The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works

by Thomas Nashe

  [Let him be carried away.]

  WILL SUMMERS: Is’t true, jackanapes, do you serve me so? As sure as this coat is too short for me, all the points of your hose for this are condemned to my pocket, if you and I ere play at span-counter211 more. Valete, spec tatores;212 pay for this sport with a plaudite, and the next time the wind blows from this corner, we will make you ten times as merry.

  Barbaras hic ego sum, quia non intelligor ulli.213

  FINIS

  3

  The Terrors of the Night

  OR

  A DISCOURSE OF APPARITIONS

  A LITTLE to beguile time idly discontented, and satisfy some of my solitary friends here in the country, I have hastily undertook to write of the weary fancies of the night, wherein if I weary none with my weak fancies, I will hereafter lean harder on my pen and fetch the pedigree of my praise from the utmost of pains.

  As touching the terrors of the night, they are as many as our sins. The night is the devil’s Black Book, wherein he recordeth all our transgressions. Even as, when a condemned man is put into a dark dungeon, secluded from all comfort of light or Company, he doth nothing but despair-fully call to mind his grace less former life, and the brutish outrages and misdemeanours at have thrown him into that desolate horror; so when night in her rusty dungeon hath imprisoned our eye-sight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keepeth his audit in our sin-guilty consciences, no sense but surrenders to our memory a true bill of parcels1 of his detestable impieties. The table2 of our heart is turned to an index of iniquities, and all our thoughts are nothing but texts to condemn us.

  The rest we take in our beds is such another kind of rest as the weary traveller taketh in the cool soft grass in summer, who thinking there to lie at ease and refresh his tired limbs, layeth his fainting head unawares on a loathsome nest of snakes.

  Well have the poets termed night the nurse of cares, the mother of despair, the daughter of hell.

  Some divines have had this conceit, that God would have made all day and no night, if it had not been to put us in mind there is a hell as well as a heaven.

  Such is the peace of the subjects as is the peace of the Prince under whom they are governed. As God is entitled the Father of Light, so is the devil surnamed the Prince of Darkness, which is the night. The only peace of mind that the devil hath is despair, wherefore we that live in his nightly kingdom of darkness must needs taste some disquiet.

  The raven and the dove that were sent out of Noah’s Ark to discover the world after the general deluge may well be an allegory of the day and the night. The day is our good angel, the dove, that returneth to our eyes with an olive branch of peace in his mouth, presenting quiet and security to our distracted souls and consciences; the night is that ill aneel the raven, which never cometh back to bring any good tidings of tranquillity: a continual messenger he is of dole and misfortune. The greatest curse3 almost that in the scripture is threatened is that the ravens shall pick out their eyes in the valley of death. This cursed raven, the night, pecks out men’s eyes in the valley of death. It hin-dreth them from looking to heaven for succour, where their Redeemer dwelleth; wherefore no doubt it is a time most fatal and unhallowed. This being proved, that the devil is a special predominant planet of the night, and that our creator for our punishment hath allotted it him as his peculiar signory and kingdom, from his inveterate envy I will amplify the ugly terrors of the night. The names importing his malice, which the scripture is plentiful of, I will here omit, lest some men should think I went about to conjure. Sufficeth us to have this heedful knowledge of him, that he is an ancient malcontent, and seeketh to make any one desperate like himself. Like a cunning fowler, to this end he spreadeth his nets of temptation in the dark, that men might not see to avoid them. As the poet saith:

  Quae nimis apparent retia vitat avis.4

  (Too open nets even simple birds do shun)

  Therefore in another place (which it cannot be but the devil hath read) he counseleth thus:

  Noctem peccatis et fraudibus obiice nubem.5

  (By night-time sin, and cloak thy fraud with clouds)

  When hath the devil commonly first appeared unto any man but in the night?

  In the time of infidelity, when spirits were so familiar with men that they called them Dii Penates, their household Gods or their Lares, they never sacrificed unto them till sun-setting. The Robin Goodfellows, elves, fairies, hobgoblins of our latter age, which idolatrous former days and the fantastical world of Greece y-clepped6 fawns, satyrs, dryads, and hamadryads, did most of their merry pranks in the night. Then ground they malt, and had hempen shirts for their labours, danced in rounds in green meadows, pinched maids in their sleep that swept not their houses clean, and led poor travellers out of their way notoriously.

  It is not to be gainsaid but the devil can transform himself into an angel of light, appear in the day as well as in the night, but not in this subtle world of Christianity so usual as before. If he do, it is when men’s minds are extraordinarily thrown down with discontent, or inly terrified with some horrible concealed murder or other heinous crime close smothered in secret. In the day he may smoothly in some mild shape insinuate, but in the night he takes upon himself like a tyrant. There is no thief that is half so hardy in the day as in the night; no more is the devil. A general principle it is, he that doth ill hateth the light.

