CHAPTER IX

MILTON, TAYLOR, CLARENDON, BROWNE, HOBBES

During the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, or (to

take literary rather than chronological dates) between the death of Bacon

and the publication of _Absalom and Achitophel_, there existed in England a

quintet of men of letters, of such extraordinary power and individuality,

that it may be doubted whether any other period of our own literature can

show a group equal to them; while it is certain that no other literature,

except, perhaps, in the age of Pericles, can match them. They were all,

except Hobbes (who belonged by birth, though not by date and character of

writing, to an earlier generation than the rest), born, and they all died,

within a very few years of each other. All were prose writers of the very

highest merit; and though only one was a poet, yet he had poetry enough to

spare for all the five. Of the others, Clarendon, in some of the greatest

characteristics of the historian, has been equalled by no Englishman, and

surpassed by few foreigners. Jeremy Taylor has been called the most

eloquent of men; and if this is a bold saying, it is scarcely too bold.

Hobbes stands with Bacon and Berkeley at the head of English-speaking

philosophers, and is, if not in general grasp, in range of ideas, or in

literary polish, yet in acuteness of thought and originality of expression,

perhaps the superior of both his companions. The excellence of Browne is

indeed more purely literary and intensely artistic first of all--a matter

of expression rather than of substance,--while he is perhaps more flawed

than any of them by the fashionable vices of his time. Yet, as an artist,

or rather architect, of words in the composite and florid style, it is vain

to look anywhere for his superior.

John Milton--the greatest, no doubt, of the five, if only because of his

mastery of either harmony--was born in London on 9th December 1608, was

educated at Cambridge, studied at home with unusual intensity and control

of his own time and bent; travelled to Italy, returned, and engaged in the

somewhat unexpected task of school-keeping; was stimulated, by the outbreak

of the disturbances between king and parliament, to take part with

extraordinary bitterness in the strife of pamphlets on the republican and

anti-prelatical side, defended the execution of the king in his capacity of

Latin secretary to the Government (to which he had been appointed in 1649);

was struck with blindness, lay hid at the Restoration for some time in

order to escape the Royalist vengeance (which does not seem very seriously

to have threatened him), composed and published in 1667 the great poem of

_Paradise Lost_, followed it with that of _Paradise Regained_, did not a

little other work in prose and poetry, and died on 8th November 1674. He

had been thrice married, and his first wife had left him within a month of

her marriage, thereby occasioning the singular series of pamphlets on

divorce, the theories of which, had she not returned, he had, it is said,

intended to put into practice on his own responsibility. The general

abstinence from all but the barest biographical outline which the scale of

this book imposes is perhaps nowhere a greater gain than in the case of

Milton. His personal character was, owing to political motives, long

treated with excessive rigour. The reaction to Liberal politics early in

the nineteenth century substituted for this rigour a somewhat excessive

admiration, and even now the balance is hardly restored, as may be seen

from the fact that a late biographer of his stigmatises his first wife, the

unfortunate Mary Powell, as "a dull and common girl," without a tittle of

evidence except the bare fact of her difference with her husband, and some

innuendoes (indirect in themselves, and clearly tainted as testimony) in

Milton's own divorce tracts. On the whole, Milton's character was not an

amiable one, nor even wholly estimable. It is probable that he never in the

course of his whole life did anything that he considered wrong; but

unfortunately, examples are not far to seek of the facility with which

desire can be made to confound itself with deliberate approval. That he was

an exacting, if not a tyrannical husband and father, that he held in the

most peremptory and exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the superiority of

man to woman, that his egotism in a man who had actually accomplished less

would be half ludicrous and half disgusting, that his faculty of

appreciation beyond his own immediate tastes and interests was small, that

his intolerance surpassed that of an inquisitor, and that his controversial

habits and manners outdid the license even of that period of controversial

abuse,--these are propositions which I cannot conceive to be disputed by

any competent critic aware of the facts. If they have ever been denied, it

is merely from the amiable but uncritical point of view which blinks all a

man's personal defects in consideration of his literary genius. That we

cannot afford to do here, especially as Milton's personal defects had no

small influence on his literary character. But having honestly set down his

faults, let us now turn to the pleasanter side of the subject without fear

of having to revert, except cursorily, to the uglier.

The same prejudice and partisanship, however, which have coloured the

estimate of Milton's personal character have a little injured the literary

estimate of him. It is agreed on all hands that Johnson's acute but unjust

criticism was directed as much by political and religious prejudice as by

the operation of narrow and mistaken rules of prosody and poetry; and all

these causes worked together to produce that extraordinary verdict on

_Lycidas_, which has been thought unintelligible. But it would be idle to

contend that there is not nearly as much bias on the other side in the most

glowing of his modern panegyrists--Macaulay and Landor. It is, no doubt, in

regard to a champion so formidable, both as ally and as enemy, difficult

to write without fear or favour, but it must be attempted.

Milton's periods of literary production were three. In each of them he

produced work of the highest literary merit, but at the same time

singularly different in kind. In the first, covering the first thirty years

of his life, he wrote no prose worth speaking of, but after juvenile

efforts, and besides much Latin poetry of merit, produced the exquisite

poems of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, the _Hymn on the Nativity_, the

incomparable _Lycidas_, the _Comus_ (which I have the audacity to think his

greatest work, if scale and merit are considered), and the delicious

fragments of the _Arcades_. Then his style abruptly changed, and for

another twenty years he devoted himself chiefly to polemical pamphlets,

relieved only by a few sonnets, whose strong originality and intensely

personal savour are uniform, while their poetical merit varies greatly. The

third period of fifteen years saw the composition of the great epics of

_Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_, and of the tragedy of _Samson

Agonistes_, together with at least the completion of a good deal of prose,

including a curious _History of England_, wherein Milton expatiates with a

singular gusto over details which he must have known, and indeed allows

that he knew, to be fabulous. The production of each of these periods may

be advantageously dealt with separately and in order.

Milton's Latin compositions both in prose and verse lie rather outside of

our scope, though they afford a very interesting subject. It is perhaps

sufficient to say that critics of such different times, tempers, and

attitudes towards their subject as Johnson and the late Rector of

Lincoln,--critics who agree in nothing except literary competence,--are

practically at one as to the remarkable excellence of Milton's Latin verse

at its best. It is little read now, but it is a pity that any one who can

read Latin should allow himself to be ignorant of at least the beautiful

_Epitaphium Damonis_ on the poet's friend, Charles Diodati.

The dates of the few but exquisite poems of the first period are known with

some but not complete exactness. Milton was not an extremely precocious

poet, and such early exercises as he has preserved deserve the description

of being rather meritorious than remarkable. But in 1629, his year of

discretion, he struck his own note first and firmly with the hymn on the

"Nativity." Two years later the beautiful sonnet on his three-and-twentieth

year followed. _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ date not before, but probably

not much after, 1632; _Comus_ dating from 1634, and _Lycidas_ from 1637.

All these were written either in the later years at Cambridge, or in the

period of independent study at Horton in Buckinghamshire--chiefly in the

latter. Almost every line and word of these poems has been commented on and

fought over, and I cannot undertake to summarise the criticism of others.

Among the greater memorabilia of the subject is that wonderful Johnsonism,

the description of _Lycidas_ as "harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the

numbers unpleasing;" among the minor, the fact that critics have gravely

quarrelled among themselves over the epithet "monumental" applied to the

oak in _Il Penseroso_, when Spenser's "Builder Oak" (Milton was a

passionate student of Spenser) would have given them the key at once, even

if the same phrase had not occurred, as I believe it does, in Chaucer, also

a favourite of Milton's. We have only space here for first-hand criticism.

This body of work, then, is marked by two qualities: an extraordinary

degree of poetic merit, and a still more extraordinary originality of

poetic kind. Although Milton is always Milton, it would be difficult to

find in another writer five poems, or (taking the _Allegro_ and its

companion together) four, so different from each other and yet of such high

merit. And it would be still more difficult to find poems so independent in

their excellence. Neither the influence of Jonson nor the influence of

Donne--the two poetical influences in the air at the time, and the latter

especially strong at Cambridge--produced even the faintest effect on

Milton. We know from his own words, and should have known even if he had

not mentioned it, that Shakespere and Spenser were his favourite studies in

English; yet, save in mere scattered phrases none of these poems owes

anything to either. He has teachers but no models; masters, but only in the

way of learning how to do, not what to do. The "certain vital marks," of

which he somewhat arrogantly speaks, are indeed there. I do not myself see

them least in the poem on the "Nativity," which has been the least general

favourite. It shows youth in a certain inequality, in a slight overdose of

ornament, and especially in a very inartistic conclusion. But nowhere even

in Milton does the mastery of harmonies appear better than in the exquisite

rhythmical arrangement of the piece, in the almost unearthly beauty of the

exordium, and in the famous stanzas beginning "The oracles are dumb." It

must be remembered that at this time English lyric was in a very

rudimentary and ill-organised condition. The exquisite snatches in the

dramatists had been snatches merely; Spenser and his followers had chiefly

confined themselves to elaborate stanzas of full length lines, and

elsewhere the octo-syllabic couplet, or the quatrain, or the dangerous

"eights and sixes," had been chiefly affected. The sestines and canzons and

madrigals of the sonneteers, for all the beauty of their occasional

flashes, have nothing like the gracious and sustained majesty of the

"Nativity" piece. For technical perfection in lyric metre, that is not so

much to be sung as said, this ode has no precedent rival. As for

_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, who shall praise them fitly? They are among

the few things about which there is no difference of opinion, which are as

delightful to childhood as to criticism, to youth as to age. To dwell on

their technical excellences (the chief of which is the unerring precision

with which the catalectic and acatalectic lines are arranged and

interchanged) has a certain air of impertinence about it. Even a critical

King Alfonso El Sabio could hardly think it possible that Milton might have

taken a hint here, although some persons have, it seems, been disturbed

because skylarks do not come to the window, just as others are troubled

because the flowers in _Lycidas_ do not grow at the same time, and because

they think they could see stars through the "star-proof" trees of the

_Arcades_.

