Editorial
Get you to your FLEAS and your Flock-beds, you
Rogues, your Kennels, and lie down close.
—Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair
For the Time of THE FLEA is agen at hand. That poet, our elegantly quill-flourishing Stephen Edgar Esq., muche belou’d of the Muses, a uerie Theocritus or Vergil for this our Age, hath, in an æ-missiue late receau’d by Yr Hble & Obdt, cunningly fresh-coin’d the word Psyllophilous, (or, if you will, Philopsyllous), viz. ‘Flea-louing’, to signify aptly the uasty & expansiue Tribe of FLEA-Louers & FLEA-Fanciers, who not satisfy’d merely to supply generously, by submission of their melodious Songs & Sonets, & their byting Satires, such meet fare for The FLEA’s degustatory Suppings, but who also, with relishe, consume by auid Reading, those poetickal delightes & delicacies which grace his well-laden board. So, my Psyllophilous Friendes, my Philopsyllous Follouuers, once more do I inuite you to partake of The FLEA’s Fabl’d Phantastickal Feast of Verse; & despite the late calamitous earth-shiftings & groanings, & th'expense of Spirit in a waste of shame, with Lions stalking abroad, roringe in the High Street beneath a swol’n bulbous Super-Moone, & muche more divers & sundry maruells & suff’ring attendant, to dare turn from sublunary upheavals, & contemplate insted the infinite Triumphs of th’Eternal Imagining Mind, render’d metrically by our Master-Wittes, and exhibited herein for the solace & uplifting of the Soule.
Moving of th' earth brings harmes and feares ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre, is innocent.
Yea, certes, among our Fleasome Poets, & notwithstanding all physical Dis-Aster, but soaring away & beyond & into Realmes of Fiery Infinite Mind, Sphere vpon shining Spheare revolues in Metered Innocence, & in Angelic Heauenlie Harmonie. Mr. Michael Cantor resonates a sonorous niggun vpon the mystical Eruv Line, deriuing therefrom mvch spritiual nourishment & insight ; Mistress Janice D. Soderling tells of a wonderfvl Turf Labyrinth, & its arcane Cretan symbolism withal ; the fabl’d & uenerable Mr. Les Murray, from his lair in Bunyah, in Antipodean Terra Australis, contemplates those industrious insect-brothers of The Mighty FLEA, the independent Native Beas, with their resilient fortitude; our graceful & accomplish’d Miss Salli Shepherd, another faire voice from Terra Australis Incognita, pursues in her numbers the lumbering auncient Mammoth ; Mr. Robert Mezey sings a pointed, craftily-rimed, wittie Valentine; & that sharpe-shooting Herne the Hunter, from far beyond the Pale in remote North Dakota, Mr. Timothy Murphy, hath penn’d a fine vehement & mordant satire on the Declyne of morals & the times, in the blasting vein & withering tone of an Ollave, Irish Master-Poet, to honour the wearing of the Green on this St. Patrick’s Day ; & as euer, manie more besides.
Rejoice, Psyllophilous Brothers & Sisters! For th’unconquerable Mightie FLEA doth leape a-newe across the Planisphere ; doth lightly springe to giddie Heightes Parnasssian once more!
