Nicholas Billingsley began working on
his The Infancy of the World (1658) when he was only fifteen. It had
probably been set aside for some while when, gratified by the reception of his
work, Brachy-martyrologia, or, A breviary of
all the greatest persecutions which have befallen the saints and people of God
from the creation to our present times paraphras'd by Nicholas Billingsly (a versification of Foxe full of hideous
relish for suffering, and for divine retributions on the tormentors), Billingsley realized he could delight his
new readers with a swift return to the press if he finished his poem on the
Creation. I doubt that he did much re-working, he more probably looked back
over his early work to check it was clear of unwise theological speculations or
lines that might be misconstrued.
As a literary work, it has some
interest, mainly negative. There was nothing here for Milton to learn from, but
the outputs of eager and pious poetasters like Peyton and Billingsley do remind
us that Milton was going to enter quite a crowded literary field. The
generation brought up on du Bartas would naturally think of Genesis as a poetic
subject. We can learn too from what Billingsley doesn’t do with his creation
narrative: the direction he took was towards the pious encyclopaedia, rather
than entering into the intellectual drama of the Fall.
The main part of the work consists,
perhaps surprisingly, of eight sections – one would have expected six, as he is
dealing with the six days’ labours from Genesis I. His sections consist of the
start of creation (as in Milton, apparently not ex nihilo, but order
created out of a material chaos), and the separation of the waters,
corresponding to verses 1-9. Then, furnishing the earth with trees and flowers
(Genesis I, 11-13); section 3, the heavens (I 14-5); the sun and moon (I 16-9);
the waters populated with fish occupies his fifth section, and the birds in his
sixth – the material for both sections comes from Genesis I 20-3. The seventh
section is the creation of the animals, and the eighth, of course, Adam and
Eve.
To round off what he had achieved,
Billingsley ventured into the Fall itself:
An Appendix
Of God’s resting day.
Of Eden garden.
Of Man’s happiness before his fall.
Of Man’s misery after his fall.
His treatment of the fall borders on the
cursory: this is the Fall of Adam. Eve is talking
… What? frownes my Adam ? wilt thou not draw nearer,
And taste my love, then whom my life’s not
dearer
For Eves sake eat, and know both good and ill.
Adam:
Seeing thou invit’st me eat, my joy, I will.
Ah! we have sin’d in medling with this Tree,
This cursed Tree; Oh whither shall we flee?
Like
Stanley Holloway’s lion, Wallace, swallowing Albert, ‘ ’E were sorry the
moment ’e’d done it’. Maybe Billingsley
had seen one of those depictions of the temptation where Adam turns away,
clutching at his throat after his first bite.
As
you will have noticed, Billingsley adopted loose rhymed couplets. Here are some
examples of him at work:
An
authorial interjection (he has just mentioned dolphins):
“Sweet Jesu! beare me to the Port
of Sion,
Be thou my Dolphin, I’ll be thy Arion.”
Enumerating the varieties of fish:
“A world of Paper, and a Sea of
Ink,
Would scarce suffice to hold them all I think.”
Some
fish are tasty, others are large:
“Are you a hungry, go and catch a
Conger
What fish is larger then the Whale or longer?”
God
himself speaks to Adam:
“Be thou obsequious, thou shalt
finde me mild,
I’ll be thy father, thou shalt be my child.”
The vocabulary has its freakish moments too:
“Under him Scorpio exporrected lies”
(a Latinism, ‘stretched out’).
“Phæbus his refulgent face,
The upper and the lower world doth grace,
With equal splendor; his irradient beams
Refresheth all things; his ignivomous teams
Run
restless races…”
(another
Latinism, and altogether a typical 17th century English word,
well-evidenced in the OED: ‘fire-vomiting’)
That God should
address Eve as ‘nefarious woman’ now sounds odd to us, as the word has become
comic, but the basic sense of ‘offending against the moral law’ makes perfect
sense:
“Nefarious woman, ah! what hast thou done,
That thus my awful presence thou dost shun?”
Billingsley’s mind moves instantly from the examples
of God’s profuse creation to the wondrous behaviours these animals exhibit in
the postlapsarian world. He isn’t troubled about what the birds, fish and
beasts did, behaviourally speaking, prior to the Fall. The author himself had
experienced desperate ill-health when young, and is recurrently emphatic of the
curative things a provident God has placed in His creation: the congregation of
the waters leads Billingsley rapidly onto an enumeration of the curative wells,
and it rather sounds as though he had spent his time at Tunbridge and Bath
taking the waters, and the herbs are all orientated to cures
Of Tunbridg famous in our Kentish
county,
For casting up their subterraneous bounty,
Which relishing of Iron, and sulph’ry veines
Cures well nigh all infirmities and paines,
Nay lengthens life causing the fates t’unspin
Lifes drawn out thred, hath any got the spleen?