The fragments of the masque just mentioned consist only of three songs and

an address in rhymed couplets. Of the songs, those ending--

Such a rural queen,

All Arcadia hath not seen,

are equal to anything that Milton has done; the first song and the address,

especially the latter, do not fall far below them. But it is in _Comus_

that, if I have any skill of criticism, Milton's poetical power is at its

greatest height. Those who judge poetry on the ground of bulk, or of

originality of theme, or of anything else extra-poetical,--much more those

(the greater number) who simply vary transmitted ideas,--may be scandalised

at this assertion, but that will hardly matter much. And indeed the

indebtedness of _Comus_ in point of subject (it is probably limited to the

Odyssey, which is public property, and to George Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_,

which gave little but a few hints of story) is scarcely greater than that

of _Paradise Lost_; while the form of the drama, a kind nearly as venerable

and majestic as that of the epic, is completely filled. And in _Comus_

there is none of the stiffness, none of the _longueurs_, none of the almost

ludicrous want of humour, which mar the larger poem. Humour indeed was what

Milton always lacked; had he had it, Shakespere himself might hardly have

been greater. The plan is not really more artificial than that of the epic;

though in the latter case it is masked to us by the scale, by the grandeur

of the personages, and by the familiarity of the images to all men who have

been brought up on the Bible. The versification, as even Johnson saw, is

the versification of _Paradise Lost_, and to my fancy at any rate it has a

spring, a variety, a sweep and rush of genius, which are but rarely present

later. As for its beauty in parts, _quis vituperavit_? It is impossible to

single out passages, for the whole is golden. The entering address of

Comus, the song "Sweet Echo," the descriptive speech of the Spirit, and the

magnificent eulogy of the "sun-clad power of chastity," would be the most

beautiful things where all is beautiful, if the unapproachable "Sabrina

fair" did not come later, and were not sustained before and after, for

nearly two hundred lines of pure nectar. If poetry could be taught by the

reading of it, then indeed the critic's advice to a poet might be limited

to this: "Give your days and nights to the reading of _Comus_."

The sole excuses for Johnson's amazing verdict on _Lycidas_ are that it is

not quite so uniformly good, and that in his strictures on its "rhyme" and

"numbers" he was evidently speaking from the point of view at which the

regular couplet is regarded as the _ne plus ultra_ of poetry. There are

indeed blotches in it. The speech of Peter, magnificently as it is

introduced, and strangely as it has captivated some critics, who seem to

think that anything attacking the Church of England must be poetry, is out

of place, and in itself is obscure, pedantic, and grotesque. There is some

over-classicism, and the scale of the piece does not admit the display of

quite such sustained and varied power as in _Comus_. But what there is, is

so exquisite that hardly can we find fault with Mr. Pattison's hyperbole

when he called _Lycidas_ the "high-water mark of English poetry."

High-water mark even in the physical world is a variable limit. Shakespere

constantly, and some other poets here and there in short passages go beyond

Milton. But in the same space we shall nowhere find anything that can outgo

the passage beginning "Alas what boots it," down to "head of thine," and

the whole conclusion from "Return Alpheus." For melody of versification,

for richness of images, for curious felicity of expression, these cannot be

surpassed.

"But O the heavy change"--to use an irresistible quotation, the more

irresistible that the change is foreshadowed in _Lycidas_ itself--from the

golden poetry of these early days to the prose of the pamphlets. It is not

that Milton's literary faculty is less conspicuous here, or less

interesting. There is no English prose before him, none save Taylor's and

Browne's in his time, and absolutely none after him that can compare with

the finest passages of these singular productions. The often quoted

personal descriptions of his aims in life, his early literary studies, his

views of poetry and so forth, are almost equal in the "other harmony of

prose" to _Comus_ and _Lycidas_. The deservedly famous _Areopagitica_ is

full of the most splendid concerted pieces of prose-music, and hardly

anywhere from the _Tractate of Reformation Touching Church Discipline_ to

the _History of Britain_, which he revised just before his death, is it

possible to read a page without coming across phrases, passages, and even

whole paragraphs, which are instinct with the most splendid life. But the

difference between Milton's poetry and his prose is, that in verse he is

constantly under the restraint (sometimes, in his later work especially,

too much under the restraint) of the sense of style; while in his prose he

seems to be wholly emancipated from it. Even in his finest passages he

never seems to know or to care how a period is going to end. He piles

clause on clause, links conjunction to conjunction, regardless of breath,

or sense, or the most ordinary laws of grammar. The second sentence of his

first prose work contains about four hundred words, and is broken in the

course of them like a wounded snake. In his very highest flights he will

suddenly drop to grotesque and bathos; and there is no more difficult task

(_haud inexpertus loquor_) than the selection from Milton of any passage of

length which shall not contain faults of which a modern schoolboy or

gutter-journalist would be ashamed. Nor is the matter made much better by

the consideration that it is not so much ignorance as temper which is the

cause of this deformity. Lest it be thought that I speak harshly, let me

quote from the late Mr. Mark Pattison, a strong sympathiser with Milton's

politics, in complete agreement if not with his religious views, yet with

his attitude towards dominant ecclesiasticism, and almost an idolater of

him from the purely literary point of view. In "_Eikonoclastes_," Milton's

reply to _Eikon Basilike_, Mr. Pattison says, and I do not care to attempt

any improvement on the words, "Milton is worse than tedious: his reply is

in a tone of rude railing and insolent swagger which would have been always

unbecoming, but which at this moment was grossly indecent." Elsewhere (and

again I have nothing to add) Mr. Pattison describes Milton's prose

pamphlets as "a plunge into the depths of vulgar scurrility and libel

below the level of average gentility and education." But the Rector of

Lincoln has not touched, or has touched very lightly, on the fault above

noted, the profound lack of humour that these pamphlets display. Others

have been as scurrilous, as libellous, as unfair; others have prostituted

literary genius to the composition of paid lampoons; but some at least of

them have been saved by the all-saving sense of humour. As any one who

remembers the dreadful passage about the guns in _Paradise Lost_ must know,

the book of humour was to Milton a sealed book. He has flashes of wit,

though not many; his indignation of itself sometimes makes him really

sarcastic. But humorous he is never.

Destitute of this, the one saving grace of polemical literature, he plunged

at the age of thirty-three into pamphlet writing. With a few exceptions his

production in this kind may be thrown into four classes,--the

_Areopagitica_ and the _Letter to Hartlib_ (much the best of the whole)

standing outside. The first class attacks prelatical government, and by

degrees glides, under the guise of apologetics for the famous

_Smectymnuus_, into a fierce and indecent controversy with Bishop Hall,

containing some of the worst examples of the author's deplorable inability

to be jocular. Then comes the divorce series, which, with all its varied

learning, is chiefly comic, owing to Milton's unfortunate blindness to the

fact that he was trying to make a public question out of private grievances

of the particular kind which most of all demand silence. Next rank the

pieces composing the Apologia of regicide, the _Eikonoclastes_, the

controversy with Salmasius (written in Latin), and the postscript thereto,

devoted to the obscure Morus. And lastly come the pamphlets in which, with

singular want of understanding of the course of events, Milton tried to

argue Monk and the weary nation out of the purpose to shake off the heavy

yoke of so-called liberty. The _History of Britain_, the very agreeable

fragment on the _History of Muscovy_, the late _Treatise Against Popery_,

in which the author holds out a kind of olive branch to the Church of

England, in the very act of proclaiming his Arianism, and the two little

masterpieces already referred to, are independent of any such

classification. Yet even in them sometimes, as always in the others, _furor

arma ministrat_; and supplies them as badly as if he were supplying by

contract.

