Satirist, Humourist, Epigrammatist, defamer, combative, quarrel, backbiting, hypocrisy, vice, bestiary
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86
11). He takes us on a librarian’s tour, pointing out the faults of the Satirist, Humourist and Epigrammatist presumably while running his finger over the spines of their satires. He also adds Weever, the whipper of satire, to his hall of defamers. Although Weever writes in a “new founde vaine” by chastising the triumvirate for their maliciousness, he is also grouped with these backbiters since he writes in a “scoffing chiding straine” (l.15 and l.17). Breton’s advocacy of pacifism disguises his membership of the satirists’ combative oeuvre. Like the other protagonists he is both self-righteous and censorious, and by joining in the quarrel while speaking out against backbiting he shares their hypocrisy. He argues that satirists become infected by what they write against, and ruin their reputations by making themselves vulnerable to detraction:
Spend not your thoughts in spilling of your wits:
Nor spoile your eies, in spying of offences.
For howsoeuer you excuse your fittes,
They carry shreud suspect of ill pretences:
And when you seeke to make your best defences,
How euer priuate friends will poorly purse ye,
If one doe blesse yee, fiue to one will curse ye. (ll.64-70)
Such are the consequences of exposing oneself to wickedness and of broadcasting sin to the world. Breton advises exercising stoic imperturbability rather than cynical indignation when confronted with the degenerate spectacles of the wencher, miser, spendthrift, plotter, swaggerer and numerous others. Rather than publishing their misdoings and thereby setting a precedent of behaviour for others to follow, and also becoming infected by vice by writing about it, the wencher should be advised discretely to “sinne no more”, and for the miser he recommends “Rather praie for him, then so raile vpon him” (l.140 and l.160).
In the second part of the tour, presumably while still perusing the booksellers’ shelves, Breton takes his reader on a second sort of journey, this time through the animal kingdom, as he presents a bestiary in which the animals themselves give advice based upon their own shortcomings: “Be gracious, sayes the Kite: gentle, the waspe:/ Be liberall, the Moile: sober,
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