CHAPTER XII.

TAYLOR, THE WATER POET.-GLIMPSES OF ENGLAND IN

THE OLD TIME.

HERE are few persons accustomed to curious reading who have not heard of "Taylor, the Water Poet." It is, indeed, a rare thing to behold a copy of his works complete. They have never been reprinted, and seldom collected; but that extraordinary bibliopolist and bibliographer, Dr. Southey, has in some degree familiarized his name and writings to the public several years since. In editing the poems of John Jones, an old servant, he prefaced them with an account of self-educated or uneducated poets and writers; and the account of Taylor is the most interesting portion of the volume.

Taylor was a man whom we should not be much disposed to hold up to modern emulation: judged by the standard of our times, he does not seem to have possessed any great share of self-respect, but his enterprise was extraordinary, and his life has about it all the romantic colourings of the age in which he lived. Some of the most important notices of the manners and customs of the people of London, and the country generally, are to be found scattered over his writings; and they abound in the vulgarities and conceits of the time, with a very ample interfusion of those more peculiar to himself.

John Taylor was born in Gloucestershire. It does not appear where, but it does appear that, from his earliest days,

he was a waggish character; for his first adventure in verse was to memorialize the strange misadventures of his schoolmaster, upon whom some of his neighbours played a wicked trick. The poor man was fond of new milk, and went to market for the purpose of buying a milch cow, but being rather shortsighted, and probably being better acquainted with books than cows, the seller (let us hope in sport, and not in roguery) sold him a bull. Our good and unsuspecting pedagogue, Master Green, drove the animal contentedly home: nor did he discover the trick until he had called the maid to milk it. This mistake our hopeful John celebrated by appropriate rhyme; and in rhyme, too, he gives but a sorry account of himself and his attainments in knowledge. When of sufficient age, he, by his own choice, was bound apprentice to a waterman. There was a wide difference between the waterman then and now. Admirably would it harmonize with his bold, hardy, and idle disposition; for it was a thriving calling. The number of those who lived by the oar in that day, between Windsor and Gravesend, Taylor estimates to have been forty thousand. Although coaches were known, they were but seldom used, and, indeed, but rarely built; though, towards the close of Taylor's career, they became customary enough, and sad were the maledictions poured down upon all the luckless race of users, and of proprietors, by the watermen.

Writing of coaches, he says:

If the curses of people that are wronged by them might have prevailed, sure, I think, the most part of them had been at the devil many years ago. I, myself, have been so served, that I have wished them in the great breach, or in a light fire upon Hounslow Heath, or Salisbury Plain.

And there were many reasons besides for the decrease of the glory of the Waterman's profession. Taylor, in the course of his verses, gives to us many accounts of the proclamations ordering noblemen to depart to their several counties, and interfering with the traffic on the Thames;

THE THAMES IN THE OLD TIME.

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of the sad misfortune of the players removing their houses to the Middlesex from the Surrey side of the water, where they played far remote from the Thames, and gathered together 3000 or 4000 people, who used to all spend their moneys on the water. Hackney coaches were, however, the crowning disaster! But Taylor would not, perhaps, suffer in an equal degree with others of his brotherhood. He certainly had a notoriety on the water; he was known to Royalty, was well acquainted with Ben Jonson, perhaps equally well with Shakespeare, though of this we have no evidence. At that time boatmen were as much expected to talk as the Venetian boatmen were expected to sing ; and in the art of happy loquacity our rhymster surely excelled. Through the writings of Taylor we obtain a glimpse of an aspect of London life over now, the life of what Leigh Hunt has happily called the Silent Highway; in Taylor's time the Thames was the great road through London. The River was frequented by all, but especially by noble personages. His experience of the world had been great; for he had made no fewer than sixteen voyages in the Queen's ships, and he was in the expeditions under Essex, at Cadiz and the Azores. He was also a diligent reader, and very few of those who are reading, or will read this account of him, know half of the books he enumerates ⚫here :

I care to get good books, and I take heed

And care what I do either write or read;