Nevertheless both Milton's faults and his merits as a prose writer are of

the most remarkable and interesting character. The former consist chiefly

in the reckless haste with which he constructs (or rather altogether

neglects the construction of) his periods and sentences, in an occasional

confusion of those rules of Latin syntax which are only applicable to a

fully inflected language with the rules necessary in a language so

destitute of inflections as English, and in a lavish and sometimes both

needless and tasteless adaptation of Latin words. All these were faults of

the time, but it is true that they are faults which Milton, like his

contemporaries Taylor and Browne, aggravated almost wilfully. Of the three

Milton, owing no doubt to the fury which animated him, is by far the most

faulty and uncritical. Taylor is the least remarkable of the three for

classicisms either of syntax or vocabulary; and Browne's excesses in this

respect are deliberate. Milton's are the effect of blind passion. Yet the

passages which diversify and relieve his prose works are far more beautiful

in their kind than anything to be found elsewhere in English prose. Though

he never trespasses into purely poetical rhythm, the solemn music of his

own best verse is paralleled in these; and the rugged and grandiose

vocabulary (it is particularly characteristic of Milton that he mixes the

extremest vernacular with the most exquisite and scholarly phrasing) is

fused and moulded with an altogether extraordinary power. Nor can we notice

less the abundance of striking phrase, now quaint, now grand, now forcible,

which in short clauses and "jewels five words long" occurs constantly, even

in the passages least artistically finished as wholes. There is no English

prose author whose prose is so constantly racy with such a distinct and

varied savour as Milton's. It is hardly possible to open him anywhere after

the fashion of the _Sortes Virgilianae_ without lighting on a line or a

couple of lines, which for the special purpose it is impossible to improve.

And it might be contended with some plausibility that this abundance of

jewels, or purple patches, brings into rather unfair prominence the slips

of grammar and taste, the inequalities of thought, the deplorable attempts

to be funny, the rude outbursts of bargee invective, which also occur so

numerously. One other peculiarity, or rather one result of these

peculiarities, remains to be noticed; and that is that Milton's prose is

essentially inimitable. It would be difficult even to caricature or to

parody it; and to imitate it as his verse, at least his later verse, has

been so often imitated, is simply impossible.

The third and, in popular estimation, the most important period of Milton's

production was again poetical. The characteristics of the poetry of the

three great works which illustrate it are admittedly uniform, though in

_Samson Agonistes_ they exhibit themselves in a harder, drier, more

ossified form than in the two great epics. This relation is only a

repetition of the relation between _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_

themselves on the one hand, and the poems of twenty years earlier,

especially _Comus_ and _Lycidas_, on the other. The wonderful Miltonic

style, so artificial and yet such a triumph of art, is evident even so

early as the ode on the "Nativity," and it merely developed its own

characteristics up to the _Samson_ of forty years later. That it is a real

style and not merely a trick, like so many others, is best shown by the

fact that it is very hard, if not impossible, to analyse it finally into

elements. The common opinion charges Milton with Latinising heavily; and so

he does. But we open _Paradise Lost_ at random, and we find a dozen lines,

and not the least beautiful (the Third Day of Creation), without a word in

them that is not perfectly simple English, or if of Latin origin,

naturalised long before Milton's time, while the syntax is also quite

vernacular. Again it is commonly thought that the habits of antithesis and

parallelism, of omission of articles, of reversing the position of

adjectives and adverbs, are specially Miltonic. Certainly Milton often

indulges in them; yet in the same way the most random dipping will find

passages (and any number of them) where no one of these habits is

particularly or eminently present, and yet which every one would recognise

as Miltonic. As far as it is possible to put the finger on one peculiarity

which explains part of the secret of Milton's pre-eminence, I should myself

select his unapproached care and felicity in building what may be called

the verse-paragraph. The dangers of blank verse (Milton's preference for

which over rhyme was only one of his numerous will-worships) are many; but

the two greatest lie in easily understood directions. With the sense

generally or frequently ending as the line ends (as may be seen in the

early dramatists and in many bad poets since), it becomes intolerably stiff

and monotonous. With the process of _enjambement_ or overlapping,

promiscuously and unskilfully indulged (the commonest fault during the last

two centuries), it is apt to degenerate into a kind of metrical and barely

metrical prose, distinguished from prose proper by less variety of cadence,

and by an occasional awkward sacrifice of sense and natural arrangement to

the restrictions which the writer accepts, but by which he knows not how to

profit. Milton has avoided both these dangers by adhering to what I have

ventured to call the verse-paragraph--that is to say, by arranging the

divisions of his sense in divisions of verse, which, albeit identical and

not different in their verse integers, are constructed with as much

internal concerted variety as the stanzas or strophes of a so-called

Pindaric ode. Of the apparently uniform and monotonous blank verse he has

made an instrument of almost protean variety by availing himself of the

infinite permutations of cadence, syllabic sound, variety of feet, and

adjustment of sense to verse. The result is that he has, it may almost be

said, made for himself out of simple blank verse all the conveniences of

the line, the couplet, and the stanza, punctuating and dividing by cadence,

not rhyme. No device that is possible within his limits--even to that most

dangerous one of the pause after the first syllable of a line which has

"enjambed" from the previous one--is strange to him, or sparingly used by

him, or used without success. And it is only necessary to contrast his

verse with the blank verse of the next century, especially in its two chief

examples, Thomson and Young,--great verse-smiths both of them,--to observe

his superiority in art. These two, especially Thomson, try the

verse-paragraph system, but they do it ostentatiously and clumsily.

Thomson's trick of ending such paragraphs with such lines as "And Thule

bellows through her utmost isles," often repeated with only verbal

substitutions, is apt to make the reader think with a smile of the breath

of relief which a man draws after a serious effort. "Thank heaven that

paragraph's done!" the poet seems to be saying. Nothing of the kind is ever

to be found in Milton. It is only on examination that the completeness of

these divisions is perceived. They are linked one to another with the same

incomparably artful concealment of art which links their several and

internal clauses. And thus it is that Milton is able to carry his readers

through (taking both poems together) sixteen books of epic, without much

narrative interest, with foregone conclusions, with long passages which are

merely versifications of well-known themes, and with others which the most

favourable critics admit to be, if not exactly dull, yet certainly not

lively. Something the same may be said of _Samson_, though here a decided

stiffening and mannerising of the verse is to some extent compensated by

the pathetic and human interest of the story. It is to be observed,

however, that Milton has here abused the redundant syllable (the chief

purely poetical mistake of which he has been guilty in any part of his

work, and which is partly noticeable in _Comus_), and that his choric odes

are but dry sticks in comparison with _Lycidas_.

It may be thought strange that I should say little or nothing of the

subject of these immortal poems. But, in the first place, those critics of

poetry who tell us that "all depends on the subject" seem to forget that,

according to this singular dictum, there is no difference between poetry

and prose--between an epic and a blue-book. I prefer--having been brought

up at the feet of Logic--to stick to the genus and differentia of poetry,

and not to its accidents. Moreover, the matter of _Paradise Lost_ and its

sequel is so universally known that it becomes unnecessary, and has been so

much discussed that it seems superfluous, to rediscuss it. The inquiries

into Milton's indebtedness to forerunners strike me as among the idlest

inquiries of the kind--which is saying a great deal. Italians, Frenchmen,

Dutchmen, Englishmen even, had doubtless treated the Creation and the Fall,

Adam and Satan, before him. Perhaps he read them; perhaps he borrowed from

them. What then? Does any one believe that Andreini or Vondel, Sylvester or

Du Bartas, could have written, or did in any measurable degree contribute

to the writing of _Paradise Lost_? If he does he must be left to his

opinion.

Reference may perhaps be made to some remarks in Chapter IV. on the

comparative position of Milton in English poetry with the only two writers

who can be compared to him, if bulk and majesty of work be taken into

consideration, and not merely occasional bursts of poetry. Of his own

poetical powers I trust that I shall not be considered a niggard admirer,

because, both in the character of its subject (if we are to consider

subjects at all) and in its employment of rhyme, that greatest mechanical

aid of the poet, _The Faerie Queene_ seems to me greater, or because

Milton's own earlier work seems to me to rank higher than _Paradise Lost_.

The general opinion is, of course, different; and one critic of no mean

repute, Christopher North, has argued that _Paradise Lost_ is the only

"great poem" in existence. That question need not be argued here. It is

sufficient to say that Milton is undoubtedly one of the few great poets in

the history of the world, and that if he falls short of Homer, Dante, and

Shakespere, it is chiefly because he expresses less of that humanity, both

universal and quintessential, which they, and especially the last, put into

verse. Narrowness is his fault. But the intense individuality which often

accompanies narrowness is his great virtue--a virtue which no poet, which

no writer either in verse or prose, has ever had in greater measure than

he, and which hardly any has been able to express with more varied and

exquisite harmony.

Jeremy Taylor, the ornament and glory of the English pulpit, was born at

Cambridge in 1613. He was the son of a barber, but was well educated, and

was able to enter Caius College as a sizar at thirteen. He spent seven

years there, and took both degrees and orders at an unusually early age.

