A Kristmas Karol

Around this time back in 2009 I shared with the world some of my Christmas haiku. I therein mentioned that I’m no great lover of Christmas. So, over fifteen years ago, when a friend held a "White Trash Christmas"-themed party and encouraged us to contribute original carols to be sung, I rose to the occasion and duly wrote a carol. Since the tide of my inspiration was unstoppable in those halcyon days, I also wrote those Christmas haiku, even though they were not strictly in keeping with the party’s theme. Both haiku and carol were hits. By popular demand, I now make the latter widely available for the first time. I should say that since I was never quite happy with the last verse, I changed it, which accounts for its mention of more recent events.

To tell truth, looking at this now, I gasp at my youthful genius and regret not further nurturing my obvious talents in this poetic direction. I indeed sigh for a road not taken. Tentanda via.

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Good King Elvis
 
[Sung to the tune of “Good King Wenceslaus”]

Good King Elvis last passed out
On the feast of Stephen,
After eating fried pork rinds,
Fatty, crisp, and seasoned.
Brightly shone the moon that night
Upon the swimming pool,
When he heard stern nature’s call
To produce a stool.

Went he then to his “throne room”
And sat himself upon it,
Set his beer down by the sink
And then began to vomit:
Forth went pork rinds, forth went beer,
Forth went wine and Ex-Lax,
Ho-Hos, Twinkies, Pogos dear,
And thirty tabs of Xanax.

“Fails my heart, I know not why,
My lungs can breathe no longer,
My head grows hot, my hands grow cold,
The bathroom smell grows stronger.”
The Memphis Mafia drinking late,
Heard the noise, all seven.
They saw the King dead on his throne,
God’s new saint in Heaven.

“Praise we now our new-found King,
Praise the good Lord Elvis.
Seize a relic, anything,
A finger bone or pelvis.”
Make the journey, all ye folk,
The pilgrimage to Graceland.
Hear Him sing down from on high,
With his backing angel band.

Who was Jesus anyway?
Just a dirty hippie.
Who needs Allah or Yaweh,
When you’ve got Lord Presley?
Bow ye heathens, sing ye hosts,
Raise hymns up to the Stout One.
Praise the King and his friend Prince,
And bless Saint Michael Jackson.

The Self-Sorting of America

A basket of deplorables.

When the result of the 2016 US presidential election became clear, most of my liberal friends — which essentially means most of my friends — were shocked. They were truly convinced that victory would be a cakewalk for Hillary Clinton. With a couple of exceptions, they never for a moment imagined that there were enough people who would vote for Trump to propel him to the presidency, since they never socialized with any. Other than in a few pockets of ignorance and/or irrational disaffection, they held fast to the delusion that “progressive” good would prevail over retrograde evil. Their delusion was enabled by almost all of the mainstream media, including The New York Times and CNN (or the “Clinton News Network”, as a libertarian friend of mine likes to call it).

Yes, I say delusion advisedly. I too did not predict a Trump win, though I was less sanguine about the notion that liberalism in America was anywhere near as predominant as my friends seemed to believe. The real America is far different from my liberal friends’ imaginings, especially my academic liberal friends. These latter suffer from an extreme form of the delusion, because they are even less likely than regular liberals to socialize with conservatives.

In a post back in April 2014, I noted a certain tendency, though specifically with reference to the Canadian political context:

“Despite signs that conservatism, broadly speaking, and in one form or other, is a majority view in this country, I would contend that liberals (again, speaking broadly and in one form or another) tend to view themselves as forming a majority, while conservatives tend to view themselves as a minority, the exact reverse of what I believe is more likely the case. I don’t have a completely plausible explanation for this phenomenon. Perhaps more liberals live in cities than in rural areas, and since people generally hang out with their own kind, it’s easier for liberals to hang out with each other and form the belief that they are the majority, whereas conservatives are more spread out geographically, and perhaps feel more isolated? This would require empirical verification.”

I further noted some consequences of this illusion:

“On the liberal side, it results in a certain complacency, with liberals mistakenly tending to assume that their political view on a given issue is the consensus one. When reality rudely intervenes, they are shocked, surprised, and can only conclude that dark, secret forces are at work to thwart the will of the people. Or if they are brought to perceive that perhaps the people truly have spoken, then they conclude that said people must be vicious, benighted, or ill-informed puppets being manipulated by a few plutocrats. For their part, conservatives are led by this illusion of minority status into a sort of siege mentality, believing that an ever-growing legion of decadents and evildoers is massing on the frontier, waiting for the opportunity to stage the coup that will bring some Marxist or atheistic despot to power. When they win political battles, as they do more often than not, they too are surprised, but they believe it to be an aberration in the overall tendency towards creeping liberalism. Thus they are neither contented nor gracious in victory. And because they see themselves as so utterly disadvantaged, I would contend that they are more likely than liberals to view underhanded means as justified in the political struggle.”

That liberal complacency was clearly on display in the lead-up to the US election. The Onion made this clear when, following the election, it published a satirical article headlined “Area Liberal No Longer Recognizes Fanciful, Wildly Inaccurate Mental Picture of Country He Lives In”. Like the man in that Onion article, most of my liberal friends, I contend, live in a private nation of their own imagining.

In that 2014 post of mine, I also noted some benefits that might come from both conservatives and liberals jettisoning their delusive beliefs about their relative numerical strength. I wrote that “liberals, with a correct view of their situation, might lose their infuriating tendency to speak on issues in the ‘royal we’ where it is not necessarily warranted — as in ‘We all know that the death penalty is wrong’”, and that it might eliminate “much of their complacency about their views and make them a more effective political force than they currently are”. Conservatives, on the other hand, in realizing that they are not as numerically beleaguered as they had believed, “might lose their unpleasant siege mentality and paranoia, which is a huge turnoff to many people who might otherwise be disposed to support at least some of their views.”

I think the latter realization is slowly starting to dawn on conservatives, whether for the better remains to be seen. The election results seem to have surprised many conservatives just as much as they did liberals. Let us hope conservatives are gracious in victory, though I’m not seeing it so far.

What about my liberal friends? Have they been shaken from their delusions into a realization that they might not be as numerous as they thought? Again, I’m not seeing it so far, but it’s still early days and the emotions are still raw. Below, I am going to present a series of maps to hopefully ease some of them into the process, to convince them that they are not necessarily the moral majority they like to think they are.

