The Pennyles Pilgrimage/Third poetry section
THAT have wasted, months, weeks, days, and hours
In viewing kingdoms, countries, towns, and towers,
Without all measure, measuring many paces,
And with my pen describing many places,
With few additions of mine own devising,
(Because I have a smack of Coryatizing[1])
Our Mandeville, Primaleon, Don Quixote,
Great Amadis, or Huon, travelled not
As I have done, or been where I have been,
Or heard and seen, what I have heard and seen;
Nor Britain's Odcombe (Zany, brave Ulysses)
In all his ambling, saw the like as this is.
I was in (would I could describe it well)
A dark, light, pleasant, profitable hell,
And as by water I was wafted in,
I thought that I in Charon's boat had been,
But being at the entrance landed thus,
Three men there (instead of Cerberus)
Conveyed me in, in each one hand a light
To guide us in that vault of endless night,
There young and old with glim'ring candles burning
Dig, delve, and labour, turning and returning,
Some in a hole with baskets and with bags,
Resembling furies, or infernal hags:
There one like Tantalus feeding, and there one,
Like Sisyphus he rolls the restless stone.
Yet all I saw was pleasure mixed with profit,
Which proved it to be no tormenting Tophet:[2]
For in this honest, worthy, harmless hell,
There ne'er did any damned Devil dwell;
And th' owner of it gains by 't more true glory,
Than Rome doth by fantastic Purgatory.
A long mile thus I passed, down, down, steep, steep,
In deepness far more deep, than Neptunes deep,
Whilst o'er my head (in fourfold stories high)
Was earth, and sea, and air, and sun, and sky:
That had I died in that Cimmerian[3] room,
Four elements had covered o'er my tomb:
Thus farther than the bottom did I go,
(And many Englishmen have not done so;)
Where mounting porpoises, and mountain whales,
And regiments of fish with fins and scales,
'Twixt me and heaven did freely glide and slide,
And where great ships may at an anchor ride:
Thus in by sea, and out by land I past,
And took my leave of good Sir George at last.
- ↑ Coryatizing.—Thomas Coryate, an English traveller, who called himself the "Odcombian leg-stretcher." He was the son of the rector of Odcombe, and in 1611 published an account of his travels on the Continent with the singular title of "Coryates Crudities. Hastily gobled up in five Moneths travells in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia, commonly called the Grisons country, Helvetia, alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany, and the Netherlands; Newly digested in the hungary aire of Odcombe in the county of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling members of this Kingdome, &c. London, printed by W. S., Anno Domini 1611." Taylor had an especial grudge against Coryat, for having had influence enough to procure his "Laugh and be Fat"—directed against the traveller—to be burned; and that he never failed to "feed fat the ancient grudge," may be seen in the many pieces of ridicule levelled at the author of the "Crudities," even after his death.
- ↑ Tophet.—The Hebrew name for Hell,
- ↑ Cimmerian.—Pertaining to the Cimmerii, or their country; extremely and perpetually dark. The Cimmerii were an ancient people of the land now called the Crimea, and their country being subject to heavy fogs, was fabled to be involved in deep and continual obscurity. Ancient poets also mention a people of this name who dwelt in a valley near Lake Avernus, in Italy, which the sun was said never to visit.