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Page 38
Coryat's abiding sensation throughout his travels was astonishment,
not at the things which he saw, but rather that he from Odcombe in
Somerset should be seeing them. He can never get over it. Here am I,
Odcombian Tom, face to face with Amiens Cathedral, with the tombs of
the kings at Saint Denis, at Fountaine Beleau cheek by jowl with Henri
IV., crossing in a litter the "stupendious" Mont Cenis, pacing the
Duomo of Milan, disputing with a Turk in Lyons, with a Jew in Padua,
to the detriment of their religions, "swimming" in a gondola on the
Grand Canal: here I am, and now what about it? There is always an
imported flavour of Odcombe about it. He brings it with him and
sprinkles it like scent. He is careful at every stage of his journey
to give you the mileage from his own door; his measure of a city's
quality is its worth to him as a gift were Odcombe the alternative.
Few cities indeed survive the test. Mantua stood a fair chance. "That
most sweet Paradise, that _domicilium Venerum et Charitum_," did
so ravish his senses and tickle his spirits, he says, that he would
desire to live there and spend the remainder of his days "in some
divine meditations among the sacred Muses," but for two things, "their
grosse idolatry and superstitious ceremonies, which I detest, and the
love of Odcombe in Somersetshire, which is so deare unto me that I
preferre the very smoak thereof before the fire of all other places
under the sunne." So much for Mantua; but Venice, before whose
"incomparable and most decantated majestie" his pen faints--Venice
beats Odcombe, or something very much like it. He decides that should
"foure of the richest mannors of Somersetshire" have been offered
him if he would have undertaken not to see Venice, he would have gone
without the manors. Odcombe, you see, is not put in question here. He
was afraid to risk it.
When he came home he hung up his pair of shoes in the chancel of
Odcombe Church, and they may be there to this day for all I know.
The Sireniacal Gentlemen made great sport of him.
If any aske in verse what soar I at?
My Muse replies The praise of Coryat----
so John Gyfford begins,
A work that will eternise thee till God come
And for thy sake the famous parish Odcombe----
so George Sydenham ends. Ben Jonson is not represented at the revels,
and Inigo Jones lets his high spirits run away with him beyond the
bounds of modern printing. Donne is not at his best:
Lo, here's a man worthy indeed to travell
Fat Libian plaines, strangest China's gravell;
For Europe well hath seen him stirre his stumpes,
Turning his double shoes to simple pumpes.
--the wit of which escapes me. Better is the conceit of
What had he done, had he e'er hugged th' ocean
With swimming Drake or famous Magelan,
And kiss'd that unturn'd cheeke of our old mother,
Since so our Europe's world he can discover?
The "unturn'd cheeke of our old mother!" The New World should be
pleased with that.
In 1615 he made a much further flight, and was to be heard of at "the
Court of the most Mighty Monarch, the Great Mogul," whence he wrote
to, among other people, the High Seneschal of the "Right Worshipful
Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen that meet the first Friday of
every month at the Signe of the Mere-maide in Bread-Streete." In this
particular letter he greets by name Mr. John Donne, "the author of two
most elegant Latine Bookes," Master Benjamin Jonson, the poet, at his
chamber in the Blacke Friars, Mr. Samuel Purkas, and Mr. Inigo
Jones, and signs himself "the Hierosolymitan--Syrian--Mesopotamian
--Armenian--Median--Parthian--Persian--Indian--Leggestretcher
of Odcomb in Somerset." The news he gives of "the most famigerated
Region of all the East, the ample and large India," is various and
occasionally incredible, but none the worse perhaps for that. You
must allow the leg-stretcher to be something also of a leg-puller. The
Great Mogul had elephant-fights twice a week, we learn. He might well
do so if we could believe that he maintained three thousand of them
"at an unmeasurable charge." Proceeding, nevertheless, to measure it,
Coryat finds it works out at �10,000 a day, which is pretty good even
for the Mogul. He also had a thousand wives, "whereof the chiefest
(which is his Queene) is called Normal." I like her name. Coryat
rode on an elephant, "determining one day (by God's leave) to have my
picture expressed in my next book, sitting upon an elephant." But the
voyage to the East was one too many for "the ingenious perambulator,"
and he died of a flux at Surat in December, 1617. Certain English
merchants offered him refreshments. "Sack, sack, is there any such
thing as sack? I pray you give me some sack." They did; the dysentery
was upon him at the time. Even as Sir John might have done did he, and
was buried "under a little monument." _Sic exit Coryatus_, says his
biographer.
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