The maps are taken from a post-election New York Times piece. Or they may have come from The Atlantic. In any case, I can’t seem to find the article now. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the maps come from a legitimate source, and not from Breitbart or Stormfront. What they show are districts in successive presidential elections which voted either landslide Democrat (blue), landslide Republican (red), or no landslide (grey):

1992

1996

2000

2004

2008

2012

2016

As you can see, there is a lot more red on the map now than there was in, say, 1992 or 1996, and there is somewhat less blue. This was the main message of the article from which these maps were drawn: Republican support has been deepening and spreading. That is what I want my liberal friends to understand, if for no other reason than so they can arm themselves with this knowledge and stop their complacent slide into irrelevance.

But there are a couple of other messages that these maps are trying to tell us. First, notice that the biggest loser on these maps over time has not been red or blue; it has been grey. Simply put, the population of the United States seems to be geographically self-segregating along party lines. There are more areas where the voting is not close. This cannot possibly be healthy. If the two sides do not start acknowledging each other’s basic humanity, there will no longer be a United States of America as such. The cracks are already appearing. Such a future is not a good one, for either red or blue Americans.

Second, at least to my mind, these maps belie the cherished liberal belief that the forces of racism took this election. If that were the case, how did Barack Obama manage to temporarily reverse the growing tide of red? Of course there have always been racists out there, plenty of them. But I doubt very much that any of them were voting Democratic in the elections that produced these maps. In order for these maps to be consistent with the racism narrative, you’d have to convince me that that many Americans across the nation suddenly became hard core racists since 2012. It’s just too implausible.

I have one more thing to say about these maps. A lot of the liberal friends I know have been expressing sentiments to the effect that all those red areas can go screw themselves. After all, Democrats won more of the popular vote in this election (as many as 2 million more votes at last count), so the democratic majority was in that sense “cheated”. In other words, this line of thought says, democracy ought to “trump” (pardon the pun) geography.

This is a dangerous way of thinking, and here’s why. The maps above show that the United States is increasingly “two nations warring within the bosom of a single state,” to use Lord Durham’s words. Now, let us suppose that demographically, one of those warring nations can be expected always to outnumber the other, as Blue Nation currently outnumbers Red Nation. Let us further imagine that there has been some kind of electoral “reform” in America, such that the electoral college has been abolished and presidents are simply elected by a plurality of the popular vote, period. The predictable result would of course be an America dominated by Blue Nation, indefinitely. If you think a two-party state is bad, try a one-party state.

What do we call it when one nation is dominated politically and subjected to the will of another nation? I think “empire” is the commonly accepted term. In such a situation, how much loyalty and obedience can be expected from the subject people? Very little. And how much political legitimacy can the dominators claim in the eyes of the dominated under such a system? Again, very little.

The American Founders were wise enough to realize that their new nation had little chance of holding together under a unicameral system of purely democratic representation. They knew that eventually a coalition of like-minded populous states could dominate the smaller ones and that the smaller ones would not stand for it. So they counterbalanced the democratic element by instituting a Senate that apportioned an equal number of representatives to each state regardless of population. Democracy is desirable, but it is not everything.

We in Canada are perhaps more aware of this than our American cousins, since Lord Durham’s words were intended to describe us. Canada is first and foremost a confederation of regions. Our nation is an ongoing experiment in holding together against the centrifugal forces of “regionalism”, an ongoing experiment in making compromises that seem on their surface to violate the democratic will of the majority. If, for example, Quebec seems to get a “special treatment” sometimes, it is because our confederation will not hold together without them. And they ultimately stay because their national identity is more secure in the long run within the confederation than outwith it.

Similarly, to Americans living in the Blue islands on the electoral map who ask why they should continue to tolerate an “unfair” system of representation that “discounts” their votes, I can only repeat the slogan of a certain Democratic candidate for president: Americans are “Stronger Together”. Such is the price of living in a federal republic, and much better than the alternative. In the meantime, rather than clamoring for recounts, and reforming the electoral system or the constitution to make them more “democratic”, it might be more constructive (or rather, less destructive) to work on ways of reversing the process of self-segregation reflected in the maps above. Such a process will necessarily involve listening and trying to understand each other.

Blue America, meet Red America. Red, meet Blue. Now start talking.

An Elegy for "Patient Zero"

This photo haunts me. I first saw it when I was a young man of around 15. It was in the Toronto Star, and the year must have been either 1987 or 1988, because it was not long after the publication of Randy Shilts’ mostly excellent book As the Band Played On (1987). The man pictured is Gaetan Dugas, the Air Canada flight attendant who became infamous as “Patient Zero” after Shilts’ book introduced him to the world. Dugas was an early AIDS patient at the centre of a study by the Centres for Disease Control published in 1984, which came to be known as the “cluster study”. CDC researchers interviewed a number of those early AIDS patients and traced their sexual histories. It was found that 40 of these patients could be linked, directly or indirectly, to one case — Dugas. In the original study, all the patients were assigned a number within their geographical area. Dugas was labelled as patient “O” (the letter, not the number), standing for “Outside the area”. Through some miscommunication in the media, he came to be called “Patient 0” (the number). This was unfortunate, as it gave the misleading impression that he was somehow the first AIDS patient (he was not). It should also be noted that the cluster study was not intended to figure out who had the disease first. It was intended to help ascertain whether or not the new disease was sexually communicable (it was).
 

The cluster study

In any case, it came to be popularly believed that Patient Zero was the person “responsible” for bringing AIDS to the United States. The fact that Dugas happened to be a flight attendant probably helped this narrative along. It also probably helped that he was not an American — he was Canadian — and had a foreign-sounding name.

Shilts portrayed Dugas as a cold-bloodedly negligent sexual athlete who didn’t much care whether he was spreading AIDS. Shilts’ publisher went a step further: their marketing for And the Band Played On portrayed Dugas as intentionally infecting people, i.e. as murderous rather than merely negligent. Shilts never claimed that Dugas was the person who imported AIDS to the US. That was the publisher’s angle, to sell more books. Still, I don’t want to let Shilts off the hook: he inserted scenes villainizing Dugas — including internal monologue — that neither Shilts nor anyone else could possibly have been privy to, scenes that, in other words, were fiction.

A Long Time Ago, In a Decade Far, Far Away…

As I said, that photo of Gaetan Dugas haunts me. It used to haunt me because of the demonizing media coverage which made it somehow seem to me like the face of evil. I know better now. Instead, it haunts me now because it brings me back to a different time, and to the accompanying fears of that time. In the late 1980s I was just upon the threshold of the world of the sexually active and, with the possible exception of the late 1490s, there has likely never been a less auspicious time to do so. During the eighties, the very same Toronto Star that ran the above photo of Dugas also ran a dedicated space in every Saturday issue of the paper to news about the AIDS epidemic. That space was invariably accompanied by the grisly tally of new infections and AIDS deaths. In 1988 the epidemic was raging, with no end in sight. Those ever-growing weekly numbers seemed apocalyptic to me, like my generation’s very own Bill of Mortality. Doomsayers regularly warned us about the inevitable proliferation of AIDS in the heterosexual community. I can remember reading predictions about how, for example, by the year 2000 the health care system would be swamped and that something like one in every two hospital beds in the US would be occupied by an AIDS patient. This heterosexual proliferation never happened, at least not to the degree we were led to expect, and at least not in North America.