Apparently, however, no solid endowment was offered him in his own

university, and he owed such preferment as he had (it was never very great)

to a chance opportunity of preaching at St. Paul's and a recommendation to

Laud. That prelate--to whom all the infinite malignity of political and

sectarian detraction has not been able to deny the title of an encourager,

as few men have encouraged them, of learning and piety--took Taylor under

his protection, made him his chaplain, and procured him incorporation at

Oxford, a fellowship at All Souls, and finally the rectory of Uppingham. To

this Taylor was appointed in 1638, and next year he married a lady who bore

him several sons, but died young. Taylor early joined the king at Oxford,

and is supposed to have followed his fortunes in the field; it is certain

that his rectory, lying in a Puritan district, was very soon sequestrated,

though not by any form of law. What took him into Wales and caused him to

marry his second wife, Joanna Brydges (an heiress on a small scale, and

said to have been a natural daughter of Charles I.), is not known. But he

sojourned in the principality during the greater part of the Commonwealth

period, and was much patronised by the Earl of Carbery, who, while resident

at Golden Grove, made him his chaplain. He also made the acquaintance of

other persons of interest, the chief of whom were, in London (which he

visited not always of his own choice, for he was more than once

imprisoned), John Evelyn, and in Wales, Mrs. Katherine Philips, "the

matchless Orinda," to whom he dedicated one of the most interesting of his

minor works, the _Measure and Offices of Friendship_. Not long before the

Restoration he was offered, and strongly pressed to accept, the post of

lecturer at Lisburn, in Ireland. He does not seem to have taken at all

kindly to the notion, but was over-persuaded, and crossed the Channel. It

was perhaps owing to this false step that, when the Restoration arrived,

the preferment which he had in so many ways merited only came to him in the

tents of Kedar. He was made Bishop of Down and Connor, held that see for

seven years, and died (after much wrestling with Ulster Presbyterians and

some domestic misfortune) of fever in 1667.

His work is voluminous and always interesting; but only a small part of it

concerns us directly here, as exhibiting him at his best and most peculiar

in the management of English prose. He wrote, it should be said, a few

verses by no means destitute of merit, but they are so few, in comparison

to the bulk of his work, that they may be neglected. Taylor's strong point

was not accuracy of statement or logical precision. His longest work, the

_Ductor Dubitantium_, an elaborate manual of casuistry, is constantly

marred by the author's inability to fix on a single point, and to keep his

argumentation close to that. In another, the _Unum Necessarium_, or

Discourse on Repentance, his looseness of statement and want of care in

driving several horses at once, involved him in a charge of Pelagianism, or

something like it, which he wrote much to disprove, but which has so far

lasted as to justify modern theologians in regarding his ideas on this and

other theological points as, to say the least, confused. All over his work

inexact quotation from memory, illicit argumentation, and an abiding

inconsistency, mar the intellectual value, affecting not least his famous

_Liberty of Prophesying_, or plea for toleration against the new

Presbyterian uniformity,--the conformity of which treatise with modern

ideas has perhaps made some persons slow to recognise its faults. These

shortcomings, however, are not more constant in Taylor's work than his

genuine piety, his fervent charity, his freedom from personal arrogance and

pretentiousness, and his ardent love for souls; while neither shortcomings

nor virtues of this kind concern us here so much as the extraordinary

rhetorical merits which distinguish all his work more or less, and which

are chiefly noticeable in his Sermons, especially the Golden Grove course,

and the funeral sermon on Lady Carbery, in his _Contemplations of the State

of Man_, and in parts of his _Life of Christ_, and of the universally

popular and admirable tractates on _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_.

Jeremy Taylor's style is emphatically and before all things florid and

ornate. It is not so elaborately quaint as Browne's; it is not so stiffly

splendid as Milton's; it is distinguished from both by a much less

admixture of Latinisms; but it is impossible to call it either verbally

chastened or syntactically correct. Coleridge--an authority always to be

differed with cautiously and under protest--holds indeed a different

opinion. He will have it that Browne was the corruptor, though a corruptor

of the greatest genius, in point of vocabulary, and that, as far as syntax

is concerned, in Jeremy Taylor the sentences are often extremely long, and

yet are generally so perspicuous in consequence of their logical structure

that they require no reperusal to be understood. And he will have the same

to be true not only of Hooker (which may pass), but of Milton, in reference

to whom admirers not less strong than Coleridge hold that he sometimes

forgets the period altogether.

It must be remembered that Coleridge in these remarks was fighting the

battle of the recoverers of our great seventeenth century writers against

the devotees of "correctness," and that in the very same context he makes

the unpardonable assertion that Gibbon's manner is "the worst of all," and

that Tacitus "writes in falsetto as compared to Tully." This is to "fight a

prize" in the old phrase, not to judge from the catholic and universal

standpoint of impartial criticism; and in order to reduce Coleridge's

assertions to that standard we must abate nearly as much from his praise of

Taylor as from his abuse of Gibbon--an abuse, by the way, which is

strangely contrasted with praise of "Junius." It is not true that, except

by great complaisance of the reader, Jeremy Taylor's long sentences are at

once understandable. They may, of course, and generally can be understood

_kata to semaino menon_, as a telegram with half the words left out may at

the other end of the scale be understood. But they constantly withstand

even a generous parser, even one who is to the fullest extent ready to

allow for idiom and individuality. They abuse in particular the conjunction

to a most enormous extent--coupling by its means propositions which have no

logical connection, which start entirely different trains of thought, and

which are only united because carelessness and fashion combined made it

unnecessary for the writer to take the little extra trouble necessary for

their separation. Taylor will, in the very middle of his finest passages,

and with hardly so much as a comma's break, change _oratio obliqua_ to

_oratio recta_, interrupt the sequence of tenses, make his verbs agree with

the nearest noun, irrespective of the connection, and in short, though he

was, while in Wales, a schoolmaster for some time, and author of a

grammatical treatise, will break Priscian's head with the calmest

unconcern. It is quite true that these faults mainly occur in his more

rhetorical passages, in his exercises rather of spoken than of written

prose. But that, as any critic who is not an advocate must see, is no

palliation. The real palliation is that the time had not yet aroused itself

to the consciousness of the fact that letting English grammar at one moment

go to the winds altogether, and at the next subjecting it to the most

inappropriate rules and licenses of Latin, was not the way to secure the

establishment of an accomplished and generally useful English prose. No

stranger instance of prejudice can be given than that Coleridge, on the

point of asking, and justly, from Dryden "a stricter grammar," should exalt

to the skies a writer compared to whom Dryden is grammatically impeccable.

But a recognition of the fact that Taylor distinctly belongs to the

antinomians of English prose, or at least to those guiltless heathens who

lived before the laws of it had been asserted, can not in any competent

critic dull the sense of the wonderful beauty of his style. It has been

said that this beauty is entirely of the florid and ornate order, lending

itself in this way easily enough to the witty and well-worded, though

unjust and ungenerous censure which South pronounced on it after the

author's death. It may or may not be that the phrases there censured, "The

fringes of the north star," and "The dew of angels' wings," and "Thus have

I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion," are not of that "apostolic

plainness" that a Christian minister's speech should have. But they and

their likes are extremely beautiful--save that in literature no less than

in theology South has justly perstringed Taylor's constant and most

unworthy affectation of introducing a simile by "so I have seen." In the

next age the phrase was tediously abused, and in the age after, and ever

since, it became and has remained mere burlesque; but it was never good;

and in the two fine specimen passages which follow it is a distinct blot:--

_The Prayers of Anger and of Lust._

"Prayer is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our

thoughts, the evenness of recollection, the seat of meditation,

the rest of our cares, and the calm of our tempest. Prayer is the

issue of a quiet mind, of untroubled thoughts; it is the daughter

of charity and the sister of meekness; and he that prays to God

with an angry--that is a troubled and discomposed--spirit, is

like him that retires into a battle to meditate and sets up his

closet in the outquarters of an army, and chooses a frontier

garrison to be wise in. Anger is a perfect alienation of the mind

from prayer, and therefore is contrary to that attention which

presents our prayers in a right line to God. For so have I seen a

lark rising from his bed of grass, soaring upwards and singing as

he rises and hopes to get to Heaven and climb above the clouds;

but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an

eastern wind and his motion made irregular and inconstant,

descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could

recover by the vibration and frequent weighing of his wings; till

the little creature was forced to sit down and pant and stay till

the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight and did

rise and sing as if it had learned music and motion from an angel

as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here

below. So is the prayer of a good man: when his affairs have

required business, and his business was matter of discipline, and

his discipline was to pass upon a sinning person, or had a design

of charity, his duty met with infirmities of a man and anger was

its instrument, and the instrument became stronger than the prime

agent and raised a tempest and overruled the man; and then his

prayer was broken and his thoughts troubled.

