Sir Henry Spelman (–1641)

Though I read an 183 re-issue, this books itself dates from the late Seventeenth Century, and in another sense, from another planet. The good Sir Henry starts from the premise that evil eventually will out and be punished, a premise which though comforting, has rarely been widely-held by great numbers of people -- or so I suspect. I myself believe in cosmic justice, but found Sir Henry's presentation so industrioulsy wrong-headed that I couldn't help but stop my friends and make them listen to some of his examples. The juiciest is probably his account of the death of William "the Conqueror", to be sure a notably vicious person. According to Sir Henry's reading of the old accounts, the Kings body swelled-up so much and so quickly after death that it had to be jammed into the sacophagous, and even then kept bloating so prodigiously that it blew the lid off. Be that as it may, it was doubtless cold comfort to all the people he'd brutalized. And of-course, his heirs, even with this notable example before them didn't tell the conquered Saxons, "Sorry. It was all a misunderstanding. We're going back to Normandy." Incidentally, the original edition of this book was in Thomas Jefferson's library, and was among those volumes sold to the young Republic to become what we now know as the Library of Congress. I like to think that he too had a good laugh over it.… (mer)