The dropsie? the vertigo? or the stone?
These waters will yield remedy alone.
Suppose th’art Lunatick, or Planet struck,
Hear’s that will help thee, if thou hast the
luck
To come and take it …
Gouts, schyaticas, the French-mans
pox,
And what flows from Pandora’s opened box
These Springs resist…
Here jaundis-cureing, Horehound,
which is good
Against the Asthma; heer is Southern-wood
Good against Feavours; here the Worm-wood eases
All Surfeits, drunk’ness, Cholerick Diseases.
Cough-chasing Rocket, Rue-expelling vapors,
Which dim the sight …
One thing that had not struck me
before about these minor hexameral works – though it’s obvious enough – in both
Peyton and Billingsley, their subject allows, even requires, the author to say
his piece about Sabbath observance – and they both take a very insistent
attitude about the sanctity of the holy day of rest. Milton doesn’t do this. At
the end of His week of creation, God returns to elaborate praise in Heaven:
So
sung they, and the Empyrean rung, VII
633
With Hallelujahs: Thus was Sabbath kept.
And thy request think now fulfill’d, that ask’d
How first this World and face of things began…
And
there it is where it should be, biblically speaking, but Milton certainly
doesn’t use this as a soap-box to insist on Sabbath observance. Not that this
is a surprise in Milton.
Among Billingsley’s lines about the
subject of the Sabbath day are these odd couplets – he is describing the waters
of the world, and among the rivers, he gets to the Thames. He praises the
watermen shooting London Bridge, and then says:
Great London is the Bow, the Thames
the string
The Boats are arrows which about do spring
The Streams Sabbatical do rest and stay.
In observation of the Sabbath day.
He
couldn’t really have thought that the tides in London stopped for the Sabbath,
could he? Maybe - Billingsley was very pious (he would go on, as a clergyman,
to have a lot of trouble conforming to the Church of England), and seems
credulous of wonders he had picked up from books.
The
largest portion of this whole work consists of a series of rhymed lists of the
things and beings God has created. Dealing with the waters, Billingsley
compiles seas, rivers, wells, until he admits his reading can carry him no
further, and it’s time for him to turn in anyway:
My Muse hath touch’d the chiefest
she hath read,
And tir’d with search, discretion calls to bed.
Next section, he busily lists trees, herbs and
flowers, then on to the constellations and planets, section 5 has a long list
of fish, 6, birds, 7, beasts. About all these aspects of creation, Billingsley
is fideistic:
Look here, look there, nay turne I
where I will
I see Gods greatness and his goodness still.
and willing therefore to believe any kind of wonders
about whatever aspect it is of God’s mysterious design:
The envious Peacock hideth out of
spight
His med’cinable dung from humane sight:
Treads softly like a theif, but from his throat
Yels out a horible Tartarian note …
Pliny asserted that the peacock
deliberately devoured its own dung; dried dung of peacocks seems to appear in
most of the pharmacopeias. It was more effective if it was white, apparently.
(I have a notion that bird poo contains vitamin B12, but this is not an idea on
which I am prepared to act.)
Here he retails, quite
uncritically, all the old lore about hyenas:
Alternately his sex Hyæna changes,
His eyes assume all colours which as strange is;
Such Dogs as on his shadow light grow dumb:
His feet stick fast whoever sees him come;
Calling the shepherds from their thatched
bowers,
He slayes them, and their slautered Corps
devours…
The
elephant, meanwhile, understands human language, has its own elephantine faith,
and is a royalist:
The Elephant next claimeth
excellence,
This beast comes nearest unto humane sense;
He knows his country speech, he’s us’d in warrs,
He worshipeth the Sun, the Moon, the Starrs.
The greatest of all beasts the earth doth hold,
He’s proud of trappings wrought with burnish’d
gold
Adores the King, his most ambitious spirit
Aspires to glory, glory to inherit.
