could avoid the imputation of libelling. I never thought the human frailty of erring in cases of religion, infamy to a state, no more than to a council. It had therefore been neither civil nor Christianly, to derogate the honour of the state for that cause, especially when I saw the parliament itself piously and magnanimously bent to supply and reform the defects and oversights of their forefathers; which to the godly and repentant ages of the Jews were often matter of humble confessing and bewailing, not of confident asserting and maintaining. Of the state therefore I found good reason to speak all honourable things, and to join in petition with good men that petitioned but against the prelates, who were the only seducers and misleaders of the state to constitute the government of the church not rightly, methought I had not vehemence enough. And thus, readers, by the example which he hath set me, I have given yet two or three notes of him out of his title-page; by which his firstlings fear not to guess boldly at his whole lump, for that guess will not fail ye; and although I tell him keen truth, yet he may bear with me, since I am like to chase him into some good knowledge, and others, I trust, shall not mispend their leisure. For this my aim is, if I am forced to be unpleasing to him whose fault it is, I shall not forget at the same time to be useful in something to the stander-by. As therefore he began in the title, so in the next leaf he makes it his first business to tamper with his reader by sycophanting, and misnaming the work of his adversary. He calls it "a mime thrust forth upon the stage, to make up the breaches of those solenın scenes between the prelates and the Smectymnuans." Wherein while he is so over-greedy to fix a name of ill sound upon another, note how stupid he is to expose himself or his own friends to the same ignominy, likening those grave controversies to a piece of stagery, or scenework, where his own Remonstrant, whether in buskin or sock, his "Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence," having dwelt on what seems to have been a favourite idea with him, viz. that the English were, in modern times, God's chosen people;—" he knocked once and twice, and came again, opening our drowsy eyelids leisurely by that glimmering light, which Wickliffe and his followers dispersed ;" and further on, in the same treatise, he adds:-" It may be denied that bishops were our first reformers, for Wickliffe was before them, and his egregious labours are not to be neglected."-ED. must of all right be counted the chief player, be it boasting Thraso, or Davus that troubles all things, or one who can shift into any shape, I meddle not; let him explicate who hath resembled the whole argument to a comedy, for "tragical," he says, 16 were too ominous." Nor yet doth he tell us what a mime is, whereof we have no pattern from ancient writers, except some fragments, which contain many acute and wise sentences. And this we know in Laertius, that the mimes of Sophron were of such reckoning with Plato, as to take them nightly to read on, and after make them his pillow. Scaliger describes a mime to be a poem imitating any action to stir up laughter.* But this being neither poem, nor yet ridiculous, * On the nature of these mimes the learned entertain very contradictory notions, some insisting they were written in verse, others in prose; and others, again willing to reconcile the contending parties, suggesting that they may have been a mixture of both. Valkenaer, in his edition of Ten Idylls of Theocri tus, p. 200, and Casaubon, de Sat. Poët. c. iii. have entered minutely into the question. More recently, Müller, in his " History and Antiquities of the Doric Race," has collected and examined critically all the testimonies of an. cient authors bearing directly on the subject. "About half a century after Epicharmus, Sophron, the mimographer, made his appearance, who was the author of a new species of comedy, though in many respects resembling that of his predecessor. Still this variety of the drama differed so much, not only from that of Sicily, but from any other which existed in Greece, that its origin must, after all our attempts at explanation, remain involved in great obscurity. The mimes of Sophron had no accompaniment of music or dancing, and they were written not in verse, but in prose, though perhaps in certain rythmical divisions. This latter circumstance seems quite singular, and without example in the Greek literature which has been transmitted to us. But that it was in reality so, seems improbable, when we remember that there would naturally be an intermediate rhythm, formed at the transition from the metrical to the prosaic style; and with the Dorians this would have taken the form of concise and disjointed sentences, a periodical style being more suited to the Athenians. We are led to this notion by the consideration of some remains of Lacedemonian composition, in which no one can fail to see the rhythmical form and symmetry of the sentences. famous letter of Hippocrates: ἔρρει τὰ καλά. Μίνδαρος γ' ἀπεσσούα Thus in the and also in that of the Lacedemonian women, preserved by Plutarch, where the rhythm passes case in other instances. κακὰ τοῦ φάμα κακκέχυται ταύταν ἀπωθεῦ, ἤ μὴ ἔσω, insensibly into verse; which is less strikingly the Whether the mimes of Sophron were publicly represented or not, is a question not easily answered. It would however be singular, if a poetica. work had been intended only for reading, at an age when everything was For if every how is it but abusively taxed to be a mime? book, which may chance excite to laugh here and there, must be termed thus, then may the dialogues of Plato, who for those his writings hath obtained the surname of divine, be esteemed as they are by that detractor. in Athenæus, no better than mimes: because there is scarce one of them, especially wherein some notable sophister lies sweating and turmoiling under the inevitable and merciless delimmas of Socrates, but written, not for the public eye but for the public ear. It is certainly more probable that these mimes were originally part of the amusements of certain festivals, as was the case with the Spartan deicelicta, which they resembled more than any other variety of the drama. Indeed it can be easily conceived, that farces of this description acted by persons who had a quick perception of the eccentricities and peculiarities of mankind, and a talent for mimicry, should have existed among the Dorians of Sicily, as well as of Laconia, particularly as the former were celebrated for their imitative skill. Even Agathocles the tyrant excited the laughter, not merely of his guests and companions, but of whole assemblies of the people, by ridiculing certain known characters, in the manner of an ethologus, or merry-andrew. Accordingly, the mimes of Sophron, by which these rude attempts were improved, and raised to a regular species of the drama, were distinguished by their faithful