Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

218

'GREEDY DOGS, WHICH

INSATIABLE.

ISAIAH lvi. II; PROVERBS XXX. 15.

N the greatest of the greater prophets we read of "greedy

of Agur the son of Jakeh we read of the horse-leech having two daughters, whose insatiate, insatiable cry is, “Give, give.” Shakspeare's Iachimo characteristically speaks of the cloyed will as “That satiate yet unsatisfied desire,

That tub both filled and running.”

As with the "ingrate" in Lucretius,-ingratam naturam pascere semper, Atque explere bonis rebus, satiareque nunquam. Out and outspoken is the style of the great Emperor Frederick II., upbraiding the Pope (Gregory IX.) with his illimitable greed: "But thou having nothing, and yet possessing all things, art ever seeking what thou mayest devour and swallow up; the whole world cannot glut the rapacity of thy maw, for the whole world sufficeth thee not.” Gregory might be bracketed, for this bad eminence of his, with Philip the Fair of France, whose coffers were always filling, never full, and who, for purposes of plunder, respected wealthy Christians no more than wealthy unbelievers: his "insatiable rapacity" is a commonplace in history. As Milman says of him, every race or community possessed of dangerous riches having in turn suffered the extortionate persecutions of Philip, that avarice which had drained the Jews, the Lombards, and laid his sacrilegious hands on the Church, was only too prompt, when temptation offered, to confiscate the riches of the Templars. He seemed a most unroyal exemplar of "that beast" at whom Dante exclaimed,

"So bad and so accursed in her kind,

That never sated is her ravenous will”—

the will of ravening dogs, such as, in the Psalmist's phrase, go about the city, there wander up and down for meat, and grudge if they be not satisfied,—which they never are, never can be; it is the nature of the beast.

CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH?

219

"All wide-expanding their voracious jaws,
Morsel on morsel swallow down unchew'd,
Unsated, through mad appetite for more;

Gorged to the throat, yet lean and ravenous still."

Herodotus in his liveliest way tells us how Alcmæon, being invited to the coast of Sardis, and granted leave by Croesus to go into the treasury and take as much gold as he could carry away on his person at one time, put on the largest tunic he could find, so as to make a capacious fold, and (as Mr. Swayne words it) the roomiest buskins; how he first stowed his boots with the gold dust, and then packed his clothes with it, and then powdered his hair with it, and lastly took a mouthful of it, and came out of the treasury, "dragging his legs with difficulty, and looking like anything rather than a human being, as his mouth was stopped up, and everything about him in a plethoric state." It was like Croesus to be highly amused, and to give his grasping guest what he had taken, and as much again.

*

Mary of Guise, as Dowager Queen Regent, "dealing with " the Earl of Angus for citadels, plied him with pleas as he sat feeding a falcon which sat upon his wrist, until, addressing the bird, but leaving the Queen to make the application, he muttered, “The deil's in this greedy gled; she will never be fu’.” Without seeming to notice the hint, the Queen continued to press her importunities until she got a very uncourtly rebuff, once for all. Amyot is virtually forgiven his rapacity for his

* Had the good-natured prince given his guest a lesson at all, one can fancy it would have been in the easy-going vein of the Ingoldsby moral :—

"Learn not to be greedy; and when you've enough,
Don't be anxious your bags any tighter to stuff,
Nor turn every thought to increasing your store,
And look always like Oliver asking for more.

Dodwell, the learned non-juror, possessed an estate in Ireland, the main income from which he generously allowed a kinsman to enjoy, only reserving for himself such a moderate maintenance as sufficed for his inexpensive habits of life—the frugality of plain living and high thinking. But his kinsman got to grumble at the subtraction of even this pittance; and a proper lesson he was taught, by his benefactor resuming his property and marrying.

220

INSATIABLE GREED.

wit in excusing it, when, upon asking from Charles IX. yet another abbacy, in addition to several already held by him, the king demurred to granting the application: "Did you not once assure me that your ambition would be quite satisfied with a revenue of a thousand crowns?" "True, sire,” replied the Bishop of Auxerre, Grand Almoner of France, and abbacyholder wholesale, "but there are some appetites which grow as you feed them." Man's heart, moralizes Young,

66

eats all things, and is hungry still;

"More, more!' the glutton cries, for something new

So rages appetite."

There are those unreasoning, or at least unreasonable, askers, of whom Pope says that,

"Who ask and reason thus, will scarce conceive
God gives enough while He has more to give."