  This Machiavellian trick hath he in him worth the noting, that those whom he dare not united or together encounter, disjoined and divided he will one by one assail in their sleep. And even as ruptures and cramps do then most torment a man when the body with any other disease is distempered, so the devil, when with any other sickness or malady the faculties of our reason are enfeebled and distempered, will be most busy to disturb us and torment us.

  In the quiet silence of the night he will be sure to surprise us, when he unfallibly knows we shall be unarmed to resist, and that there will be full auditory granted him to undermine or persuade what he lists.7 All that ever he can scare us with are but Seleucus’ airy castles,8 terrible bugbear brags, and nought else, which with the least thought of faith are quite evanished and put to flight. Neither in his own nature dare he come near us, but in the name of sin and as God’s executioner. Those that catch birds imitate there voices; so will he imitate the voices of God’s vengeance, to bring us like birds into the net of eternal damnation.

  Children, fools, sick-men or madmen, he is most familiar with, for he still delights to work upon the advantage, and to them he boldly revealeth the whole astonishing treasury of his wonders.

  It will be demanded why in the likeness of one’s father or mother, or kinsfolks, he oftentimes presents himself unto us.

  No other reason can be given of it but this, that in those shapes which he supposeth most familiar unto us, and that we are inclined to with a natural kind of love, we will sooner harken to him than otherwise.

  Should he not disguise himself in such subtle forms of affection, we would fly from him as a serpent, and eschew him with that hatred he ought to be eschewed. If any ask why he is more conversant and busy in churchyards and places where men are buried than in any other places, it is to make us believe that the bodies and souls of the departed rest entirely in his possession and the peculiar power of death is resigned to his disposition.9 A rich man delights in nothing so much as to be uncessantly raking in his treasury, to be turning over his rusty gold every hour. The bones of the dead, the devil counts his chief treasury, and therefore is he continually raking amongst them; and the rather he doth it, that the living which hear it should be more unwilling to die, insomuch as after death their bones should take no rest.

  It was said of Catiline, Vultum gestavit in manibus: with the turning of a hand he could turn and alter his countenance. Far more nimble and sudden is the devil in shifting his habit; his form he can change and cog10 as quick as thought.

  What do we talk of one devil? There is not a room in any man’s house but is pe
stered and close-packed with a camp-royal of devils. Chrisostom saith the air and earth are three parts inhabited with spirits. Hereunto the philosopher alluded when he said nature made no voidness in the whole universal; for no place (be it no bigger than a pock-hole in a man’s face) but is close thronged with them. Infinite millions of them will hang swarming about a worm-eaten nose.

  Don Lucifer himself, their grand Capitano, asketh no better throne than a blear eye to set up his state in. Upon a hair they will sit like a nit,11 and overdredge a bald pate like a white scurf. The wrinkles in old witches visages they eat out to entrench themselves in.

  If in one man a whole legion of devils have been billetted, how many hundred thousand legions retain to a term in London? If I said but to a tavern, it were an infinite thing. In Westminster Hall a man can scarce breathe for them; for in every corner they hover as thick as motes in the sun.

  The Druids that dwelt in the Isle of Man, which are famous for great conjurers, are reported to have been lousy with familiars.12 Had they but put their finger and their thumb into their neck, they could have plucked out a whole nest of them.

  There be them that think every spark in a flame is a spirit, and that the worms which at sea eat through a ship are so also; which may very well be, for have not you seen one spark of fire burn a whole town and a man with a spark of lightning made blind or killed outright? It is impossible the guns should go off as they do, if there were not a spirit either in the fire or in the powder.

  Now for worms: what makes a dog run mad but a worm in his tongue?13 And what should that worm be but a spirit? Is there any reason such small vermin as they are should devour such a vast thing as a ship, or have the teeth to gnaw through iron and wood? No, no, they are spirits, or else it were incredible.

  Tullius Hostilius,14 who took upon him to conjure up Jove by Numa Pompilius’ books, had no sense to quake and tremble at the wagging and shaking of every leaf but that he thought all leaves are full of worms, and those worms are wicked spirits.

  If the bubbles in streams were well searched, I am persuaded they would be found to be little better. Hence it comes that mares, as Columella reporteth, looking their forms in the water run mad. A flea is but a little beast, yet if she were not possessed with a spirit, she could never leap and skip so as she doth. Froisard saith the Earl of Foix had a familiar that presented itself unto him in the likeness of two rushes fighting one with another. Not so much as Tewkesbury mustard15 but hath a spirit in it or else it would never bite so. Have we not read of a number of men that have ordinarily carried a familiar or a spirit in a ring instead of a spark of a diamond? Why, I tell ye we cannot break a crumb of bread so little as one of them will be if they list.