imitation of manners, even of the vulgar; and the solecisms and rude dialect of the common people were copied with great exactness, and hence the numerous sayings and proverbs which were introduced. On the other hand, he was most skilful in seizing the more delicate shades and turns of feeling, and in preserving the unity and consistency of his characters, without which he would never have been so much admired by Plato, or the study of his works so serviceable in the composition of the Socratic dialogues, as we know on good authority to have been the case; and hence we should compare the scenery of Plato's dialogues with the poems of Theocritus, which we know to be imitated from the female mimes of Sophron, in order to obtain a proper idea of those masterpieces. His talent for description must however have been supported and directed by moral considerations; which probably preponderated rather in the serious, (μiμoi orovdało,) and were less prominent in the common mimes (μiμoi yeλoio.) The tribe of Aretalogi and Ethologi, who originally spoke much of virtue and morality but gradually sunk into mere buffoons, appears to have come from Sicily, and was, perhaps, through several intermediate links, connected with Sophron. In considering these philosophical sports, which mingled in the same breath the grave and solemn lessons of philosophy and the most ludicrous mimicry and buffoonery, we may perhaps find a reason why Persius, a youth educated in the Stoic sect, should have thought of making Sophron the model of his satires. This statement is given by a late, but in this instance a credible writer, and is confirmed by the dramatic character of the Satires of Persius, and the constant use of mimicry in them, particularly the first four; so much so indeed, that a study of Persius is the best method of forming an accurate and lively idea of the mimes of Sophron."-Vol. ii. p. 371-374.-ED. 66 that he who reads, were it Saturn himself, would be often robbed of more than a smile. And whereas he tells us, that "scurrilous Mime was a personated grim lowering fool," his foolish language unwittingly writes fool upon his own friend, for he who was there personated was only the Remonstrant: the author is ever distinguished from the person he introduces. But in an ill hour hath this unfortunate rashness stumbled upon the mention of miming, that he might at length cease, which he hath not yet since he stepped in, to gall and hurt him whom he would aid. Could he not beware, could he not bethink him, was he so uncircumspect as not to foresee, that no sooner would that word mime be set eye on in the paper, but it would bring to mind that wretched pilgrimage over Minsheu's dictionary* called "Mundus alter et idem," the idlest and the paltriest mime that ever mounted upon bank? Let him ask "the author of those toothless satires," who was the maker, or rather the anticreator of that universal foolery, who he was, who, like that other principal of the Manichees, the arch evil one, when he had looked upon all that he had made and mapped out, could say no other but contrary to the divine mouth, that it was all very foolish. That grave and noble invention, which the greatest and sublimest wits in sundry ages, Plato in Critias, and our two famous countrymen, the one in his "Utopia," the other in his "New Atlantis," chose, I may not say as a field, but as a mighty continent, wherein to display the largeness of their * This is a bitter satire on Bishop Hall's Latin romance, entitled "Mundus Alter et Idem," said, on the title-page, to have been printed at Utrecht, by Johannis à Waesberg, in 1643. The frontispiece represents a company of coarse revellers at a feast, an apt illustration of the book, which is a satire on gluttony, drunkenness, and immodesty. The "Civitas Solis," of Thomas Campanella, and Lord Bacon's "Nova Atlantis," are included in the same volume. As both in the text and notes the author scatters round with a lavish hand proofs of his acquaintance with various languages, Milton, to humble his pride, represents him painfully picking up his knowledge from "Minsheu's Dictionary," a very curious book, now little known. It is entitled, "The Guide into the Tongues, with their agreement and consent one with another, as also their Etymologies, that is, the reasons and derivations of all or the most part of Words, in these Nine Languages, viz. English, Low Dutch, High Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, &c. By the industry. study, labour, and at the charges of John Minsheu, published and printed, July 22, 1625. 2nd. Edit. 1627.”—ED. spirits, by teaching this our world better and exacter things than were yet known or used; this petty prevaricator of An erica, the zany of Columbus, (for so he must be till his world's end,) having rambled over the huge topography of his own vain thoughts, no marvel if he brought us home nothing but a mere tankard drollery, a venereous parjetory for stews. Certainly, he that could endure with a sober pen to sit and devise laws for drunkards to carouse by, I doubt me whether the very soberness of such a one, like an unliquored Silenus, were not stark drunk. Let him go now and brand another man injuriously with the name of mime, being himself the loosest and most extravagant mime that hath been heard of, whom no less than almost half the world could serve for stage-room to play the mime in. And let him advise again with Sir Francis Bacon, whom he cites to confute others, what it is "to turn the sins of Christendom into a mimical mockery, to rip up the saddest vices with a laughing countenance," especially where neither reproof nor better teaching is adjoined. Nor is my meaning, readers, to shift off a blame from myself, by charging the like upon my accuser, but shall only desire that sentence may be respited till I can come to some instance whereto I may give answer. Thus having spent his first onset, not in confuting, but in a reasonless defaming of the book, the method of his malice hurries him to attempt the like against the author; not by proofs and testimonies, but "having no certain notice of me," as he professes, "further than what he gathers from the Animadversions," blunders at me for the rest, and flings out stray crimes at a venture, which he could never, though he be a serpent, suck from anything that I have written, but from his own stuffed magazine and hoard of slanderous inventions, over and above that which he converted to venom in the drawing. To me, readers, it happens as a singular contentment, and let it be to good men no light satisfaction, that the slanderer here confesses he has "no further notice of me than his own conjecture." Although it had been honest to have inquired, before he uttered such infamous words, and I am credibly informed he did inquire; but finding small comfort from the intelligence which he received, whereon to ground the falsities which he had provided, thought it his likeliest course, under a pretended ignorance, to let drive at |