Mourning, exhaust their moisture and decay.
With sorrow-wounded hearts they sob and cry
Themselves to death, they take their turns to dye.
Because one's death from th' other draws such grief,
As kills the Soul in spight of all relief:
Next is he brought on shoulders of his Friends
Along the Streets, where dismally attends

A Croud of Mourners to the Church, where they
Are twice fore-told, and warn'd they are but Clay;
First by the words of the Preacher, and the next
The Corps (tho' tacitly) repeats the Text:
But lo the End's more dismal than the rest,
Which brings the final Consummatum est:
Earth now is layd on Earth, and dust to dust,
Earth ope's its mouth, the Coffin stop it must.
This is the Lot of all, none can it flee:

Earth's not quite full, there's room yet left for thee.

The House of Weeping was so well received that the son was encouraged to publish, two years later, eight other paternal compositions as Dunton's Remains: or, The Dying Pastours Last Legacy to his Friends and Parishioners (1684).18 "The Author's Holy Life and Triumphant Death," contributed by Dunton, is of interest mainly for what it says concerning the biographer himself. It is a fact of some importance that nearly all we know of him and his antecedents, or think we know, is drawn from his own reports, certainly not a thoroughly reliable source. That Gildon wrote a biography of him means nothing. Gildon's methods are well known; he merely put down what he was told. Among the eight pieces included in this volume is "A Looking-Glass for our English Ladies: Or, Daily Directions for their Dress and Apparel." In view especially of many passages of a similar kind in the Athenian Mercury and elsewhere, this essay suggests Dunton fils rather than Dunton père. The other discourses are of a convincingly clerical type-a sermon called "Dives Roaring in Hell Flames, whilst Lazarus rejoyces in Abraham's Bosom" (grotesquely illustrated); the story of the Penitent Prodigal (also accompanied by proper illustrations); "A Friendly Dialogue between a Moderate Conformist and one of his parishioners, concern

18 Licensed Nov. 1683 (T. C. II, 38). This is another of the seven books he repented of-apparently because of some dishonesty in connection with it. (Life and Errors, 1, 159).

ing several Points of great Moment," one of the points being the need of accepting the dogma of predestination; the story of the bloody persecutions committed upon Protestants of the sixteenth century by the Duke of Guise; and an excruciatingly detailed account of the trial and crucifixion of Christ. Also two funeral sermons are included. The suggestion for calling one of these the author's funeral discourse upon himself probably emanated from John Donne's famous farewell sermon, "Death's Duel." The other specimen is said to be the sermon that had been preached by N. H. in memory of "that faithful and Laborious Servant of Christ, Mr. John Dunton." If there is anything in this entire collection worth noting for a gleam of literary value, it is a section entitled Closet Employment: or Virtues and Vices . . . characterized." Although the title and the selection of topics were apparently suggested by Bishop Hall's collection of prose characters, the imitation is remote enough to be legitimate. Up to this point in his career, in fact, there is no certain evidence that Dunton had fallen into evil ways.

In the same year (1684) he brought out, undated and unlicensed, The Pilgrims Guide from the Cradle to his Death-bed, one of his two monumental contributions to the cause of religion. The title indicates the ambitiousness of the design. One manual of piety had succeeded another since the time of the Reformation, each attempting to do for Protestants what had long since been accomplished by Roman Catholic treatises on practical conduct. Dunton's was merely an attempt to bring all the depressing ideals and rules of Christianity within the compass of a single convenient volume, one that would perform the service, for example, of Bishop Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying. Dunton knew what we can now learn thoroughly only from the history of such works, that the popularity of one creates a demand for another, and that the English capacity for consuming melancholy advice was unlimited. It was a question only of producing a new one big enough and strong enough to satisfy the morbid appetite as none of the others had done. And this is what Dunton undertook. The title, as usual, was well chosen. For a time after the Reformation the medieval fondness for "Pilgrimages" had been checked by the prejudice of the Reformers against a word that recalled too painfully one of the proscribed habits of the old religion. It came

into literary popularity again, however, with Leonard Wright's prose manual The Pilgrimage to Paradise (1591) and Nicholas Breton's poem of the same title in the year following (1592). From that time onward there was a constant succession of Pilgrimages, leading up to Bunyan's greatest work. In this one instance Dunton's general title indicated only a part of the entire content of his book. The volume is made up of the following separate divisions: (1) "The Pilgrim's Guide" (2) "The Sick Man's Passing-Bell" (3) a set of miscellaneous pieces described in the title as "no less than Fifty Several Treatises besides (rarely if ever handled before)" (4) an appendix of less than one page called "The Sighs and Groans of a Dying Man." This last item is another of the productions inherited from Dunton senior. Noting how useful The House of Weeping and The Dying Pastour's Last Legacy had proved, the son was encouraged to reoblige the world by this third composition, which was ready for publication at the time of the author's death. With an eye to the future, he adds that there are still other papers of his father's to be published as scon as he can find time to decipher the short-hand and prepare them for the press.

