pearl together, he stole in ere
we sent for him, and bade much good it us, and asked us whether we
wanted any guests. If he had asked me whether I would have hanged
myself, his question had been more acceptable. He that had then
ungartered me might have plucked out my heart at my heels.
　　　　My soul, which was made to soar upward, now sought for passage
downward; my blood, as the blushing Sabine maids, surprised on the
sudden by the soldiers of Romulus, ran to the nobles of blood amongst
them for succour, that were in no less (if not greater) danger, so
did it run for refuge to the noblest of his blood about my heart
assembled, that stood in more need itself of comfort and refuge. A
trembling earthquake or shaking fever assailed either of us, and I
think unfeignedly if he, seeing our faint-heart agony, had not soon
cheered and refreshed us, the dogs had gone together by the ears
under the table for our fear-dropped limbs.
　　　　Instead of menacing or affrighting me with his sword or his
frowns for my superlative presumption, he burst out into laughter
above ela,222 to think how bravely napping he had took us, and how
notably we were damped and struck dead in the nest with the
unexpected view of his presence.
　　　　Ah, quoth he, my noble Lord (after his tongue had borrowed a
little leave of his laughter), is it my luck to visit you thus
unlooked for? I am sure you will bid me welcome, if it be but for
the name’s sake. It is a wonder to see two English earls of one
house at one time together in Italy. I, hearing him so pleasant,
began to gather up my spirits, and replied as boldly as I durst:
Sir, you are welcome; your name which I borrowed I have not abused;
some large sums of money this, my sweet mistress Diamante, hath
made me master of, which I knew not how better to employ for the
honour of my country than by spending it munificently under your
name. No Englishman would I have renowned for bounty, magnificence
and courtesy but you; under your colours all my meritorious works
I was desirous to shroud. Deem it no insolence to add increase to
your fame. Had I basely and beggarly, wanting ability to support
any part of your royalty, undertook the estimation of this high
calling, your allegement of injury had been the greater, and my
defence less authorized. It will be thought but a policy of yours
thus to send one before you who, being a follower of yours, shall
keep and uphold the estate and port of an earl. I have known many
earls myself that in their own person would go very plain, but
delighted to have one that belonged to them (being loaden with
jewels, apparelled in cloth of gold and all the rich embroidery
that might be) to stand bare-headed unto him, arguing thus much,
that if the greatest men went not more sumptuous, how more great
than the greatest was he that could command one going so sumptuous.
A nobleman’s glory appeareth in nothing so much as in the pomp
of his attendants. What is the glory of the sun, but that the moon
and so many millions of stars borrow their lights from him? If
you can reprehend me of any one illiberal licentious action I
have disparaged your name with, heap shame on me prodigally;
I beg no pardon or pity.
　　　　Non veniunt in idem pudor and amor,223 he was loath to detract
from one that he loved so. Beholding with his eyes that I clipped not
the wings of his honour, but rather increased them with additions
of expense, he entreated me as if I had been an embassador; he
gave me his hand, and swore he had no more hearts but one, and
I should have half of it, in that I so enhanced his obscured
reputation. One thing, quoth he, my sweet Jack, I will entreat
thee (it shall be but one), that though I am well pleased thou
shouldst be the ape of my birthright (as what nobleman hath not
his ape and his fool?), yet that thou be an ape without a clog,224
not carry thy courtesan with thee. I told him that a king could
do nothing without his treasury; this courtesan was my purse-bearer,
my countenance and supporter. My earldom I would sooner resign
than part with such a special benefactor. Resign it I will however,
since I am thus challenged of stolen goods by the true owner; lo,
into my former state I return again; poor Jack Wilton and your
servant am I, as I was at the beginning, and so will I persevere
to my life’s ending.
　　　　That theme was quickly cut off, and other talk entered in place,
of what I have forgot, but talk it was, and talk let it be, and talk
it shall be, for I do not mean here to remember it. We supped, we
got to bed, rose in the morning, on my master I waited, & the first
thing he did after he was up, he went and visited the house where
his Geraldine was born, at sight whereof he was so impassioned that
in the open street, but for me, he would have made an oration in
praise of it. Into it we were conducted, and showed each several
room thereto appertaining. O, but when he came to the chamber where
his Geraldine’s clear sunbeams first thrust themselves into this
cloud of flesh, and acquainted mortality with the purity of angels,
then did his mouth overflow with Magnificats; his tongue thrust the
stars out of heaven, and eclipsed the sun and moon with comparisons;
Geraldine was the soul of heaven, sole daughter and heir to primus
motor.225 The alchemy of his eloquence, out of the incomprehensible
drossy matter of clouds and air, distilled no more quintessence
than would make his Geraldine complete fair. In praise of the
chamber that was so illuminatively honoured with her radiant
conception, he penned this sonnet:

　　　　Fair room, the presence of sweet beauty’s pride,
　　　　The place the sun upon the earth did hold
　　　　When Phaeton his chariot did misguide,
　　　　The tower where Jove rained down himself in gold,
　　　　Prostrate, as holy ground I’ll worship thee;
　　　　Our lady’s chapel henceforth be thou named;
　　　　Here first love’s queen put on mortality,
　　　　And with her beauty all the world inflamed.
　　　　Heaven’s chambers harbouring fiery cherubins
　　　　Are not with thee in glory to compare;
　　　　Lightning it is, not light, which in thee shines,
　　　　None enter thee but straight entranced are.
　　　　O, if Elysium be above the ground,
　　　　Then here it is, where naught but joy is found.

　　　　Many other poems and epigrams in that chamber’s patient
alabaster enclosure (which her melting eyes long sithence had
softened) were curiously engraved. Diamonds thought themselves
Dii mundi 226 if they might but carve her name on the naked glass.
With them on it did he anatomize these body-wanting mots, Dulce
puella malum est. Quod fugit ipse sequor. Amor est mihi causa
sequendi. O infoelix ego. Cur vivi? cur perii? Non patienter
amo. Tantum patiatur amari. 227 After the view of these venerial
monuments, he published a proud challenge in the Duke of
Florence’ court against all comers (whether Christians,
Turks, Jews or Saracens) in defence of his Geraldine’s
beauty. More mildly was it accepted in that she whom he
defended was a town-born child of that city, or else
the pride of the Italian would have prevented him ere he
should have come to perform it. The Duke of Florence
nevertheless sent for him and demanded him of his estate
and the reason that drew him thereto, which when he was
advertised of to the full, he granted all countries
whatsoever as well enemies and outlaws as friends and
confederates, free access and regress into his dominions
unmolested, until that insolent trial were ended.
　　　　The right honourable and ever renowned Lord Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey, my singular good lord and master, entered the
lists after this order. His armour was all intermixed with lilies
and roses, and the bases thereof bordered with nettles and
weeds, signifying stings, crosses and overgrowing encumbrances
in his love, his helmet round proportioned like a gardener’s
water-pot, from which seemed to issue forth small threads
of water, like cittern-strings, that not only did moisten the
lilies and roses, but did fructify as well the nettles and weeds,
and made them overgrow their liege lords. Whereby he did import
thus much, that the tears that issued from his brains, as those
artificial distillations issued from the well counterfeit water-pot
on his head, watered and gave life as well to his mistress’
disdain (resembled to nettles and weeds) as increase of glory
to her carecausing beauty (comprehended under the lilies and
roses). The symbol thereto annexed was this, Ex lachrimis
lachrimae.228 The trappings of his horse were pounced and bolstered
out with rough plumed silver plush, in full proportion and shape
of an estrich. On the breast of the horse were the fore-parts of
this greedy bird advanced, whence, as his manner is, he reached
out his long neck to the reins of the bridle, thinking they had
been iron, and still seemed to gape after the golden bit, and ever
as the courser did raise or curvet,229 to have swallowed it half in.
His wings, which he never useth but running, being spread full
sail, made his lusty steed as proud under him as he had been some
other Pegasus, and so quiveringly and tenderly were these his broad
wings bound to either side of him, that as he paced up and down
the tilt-yard in his majesty ere the knights were entered, they
seemed wantonly to fan in his face and make a flickering sound,
such as eagles do, swiftly pursuing their prey in the air. On
either of his wings, as the estrich hath a sharp goad or prick
wherewith he spurreth himself forward in his sail-assisted race,
so this artificial estrich, on the inbent knuckle of the pinion
of either wing, had embossed crystal eyes affixed, wherein wheel-
wise were circularly engrafted sharp-pointed diamonds, as rays
from those eyes derived, that like the rowel of a spur ran deep
into his horse’s sides, and made him more eager in his course.
　　　　Such a fine dim shine did these crystal eyes and these round-
enranked diamonds make through their bollen swelling bowers230 of
feathers as if it had been a candle in a paper lantern, or a glow-
worm in a bush by night, glistering through the leaves and briers.
The tail of the estrich, being short and thick, served very fitly
for a plume to trick up his horse-tail with, so that every part of
him was as naturally coapted231 as might be. The word of this device
was Aculeo alatus,232 I spread my wings only spurred with her eyes.
The moral of the whole is this, that as the estrich, the most burning-
sighted bird of all others, insomuch as the female of them hatcheth
not her eggs by covering them, but by the effectual rays of her eyes,
as he, I say, outstrippeth the nimblest trippers of his feathered
condition in footmanship, only spurred on with the needle-quickening
goad under his side, so he, no less burning-sighted than the estrich,
spurred on to the race of honour by the sweet rays of his mistress’
eyes, persuaded himself he should outstrip all other in running to
the goal of glory, only animated and incited by her excellence. And
as the estrich will eat iron, swallow any hard metal whatsoever, so
would he refuse no iron adventure, no hard task whatsoever, to sit
in the grace of so fair a commander. The order of his shield was
this: it was framed like a burning-glass, beset round with flamecoloured
feathers, on the outside whereof was his mistress’ picture adorned
as beautiful as art could portraiture, on the inside a naked sword
tied in a true-love knot; the mot, Militat omnis amans,233 signifying
that in a true-love knot his sword was tied, to defend and maintain
the features of his mistress.
　　　　Next him entered the black knight, whose beaver was pointed all
torn and bloody, as though he had new come from combating with a bear;
his head-piece seemed to be a little oven fraught with smothering
flames, for nothing but sulphur and smoke voided out at the clefts
of his beaver. His bases were all embroidered with snakes and adders,
engendered of the abundance of innocent blood that was shed. His
horse's trappings were throughout bespangled with honey-spots, which
are no blemishes, but ornaments. On his shield he bare the sun full
shining on a dial at his going down; the word, Sufficit tandem.234

After him followed the knight of the owl, whose armour was a stubbed
tree overgrown with ivy, his helmet fashioned like an owl sitting on
the top of this ivy; on his bases were wrought all kind of birds, as
on the ground, wondering(?) about him; the word, Ideo mirum quia mons-
trum;235 his horse's furniture was framed like a cart, scattering whole
sheaves of corn amongst hogs; the word, Liberalitas liberalitate perit.236
On his shield a bee entangled in sheep's wool; the mot, Frontis nulla
fides.238 The fourth that succeeded was a well-proportioned knight in an
armour imitating rust, whose head-piece was prefigured like flowers
growing in a narrow pot, where they had not any space to spread their
roots or disperse their flourishing. His bases embellished with open-
armed hands, scattering gold amongst truncheons; the word, Cura futuri
est.239 His horse was harnessed with leaden chains, having the outside
gilt, or at least saffroned instead of gilt, to decipher a holy or golden
pretence of a covetous purpose; the sentence, Cani capilli mei com-
pedes;240 on his target he had a number of crawling worms kept under
by a block; the faburthen,241 Speramus lucent.242 The fifth was the for-
saken knight, whose helmet was crowned with nothing but cypress and
willow garlands; over his armour he had Hymen's nuptial robe, dyed in a
dusky yellow, and all-to-bedefaced and discoloured with spots and stains.
The enigma, Nos quoque florimus, as who should say, We have been in
fashion; his steed was adorned with orange-tawny eyes, such as those
have that have the yellow jandies,243 that make all things yellow they
look upon, with this brief,244 Qui invident egent, Those that envy are
hungry. The sixth was the knight of the storms, whose helmet was round
moulded like the moon, and all his armour like waves, whereon the shine
of the moon, sleightly silvered, perfectly represented moonshine in
the water; his bases were the banks or shores that bounded in the
streams. The spoke245 was this, Frustra pius, as much to say as, Fruit-
less service. On his shield he set forth a lion driven from his prey
by a dunghill-cock. The word, Non vi sed voce, not by violence but by
voice.

