_G.M._ Oh, if you knew what our astrologers say of the coming age, and of our age, that has in it more history within a hundred years than all the world had in four thousand years before! Of the wonderful invention of printing and guns, and the use of the magnet, and how it all comes of Mercury, Mars, the Moon, and the Scorpion!
_Capt._ Ah, well! God gives all in His good time. They astrologize too much.
Joseph Hall was born at Bristow Park, by Ashby-de-la-Zouch, in the year 1574, and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1597 he published three books, and in 1598 three more books, of Satires, "_Virgidemiarum_, Six Bookes." These satires, with others published about the same time by Marlowe and Marston, were burnt by order of Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had no relish for that kind of writing. Nine years later, in the year 1607, at the age of thirty-two, Hall published the satire now to be described. He was a witty and an earnest man, who rose to honour in the Church, became successively Bishop of Exeter and of Norwich; as Bishop of Norwich was in controversy with John Milton on Church Discipline; suffered patiently imprisonment and persecution from the Puritans; and closed an honourable life of more than fourscore years in 1656. He has been called by some the Christian Seneca.
His early work, the "Mundus Alter et Idem," represents an ideal world divided into regions answering to man's chief weaknesses or vices. He gave with it a map of its Crapulia, Latronia, &c., fully peopled, with a neighbouring land in which there are no signs of settlement, _Terra Sancta, ignota etiam adhuc_, the Holy Land, even yet unknown.
Joseph Hall's new world is also figured as an Austral Continent. They are good travellers, he says, who tell what they have seen in known lands, but he is a better who not only travels but is himself the maker of the lands he travels through. He chose his day, and went aboard the good ship Phantasy, quitted harbour, sailed away, reached in two years the Fortunate Isles, and, leaving the shores of Africa behind him, came in sight of the black headland of Crapulia.
Here Introduction ends and Travel begins with the part partly translated by Dr. King: Crapulia, named from Crapula, is the Land of Inebriate Excess, and its two provinces, Pamphagonia and Yvronia, mean by their names the provinces of Omnivorous Gluttony and Drunkenness. Dr. King has translated six chapters, and begun the seventh, which is upon the wars of the Pamphagonians, to which they march forth armed with spits and two-pronged forks and heavy ribs of beef. In their free city, Ucalegon, built near the borders of Moronia, the citizens live happy as monks. They are so well shut in by high rocks that they can laugh at enemies, and through a hollow in the rocks with softest pace creeps the river Oysivius (the Idle). There is only one way up, their rocks for the inhabitants, and that is not by zigzag steps, but by a rope and basket. Birds wholly peculiar to the place supply food by being themselves eatable, and by the great multitude of their eggs, and by the loads of fish they bring into their nests to feed their young. The citizens make to themselves also beds of the soft feathers of these birds. This valley yields to the people of Ucalegon everything except what they don't care for. They are free, therefore, to sup, sleep, rise, dine, and lie down.