19

The mere fact that The Pilgrim's Guide comprises three hundred and six pages of closely-printed matter would lead one to suspect that it was not entirely honest. I am unable to state the full extent of plagiarism, but it is certain that the author borrowed without scruple. The very undignified wrangle between the Judge and a condemned sinner at the Final Assizes is an echo of a famous passage in Thomas Shepard's Sincere Convert. A few pages later we come across Jerusalem my happy home," a hymn written as a broadside by a Roman Catholic poet early in the century.20 The same illustrations that had been used as a frontispiece to The House of Weeping are again pressed into service here to illustrate the perennial topic of death, and are accompanied by fragments of two of the original commendatory poems, but now without the writers' initials. In fact, these poems seem to have been taken over as a part of Dunton's original work and permanent stock in

19 Dunton, pp. 76-8; Shepard, ed. 1641, pp. 87-8.

20 Dunton, pp. 87-8; "Hierusalem my happie home. A song made by F. B. P." (Hyder E. Rollins, Old English Ballads, 1920, No. 24). Cf.

No. 25.

trade.21 The "Death-bed Legacies," a long harangue delivered by a dying man to his wife, son, daughters, and servants, is copied verbatim, with a few excisions, from Thomas Becon's Sicke Mans Salve, including in full the advice given to the wife for selecting a second husband.22 Becon's book, first published in 1561, was the most popular of the Elizabethan death-bed manuals and continued in vogue until the middle of the seventeenth century. Dunton evidently calculated that it was no longer a household treasure. One of the most readable sections in The Pilgrim's Guide is a long poem called "An Awaking Dialogue between the Soul and Body of a Damned Man; each laying the fault upon the other." This is plagiarized from the seventeenth-century broadside, in two parts, Saint Bernard's Vision; Or, A briefe Discourse (Dialogue-wise) between the Soule and the Body of a damned man newly deceased, laying open the faults of each other; with a speech of the Divels in Hell.23 To trace all the innumerable essays, prayers, meditations, dialogues, and poems of The Pilgrim's Guide to their real owners would be the labor of a tedious and unprofitable lifetime. Part III alone, the fifty several pleasant treatises, would present a formidable task. There is ample reason for supposing that the principal work expended by Dunton and his confederates was purely manual. It is not surprising that no reference is made to this performance in The Life and Errors.

The reader of The Pilgrim's Guide should, however, divest himself of all conventional notions of proprietorship and accept Dunton's own convenient theory. In this uncritical frame of mind he will find it an extraordinary succès de curiosité. While there is nothing especially distinctive in the emphasis upon death, since all human duties had long since been focused into this single point of meditation, and all the "Pilgrimages" keep attention riveted upon the dire end of the journey, by stealing right and left Dunton succeeded as probably no one else had done in ringing all the possible changes upon the old subject. Luctus ubique pavor et plurima mortis imago. The art of the illustrator comes to the

1 See Athenianism, p. 61.

" Dunton, pp. 202-8; Becon, ed. 1584, pp. 147-154.

"Dunton, pp. 213-224; Roxburghe Ballads, II, 490-97. Courthope points out that a translation of Querela sive Dialogus Animae et Corporis Damnati, usually ascribed to St. Bernard, was made by William Crashaw (History of English Poetry, III, 219).

aid of prose and verse. Ministers visit the dying, passing-bells are constantly tolling, dead men are "stript and laid out on the bed," wrapped in winding-sheets, and laid in coffins. Directions are given for funeral processions and funeral etiquette. The writer regrets that while living in a country village, where a burial was a rarity, he had seldom had death presented to his attention. But "London is a Library of Mortality: Volumes of all sorts and sizes, Rich and Poor, Infants, Children, Youth, Men, Old men daily dye." 24 In the course of the volume a country parson and a stranger meet on their way to London. Their decision to enliven the journey by exchanging views upon death results in a dialogue stretching over many pages. In moments of high enthusiasm the pedestrians break into poetry. One sample will not be amiss:

A shirt is all remains in fine
To victorious Saladine;

At Death a piece of Linnen is

All that great Monarch could call his:

Poor Prince! who to his Son the East bequeaths,
When Death had turn'd his Bays to Cypress wreaths.
Poor prince! one Shirt must all his Trophys be,
Deaths a far greater Conqueror than he.25

The moral is pointed for us: "Let us therefore now, kind Reader, every day make Funeral processions, or at least visit in meditation every hour our Tomb, as the place where our bodies must make so long abode. Celebrate we our selves our own Funerals, and invite to our exequies Ambition, Pride, Choler, Luxury, Gluttony, and all the other Passions." 26 "The entire world," says the parson, in a fit of pulpit eloquence worthy of his successor Edward Young, "is but as it were a Coemitary or Church-yard. . . . A walk into Church-yards, and Charnels, though it be sad and melancholy, by reason of the doleful objects there obvious, hath yet nevertheless something in it agreeable to content good souls, in the contemplation of those very objects, which they there find. How often have I taken pleasure to consider a great number of Deadmens Sculls arranged one in pile upon another with this conceit of the vanity, and arrogance, wherewith otherwhile they have been filled." 27

24 P. 160.

35 P. 178.

36 P. 195.

97 P. 196.