THIRTEEN WORTHIES THIRTEEN WORTHIES By LLEWELYN POWYS Preface by VAN WYCK BROOKS NEW YORK AMERICAN LIBRARY SERVICE 1923 This small book is dedicated in admiration and devotion to the last of the Thirteen ff orthies, whose footfalls still, by the Grace of God, indent the turnpike roads, the honeysuckle lanes, the flinty ewe-cropped downs of the an cient county of Dorset, in England PREFACE GENERATIONS of Harvard fresh men will recall the scorn with which Professor Kittredge used to inveigh against the misapplication of the word quaint. Perhaps he still does so it was the association of the adjective with Chaucers jocund image that especially provoked, as I remember, those indignant shakings of the old word-masters lionlike head. Chaucer was a man of the world and his idiom was an idiom of the world that was the drift of the professorial argument. It was the most infamous of errors to think of him in terms that might be ap plied to some rustic wiseacre, some provincial spinster of a bygone age. No doubt this word quaint has been sadly abused. Strictly speak ing, it is as little appropriate as any of the other adjectives that rise so PREFACE easily to our lips when we think of the worthies eight or ten of them, at least of whom Mr. Powys writes in these engaging essays. We need a word which, like a Chinese ideogram, conveys a complex mental picture and touches in a flash the springs of the five senses, a word that suggests, among other things, the ruddy skins, slightly shrivelled, the toughness and viscosity, the pungent flavour of rare country apples that have been laid away for the winter. I am the freer to use this figure because Mr. Powys worthies are all so redolent of the vegetablekingdom their veins seem to flow as much with the sap of trees as with the blood of animals and on occasion the ichor of angels. How firmly planted they appear to be in the fat soil of those old-world meadows and river bottoms of which their writings, so sweet and so bitter, might almost be taken for a direct expression. Vari ous as were the parts they played in Page 8 PREFACE life and far as some of them wan dered in the world, their poetry and their wisdom, as Mr. Powys shows us, were fruits of the long infancy, the profound, productive inertia of that abundant rural life of old times. Nothing could be more charming than the slow pleasure with which Mr. Powys lingers over the memory of these grave, gentle, honest, lusty and curious men. He delights in let ting them go their own way, in fol lowing their meandering minds, in tracing their idiosyncrasies and their humours. He has, we gather, some thing in common with them he shares their belief perhaps, the belief ex pressed by a certain French philoso pher, that one should carefully culti vate ones faults. For the rest, roundhead and royalist are alike to him so long as they are men of let ters. Moreover, he is the best of tasters when it comes to these well matured literary vintages. The pa pers on Izaak Walton, Bunyan, Chaucer, and Montaigne are certain Page 9 PREFACE to revive in many a mind many an old affection. With Nicholas Cul peper and Tom Coryat, on the other hand, most readers will make their first acquaintance in the savoury pages of this little book. But one and all, exalted or obscure, these worthies live again and live worthily, in the happy cadences of Mr. Powys prose. VAN WYCK BROOKS New York March 31, 1923 Page 10CONTENTS PAGE GEOFFREY CHAUCER . . 15 MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE . . 33 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE . . - 57 TOM CORYAT .... 73 SIR THOMAS URQUHART . . .91 IZAAK WALTON .... 107 JOHN BUNYAN . . 123 NICHOLAS CULPEPER ... 143 BEAU NASH ... . 155 JOHN WOOLMAN . . . . 167 THOMAS BEWICK . . . .181 WILLIAM BARNES . . . . 193 THOMAS HARDY .... 209 Page u NOTE The following essays have al ready appeared either in The Freeman, The Dial, The North American Review or The Forum, and are printed here with the kind permis sion of the editors THIRTEEN WORTHIES