Traveller’s Check
A much-travelled Spanish visitor amazes an English audience with his tales of wonder overseas, until he is brought up short by his servant.
1642
King Charles I 1625-1649
A much-travelled Spanish visitor amazes an English audience with his tales of wonder overseas, until he is brought up short by his servant.
1642
King Charles I 1625-1649
As a young man, James Howell (?1594-1666) had toured extensively abroad and studied several foreign languages. In 1642, his lavish tastes landed him in the Fleet prison for debt, and there he began to write professionally; that same year, he published a handbook on travel, in which he made a little digression on the subject of the tales travellers tell on their return.
EVERY one knows the tale of him who reported he had seen a cabbage, under whose leaves a regiment of soldiers were sheltered from a shower of rain.
Such another was the Spanish traveller, who was so habituated to hyperbolise and relate wonders, that he became ridiculous in all companies, so that he was forced at last to give order to his man, when he fell into any excess this way, and report anything improbable, he should pull him by the sleeve.
The master falling into his wonted hyperboles, spoke of a church in China that was ten thousand yards long;* his man, standing behind, and pulling him by the sleeve, made him stop suddenly. The company asking, “I pray sir, how broad might that church be?” he replied: “But a yard broad; and you may thank my man for pulling me by the sleeve, else I had made it foursquare* for you.”
* At almost 186 yards, Winchester Cathedral is the longest intact mediaeval church in England. The Spanish traveller’s mythical Chinese church could have accommodated over 53 Winchester Cathedrals down its length.
* That is, square, the same in width as in length.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.