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Updated: July 8, 2025
Decurrit autem per quendam locum dictum Maron, ac secus stagnum quod diciter Mare Tyberiadis, ac subter montes Gylboe per amoenissima loca, atque in subterraneis meatibus per longum spacium se occultans tandem exit in planitie, quae dicitur Meldam, id est, forum, quod certis temporibus ibi Nundinae exercentur, et ad extremum se iactat in mare mortuum.
And not only that, Amyas; but trust me, that silly fashion of the French and Italians, to be hanging ever at some woman's apron string, so that no boy shall count himself a man unless he can vagghezziare le donne, whether maids or wives, alas! matters little; that fashion, I say, is little less hurtful to the soul than open sin; for by it are bred vanity and expense, envy and heart-burning, yea, hatred and murder often; and even if that be escaped, yet the rich treasure of a manly worship, which should be kept for one alone, is squandered and parted upon many, and the bride at last comes in for nothing but the very last leavings and caput mortuum of her bridegroom's heart, and becomes a mere ornament for his table, and a means whereby he may obtain a progeny.
The De doctrina Christiana is the prose counterpart of Paradise Lost and Regained, a caput mortuum of the poems, with every ethereal particle evaporated. In the royal injunctions of 1614, James I. had ordered students in the universities not to insist too long upon compendiums, but to study the Scriptures, and to bestow their time upon the fathers and councils.
I do not want to bore them with sermons, especially seeing I have always said that no sermons ought to be printed; for in print they are but what the old alchymists would have called a caput mortuum, or death's head, namely, a lifeless lump of residuum at the bottom of the crucible; for they have no longer the living human utterance which gives all the power on the minds of the hearers.
And what if the wisdom and authority of the honourable Houses, upon advice from the reverend and learned Assembly, choose another way than this? Must all the synodical debates, and all the grave parliamentary consultations, resolve themselves into Mr Coleman’s way, like Jordan into Mare Mortuum.
To our imagination, as above hinted, there is a certain apotheosis in it; but in the reality no apotheosis at all. Popularity is as a blaze of illumination, or alas, of conflagration kindled round a man; showing what is in him; not putting the smallest item more into him; often abstracting much from him; conflagrating the poor man himself into ashes and caput mortuum!
And had Charles Lamb not been trembling on the verge of insanity, the Essays of Elia would have wanted great part of their strange, undefinable charm. Had Ford and Massinger led more regular lives and written more reasonable sentiments, what a caput mortuum their tragedies would be! Had Coleridge been a man of homely common-sense, he would never have written Christabel.
The one has a good deal of the caput mortuum of genius, the other is all volatile salt. The conversation of Sir James Mackintosh has the effect of reading a well-written book, that of his friend is like hearing a bewildered dream. The one is an Encyclopedia of knowledge, the other is a succession of Sybilline Leaves!
But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer.
It is, then, this last product, this "caput mortuum" of all sects and believers of every shade and kind, that is favored by the no-belief system of education.
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