Momus

“ He can raise storms and hurricanes, and restrain their rage at pleasure.
Momus is a jester, mocker, or mimic. His life is spent in idleness, merely observing the sayings and doings of the gods, and then censuring and deriding them. For instance, when Neptune was made a bull, Minerva a house, and Vulcan a man, Momus was appointed to judge as to whom the greatest skill was manifested in creation. The carping god disapproved of all. He found fault with the bull for not having his horns before his eyes in his forehead, that he might be enabled to push the surer. ”

“ Little by little, with growing reluctance, the heap of spare belongings was examined and condemned, until finally only the garments they wore, the tents that were to shelter them and the essential harness of the camels were left. Then Momus drew from his wallet a fragment of aromatic gum and cast it on the blaze. While it ignited and burned with great vapors of penetrating incense, he unstrapped the precious casket, set it down between his feet, stripped off his comfortable woolen tunic and passed it through the volumes of white smoke piling up from the fire. ”

“ The “Historia Moral del Dios Momo” (4to, Madrid, 1666, 12mo) is an account of the exile of the god Momus from heaven, and his transmigration through the bodies of persons in all conditions on earth, doing mischief wherever he goes. Each chapter of the eighteen into which it is divided is followed by a moralizing illustration; as, for instance, (c. 5,) the disturbance Momus excites on earth against heaven is illustrated by the heresies of Germany and England, in which the Duke of Saxony and Henry VIII. appear to very little advantage. ”

“ She gave him attention.
"Let us not carry peril with us," he added in a half-whisper. "Let us not carry food for pestilence with us."
"I do not understand," she answered, adopting his low tone.
"The more we are, the more of us to die. You must live; I must live," he explained, nodding toward Momus. ”

“ Love is in the hands of the Lord; you can not consign it longer than the little span of your life to the hands of the devil."
Momus, in whose mind had passed an immense surmise, was again at her side.
"O daughter of a noble father," his dumb gaze said, "wilt thou put away that virtue which was born in thee and let my labor come to naught?"
But the preaching of Nathan and the reproach of Momus were feeble, compared to the great tumult that went on in her soul. She had seen John of Gischala cast Amaryllis aside. Even the Greek's sympathy was hateful to him. ”

“ The village stream swelled to a river, and the river was a kingdom's wealth,
Where is he who boasted he could step across that stream?
Such are the beginnings of the famous: little in the judgment of their peers,
The juster verdict of posterity shall fix them in the orbits of the Great.
Therefore dull Zoilus, clamouring ascendant of the hour,
Will soon be fain to hide his hate, and bury up his bitterness for shame:
Therefore mocking Momus, offended at the footsteps of Beauty,
Shall win the prize of his presumption, and be hooted from his throne among the stars. ”

“ Momus were its lessees, and when there was more fun to be found within its walls than in any other place in London, even of treble its size. The chiefs of that merry company are both dead; the belles whose bright eyes enthralled us then are portly matrons now, renewing their former beauty in their daughters; the walking gentlemen have walked off entirely or lapsed into heavy fathers; and the authors, who were constantly lounging in the greenroom, and convulsing actors and actresses with their audacious chaff, are some dead, and all who are left sobered and steadied and aged. ”

“ Laodice and Aquila who rode in the open were fair targets for half the hail that fell about them. The girl groaned as the missiles fell into the howdah upon the helpless shape of Costobarus, who did not lift a hand to fend off the stones. The pagan, bruised and raging, drew his weapon and spurred his horse to ride down his assailants, but they scattered before him and from safe refuge continued their assault with redoubled determination.
Momus, seeing only injury in attempting to enforce hospitality, turned his camel and, swinging around the outermost limits of the settlement, fled. ”

“ Hides away his face of light,
Though Minerva looks askance,
Deigning me no smiling glance,
Kings and queens may envy me
While I claim the god of glee.
Wisdom wearies, Love has wings—
Wealth makes burdens, Pleasure stings,
Glory proves a thorny crown—
So all gifts the gods throw down
Bring their pains and troubles after;
All save Momus, god of laughter.
He alone gives constant joy. ”

