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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2019, SPi

Vicarious Narratives
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Vicarious Narratives
A Literary History of Sympathy,
1750–1850

JEANNE M. BRITTON

1
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3
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© Jeanne M. Britton 2019
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First Edition published in 2019
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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ISBN 978–0–19–884669–7
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2019, SPi

for my parents
John and Kathy Britton
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Acknowledgments

From its first incarnation as a dissertation at the University of Chicago and

through its transformations elsewhere, this book has benefitted from the
guidance, encouragement, and support of many people. My ideas about
sympathy were profoundly influenced by James Chandler. I am also grateful
to Thomas Pavel for nudging me to think more about characters in fictional
sympathetic encounters and Robert Morrissey for pushing me to think more
about the French Revolution. At the University of Chicago, I also benefitted
from the insights of Elaine Hadley, Sandra Macpherson, Robin Valenza, and
discussions of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Reading Group.
Generous support from the Franke Institute of Humanities propelled the
original project to completion. Early versions of portions of this book have
previously appeared in “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,”
Studies in Romanticism 48.1 (2009): 3–22; and “Translating Sympathy by
the Letter: Henry Mackenzie, Sophie de Condorcet, and Adam Smith,”
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22.2 (2009): 71–98. I am grateful to the publishers
for their permission to use this material here.
At various points in this process, I have relied on the following people
for their advice, questions, generosity, and humor: Rachel Ablow, Sarah
Berry, Claire Colebrook, Danielle Coriale, Eurie Dahn, Susan Edmunds,
Paula Feldman, Mike Goode, Emily Harrington, Tony Jarrells, Nicholas
Joukovsky, Claudia Klaver, Patricia Roylance, Robin Schulze, Lisa Sternlieb,
and Linda Shires. Thanks to an Emerson Fellowship at Syracuse University,
I was able to devote substantial time to reformulating the book’s methods
and argument. I would also like to thank members of the Faculty Writing
Group at Syracuse University and the Upstate New York 19c Reading Group
as well as students in my graduate courses at Penn State University and the
University of South Carolina for their questions and conversation.
I am thrilled to have completed this book at USC, my alma mater, as a
member of the library faculty in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and
Special Collections. In addition to working among first editions of novels
I discuss in this book, I have been very fortunate to work alongside Jessica
Crouch and Michael Weisenburg and under the leadership of Associate
Dean Elizabeth Sudduth and Dean Thomas McNally. At Oxford University
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viii 

Press, I am grateful to Robert Faber, Stephanie Ireland, Eleanor Collins, and

Aimee Wright. The informed comments and insightful questions of two
anonymous readers reshaped the book’s argument and strengthened its
details.
My most heartfelt thanks are for my tireless supporters: my parents John
and Kathy Britton, and my husband and best friend Jody Fowler. Their
unwavering confidence has sustained me and this book. Completing it—a
book about resemblance and fraternity—as a mother of identical twin boys
has, to say the least, altered my understanding of some of its central
concepts. Thanks to Simon and Oliver, I can look forward to many years
of being an eager witness to the frequent happiness and occasional strife of
brotherhood.
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Contents

Introduction: Defining Sympathy 1

Smith’s Sympathy and the History of the Novel 10
Sympathy, Literary Form, and History 14

1. 1759 and 1794: Moral Sentiments, Political Revolution,

and Narrative Form 22
Historical Torture and Fictional Imagination 26
Adam Smith’s “Our Brother . . . upon the Rack” in
Post-Revolutionary France 30
Bodies and Persons in Sympathy’s Grammar of Vicarious
Experience 37
“Things as They Are” or “As If They Were My Own” in
Caleb Williams 41
Kinship in Smith’s Sympathy 56
Through Smith’s Window: From Visual Perception to
Imaginative Perspective 59

2. Letters in the Novel and the Novel in Letters: Henry

Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné and the Afterlife of the
Epistolary Novel 70
Sympathy and the Epistolary Novel 72
Correspondence, Soliloquy, and Mackenzie’s Novelistic
Voices 79
Mackenzie’s Reformulation of Epistolary Perspectives 84
Shared Language and Racial Difference 89

3. Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology 93

Literary Anthologies: Sentimental Extracts and Reading
Strategies 97
Sterne’s Starling and the Mechanics of Citation 102
“The Negro Girl” of Tristram Shandy 108
Torture, Kinship, and the Jewish Body in Tristram
Shandy 117
Animal Minds and Perspectival Sympathy 122
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4. The Ends of Kinship in the French Romantic Novel 126

Narrative Exchange and Sympathetic Experience in
Prévost’s Manon Lescaut 128
Fostering Family Ties in Paul et Virginie 131
Atala and René: From Fraternity to Difference 139
Kinship Structures and Narrative Forms 146

5. Novelistic Sympathy in Frankenstein 152

Redefining Sympathy: Social Failure and Narrative
Promise 155
Shifting Genres and Shifting Speakers 159
Copied Letters 168
“Similar, yet . . . Strangely Unlike”: Forms of Difference 172

6. Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel 180

Transforming Lockwood’s “Sympathetic Chord” 183
“I am Heathcliff”: Sibling and Stranger 187
Lockwood’s Vicarious Narrative 195
A “Relic of the Dead”: Reframing the Epistolary Novel 200

Coda 209

Bibliography 213
Index 231
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Introduction
Defining Sympathy

Novels have long been enjoyed for the sympathetic responses they elicit. For
twenty-first century audiences, sympathetic identification is, as it was for
many of the genre’s earliest critics, a defining feature of reading novels.
Today, reading fiction is frequently discussed as a cultural activity with
positive ethical, social, and neurological consequences. But when, rather
than the sympathetic responses that living readers have for fictional char-
acters, we consider instead the experiences of sympathy that literary char-
acters share with each other, different consequences come to light. These
consequences, which are the subject of this book, lie in the intertwined
histories of fiction and sympathy. In depicting rather than eliciting sympa-
thetic response, certain novels reshape sympathy’s shared sentiments and
mingled tears into an emphatically structural feature of fiction, and they
generate a novelistic version of sympathy that aims to accommodate human
difference through the experience of narrative. While sympathy is, as early
and recent readers of novels attest, a defining feature of the novel’s cultural
value, my contention is that, in the years of the genre’s development between
1750 and 1850, key works of British and French fiction fundamentally
redefine sympathy.
This redefinition entails fiction’s transformation of philosophical models
of sympathy into elements of narrative form. Defining “sympathy,” though,
has a long interdisciplinary history that continues today.¹ Rooted in human
neurology by current scientific research and differentiated from empathy in
early twentieth-century aesthetics and psychology, “sympathy” most
broadly refers, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to a

