,
sharply or bluntly, like witless mowers, without stopping to whet their
scythes. They were inspired by the scribbling demon of that rabbin, who,
in his oriental style and mania of volume, exclaimed that were "the
heavens formed of paper, and were the trees of the earth pens, and if
the entire sea run ink, these only could suffice" for the monstrous
genius he was about to discharge on the world. The Spanish Tostatus
wrote three times as many leaves as the number of days he had lived; and
of Lope de Vega it is said this calculation came rather short. We hear
of another who was unhappy that his lady had produced twins, from the
circumstance that hitherto he had contrived to pair his labours with her
own, but that now he was a book behindhand.

I fix on four celebrated _Scribleri_ to give their secret history; our
Prynne, Gaspar Barthius, the Abbe de Marolles, and the Jesuit Theophilus
Raynaud, who will all show that a book might be written on "authors
whose works have ruined their booksellers."

Prynne seldom dined: every three or four hours he munched a manchet, and
refreshed his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant;
and when "he was put into this road of writing," as crabbed Anthony
telleth, he fixed on "a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his
eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light;" and
then hunger nor thirst did he experience, save that of his voluminous
pages. Prynne has written a library amounting, I think, to nearly two
hundred books. Our unlucky author, whose life was involved in
authorship, and his happiness, no doubt, in the habitual exuberance of
his pen, seems to have considered the being debarred from pen, ink, and
books, during his imprisonment, as an act more barbarous than the loss
of his ears.[349] The extraordinary perseverance of Prynne in this
fever of the pen appears in the following title of one of his
extraordinary volumes. "Comfortable Cordials against discomfortable
Fears of Imprisonment; containing some Latin Verses, Sentences, and
Texts of Scripture, _written by Mr. Wm. Prynne, on his Chamber Walls_,
in the Tower of London, during his imprisonment there; translated by him
into English Verse, 1641." Prynne literally verified Pope's description:

Is there, who locked from ink and paper, scrawls
With desperate charcoal round his darkened walls.

We have also a catalogue of printed books, written by Wm. Prynne, Esq.,
of Lincoln's Inn,