  From this general discourse of spirits, let us digress and talk another while of their separate natures and properties.

  The spirits of the fire which are the purest and perfectest are merry, pleasant, and well-inclined to wit, but nevertheless giddy and unconstant.

  Those whom they possess they cause to excel in whatever they undertake. Or poets or boon companions they are, out of question.

  Socrates’ genius was one of this stamp, and the dove16 wherewith the Turks hold Mohamet their prophet to be inspired. What their names are and under whom they are governed The Discovery of Witchcraft hath amplified at large, wherefore I am exempted from that labour. But of the divinest quintessence of metals and of wines are many of these spirits extracted. It is almost impossible for any to be encumbered with ill spirits who is continually conversant in the excellent restorative distillations of wit and of alchemy. Those that ravenously englut themselves with gross meats and respect not the quality but the quantity of what they eat, have no affinity with these spirits of the fire.

  A man that will entertain them must not pollute his body with any gross carnal copulation or inordinate beastly desires, but love pure beauty, pure virtue, and not have his affections linsey-wolsey,17 intermingled with lust and things worthy of liking.

  As for example, if he love good poets he must not countenance ballad-makers; if he have learned physicians he must not favour horse-leeches and mountebanks. For a bad spirit and a good can never endure to dwell together.

  Those spirits of the fire, however I term them comparatively good in respect of a number of bad, yet are they not simply well-inclined, for they be by nature ambitious, haughty, and proud; nor do they love virtue for itself any whit, but because they would overquell and outstrip others with the vain-glorious ostentation of it. A humour of monarchizing and nothing else it is, which makes them affect rare qualified studies.18 Many atheists are with these spirits inhabited.

  To come to the spirits of the water, the earth and the air: they are dull phlegmatic drones, things that have much malice without any great might. Drunkards, misers and women they usually retain to. Water, you all know, breedeth a medley kind of liquor called beer; with these watery spirits they were possessed that first invented the art of brewing. A quagmire consisting of mud and sand sendeth forth the like puddly mixture.

  All rheums, poses,19 sciaticas, dropsies and gouts are diseases of their phlegmatic engendering. Sea-faring men of what sort soever are chief entertainers of those spirits. Greedy vintners likewise give hospitality to a number of them; who, having read no more scripture than that miracle of Christ’s turning water into wine in Canaan, think to do a far stranger miracle than ever he did, by turning wine into water.

  Alehouses and cooks’ shady pavilions, by watery spirits are principally upholden.

  The spirits of the earth are they which cry ‘All bread and no drink’, that love gold and a buttoned cap above heaven. The worth in nought they respect, but the weight; good wits they naturally hate, insomuch as the element of fire, their progenitor, is a waste-good and a consumer. If with their earth-ploughing snouts they can turn up a pearl out of a dunghill, it is all they desire. Witches have many of these spirits and kill kine with them. The giants and chieftains of those spirits are powerful sometimes to bring men to their ends, but not a jot of good can they do for their lives.

  Soldiers with these terrestial spirits participate part of their essence; for nothing but iron and gold, which are earth’s excrements, they delight in. Besides, in another kind they may be said to participate with them, insomuch as they confirm them in their fury and congeal their minds with a bloody resolution. Spirits of the earth they were that entered into the herd of swine in the gospel. There is no city merchant or country purchaser, but is haunted with a whole host of these spirits of the earth. The Indies is their metropolitan realm of abode.

  As for the spirits of the air, which have no other visible bodies or form, but such as by the unconstant glimmering of our eyes is begotten, they are in truth all show and no substance, deluders of our imagination and naught else. Carpet knights, politic statesmen, women and children they most converse with. Carpet knights they inspire with a humour of setting big looks on it, being the basest cowards under heaven, covering an ape’s heart with a lion’s case, and making false alarums when they mean nothing but a may-game. Politic statesmen they privily incite to blear the world’s eyes with clouds of commonwealth pretences, to broach any enmity or ambitious humour of their own under a title of their country’s preservation; to make it fair or foul when they list, to procure popularity, or induce a preamble to some mighty piece of prowling, to stir up tempests round about, and replenish heaven with prodigies and wonders, the more to ratify their avaricious religion. Women they underhand instruct to pounce and bolster out their brawn-fallen deformities, to new parboil with painting their rake-lean withered visages, to set up flax shops on their foreheads when all their own hair is dead and rotten, to stick their gums round with comfits when they have not a tooth left in their heads to help them to chide withal.