¹ Defining emotion is a central task in the field of the history of emotions, which has
identified the turn of the nineteenth century as a crucial period. See Thomas Dixon, From
Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003) and William M. Reddy, Navigations of Feeling: A Framework for the
History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford

University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001
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primarily emotional experience that is to some extent shared between

people.² Its wide range of meaning encompasses emotional, cognitive,
physiological, and mystical transmissions of feeling; self-projection and
identification with another person; the contagious, automatic spread of
emotions among groups of people; and the labored exchange of feeling
between two individuals.³ Distinctive within this range is Adam Smith’s
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which characterizes sympathy as a
process of shifting perspectives—of seeing, essentially, from another per-
son’s point of view. At a time when “sympathy” more commonly describes
easy, inevitable, and sometimes dangerous movements of emotions among
people, Smith’s abstract conception of feelings that are shared between two
individuals is unique.
His version of sympathy is also uniquely amenable to the forms of fiction.
The narrative aspects of Smith’s Theory itself have been highlighted in
various ways.⁴ But novels also adapt aspects of Smith’s definition as they
redefine sympathy through their formal structures—shifting perspectives or
“stories within stories” in which one character assumes the perspective and
voice of another. In this way, key works of fiction follow Smith’s emphasis
on imaginative abstraction and the shifting perspectives that, for him,

² For a popular overview of neurological studies on empathy, see Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring
People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others (New York: Picador, 2009).
“Empathy” is derived from the German term “Einfühlung,” which approximates “feeling with”
or, more strictly, “feeling into.” See Rae Greiner, “1909: The Introduction of ‘Empathy’ into
English,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco
Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Accessed July 22, 2014. While
I specify the significance of “sympathy,” I agree with Derek Attridge’s urging that readers not be
dogmatic in distinguishing among “emotion,” “sentiment,” “feeling,” and “affect.” The Work of
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 261.
³ Jonathan Lamb provides a comprehensive view of the concept’s varied permutations. The
Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009),
esp. pp. 67, 115. On sympathy’s medical meanings, see Anne Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century
Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004) and Christopher Lawrence, “The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish
Enlightenment,” in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes
and Steven Shapin (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979). On its metaphysical uses, see Seth
Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
⁴ Charles Griswold, for example, has noted in his discussion of Smith that “[t]he sympathetic
imagination is not solely representational or reproductive. It is also narrative, always seeking to
flow into and fill up another situation and to draw things together into a coherent story.” Adam
Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 116.
More recently, Stephanie DeGooyer has argued that sentimental fiction “reproduces Smith’s
triangulated, formal structure of sympathy” through its representations of “distance, time, and
reflection.” “ ‘The Eyes of Other People’: Adam Smith’s Triangular Sympathy and the Senti-
mental Novel,” English Literary History 85.3 (2018), pp. 685, 686.
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 3

constitute sympathetic response. This formal echo coincides, though, with a

significant challenge to the role that resemblance plays in philosophical
definitions of sympathy. Despite David Hume’s claims in A Treatise of
Human Nature (1738–40) that all human beings resemble each other, he
specifies that “We sympathize more with persons contiguous to us, than
with persons remote from us: With our acquaintance, than with strangers:
With our countrymen, than with foreigners.”⁵ Similarly, Smith explains that,
if we are in a state of distress, we “expect less sympathy from a common
acquaintance than from a friend” and “expect still less sympathy from an
assembly of strangers.”⁶ Even as they aspire to universal inclusivity, Enlight-
enment theories of sympathy tend to flourish in the closed circles of kinship
and familiarity.
In the novels I discuss, by contrast, characters who are separated by
differences of class, race, or species experience a version of sympathy that
struggles to accommodate precisely such differences by greeting strangers as
siblings and welcoming foreigners as family members. Encounters between
these characters produce shifts in narrative perspective and cited, framed, or
inset tales as one character sympathizes with another and begins to tell his
story. At these moments, fiction redefines sympathy as the struggle to
overcome difference through the active engagement with narrative—
through hearing, retelling, and transcribing the stories of others. I use the
phrase “vicarious narratives” to identify intersections between second-hand
emotions, or feeling another person’s emotions as if they were one’s own,
and second-hand narratives, or telling another person’s story as if it were
one’s own. British and French novels published between 1750 and 1850
generate a specific version of sympathy by manipulating traditional narra-
tive forms (epistolary fiction, embedded tales) and new publication practices
(the anthology, the novelistic extract) in response to Enlightenment theories
of shared feeling.
Gabrielle Starr has noted the curious absence of any theorization about
sympathy’s relationship to narrative in eighteenth-century aesthetics or
philosophy, an absence that seems especially odd given that the period is

⁵ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 371. Lord Kames, a mentor of Smith’s, offers a
similar view: “Our relations in distress claim this duty from us, and even our neighbors; but
distant distress, where there is no particular connection, scarce rouses our sympathy, and never
is an object of duty.” Principles of Equity (London: A. Millar, 1767), p. 15.
⁶ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 28. Subsequent references to this edition will be noted
parenthetically.
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so rich in embedded tales that elicit sympathetic response.⁷ This book