The seventh had, like the giants that sought to scale heaven in despite
of Jupiter, a mount overwhelming his head and whole body, his bases out-
laid with arms and legs which the skirts of that mountain left uncover-
ed. Under this did he characterize a man desirous to climb to the heaven
of honour, kept under with the mountain of his prince's command, and yet
had he arms and legs exempted from the suppression of that mountain. The
word, Tu mihi criminis author 246 (alluding to his prince's command), Thou
art the occasion of my imputed cowardice. His horse was trapped in the
earthy strings of tree-roots, which though their increase was stubbed
down to the ground, yet were they not utterly deaded, but hoped for an
after resurrection. The word, Spe alor,247 I hope for a spring. Upon his
shield he bare a ball, sticken down with a man's hand that it might
mount. The word, Ferior ut efferar, I suffer myself to be contemned be-
cause I will climb.

The eighth had all his armour throughout engrailed like a crabbed briery
hawthorn bush, out of which notwithstanding sprung (as a good child of
an ill father) fragrant blossoms of delightful mayflowers, that made
(according to the nature of may) a most odoriferous smell. In midst of
this his snowy-curled top, round wrapped together on the ascending of
his crest sat a solitary nightingale close encaged, with a thorn at her
breast, having this mot in her mouth, Luctus monumenta manebunt.248 At
the foot of this bush, represented on his bases, lay a number of black
swollen toads gasping for wind, and summer-lived grasshoppers gaping
after dew, both which were choked with excessive drouth for want of
shade. The word, Non sine vulnere viresco,249 I spring not without impe-
diments, alluding to the toads and suchlike that erst lay sucking at
his roots, but now were turned out, and near choked with drought. His
horse was suited in black sandy earth (as adjacent to this bush) which
was here and there patched with short burnt grass, and as thick ink-
dropped with toiling ants and emmets as ever it might crawl, who, in the
full of the summer moon (ruddy garnished on his horse's forehead) hoar-
ded up their provision of grain against winter. The word, Victrix fortu-
nae sapientia,250 Providence prevents misfortune. On his shield he set forth
the picture of death doing alms-deeds to a number of poor desolate child-
ren. The word, Nemo alius explicat,251 No other man takes pity upon us.
What his meaning was herein I cannot imagine, except death had done him
and his brethren some great good turn in ridding them of some untoward
parent or kinsman that would have been their confusion, for else I can-
not see how death should have been said to do almsdeeds, except he had
deprived them suddenly of their lives, to deliver them out of some fur-
ther misery, which could not in any wise be, because they were yet liv-
ing.

The ninth was the infant knight, who on his armour had enamelled a poor
young infant put into a ship without tackling, masts, furniture or any-
thing. This weather-beaten or illapparelled ship was shadowed on his
bases, and the slender compass of his body set forth the right picture
of an infant. The waves wherein the ship was tossed were fretted on his
steed's trappings so movingly that, ever as he offered to bound or stir,
they seemed to bounce and toss, and sparkle brine out of their hoary sil-
ver billows; the mot, Inopem me copia fecit,252 as much to say as, The rich
prey makes the thief.

On his shield he expressed an old goat that made a young tree to wither
only with biting it; the word thereto, Primo extinguor in aeuo,253 I am frost-
bitten ere I come out of the blade.

It were here too tedious to manifest all the discontented or amorous de-
vises that were used in this tournament; the shields only of some few I
will touch, to make short work. One bare for his impress the eyes of
young swallows coming again after they were plucked out, with this mot,
Et addit et addimit, Your beauty both bereaves and restores my sight.
Another, a siren smiling when the sea rageth and ships are overwhelmed,
including a cruel woman, that laughs, sings and scorns at her lover's
tears and the tempests of his despair; the word, Cuncta pereunt, All my
labour is ill employed. A third, being troubled with a curst,254 a treach-
erous, and wanton wife, used this similitude. On his shield he caused
to be limned Pompey's ordinance for parricides, as namely, a man put
into a sack with a cock, a serpent, and an ape, interpreting that his
wife was a cock for her crowing, a serpent for her stinging, and an ape
for her unconstant wantonness, with which ill qualities he was so beset
that thereby he was thrown into a sea of grief; the word, Extremum mal-
orum mulier, The utmost of evils is a woman. A fourth, who, being a per-
son of suspected religion, was continually haunted with intelligencers
and spies that thought to prey upon him for that he had, he could not
devise which way to shake them off but by making away that he had. To
obscure this he used no other fancy but a number of blind flies, whose
eyes the cold had closed; the word, Aurum reddit acutissimum, Gold is
the only physic for the eyesight. A fifth, whose mistress was fallen
into a consumption, and yet would condescend to no treaty of love, em-
blazoned for his complaint grapes that withered for want of pressing.
The ditty to the mot, Quid regna sine usu.255 I will rehearse no more,
but I have a hundred other; let this be the upshot of those shows,
they were the admirablest that ever Florence yielded.

To particularize their manner of encounter were to describe the
whole art of tilting. Some had like to have fallen over their horses'
necks, and so break their necks in breaking their staves. Others ran
at a buckle instead of a button, and peradventure whetted their
spears' points idly gliding on their enemies' sides, but did no other
harm. Others ran a cross at their adversary's left elbow, yea, and by
your leave sometimes let not the lists scape scot-free, they were
so eager. Others, because they would be sure not to be unsaddled
with the shock when they came to the spear's utmost proof, they
threw it over the right shoulder, and so tilted backward, for forward
they durst not. Another had a monstrous spite at the pommel of his
rival's saddle, and thought to have thrust his spear twixt his legs
without rasing any skin, and carried him clean away on it as a cool-
staff.256 Another held his spear to his nose, or his nose to his spear,
as though he had been discharging his caliver, and ran at the right
foot of his fellow's steed. Only the Earl of Surrey, my master, ob-
served the true measures of honour, and made all his encounterers
new scour their armour in the dust; so great was his glory that day
as Geraldine was thereby eternally glorified. Never such a bountiful
master came amongst the heralds, (not that he did enrich them with
any plentiful purse largesse, but that by his stern assaults he tithed
them more rich offals257 of bases, of helmets, of armour, than the
rent of their offices came to in ten years before).

What would you have more? The trumpets proclaimed him master of
the field, the trumpets proclaimed Geraldine the exceptionless fairest
of women. Everyone strived to magnify him more than other. The
Duke of Florence, whose name (as my memory serveth me) was Pas-
chal de Medicis,258 offered him such large proffers to stay with him as
it were incredible to report. He would not; his desire was, as he had
done in Florence, so to proceed throughout all the chief cities in
Italy. If you ask why he began not this at Venice first, it was be-
cause he would let Florence, his mistress' native city, have the
maidenhead of his chivalry. As he came back again he thought to
have enacted something there worthy the annals of posterity, but
he was debarred both of that and all his other determinations, for,
continuing in feasting and banqueting with the Duke of Florence
and the princes of Italy there assembled, post-haste letters came
to him from the King, his master, to return as speedily as he
could possible into England, whereby his fame was quite cut off
by the shins, and there was no reprieve but beso las manos,259 he
must into England, and I with my courtesan travelled forward in
Italy.

What adventures happened him after we parted, I am ignorant, but
Florence we both forsook, and I, having a wonderful ardent incli-
nation to see Rome, the queen of the world & metrapolitan mis-
tress of all other cities, made thither with my bag and baggage
as fast as I could.

Attained thither, I was lodged at the house of one Johannes de I-
mola, a Roman cavaliero, who, being acquainted with my courtesan's
deceased doting husband, for his sake used us with all the famil-
iarity that might be. He showed us all the monuments that were to
be seen, which are as many as there have been emperors, consuls,
orators, conquerors, famous painters or players in Rome. Till this
day not a Roman (if he be a right Roman indeed) will kill a rat,
but he will have some registered remembrance of it.

There was a poor fellow during my remainder there that, for a new
trick that he had invented of killing cimexes260 and scorpions, had
his mountebank banner hung up on a high pillar, with an inscript-
ion about it longer than the King of Spain's style. I thought these
cimexes, like the Cimbrians, had been some strange nation he had
brought under, and they were no more but things like lice, which
alive have the most venomous sting that may be, and being dead
do stink out of measure. Saint Austin261 compareth heretics unto
them. The chiefest thing that my eyes delighted in was the
church of the seven Sibyls,262 which is a most miraculous thing,
all their prophecies and oracles being there enrolled, as also
the beginning and ending of their whole catalogue of the heathen
gods, with their manner of worship. There are a number of other
shrines and statues dedicated to the emperors, and withal some
statues of idolatry reserved for detestation.

I was at Pontius Pilate's house, and pissed against it. The name
of the place I remember not, but it is as one goes to Saint Paul's
church not far from the Jews piazza.263 There is the prison yet
packed up together (an old rotten thing) where the man that was
condemned to death, and could have nobody come to him and suc-
cour him but was searched, was kept alive a long space by sucking
his daughter's breasts.

These are but the shop dust of the sights that I saw, and in
truth I did not behold with any care hereafter to report, but
contented my eye for the present, & so let them pass; should I
memorize half the miracles which they there told me had been
done about martyrs' tombs, or the operations of the earth of
the Sepulchre and other relics brought from Jerusalem, I should
be counted the most monstrous liar that ever came in print.
The ruins of Pompey's theatre, reputed one of the nine wond-
ers of the world, Gregory the Sixth's tomb,264 Priscilla's grate,265
or the thousands of pillars areared amongst the rased founda-
tions of old Rome, it were frivolous to specify, since he that
hath but once drunk with a traveller talks of them. Let me be a
historiographer of my own misfortunes, and not meddle with the
continued trophies of so old a triumphing city.

At my first coming to Rome, I, being a youth of the English cut,
ware my hair long, went apparelled in light colours, and imitated
four or five sundry nations in my attire at once, which no sooner
was noted, but I had all the boys of the city in a swarm wonder-
ing about me.

I had not gone a little farther, but certain officers crossed
the way of me, and demanded to see my rapier, which, when they
found (as also my dagger) with his point unblunted, they would
have haled me headlong to the strappado, but that with money I
appeased them, and my fault was more pardonable in that I was
a stranger, altogether ignorant of their customs.

Note, by the way, that it is the use in Rome for all men whatso-
ever to wear their hair short, which they do not so much for con-
science' sake, or any religion they place in it but because the
extremity of the heat is such there that, if they should not do
so, they should not have a hair left on their heads to stand up-
right when they were scared with sprights. And he is counted no
gentleman amongst them that goes not in black; they dress their
jesters and fools only in fresh colours, and say variable gar-
ments do argue unstaidness and unconstancy of affections.

The reason of their straight ordinance for carrying weapons with-
out points is this: the bandettos, which are certain outlaws that
lie betwixt Rome and Naples, and besiege the passage, that none
can travel that way without robbing. Now and then, hired for some
few crowns, they will steal to Rome and do a murder, and betake
them to their heels again. Disguised as they go, they are not
known from strangers; sometimes they will shroud themselves un-
der the habit of grave citizens. In this consideration, neither
citizen or stranger, gentleman, knight, marquess, or any may
wear any weapon, endamageable upon pain of the strappado. I
bought it out; let others buy experience of me better cheap.


To tell you of the rare pleasures of their gardens, their baths,
their vineyards, their galleries, were to write a second part of
the Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Devices.266 Why, you should not
come into any man's house of account but he had fishponds and
little orchards on the top of his leads. If by rain or any oth-
er means those ponds were so full they need to be sluiced or
let out, even of their superfluities they made melodious use,
for they had great wind instruments instead of leaden spouts,
that went duly on consort, only with this water's rumbling des-
cent.

I saw a summer banqueting house belonging to a merchant that
was the marvel of the world, & could not be matched except God
should make another paradise. It was built round of green mar-
ble like a theatre without; within there was a heaven and earth
comprehended both under one roof: the heaven was a clear over-
hanging vault of crystal wherein the sun and moon and each vis-
ible star had his true similitude, shine, situation and motion,
and, by what enwrapped art I cannot conceive, these spheres in
their proper orbs observed their circular wheelings and turnings,
making a certain kind of soft angelical murmuring music in their
often windings & going about, which music the philosophers say
in the true heaven, by reason of the grossness of our senses,
we are not capable of. For the earth, it was counterfeited in
that likeness that Adam lorded out it before his fall. A wide
vast spacious room it was, such as we would conceit Prince Ar-
thur's hall to be, where he feasted all his Knights of the
Round Table together every Pentecost. The floor was painted
with the beautifullest flowers that ever man's eye admired,
which so lively267 were delineated that he that viewed them a-
far off, and had not directly stood poringly over them, would
have sworn they had lived indeed. The walls round about were
hedged with olives and palm trees, and all other odoriferous
fruit-bearing plants, which at any solemn entertainment drop-
ped myrrh and frankincense. Other trees, that bare no fruit,
were set in just order one against another, & divided the room
into a number of shady lanes, leaving but one overspreading
pine-tree arbour where we sat and banqueted.