* * * * *

"For so an impure vapour--begotten of the slime of the earth by

the fevers and adulterous heats of an intemperate summer sun,

striving by the ladder of a mountain to climb to heaven and

rolling into various figures by an uneasy, unfixed revolution,

and stopped at the middle region of the air, being thrown from

his pride and attempt of passing towards the seat of the

stars--turns into an unwholesome flame and, like the breath of

hell, is confined into a prison of darkness and a cloud, till it

breaks into diseases, plagues and mildews, stinks and blastings.

So is the prayer of an unchaste person. It strives to climb the

battlements of heaven, but because it is a flame of sulphur salt

and bitumen, and was kindled in the dishonourable regions below,

derived from Hell and contrary to God, it cannot pass forth to

the element of love; but ends in barrenness and murmurs,

fantastic expectations and trifling imaginative confidences; and

they at last end in sorrows and despair."

Indeed, like all very florid writers, Taylor is liable to eclipses of

taste; yet both the wording of his flights and the occasion of them (they

are to be found _passim_ in the _Sermons_) are almost wholly admirable. It

is always a great and universal idea--never a mere conceit--that fires him.

The shortness and dangers of life, the weakness of children, the fragility

of women's beauty and men's strength, the change of the seasons, the

vicissitudes of empires, the impossibility of satisfying desire, the

disgust which follows satiety--these are, if any one chooses, commonplace

enough; yet it is the observation of all who have carefully studied

literature, and the experience of all who have observed their own thoughts,

that it is always in relation to these commonplaces that the most beautiful

expressions and the noblest sentiments arise. The uncommon thought is too

likely if not too certain to be an uncommon conceit, and if not worthless,

yet of inferior worth. Among prose writers Taylor is unequalled for his

touches of this universal material, for the genius with which he makes the

common uncommon. For instance, he has the supreme faculty of always making

the verbal and the intellectual presentation of the thought alike

beautiful, of appealing to the ear and the mind at the same time, of never

depriving the apple of gold of its picture of silver. Yet for all this the

charge of over-elaboration which may justly be brought against Browne very

rarely hits Taylor. He seldom or never has the appearance which ornate

writers of all times, and of his own more especially, so often have, of

going back on a thought or a phrase to try to better it--of being

stimulated by actual or fancied applause to cap the climax. His most

beautiful passages come quite suddenly and naturally as the subject

requires and as the thought strikes light in his mind. Nor are they ever,

as Milton's so often are, marred by a descent as rapid as their rise. He is

never below a certain decent level; he may return to earth from heaven, but

he goes no lower, and reaches even his lower level by a quiet and equable

sinking. As has been fully allowed, he has grave defects, the defects of

his time. But from some of these he was conspicuously free, and on the

whole no one in English prose (unless it be his successor here) has so much

command of the enchanter's wand as Jeremy Taylor.

Sir Thomas Browne was born in the heart of London in 1605, his father (of

whom little is known except one or two anecdotes corresponding with the

character of the son) having been a merchant of some property, and claiming

descent from a good family in Cheshire. This father died when he was quite

young, and Browne is said to have been cheated by his guardians; but he was

evidently at all times of his life in easy circumstances, and seems to have

had no complaint to make of his stepfather, Sir Thomas Dutton. This

stepfather may at least possibly have been the hero of the duel with Sir

Hatton Cheeke, which Mr. Carlyle has made famous. With him Browne visited

Ireland, having previously been brought up at Winchester and at Broadgates

Hall, which became, during his own residence, Pembroke College, at Oxford.

Later he made the usual grand tour. Then he took medical degrees; practised

it is said, though on no very precise evidence, both in Oxfordshire and

Yorkshire; settled, why is not known, at Norwich; married in 1641 Dorothy

Mileham, a lady of good family in his adopted county; was a steady Royalist

through the troubles; acquired a great name for medical and scientific

knowledge, though he was not a Fellow of the Royal Society; was knighted by

Charles II. in 1662, and died in 1682. His first literary appearance had

been made forty years earlier in a way very common in French literary

history, but so uncommon in English as to have drawn from Johnson a rather

unwontedly illiberal sneer. At a time unknown, but by his own account

before his thirtieth year (therefore before 1635), Browne had written the

_Religio Medici_. It was, according to the habit of the time, copied and

handed about in MS. (there exist now five MS. copies showing remarkable

differences with each other and the printed copies), and in 1642 it got

into print. A copy was sent by Lord Dorset to the famous Sir Kenelm Digby,

then under confinement for his opinions, and the husband of Venetia wrote

certain not very forcible and not wholly complimentary remarks which, as

Browne was informed, were at once put to press. A correspondence ensued,

and Browne published an authorised copy, in which perhaps a little

"economy" might be noticed. The book made an extraordinary impression, and

was widely translated and commented on in foreign languages, though its

vogue was purely due to its intrinsic merits, and not at all to the

circumstances which enabled Milton (rather arrogantly and not with absolute

truth) to boast that "Europe rang from side to side" with his defence of

the execution of Charles I. Four years later, in 1646, Browne published his

largest and in every sense most popular book, the _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_

or _Enquiry into Vulgar Errors_. Twelve more years passed before the

greatest, from a literary point of view, of his works, the _Hydriotaphia_

or _Urn-Burial_,--a magnificent descant on the vanity of human life, based

on the discovery of certain cinerary urns in Norfolk,--appeared, in company

with the quaint _Garden of Cyrus_, a half-learned, half-fanciful discussion

of the mysteries of the quincunx and the number five. Nor did he publish

anything more himself; but two collections of posthumous works were issued

after his death, the most important item of which is the _Christian

Morals_, and the total has been swelled since by extracts from his MSS.,

which at the death of his grandson and namesake in 1710 were sold by

auction. Most fortunately they were nearly all bought by Sir Hans Sloane,

and are to this day in the British Museum. Browne's good luck in this

respect was completed by the devotion of his editor, Simon Wilkin, a

Norwich bookseller of gentle blood and good education, who produced (1835)

after twelve years' labour of love what Southey has justly called the best

edited book in the English language. Not to mention other editions, the

_Religio Medici_, which exhibits, owing to its history, an unusual

variation of text, has been, together with the _Christian Morals_,

separately edited with great minuteness by Dr. Greenhill. Nor is it

unimportant to notice that Johnson, during his period of literary

hack-work, also edited Sir Thomas Browne, and wrote what Wilkin's good

taste has permitted to be still the standard text of his Life.

The work of this country doctor is, for personal savour, for strangeness,

and for delight, one of the most notable things in English literature. It

is not of extraordinary voluminousness, for though swollen in Wilkin's

edition by abundant editorial matter, it fills but three of the well-known

volumes of Bohn's series, and, printed by itself, it might not much exceed

two ordinary library octavos; but in character and interest it yields to

the work of no other English prose writer. It may be divided, from our

point of view, into two unequal parts, the smaller of which is in truth of

the greater interest. The _Vulgar Errors_, those of the smaller tracts

which deal with subjects of natural history (as most of them do), many of

the commonplace book entries, the greater part of the _Garden of Cyrus_,

and most of the _Letters_, are mainly distinguished by an interest of

matter constantly increased, it is true, by the display of the author's

racy personality, and diversified here and there by passages also

displaying his style to the full, but in general character not differing

from the works of other curious writers in the delightful period which

passed between the childish credulity of mediaeval and classical physics and

the arid analysis of the modern "scientist." Sir Thomas Browne was of a

certain natural scepticism of temperament (a scepticism which, as displayed

in relation to other matters in the _Religio Medici_, very unjustly

brought upon him the reproach of religious unorthodoxy); he was a trained

and indefatigable observer of facts, and he was by no means prepared to

receive authority as final in any extra-religious matters. But he had a

thoroughly literary, not to say poetical idiosyncrasy; he was both by

nature and education disposed to seek for something more than that physical

explanation which, as the greatest of all anti-supernatural philosophers

has observed, merely pushes ignorance a little farther back; and he was

possessed of an extraordinary fertility of imagination which made comment,

analogy, and amplification both easy and delightful to him. He was,

therefore, much more disposed--except in the face of absolutely conclusive

evidence--to rationalise than to deny a vulgar error, to bring explanations

and saving clauses to its aid, than to cut it adrift utterly. In this part

of his work his distinguishing graces and peculiarities of style appear but

sparingly and not eminently. In the other division, consisting of the

_Religio Medici_, the _Urn-Burial_, the _Christian Morals_, and the _Letter

to a Friend_, his strictly literary peculiarities, as being less hampered

by the exposition of matter, have freer scope; and it must be recollected

that these literary peculiarities, independently of their own interest,

have been a main influence in determining the style of two of the most

remarkable writers of English prose in the two centuries immediately

succeeding Browne. It has been said that Johnson edited him somewhat early;