identifies connections between works of British and French fiction and
philosophy that begin to fill that absence. The relationship between shared
feelings and shared stories has a conceptual origin in the most iconic
Enlightenment definition of sympathy, the opening scene of Smith’s Theory:
“Though our brother is upon the rack,” he begins, “as long as we ourselves
are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers, . . . and it is
by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his
sensations.” The imagination, he continues, grants access to another per-
son’s sensations only “by representing to us what would be our own, if we
were in his case” (11). With this “brother,” Smith makes sympathy rely,
whether figuratively or literally, on the bonds of kinship. With the rack, he
describes the process of imagining another person’s emotions by referring to
an outdated torture device used to inflict extreme physical pain in pursuit of
a criminal confession. He does so only to specify, however, that it is the
representational capacity of the imagination, not sensory experience, that
tells us about another person’s feelings. To submit a suspected criminal to
the agonies of the rack is to make the physical display of bodily pain signal
buried truth and concealed narrative. This implicit correlation between the
experience of sympathy and the pursuit of narrative pervades Smith’s
Theory, and its elaboration in works of fiction clarifies the under-theorized
relationship between sympathy and narrative in this period.⁸
Smith further explains the role the imagination plays in sympathetic
response with his figure of the “impartial spectator,” an imagined third
party to a sympathetic encounter whose perspectives on both the sufferer
and sympathizer encourage those two parties to moderate their own reac-
tions. Smith tests the perspectival labor that constitutes his version of
sympathy when he posits, instead of a family member on the rack, a mass
of people suffering from an earthquake in China. In this scenario, Smith
initiates a movement beyond his familial notion of sympathy towards a
conception of sympathy that might accommodate difference. He also traces
a key feature of his notion of sympathy that has particular ramifications for

⁷ G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 190, 269–70.
⁸ On the connection of criminal confessions to fiction, see Peter Brooks, Troubling
Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),
pp. 8–34; Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and Philip Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle
Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1992).
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narrative—the transition from visual perception to imaginative perspective.

For Smith, sympathetic response does not necessarily require the operation
of the senses; instead, visual perception must give way to the abstraction of
cognitive perspective. Unlike other writers for whom sympathy is immedi-
ate, inevitable, and contagious, Smith focuses on the strain or obstacles that,
by challenging and limiting sympathetic response, give rise to an imagina-
tive form that is spatial, geometric, and structural. In the effort or inability to
overcome the obstacle of human difference—indexed in the Theory by the
distinction between the tortured brother and suffering foreigners—his con-
ception of perspective anticipates a novelistic version of sympathy that
struggles to accommodate difference through the shifting perspectives
entailed in acts of narrative transmission.
The much-discussed “rise of the novel” seems to stray off course at certain
stages during the Romantic period, troubled by odd gothic forms and
category-defying “quasi-novels,” torn between Jane Austen’s domesticity
and Walter Scott’s historicism.⁹ Attention to sympathy’s formal dynamics
across this study’s expansive chronology of “the Romantic century” reframes
some of these questions of literary history and generic classification. Sym-
pathy is most commonly associated with a particular kind of realist, psy-
chological fiction, especially the works of Austen or Henry James, but it is
both prominently experienced and profoundly redefined in sentimental and
gothic fiction, in epistolary novels and frame tales. The works I discuss by
Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, François-René de Chateaubriand, Ber-
nardin de Saint-Pierre, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë redefine sympathy
as a novelistic phenomenon by staging scenes of sympathy between charac-
ters whose affinities suggest figurative kinships but whose differences stretch
the limits of resemblance. The inset or framed tales that follow or precede
such sympathetic encounters suggest that the experience of narrative can
temporarily suspend difference by allowing one character to speak and feel
for another. These novels redefine sympathy as the intersubjective experi-
ence of narrative that replaces lived experiences of sympathy that remain
unsustainable or impossible between characters separated by difference.
Without privileging either the lived experience of sympathy or its narrative
approximation, these works suggest that when sensory experience tells
characters little about each other’s pasts and emotions, the shifts in perspec-
tive by which one character narrates another’s story more reliably allow the

⁹ The term “quasi-novel” is from Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period:
1789–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1989), p. 253.
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imagination to represent and simulate the emotions and experiences of

another person.
Most broadly, this redefinition of sympathy grants certain novels an
active role in sympathy’s cultural history. More specifically, it sheds new
light on two sub-plots in the story of the novel’s rise—the decline of the
epistolary novel at the end of the eighteenth century and the increasing
popularity and revisionary effects of novelistic extracts during the Romantic
period. In tracing the first of these sub-plots, I offer fictional revisions of
sympathy as they appear in Henry Mackenzie’s best-selling novel in letters
Julia de Roubigné (1777) as a new explanation for the persistent influence of
epistolary dynamics in nineteenth-century frame tales—Chateaubriand’s
René (1802), Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
(1847). Identifying the novel’s revision of sympathy as a mode of vicarious
narrative calls for a reinterpretation of retrospective frame tales in which
they can be seen to transform features associated with (but not exclusive to)
epistolary fiction—vocal mobility, emotional immediacy, and multiple
perspectives—into the frame tale’s narrative levels and shifting speakers.
The second sub-plot in the history of the novel that this book traces centers
on short tales framed by sympathetic response—first, the sympathetic scenes
that pervade the anthologies that flooded the British literary market after
perpetual copyright was lifted in 1774 and, second, canonical French novels
that originally appeared as narrative episodes in longer, non-fictional works.
In the first case, literary anthologies are explicit about modeling morality and
celebrating sentiment. Less explicitly, they are instrumental in the rises of the
novel and of certain types of novel reading. When repackaged, resequenced,
and retitled in these collections, the inset, embedded tales of Laurence Sterne’s
novels reconfigure significant elements of his works—shared and private
feelings, figures of radical difference, and the narrative effects of sympathy.
In the second case, I look to the narrative roles that kinship metaphors and
sympathetic response play in Paul et Virginie (1788) by Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre and René and Atala (1801) by Chateaubriand, all of which originally
appeared as episodes within longer works. The narrative structures and
publication histories of these novels put forth a specific model of sympathetic
narrative transmission. In these works, experiences of sympathy between
adoptive fathers and sons cross lines of racial, cultural, and generational
difference, and they produce the shifting perspectives and narrative levels
that constitute these canonical frame tales. Along with gothic frame tales and
epistolary fiction, narrative extracts and episodes framed by sympathetic
response generate a novelistic version of sympathy that reshapes the mental
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 7