On the well-clothed boughs of this conspiracy of pine-trees
against the resembled sunbeams, were perched as many sorts of
shrill-breasted birds as the summer hath allowed for singing
men in her sylvan chapels, who, though there [sic?] were bo-
dies without souls, and sweet resembled substances without
sense, yet by the mathematical experiments of long silver
pipes secretly enrinded in the entrails of the boughs where-
on they sat, and undiscernably conveyed under their bellies
into their small throats' sloping, they whistled and freely
carolled their natural field-note. Neither went those silver
pipes straight, but by many edged unsundered writhings &
crankled wanderings aside, strayed from bough to bough into
an hundred throats. But into this silver pipe so writhed
and wandering aside, if any demand how the wind was breath-
ed, forsooth, the tail of the silver pipe stretched itself
into the mouth of a great pair of bellows, where it was
close soldered, and bailed about with iron; it could not
stir or have any vent betwixt. Those bellows, with the ris-
ing and falling of leaden plummets wound up on a wheel, did
beat up and down uncessantly, and so gathered in wind, ser-
ving with one blast all the snarled pipes to and fro of one
tree at once. But so closely were all those organizing imple-
ments obscured in the corpulent trunks of the trees that every
man there present renounced conjectures of art, and said it
was done by enchantment.


One tree for his fruit bare nothing but unchained chirping birds,
whose throats being conduit-piped with squared narrow shells, &
charged syringe-wise268 with searching sweet water driven in by
a little wheel for the nonce, that fed it afar off, made a spirt-
ing sound, such as chirping is, in bubbling upwards through the
rough crannies of their closed bills.

Under tuition of the shade of every tree that I have signified
to be in this round hedge, on delightful leavy cloisters lay a
wild tyrannous beast asleep all prostrate; under some, two toge-
ther, as the dog nuzzling his nose under the neck of the deer,
the wolf glad to let the lamb lie upon him to keep him warm,
the lion suffering the ass to cast his leg over him, preferring
one honest unmannerly friend before a number of crouching pick-
thanks.269 No poisonous beast there reposed (poison was not, be-
fore our parent Adam transgressed). There were no sweet-breath-
ing panthers that would hide their terrifying heads to betray,
no men-imitating hyenas that changed their sex to seek after
blood. Wolves, as now when they are hungry eat earth, so then
did they feed on earth only, and abstained from innocent flesh.
The unicorn did not put his horn into the stream to chase away
venom before he drank,270 for then there was no such thing extant
in the water or on the earth. Serpents were as harmless to man-
kind as they are still one to another; the rose had no cankers,
the leaves no caterpillars, the sea no sirens, the earth no
usurers. Goats then bare wool, as it is recorded in Sicily they
do yet. The torrid zone was habitable; only jays loved to steal
gold and silver to build their nests withal, and none cared
for covetous clientry, or running to the Indies. As the ele-
phant understands his country speech, so every beast understood
what man spoke. The ant did not hoard up against winter, for
there was no winter, but a perpetual spring, as Ovid271 saith. No
frosts to make the green almond tree counted rash and improvi-
dent in budding soonest of all other, or the mulberry tree a
strange politician, in blooming late and ripening early. The
peach-tree at the first planting was fruitful and wholesome,
whereas now, till it be transplanted, it is poisonous and hate-
ful; young plants for their sap had balm, for their yellow gum,
glistering amber. The evening dewed not water on flowers, but
honey. Such a golden age, such a good age, such an honest age
was set forth in this banqueting house.

O Rome, if thou hast in thee such soul-exalting objects, what a
thing is heaven incomparison of thee, of which Mercator's globe272
is a perfecter model than thou art? Yet this I must say to the
shame of us Protestants; if good works may merit heaven, they do
them, we talk of them. Whether superstition or no makes them un-
profitable servants, that let pulpits decide, but there you shall
have the bravest ladies, in gowns of beaten gold, washing pilgrims
& poor soldiers' feet, and doing nothing, they and their waiting-
maids, all the year long, but making shirts and bands for them
against273 they come by in distress. Their hospitals are more like
noblemen's houses than otherwise, so richly furnished, clean kept,
and hot perfumed that a soldier would think it a sufficient recom-
pense for all his travail and his wounds, to have such a heavenly
retiring place. For the Pope and his pontificalibus I will not
deal with; only I will dilate unto you what happened whilst I was
in Rome.

So it fell out that it being a vehement hot summer when I was a
sojourner there, there entered such a hotspurred274 plague as hath
not been heard of: why, it was but a word and a blow, Lord have
mercy upon us, and he was gone. Within three-quarters of a year
in that one city there died of it a hundred thousand; look in
Lanquet's Chronicle 275 and you shall find it. To smell of a nosegay
that was poisoned, and turn your nose to a house that had the
plague, it was all one. The clouds, like a number of cormorants
that keep their corn till it stink and is musty, kept in their
stinking exhalations till they had almost stifled all Rome's in-
habitants. Physicians' greediness of gold made them greedy of
their destiny. They would come to visit those with whose infirm-
ity their art had no affinity, and even as a man with a fee should
be hired to hang himself, so would they quietly go home and die
presently after they had been with their patients. All day and
all night long carmen did nothing but go up and down the streets
with their carts and cry, Have you any dead bodies to bury, and
had many times out of one house their whole loading; one grave
was the sepulchre of seven-score, one bed was the altar whereon
whole families were offered.

The walls were hoared and furred with the moist scorching steam
of their desolation. Even as before a gun is shot off, a stinking
smoke funnels out and prepares the way for him, so before any
gave up the ghost, death, arrayed in a stinking smoke, stopped
his nostrils and crammed itself full into his mouth that closed
up his fellow's eyes, to give him warning to prepare for his fu-
neral. Some died sitting at their meat, others as they were ask-
ing counsel of the physician for their friends. I saw at the
house where I was hosted a maid bring her master warm broth for
to comfort him, and she sink down dead herself ere he had half
eat it up.

During this time of visitation, there was a Spaniard, one Esdras
of Granado, a notable bandetto, authorized by the Pope because he
had assisted him in some murders. This villain, colleagued with
one Bartol, a desperate Italian, practised to break into those
rich men's houses in the night where the plague had most reigned,
and if there were none but the mistress and maid left alive, to
ravish them both, & bring away all the wealth they could fasten
on. In an hundred chief citizens' houses where the hand of God
had been, they put this outrage in ure.276 Though the women so rav-
ished cried out, none durst come near them for fear of catching
their deaths by them, and some thought they cried out only with
the tyranny of the malady. Amongst the rest, the house where I
lay he invaded, where all being snatched up by sickness but the
goodwife of the house, a noble & chaste matron called Heraclide,
and her zany, and I and my courtesan, he, knocking at the door
late in the night, ran in to the matron and left me and my love
to the mercy of his companion. Who finding me in bed (as the time
required) ran at me full with his rapier thinking I would resist
him, but as good luck was, I escaped him and betook me to my pis-
tol in the window uncharged. He, fearing it had been charged,
threatened to run her through if I once offered but to aim at him.
Forth the chamber he dragged her, holding his rapier at her heart,
whilst I cried out, Save her, kill me, and I'll ransom her with a thou-
sand ducats, but lust prevailed, no prayers would be heard. Into my
chamber I was locked, and watchmen charged (as he made semb-
lance where there was none there) to knock me down with their
halberds if I stirred but a foot down the stairs. Then threw I my-
self pensive against my pallet,277 and dared all the devils in hell,
now I was alone, to come and fight with me one after another in
defence of that detestable rape. I beat my head against the walls
& called them bawds because they would see such a wrong com-
mitted, and not fall upon him.

To return to Heraclide below, whom the ugliest of all blood-suck-
ers, Esdras of Granado, had under shrift.278 First he assailed her
with rough means, and slew her zany at her foot, that stepped be-
fore her in rescue. Then when all armed resist was put to flight,
he assayed279 her with honey speech, & promised her more jewels
and gifts than he was able to pilfer in an hundrd years after. He dis-
coursed unto her how he was countenanced and borne out by the
Pope, and how many execrable murders with impunity he had execu-
ted on them that displeased him. This is the eightscore house (quoth
he) that hath done homage unto me, & here I will prevail, or I will be
torn in pieces. Ah, quoth Heraclide (with a heart-rending sigh), art
thou ordained to be a worse plague to me than the plague itself?
Have I escaped the hands of God to fall into the hands of man? Hear
me, Jehovah, & be merciful in ending my misery. Dispatch me incon-
tinent,280 dissolute homicide, death's usurper. Here lies my husband
stone cold on the dewy floor. If thou beest of more power than God
to strike me speedily, strike home, strike deep, send me to heaven
with my husband. Ay me, it is the spoil of my honour thou seekest
in my soul's troubled departure; thou art some devil sent to tempt
me. Avoid from me, Satan, my soul is my Saviour's; to him I have be-
queathed it, from him can no man take it. Jesu, Jesu, spare me un-
defiled for thy spouse; Jesu, Jesu, never fail those that put their
trust in thee.

With that she fell in a sound, and her eyes in their closing seem-
ed to spawn forth in their outward sharp corners new-created seed-
pearl, which the world before never set eye on. Soon he rigorously
revived her, & told her that he had a charter above scripture; she
must yield, she should yield, see who durst remove her out of his
hands. Twixt life and death thus she faintly replied,

How thinkest thou, is there a power above thy power? If there be,
he is here present in punishment, and on thee will take present
punishment if thou persistest in thy enterprise. In the time of
security every man sinneth, but when death substitutes one friend
his special bailie to arrest another by infection, and disperseth
his quiver into ten thousand hands at once, who is it but looks
about him? A man that hath an unevitable huge stone hanging only
by a hair over his head, which he looks every paternoster-while281
to fall and pash282 him in pieces, will not he be submissively sor-
rowful for his transgressions, refrain himself from the least
thought of folly, and purify his spirit with contrition and peni-
tence? God's hand, like a huge stone, hangs inevitably over thy
head; what is the plague but death playing the provost-marshal, to
execute all those that will not be called home by any other means?
This my dear knight's body is a quiver of his arrows, which already
are shot into thee invisibly. Even as the age of goats is known by
the knots on their horns, so think the anger of God apparently vis-
ioned or shown unto thee in the knitting of my brows. A hundred have
I buried out of my house, at all whose departures I have been present.
A hundred's infection is mixed with my breath; lo, now I breathe upon
thee, a hundred deaths come upon thee. Repent betimes, imagine there
is a hell though not a heaven; that hell thy conscience is throughly
acquainted with, if thou hast murdered half so many as thou unblush-
ingly braggest. As Maecenas in the latter end of his days was seven
years without sleep, so these seven weeks have I took no slumber; my
eyes have kept continual watch against the devil, my enemy. Death I
deemed my friend (friends fly from us in adversity); death, the devil,
and all the ministering spirits of temptation are watching about thee
to entrap thy soul (by my abuse) to eternal damnation. It is thy soul
thou mayest save, only by saving mine honour. Death will have thy body
infallibly for breaking into my house, that he had selected for his
private habitation. If thou ever camest of a woman, or hopest to be
saved by the seed of a woman, pity a woman. Deers oppressed with dogs,
when they cannot take soil, run to men for succour; to whom should wo-
men in their disconsolate and desperate estate run but to men (like the
deer) for succour and sanctuary? If thou be a man, thou wilt succour
me, but if thou be a dog and a brute beast, thou wilt spoil me, defile
me, and tear me; either renounce God's image, or renounce the wicked
mind thou bearest.