“ For bibliographical detail Momus is not entirely superseded by the Account since over sixteen descriptions of format [22] and thirty of genre are not incorporated in the later catalogue. Furthermore, about thirty-eight plays are given sources in Momus which are not carried over into the Account. ”

“ Momus, having thus delivered himself, stayed not for an answer, but left the goddess to her own resentment. Up she rose in a rage, and, as it is the form on such occasions, began a soliloquy: "It is I" (said she) "who give wisdom to infants and idiots; by me children grow wiser than their parents, by me beaux become politicians, and schoolboys judges of philosophy ”

“ Momus was about to congratulate Prometheus on the good effects of civilisation, and the happiness that seemed to be inseparable from human life. He wished also to remind him that no animal except man voluntarily killed itself, or was impelled by feelings of despair to take the life of its own offspring. ”

“ And, for a lighter pastime, it shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere. ”

“ I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy.—Accordingly I set off thus:
If the fixture of Momus's glass in the human breast, according to the proposed emendation of that arch-critick, had taken place,—first, This foolish consequence would certainly have followed,—That the very wisest and very gravest of us all, in one coin or other, must have paid window-money every day of our lives. ”

“ And he starts again. But there's another joke he must be part of, just as old and just as silly.
Momus.. No, no! Turn to the right, and to the right. Still to the right. And again to the right. That's right. ”

“ The senate assembled, he declares the occasion of convening them; a bloody battle just impendent between two mighty armies of ancient and modern creatures, called books, wherein the celestial interest was but too deeply concerned. Momus, the patron of the Moderns, made an excellent speech in their favour, which was answered by Pallas, the protectress of the Ancients. ”

“ It is almost inconceivable that good judges can ever have had any doubt about him. It is perfectly—it is, indeed, childishly easy to pick faults, even if matter be kept wholly out of sight. In Mr. Ruskin's later books a certain tendency to conversational familiarity sometimes mocks those, and not those only, who hold to the tradition of dignified and ex cathedra pronouncement; in his earlier, and in all, it is possible for Momus to note an undue floridness, an inclination to blank verse in prose, tricks and manners of this or that kind unduly exuberant and protuberant. ”

“ Although the Teuton male likes to contemplate himself and be contemplated as candid Mother Nature made him, he could not adapt himself to the idea of his fleshy women appearing naked before a critical and commenting world. Momus had at last arrived in ancient Deutschland and was feared.
While the movement, which was presuming to cover Germany with sculptures of its heroes in complete undress, honored itself by such [139] fitting testimonials to their lordliness, Fritz curiously shrank before public statues depicting his fat housewife in like absence of attire. ”

“ Secondly, it serves as the strong and carefully articulated skeleton for Langbaine's elaborately expanded Account of the English Dramatick Poets published some three years later in 1691, and itself a catalogue which remains "a major work of literary scholarship that is immune from obsolescence." [1] Thirdly, and more privately, Momus stands as both a partial record and efficient cause of a quarrel whose claim to our attention is its connection with Dryden. It is a quarrel minor in itself and of which few details are known. ”

“ Macbeth, act iv. sc. 1, line 74.]
[186] {396} ["Momus is the god of cruel mockery. He is said to have found fault with the man formed by Hephæstus, because a little door had not been left in his breast, so as to enable his fellows to look into his secret thoughts." (See Lucian's Hermotimus, cap. xx.) There was a proverb, Τῷ Μώμῳ ἀρέσκειν Momo santisfacere; vide Adagia Variorum, 1643, p. 58. Byron describes Suwarrow as "Now Mars, now Momus" (Don Juan, Canto VII. stanza Iv. line 7) .] ”