faculty that Smith defined into the imaginative attempt to overcome differ-
ence through the active engagement with another person’s story.
Scholars have drawn a broad range of conclusions about the roles that
sympathetic experience plays in cultural history. In a central paradox,
sympathy has, on one hand, been praised for its contributions to the rise
of democracy and humanistic education while, on the other, its emotional
structures have been seen to collude with institutions of social inequality and
physical or psychological oppression. Sympathy’s ethical value often hinges
on the responses of novel readers, and the role sympathy plays in novelistic
forms and subgenres specifies aspects of this far-reaching paradox. Martha
Nussbaum has influentially claimed that reading literature fosters habits of
mind that facilitate the acceptance of racial or cultural difference by means
of the sympathetic imagination.¹⁰ Extending this claim, other scholars have
aligned sympathy’s ethical value and its relationship to fiction with major
historical developments: Nussbaum’s assertion that the rise of the novel
“coincided with, and supported, the rise of modern democracy” has been
echoed by Lynn Hunt, who suggests, based on Benedict Anderson’s notion
of the imagined community, that the rise of “imagined empathy” contributes
to the construction of democratic ideals in the middle of the eighteenth
century.¹¹ The novel, according to this view, promotes new versions of
psychological identification, which in turn provide the foundation for
human rights to be considered self-evident. Ian Baucom has described the
philosophical, financial, and literary discourses whose convergence pro-
duced an “alternate form of representational legitimacy” through “remon-
strance, expostulation, and sympathy,” enumerating the ways in which the
reproducibility of the melancholy fact generates a new kind of affective
epistemology that is the foundation of modern humanitarianism.¹²

¹⁰ Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal

Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 94. Suzanne Keen, by contrast,
argues that reading fiction, especially popular fiction, does not lead to ethical behavior. Empathy
and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Raymond Mar and Keith
Oatley, “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (2008), pp. 173–92; Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We
Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); and Keith
Oatley, The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), pp. 153–70.
¹¹ Nussbaum, p. 94. Lynn Hunt, “Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights
and Revolutions, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 3–17.
¹² Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of
History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 208, 209.
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8  

But, as these critics are aware, claims that the genre of the novel fosters the
sympathetic imagination, which then fuels the spread of democracy and
humanitarianism, risk overlooking other connections between the rise of the
novel and the rise of other European political and social institutions, most
notably those of empire and slavery. A significant body of work on senti-
ment and sympathy that focuses on the incorporation of these concepts in
novelistic perspective has identified invasive, coercive, and violent implica-
tions in eighteenth-century descriptions of sympathy. Other critics have
been attentive to sentimentalism’s dependence on inequalities of class,
gender, and race; when literary sentimentalism’s tropes migrate to the far
reaches of empire, a European’s distress over a colonial subject’s sufferings
can be seen to reinforce racial and imperial hierarchies.¹³ Lynn Festa, noting
that sentimental fiction and the shared feelings it celebrates reach a height in
Britain and France at a time “when categories of national, ethnic, and
cultural difference seem most imperiled,” argues that these novels work to
“create the semblance of likeness while upholding forms of national, cul-
tural, and economic difference.”¹⁴
This underlining of difference in tandem with the exploration of similar-
ity describes the cultural work that certain novels perform in their very
structure. Narrative exchanges enacted by novelistic forms through which
one character speaks and feels for another suggest that sympathetic identi-
fication can temporarily transcend distinctions of class, race, or species, and
that speaking as another need not signal emotional appropriation but
instead might, during the act of narrative transmission, suspend the bound-
aries that create human difference. Challenges in certain novels to philoso-
phy’s apparent insistence on biological similarity mean that, during the
same decades that witness the ascendancy of racism as a cultural discourse
underwritten by speculative science, key novels integrate attempts to over-
come difference in their structural fabric. These novels not only promote the

¹³ Classic studies remain G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and R. F. Brissenden,
Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes
& Noble, 1974). On sympathy in imperial contexts, see Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy:
Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002) and Marcus Wood,
Empathy, Slavery, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). In a similar vein
but different context, Audrey Jaffe argues that sympathy in Victorian fiction upholds the social
divisions it might seem to erase. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian
Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
¹⁴ Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 51.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2019, SPi

 9

experience of sympathetic identification in their readers but actually entail

the imaginative dynamics of that experience in their form. By giving mater-
ial shape to both the philosophical tradition of sympathy and the emotional
and ethical effects of novel reading, the traditionally marginal subgenres of
the sentimental novel, gothic fiction, and the fictional extract assume more
prominent positions in the cultural and literary histories of sympathy.
To be sure, the frame tale and the epistolary novel are not the only
novelistic forms to engage with sympathy. The marriage plot and the
national tale are also linked to sympathy’s cultural currency.¹⁵ Gender and
nationality are not the focus of this study, though, because, although they are
frequently mediated by sympathetic responses, they also tend to be accom-
modated by the novelistic forms of the marriage plot and the national tale—
in sentimentalism, sympathy frequently morphs into eroticism or romantic
love, and in the national tale, sympathy is mobilized to establish new forms
of national union. Marriage can offer an apparent resolution to gender
difference, and naturalization, often joined with marriage, can seem to
accommodate national difference. It is instead through a mode of vicarious
narration that this era’s fiction attempts to accommodate differences of race
and species that its social institutions and historical realities cannot.
In fictional worlds, stories shared by characters who cross lines of
difference—lines that would only be reinforced by identity categories and
institutional structures—suggest that imaginative forms might suspend
these boundaries and, for example, allow a European monster to speak on
behalf of an Arabian woman, or permit an Englishman to speak for a caged
bird. Such encounters across boundaries of differences that Romantic-era
institutions cannot accommodate challenge what Nancy Yousef has called
sympathy’s “demands for intersubjective symmetry—be it the perception of
similarity, the impression of equality, or the expectation of reciprocity.”¹⁶
When the experience of sympathy between dissimilar individuals is blocked,
stymied, strained, or delusional, fiction generates a new version of sympathy
that reformulates the imaginative shifts in perspective that characterize
Smith’s sympathy in its attempt to accommodate difference.

