Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/105

  from the dust-abysses this and other old shadows of ‘precedents,’ promising to be of great use in the present distressed state of the Finance Department. Parliament being in abeyance, how to raise money was now the grand problem. Noy himself was dead before the Writ came out; a very mixed renown following him. The Vintners, says Wood, illuminated at his death, made bonfires, and ‘drank lusty carouses’: to them, as to every man, he had been a sore affliction. His heart, on dissection, adds old Anthony, was found ‘all shrivelled up like a leather penny-purse’; which gave rise to comments among the Puritans. His brain, said the pasquinades of the day, was found reduced to a mass of dust, his heart was a bundle of old sheep-skin writs, and his belly consisted of a barrel of soap. Some indistinct memory of him still survives, as of a grisly Law Pluto, and dark Law Monster, kind of Infernal King, Chief Enchanter in the Domdaniel of Attorneys; one of those frightful men, who, as his contemporaries passionately said and repeated, dare to ‘decree injustice by a law.’

The Shipmoney Writ has come out, then; and Cousin Hampden has decided not to pay it!—As the date of Oliver’s St. Ives Letter is 1635-6, and we are now come in sight of that, we will here close our Chronology.

and authentic Utterances of Oliver lie scattered, in print and manuscript, in a hundred repositories, in all varieties of condition and environment. Most of them, all the important of them, have already long since been printed and again printed; but we cannot in general say, ever read: too often it is apparent that the very editor of these poor