These words might have moved a compound heart of iron and adamant,
but in his heart they obtained no impression. For he sitting in his chair
of state against the door all the while that she pleaded, leaning his
overhanging gloomy eyebrows on the pommel of his unsheathed sword,
he never looked up or gave her a word, but when he perceived she ex-
pected his answer of grace or utter perdition, he start up and took her
currishly by the neck, asking how long he should stay for her Ladyship.
Thou tell'st me (quoth he) of the plague, & the heavy hand of God, and
thy hundred infected breaths in one; I tell thee, I have cast the dice
an hundred times for the galleys in Spain, and yet still missed the ill
chance. Our order of casting is this: if there be a general or captain
new come home from the wars, & hath some 4 or 500 crowns overplus of
the King's in his hand, and his soldiers all paid, he makes proclama-
tion that whatsoever two resolute men will go to dice for it, and win
the bridle or lose the saddle, to such a place let them repair, and it
shall be ready for them. Thither go I, and find another such needy
squire resident. The dice run, I win, he is undone. I winning have the
crowns, he losing is carried to the galleys. This is our custom, which
a hundred times and more hath paid me custom of crowns when the poor
fellows have gone to Gehenna,283 had coarse bread and whipping-cheer
all their life after. Now thinkest thou that I, who so oft have escaped
such a number of hellish dangers, only depending upon the turning of
a few pricks, can be scare-bugged with the plague? What plague canst
thou name worse than I have had? Whether diseases, imprisonment, pov-
erty, banishment, I have passed through them all. My own mother gave
I a box of the ear to, and brake her neck down a pair of stairs, be-
cause she would not go in to a gentleman when I bade her; my sister
I sold to an old leno,284 to make his best of her; any kinswoman that I
have, knew I she were not a whore, myself would make her one; thou
art a whore, thou shalt be a whore, in spite of religion or precise285
ceremonies.

Therewith he flew upon her, and threatened her with his sword, but
it was not that he meant to wound her with. He grasped her by the
ivory throat, and shook her as a mastiff would shake a young bear,
swearing and staring he would tear out her weasand if she refused.
Not content with that savage constraint, he slipped his sacrilegi-
ous hand from her lily lawn-skinned neck, and enscarfed it in her
long silver locks, which with struggling were unrolled. Backward
he dragged her, even as a man backward would pluck a tree down by
the twigs, and then, like a traitor that is drawn to execution on
a hurdle, he traileth her up and down the chamber by those tender
untwisted braids, and setting his barbarous foot on her bare snowy
breast, bade her yield or have her wind stamped out. She cried,
Stamp, stifle me in my hair, hang me up by it on a beam, and so
let me die, rather than I should go to heaven with a beam in my
eye. No, quoth he, nor stamped nor stifled, nor hanged, nor to hea-
ven shalt thou go till I have had my will of thee; thy busy arms
in these silken fetters I'll enfold. Dismissing her hair from his
fingers, and pinioning her elbows therewithal, she struggled, she
wrested, but all was in vain. So struggling and so resisting, her
jewels did sweat, signifying there was poison coming towards her.
On the hard boards he threw her, and used his knee as an iron ram
to beat open the two-leaved gate of her chastity. Her husband's
dead body he made a pillow to his abomination. Conjecture the rest;
my words stick fast in the mire, and are clean tired; would I had
never undertook this tragical tale. Whatsoever is born, is born to
have an end. Thus ends my tale; his whorish lust was glutted, his
beastly desire satisfied; what in the house of any worth was carr-
iageable, he put up, and went his way.

Let not your sorrow die, you that have read the proem and narration
of this elegiacal history. Show you have quick wits in sharp conceit
of compassion. A woman that hath viewed all her children sacrificed
before her eyes, & after the first was slain, wiped the sword with
her apron to prepare it for the cleanly murder of the second, and so
on forward till it came to the empiercing of the seventeenth of her
loins, will you not give her great allowance of anguish? This woman,
this matron, this forsaken Heraclide, having buried fourteen children
in five days, whose eyes she howlingly closed, & caught many wrinkles
with funeral kisses, besides having her husband within a day after
laid forth as a comfortless corse, a carrionly block, that could nei-
ther eat with her, speak with her, nor weep with her, is she not to be
borne withal though her body swell with a timpany286 of tears, though
her speech be as impatient as unhappy Hecuba's, though her head raves
and her brain dote? Devise with yourselves that you see a corse rising
from his hearse after he is carried to church, & such another suppose
Heraclide to be, rising from the couch of enforced adultery.

Her eyes were dim, her cheeks bloodless, her breath smelled earthy,
her countenance was ghastly. Up she rose after she was deflowered, but
loath she arose, as a reprobate soul rising to the day of judgement.
Looking on the tone side as she rose, she spied her husband's body
lying under her head; ah, then she bewailed, as Cephalus when he had
killed Procris unwittingly, or Oedipus when ignorantly he had slain
his father, & known his mother incestuously. This was her subdued rea-
son's discourse.

Have I lived to make my husband's body the bier to carry me to hell?
Had filthy pleasure no other pillow to lean upon but his spreaded
limbs? On thy flesh my fault shall be imprinted at the day of resur-
rection. O beauty, the bait ordained to ensnare the irreligious; rich
men are robbed for their wealth, women are dishonested for being too
fair. No blessing is beauty, but a curse; cursed be the time that my
mother brought me forth to tempt. The serpent in paradise did no more;
the serpent in paradise is damned sempiternally; why should not I
hold myself damned (if predestination's opinions be true), that am
predestinate to this horrible abuse? The hog dieth presently if he
loseth an eye; with the hog have I wallowed in the mire; I have lost
my eye of honesty; it is clean plucked out with a strong hand of un-
chastity; what remaineth but I die? Die I will, though life be un-
willing; no recompense is there for me to redeem my compelled off-
ence, but with a rigorous compelled death. Husband, I'll be thy wife in
heaven; let not thy pure deceased spirit despise me when we meet, be-
cause I am tyrannously polluted. The devil, the belier of our frailty,
and common accuser of mankind, cannot accuse me, though he would,
of unconstrained submitting. If any guilt be mine, this is my fault, that
I did not deform my face ere it should so impiously allure.

Having passioned thus awhile, she hastily ran and looked herself in her
glass, to see if her sin were not written on her forehead; with looking,
she blushed, though none looked upon her but her own reflected image.

Then began she again, Heu quam difficile est crimen non prodere vultu,287
"How hard is it not to bewray a man's fault by his forehead?" Myself do
but behold myself, and yet I blush; then, God beholding me, shall not
I be ten times more ashamed? The angels shall hiss at me, the saints
and martyrs fly from me; yea, God himself shall add to the devil's damn-
ation because he suffered such a wicked creature to come before him.
Agamemnon, thou wert an infidel, yet when thou went'st to the Tro-
jan war, thou left'st a musician at home with thy wife, who by playing
the foot Spondaeus288 till thy return, might keep her in chastity. My hus-
band going to war with the devil and his enticements, when he surren-
dered, left no musician with me, but mourning and melancholy; had he
left any, as Aegisthus killed Agamemnon's musician ere he could be suc-
cessful, so surely would he have been killed ere this Aegistus surceas-
ed. My distressed heart, as the hart whenas he loseth his horns is ast-
onied, and sorrowfully runneth to hide himself, so be thou afflicted
and distressed; hide thyself under the Almighty's wings of mercy; sue,
plead, entreat; grace is never denied to them that ask. It may be de-
nied; I may be a vessel ordained to dishonour.

The only repeal we have from God's undefinite chastisement is to chas-
tise ourselves in this world, and I will; naught but death be my pen-
ance, gracious and acceptable may it be; my hand and my knife shall
manumit289 me out of the horror of mind I endure. Farewell, life, thou
hast lent me nothing but sorrow. Farewell, sin-sowed flesh, that hast
more weeds than flowers, more woes than joys. Point, pierce; edge,
enwiden; I patiently afford thee a sheath; spur forth my soul to mount
post to heaven. Jesu, forgive me; Jesu, receive me.

So (throughly stabbed) fell she down, and knocked her head against her
husband's body, wherewith he, not having been aired his full four and
twenty hours, start as out of a dream, while I through a cranny of my
upper chamber unseeled, had beheld all this sad spectacle. Awaking, he
rubbed his head to and fro, and wiping his eyes with his hand, began
to look about him. Feeling something lie heavy on his breast, he turn-
ed it off, and getting upon his legs, lighted a candle.

Here beginneth my purgatory. For he, good man, coming into the hall with
the candle, and spying his wife with her hair about her ears, defiled
and massacred, and his simple zany Capestrano run through, took a hal-
berd in his hand, and running from chamber to chamber to search who in
his house was likely to do it, at length found me lying on my bed, the
door locked to me on the outside, and my rapier unsheathed in the window,
wherewith he straight conjectured it was I, and calling the neighbours
hard by, said that I had caused myself to be locked into my chamber after
that sort, sent away my courtesan whom I called my wife, and made clean
my rapier because I would not be suspected.

Upon this was I laid in prison, should have been hanged, was brought to
the ladder, had made a ballad for my farewell in a readiness called Wil-
ton's wantonness, and yet for all that scaped dancing in a hempen circle.
He that hath gone through many perils and returned safe from them, makes
but a merriment to dilate them. I had the knot under my ear, there was
fair play, the hangman had one halter, another about my neck was fast-
ened to the gallows, the riding device290 was almost thrust home, and his
foot on my shoulder to press me down, when I made my saintlike confess-
ion as you have heard before, that such and such men at such an hour
brake into the house, slew the zany, took my courtesan, locked me into
my chamber, ravished Heraclide, and finally how she slew herself.

Present at the execution was there a banished English earl, who hearing
that a countryman of his was to suffer for such a notable murder, came
to hear his confession, and see if he knew him. He had not heard me tell
half of that I have recited but he craved audience, and desired the ex-
ecution might be stayed.

Not two days since it is, gentlemen and noble Romans (said he) since,
going to be let blood in a barber's shop against the infection, all on
sudden in a great tumult and uproar was there brought in one Bartol, an
Italian, grievously wounded and bloody. I, seeming to commiserate his
harms, courteously questioned him with what ill debtors he had met, or
how or by what casualty he came to be so arrayed. O (quoth he), long
have I lived sworn brothers in sensuality with one Esdras of Granado;
five hundred rapes and murders have we committed betwixt us. When our
iniquities were grown to the height, and God had determined to coun-
tercheck our amity, we came to the house of Johannes de Imola (whom
this young gentleman hath named); there did he justify all those rapes
in manner and form as the prisoner here hath confessed. But lo, an ac-
cident after, which neither he nor this audience is privy to. Esdras
of Granado, not content to have ravished the matron Heraclide, and
robbed her, after he had betook him from thence to his heels, lighted
on his companion Bartol with his courtesan, whose pleasing face he
had scarce winkingly glanced on, but he picked a quarrel with Bartol
to have her from him. On this quarrel they fought, Bartol was wounded
to the death, Esdras fled, and the fair dame left to go whither she
would. This, Bartol in the barber's shop freely acknowledged, as both
the barber and his man and other here present can amply depose.

Deposed they were; their oaths went for current; I was quit by pro-
clamation; to the banished earl I came to render thanks, when thus
he examined and schooled me.

Countryman, tell me, what is the occasion of thy straying so far out
of England to visit this strange nation? If it be languages, thou may-
est learn them at home; naught but lasciviousness is to be learned here.
Perhaps, to be better accounted of than other of thy condition, thou
ambitiously undertakest this voyage; these insolent fancies are but I-
carus' feathers, whose wanton wax, melted against the sun, will betray
thee into a sea of confusion.

The first traveller was Cain, and he was called a vagabond runagate on
the face of the earth. Travel (like the travail wherein smiths put wild
horses when they shoe them) is good for nothing but to tame and bring men
under.

God had no greater curse to lay upon the Israelites than by leading them
out of their own country to live as slaves in a strange land. That which
was their curse, we Englishmen count our chief blessedness; he is nobody
that hath not travelled; we had rather live as slaves in another land,
crouch and cap, and be servile to every jealous Italian's and proud Span-
iard's humour where we may neither speak, look, nor do anything but what
pleaseth them, than live as freemen and lords in our own country.

He that is a traveller must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue
like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is
set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing, and
if this be not the highest step of thraldom, there is no liberty or free-
dom.

It is but a mild kind of subjection to be the servant of one master at
once, but when thou hast a thousand thousand masters, as the veriest
botcher, tinker or cobbler freeborn will domineer over a foreigner, and
think to be his better or master in company, then shalt thou find there
is no such hell as to leave thy father's house (thy natural habitation)
to live in the land of bondage.