¹⁵ On sympathy’s relationship to the marriage plot, see especially Rachel Ablow, The
Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007); on its relationship to the national tale, see Evan Gottlieb, Feeling
British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007).
¹⁶ Nancy Yousef, Romantic Intimacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 3.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
caeria en la maldiçion, y
Magençia encogiendose con gran
verguença reusó el vaso con
algun miedo que Alçidamas no la
afrontasse; y los combidados
temiendole hizieron por apartarle
afuera; pero él juró por sus
ordenes que si no daua vn fiador
que bebiesse por ella, que se lo
auia de derramar acuestas; y el
cura de San Miguel que era vn
gran bebedor dando a entender
que lo hazia mouido de piedad,
dijo que él queria beber por ella, y
ansi tomando el vaso en sus
manos bebio vn terrible golpe que
a juizio de todos igualó[909]. Pero
Alçidamas que estaua ya sentado
en el suelo recostada la cabeça
sobre el braço derecho dixo a
grandes vozes: mostradme el
vaso, que quiero ver si cunplio
conforme a su obligaçion. Y
leuantandose en pies todos los
pechos y zarahuelles
desabrochados, de manera que
casi todo estaua desnudo, que se
le pareçian las partes
vergonçosas, y perdido el bonete
de la cabeça, tomó el vaso en sus
manos y afirmando con juramento
que no auia cunplido el fiador
amagó para mojar con el vino que
quedaua a Magençia, y el[910]
cura de San Miguel pareçiendole
que estaua obligado a responder
saltó por çima las mesas,
dexadas sus lobas y pantufos, y
tomando[911] por los cabellos a
Alçidamas le hizo[912] por fuerça
boluer para sy, y Alçidamas hirio
de vn tan fiero golpe con el vaso
al cura de San Miguel que
dandole en la frente hizo vn
arroyo de sangre y de vino
mezclado que todos nos
pensamos anegar. Luego
vierades las hazes de ambas
partes rebueltas, porque los vnos
faboreçiendo a Alçidamas, y los
otros al cura de San Miguel que
no auia quien los pudiesse
apartar. Porque contra Alçidamas
se leuantaron Hermon, cura de
Sancto Thomé, y Eucrito cura de
San Dionisio porque estauan
injuriados de las afrentas que les
auia dicho, y tanbien Eustochio
cura de San Martin por que le
auia dicho Alçidamas que si auia
acabado de jugar el asegur y
afilador que su padre le dexó de
la carneçeria; y ansi estos se
leuantaron lleuando los manteles
tras si; y en favor de Alçidamas se
leuantaron el cura de San Juan y
el cura de Sancta Marina y el cura
de San Pedro y el sacristan de
San Miguel.
Miçilo.—¿Qué, tanbien estaua
allí el sacristan de San Miguel? yo
seguro que no faltassen uozes.
Gallo.—Alli vino con grande
importunidad; que en vna silla le
truxieron porque estaua
enfermo[913]. Reboluyeronse
todos trabados por los cabellos
que no pareçia sino la pelea de
los andabatas. Digo de aquellos
que entran en el palenque a se
matar sin poderse vnos a otros
ver. Andauan los xarros, los
saleros, las syllas y vancos
arroxados[914] de la vna parte a la
otra tan espesos que cubrian el
sol[915]. En fin se leuantaron
Aristeneto y el padrino Cleodemo,
y el prior y el guardian, y en
conclusion todos aquellos
maestros y sabios, y de la otra
parte los casados, avnque
estauan confusos de ver lo que
passaua. Los quales todos
metiendose en el medio los
apartaron y pusieron en paz, y
lleuaron luego a curar al cura de
San Miguel, porque Alçidamas le
descalabró mal quando con la
copa le dio. Luego Alçidamas se
tendio en el suelo que pareçia a
Hercules como le pintan los
antiguos en el monte Pholo
acabando de pelear con aquella
brauosa hydria, sierpe famosa, y
muy sosegados, ygualadas las
mesas se tornaron todos a sentar
y luego a Zenothemo maestro de
la gramatica començó a cantar
vna ensalada de[916] romançe y
de latin que neçesitaua a çerrar
las damas los ojos y avn las
orejas tanbien[917], por no ver
peruertida la grauedad de tanto
maestro. Pero como es
costumbre en los tales lugares en
el proçeso de la comida cantar los
clerigos semejantes donayres a
su misa cantano, no pareçe que
les hazia asco aquel lenguaje a
sus paladares: porque si[918] vno
lo començaua suçio, el otro lo
ensuçiaua mas; y ansi acabando
Zenothemo su cançion prosiguió
el cura de Sanctesidro con toda
su vejez vn cantar que no ay
lengua tan desuergonçada que
fuera de alli le pueda referir.
Miçilo.—Maldita sea costumbre
tan mala y tan corrupta y
deshonesta, y tan indigna de
bocas y lenguas de hombres que
han de mostrar la regla del buen
hablar y viuir. No se deurian en
esto los perlados descuydar.
Gallo.—En esto[919] auia en la
sala mucha paz, porque ya
Alçidamas se començo a dormir, y
por las partes inferiores y
superiores començo a roncar con
gran furor. Entonçes dixo el prior:
salua res est; y de consejo de
todos fue que le atassen pies y
manos por poder passar su fiesta
más en paz, y ansi se leuantó
Dionico maestro de capilla de la
iglesia mayor con otros seys
cantores que estauan alli, los
quales todos puestos en calças y
jubon le ataron[920] fuertemente
las manos y pies con vn cordel.
Miçilo.—Nunca de cantores se
pudo tan buen consejo esperar.
Gallo.—Ni por esto Alçidamas
despertó. Dionico con sus seys
compañeros quedando ansi en
medio de las mesas desnudos
como estauan[921] començaron a
cantar y vailar: cantauan cantares
del mesmo jaez y peor, y despues
çelebraron la fiesta que dizen de
los matachines, hazian puestos y
visajes tan desuergonçados y
suçios que avn acordandome
agora estoy por bomitar. Porque
en el proçeso de su dança se
desnudó el maestro Dionico hasta
quedar en carnes y vinieron los
compañeros a poner sus bocas,
rostros y manos en partes y
lugares que por reuerençia del
saçerdoçio de que eran todos
señalados no lo quiero dezir, y
avn no me querria acordar. Pues
como estos acabaron su suçia y
deshonesta[922] fiesta se fueron a
sentar cada qual en su lugar: y
començaron de nueuo[923] el
comer y beber, que avn no se
auia dado fin porque de nueuo los
començaron a seruir.
Miçilo.—Dime por tu vida[924]
gallo: desto todo que estos
clerigos hazian, que sentian y
dezian[925] los casados?
Gallo.—Todos dexaron[926] de
comer y mirauan en los clerigos
con gran atençion. Las dueñas
con sus pañizuelos fingiendose
limpiar del[927] sudor cubrian su
rostro no queriendo de empacho
ver aquellas suçias
desuerguenças que en juglares
fueran notable deshonestidad.
Estando en esto que todos
comian y callauan[928] entró vn
mochacho en medio de la sala, y
saludando con el bonete en la
mano a Aristeneto en alta boz le
dixo: Señor Aristeneto, mi amo
Etemocles, cura de Sancto
Eugenio me mandó que delante
de todos quantos estan en este
combite te lyesse este carta que
te embia: por tanto mira si me das
liçençia. Aunque Aristineto pensó
si sería bueno tomar la carta al
mochacho y despues leerla, en fin
de consejo de todos aquellos
varones graues que estauan a los
lados se le dio liçençia para la
leer, y prinçipalmente porque
todos la deseauamos oyr; y ansi
el mochacho en alta voz, callando
todos, començó.