A Bill of Mortality for 1665.

I remember one person in the pages of the Toronto Star at the time who told us that these warnings were overblown, and that a widespread breakthrough into the heterosexual community was unlikely: Dr. Morton Schulman, physician, politician, and for a time Ontario’s chief coroner. It was his opinion that the threat of AIDS to the heterosexual population was purposely being overblown in order to generate funding and sympathy from mainstream society. He became Public Enemy #1 among activists. Of course, it turns out Schulman was (mostly) correct. Even so, there were extremely good reasons to fund research into AIDS regardless of whether it was primarily a heterosexual disease or not. After all, homosexuals are citizens too. In any case, I only bring it up to remind people of the somewhat paranoid and frightening atmosphere of the AIDS years, the atmosphere in which Gaetan Dugas became a media bogeyman.

(An aside: If anyone reading this can remember when the Star stopped publishing its weekly AIDS feature, I’d like to know. I stopped reading that paper around 1990. Sometime after the 1997 introduction of the AIDS “drug cocktails” I remember reading something about how San Francisco’s Bay Area Observer was celebrating the fact that it had no AIDS deaths on its obituary pages for the first time since the epidemic began. Perhaps with the AIDS threat perceived to be subsiding in the developed world the Star feature no longer warranted all that column space?)

Generationally speaking, there are two geopolitical circumstances or events that I would say were fundamental in forming the person that I am, and that probably had a disproportionate effect in forming a certain generation. One was the Cold War, with its constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation. The other was AIDS, with its threat of slow and horrifying physical annihilation. Neither of these makes the news much anymore, so I sometimes feel like I’m an old soldier mentally fighting wars that, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, are long over.

(Though mark my words: sooner rather than later we’ll find that our historical business with Russia is not concluded — they know it, while we’re only gradually coming to the realization. And contrary to common belief, AIDS is not over either if you happen to live outside the developed world.)

Some New News, Some Old News

So imagine my surprise about a month ago when I came across a story accompanied by that same photo of Gaetan Dugas. And in the Toronto Star no less! For me it was a real blast from the past. The story was about a study recently published in Nature on the early history of AIDS in North America. The methodology of the study was interesting. However, to someone who is fairly well-versed in the early history of the AIDS epidemic, the results of the study demonstrated that which was already known independently of the methodology.

Let’s begin with the methodology. In a nutshell, the researchers mapped the genes of HIV viruses extracted from old blood samples. Since in some cases the material they were working with was degraded, they developed a method to fill in the missing parts of the viral samples. They then worked out how the virus had evolved and placed the versions of it in a rough timeline. This is fascinating stuff and merited the media attention

This process led them to infer that the HIV virus was circulating in the US since around 1970, well before Gaetan Dugas came on the scene, and that the strains in circulation probably were imported to North America via the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. Neither of these inferences is new. Indeed, the researchers were working with blood samples preserved from hepatitis B studies done on gay men in New York and San Francisco in 1978 and 1979. These had already been tested for HIV a long time ago, so it was no surprise that they would find HIV there. In fact, between 3.7% and 6.6% of the subjects tested were already infected with the virus back then. The study did find that the strain of the virus Dugas carried was not one of the strains in common circulation at the time, meaning that it could not be the case that Dugas was the man who was doing most of the transmitting.

So again, Dugas did not give America AIDS. And again, this was known before this study. One might note, for example, that well before the first medical reports in 1981 of what would eventually be called AIDS, there had been numerous reports of what was then variously called “junkie pneumonia” or “the dwindles” killing off IV drug users in New York in the 1970s. This was a population mostly invisible to the media at the time, so a new disease spreading there could go undetected for a long time (as it did among the homosexual community).

And, of course, there was the sad case of Robert Rayford, an African-American teenager who showed up in a hospital in St. Louis in 1969 suffering from an array of florid infections, including Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a telltale AIDS-related opportunistic infection. Tests done on Rayford’s stored blood samples in 1987 confirmed the presence of HIV. Repeat testing done years later found the same results. There were possible earlier cases than Rayford’s, for which blood samples weren’t preserved but for which convincing diagnoses could be made based on criteria in use in the early 1980s, when a blood test was not yet available.

I mentioned the misleading and sensationalist marketing and media coverage of the “Patient Zero” story from Shilts’ book. The marketing around the recent Nature study has ironically carried on the same theme. The study is described in various media reports as “exonerating” Dugas, as if he stood in need of exoneration, as if he was guilty of something. The disease was new at the time Dugas suffered from it, and in any case nobody was entirely sure whether it was spread through sexual contact — hence the whole point of the cluster study in the first place. And it’s not like Dugas could have intended to bring a new disease to the US, nor was he purposely trying to infect people. As we’ve seen, the first charge lacks a factual basis: he did not bring AIDS to the US. Regarding the second charge, of malice aforethought, he is likewise innocent, according to any real evidence (excluding Shilts’ dubious hearsay) yet presented. Perhaps he was negligent, and if so, he certainly wasn’t alone. Dugas would only stand in need of “exoneration” if his portrayal by Shilts and his publisher were true. Largely it is not. But the study would be a lot less interesting to the lay public without this villain narrative.

Ironically, in separate work, Richard McKay, a medical historian who is one of the Nature study’s co-authors, had already ably debunked this villain narrative, while reconstructing a sympathetic portrait of Dugas as a human being, with friends, family, interests and hopes that were cut short. It is well worth reading. One concern I have about Shilts' portrayal of Dugas, aside from its inaccuracy, is the questionable morality of naming "Patient Zero" in the first place. The ethical question here is twofold: 1. Was it ethical for Shilts to name the patient? and 2. Was it ethical for Shilts to be made privy to that name in the first place? Which leads to a third question, one having more to do with accountability: 3. Who, among the researchers involved in that cluster study, outed Gaetan to Shilts as "Patient Zero"? If a villain be required, we might begin our search there.

