_Capt._ Ah, well! God gives all in His good time. They astrologize too
much.
A FRAGMENT OF
JOSEPH HALL'S
MUNDUS ALTER ET IDEM
(_THE OTHER-AND SAME WORLD_)
TRANSLATED BY
DR. WILLIAM KING.
INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.
Joseph Hall was born at Bristow Park, by Ashby-de-la-Zouch, in the year
1574, and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1597 he published
three books, and in 1598 three more books, of Satires, "_Virgidemiarum_,
Six Bookes." These satires, with others published about the same time by
Marlowe and Marston, were burnt by order of Whitgift, Archbishop of
Canterbury, who had no relish for that kind of writing. Nine years
later, in the year 1607, at the age of thirty-two, Hall published the
satire now to be described. He was a witty and an earnest man, who rose
to honour in the Church, became successively Bishop of Exeter and of
Norwich; as Bishop of Norwich was in controversy with John Milton on
Church Discipline; suffered patiently imprisonment and persecution from
the Puritans; and closed an honourable life of more than fourscore years
in 1656. He has been called by some the Christian Seneca.
His early work, the "Mundus Alter et Idem," represents an ideal world
divided into regions answering to man's chief weaknesses or vices. He
gave with it a map of its Crapulia, Latronia, &c., fully peopled, with a
neighbouring land in which there are no signs of settlement, _Terra
Sancta, ignota etiam adhuc_, the Holy Land, even yet unknown.
Joseph Hall's new world is also figured as an Austral Continent. They
are good travellers, he says, who tell what they have seen in known
lands, but he is a better who not only travels but is himself the maker
of the lands he travels through. He chose his day, and went aboard the
good ship Phantasy, quitted harbour, sailed away, reached in two years
the Fortunate Isles, and, leaving the shores of Africa behind him, came
in sight of the black headland of Crapulia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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