Complete. From the “Holy State.”
HARMLESS mirth is the best cordial against the consumption of the spirits; wherefore jesting is not unlawful if it trespasseth not in quantity, quality, or season.
It is good to make a jest, but not to make a trade of jesting. The Earl of Leicester, knowing that Queen Elizabeth was much delighted to see a gentleman dance well, brought the master of a dancing school to dance before her. “Pish,” said the Queen, “it is his profession; I will not see him.” She liked it not where it was a master quality, but where it attended on other perfections. The same may we say of jesting.
Jest not with the two-edged sword of God’s Word. Will nothing please thee to wash thy hands in but the font? or to drink healths in but the church chalice? And know the whole art is learned at the first admission, and profane jests will come without calling. If, in the troublesome days of King Edward IV., a citizen in Cheapside was executed as a traitor for saying he would make his son heir to the crown, though he only meant his own house, having a crown for the sign; more dangerous is it to wit-wanton it with the majesty of God. Wherefore, if without thine intention, and against thy will, by chance medley thou hittest Scripture in ordinary discourse, yet fly to the city of refuge, and pray to God to forgive thee.
Wanton jests make fools laugh and wise men frown. Seeing we are civilized Englishmen, let us not be naked savages in our talk. Such rotten speeches are worst in withered age, when men run after that sin in their words which flieth from them in the deed.
Let not thy jests, like mummy, be made of dead men’s flesh. Abuse not any that are departed; for to wrong their memories is to rob their ghosts of their winding sheets.
Scoff not at the natural defects of any which are not in their power to amend. Oh, ’tis cruelty to beat a cripple with his own crutches. Neither flout any for his profession, if honest, though poor and painful. Mock not a cobbler for his black thumbs.
He that relates another man’s wicked jest with delight adopts it to be his own. Purge them therefore from their poison. If the profaneness may be severed from the wit, it is like a lamprey; take out the string in the back, it may make good meat; but if the staple conceit consists in profaneness, then it is a viper, all poison, and meddle not with it.
He that will lose his friend for a jest deserves to die a beggar by the bargain. Yet some think their conceits, like mustard, not good except they bite. We read that all those who were born in England the year after the beginning of the great mortality, 1349, wanted their four cheek-teeth. Such let thy jests be, that they may not hurt the credit of thy friend, and make not jests so long till thou becomest one.
No time to break jests when the heartstrings are about to be broken. No more showing of wit when the head is to be cut off. Like that dying man, who, when the priest coming to him to give him extreme unction, asked of him where his feet were, answered, “At the end of my legs.” But at such a time jests are an unmannerly crepitus ingenii; and let those take heed who end here with Democritus, that they begin not with Heraclitus hereafter.