Given the Toronto Star’s early complicity in propagating the Patient Zero myth, that article last month should have come with a formal apology to Gaetan Dugas and his family and friends. At least now in my mind I no longer imagine Dugas as an evil Typhoid Mary. Instead, I imagine him as what he probably was, a very frightened young man unfairly cut down in his prime by a disease little understood at the time, a disease which no decent person would wish on their worst enemy. As I said, that photo still haunts me.

Postscript 1:

Since writing the above,  I went back and re-read the McKay paper to which I referred. I'm glad I did, for two reasons. First, it allows me to make a correction/clarification. I had posed a question of accountability, asking who "among the researchers involved in that cluster study, outed Gaetan to Shilts"? It turns out it was not anybody connected to the study. The researchers themselves seem to have maintained confidentiality. Shilts put two and two together based on his interviews with people in the community who were acquainted with Dugas. It is worth noting, however, that Shilts got much personal information about Dugas from interviewing his friends in Vancouver. This information was given on the understanding that Shilts would not reveal Gaetan Dugas' name — an understanding which Shilts obviously violated.

The second reason I'm glad I re-read McKay's paper is that I found information about that Toronto Star article buried in an endnote. It turns out the date of the article was December 12, 1987 and consisted largely of an excerpt from And the Band Played On. To give a sense of its demonizing tone, the headline was "Patient Zero: The airline steward who carried a disease and a grudge". Even back then, this bit of character assassination prompted a critical letter to the editor on December 29, the anonymous writer of which took particular issue with Shilts' claim that Dugas represented "what every man wanted from gay life".

 Postscript 2:

For anyone interested in the early history of the AIDS epidemic in the US, there is an indispensable but little-known source that I highly recommend. In 1983, the BBC program Horizon did a documentary on AIDS called “Killer in the Village”. If you live in the UK you can view it online through the BBC’s website. It is currently unavailable in North America via legitimate sources, but it does pop up from time to time on YouTube before being taken down. At the time of writing this (14 December 2016), it happens to be available there, though the sound quality is rather poor.

It is a fascinating document. Most of it was filmed in 1982, very early days for the epidemic. To my knowledge, no mainstream television program had yet to cover the disease in-depth (please tell me if I’m wrong). At the time, the disease had just ceased to be called "gay cancer" or “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID), and was being referred to — at least by the BBC presenter — as “A-I-D-S”, the letters of the acronym being individually pronounced. No virus had yet been discovered. Indeed, part of the program’s focus was on the medical “mystery” of the emergent disease’s possible causes, in particular, whether it was caused by some new virus.

For present purposes, the program’s main interest lies in the fact that “Patient Zero” gets his very first discreet public mention, four years before Randy Shilts indiscreetly introduced him to the world. In one scene, a researcher from the original cluster study is being interviewed. He shows a detail of the chart I reproduced above, the part specifically showing the California cluster. Clearly marked on the chart is one patient labelled “Outside California”. The narrator points out that all the patients on the chart are linked to him sexually, and then helpfully refers to this patient as a flight attendant. Knowing that this nameless flight attendant would be “outed” as Gaetan Dugas four years later and made a media monster, I find it a chilling moment in the program.

Also chilling — and sad — is the realization that every one of the many AIDS sufferers interviewed in that program, all of them relatively young at the time, must have died soon after.

Some Remarks on Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”

As the song says, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year”. Not Christmas. Rather, Autumn, also known as college book sale season. Among my finds this year are a well-bound three-volume facsimile edition of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible (Old Testament 1635, New Testament 1582) and Clarendon Press editions of various 17th-century Cavalier poets (Carew, Crashaw, Cleveland, Lovelace). But  the Holy Grail for this year (so far) has been finding a near-complete set of the Twickenham Edition of the poems of Alexander Pope (it's only missing the volume containing his minor poems). For those not in the know, the Twickenham Edition — published by Methuen in the UK and Yale University Press in North America — is the gold standard in Pope scholarship, excellently edited and printed, and quite difficult to get hold of. Each volume was priced at only $5, but because they were having a buy-two-get-one free sale, two of the volumes were free. So I paid $20 total. You, dear Reader, will just have to take my word for it when I tell you that I am very excited about this.

So excited am I, in fact, that within a week I had already read three of the six volumes (along with Geoffrey Tillotson’s little volume, On the Poetry of Pope). In other words, I have decided to immerse myself in Pope for awhile. I just finished with volume II, The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems. I had read The Rape of the Lock as a first-year undergraduate English major, which was a long time ago. I was perhaps too young to appreciate its artistry then. Now I rank it high amongst Pope’s works. (At the same time, a work of Pope's that I used to rank very highly, An Essay on Man, has now a much lesser share in my esteem.) The poem is a mock epic, using the loftiest of language and all the devices of the Iliad to depict a trivial event: a man cutting a lock of hair from the fair Belinda. It does not mock the epic form; rather it uses the epic form to mock the banality of 18th-century consumer society.

There are two versions of The Rape of the Lock. The first came out in 1712, followed by an expanded version in 1714. I may be singular in preferring the 1712 version. Of course, I understand what Pope was doing in introducing the divine “machinery” of sylphs and nymphs into the 1714 poem, that he had to do so in order to more closely follow (and lampoon) the received epic form. Still, it seems to me that there is more integrity in the 1712 edition, as well as an energy that seems to have been rendered more diffuse as the poem was expanded.

I have less to say about the poem itself than about the Twickenham Edition of it. Again, the Twickenham is excellently edited and printed. The introductions to each work are very long; though they are informative, they do at times border on the tedious. The copious footnote annotations are a wonder of scholarship, though, as is almost inevitable with such scholarly editing, there is a fine line between information and intrusion that is sometimes crossed. However, for any scholar truly interested in Pope, the notes are indispensable. Perhaps the highest praise that can be bestowed on the Twickenham Edition is that, despite being over 50 years old, it is still referred to as the definitive edition. The only other such editing masterpiece in this class that I can think of off the top of my head is the Latham and Matthews edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys.

To give a flavor of the thoroughness of the notes, here is Canto V, lines 105-106 (1714 ed.):
   
        Not fierce Othello in so loud a Strain
        Roar’d for the Handkerchief that caus’d his Pain.

In his footnote, editor Geoffrey Tillotson, rightly points out the allusion to Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693), who had criticized Shakespeare for overemphasizing the handkerchief as a plot device in Othello: “So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief! Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?” (p. 135). Besides citing literature that could have influenced Pope, the footnotes give much information connecting passages to details about his life and work, through his correspondence and the accounts of others such as Spence.