If thou dost but lend half a look to a Roman's or Italian's wife, thy por-
ridge shall be prepared for thee, and cost thee nothing but thy life.
Chance some of them break a bitter jest on thee, and thou retort'st it se-
verely, or seemest discontented, go to thy chamber and provide a great ban-
quet, for thou shalt be sure to be visited with guests in a mask the next
night, when in kindness and courtship thy throat shall be cut, and the do-
ers return undiscovered. Nothing so long of memory as a dog; these Italians
are old dogs, & will carry an injury a whole age in memory; I have heard of
a box on the ear that hath been revenged thirty year after. The Neapolitan
carrieth the bloodiest mind, and is the most secret fleering291 murderer,
whereupon it is grown to a common proverb, I'll give him the Neapolitan
shrug, when one intends to play the villain and make no boast of it.

The only precept that a traveller hath most use of, and shall find most
ease in, is that of Epicharchus,292 Vigila, et memor sis ne quid credas,
"Believe nothing, trust no man, yet seem thou as thou swallowed'st all, sus-
pected'st none, but wert easy to be gulled by everyone." Multi fallere doc-
uerunt (as Seneca saith) dum timent falli, "Many by showing their jealous
suspect of deceit have made men seek more subtle means to deceive them."

Alas, our Englishmen are the plainest-dealing souls that ever God put life
in; they are greedy of news, and love to be fed in their humours293 and hear
themselves flattered the best that may be. Even as Philemon, a comic poet,
died with extreme laughter at the conceit of seeing an ass eat figs, so
have the Italians no such sport as to see poor English asses, how soberly
they swallow Spanish figs,294 devour any hook baited for them. He is not fit
to travel that cannot, with the Candians, live on serpents, make nourish-
ing food even of poison. Rats and mice engender by licking one another; he
must lick, he must crouch, he must cog, lie, and prate, that either in the
court or a foreign country will engender and come to preferment. Be his
feature what it will, if he be fair-spoken he winneth friends. Non formo-
sus erat, sed erat facundus Ulysses:295 "Ulysses, the long traveller, was
notamiable, but eloquent." Some allege they travel to learn wit, but I am
of this opinion, that as it is not possible for any man to learn the art of
memory, whereof Tully, Quintilian, Seneca and Hermannus Buschius have
written so many books, except he have a natural memory before, so is it
not possible for any man to attain any great wit by travel, except he
have the grounds of it rooted in him before. That wit which is thereby
to be perfected or made staid is nothing but Experientia longa malorum,296
the experience of many evils; the experience that such a man lost his
life by this folly, another by that, such a young gallant consumed his
substance on such a courtesan, these courses of revenge a merchant of
Venice took against a merchant of Ferrara, and this point of justice was
showed by the Duke upon the murderer. What is here but we may read in
books, and a great deal more too, without stirring our feet out of a
warm study?

　　　　　　Vobis alii ventorum praelia narrent (saith Ovid),
　　　　　　Quasque Scilla infestat, quasue Charybdis aquas.
　　　　　　Let others tell you wonders of the wind,
　　　　　　How Scilla or Charybdis is inclined.
　　　　　　　-vos quod quisque loquetur
　　　　　　Credite. Believe you what they say, but never try.

So let others tell you strange accidents, treasons, poisonings, close
packings in France, Spain and Italy; it is no harm for you to hear of
them, but come not near them.

What is there in France to be learned more than in England but falsehood
in fellowship, perfect slovenry, to love no man but for my pleasure, to
swear Ah, par la mort Dieu when a man's hams are scabbed. For the idle
traveller (I mean not for the soldier), I have known some that have con-
tinued there by the space of half a dozen years, and when they come home
they have hid a little wearish297 lean face under a broad French hat, kept a
terrible coil298 with the dust in the street in their long cloaks of grey pa-
per, and spoke English strangely. Naught else have they profited by their
travel, save learned to distinguish of the true Bordeaux grape, and know
a cup of neat Gascoigne wine from wine of Orleans; yea, and peradventure
this also, to esteem of the pox as a pimple, to wear a velvet patch on
their face, and walk melancholy with their arms folded.

From Spain what bringeth our traveller? A skull-crowned hat of the fash-
ion of an old deep porringer, a diminutive alderman's ruff with short
strings like the droppings of a man's nose, a close-bellied doublet com-
ing down with a peak behind as far as the T crupper, and cut off before by
the breastbone like a partlet or neckercher, a wide pair of gaskins which
ungathered would make a couple of women's riding-kirtles, huge hangers299
that have half a cow-hide in them, a rapier that is lineally descended
from half a dozen dukes at the least. Let his cloak be as long or as
short as you will; if long, it is faced with Turkey grogeran300 ravelled;
if short, it hath a cape like a calf's tongue, and is not so deep in
his whole length, nor hath so much cloth in it, I will justify, as only
the standing-cape of a Dutchman's cloak. I have not yet touched all,
for he hath in either shoe as much taffeta for his tyings as would serve
for an ancient, which serveth him (if you will have the mystery of it)
of the own accord for a shoe-rag. A soldier & a braggart he is (that's
concluded); he jetteth strouting,301 dancing on his toes with his hands
under his sides. If you talk with him, he makes a dish-cloth of his
own country in comparison of Spain, but if you urge him more particu-
larly wherein it exceeds, he can give no instance but in Spain they
have better bread than any we have, when (poor hungry slaves) they may
crumble it into water well enough, and make misers302 with it, for they have
not a good morsel of meat except it be salt pilchards to eat with it all
the year long, and, which is more, they are poor beggars, and lie in foul
straw every night.

Italy, the paradise of the earth and the epicure's heaven, how doth it
form our young master? It makes him to kiss his hand like an ape, cringe
his neck like a starveling, and play at hey-pass, repass, come aloft,303 when
he salutes a man. From thence he brings the art of atheism, the art of ep-
icurizing, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, the art of sodomitry.
The only probable good thing they have to keep us from utterly condemning
it is that it maketh a man an excellent courtier, a curious carpet-knight,
which is, by interpretation, a fine close lecher, a glorious hypocrite.
It is now a privy note amongst the better sort of men, when they would set
a singular mark or brand on a notorious villainy, to say, he hath been in
Italy.

With the Dane and the Dutchman I will not encounter, for they are simple
honest men that, with Danaus' daughters,304 do nothing but fill bottomless
tubs, & will be drunk & snort in the midst of dinner; he hurts himself only
that goes thither; he cannot lightly be damned, for the vintners, the brew-
ers, the maltmen and ale-wives pray for him. Pitch and pay,305 they will pray
all day; score & borrow, they will wish him much sorrow. But lightly a man
is ne'er the better for their prayers, for they commit all deadly sin for
the most part of them in mingling their drink, the vintners in the highest
degree.

Why jest I in such a necessary persuasive discourse? I am a banished exile
from my country, though near linked in consanguinity to the best, an earl
born by birth, but a beggar now as thou seest. These many years in Italy
have I lived an outlaw. Awhile I had a liberal pension of the Pope, but
that lasted not, for he continued not; one succeeded him in his chair that
cared neither for Englishmen nor his own countrymen. Then was I driven to
pick up my crumbs among the cardinals, to implore the benevolence & charity
of all the dukes of Italy, whereby I have since made a poor shift to live,
but so live as I wish myself a thousand times dead.

　　　　　　Cum patriam amisi, tunc me periisse putato:306
　　　　　　When I was banished, think I caught my bane.

The sea is the native soil to fishes; take fishes from the sea, they take
no joy, nor thrive, but perish straight. So likewise the birds removed from
the air (the abode whereto they were born), the beasts from the earth, and
I from England. Can a lamb take delight to be suckled at the breasts of a
she-wolf? I am a lamb nourished with the milk of wolves, one that, with the
Ethiopians inhabiting over against Meroe, feed on nothing but scorpions; use
is another nature, yet ten times more contentive were nature restored to the
kingdom from whence she is excluded. Believe me, no air, no bread, no fire,
no water doth a man any good out of his own country. Cold fruits never pros-
per in a hot soil, nor hot in a cold. Let no man for any transitory pleasure
sell away the inheritance he hath of breathing in the place where he was born.
Get thee home, my young lad, lay thy bones peaceably in the sepulchre of thy
fathers, wax old in overlooking thy grounds, be at hand to close the eyes of
thy kindred. The devil and I am desperate, he of being restored to heaven, I
of being recalled home.

Here he held his peace and wept. I, glad of any opportunity of a full point
to part from him, told him I took his counsel in worth; what lay in me to re-
quite in love should not be lacking. Some business that concerned me highly
called me away very hastily, but another time I hoped we should meet. Very
hardly he let me go, but I earnestly overpleading my occasions, at length he
dismissed me, told me where his lodging was, and charged me to visit him with-
out excuse very often.

Here's a stir, thought I to myself after I was set at liberty, that is worse
that an upbraiding lesson after a breeching; certainly if I had bethought me
like a rascal as I was, he should have had an Ave Mary of me for his cynic
exhortation. God plagued me for deriding such a grave fatherly advertiser.
List the worst throw of ill lucks. Tracing up and down the city to seek my
courtesan till the evening began to grow very well in age, it thus fortuned:
the element, as if it had drunk too much in the afternoon, poured down so
profoundly that I was forced to creep like one afraid of the watch close un-
der the pentices,307 where the cellar-door of a Jew's house called Zadoch
(over which in my direct way I did pass) being unbarred on the inside, over
head and ears I fell into it, as a man falls in a ship from the orlop into the
hold, or as in an earthquake the ground should open, and a blind man come
feeling pad pad over the open gulf with his staff, should tumble on a sud-
den into hell. Having worn out the anguish of my fall a little with wallow-
ing up & down, I cast up mine eyes to see under what continent I was, and
lo (O destiny), I saw my courtesan kissing very lovingly with a prentice.

My back and my sides I had hurt with my fall, but now my head swelled and
ached worse than both. I was even gathering wind to come upon her with a
full blast of contumely when the Jew (awaked with the noise of my fall) came
hast-ily bustling down the stairs, and, raising his other tenants, attached308
both the courtesan and me for breaking his house and conspiring with his
prentice to kill him.

It was then the law in Rome that if any man had a felon fallen into his
hands, either by breaking into his house, or robbing him by the highway, he
might choose whether he would make him his bondman, or hang him. Zadoch
(as all Jews are covetous), casting with himself he should have no benefit by
casting me off the ladder, had another policy in his head: he went to one
Doctor Zachary, the Pope's physician, that was a Jew and his countryman
likewise, and told him he had the finest bargain for him that might be. It
is not concealed from me (saith he) that the time of your accustomed yearly
anatomy is at hand, which it behooves you under forfeiture of the foundation
of your college very carefully to provide for. The infection is great, &
hardly will you get a sound body to deal upon; you are my countryman, there-
fore I come to you first. Be it known unto you I have a young man at home
fallen to me for my bondman, of the age of eighteen, of stature tall,
straight-limbed, of as clear a complexion as any painter's fancy can ima-
gine; go to, you are an honest man, and one of the scattered children of
Abraham; you shall have him for five hundred crowns. Let me see him, quoth
Doctor Zachary, and I will give you as much as another. Home he sent for me;
pinioned and shackled I was transported alongst the streets where, passing
under Juliana's the Marquess of Mantua's wife's window, that was a lusty
bona-roba, one of the Pope's concubines, as she had her casement half open,
she looked out and spied me. At the first sight she was enamoured with my
age and beardless face, that had in it no ill sign of physiognomy fatal to
fetters; after me she sent to know what I was, wherein I had offended, and
whither I was going. My conducts resolved them all. She having received this
answer, with a lustful collachrymation lamenting my Jewish praemunire,309
that body and goods I should light into the hands of such a cursed genera-
tion, invented the means of my release.

But first I'll tell you what betided me after I was brought to Doctor Zach-
ary's. The purblind Doctor put on his spectacles and looked upon me, and
when he had throughly viewed my face, he caused me to be stripped naked,
to feel and grope whether each limb were sound, & my skin not infected.
Then he pierced my arm to see how my blood ran, which assays and search-
ings ended, he gave Zadoch his full price and sent him away, then locked
me up in a dark chamber till the day of anatomy.