Maybe
I am being severe on Billingsley. If Pseudodoxia Epidemica, published in
1646, does not seem to have come his way, even if Browne dismisses the nonsense
about the elephant’s legs having no joints, he was himself willing to credit
elephants as writers and speakers, as they enjoy a ‘proximity of reason’:
“That some Elephants
have not only written whose sentences, as Aelian ocularly testifieth, but have
also spoken, as Oppianus delivereth, and Christophorus a Costa particularly
relateth … we doe not conceive impossible; nor beside the affinity of reason in
this Animall any such intolerable incapacity in the organs of divers other
Quadrupedes, whereby they might not be taught to speake, or become imitators of
speech like birds; and indeed strange it is how the curiosity of men that have
been active in the instruction of beasts, have never fallen upon this artifice,
and among those many paradoxicall and unheard of imitations, should not attempt
to make one speak; the Serpent that spake unto Eve, the Dogs & Cats, that
usually speak unto Witches, might afford some encouragement, and since broad
and thick chops are required in birds that speake, since lips and teeth are
also organs of speech; from these there is also an advantage in quadrupedes,
and a proximity of reason in Elephants and Apes above them all.”
But occasionally Billingsley the fifteen year old appears in his verse:
“The Stockfish is a fish that wil
not boyl
Unless you beat it with a stick a while”
Billingsley
does not seem to have registered that dried cod needs to be tenderized before
cooking, that you can’t just boil it without doing this first seems to have
stuck in his mind as a miraculous property of something called a ‘stockfish’.
As I said, Billingsley added an appendix about the
Fall to his poem about the Creation. here, he daringly ventures into dialogue.
God and Adam he treats using a figure of the two as
landlord and tenant:
Of all the trees that in the
Orchard be
I set them for thy use, one only tree
Shall be my rent; that tree thou shalt not tast,
Which in the center of the garden’s plac’d
The rest are freely thine, by my permission,
Rent-free: but yet on an imply’d condition:
What I injoyne be studious to fulfill,
Touch not the tree of knowledg, good, and ill;
For by my sacred majesty, I vow,
And by my venerable name, if thou
Break but thy Lease, “thy very lips that shall
“Let in this fruit, shall let in death withal.
But if thou please me well, this tree shal be
A sacred pledg between thy God, and thee.
Adam
replies in kind, and sounds up-to-date on property law
shall
I fail
To keep from thee thy right? shall my
transgression
Displease the Landlord of my free possession.
O no, I will obey …
Adam then produces a series of
impossibility tropes, including some that show him creditably knowledgeable
about the world he has so recently entered:
Sooner shall sun-burnt India grow cold,
And Icy Zealand hot, and heav’ns grow old.
E’re I from my first principles retreat,
And disobey my God, so good, so great…
But Satan does his thing:
(His) plot the better to accomplish, he
Goes wriggling up on the forbidden tree:
Assaults the woman, with his baited gin,
And thus he drawes the silly woman in:
Serpent.
Great Empress of the world: I humbly sue
To be resolved of a doubt, which you
Can satisfie me in: have you indeed
Your appetite restrain’d? what, mayn’t you feed
On evr’y pleasant fruit? why so? doth God
Limit your pow’r? if so, 'tis very odd.
At this point, Billingsley opts to make Satan into a
bad Cavalier poet:
Coy woman tast, behold their beautiful
And cherry cheeks, coy woman do but pull.
Cannot those mellow-delicates, invite
Your wat’ring palate, to an appetite?
Methinkes they should, taste, and you shall have
skil,
To know the diference 'twixt good, and ill.
Why draw’st thou back?
To
the possessed Snake,
The cred’lous woman this reply did make.
Eve.
Wisest of beasts, all that you speak is true,
You counsel for the best, all thanks be due,
For your great love your love which doth
transcend
All merit of mine, thanks to my loyal friend:
My life’s to small to hazard for your ease,
Friend I could give’t, your speeches doe so
please.
This fruit is marv’lous pleasing to the eye;
And questionless, 'tis to the taste: I’ll try.
And eat thereof and give my husband Adam .
Serpent.
They bow to serve you, at your pleasure, Madam.
Eve.
Ah! how delitious is this fruit, how sweet!
A finer Apple I did never eat …
The commendatory verses Billingsley solicited from fellow
students and relatives are kind, and lay judicious stress on his youth. If we
made him touch Josuah Sylvester’s corpse, asks William Jacob, would it cry out
‘murder!’? No, not a bit of it. John Swan notes that
Whiles others of thine age mispent their times
In toys and pastimes, thou in sacred Rhimes
Applied thy self …
D.R. of Merton College says that this ‘accurate’ poem that
it confutes Epicurean atomism.