and all the best authorities are in accord that the Johnsonian Latinisms,

differently managed as they are, are in all probability due more to the

following--if only to the unconscious following--of Browne than to anything

else. The second instance is more indubitable still and more happy. It

detracts nothing from the unique charm of "Elia," and it will be most

clearly recognised by those who know "Elia" best, that Lamb constantly

borrows from Browne, that the mould and shape of his most characteristic

phrases is frequently suggested directly by Sir Thomas, and that though

there seldom can have been a follower who put more of his own in his

following, it may be pronounced with confidence, "no Browne, no Lamb," at

least in the forms in which we know the author of "Elia" best, and in which

all those who know him best, though they may love him always, love him

most. Yet Browne is not a very easy author to "sample." A few splendid

sustained passages, like the famous one in the _Urn-Burial_, are

universally known, but he is best in flashes. The following, from the

_Christian Morals_, is characteristic enough:--

"Punish not thyself with pleasure; glut not thy sense with

palative delights; nor revenge the contempt of temperance by the

penalty of satiety. Were there an age of delight or any pleasure

durable, who would not honour Volupia? but the race of delight is

short, and pleasures have mutable faces. The pleasures of one age

are not pleasures in another, and their lives fall short of our

own. Even in our sensual days the strength of delight is in its

seldomness or rarity, and sting in its satiety; mediocrity is its

life, and immoderacy its confusion. The luxurious emperors of old

inconsiderately satiated themselves with the dainties of sea and

land till, wearied through all varieties, their refections became

a study with them, and they were fain to feed by invention:

novices in true epicurism! which by mediocrity, paucity, quick

and healthful appetite, makes delights smartly acceptable;

whereby Epicurus himself found Jupiter's brain in a piece of

Cytheridian cheese, and the tongues of nightingales in a dish of

onions. Hereby healthful and temperate poverty hath the start of

nauseating luxury; unto whose clear and naked appetite every meal

is a feast, and in one single dish the first course of Metellus;

who are cheaply hungry, and never lose their hunger, or advantage

of a craving appetite, because obvious food contents it; while

Nero, half famish'd, could not feed upon a piece of bread, and,

lingering after his snowed water, hardly got down an ordinary cup

of _Calda_. By such circumscriptions of pleasure the contemned

philosophers reserved unto themselves the secret of delight,

which the Helluos of those days lost in their exorbitances. In

vain we study delight; it is at the command of every sober mind,

and in every sense born with us; but Nature, who teacheth us the

rule of pleasure, instructeth also in the bounds thereof and

where its line expireth. And therefore temperate minds, not

pressing their pleasures until the sting appeareth, enjoy their

contentations contentedly and without regret, and so escape the

folly of excess, to be pleased unto displacency."

* * * * *

"Bring candid eyes unto the perusal of men's works, and let not

Zoilism or detraction blast well-intended labours. He that

endureth no faults in men's writings must only read his own,

wherein for the most part all appeareth white. Quotation

mistakes, inadvertency, expedition and human lapses, may make not

only moles but warts in learned authors, who notwithstanding,

being judged by the capital matter, admit not of disparagement.

I should unwillingly affirm that Cicero was but slightly versed

in Homer, because in his work _De Gloria_ he ascribed those

verses unto Ajax which were delivered by Hector. What if Plautus,

in the account of Hercules, mistaketh nativity for conception?

Who would have mean thoughts of Apollinaris Sidonius, who seems

to mistake the river Tigris for Euphrates; and, though a good

historian and learned Bishop of Auvergne, had the misfortune to

be out in the story of David, making mention of him when the ark

was sent back by the Philistines upon a cart, which was before

his time? Though I have no great opinion of Machiavel's learning,

yet I shall not presently say that he was but a novice in Roman

History, because he was mistaken in placing Commodus after the

Emperor Severus. Capital truths are to be narrowly eyed,

collateral lapses and circumstantial deliveries not to be too

strictly sifted. And if the substantial subject be well forged

out, we need not examine the sparks which irregularly fly from

it."

Coleridge, as we have seen, charges Browne with corrupting the style of the

great age. The charge is not just in regard to either of the two great

faults which are urged against the style, strictly speaking; while it is

hardly just in reference to a minor charge which is brought against what is

not quite style, namely, the selection and treatment of the thought. The

two charges first referred to are Latinising of vocabulary and disorderly

syntax of sentence. In regard to the first, Browne Latinises somewhat more

than Jeremy Taylor, hardly at all more than Milton, though he does not,

like Milton, contrast and relieve his Latinisms by indulgence in vernacular

terms of the most idiomatic kind; and he is conspicuously free from the

great fault both of Milton and of Taylor--the clumsy conglomeration of

clauses which turns a sentence into a paragraph, and makes a badly ordered

paragraph of it after all. Browne's sentences, especially those of the

books regularly prepared for the press by him, are by no means long and are

usually very perspicuous, being separable in some cases into shorter

sentences by a mere mechanical repunctuation which, if tried on Taylor or

Milton, would make nonsense. To say that they are sometimes longer than

they should be, and often awkwardly co-ordinated, is merely to say that he

wrote when he wrote; but he by no means sins beyond his fellows. In regard

to Latinisms his case is not so good. He constantly uses such words as

"clarity" for "clearness," "ferity" for "fierceness" or "wildness," when

nothing is gained by the exotic form. Dr. Greenhill's useful glossary to

the _Religio_ and the _Morals_ exhibits in tabular form not merely such

terms as "abbreviatures," "aequilibriously," "bivious," "convincible,"

"exantlation," and hundreds of others with which there is no need to fill

the page, but also a number only less considerable of those far more

objectionable usages which take a word generally understood in one sense

(as, for instance, "equable," "gratitudes," and many others), and by

twisting or translation of its classical equivalents and etymons give it

some quite new sense in English. It is true that in some cases the usual

sense was not then firmly established, but Browne can hardly be acquitted

of wilfully preferring the obscurer.

Yet this hybrid and bizarre vocabulary is so admirably married to the

substance of the writing that no one of taste can find fault with it. For

Browne (to come to the third point mentioned above), though he never

descends or diverges--whichever word may be preferred--to the extravagant

and occasionally puerile conceits which even such writers as Fuller and

Glanville cannot resist, has a quaintness at least equal to theirs. In no

great writer is the unforeseen so constantly happening. Everyone who has

written on him has quoted the famous termination of the _Garden of Cyrus_,

where he determines that it is time to go to bed, because "to keep our eyes

open longer were but to act our antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America,

and they are already past their first sleep in Persia." A fancy so

whimsical as this, and yet so admirable in its whimsies, requires a style

in accordance; and the very sentence quoted, though one of the plainest of

Browne's, and showing clearly that he does not always abuse Latinising,

would hardly be what it is without the word "antipodes." So again in the

_Christian Morals_, "Be not stoically mistaken in the quality of sins, nor

commutatively iniquitous in the valuation of transgressions." No expression

so terse and yet so striking could dispense with the classicism and the

catachresis of "stoically." And so it is everywhere with Browne. His

manner is exactly proportioned to his matter; his exotic and unfamiliar

vocabulary to the strangeness and novelty of his thoughts. He can never be

really popular; but for the meditative reading of instructed persons he is

perhaps the most delightful of English prosemen.

There are probably few English writers in regard to whom the judgment of

critics, usually ranked as competent, has varied more than in regard to

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. To some extent this is easily intelligible

to any one who, with some equipment, reads any considerable quantity of his

work; but it would be idle to pretend that the great stumbling-block of all

criticism--the attention to matter rather than to form--has had nothing to

do with it. Clarendon, at first not a very zealous Royalist, was the only

man of decided literary genius who, with contemporary knowledge, wrote the

history of the great debate between king and commonwealth. The effect of

his history in deciding the question on the Royalist side was felt in

England for more than a century; and since popular judgment has somewhat

veered round to the other side, its chief exponents have found it necessary

either to say as little as possible about Clarendon or to depreciate him.

His interesting political history cannot be detailed here. Of a good

Cheshire family, but not originally wealthy, he was educated as a lawyer,

was early adopted into the "tribe of Ben," and was among the first to take

advantage of the opening which the disputes between king and parliament

gave to men of his birth, education, and gifts. At first he was a moderate

opponent of the king's attempts to dispense with parliament; but the

growing evidence that the House of Commons was seeking to increase its own

constitutional power at the expense of the prerogative, and especially the

anti-Church tendencies of the parliamentary leaders, converted him at first

into a moderate and then into a strong Royalist. One of the chief of the

king's constitutional advisers, he was after the Restoration the most

distinguished by far of those Cavaliers who had parliamentary and

constitutional experience; and with the title and office of Chancellor, he

exercised a practical premiership during the first seven years of the

Restoration. But ill-fortune, and it must be confessed some unwisdom,

marked his government. He has been often and truly said to have been a

statesman of Elizabeth, born three-quarters of a century too late. He was

thought by the public to be arbitrary, a courtier, and even to some extent

corrupt. He seemed to the king to be a tiresome formalist and censor, who

was only scrupulous in resisting the royal will. So he was impeached; and,

being compelled to quit the kingdom, spent the last seven years of his life

in France. His great works, begun during his first exile and completed

during his second, are the _History of the Rebellion_ and his own _Life_,

the former being by much the more important though the latter (divided into

a "Life" and a "Continuation," the last of which starts from the

Restoration) contains much interesting and important biographical and

historical matter. The text of these works was conveyed by his heirs to the

University of Oxford, and long remained an exception to the general rule of

the terminableness of copyright.