O, the cold sweating cares which I conceived after I knew I should be cut
like a French summer doublet. Methought already the blood began to gush
out at my nose; if a flea on the arm had but bit me, I deemed the instru-
ment had pricked me. Well, well, I may scoff at a shrewd turn, but there's
no such ready way to make a man a true Christian as to persuade himself
he is taken up for an anatomy. I'll depose I prayed then more than I did
in seven year before. Not a drop of sweat trickled down my breast and my
sides, but I dreamt it was a smooth-edged razor tenderly slicing down my
breast and sides. If any knocked at door, I supposed it was the beadle of
Surgeons' Hall come for me. In the night I dreamed of nothing but phlebo-
tomy,310 bloody fluxes, incarnatives,311 running ulcers. I durst not let out
a wheal312 for fear through it I should bleed to death. For meat in this dis-
tance I had plum-porridge of purgations ministered me one after another
to clarify my blood, that it should not lie cloddered in the flesh. Nor
did he it so much for clarifying physic, as to save charges. Miserable
is that mouse that lives in a physician's house; Tantalus lives not so
hunger-starved in hell as she doth there. Not the very crumbs that fall
from his table, but Zachary sweeps together, and of them moulds up a man-
na. Of the ashy parings of his bread he would make conserve of chippings.
Out of bones, after the meat was eaten off, he would alchemize an oil that
he sold for a shilling a dram. His snot and spittle a hundred times he
hath put over to his apothecary for snow-water. Any spider he would temper
to perfect mithridate.313 His rheumatic eyes, when he went in the wind, or
rose early in a morning, dropped as cool alum-water as you would request.
He was Dame Niggardise' sole heir & executor. A number of old books had
he, eaten with the moths and worms; now all day would not he study a
dodkin,314 but pick those worms and moths out of his library, and of their
mixture make a preservative against the plague. The liquor out of his
shoes he would wring, to make a sacred balsamum against barrenness.

Spare we him a line or two, and look back to Juliana, who, conflicted in
her thoughts about me very doubtfully, adventured to send a messenger to
Doctor Zachary in her name, very boldly to beg me of him and if she might
not beg me, to buy me with what sums of money soever he would ask. Zachary
Jewishly and churlishly denied both her suits, and said if there were no
more Christians on the earth, he would thrust his incisionknife into his
throat-boll immediately. Which reply she taking at his hands most despite-
fully, thought to cross him over the shins with as sore an overwhart315
blow ere a month to an end. The Pope (I know not whether at her entreaty
or no) within two days after fell sick; Doctor Zachary was sent for to
minister unto him, who, seeing a little danger in his water, gave him a
gentle comfortive for the stomach, and desired those near about him to
persuade his Holiness to take some rest, & he doubted not but he would
be forthwith well. Who should receive this mild physic of him but the
concubine Juliana, his utter enemy? She, being not unprovided of strong
poison at that instant, in the Pope's outward chamber so mingled it
that when his grand Sublimity' taster came to relish it, he sunk down
stark dead on the pavement. Herewith the Pope called Juliana, and asked
her what strong-concocted broth she had brought him. She kneeled down
on her knees, & said it was such as Zachary the Jew had delivered her
with his own hands, and therefore if it misliked his Holiness, she
craved pardon. The Pope, without further sifting into the matter, would
have had Zachary and all the Jews in Rome put to death, but she hung a-
bout his knees, and with crocodile tears desired him the sentence might
be lenified, and they be all but banished at the most. For Doctor Zach-
ary, quoth she, your ten times ungrateful physician, since notwithstand-
ing his treacherous intent, he hath much art, and many sovereign simples,
oils, gargarisms316 and syrups in his closet and house that may stand your
Mightiness in stead, I beg all his goods only for your Beatitude's pre-
servation and good. This request at the first was sealed with a kiss,
and the Pope's edict without delay proclaimed throughout Rome, namely,
that all foreskin clippers, whether male or female, belong to the Old
Jewry, should depart and avoid, upon pain of hanging, within twenty
days after the date thereof.

Juliana (two days before the proclamation came out) sent her servants
to extend upon Zachary's territories, his goods, his moveables, his
chattels and his servants, who performed their commission to the ut-
most tittle, and left him not so much as master of an old urinal case
or a candle-box. It was about six o'clock in the evening when those
boothalers entered; into my chamber they rushed, when I sat leaning
on my elbow, and my left hand under my side, devising what a kind of
death it might be to be let blood till a man die. I called to mind
the assertion of some philosophers, who said the soul was nothing
but blood; then thought I what a thing were this, if I should let
my soul fall and break his neck into a basin. I had but a pimple
rose with heat in that part of the vein where they use to prick,
and I fearfully misdeemed it as my soul searching for passage. Fie
upon it! A man's breath to be let out at a back door, what a vill-
ainy it is! To die bleeding is all one as if a man should die piss-
ing. Good drink makes good blood, so that piss is nothing but blood
under-age. Seneca and Lucan were lobcocks317 to choose that death
of all other; a pig, or a hog, or any edible brute beast a cook or a
butcher deals upon dies bleeding. To die with a prick wherewith the
faintest-hearted woman under heaven would not be killed, O God, it
is infamous.

In this meditation did they seize upon me; in my cloak they muffled
me, that no man　might know me, nor I see which way I was carried.
The first ground I touched after I was　out of Zachary's house was
the Countess Juliana's chamber; little did I surmise that　fortune
reserved me to so fair a death. I made no other reckoning all the
while they had　me on their shoulders but that I was on horseback
to heaven, and carried to church on a　bier, excluded forever for
drinking any more ale or beer. Juliana scornfully questioned　them
thus (as if I had fallen into her hands beyond expectation): what
proper apple-squire318　is this you bring so suspiciously into my
chamber? What hath he done, or where had you　him? They answered
likewise afar off, that in one of Zachary's chambers they found
him close prisoner, and thought themselves guilty of the breach of
her Ladyship's commandment if they should have left him. O, quoth
she, ye love to be double diligent, or thought peradventure that
I, being a lone woman, stood in need of a love. Bring you me a
princocks319 beardless boy (I know not whence he is, or whither he
would) to call my name in suspense? I tell you, you have abused
me, and I can hardly brook it at your hands. You should have led
him to the magistrate; no commission received you of me but for
his goods & his servants. They besought her to excuse their error,
proceeding of duteous zeal, no negligent default. But why should
not I conjecture the worst, quoth she? I tell you troth, I am half
in a jealousy he is some fantastic youngster who hath hired you to
dishonour me. It is a likely matter that such a man as Zachary
should make a prison of his house; by your leave, sir gallant, un-
der lock and key shall you stay with me till I have inquired far-
ther of you; you shall be sifted throughly ere you and I part. Go,
maid, show him to the farther chamber at the end of the gallery
that looks into the garden; you, my trim panders, I pray guard him
thither as you took pains to bring him hither; when you have so done,
see the doors be made fast, and come your way. Here was a wily wench
had her liripoop320 without book; she was not to seek in her knacks and
shifts; such are all women, each of them hath a cloak for the rain,
and can blear her husband's eyes as she list.

Not too much of this Madam Marquess at once; let me dilate a little
what Zadoch did with my courtesan after he had sold me to Zachary.
Of an ill tree I hope you are not so ill sighted in grafting to ex-
pect good fruit; he was a Jew, and entreated her like a Jew. Under
shadow of enforcing her to tell how much money she had of his pren-
tice so to be trained to his cellar, he stripped her, and scourged
her from top to toe tantara.321 Day by day he digested his meat with
leading her the measures. A diamond Delphinical dry lecher it was.　
The Ballad of the Whipper322 of late days here in England was but a
scoff in comparison of him. All the colliers of Romford, who hold
their corporation by yarking the blind bear at Paris Garden,323 were
but bunglers to him; he had the right agility of the lash; there
were none of them could make the cord come aloft with a twang half
like him. Mark the ending; mark the ending.

The tribe of Judah is adjudged from Rome to be trudging; they may
no longer be lodged there; all the Albumazers, Rabisacks, Gedions,
Tebiths, Benhadads, Benrodans, Zedechias, Halies of them were ban-
querouts,324 and turned out of house and home. Zachary came running
to Zadoch's in sackcloth and ashes presently after his goods were con-
fiscated, and told him how he was served, and what decree was com-
ing out against them all. Descriptions, stand by; here is to be ex-
pressed the fury of Lucifer when he was turned over heaven bar for
a wrangler.325 There is a toad-fish which, taken out of the water,
swells more than one would think his skin could hold, and bursts
in his face that toucheth him. So swelled Zadoch, and was ready to
burst out of his skin and shoot his bowels like chain-shot full at
Zachary's face for bringing him such baleful tidings; his eyes glar-
ed & burnt blue like brimstone and aqua-vitae set on fire in an egg-
shell, his very nose lightened glow-worms, his teeth crashed and
grated together like the joints of a high building cracking and
rocking like a cradle whenas a tempest takes her full-butt against
his broadside. He swore, he cursed, and said,

These be they that worship that crucified God of Nazareth; here's
the fruits of their new-found gospel; sulphur and gunpowder carry
them all quick to gehenna. I would spend my soul willingly to have
that triple-headed Pope with all his sin-absolved whores and oil-
greased priests borne with a black sant326 on the devil's back in pro-
cession to the pit of perdition. Would I might sink presently into
the earth, so I might blow up this Rome, this whore of Babylon, in-
to the air with my breath. If I must be banished, if those heathen
dogs will needs rob me of my goods, I will poison their springs &
conduit-heads whence they receive all their water round about the
city; I'll tice all the young children into my house that I can get,
and cutting their throats, barrel them up in powdering beef tubs,
and so send them to victual the Pope's galleys. Ere the officers
come to extend, I'll bestow an hundred pound on a dole of bread
which I'll cause to be kneaded with scorpions' oil that will kill
more than the plague. I'll hire them that make their wafers or sac-
ramentary gods, to minge327 them after the same sort, so in the zeal
of their superstitious religion shall they languish and drop(?) like
carrion. If there be ever a blasphemous conjurer that can call the
winds from their brazen caves, and make the clouds travail before
their time, I'll give him the other hundred pounds to disturb the
heavens a whole week together with thunder and lightning, if it be
for nothing but to sour all the wines in Rome, and turn them to vin-
egar. As long as they have either oil or wine, this plague feeds but
pinglingly328 upon them.

Zadoch, Zadoch, said Doctor Zachary (cutting him off), thou threat-
enest the air, whilst we perish here on earth. It is the Countess
Italiana, the Marquess of Mantua's wife, and no other, that hath
complotted our confusion. Ask not how, but insist in my words, and
assist in revenge.

As how, as how? said Zadoch, shrugging and shrubbing.329 More happy
than the patriarchs were I if, crushed to death with the greatest
torments Rome's tyrants have tried, there might be quintessenced
out of me one quart of precious poison. I have a leg with an issue;
shall I cut it off, & from his fount of corruption extract a venom
worse than any serpent's? If thou wilt, I'll go to a house that is
infected, where, catching the plague, and having got a running sore
upon me, I'll come and deliver her a supplication, and breathe upon
her. I know my breath stinks so already that it is within half a de-
gree of poison. I'll pay her home if I perfect it with any more
putrefaction.

No, no, brother Zadoch, answered Zachary, that is not the way. Canst
thou provide me ere a bondmaid endued with singular & divine quali-
fied beauty, whom as a present from our synagogue thou may'st commend
unto her, desiring her to be good and gracious unto us?

I have; I am for you, quoth Zadoch. Diamante, come forth. Here's a
wench (said he) of as clean a skin as Susanna; she hath not a wem on
her flesh from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head; how
think you, master Doctor, will she not serve the turn?

She will, said Zachary, and therefore I'll tell you what charge I
would have committed to her. But I care not if I disclose it only
to her. Maid (if thou beest a maid), come hither to me; thou must
be sent to the Countess of Mantua's about a small piece of service
whereby, being now a bondwoman, thou shalt purchase freedom and
gain a large dowry to thy marriage. I know thy master loves thee
dearly, though he will not let thee perceive so much; he intends
after he is dead to make thee his heir, for he hath no children;
please him in that I shall instruct thee, and thou art made for-
ever. So it is that the Pope is far out of liking with the Count-
ess of Mantua, his concubine, and hath put his trust in me, his
physician, to have her quietly and charitably made away. Now I
cannot intend it, for I have many cures in hand which call upon
me hourly; thou, if thou beest placed with her as her waiting-
maid or cup-bearer, mayest temper poison with her broth, her
meat, her drink, her oils, her syrups, and never be bewrayed. I
will not say whether the Pope hath heard of thee, and thou mayest
come to be his leman in her place if thou behave thyself wisely.
What, hast thou the heart to go through with it or no?