Though some through ignorance, and some through spite,
Have said that I can neither read nor write.
But though my lines no scholarship proclaim,
Yet I at learning have a kind of aim:
And I have gathered much good observations,
From many human and Divine translations.
The Poet Quid (or Ovid if you will),
Being in English, much hath helped my skill;
And Homer, too, and Virgil I have seen,
And reading them I have much bettered been.
Godfrey of Bulloyne, well by Fairfax done,
Du Bartas, that much love hath rightly won,

Old Chaucer, Sydney, Spenser, Daniel, Nash,
I dipt my finger when they used to wash.
As I have read these Poets, I have noted
Much good, which in my memory is quoted.
Of histories I have perused some store,
As no man of my function hath done more;
The Golden Legend I did overtoss,

And found the gold mixed with a deal of dross.
I have read Plutarch's Morals and his Lives,
And like a bee sucked honey from those hives;
Josephus of the Jews, Knowls of the Turks,
Martin's Aurelius, and Guetara's works,
Loyor, Grimstone, Montaigne, and Suetonius,
Agrippa, whom some call Cornelius;

Grave Seneca, and Cambden, Purchas, Speed,

Old Monumental Fox and Holinshed:

And that sole Book of Books, which God hath given,—

The blest eternal Testaments of Heaven;

That I have read, and I with care confess

Myself unworthy of such happiness.

Taylor's first book had a very odd name; he called it "Taylor's Water Work; or the Sculler's Travels from Tyber to Thames. With his boat laden with a hotch-potch or gallimawfry of Sonnets, Satires, and Epigrams, with an inkhorn disputation betwixt a lawyer and a poet, and a quaterne of new-catched Epigrams caught the last fishingtide; together with an addition of Pastoral Equivoques, or the complaint of a Shepherd; dedicated to neither Monarch nor Miser, Kaiser nor Caitiff, Palatine nor Plebeian, but to great Mounsier Multitude, alias All, or every one." The manner in which he published his books, which separately were of very great bulk, was to print them at his own cost, make presents of them, and then hope for some "sudden remuneration." The times were not very fastidious, and although this mode does not to us seem far removed from mendicity, there was then nothing either especially strange or contemptible in the method: both James I. and Charles I. seem to have been of the number of his patrons: and it is probable that on many occasions he was admitted to their presence. All his books had quaint and curious titles:

"THE PENNYLESS PILGRIMAGE."

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thus we have one called, “A Navy of Ships and other Vessels, that have the art to sail by land as well as by sea." The names of these vessels are "Lordship, Scholarship, Ladyship, Goodfellowship Apprenticeship, Courtship, Friendship, Fellowship, Footmanship, Horsemanship, Worship, Suretyship,Woodmanship." His adventures helped his books, and his books his adventures; his life was full of them.

The first he undertook was in the year 1616. He published an account of it with this title, "Taylor's Travels: three weeks', three days', and three hours' observations from London to Hamburg, in Germany, amongst Jews and Gentiles; with descriptions of Towns and Towers, Castles and Citadels, Artificial Gallowses, and natural Hangmen. Dedicated for the present to the absent Odcombian, Knighterrant, Sir Thomas Coryat, Great Britain's error and the world's mistake." Another of his adventures was to travel on foot from London to Edinburgh, "not carrying any money to or fro; neither begging, borrowing, nor asking for meat, drink, or lodging." And of this he published an account in verse and prose, entitled "The Pennyless Pilgrimage ; or, The Parambulation of John Taylor, alias the King's Majesty's Water Poet."

"I made my legs my oars, and rowed by land."

Thus says the Rhymer: this "Pennyless Pilgrimage" gives us not only a very humorous account of his achievements, his deeds, and his adventures, but it also is instructive in reference to the social usages and observances of the time, and it certainly showed that our forefathers in the year of grace 1618 were not wanting in a large, open-handed, rude hospitality. However, the undertaking (which was for a wager) was not so hazardous as it may, perhaps, seem to us; Taylor had a tolerably wide notoriety; he took with him his man, and a sumpter beast well victualled, for if he allowed himself no money, he yet laid in a good stock of provisions. Still they sometimes seem to have been nearly on the point of foundering; and when they reached Daven