However, as thorough as the notes are, they occasionally miss something. I will give two such examples from The Rape of the Lock. The first is from Canto III, lines 117-118 (1714):

        Coffee, (which makes the Politician wise,
        And see thro’ all things with his half-shut Eyes)

In the footnote inserted there, Tillotson cites the Tatler and the Spectator for contemporary references to the connection between politicians and coffeehouses. Valid as this observation may be, by focusing blindly (pardon the double pun) on the coffeehouse connection, he misses the connection between politicians and their eyes, and hence to allusions to, for example, Shakespeare and Samuel Butler. See, for example, Act V, scene iv of King Lear:

        Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician, seem
        to see the things thou dost not.

And Butler’s Hudibras (1662), III.ii.351-356:

        ‘Mong these there was a Politician,
        With more heads than a Beast in Vision,
        And more Intrigues in ev’ry one,
        Than all the Whores of Babylon:
        So politick, as if one eye
        Upon the other were a Spy;

Before moving on to the next example, there is something else notable about the above lines from Pope. If one reckons “half-shut” as two words rather than one, as I believe one ought, then the second line is technically a ten-monosyllable heroic, which Pope had declaimed against in his An Essay on Criticism (1711), lines 344-349:

        These Equal Syllables alone require
        Tho’ oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
        While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
        And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
        While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
        With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.

On the other hand, in a letter to William Walsh (22 October 1706), Pope allowed for the practice under certain limited conditions:  “Monosyllable Lines, unless very artfully managed, are stiff, or languishing: but may be beautiful to express Melancholy, Slowness, or Labour.” This would excuse its appearance in the example from the Essay on Criticism (“And ten low words…”), but not from The Rape of the Lock (“And see thro’ all…”).

(The editors of the first volume of the Twickenham Edition, containing the Essay on Criticism, duly note that Lord Shaftesbury had also inveighed against “Ten-Monosyllable Heroicks” in the same year as Pope’s Essay came out.)

The next example from The Rape of the Lock where Tillotson has missed something worthy of a footnote occurs in Canto I, lines 75-76 of the 1712 version, or Canto III, lines 11-12 of the 1714 version. I reproduce both versions:

        1712:
        In various Talk the cheerful hours they past,
        Of, who was Bitt, or who Capotted last:

        1714:   
        In various Talk th’instructive hours they past,
        Who gave the Ball, or paid the Visit last:

The lines are an homage to the opening lines of Lord Rochester’s “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” (Poems on Several Occasions, Antwerpen, 1680, p. 14):

        Much Wine had past with grave discourse,
        Of who Fucks who, and who does worse;

This escaped Tillotson, which is a pity, as it gives us an interesting standpoint from which to discuss the relative merits of the two versions. It helps to discuss each of the couplet’s lines in turn. Since the second line contains more slang in the 1712 version (“bitt” = cheated at cards, “capotted” = scored all of the tricks), it preserves the sinking effect of Rochester’s use of “fuck”. In Rochester we move from “grave discourse” to fucking. There is sinking in Pope’s lines too, but in the later version the bottom to which the reader sinks in the second line is effectively raised. It is a shorter fall. As frivolous as they may be, giving balls and paying social visits are certainly more elevated than cheating at cards. As such, I wish Pope had left his second line unchanged.

If the second line contains the bottom to which the reader sinks, the first line contains the height from which he dives. In changing “cheerful hours” to “th’instructive hours” Pope has raised the height from which the whole sentiment leaps. There is also more irony in the later version, since though the conversation may be cheerful enough (1712), it is certainly not instructive (1714). The alteration also has the merit of bringing the sense much closer to Rochester’s: “grave” discourse better corresponds to “instructive” than to “cheerful”.

In short, the alteration of the first line was felicitous; that to the second was not.

Finally, one more observation on The Rape of the Lock. When the editors refer to period literature in their footnotes, it is almost always to literature that predates Pope’s. In other words, they are more interested in what may have influenced Pope than in who was influenced by him. As an editorial decision this is fair enough, and at least it prevents the notes from swelling even further. But I was struck by something I’d not thought of before. I recently read Charlotte Lennox’s novel The Female Quixote (1752) for the first time. Its heroine is a young lady named Arabella who is rendered romantically delusional by reading of too many 17th-century French romances. I thought of this when I came across these lines from The Rape of the Lock, Canto II, lines 37-38 :

        But chiefly Love — to Love an Altar built,
        Of twelve vast French Romances, neatly gilt.

This is much the way Arabella’s volumes are described as her father is attempting to set fire to them — they are large gilt folios. Furthermore, Pope’s dedication to the 1714 edition of The Rape of the Lock reveals that the real identity of his Belinda was Miss Arabella Fermor. As Lennox’s novel makes abundantly clear, the morality depicted in these French romances was by turns frivolous and absurd. So is the morality depicted in The Rape of the Lock.

Count Fathom's Tears

I have been reading an unusual amount of fiction lately, unusual at least for me. Almost all of them are 18th-century English novels, for which I have developed a taste. The latest one I finished was Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), a picaresque novel in which the title character is more than a mere scamp; he is downright evil. He is a criminal fraud artist and “adventurer” with absolutely no morals to speak of. Indeed, he is evil enough that much of this novel reads more like horror than the comedy Smollett presumably intended it to be. It makes for a kind of instability of genre that tends to disorient readers. Indeed, as Fathom’s deeds become progressively more wicked, the laughs become fewer and are replaced by cringe and discomfort. It gets so bad that Smollett seems to have felt it necessary to remove Fathom from the novel for the last hundred pages or so and, instead, turn to the happier stories of other characters. Fathom only reappears in the last fifteen pages of the novel, and in a rather tacked-on fashion.

Now, Count Fathom is not generally regarded as Smollett’s best work. If the novel receives any praise at all, it is mainly for its use of elements that anticipate the rise of the Gothic novel. And of course, it has many of the same flaws found even in Smollett’s accepted masterpieces: abrupt and gratuitous changes of scene, characters introduced for comic effect at the expense of plot, and an overdependence on incredible coincidences to move whatever thin plot there is. Smollett had always aspired to be a playwright, and this is the source of many of his weaknesses as a novelist. In a play it is often no great sin to introduce a new minor character or scene simply for comic effect. In a novel, however, it rather detracts from the integrity of the whole.

In total, I have read three of Smollett’s novels: Count Ferdinand, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, and Sir Launcelot Greaves. Of these, only Humphrey Clinker is counted among his masterpieces. And yet, despite the flaws noted above, I rank Count Fathom first of the three in order of personal preference. This is mainly because I am fascinated by the central character. Fathom, I believe, is one of the purest examples of a clinical psychopath one is likely to find in classic fiction. In him, I was pleasantly surprised to find Smollett’s talent as a master psychologist. One other notable example of a literary psychopath might be Shakespeare’s Richard III. But of course, we already knew Shakespeare was a master psychologist.