Diamante, deliberating with herself in what hellish servitude she
lived with the Jew, & that she had no likelihood to be released of
it, but fall from evil to worse if she omitted this opportunity,
resigned herself over wholly to be disposed and employed as seemed
best unto them. Thereupon, without further consultation, her ward-
robe was richly rigged, her tongue smooth filed & new edged on the
whetstone, her drugs delivered her, and presented she was by Zadoch,
her master, to the Countess, together with some other slight newfan-
gles, as from the whole congregation, desiring her to stand their
merciful mistress, and solicit the Pope for them, that through one
man's ignorant offence were all generally in disgrace with him, and
had incurred the cruel sentence of loss of goods and of banishment.

Juliana, liking well the pretty round face of my black-browed Dia-
mante, gave the Jew better countenance than otherwise she would have
done, and told him, for her own part she was but a private woman,
and could promise nothing confidently of his Holiness, for though he
had suffered himself to be overruled by her in some humours, yet in
this that touched him so nearly, she knew not how he would be inclin-
ed, but what lay in her either to pacify or persuade him, they should
be sure of, and so craved his absence.

His back turned, she asked Diamante what countrywoman she was, what
friends she had, and how she fell into the hands of that Jew? She an-
swered that she was a magnifico's daughter of Venice, stolen when she
was young from her friends, and sold to this Jew for a bondwoman who
(quoth she) hath used me so Jewishly and tyrannously that forever I
must celebrate the memory of this day wherein I am delivered from his
jurisdiction. (quoth she, deep sighing), why did I enter into any men-
tion of my own misusage? It will be thought that that which I am now
to reveal proceeds of malice, not truth. Madam, your life is sought by
these Jews that sue to you. Blush not, nor be troubled in your mind,
for with warning I shall arm you against all their intentions. Thus
and thus (quoth she) said Doctor Zachary unto me; this poison he del-
ivered me. Before I was called in to them, such & such consultation
through the crevice of the door hard locked did I hear betwixt them.
Deny it if they can, I will justify it; only I beseech you to be fa-
vourable lady unto me, and let me not fall again into the hands of
those vipers.

Juliana said little, but thought unhappily; only she thanked her for
detecting it, and vowed though she were her bondwoman to be a mother
unto her. The poison she took of her, and set it up charely on a shelf
in her closet, thinking to keep it for some good purposes as, for exam-
ple, when I was consumed and worn to the bones through her abuse, she
would give me but a dram too much, and pop me into a privy. So she had
served some of her paramours ere that, and if God had not sent Diamante
to be my redeemer, undoubtedly I had drunk of the same cup.

In a leaf or two before was I locked up; here in this page the foresaid
goodwife Countess comes to me; she is no longer a judge, but a client.
How she came, in what manner of attire, with what immodest and uncomely
words she courted me, if I should take upon me to enlarge, all modest
ears would abhor me. Some inconvenience she brought me to by her harlot-
like behaviour, of which enough I can never repent me.

Let that be forgiven and forgotten; fleshly delights could not make her
slothful or slumbering in revenge against Zadoch. She set men about him
to incense and egg him on in courses of discontentment, and other super-
vising espials to ply, follow, and spur forward those suborning incensors.
Both which played their parts so that Zadoch, of his own nature violent,
swore by the ark of Jehovah to set the whole city on fire ere he went out
of it. Zachary, after he had furnished the wench with the poison, and gi-
ven her instructions to go to the devil, durst not stay one hour for fear
of disclosing, but fled to the Duke of Bourbon330 that after sacked Rome,
and there practised with his bastardship all the mischief against the
Pope & Rome that envy could put into his mind. Zadoch was left behind for
the hangman. According to his oath, he provided balls of wild-fire in a
readiness, and laid trains of gunpowder in a hundred several places of
the city to blow it up, which he had set fire to, & also bandied his balls
abroad, if his attendant spies had not taken him with the manner. To the
straightest prison in Rome he was dragged, where from top to toe he was
clogged with fetters and manacles. Juliana informed the Pope of Zachary's
and his practice; Zachary was sought for, but Non est inventus,331 he was
packing long before. Commandment was given that Zadoch, whom they
had under hand and seal of lock and key should be executed with all the
fiery torments that could be found out.

I'll make short work, for I am sure I have wearied all my readers. To the
execution place was he bought, where first and foremost he was stripped,
then on a sharp iron stake fastened in the ground he had his fundament
pitched, which stake ran up along into the body like a spit; under his
armholes two of like sort; a great bonfire they made round about him,
wherewith his flesh roasted, not burned, and ever as with the heat his
skin blistered, the fire was drawn aside, and they basted him with a mix-
ture of aquafortis, alum-water, and mercury sublimatum,332 which smarted
to the very soul of him, and searched him to the marrow. Then did they
scourge his back parts so blistered and basted with burning whips of red-
hot wire; his head they nointed over with pitch and tar, and so inflamed
it. To his privy members they tied streaming fire-works; the skin from
the crest of the shoulder, as also from his elbows, his huckle-bones, his
knees, his ankles, they plucked and gnawed off with sparkling pincers;
his breast and his belly with sealskins they grated over, which as fast
as they grated and rawed, one stood over and laved with smiths' cindery
water333 and aqua-vitae; his nails they half raised up, and then under-
propped them with sharp pricks, like a tailor's shop-window half open on
a holiday; every one of his fingers they rent up to the wrist; his toes they
brake off by the roots, and let them still hang by a little skin. In conclu-
sion, they had a small oil fire, such as men blow light bubbles of glass
with, and beginning at his feet, they let him lingeringly burn up limb by
limb till his heart was consumed, and then he died. Triumph women, this
was the end of the whipping Jew, contrived by a woman, in revenge of
two women, herself and her maid.

I have told you, or should tell you, in what credit Diamante grew with her
mistress.　Juliana never dreamed but she was an authentical maid; she made
her the chief of her　bedchamber; she appointed none but her to look in to
me, & serve me of such necessaries　as I lacked. You must suppose when we
met there was no small rejoicing on either part,　much like the three bro-
thers that went three several ways to seek their fortunes, & at the　
year's end at those three cross-ways met again, and told one another how
they sped; so　after we had been long asunder seeking our fortunes, we
commented one to another most　kindly what cross haps had encountered us.
Ne'er a six hours but the Countess cloyed　me with her company. It grew to
this pass, that either I must find out some miraculous means of escape, or
drop away in a consumption, as one pined for lack of meat; I was clean
spent and done, there was no hope of me.

The year held on his course to doomsday, when Saint Peter's day334 dawned.
That day is a day of supreme solemnity in Rome, when the embassador of
Spain comes and presents a milk-white jennet to the Pope that kneels down
upon his own accord in token of obeisance and humility before him, and lets
him stride on his back as easy as one strides over a block; with this jen-
net is offered a rich purse of a yard length, full of Peter-pence. No music
that hath the gift of utterance but sounds all the while; copes and costly
vestments deck the hoarsest and beggarliest singing man, not a clerk or
sexton is absent, no, nor a mule nor a foot-cloth belonging to any cardinal
but attends on the tail of the triumph. The Pope himself is borne in his
pontificalibus through the Burgo (which is the chief street in Rome) to the
embassador's house to dinner, and thither resorts all the assembly, where,
if a poet should spend all his lifetime in describing a banquet, he could
not feast his auditors half so well with words as he doth his guests with
junkets.

To this feast Juliana addressed herself like an angel; in a litter of green
needlework wrought like an arbour and open on every side was she borne by
four men, hidden under cloth rough plushed and woven like eglantine and
woodbine. At the four corners it was topped with four round crystal cages
of nightingales. For footmen, on either side of her went four virgins clad
in lawn, with lutes in their hands, playing. Next before her, two and two
in order, a hundred pages in suits of white cypress and long horsemen's
coats of cloth of silver who, being all in white, advanced every one of
them her picture enclosed in a white round screen of feathers, such as is
carried over great princesses' heads when they ride in summer, to keep
them from the heat of the sun. Before them went a fourscore beads-women
she maintained, in green gowns, scattering strawing-herbs and flowers. A-
fter her followed the blind, the halt, and the lame, sumptuously apparel-
led like lords, and thus passed she on to St. Peter's.

Interea quid agitur demi, how is't at home all this while? My courtesan is
my keeper, the keys are committed unto her, she is mistress factotum. A-
gainst our countess we conspire, pack up all her jewels, plate, money that
was extant, and to the water-side send them; to conclude, courageously rob
her, and run away. Quid non auri saca fames,335 What defame will not gold
salve? He mistook himself that invented the proverb Dimicandum est pro
aris et focis, for it should have been pro auro et fama, Not for altars and
fires we must contend, but for gold and fame.

Oars nor wind could not stir nor blow faster than we toiled out of Tiber; a
number of good-fellows would give size-ace and the dice336 that with as lit-
tle toil they could leave Tyburn behind them. Out of ken we were, ere the
Countess came from the feast. When she returned and found her house not so
much pestered as it was wont, her chests, her closets, and her cupboards
broke open to take air, and that both I and my keeper was missing, O, then
she fared like a frantic bacchanal, she stamped, she stared, she beat her
head against the walls, scratched her face, bit her fingers, and strewed
all the chamber with her hair. None of her servants durst stay in her sight,
but she beat them out in heaps, and bade them go seek, search they knew not
where, and hang themselves, and never look her in the face more if they
did not hunt us out.

After her fury had reasonably spent itself, her breast began to swell with the
mother,337 caused by her former fretting and chafing, and she grew very ill
at ease. Whereupon she knocked for one of her maids, and bade her run into
her closet, and fetch her a little glass that stood on the upper shelf, where-
in there was spiritus vini. The maid went, and, mistaking, took the glass of
poison which Diamante had given her, and she kept in store for me. Coming
with it as fast as her legs could carry her, her mistress at her return was
in a sound, and lay for dead on the floor, whereat she shrieked out, and fell
a-rubbing & chafing her very busily. When that would not serve, she took a
key and opened her mouth, and having heard that spiritus vini was a thing
of mighty operation, able to call a man from death to life, she took the poi-
son, and verily thinking it to be spiritus vini (such as she was sent for),
poured a large quantity of it into her throat, and jogged on her back to
digest it. It revived her with a very vengeance, for it killed her outright;
only she awakened & lift up her hands, but spake ne'er a word. Then was
the maid in my grandam's beans,338 and knew not what should become of
her; I heard the Pope took pity on her, & because her trespass was not
voluntary, but chance-medley,339 he assigned her no other punishment
but this, to drink out the rest of the poison in the glass that was left,
and so go scot-free. We, careless of these mischances, held on our flight,
and saw no man come after us but we thought had pursued us. A thief, they
say, mistakes every bush for a trueman; the wind rattled not in any bush
by the way as I rode, but I straight drew my rapier. To Bologna with a mer-
ry gale we posted, where we lodged ourselves in a blind street out of the
way, and kept secret many days, but when we perceived we sailed in the ha-
ven, that the wind was laid, and no alarum made after us, we boldly came
abroad, & one day hearing of a more desperate murderer than Cain that was
to be executed, we followed the multitude, and grutched340 not to lend him
our eyes at his last parting.

Who should it be but one Cutwolf, a wearish341 dwarfish writhen-faced
cobbler, brother to Bartol the Italian, that was confederate with Esdras of
Granado, and at that time stole away my courtesan when he ravished Her-
aclide?

It is not so natural for me to epitomize his impiety, as to hear him in
his own person speak upon the wheel where he was to suffer.

Prepare your ears and your tears, for never till this thrust I any tragi-
cal matter upon you. Strange and wonderful are God's judgements; here
shine they in their glory. Chaste Heraclide, thy blood is laid up in hea-
ven's treasury; not one drop of it was lost, but lent out to usury; water
poured forth sinks down quietly into the earth, but blood spilt on the
ground sprinkles up to the firmament. Murder is wide-mouthed, and will
not let God rest till he grant revenge. Not only the blood of the slaugh-
tered innocent, but the soul, ascendeth to his throne, and there cries
out & exclaims for justice and recompense. Guiltless souls that live ev-
ery hour subject to violence, and with your despairing fears do much im-
pair God's providence, fasten your eyes on this spectacle that will add
to your faith. Refer all your oppressions, afflictions, & injuries to the
even-balanced eye of the Almighty; he it is that when your patience
sleepeth, will be most exceeding mindful of you.

This is but a gloss upon the text; thus Cutwolf begins his insulting ora-
tion.