Clarendon is a very striking example of the hackneyed remark, that in some

cases at any rate men's merits are their own and their faults those of

their time. His literary merits are, looked at by themselves, of nearly the

highest kind. He is certainly the best English writer (and may challenge

any foreigner without much fear of the result) in the great, difficult, and

now almost lost art of character-(or, as it was called in his time,

portrait-) drawing--that is to say, sketching in words the physical, moral,

and mental, but especially the moral and mental, peculiarities of a given

person. Not a few of these characters of his are among the well-known

"beauties" justified in selection by the endorsement of half a dozen

generations. They are all full of life; and even where it may be thought

that prejudice has had something to do with the picture, still the subject

lives, and is not a mere bundle of contradictory or even of superficially

compatible characteristics. Secondly, Clarendon is at his best an

incomparable narrator. Many of his battles, though related with apparent

coolness, and without the slightest attempt to be picturesque, may rank as

works of art with his portraits, just as the portraits and battle pieces of

a great painter may rank together. The sober vivid touches, the little bits

of what the French call _reportage_ or mere reproduction of the actual

words and deeds of the personages, the elaborate and carefully-concealed

art of the composition, all deserve the highest praise. Here, for instance,

is a fair average passage, showing Clarendon's masterly skill in summary

narration and his equally masterly, though, as some hold, rather

unscrupulous faculty of insinuating depreciation:--

"Since there will be often occasion to mention this gentleman,

Sir Richard Granvil, in the ensuing discourse, and because many

men believed that he was hardly dealt with in the next year,

where all the proceedings will be set down at large, it will not

be unfit in this place to say somewhat of him, and of the manner

and merit of his entering into the king's service some months

before the time we are now upon. He was of a very ancient and

worthy family in Cornwall which had in several ages produced men

of great courage, and very signal in their fidelity to and

service of the crown; and was himself younger brother (though in

his nature or humour not of kin to him) to the brave Sir Basil

Granvil who so courageously lost his life at the battle of

Lansdowne. Being a younger brother and a very young man, he went

into the Low Countries to learn the profession of a soldier; to

which he had devoted himself under the greatest general of that

age, Prince Maurice, and in the regiment of my Lord Vere, who was

general of all the English. In that service he was looked upon as

a man of courage and a diligent officer, in the quality of a

captain, to which he attained after four years' service. About

this time, in the end of the reign of King James, the war broke

out between England and Spain; and in the expedition to Cadiz

this gentleman served as a major to a regiment of foot, and

continued in the same command in the war that shortly after

followed against France; and at the Isle of Rhe insinuated

himself into the very good graces of the Duke of Buckingham, who

was the general in that mission; and after the unfortunate

retreat from thence was made colonel of a regiment with general

approbation and as an officer that well deserved it.

"His credit increased every day with the duke: who, out of the

generosity of his nature, as a most generous person he was,

resolved to raise his fortune; towards the beginning of which, by

his countenance and solicitation, he prevailed with a rich widow

to marry him, who had been a lady of extraordinary beauty, which

she had not yet outlived; and though she had no great dower by

her husband, a younger brother of the Earl of Suffolk, yet she

inherited a fair fortune of her own near Plymouth, and was

besides very rich in a personal estate, and was looked upon as

the richest marriage of the West. This lady, by the duke's

credit, Sir Richard Granvil (for he was now made a knight and

baronet) obtained, and was thereby possessed of a plentiful

estate upon the borders of his own country, and where his own

family had great credit and authority. The war being now at an

end and he deprived of his great patron, [he] had nothing to

depend upon but the fortune of his wife: which, though ample

enough to have supported the expense a person of his quality

ought to have made, was not large enough to satisfy his vanity

and ambition, nor so great as he upon common reports had

possessed himself by her. By being not enough pleased with her

fortune he grew displeased with his wife, who, being a woman of a

haughty and imperious nature and of a wit superior to his,

quickly resented the disrespect she received from him and in no

respect studied to make herself easy to him. After some years

spent together in those domestic unsociable contestations, in

which he possessed himself of all her estate as the sole master

of it, without allowing her out of her own any competency for

herself, and indulged to himself all those licenses in her own

house which to women are most grievous, she found means to

withdraw herself from him; and was with all kindness received

into that family in which she had before been married and was

always very much respected."

To superficial observers, or observers who have convinced themselves that

high lights and bright colourings are of the essence of the art of the

prose writer, Clarendon may seem tame and jejune. He is in reality just the

contrary. His wood is tough enough and close-grained enough, but there is

plenty of sap coursing through it. In yet a third respect, which is less

closely connected with the purely formal aspect of style, Clarendon stands,

if not pre-eminent, very high among historians. This is his union of acute

penetration and vigorous grasp in the treatment of complicated events. It

has been hinted that he seems to have somewhat lost grasp, if not

penetration, after the Restoration. But at the time of his earlier

participation in public affairs, and of his composition of the greater part

of his historical writings, he was in the very vigour and prime of life;

and though it may be that he was "a Janus of one face," and looked rather

backward than forward, even then he was profoundly acquainted with the

facts of English history, with the character of his countrymen, and with

the relations of events as they happened. It may even be contended by those

who care for might-have-beens, that but for the headlong revolt against

Puritanism, which inspired the majority of the nation with a kind of

carnival madness for many years after 1660, and the strange deficiency of

statesmen of even moderately respectable character on both sides (except

Clarendon himself, and the fairly upright though time-serving Temple, there

is hardly a respectable man to be found on any side of politics for forty

years), Clarendon's post-Restoration policy itself would not have been the

failure that it was. But it is certain that on the events of his own middle

age he looked with the keenest discernment, and with the widest

comprehension.

Against these great merits must be set a treble portion of the great defect

which, as we have said, vitiates all the English prose work of his time,

the unconscious or wilful ignoring of the very fundamental principles of

sentence-and paragraph-architecture. His mere syntax, in the most

restricted sense of that word, is not very bad; he seldom indulges out of

mere _incuria_ in false concords or blunders over a relative. But he is the

most offending soul alive at any time in English literature in one grave

point. No one has put together, or, to adopt a more expressive phrase,

heaped together such enormous paragraphs; no one has linked clause on

clause, parenthesis on parenthesis, epexegesis on exegesis, in such a

bewildering concatenation of inextricable entanglement. Sometimes, of

course, the difficulty is more apparent than real, and by simply

substituting full stops and capitals for his colons and conjunctions, one

may, to some extent, simplify the chaos. But it is seldom that this is

really effective: it never produces really well balanced sentences and

really well constructed paragraphs; and there are constant instances in

which it is not applicable at all. It is not that the jostling and confused

relatives are as a rule grammatically wrong, like the common blunder of

putting an "and which" where there is no previous "which" expressed or

implied. They, simply, put as they are, bewilder and muddle the reader

because the writer has not taken the trouble to break up his sentence into

two or three. This is, of course, a very gross abuse, and except when the

talents above noticed either fuse his style into something better, or by

the interest they excite divert the attention of the reader, it constantly

makes Clarendon anything but agreeable reading, and produces an impression

of dryness and prolixity with which he is not quite justly chargeable. The

plain truth is that, as has been said often before, and may have to be said

more than once again, the sense of proportion and order in prose

composition was not born. The famous example--the awful example--of Oliver

Cromwell's speeches shows the worst-known instance of this; but the best

writers of Cromwell's own generation--far better educated than he,

professed men of letters after a fashion, and without the excuse of

impromptu, or of the scurry of unnoted, speech--sometimes came not far

behind him.

Against one great writer of the time, however, no such charge can be justly

brought. Although much attention has recently been given to the

philosophical opinions of Hobbes, since the unjust prejudice against his

religious and political ideas wore away, and since the complete edition of

his writings published at last in 1843 by Sir William Molesworth made him

accessible, the extraordinary merits of his style have on the whole had

rather less than justice done to them. He was in many ways a very singular

person. Born at Malmesbury in the year of the Armada, he was educated at

Oxford, and early in the seventeenth century was appointed tutor to the

eldest son of Lord Hardwick, afterwards Earl of Devonshire. For full

seventy years he was on and off in the service of the Cavendish family; but

sometimes acted as tutor to others, and both in that capacity and for other

reasons lived long abroad. In his earlier manhood he was much in the

society of Bacon, Jonson, and the literary folk of the English capital; and

later he was equally familiar with the society (rather scientific than

literary) of Paris. In 1647 he was appointed mathematical tutor to the

Prince of Wales; but his mathematics were not his most fortunate

acquirement, and they involved him in long and acrimonious disputes with

Wallis and others--disputes, it may be said, where Hobbes was quite wrong.