Shakespeare’s Iago is often put forward as another example of a literary psychopath. I am not convinced. Up until the events of Othello, there is little to indicate that Iago was previously anything less than a responsible husband and dutiful soldier. He has at least one intelligible motivation for the evil he does: he was (he feels) unfairly passed over for promotion. So his motivation is straightforward vengeance, which is not typically a sociopathic motivation, at least not in any sustained way. By contrast, Fathom is not motivated by vengeance. He is quick to forget a wrong and is not, for instance, concerned with getting back at Sir Stentor Stile and Sir Giles Squirrel for fleecing him when he has the opportunity to do so in Paris. At one point, while passing himself off as a physician, he swears vengeance against a certain apothecary who betrayed him, but strangely, the vengeance never happens. As is commonly the case with psychopaths, Fathom does not seem to experience the passion of anger in a way stable enough for him to form and carry out a sustained plan of revenge. He simply does not get angry enough for long enough to wreak vengeance upon anyone, despite being cheated and betrayed by his fellow adventurers on multiple occasions. In this respect, Fathom rings true as a psychopath, while Iago does not.

One of the hallmarks of a clinical psychopath is his very limited emotional and motivational palette. He has a marked emotional deficit when it comes to certain emotions of self-assessment (remorse, shame) and certain prosocial emotions (benevolence, love, gratitude, compassion). This certainly matches Fathom’s profile as Smollett presents him: “Fathom, though an utter stranger to the sentiments of honour, pity, and remorse…. mimicked that compassion and benevolence, which his heart had never felt” (p. 142).

Not only does he not experience these emotions himself, but in many cases he finds them literally incomprehensible in others. Joshua, the Jewish moneylender, is a benevolent character who, brought to weeping by Melvile’s predicament, lends him money without interest. Observing this, and having no such deep emotions himself, saving those that touch his own self-interest, Fathom cannot imagine that others might have them. Therefore, “he scrupled not to impute all this kindness to some deep-laid interested scheme, the scope of which he could not at present comprehend” (p. 229).

Fathom does, however, understand the outward manifestations of emotion, for although he cannot understand Joshua’s motivations, he can understand his tears. Indeed, we are told that Fathom is a master of such display himself, and can turn his tears on and off as required. At one point, he is described as “shedding a flood of tears (of which he had always a magazine at command)” (p. 217). Hence, although Fathom is given to displays of emotion, Smollett always makes clear that these are either feigned, or else, though real enough, proceed from motives that are not what they seem, usually self-interested motives. An example of the latter occurs when Fathom, who is languishing in jail after being prosecuted by Mr. Trapwell for seducing his wife, catches sight of Renaldo de Melvile, his childhood acquaintance from Hungary (I avoid the word “friend” on purpose, for Fathom is incapable of real friendship): “Ferdinand… was not deficient in expressions of tenderness and joy… the tears trickled down his cheeks, and that perturbation which proceeded from conscious perfidy and fear, was mistaken by the unsuspecting Hungarian for the sheer effects of love, gratitude, and surprise” (p. 196). He is deficient in tenderness and joy; he is not deficient in expressions of tenderness and joy. And where Fathom does experience emotions of tenderness and joy, their object is always Fathom.

What are we to make of someone who understands that certain occasions call for tears but does not understand the reason why? If everyone is, as Fathom believes, playing the same game as he is, and their tears are created in order to further self-interested objectives, then what social function could tears possibly serve? Returning to the example of Joshua the Jew, if tears of compassion are just part of lying, and if everyone knows this, why does anyone cry at all in situations calling for compassion? Crying would then simply be a signal that one is lying. The tears would defeat their purpose. There could be no social “game” called “tears of compassion” (to put it in Wittgensteinian terms) unless at least some people really felt compassion. One cannot successfully fake something, unless there is really something existent that may be faked. This never occurs to Fathom, because compassion is beyond his horizon of understanding. I imagine that to someone like him, tears are simply a game to be manipulated in order to achieve his objectives; he is uninterested in how or why the game exists at all, and that something called “compassion” is a precondition for it.

Romantic love is another of Fathom’s emotional deficiencies. At one point, shortly upon arriving in England, he meets and exchanges glances with a woman in a stage coach to London: “her attractions, though not enough to engage the affection, were yet sufficient to inflame the desire of our adventurer, who very honestly marked her chastity for prey to his voluptuous passion” (p. 139). This, in a nutshell, is the core problem with Fathom as a lover: he does not have affections as such; he has appetites ( or “voluptuous passions”), involuntary and fleeting. Indeed, he is a squirming, writhing ball of such appetites. Affections are other-regarding; appetites are always self-regarding. Hence, the closest he comes to being in love is with Mrs. Trapwell. Of course, the “love” Fathom experiences for Trapwell is really no more than an appetite that takes longer than usual to be satisfied: “so well did she [Trapwell] manage her attractions, as in some measure to fix the inconstancy of his disposition; for, at the end of the season, his passion was not sated” (p. 168). Not quite as endearing a romance as that of Elizabeth Bennett and her Mr. Darcy, to say the least.

In his book Without Conscience, Robert Hare, a renowned expert on psychopathy, tells the following story of being consulted by filmmakers who were working on a movie based on a psychopathic protagonist. The scriptwriter, it seems, was having trouble getting into the mind of the character, his feelings and motivations.

"The filmmakers had great concern for accuracy and had researched the subject as thoroughly as they were able. But the scriptwriter phoned me one day in near desperation. 'How can I make my character interesting?' he asked. 'When I try to get into his head, try to work out his motivations, desires, and hang-ups in a way that will make some sort of sense to the audience, I draw a blank. These guys … are too much alike, and there doesn’t seem to be much of interest below the surface.'
     In a sense the screenwriter had nailed it: As portrayed in film and story, psychopaths do tend to be two-dimensional characters …. The philosophy of life that these individuals espouse usually is banal, sophomoric, and devoid of the detail that enriches the lives of normal adults." (Hare 140-141)

One thing that comes out in Hare’s story is that, in part, character plays an individuating role: your character is what makes you you, and not someone else. Psychopaths do not have “character” in the way normal humans have character. Their characters are much the same, and one psychopath is largely indistinguishable from another in terms of personality and motivation (“these guys are too much alike”). It’s hard to point to any trait of character that makes Fathom stand out from the array of like-minded minor criminal characters he associates with. They’re after the same things, they run the same scams, and they cheat each other with monotonous predictability. There simply isn’t much going on in the minds of psychopaths to make them interesting. They’re too thin, too empty, too reptilian to make for interesting film or literary characters. Because they lack rich inner lives, the writer is forced to focus on their aberrant and abhorrent actions, which are the only interesting thing about them, in the absence of anything to write about their motivations or intentions. The psychopath’s actions, because of their very deviance, provide the entertainment in lieu of a true character.