Inveterate wolf! is Dante's apostrophe to Avarice, "whose
gorge ingluts more prey than every beast beside, yet is not
filled, so bottomless thy maw." One woe denounced by
Micah the Morasthite is, "Thou shalt eat, but not be satis-
fied." As with the improbæ divitiæ of the heathen poet : cre-
scunt; tamen
nescio quid semper abest.

66

Te semper inops agitet vexetque cupido."

In a sermon on the odious sin of ingratitude, South affirms the only voice of that sin to be, Give, give; but when the gift is once received, he adds, then, like the swine at his trough, it is silent and insatiable. In a word, he defines the ungrateful person as a monster which is all throat and belly, a kind of . thoroughfare, or common sewer, for the good things of the world to pass into; and of whom, in respect of all kindnesses conferred on him, may be verified the observation on the lion's den-plenty of footmarks betokening an abundant entrance, not one of egress. Mr. Motley's portrait of that crapulous, licentious, shameless commander, the Duke of Mayenne, is of one "covetous and greedy beyond what was considered decent even in that cynical age,”—the duke receiving subsidies and alms with both hands from those who distrusted and despised

ILLIMITABLE APPETITE.

221

him, but could not eject him from his advantageous position, that of ostensible leader of the League. This was the man who was notorious for spending more time at table than the Béarnese in sleep, and who was so fat that he was said to require the help of twelve men to put him in the saddle again whenever he fell from his horse-an approximate resemblance to the desperate case of Humpty-Dumpty in the nursery-ballad, in whose instance all the king's horses and all the king's men were of no avail. The historian of the United Netherlands declares of the "infinite capacity for pecuniary absorption," manifested by the grandees of that age, that it makes one's brain reel, and enlarges one's ideas of the human faculties in certain directions. Philip of Spain knew his man when he thus wrote to the Archduke Ernest with reference to Mayenne : "You must try to keep him dependent on me, not giving him any more money than is necessary to prevent him from falling away entirely; for to content his appetite completely, there is not a fortune in the world that would suffice." He was just the sort of man of whom it might be said, as of quite another insatiable spirit it has been said, that were you to make him a present of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, all of your own mere grace and favour, purely and simply a free gift, he would be instant with a request to have the Isle of Man thrown in too, for a potato garden. There are Irishmen, an English publicist said, when discussing the prospects of the Land Bill as a healing measure, who, if England gave them the whole terrestrial globe, would swear by the harp of Erin that they would go off into space unless they got the moon too.

Some take by sea and some by land, quoth old Dunbar, and never from taking can hold their hand till they be "tyit up to ane tree." Some would take all their neighbour's gear, disdainful of Dunbar's cautionary refrain, In taking should discretion be.

"Some wad tak' a' this warld on breid;
And yet not satisfied o' their need,
Thro' heart unsatiable and greedie."

* In the whole breadth of it.

*

[ocr errors]

222

66

66

SOUTH ON COVETOUSNESS.

There cannot be a greater plague, says an old divine, than to be always baited with the importunities of a growing appetite. Beggars are troublesome, even in the streets as we pass through them; but how much more when a man shall carry a perpetually clamorous beggar in his own breast, which shall never leave off crying, Give, give, whether a man has anything to give or no." Such a one is likened to a man with a numerous charge of children, with a great many hungry mouths to be fed, and little or nothing to feed them with. What greater misery than for a man to have a perpetual hunger upon him—his appetite growing fiercer and sharper amidst the very objects and opportunities of satisfying it? This is to have such a dropsy upon the soul," that the more it takes in, the more it may; like a drunkard that drinks himself athirst, and is driven to drink more because he has already drunk too much. Graphic after his wont is South's picture of Covetousness, as so great and voracious a prodigy, that it will not allow a man to set bounds to his appetite, though he feels himself stinted in his capacities; but impetuously pushes him on to get more, while he is at a loss for room to bestow and a heart to enjoy what he has already. The preacher pictures men with open mouth flying upon the prey, and catching with such eagerness as if they could never open their hands wide enough, nor reach them out far enough, to compass the objects of their boundless desires. “So that, had they (as the fable goes of Briareus) each of them one hundred hands, these would all of them be employed in grasping and gathering, and hardly one of them in giving or laying out; but all in receiving and none in restoring; a thing in itself so monstrous, that nothing in nature besides is like it, except it be death and the grave,—the only things I know which are always robbing and carrying off the spoils of the world, and never making restitution." The prophet Habakkuk speaks of one who enlargeth his desire as hell, or the grave. The grave is one of the things signalized by Agur as never saying, It is enough, and that cannot be satisfied, but gathereth unto him all nations, and heapeth unto him all people. The traditional figure of Alexan

« ForrigeFortsæt »