CARTA DE ETEMOCLES A
ARISTENETO[929]
Muy noble Aristeneto. Este tu
Etemocles antiguo capellan y
padre de confession, como a hijo
muy querido, te enbian a saludar,
y no quiero que tengas
presunçion que por esto que te
escriuo y a tal tiempo sea yo muy
cobdiçioso de combites, porque
de mi vida pasada, y de otras
vezes que ya me has combidado
ternas entendida mi templada
condiçion, y tanbien lo tienen
mucho antes bien conoçido de mi
otros muy más ricos que tú que
de cada dia me combidan a sus
çenas y comidas, y las reuso
porque sé bien los desmanes y
desbarates que en semejantes
congregaçiones y lugares se
suelen ofreçer. Pero agora
mueuome a te escreuir porque
como me has hecho la afrenta
publica, y en ese lugar donde
estás, es mucha razon que
publicamente y en ese lugar
donde estás me aya[930] de
satisfazer. A todos es notorio,
señor Aristeneto, ser yo tu
confesor desde que agora diez
años te quisiste morir. Que
publico fue en esta çiudad que yo
solo hallandote vsurero publico
cambiador, porque no te
negassen la sepoltura sagrada
como a tal, te hize prestar
cauçion, y pregonar publicamente
que porque estauas en el articulo
de morir viniessen a tu casa todos
quantos a tu hazienda por
canbios, o intereses vsurarios
tuuiessen hazion y derecho, que
tú se lo querias restituir; y como
éste fuesse tan famoso consejo y
vnico para tu salud fue por todos
devulgado por consejo de mí[931]
que era tu confessor, y despues
que tú tornaste a conualeçer corri
peligro en[932] mi honrra por verte
todos a boluer a canbiar, diziendo
tener la culpa yo[933]; y esto todo
sufrí y passé por conseruar tu
buena amistad, y es publico que
yo solo contra todo el comun
sustenté, que en nonbre y como
criado de otro podias vsurar no
vsurando por tí; y agora sobre
todas estas mis industrias[934] y
publica amistad has procurado en
tu combite nueuos amigos, de
hombres que avnque mil vezes
les[935] des de comer no
auenturarán por tí sus
conçiençias como yo. Sino
pregunta al prior y al guardian y a
los otros letrados y curas que
tienes ay, cómo te sabran
sustentar, cómo se puede sufrir,
sin ser publico vsurero ser en
ferias, ni avn en la çiudad
cambiador? Pues bien sabes que
esto yo lo he defendido al perlado
por ti. Pues acuerdate que tienes
tú publicado en esta çiudad, que
tienes veynte mil ducados por mí;
porque[936] confessandome tú
que los auias ganado con
çinquenta mil marauedis que tu
suegro en dote te dio, lo[937]
poseyas tú por solo no te los
mandar yo restituir, lo qual todo
era injuriarme a mí; pues,
¿pareçete que con[938] todas
estas cosas me das buen pago de
nuestra publica amistad?
Pareçeme a mi que no; porque en
fin no han de pensar sino que en
mí ay meritos de tu ingratitud, y
por tanto te pido que pues
publicamente me afrentas sin
darte yo a ello causa,
publicamente me hagas la
satisfaçion, todos quantos tienes
en ese[939] combite me
buelue [940] en mi honrra; sino de
aqui protesto que ni ante Dios ni
ante los hombres en mi vida te lo
perdonaré. Al mochacho mandé
que aunque le des torta, o xarro
de vino, o capon, o perdiz, o
pernil de tozino no le[941] tome, so
pena que le dare de cozes y se lo
haré boluer, porque no pienses
satisfazer con tan pocas cosas
tan grande injuria como me has
hecho. Ni tanpoco te puedes
escusar diziendo que te oluidaste
por auer mucho tiempo que no
me viste, pues ayer te hablé dos
vezes; vna a tu puerta pasando
yo, y otra en el templo de
Sanctiago donde yo fue a
dezir[942] misa y tu fueste a
oyrla[943]. No alargo más por no
ser molesto con larga carta a los
que procuras ser graçioso con tu
combite, del qual salgas tan
prospero como yo satisfecho de
mi injuria.—Vale.
Como el mochacho ouo leydo la
carta se la demandó Aristeneto y
le dixo: anda y dy á tu señor
Etemocles que ansi lo haré como
me lo enbia a mandar: y ansi se
fue el mochacho quedando la
carta en Aristeneto, la qual le
demandé para leer, que la
deseaua ver porque á mi pareçer
es la más donosa que yo nunca
ví. Estando todos
murmurando[944] sobre la carta
cada qual segun su ingenio, los
vnos[945] la loauan de aguda
maliçiosa; otros dezian ser neçia;
otros acusauan a Etemocles de
hombre gloton, por se afrontar por
no le auer combidado a comer. En
fin, estando todos ocupados en
esta diuersidad de juizios, aunque
la mayor parte y de los mas
cuerdos fue que fue escripta con
animo de afrontar a Aristeneto,
estando todos ansi entró en la
sala vno de aquellos chocarreros
que para semejantes cenas y
combites se suelen alquilar,
disfraçado de xoglar, y con vn
laud en la mano entró con vn
puesto tan graçioso que a todos
hizo reyr, y con admirable[946]
industria comencó a dar a todos
plazer. Representó
ingeniosamente en portogues el
sermon de la batalla de
Aljubarrota[947], en el qual dixo
cosas muy graçiosas y agudas
con la proçesion del Cuerpo de
Dios. Despues que este ouo
representado su habilidad se salio
y entró otro que por el semejante
traya otra differençia de agraçiado
disfraz y en la mano vn laud y
alliante todos representó vn
graçioso coloquio en cuatro
lenguas: ytaliana, española,
françesa y portuguesa; en el qual
con grandes donayres y
entremeses mostró vn tema que
