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CHAPTER III

PROSE WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

THE seventeenth century was, in England, a great period of classical learning. At no time was the level of scholarship higher in our Universities; at no time were men of letters more familiar with the poets and historians of the ancient world. Dryden knows the Greek tragedians almost as well as the French; Cowley quotes from Varro and Columella as if they lay on every man's writing table; and if this were the practice in Court and Coffee-house, still more did it prevail among those with whom learning was a passion. There are pages of Burton's Anatomy which are piled at random with English and Latin phrases-the writer seems hardly to know which is uppermost; there are pages of Sir Thomas Browne in which the languages have been fused into a sort of Corinthian metal; not Greek or Latin or English, but a chemical compound of all three. That there was no sarcophagy before the Flood'; that 'stags' horns are alexipharmacous 2', these instances are strange enough, but they pale before the sentence which tells us that 'the offices of Jupiter's trisulk3 are to burn, discuss, and terebrate 5'.

6

It is impossible to imagine what would have happened to English prose if it had continued along this line of development. But meanwhile,

1 Eating meat.

3 Three-forked lightning.

2 Protective against poison.
'Scatter.

5 Pierce. There is no need to add that the structure of Browne's prose, as in the example given below, is of great strength and dignity. In his own kind he is a classic.

from the very homes and strongholds of learning, had been wrought a work which not only turned scholarship to incomparably finer account, but set the English language on a four-square monument for all time. This was the Authorized Version of the Bible, translated, between 1607 and 1611, by three committees at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster. The names of the translators, though preserved to us, are with hardly an exception obscure and unfamiliar: in an age of great divines they made little or no personal mark; their one supreme achievement finished, they laid their pens aside and returned to the customary routine of study or administration. But the effect of their work was in less than a generation clearly apparent; it influenced the style of Walton and formed that of Bunyan, it reappeared in varying degree through the writings of Fuller and Jeremy Taylor, of Bacon and Traherne; it exercised almost every province of thought, a sway nearly as potent as that of Luther's Bible over the language and literature of Germany.

Beside these, and affected in due measure by both, there was steadily growing and developing the prose of common speech-that clear lucid expression, in everyday language, of the plain fact at issue,which forms the texture of Tillotson and Dryden, of Clarendon's History, and of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. It has some of the qualities of the best French prose-of Voltaire for instanceit is almost wholly free from ornament, it follows rather than leads the accepted language of the time, it never distracts the reader from its point or leaves him in doubt as to its meaning. If the aim of style be 'to say what you have to say as simply as possible', that is an aim which generation by generation it has successively achieved: in Swift, in Defoe, in Goldsmith, in Hazlitt we may trace the line of inheritance which lives on its own means and neither

envies nor seeks to rival the gold and jewellery of its more sumptuous neighbours.

Two more general points may briefly be noted. First, the width of range covered by the topics of seventeenth-century prose. Browne, like Pepys, is interested in everything under the sun; Burton reads every book in the library and stores his mind with a miscellaneous treasury of anecdotes and illustrations; Walton's Complete Angler includes acoustical experiments from Bacon and verses from Waller in praise of music, and a hymn of George Herbert, which is most in place of them all. Secondly, the age contributed in more than one way to the later development of the English novel. It had a keen eye for picturesque detail: witness the descriptions in Fuller's Holy War, and in both the principal allegories of Bunyan; it was found of analysing character from the fictions of Earle to the biographies of Walton and the historical portraits of Clarendon; the diarists, and not these alone, are occupied in a spirited and vivacious reflection of ordinary life. The time has not yet come for Captain Singleton and Tom Jones, but there is already a premonition of their appearance.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682), educated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, was a noted physician of Norwich. His best known work, the Religio Medici, was written probably in 1635, though it was not published until 1642. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Browne's sympathies were wholly with the Royalists, but he took no active part in the struggle. In 1646 appeared 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths which examined prove but Vulgar and Common Errors'. In 1658 came' Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk'; and The Garden of Cyrus, an account of horticulture from the earliest times, with a disquisition on the mystic properties of the number five. Browne was knighted by Charles II when the king visited Norwich in 1671. Various miscellaneous

tracts and letters were published after his death, of which the most important is the collection of maxims known as Christian Morals.

RELIGIO MEDICI

PART II, SECT. I

I

Now for that other virtue of Charity, without which faith is a mere notion and of no existence, I have ever endeavoured to nourish the merciful disposition and humane inclination I borrowed from my parents, and regulate it to the written and prescribed laws of Charity. And, if I hold the true anatomy of myself1, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of virtue, for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things. I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humour, air, anything. wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools, nor at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them make them my common viands, and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs. I could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander; at the sight of a toad or viper I find in me no desire to take up a stone to destroy them. I feel not in myself those common antipathies that I can discover in others; those national repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch; but, where I find their actions in balance with my countrymen's, I honour, love, and embrace them in the same degree. I was born in the eighth climate 2, seem for to be framed and constellated unto all. I am

1

i. e. if I can truly analyse my own feelings.

but

2 The earth was divided into seven zones or 'climates', each of which was under one of the 'seven planets'. Browne means that he does not belong to any one climate in particular.

All

no plant that will not prosper out of a garden. places, all airs, make unto me one country: I am in England everywhere, and under any meridian. I have been shipwrecked, yet am not enemy with the sea or winds; I can study, play, or sleep in a tempest. In brief, I am averse from nothing: my conscience would give me the lie if I should say I absolutely detest or hate any essence but the devil, or so at least abhor anything but that we might come to composition'. If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion, the multitude-that numerous piece of monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men and the reasonable creatures of God, but, confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than hydra. It is no breach of Charity to call these fools; it is the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonical Scripture, and a point of our faith to believe so. Neither in the name of Multitude do I only include the base and minor sort of people; there is a rabble even amongst the gentry, a sort of Plebeian heads whose fancy moves with the same wheel as these, men in the same level with mechanics, though their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and their purses compound for their follies. But as in casting account three or four men together come short in account of one man placed by himself below them, so neither are a troop of these ignorant doradoes of that true esteem and value as many a forlorn person whose condition doth place him below their feet. Let us speak like politicians; there is a nobility without heraldry, a natural dignity whereby one man is ranked with another, another filed before him, according to the 1 'Agreement'. 2 Gilded ones'.

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