Ostrich Eyes
This book is episodic, panoramic, picaresque and massive. The result is a collection of events and characters and incidents and moments that are connected more by the fact of entertaining the author than plot or coherent storyline. And what results from that style of writing is imagery that can be fun to read, but which perhaps falls a little short of being genuinely necessary. The best advice for the average reader is to simply buckle up, hold tight, and enjoy the scenery as it rushes by:
“as the estrich, the most burning-sighted bird of all others, insomuch as the female of them hatcheth not her eggs by covering them, but by the effectual rays of her eyes, as he, I say, outstrippeth the nimblest trippers of his feathered condition in footmanship, only spurred on with the needle-quickening goad under his side, so he, no less burning-sighted than the estrich, spurred on to the race of honour by the sweet rays of his mistress’ eyes, persuaded himself he should outstrip all other in running to the goal of glory”
Sweating Sickness
The setting of the narrative places the titular hero squarely in the crosshairs of several historical events. One of which is the curious outbreaking of what came to be known as “sweating sickness” through the first half of the 1500’s. It was not a thing to take lightly as the desperation of the imagery reveals:
“O, the cold sweating cares which I conceived after I knew I should be cut like a French summer doublet. Methought already the blood began to gush out at my nose; if a flea on the arm had but bit me, I deemed the instrument had pricked me…Not a drop of sweat trickled down my breast and my sides, but I dreamt it was a smooth-edged razor tenderly slicing down my breast and sides. If any knocked at door, I supposed it was the beadle of Surgeons’ Hall come for me. In the night I dreamed of nothing but phlebotomy, bloody fluxes, incarnatives, running ulcers. I durst not let out a wheal for fear through it I should bleed to death.”
John of Leyden
In addition to meeting up with the sweeping tidal flood of natural events, the book also follows the familiar path of such picaresque fiction by having its Everyman protagonist cross paths with the famous and infamous. One of the leading figures of the latter notoriously was an early success in the idea that if you lie big enough and long enough, you can convince an astounding number of people to do really, really stupid things:
“That day come, flourishing entered John Leyden, the botcher, into the field, with a scarf made of lists like a bow-case, a cross on his breast like a thread bottom, a round twilted tailor’s cushion buckled like a tankard-bearer’s device on his shoulders for a target, the pike whereof was a pack-needle, a tough prentice’s club for his spear, a great brewer’s cowl(?) on his back for a corslet, and on his head, for a helmet, a huge high shoe with the bottom turned upwards, embossed as full of hobnails as ever it might stick.”
Surrender Monkeys
A great world traveler is the narrator, but some places leave him a more satisfied tourist than others. Which is to say that some European countries are not quite as roundly disappointing as others. Italy comes off not too bad; at least it is better than Spain. Both are a kind of heaven on earth compared to France, however:
“What is there in France to be learned more than in England but falsehood in fellowship, perfect slovenry, to love no man but for my pleasure, to swear Ah, par la mort Dieu when a man’s hams are scabbed…I have known some that have continued there by the space of half a dozen years, and when they come home they have hid a little…profited by their travel, save learned to distinguish of the true Bordeaux grape, and know a cup of neat Gascoigne wine from wine of Orleans”