Men and people that have made holiday to behold my pained flesh toil on
the wheel, expect not of me a whining penitent slave, that shall do no-
thing but cry and say his prayers, and so be crushed to pieces. My body
is little, but my mind is as great as a giant's; the soul which is in me
is the very soul of Julius Caesar by reversion. My name is Cutwolf, nei-
ther better nor worse by occupation than a poor cobbler of Verona; cobb-
lers are men, and kings are no more. The occasion of my coming hither at
this present is to have a few of my bones broken (as we are all born to
die) for being the death of the emperor of homicides, Esdras of Granado.
About two years since in the streets of Rome he slew the only and eldest
brother I had, named Bartol, in quarrelling about a courtesan. The news
brought to me as I was sitting in my shop under a stall, knocking in of
tacks, I think I raised up my bristles, sold pritchel,342 sponge, blacking
tub and punching iron, bought me rapier and pistol, and to go I went.
Twenty months together I pursued him, from Rome to Naples, from Na-
ples to Gaeta, passing over the river, from Gaeta to Siena, from Siena to
Florence, from Florence to Parma, from Parma to Pavia, from Pavia to Sion,
from Sion to Geneva, from Geneva back again towards Rome, where in the
way it was my chance to meet him in the nick here at Bologna, as I will tell
you how. I saw a great fray in the streets as I passed along, and many
swords walking, whereupon drawing nearer, and inquiring who they were,
answer was returned me it was that notable bandetto, Esdras of Granado.
O, so I was tickled in the spleen with that word, my heart hopped and
danced, my elbows itched, my fingers frisked, I wist not what should be-
come of my feet, nor knew what I did for joy. The fray parted, I thought
it not convenient to single him out (being a sturdy knave) in the street,
but to stay till I had got him at more advantage. To his lodging I dogg-
ed him, lay at the door all night where he entered, for fear he should
give me the slip any way. Betimes in the morning I rung the bell and cra-
ved to speak with him; now to his chamber-door I was brought, where knock-
ing, he rose in his shirt and let me in, and when I was entered, bade me
lock the door and declare my arrant,343 and so he slipped to bed again.

Marry, this, quoth I, is my errand. Thy name is Esdras of Granado, is it
not? Most treacherously thou slew'st my brother Bartol about two years ago
in the streets of Rome; his death am I come to revenge. In quest of thee
ever since, above three thousand miles have I travelled. I have begged to
maintain me the better part of the way, only because I would intermit no
time from my pursuit in going back for money. Now have I got thee naked in
my power; die thou shalt, though my mother and my grandmother dying did
entreat for thee. I have promised the devil thy soul within this hour; break
my word I will not; in thy breast I intend to bury a bullet. Stir not, quinch344
not, make no noise, for if thou dost it will be worse for thee.

Quoth Esdras, whatever thou beest at whose mercy I lie, spare me, and I
will give thee as much gold as thou wilt ask. Put me to any pains, my life
reserved, and I willingly will sustain them; cut off my arms and legs, and
leave me as a lazar to some loathsome spittle, where I may but live a year
to pray and repent me. For thy brother's death the despair of mind that
hath ever since haunted me, the guilty gnawing worm of conscience I feel
may be sufficient penance. Thou canst not send me to such a hell as already
there is in my heart. To dispatch me presently is no revenge; it will soon
be forgotten; let me die a lingering death; it will be remembered a great
deal longer. A lingering death may avail my soul, but it is the illest of
ills that can befortune my body. For my soul's health I beg my body's tor-
ment; be not thou a devil to torment my soul, and send me to eternal damn-
ation. Thy overhanging sword hides heaven from my sight; I dare not look
up lest I embrace my death's-wound unwares. I cannot pray to God and plead
to thee both at once. Ay me, already I see my life buried in the wrinkles
of thy brows; say but I shall live, though thou meanest to kill me. Nothing
confounds like to sudden terror; it thrusts every sense out of office. Poi-
son wrapped up in sugared pills is but half a poison; the fear of death's
looks are more terrible than his stroke. The whilst I view death, my faith
is deaded; where a man's fear is, there his heart is. Fear never engenders
hope; how can I hope that heaven's Father will save me from the hell ever-
lasting, when he gives me over to the hell of thy fury?

Heraclide, now think I on thy tears sown in the dust (thy tears that my
bloody mind made barren). In revenge of thee, God hardens this man's heart
against me; yet I did not slaughter thee though hundreds else my hand hath
brought to the shambles. Gentle sir, learn of me what it is to clog your
conscience with murder, to have your dreams, your sleeps, your solitary
walks troubled and disquited [sic?] with murder; your shadow by day will
affright you; you will not see a weapon unsheathed, but immediately you
will imagine it is predestinate for your destruction.

This murder is a house divided within itself; it suborns a man's own soul
to inform against him; his soul (being his accuser) brings forth his two
eyes as witnesses against him, and the least eye-witness is unrefutable.
Pluck out my eyes if thou wilt, and deprive my traitorous soul of her two
best witnesses. Dig out my blasphemous tongue with thy dagger; both tongue
and eyes will I gladly forgo to have a little more time to think on my
journey to heaven.

Defer awhile thy resolution; I am not at peace with the world, for even but
yesterday I fought, and in my fury threatened further vengeance; had I a
face to ask forgiveness, I should think half my sins were forgiven. A hund-
red devils haunt me daily for my horrible murders; the devils when I die
will be loath to go to hell with me, for they desired of Christ he would
not send them to hell before their time; if they go not to hell, into thee
they will go, and hideously vex thee for turning them out of their habita-
tion. Wounds I contemn, life I prize light; it is another world's tranquil-
lity which makes me so timorous, everlasting damnation, everlasting howling
and lamentation. It is not from death I request thee to deliver me, but from
this terror of torment's eternity. Thy brother's body only I pierced unadvis-
edly; his soul meant I no harm to at all; my body & soul both shalt thou
cast away quite if thou dost at this instant what thou mayest. Spare me,
spare me, I beseech thee; by thy own soul's salvation I desire thee, seek
not my soul's utter perdition; in destroying me, thou destroyest thyself
and me.

Eagerly I replied after this long suppliant oration: Though I knew God would
never have mercy upon me except I had mercy on thee, yet of thee no mercy
would I have. Revenge in our tragedies is continually raised from hell; of
hell do I esteem better than heaven, if it afford me revenge. There is no
heaven but revenge. I tell thee, I would not have undertook so much toil to
gain heaven as I have done in pursuing thee for revenge. Divine revenge, of
which (as of the joys above) there is no fullness or satiety. Look how my
feet are blistered with following thee from place to place. I have riven my
throat with overstraining it to curse thee. My tongue with vain threats is
bollen, and waxen too big for my mouth; my eyes have broken their strings
with straining and looking ghastly as I stood devising how to frame or set
my countenance when I met thee. I have near spent my strength in imaginary
acting on stone walls what I determined to execute on thee; entreat not; a
miracle may not reprieve thee; villain, thus march I with my blade into thy
bowels.

Stay, stay, exclaimed Esdras, and hear me but one word further. Though nei-
ther for God nor man thou carest, but placest thy whole felicity in murder,
yet of thy felicity learn how to make a greater felicity. Respite me a lit-
tle from thy sword's point, and set me about some execrable enterprise that
may subvert the whole state of Christendom, and make all men's ears tingle
that hears of it. Command me to cut all my kindred's throats, to burn men,
women and children in their beds in millions by firing their cities at mid-
night. Be it pope, emperor or Turk that displeaseth thee, he shall not brea-
the on the earth. For thy sake will I swear and forswear, renounce my bapt-
ism, and all the interest I have in any other sacrament. Only let me live
how miserable soever, be it in a dungeon amongst toads, serpents and adders,
or set up to the neck in dung. No pains I will refuse, howsoever prorogued,
to have a little respite to purify my spirit; oh, hear me, hear me, & thou
canst not be hardened against me.

At this his importunity I paused a little, not as retiring from my wreakful
resolution, but going back to gather more forces of vengeance. With myself
I devised how to plague him double for his base mind; my thoughts travelled
in quest of some notable new Italianism, whose murderous platform might not
only extend on his body, but his soul also. The groundwork of it was this:
that whereas he had promised for my sake to swear and forswear, and commit
Julian-like violence on the highest seals of religion, if he would but this
far satisfy me, he should be dismissed from my fury. First and foremost he
should renounce God and his laws, and utterly disclaim the whole title or
interest he had in any covenant of salvation. Next, he should curse him to
his face, as Job was willed by his wife, and write an absolute firm obliga-
tion of his soul to the devil, without condition or exception. Thirdly and
lastly (having done this), he should pray to God fervently never to have
mercy upon him, or pardon him.

Scarce had I propounded these articles unto him but he was beginning his
blasphemous abjurations. I wonder the earth opened not and swallowed us
both, hearing the bold terms he blasted forth in contempt of Christianity:
heaven hath thundered when half less contumelies against it have been ut-
tered. Able they were to raise saints and martyrs from their graves, and
pluck Christ himself from the right hand of his Father. My joints trembled
& quaked with attending them, my hair stood upright, & my heart was turned
wholly to fire. So affectionately and zealously did he give himself over to
infidelity as if Satan had gotten the upper hand of our high Maker. The vein
in his left hand that is derived from the heart with no faint blow he pierc-
ed, & with the full blood that flowed from it, writ a full obligation of his
soul to the devil; yea, he more earnestly prayed unto God never to forgive
his soul than many Christians do to save their souls. These fearful ceremo-
nies brought to an end, I bade him ope his mouth and gape wide. He did so
(as what will not slaves do for fear?); therewith made I no more ado, but
shot him full into the throat with my pistol; no more spake he after; so did
I shoot him that he might never speak after or repent him. His body being
dead looked as black as a toad; the devil presently branded it for his own.
This is the fault that hath called me hither; no true Italian but will hon-
our me for it. Revenge is the glory of arms, & the highest performance of
valure; revenge is whatsoever we call law or justice. The farther we wade
in revenge, the nearer come we to the throne of the Almighty. To his scep-
ter it is properly ascribed; his scepter he lends unto man, when he lets
one man scourge another. All true Italians imitate me in revenging constan-
tly and dying valiantly. Hangman, to thy task, for I am ready for the utmost
of thy rigour.

Herewith all the people (outrageously incensed) with one conjoined outcry
yelled mainly, Away with him, away with him. Executioner, torture him, tear
him, or we will tear thee in pieces if thou spare him.

The executioner needed no exhortation hereunto, for of his own nature was he
hackster good enough; old excellent he was at a bone-ache. At the first chop
with his wood-knife would he fish for a man's heart, and fetch it out as ea-
sily as a plum from the bottom of a porridge-pot. He would crack necks as
fast as a cook cracks eggs; a fiddler cannot turn his pin so soon as he would
turn a man off the ladder. Bravely did he drum on this Cutwolf's bones, not
breaking them outright, but, like a saddler knocking in of tacks, jarring on
them quaveringly with his hammer a great while together. No joint about him
but with a hatchet he had for the nonce he disjointed half, and then with boi-
ling lead soldered up the wounds from bleeding; his tongue he pulled out, lest
he should blaspheme in his torment; venomous stinging worms he thrust into his
ears, to keep his head ravingly occupied; with cankers scruzed345 to pieces he
rubbed his mouth and his gums; no limb of his but was lingeringly splintered
in shivers. In this horror left they him on the wheel as in hell, where, yet
living, he might behold his flesh legacied amongst the fowls of the air.

Unsearchable is the book of our destinies. One murder begetteth another; was
never yet bloodshed barren from the beginning of the world to this day. Morti-
fiedly abjected and daunted was I with this truculent346 tragedy of Cutwolf and
Esdras. To such straight life did it thenceforward incite me that ere I went
out of Bologna, I married my courtesan, performed many alms-deeds, and hasted
so fast out of the Sodom of Italy that within forty days I arrived at the King
of England's camp347 twixt Ardres and Guines in France, where he with great tri-
umphs met and entertained the Emperor and the French King, and feasted many
days. And so as my story began with the King at Tournay and Terouanne, I think
meet here to end it with the King at Ardres and Guines. All the conclusive epi-
logue I will make is this, that if herein I have pleased any, it shall animate
me to more pains in this kind.

　　　　　　　　Otherwise, I will swear upon an English chronicle
　　　　　　　　　　　never to be outlandish chronicler more
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　while I live. Farewell, as many
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 　as wish me well.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 　　　　FINIS.

June 27, 1593.

　　　　　　　(1594)
　　by Thomas Nashe