9 Who, loving knowledge, would not give all the wealth they possess, yea, and pawn their family inheritance till the end of time, to recover from the shades and hold in their hand, a daily record of things done, seen and heard by a percipient citizen of Periclean Athens, Caesarial Rome or any other heroickal time? How much more wealth would we give for such a diurnal in the manuscript of a Euclid, Vergil or Roland of Roncevalles?
10 Let me start, therefor, by stating that this morning
MIDSUMMER EVE 1653:
THE TOWER OF LONDON
This day concluded much. The Chief Secretary of State arrived soon after the board of this chamber had, by my command, been decked with wine, baked meats, pickles, fruit and other viands suited to a sckolastic colloquial symposiasmos, for his greek is not much inferiour to my own, though I exceed him utterly in power of invention, for like all politicians he is no philomathet, so cannot proconceive and concert well-measured symplasmical forms; in common english, his imagination is fanatick not poetick.
2 He entered to me peeringly, having the use of a single eye, and that a failing one, yet I saw it allowed him enough light to admire my figure, and this admiration I was able, in part, to return, for although neither of us very small men, we both lack that redundant height and girth which gross multitudes think commonplace: his manner also was pleasingly jocund and his voice familiar to my ear, for he pronounced his R, littera cannina, the latin dog-letter, extreme hard as we Scots do, a certain signe of a Satyricall Wit.
3 We furthered our amity by also discovering, beneath radically opposed views of church and state, an equal hatred of Presbyters (press-biters, he called them; I did not disclose that the like witticism had occurred to myself) I because of the malign difluence these coine-coursing collybists have cast upon my best endeavours, and because they have betrayed two kings, one of them unto death; he because they have ignored or saught to censor his proposals to replace universities by simple, sensible foundations, and to make divorce of marriages an easy thing entirely dependant on the husband’s will, and also because (turning traitour to their own treason) they opposed the monarch’s juridicial apokakefalization.
4 He had himself been offered (I gathered) the office of state licenser of all Brittish bookes, and might be obliged to accept that post to prevent it falling into worse hands; though he was determined to pass without question every book submitted to him, excepting such as would foster naked libidinal lewdness and atheism.
5 He then turned the talk neatly to my own published Introduction to the Universal Language, prologueing his remarks with a disclaim, that he spoke as a publick officer; whereat I girded my intellects for a cruxiferous encounter.
6 I began by asserting that all men originally shared the same language, since mankind had been made in one place at one time: he nodded agreement.
7 And before I could say more, recited verbatim the first nine verses of the eleventh chapter of Genesis, first in the Hebrew, then (because he said, it contained no very glaring innacuracie) in that translitteration authorized for the press by King Jamie in 1608, the year of my birth.
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefor is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
8 I hid my surprize, by suavely thanking him for anticipating me, and asking, How God had worked to confound the first speech he had given men to use? Was the Latin Secretary of the British Republick one of those who believed Jehovah had miraculously and simultaneously infused, into the Babel-builders’ brains, entirely differing sets of grammars and vocabularies?
9 He answered saying, No; he agreed with the Rabins, that the first confusion was of accent meerly, the foundation speech of these accents not deeply changing, until by dispersal around all the earth, the scattered nations of men were divided one from another by almost impassible distances of desert wilderness, mountain chains and nearly non-navigable seas: for each nation encountering different soyls, plants, creatures and climates, was compelled to devize new tools, arts and oeconomies to cultivate them, new sciences to understand them, new words to describe them, so that in time, lacking all written records, the old verbal tokens of our common oeconomy on Shinar’s plain were by new speech utterly ousted and submerged, leaving one accurate account of the paleological confusion among a people living near the place where it happened, the rest retaining but foggy legends of a primitive catastrophe.
10 Then it behoves us to enquire (said I) how God, operating within one single city-state on Shinar’s plain, came to stunt that great work by diversity of accent; for you and I are rational not supersititious men; we know God works His changes on earth by the agency of nature, his deputy magistrate, who in men is called human nature: what fact of human nature made men inarticulate to one another, who were united in a great project which, while certainly presumptuous, would otherwise have succeeded?
11 To this he replied, The desire for supremacy over their own kind.
12 I had intended, by a skilled deployment of Socratic questioning, to educt from his own lips conclusions which were precisely my own; his answer was so unexpected that I responded to it with open mouth and arched eyebrows, which he interpreted as an invitation to explicate.
13 We may only understand these nine verses rightly, said he, if we remember two things: firstly, that when Jehovah said, Nothing will be restrained from men, which they have imagined to do, He was speaking ironically to his Angels, for although the Almighty had not read the astronomy of Signor Galileo, He well knew the Grandeur of the Heavens He had Builded, and knew that they were far beyond the reach of any earthly construction; had the tower rizen one or two short miles above the surface of the plain it would have entered a region of air too rarified to support human nourishment; if this tremendous irony is forgot, then God’s words sound like the peevish pronuncimentos of a meer absolute Monarch, who dreads that his people will usurp his privelege.