Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/265

Coryate serious interpretation is to be found for the words prefixed to another copy of verses which follows, the queen gave the youth five pounds for his pains; whereupon he wrote another poem recommending her majesty to marry without delay. He can hardly have been more than fourteen years old when he tendered this piece of advice. While at Oxford he was evidently in needy circumstances, and in great measure had to live by his wits. He translated the whole book of psalms into Latin verse, a performance which happily was never printed, and has perished, but its completion was the occasion of another letter to Queen Elizabeth. He seems to have had no scruple about writing Latin verses to the nobility and others from whom there was any hope of getting a douceur. Once, at least, he addressed Lord Burghley, who sent him forty shillings in acknowledgment. On the occasion of the death of William, earl of Pembroke, he composed a silly elegy upon the deceased peer, whose son, Henry, lord Pembroke, made him his chaplain. At another time he sent some verses to the Lord-keeper Puckering, as well as to Archbishop Whitgift, besides writing epitaphs on Bishop Jewell and Archbishop Piers of York. His son inherited from him a considerable spice of the cunning and impudence which characterised that eccentric adventurer. He is registered as having ‘supplicated’ for the B.D. degree in July 1592, and as New College men were exempt from ‘supplication,’ this may have been a mistake of the registrar for Coryate's actual graduation. He was presented to the prebendal stall of Warthill in the cathedral of York, 17 Jan. 1594, but never rose to higher preferment. He died in the parsonage house at Odcombe, 4 March, 1606–7; ‘whereupon his son Tom, upon some design, preserving his body from stench above ground, till the 14th April following, 'twas then buried in the chancel of the church at Odcombe.’ He left behind him a widow, Gertrude, of whose parentage nothing is known. She survived her husband nearly forty years, and was buried near him 3 April 1645.

 CORYATE, THOMAS (1577?–1617), traveller, son of the Rev. George Coryate [q. v.], rector of Odcombe, Somersetshire, by Gertrude his wife, was born in the parsonage house at Odcombe, about 1577, and entered at Gloucester Hall in the university of Oxford in 1596. He left the university without taking a degree, and appears to have led an aimless life for a few years, till, on the accession of James I, he became a hanger-on of the court, picking up a precarious livelihood as a kind of privileged buffoon. Gifted with an extraordinary memory, and being no contemptible scholar, with what Fuller calls ‘an admirable fluency in the Greek tongue,’ and a certain sort of ability which occasionally showed itself in very pungent repartee, and an appearance which must have been indescribably comic, he soon attracted notice, ‘indeed was the courtiers' anvil to try their wits upon; and sometimes this anvil returned the hammers as hard knocks as it received, his bluntness repaying their abusiveness. He carried folly,’ says Fuller ‘(which the charitable called merriment), in his very face. The shape of his head had no promising form, being like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before, as composed of fancy and memory, without any common sense.’ When a separate establishment was set up for the household of Prince Henry and his sister, the Princess Elizabeth, Coryate obtained some post of small emolument which brought him into familiar relations with all the eminent men of the time, who appear to have amused themselves greatly at his expense. Prince Henry had a certain regard for him, and allowed him a pension. Always provided that they made it worth his while, Coryate had no objection even to the courtiers playing practical jokes upon him. On one occasion they shut him up in a trunk, and introduced him in a masque at court, much to the delight of the spectators (, Progresses of James I, ii. 400). The incident is alluded to by Ben Jonson and other writers of the time. It is probable that he inherited some little property on the death of his father, for within a year of that event he had determined to start on his travels. He sailed from Dover on 14 May 1608, and availing himself of the ordinary means of transit, sometimes going in a cart, sometimes in a boat, and sometimes on horseback, he passed through Paris, Lyons, and other French towns, crossed the Mont Cenis in a chaise à porteurs on 9 June, and, after visiting Turin, Milan, and Padua, arrived at Venice on the 24th. Here he stayed till 8 Aug., when he commenced his homeward journey on foot. He crossed the Splugen, passed through Coire, Zurich, and Basle, and thence sailed down the Rhine, stopping at Strasburg and other places, and reached London at last on 3 Oct., having travelled, according to his own reckoning, 1,975 miles, the greater part of which distance he had covered on foot, and having visited in the