The publication of his philosophical treatises, and especially of the

_Leviathan_, brought him into very bad odour, not merely on political

grounds (which, so long as the Commonwealth lasted, would not have been

surprising), but for religious reasons; and during the last years of his

life, and for long afterwards, "Hobbist" was, certainly with very little

warrant from his writings, used as a kind of polite equivalent for atheist.

He was pensioned after the Restoration, and the protection of the king and

the Earl of Devonshire kept him scatheless, if ever there was any real

danger. Hobbes, however, was a timid and very much self-centred person,

always fancying that plots were being laid against him. He died at the

great age of ninety-two.

This long life was wholly taken up with study, but did not produce a very

large amount of original composition. It is true that his collected works

fill sixteen volumes; but they are loosely printed, and much space is

occupied with diagrams, indices, and such like things, while a very large

proportion of the matter appears twice over, in Latin and in English. In

the latter case Hobbes usually wrote first in Latin, and was not always his

own translator; but it would appear that he generally revised the work,

though he neither succeeded in obliterating nor perhaps attempted to

obliterate the marks of the original vehicle. His earliest publication was

a singularly vigorous, if not always scholastically exact, translation of

Thucydides into English, which appeared in 1629. Thirteen years later he

published in Paris the _De Cive_, which was shortly followed by the

treatise on _Human Nature_ and the _De Corpore Politico_. The latter of

these was to a great extent worked up in the famous _Leviathan_, or the

_Matter, Power, and Form of a Commonwealth_, which appeared in 1651. The

important _De Corpore_, which corresponds to the _Leviathan_ on the

philosophical side, appeared in Latin in 1655, in English next year.

Besides minor works, Hobbes employed his old age on a translation of Homer

into verse, and on a sketch of the Civil Wars called _Behemoth_.

His verse is a mere curiosity, though a considerable curiosity. The chief

of it (the translation of Homer written in the quatrain, which his friend

Davenant's _Gondibert_ had made popular) is completely lacking in poetical

quality, of which, perhaps, no man ever had less than Hobbes; and it is

written on a bad model. But it has so much of the nervous bull-dog strength

which, in literature if not in life, was Hobbes's main characteristic, that

it is sometimes both a truer and a better representative of the original

than some very mellifluous and elegant renderings. It is as a prose writer,

however, that Hobbes made, and that he will keep, his fame. With his

principles in the various branches of philosophy we have little or nothing

to do. In choosing them he manifested, no doubt, something of the same

defiance of authority, and the same self-willed preference for his own not

too well-educated opinion, which brought him to grief in his encounter with

Wallis. But when he had once left his starting points, his sureness of

reasoning, his extreme perspicacity, and the unerring clearness and

certainty with which he kept before him, and expressed exactly what he

meant, made him at once one of the greatest thinkers and one of the

greatest writers of England. Hobbes never "pays himself with words," never

evades a difficulty by becoming obscure, never meanders on in the graceful

allusive fashion of many philosophers,--a fashion for which the prevalent

faults of style were singularly convenient in his time. He has no ornament,

he does not seem to aim at anything more than the simplest and most

straightforward presentation of his views. But this very aim, assisted by

his practice in writing the terse and clear, if not very elegant, Latin

which was the universal language of the literary Europe of his time,

suffices to preserve him from most of the current sins. Moreover, it is

fair to remember that, though the last to die, he was the first to be born

of the authors mentioned in this chapter, and that he may be supposed, late

as he wrote, to have formed his style before the period of Jacobean and

Caroline luxuriance.

Almost any one of Hobbes's books would suffice to illustrate his style; but

the short and interesting treatise on _Human Nature_, perhaps, shows it at

its best. The author's exceptional clearness may be assisted by his lavish

use of italics; but it is not necessary to read far in order to see that it

is in reality quite independent of any clumsy mechanical device. The

crabbed but sharply outlined style, the terse phrasing, the independence of

all after-thoughts and tackings-on, manifest themselves at once to any

careful observer. Here for instance is a passage, perhaps his finest, on

Love, followed by a political extract from another work:--

"Of love, by which is to be understood the joy man taketh in the

fruition of any present good, hath been spoken already in the

first section, chapter seven, under which is contained the love

men bear to one another or pleasure they take in one another's

company: and by which nature men are said to be sociable. But

there is another kind of love which the Greeks call Eros, and is

that which we mean when we say that a man is in love: forasmuch

as this passion cannot be without diversity of sex, it cannot be

denied but that it participateth of that indefinite love

mentioned in the former section. But there is a great difference

betwixt the desire of a man indefinite and the same desire

limited _ad hunc_: and this is that love which is the great theme

of poets: but, notwithstanding their praises, it must be defined

by the word need: for it is a conception a man hath of his need

of that one person desired. The cause of this passion is not

always nor for the most part beauty, or other quality in the

beloved, unless there be withal hope in the person that loveth:

which may be gathered from this, that in great difference of

persons the greater have often fallen in love with the meaner,

but not contrary. And from hence it is that for the most part

they have much better fortune in love whose hopes are built on

something in their person than those that trust to their

expressions and service; and they that care less than they that

care more: which not perceiving, many men cast away their

services as one arrow after another, till, in the end, together

with their hopes, they lose their wits."

* * * * *

"There are some who therefore imagine monarchy to be more

grievous than democracy, because there is less liberty in that

than in this. If by liberty they mean an exemption from that

subjection which is due to the laws, that is, the commands of the

people; neither in democracy nor in any other state of

government whatsoever is there any such kind of liberty. If they

suppose liberty to consist in this, that there be few laws, few

prohibitions, and those too such that, except they were

forbidden, there could be no peace; then I deny that there is

more liberty in democracy than in monarchy; for the one as truly

consisteth with such a liberty as the other. For although the

word liberty may in large and ample letters be written over the

gates of any city whatsoever, yet it is not meant the subjects'

but the city's liberty; neither can that word with better right

be inscribed on a city which is governed by the people than that

which is ruled by a monarch. But when private men or subjects

demand liberty under the name of liberty, they ask not for

liberty but domination: which yet for want of understanding they

little consider. For if every man would grant the same liberty to

another which he desires for himself, as is commanded by the law

of nature, that same natural state would return again in which

all men may by right do all things; which if they knew they would

abhor, as being worse than all kinds of civil subjection

whatsoever. But if any man desire to have his single freedom, the

rest being bound, what does he else demand but to have the

dominion?"

It may be observed that Hobbes's sentences are by no means very short as

far as actual length goes. He has some on a scale which in strictness is

perhaps hardly justifiable. But what may generally be asserted of them is

that the author for the most part is true to that great rule, of logic and

of style alike, which ordains that a single sentence shall be, as far as

possible, the verbal presentation of a single thought, and not the

agglomeration and sweeping together of a whole string and tissue of

thoughts. It is noticeable, too, that Hobbes is very sparing of the

adjective--the great resource and delight of flowery and discursive

writers. Sometimes, as in the famous comparison of human life to a race

(where, by the way, a slight tendency to conceit manifests itself, and

makes him rather force some of his metaphors), his conciseness assumes a

distinctly epigrammatic form; and it is constantly visible also in his more

consecutive writings.

In the well-known passage on Laughter as "a passion of sudden glory" the

writer may be charged with allowing his fancy too free play; though I, for

my part, am inclined to consider the explanation the most satisfactory yet

given of a difficult phenomenon. But the point is the distinctness with

which Hobbes puts this novel and, at first sight, improbable idea, the apt

turns and illustrations (standing at the same time far from the excess of

illustration and analogy, by which many writers of his time would have spun

it out into a chapter if not into a treatise), the succinct, forcible,

economical adjustment of the fewest words to the clearest exposition of

thought. Perhaps these things strike the more as they are the more unlike

the work in juxtaposition with which one finds them; nor can it be

maintained that Hobbes's style is suitable for all purposes. Admirable for

argument and exposition, it is apt to become bald in narration, and its

abundance of clearness, when translated to less purely intellectual

subjects, may even expose it to the charge of being thin. Such a note as

that struck in the Love passage above given is rare, and sets one wondering

whether the dry-as-dust philosopher of Malmesbury, the man who seems to

have had hardly any human frailties except vanity and timidity, had himself

felt the bitterness of counting on expressions and services, the madness of

throwing away one effort after another to gain the favour of the beloved.

But it is very seldom that any such suggestion is provoked by remarks of

Hobbes's. His light is almost always dry; and in one sense, though not in

another, a little malignant. Yet nowhere is there to be found a style more

absolutely suited, not merely to the author's intentions but to his

performances--a form more exactly married to matter. Nor anywhere is there

to be found a writer who is more independent of others. He may have owed

something to his friend Jonson, in whose _Timber_ there are resemblances to

Hobbes; but he certainly owed nothing, and in all probability lent much, to

the Drydens, and Tillotsons, and Temples, who in the last twenty years of

his own life reformed English prose.