“ So Proctor, for instance, fought and expressed his feeling of the preposterous, against Sir W.H. Thomson's notions of arrival upon this earth of organisms on meteorites—
"I can only regard it as a jest" (Knowledge, 1-302) .
Or that there is nothing but jest—or something intermediate to jest and tragedy:
That ours is not an existence but an utterance;
That Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive—like characters in something a novelist is writing ”

“ It is singular that the successor of Momus, as brewer of6 laughter to the gods, was Vulcan, and that he also was kicked out from Olympus. On the ninth day of his descent he came in sight of Lemnos, where the people, without stopping to think whether they were about to receive a precious gift or a rejected waif from Heaven, stretched out their arms to catch him. It is not everything that seems to come from above, that is divine.
And mark!—Since Momus fell, Folly has never left the Earth. But Vulcan taught men to labour ”

“ As if the gods, said Mercury, were anxious about nothing but their own vainglory, cared nothing for the injury caused to human society. And they defame us, Momus continued, by calling [Pg 256] this an institution of heaven, decrying effects or fruits; while all the time they are doing no work themselves, but living on the works of others, who instituted temples, chapels, hospices, hospitals, colleges, universities, for quite other men than they. These others, even if they are not perfect, will not, like their usurpers, be perverse and pernicious to the world ”

“ The woman bowed her shawled head and murmured with emotion after a silence:
"The blessings of a servant be upon you and yours; may the God of Israel be with you for evermore."
She dropped back to the rear of the party and the train moved on.
Meanwhile, Keturah, who sat huddled on the floor of Laodice's howdah, had not moved since they had left the doorway of Costobarus' house. Momus, on the neck of Laodice's camel, had observed her once or twice, and now he reached back and touched her. He jerked his hand away and brought up his camel with a wrench. ”

“ The debate is, of course, a good deal complicated by topics of mere erudition and by disputes as to whether Momus was really meant as a caricature of Rainolds, or as to whether Rainolds's abstract argument about infamia bore the concrete implication that such honest youths as the Christ Church students or so well-voiced a musician as the Master of the Choristers, who had played with them, were in fact infames, or as to the extent of approval implied by the presence of University dignitaries and of the queen herself at performances of Gager's pieces. ”

“ The rector of this parish was a man who, though sensitive in the extreme to the absurdities of others,—being, in fact, a regular son of Momus,—was entirely unconscious of his own amusing eccentricities. Among these, numerous and singular, he had the habit of suddenly stopping in the middle of a sentence, while preaching, and calling out to the sexton, across the church, "Dooke, turn on more gas!" or "Dooke, shut that window!" or "Dooke, do"—something else which was pretty sure to be wanting itself done during the delivery of his discourse. ”

“ Momus made a bow to the bench, and stood upon her hind-legs; which put the magistrate in such a good humour, that he let off the showman with a caution.
The incident was anything but a funny one to the Dibbles, for they lost their lodgers, and Mrs. Dibble lost her respectability and her control of the street; so she gave vent to her feelings by upbraiding Thomas, and the end was that they were exceedingly miserable, and Mrs. Dibble [Pg 158] talked of a “judicious separation,” which was a thing that her “wortht dreamth had never brought to her mind; and oh! ”

“ Langbaine's animadversions on "crafty Booksellers" ( [A4r] ) as well as his attacks on Dryden may have caused an embarrassing bibliographical trick to be played on him. Wood reports that Momus was published in November, 1687, and five hundred copies sold before Langbaine "caused another title to be put to the rest of the copies (with an advertisement against the first) ." [25] This new titlepage, added early in December, reads as follows:
A New Catalogue of English Plays, Containing All The Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, Operas, Masques, Pastorals, Interludes, Farces, &c. ”

“ These bulls have their horns growing not upon their heads but under their eyes, as Momus thought it better.Momus found fault with Jupiter for not setting the bulls' horns in this manner. Arist. de part. ani. l. 3. He was the god of feasting and of carping amongst the Heathen.
⁠Hesiod, in his Theog., says that he was the son of the Night, but begotten without a father. ”