propuso provar: que los ytalianos
pareçen sabios y sonlo; y los
españoles pareçen sabios y no lo
son; y los franceses pareçen
locos y no lo son; y los
portugueses pareçen locos y
sonlo. Fue juzgado por todos por
ingeniosa esta representacion por
orden, començando del misa
cantano, padre y padrino, no
perdonando frayles, clerigos ni
casados; y aunque a vnos era
graçioso y apazible a otros fue en
esto molesto y enojoso y aun
injurioso. De lo qual reyendo
algunos[948] donayres se
començaron entre sí a alborotar
en tanta manera que dieron
ocasion a que despertase
Alçidamas de su sueño y
elevamiento profundo, y como
desperto y él se echó de ver
atado, y vio que el xoglar se reya
con todos y todos dél[949], dixo
con vna boz muy horrenda lo que
dixo aquel Syleno; Soluite me; y
ansi el xoglar dexando en el suelo
su[950] laud entendió en le[951]
desatar, y como Alcidamas se vio
desatado arrebató[952] del laud
antes que el xoglar le pudiese
tomar, y dale tan gran golpe sobre
la cabeça con él que bolandole en
infinitas pieças dio con el xoglar
en el suelo sin juizio ni acuerdo
de sí, y con el mastil y trastes que
en la mano le quedó como vio
que sus tres enemigos se reyan
arrebató dél, Ermon, Eucrito y
Eustochio curas antiguos y muy
honrrados dio a cada vno su palo
que a todos descalabró mal, y de
aqui partio para la mesa principal
y hirio al guardian y prior, y ya
eran levantados los amigos de los
tres heridos que se venian para
Alçidamas a se vengar; y de la
otra parte el xoglar que bolviendo
en sí tomó un palo que halló a vn
rincon y haziendo campo por
entre todos viene rostro a rostro
con Alçidamas tirandose muy
fuertes golpes ambos a dos.
Vieras un consagrado saçerdote
cura dar y reçibir palos de un
xoglar; cosa por çierto digna de
lagrimas; y porque todos estavan
injuriados, qual del vno, qual del
otro, no auia quien entre ellos se
quisiesse meter, ni avn
osauan[953] por no tener armas
con que los despartir; tanta era la
furia con que se herian y andauan
trauados. Arrojauanles los
manteles, sillas, vancos, vasijas.
Vieras vna batalla tan sangrienta
y trabada qual de la
Pharsalica[954], puedes imaginar.
Las mugeres y niños dando gritos
echaron a la calle a huyr, por lo
qual alterado todo el pueblo
acudieron[955] a los socorrer.
Despartidos todos hallamos que
estando trabados Alçidamas con
el xoglar le auia rompido la boca y
descalabrado con el laud[956]:
pero el xoglar arrancó a
Alçidamas con la vna mano vn
gran pedaço de vna oreja y con la
otra mano le arrancaua la nariz.
De todos los otros curas, no
quedó hombre sin sangrienta
herida particular, qual en la
cabeça, qual en el rostro, qual en
otra parte de su cuerpo, y siendo
todos presos por el eclesiastico
juez se sentenció ninguno auer
incurrido en irregularidad, porque
aueriguó ninguno estar en su libre
poder y juizio. Pues plazio a Dios
que echados fuera de la sala
todos los heridos, porque todos
fueron embiados a sus casas a se
curar y luego quedó sosegado
todo el campo. Que esto tiene de
bueno esta gente saçerdotal: que
tan presto como la colera o fuego
los ençiende y se enojan, tan
presto son desenojados: y
cualquiera persona que se meta
en medio los hará amigos: por
que dizen que no puede en ellos
durar enemistad porque ganan de
comer en officio que no sufre
enemigo; que es dezir misa. Y
ansi el sacerdote cuando ryñe, no
tiene más que el primer golpe, del
qual sino hiere, sed seguro que
no tirará más. Pero como no
estaua avn asentado lo bebido y
cada momento bebian más tenian
avn los animos prestos y
aparejados por qualquiera
oportunidad a batalla. Y ansi
Cleodemo que estaua al lado de
su ahijado Zenon boluiendo a la
carta de Etemocles, porque sintio
afrontado a Aristeneto, y avn a
aquellos religiosos que junto a sí
tenía dixo: ¿Qué os parece
señores de la elegançia de
Etemocles en su escrivir piensa
que no entendemos su intinçion y
dónde va a parar su eloquençia.
Por çierto sy Aristeneto le
embiasse agora vna gallina[957] y
vn xarro de vino con que le
matasse la[958] hambre yo le
asegurasse su[959] amistad. En
esto Zenothemides que era cura
de San Leandro que tenía la
perrocha junto a la de Sancto
Eugenio respondio por su vezino
Etemocles, y dixo: por cierto,
Cleodemo, mal miras lo que
dizes, pues sabes bien que a
Etemocles no le falta muy bien de
comer y beber, y que no tiene
neçesidad de la raçion de
Aristeneto como tú. Dixo
Aristeneto: señores no riñais, ni
tomeis passion: por cierto la carta
fue muy buena, elegante, que
muestra bien ser de letrado[960],
yo me conozco culpado, y[961]
protesto purgar mi pecado
satisfaziendo a mi acreedor. Dixo
Cleodemo; por cierto poca
obligacion tiene Zenothemides de
responder aqui por Etimoclides,
pues si aqui se le huuiesse hecho
injuria en lo que yo he dicho auria
muchos que respondiessen por
él; y no me marauillo que
responda Zenothemides por él,
pues ambos tienen hecho
concierto de no enterrar los
feligreses muertos[962] sin que
primero le enbien prenda por el
tañer y sacar la cruz. Respondio
Zenothemides; por çierto peor es
lo que tú hazes, Cleodemo, que
los tienes en la carçel hasta que
te hayan de pagar quexandote al