Smollett indeed adopts this strategy of focusing on actions rather than passions, affections, and intentions, but he also adopts a different strategy: in many places he often demotes Fathom to the rank of a relatively minor character in his own story. For example, upon his arrival in England, he shares a stage coach ride towards London, during which he is largely silent as the other passengers converse (or rather argue) amongst themselves, in what is a fairly long scene. Now this was perhaps simply an opportunity for Smollett to introduce a gratuitous comic tableau and fill it with humorous character sketches (the Quaker, the fat Wapping landlady, for example), as he is wont to do. Indeed, as a writer generally, and as noted above, Smollett can’t seem to help inserting gratuitous scenes and characters at the expense of narrative integrity.

On the other hand, it is remarkable how large a proportion of the novel’s action does not concern Fathom at all (for example, the long digression concerning Don Diego de Zelos’ back story), or only concerns him insofar as he is a character who is occasionally discussed but is not present (most of the final third of the novel, for example). It is almost as if Smollett senses that the reader has grown weary of hearing about Fathom’s crimes and deceits and, having nothing else to offer from that quarter, he has allowed his title character to simply fade into the background. Is this intentional on Smollett’s part? In other words, is it a strategy as such? Or was it simply an involuntary or reflexive response to the very emptiness of his protagonist’s character? One wonders how far Smollett got into writing the novel before realizing his main character was not up to the job of lead role in the story.

What was Smollett’s original motivation in inventing a character like Ferdinand Count Fathom and constructing a novel around him? In his role as narrator, Smollett insists that he has presented Fathom as a warning to us to be on our guard: “Perfidious wretch! Thy crimes turn out so atrocious, that I half repent me of having undertaken to record thy memoirs: yet such monsters ought to be exhibited to public view, that mankind may be upon their guard against imposture” (p. 242). In other words, these people (what we would call psychopaths) are out there, and their special art is deceit. Reader be warned.

Not only does the reader need to be alerted for her own good that such people exist, but Smollett shows an astute understanding of the greater social danger they pose. They do not just deceive and hurt individuals, they also undermine social trust, a very valuable, but also a very fragile, commodity. Upon learning the true depth of Fathom’s wickedness,

"Melvile, glowing with rage, replied, that he was a venomous serpent, which it was incumbent on every foot to crush; that it was the duty of every man to contribute his whole power in freeing society from such a pernicious hypocrite; and that if such instances of perfidy and ingratitude were suffered to pass with impunity, virtue and plain-dealing would soon be expelled from the habitations of men." (p. 321).

Note two things about that passage: First, that by likening Fathom to a serpent deserving to be crushed underfoot, Melvile is drawing an implicit comparison of the psychopath to Satan, whose punishment in the Bible was to be turned into a serpent, to be forever trodden under foot by the sons of men (Genesis 3:14-15). Second, Melvile’s imprecation is expressed not in terms of the harm that he has himself suffered from Fathom on his own account, but rather in terms of the potential harm such people pose to the common good. As always, the pure and benevolent Melvile is thinking of the good of others, a way of thinking that Fathom would literally find unfathomable (pardon the pun).

I believe that part of Smollett’s motivation in inventing the character of Fathom, besides providing a vehicle for entertaining adventures, was to offer a plausible literary counter-example to the moral sense philosophers like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, whom he construes as peddling the mistaken notion that man is inherently virtuous by nature. For instance, he takes the tendency of virtuous actions to flow from self-interested or downright vicious motives — Bernard Mandeville’s thesis that public benefits spring from private vices — as a refutation of “Plato, and some modern moralists,” who impute to man an “innate virtue” and a “generosity of the human heart” (p. 263). The narrator (Smollett) disagrees: “But I, whose notions of human excellence are not quite so sublime, am apt to believe it [virtuous conduct] is owing to that spirit of self-conceit and contradiction, which is, at least, as universal, if not as natural, as the moral sense so warmly contended for by those ideal philosophers” (ibid.). No doubt the philosophers to which he alludes are Shaftesbury and, probably, Francis Hutcheson.

However, despite what he says, Smollett clearly does not believe that human nature is entirely vicious and depraved. For example, I contend that we are meant to take the innately virtuous Melvile’s seemingly misanthropic reflections on human nature in an ironic sense: “He could not help moralizing upon this rencounter, which inspired great contempt for human nature: and next day he proceeded on his journey with a heavy heart, ruminating on the perfidy of mankind” (p. 309). Indeed, if Smollett really meant to demonstrate that man’s moral nature was Mandevillian rather than Shaftesburean, he wouldn’t have introduced into the novel such disinterestedly benevolent characters as Major Farrel, Madam Clement, Joshua the Jew, and Melvile himself. He simply wanted to show that the opposite character-type was also a possibility — thereby providing a single counterexample to void the Shaftesburean hypothesis in its strongest form.

In Count Fathom, Smollett presents us with what I take to be one of the purest examples of a clinical psychopath in classic literature. However, the generally poor critical reception the novel has received may, I believe, be partly be attributable to the decision to make his title character what we today would call a psychopath. It is inherently a character without character. Fathom’s wickedness becomes tedious, his personality is purposely — necessarily — superficial, and his lack of any traits upon which the reader’s sympathy can lay hold are all qualities which eventually conspire to force Smollett to withdraw him from the stage for almost the final third of the novel. As if realizing that his title character has unaccountably gone missing, he brings Fathom back in the final fifteen or so pages, where he has suddenly become a true penitent. Presumably it was thought that this would make Fathom more personable and re-ignite the audience’s interest in him and his fate. How exactly he has managed to acquired the capacity to experience such emotions of self-assessment as remorse and shame during his hundred-page sabbatical is mostly left undeveloped. One supposes such a radical reformation is not impossible. But in order to be believable, it must be developed in more than fifteen pages. Indeed, it would realistically take an entire novel. The lack of a clearly developed path from shamelessness to repentance renders Fathom’s reformation impossible to credit. The unseemly haste with which the scene is brought before us and then thankfully removed indicates that Smollett didn’t really believe it either.

In The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Smollett has drawn his title character with masterly deftness. It is precisely this success that leads to the novel’s ultimate failure.

Works Cited

SMOLLETT, Tobias. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. Damian Grant (ed.). London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

HARE, Robert D. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.