juez; y diziendo esto se leuantó
de la mesa donde estaua sentado
y se vino para él; y Cleodemo
tenía la copa en la mano que
queria beber, y dixole:
Zenothemides, en esa arte es
más çierto, Cleodemo, que
morirás tú que no piloto en el mar;
que ansi tienes tú çinquenta
cofradias en esta çiudad que en
todo el año no vas a tu casa a
comer. Y como Cleodemo tuuo a
Zenothemides junto a sí le arrojó
todo el vino acuestas, que todo el
rostro y cuerpo le inchó dél; luego
Zenothemides rompiendo por la
mesa tomó a Cleodemo por los
vestidos y sobrepelliz y le truxo al
suelo sin le poder ninguno quitar.
No pareçia sino garza debajo del
halcon. Daua el desuenturado
grandes vozes diziendo: que me
mata, que me ahoga; valeme
Aristeneto y Zenon; y aquellos
religiosos se le quitaron, que le
mataua; y cuando debajo salio no
tenía pluma, ni aun hueso en su
lugar. El rostro todo arañado y un
ojo casi fuera, del qual se sintio
muy lastimado y fué neçesario
que luego le llevassen a su casa
á se proueer, y hizieron que
Zenothemides se fuese tanbien,
pensando que la Justiçia acudiera
alli. Pues purgada la casa de
todos aquellos arriscados y
belicosos curas, porque todos
fueron de tres recuentros heridos
y sacados del canpo, como te he
contado...[963].
Miçilo.—¿No supiste si el
perlado los castigó? Porque çierto
en vn tan desuaratado
aconteçimiemto auia con grandes
penas de proueer.
Gallo.—Supe que ese otro dia
los auia el vicario lleuado a la
carçel todos y que se sentençió
que ninguno auia incurrido en
irregularidad, porque se aueriguó
ninguno estar en su juizio y libre
poder. Pero fin a cada vno dellos
condenó qual en seys ducados, y
a otros a diez para la camara del
obispo que la tenía necesidad de
se trastejar.
Miçilo.—¡O qué cosa tan justa
fue!
Gallo.—Pues quedando la otra
gente del combite ansi muy
confusos y marauillados[964] de
ver su poco sosiego y templança
y mal exemplo[965], todos los
seglares se salieron cada qual
con su muger sin saludar al
huesped ni ser sentidos de
alguno. Luego Dionico maestro de
capilla y todos sus compañeros
pensaron entender en algun
recoçijo[966] por boluer la fiesta a
su deuido lugar, y como la comida
fue acabada y el misa cantano
echó[967] la bendiçion y oraçion
de la messa, llegó[968]
Dionico[969] con la mano llena de
tizne de vna sarten y entiznó[970]
todo el rostro del misacantano
que no le quedo cosa blanca, y
como no tenía padrino le tomaron
por fuerça y le sacaron[971] de
casa a la puerta donde estaua el
medio pueblo que era llegado al
ruydo y vozes de la batalla
pasada y vistieronle vn costal
abierto por el suelo que se
acabaua de vaçiar de[972] harina,
y salio Dionico á la calle en alta
voz diziendo: Ecce homo. Todos
prosiguiendo gran grito y mofa le
tirauan trapos suçios y puños del
çieno que estaua en la calle, que
me hicieron llorar.
Miçilo.—Por cierto con mucha
razon[973].
Gallo.—Pues ansi le subieron en
vn asno y le lleuaron con gran
denuesto por toda la ciudad[974].
Miçilo.—Pues en el entretanto,
¿qué hazias tú?[975].
Gallo.—En el entretanto que
estas cosas passauan, que te
tengo contado, estaua yo entre mí
pensando otras muchas[976]. Lo
primero que consideraua era que
aquel nueuo vngido por saçerdote
representaua al verdadero Cristo
Saçerdote eterno segun el orden
de Melchisedech, y alli en aquel
mal tratamiento se me representó
todo el que Cristo padeçio por mí
en sus vituperios, injurias y
tormentos; en tanta manera que
no me pude contener sin llorar, y
doliame mucho porque era tanta
la çeguedad de aquellos vanos
saçerdotes que sin templança
alguna proseguian en aquella
vanidad con tanta disoluçion,
perdida la magestad y reuerençia
deuida a tan alta dignidad y
representaçion de nuestro Dios, y
para alguna consolaçion mia
pense ser aquello como vexamen
de doctor; porque aquel nueuo
saçerdote no se ensoberuezca
por ser de nueuo admitido a tan
çelestial[977] dignidad y despues
desto consideraua en todo lo que
en la comida auia proçedido entre
aquellos que tenian el titulo y
preheminençia en la auctoridad y
sçiençias[978] pensando que no
ay cosa mas preçiosa en las
letras[979] que procurar el que las
estudia componer la vida con
ellas, porque no veo cosa más
comun en el vulgo que los que de
la virtud más parlan estar más
lexos del hecho; y despues
veniame a la memoria quan
corruptos estan en las
costumbres los que tienen
obligaçion a dar buen exemplo.
Consideraua quanto philosopho,
religioso, cura y saçerdote estaua
alli, tan distraydos en el
recogimiento, que si los vnos
hazian vajezas los otros las
dezian muy mayores, y tanto que
ya no podia echar toda la culpa al
vino y comida quando oy y ley lo
que estando ayuno escriuio
Etimocles. Pareçiome en alguna
manera aquella carta a lo que
fabulosamene cuentan los poetas
de la diosa Eride: que por no ser
combidada a las bodas del rey
Peleo hechó en medio de las
mesas aquella mançana que
despues fue causa de aquella
brauissima y memorable
contienda troyana. Enfin todas las
cosas me pareçian que estauan
alli al reues, porque via alli una
mesa de feligreses, casados
ydiotas populares, callando y
comiendo con mucho orden y
tenplança, que ni con el vino