Of the Many Doors to Death

Sept. 27, 1755

My Dear Mr. Avenger,

To your first Query, whether the Word “enow”, in your quoted Passage from my Lord SHAFTESBURY is to be taken to mean “enough”, I answer in the Affirmative. As to your other Question, whether it truly be current English, I aver that, altho’ it was acceptable Usage in the Age of our Queen Anne, along with ’em for them, yet now it is but little heard in polite Society, and is confin’d largely to the Speech of Rusticks and the Realm of Market Billingsgate.

To the turn to the Conceit contain’d in his Lordship’s Words:
 
     “But tho’ there are Doors enow to go out of Life, etc.” [Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Vol. I, p. 179 – Ed.]

If Life may be reckon’d as a sort of Market Town in which we are all Visitors, and which hath its Limits or Bounds, separating it from the neighbouring Countryside, then of this Town, it may very well be said, that tho’ there is but one Road leading into it, many are the Roads that take us out of it. The Image may be taken in a double Sense: First, as a simple Statement of natural Fact, that indeed we are vented into this breathing World but by one maternal Passage and usher’d out of it by any one of many; and, Second, that since there are so many Passages out of this same bustling World, ‘tis an easy Matter, if one chooses, to take one of them whenever he hath grown tir’d of the Spectacle. I cannot, of course, as a decent Christian Man, approve of this latter Sentiment, however patently true is the former.

The Conceit is an ancient one, and is not original to his Lordship. Indeed, this noble Author hath taken it from the Story, which he recounts, of Araspas and Panthea in XENOPHON, where the former remarks that “tho’ there are ten thousand possible Ways of getting rid of Life, few do so” [Xenophon, Cyropædia, 5.1.13 – Ed.]. From thence, the Conceit seems to have become a stock Favourite with the Stoick Philosophers. We find EPICTETUS advising that “one ought to remember and hold fast to this, that the Door stands open.” [Epictetus, Discourses, I.25 – Ed.]. In a similar Vein was SENECA’s Observation that,

     Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest,
     At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent.
[“Anyone can rob a man of life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.” Seneca, Phoenissae, l. 152 – Ed.]

From the Stoicks, the Sentiment seems to have pass’d into the Works of the ancient Poets:

     Noctes atque dies patet atri Janua Ditis.
[“The Gates of Death are open night and day.” Virgil, Æneid, 6.127  – Ed.]

                                               adeo tot fata, quot illa
     nocte patent vigiles te praetereunte fenestrae.
[“As you pass by at night, there are precisely as many causes of death as there are open windows watching you.” Juvenal, Satires, III.274-275. For “Death”, the original has fata, “fates” – Ed.].

Thus much for the Ancients. Among the Moderns, the Conceit was taken up by old MONTAIGNE, who wrote of Nature that “she has ordained only one Entry into Life, and a hundred thousand Exits” [Michel de Montaigne, Essays, “A Custom of the Island of Cea” – Ed.]. Among our English Dramatick Authors, ‘twas MASSINGER who observ’d that “Death hath a thousand Doors to let out Life” [Philip Massinger, A Very Woman (c. 1622), V.iv – Ed.], from whom WEBSTER seems to have taken his Hint:

     I know Death hath ten thousand several Doors
     For Men, to take their Exits.
[John Webster, The Dutchesse of Malfy (1623), IV.ii.215-216 – Ed.].

Among our moral Authors, “Man hath but one Entrance into the World,” said a notable Divine from an Age or two past,  “but a thousand ways to pass from thence” [see Jeremy Taylor, Discourses on Various Subjects (1807), Vol. II, Sermon XVI, p. 279 – Ed.]. Mr. ADDISON said much the same Thing: “Some of our Quaint Moralists have pleased themselves with an Observation, that there is but one Way of coming into the World, but a thousand to go out of it” [Joseph Addison, Guardian No. 136 (17 August 1713) – Ed.]. Since so various are the Passages opening unto Death’s midnight Kingdom, Dr. BROWNE was grateful that ‘tis only necessary to pass through one of them: “Considering the Doors that lead to Death I do thank my God that we can die but once” [Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643), Pt. I, §44 – Ed.].

Indeed, the Observation  may be apply’d to other Things than to the Beginnings and Endings of Men: for ‘twas said by Dean SWIFT, that “Books, like Men their Authors, have no more than one Way of coming into the World, but there are ten Thousand to go out of it, and return no more” [Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1710), p. 9 – Ed.]. And I my self once apply’d it to the getting and spending of an Household: for tho’ the ways by which Money may come into a Family are few, yet limitless are the possible Outlays that a Family may make, if, for Example, the Mistress of the House be Vain or the Master a Prodigal.

Amongst our English Poets, SIDNEY in his Arcadia seems to have been fond of this Notion: “Yet the house of Death had so many doores, as she would easilie flie into it, if euer she founde her honor endaungered.” [Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), Bk. III, ch. iii, p. 256 – Ed.]. And again, of two Knights in Combat, he says of one that he had “made many windowes” in the other’s Armour “for Death to come in at” [Ibid. Bk. III, ch. xvi – Ed.]. And let us not forget our great national Poet in the Epick Kind,

                                           Death thou hast seen
     In his first shape on man; but many shapes
     Of Death, and many are the wayes that lead
     To his grim Cave, all dismal; yet to sense
     More terrible at th’ entrance then within.
                                          — Milton, Par. Lost, Bk. XI, 466-470.

Again, whether Death be got at thro’ Doors or Windows, or by Roads and other Passages, ‘tis plain Fact that Nature is as generous and inventive in giving us new ways to die as Men are in finding new Villanies to practice upon one another. And when Nature and Man are combin’d in their Invention, they beget every Kind of monstrous Death, as attested by the many Diseases consequent upon Vice, as well as the Pillow over the Sleeper’s unsuspecting Face, the Dagger in the Dark, Poison —

     Livida materno fervent adipata veneno.
     Mordeat ante aliquis quidquid porrexerit illa
     quae peperit, timidus praegustet pocula papas.
                                                                     — Juv. Sat. VI

[“Those pastries are steaming darkly with maternal poison. Get someone else to taste first anything that’s offered to you by the woman who bore you. Get your terrified tutor to drink from the cup before you.” Juvenal, Satires, 6.631-633 – Ed.].

What all these Authors abovemention’d have really to teach us is that, as there is but one Door into Life and many more of them unto Death, so it wou’d seem that the Ways of expressing the same are equally various.

I am, my Friend, ever your
    Devoted,
        Humble Servant,
            Jos. Darlington, Esq.
            Darlington Close,
            Horton-cum-Studley, Ox.