ANTIQUARIANS AND MEN OF SCIENCE.
[Sidenote: Anthony a Wood (1632-1695).]
The pursuit of antiquarianism has always flourished in England since her
inhabitants have enjoyed sufficient culture to be aware that they
possessed a past. Even the poetry of Layamon is in a certain measure
antiquarian, and Chaucer, Spenser, Milton appear progressively more and
more leavened with antiquarian sentiment, which, as a factor of literary
inspiration, attains perhaps its highest conceivable development in the
works of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. The Restoration period
produced no such examples of antiquarian men of genius; but several
excellent antiquarian writers, whose works are of sufficient compass and
intrinsic importance, and are distinguished by sufficient attention to
diction, to bring them within the domain of literature. It may be said
of all the principal of these laborious men, that they have erected
imperishable monuments to themselves, and have left little room for
successors, except in the capacity of editors and annotators. Of Anthony
a Wood, the historian and biographer of Oxford, it is almost enough
praise to say that two centuries have elapsed without producing anyone
capable either of continuing his Oxonian labours on the same scale, or,
since the late Mr. C. H. Cooper's work has remained incomplete, of
performing the like for the sister university. A terrible toiler, a
loyalist and high churchman, as beseemed the Oxonian of his day, but
apparently with few serious interests in life except the fame of his
beloved Alma Mater, he sat down at thirty in his college (Merton), and
delved resolutely until he had produced his _History and Antiquities_
(1674) and his _Athenae Oxonienses_ (1691). The former was originally
published in a Latin version made by one Peers, and seriously garbled at
the instigation of Dr. Fell. The original English text, however, was
published in the eighteenth century. The labours of Wood's nineteenth
century editor, Dr. Bliss, upon the _Athenae_, are universally known.
Wood is not a pure or elegant writer, but his works will last as long as
Oxford.
[Sidenote: Rymer's _Foedera_.]
Thomas Rymer has already been mentioned with due disrespect among
critics, and his more useful and honourable labours as an antiquary do
not, strictly speaking, entitle him to be named among men of letters,
being mainly those of an editor. It is impossible, however, to pass over
in silence a collection of such unspeakable value as his _Foedera_, ten
folio volumes of most precious documents relating to English history
from 1102 to 1654. Rymer the Dryasdust, however, cannot quite forget
Rymer the Longinus; his work is graced with a Latin address to Queen
Anne, more like a dithyrambic than a dedication.
[Sidenote: Sir William Dugdale (1605-1686).]
[Sidenote: Elias Ashmole (1617-1692).]
Next to Wood, the most important antiquary of the age was Sir William
Dugdale, of little account as author, but whom his industry and the
assistance he was successful in enlisting from various quarters, enabled
to achieve several works, any one of which would have sufficed to gain
him immortal renown as an antiquarian. These were his monumental
_Monasticon Anglicanum_ (1655-1673), a gigantic work, but founded in
great part upon the collections of Roger Dodsworth; his _Antiquities of
Warwickshire_ (1656), an immense improvement upon everything that had
previously been effected in the department of county history, and the
model of all that has been accomplished since; his _History of St.
Paul's Cathedral_ (1658), and his _Baronage of England_ (1675-1676). He
was also the author of several other works. So eminent a genealogist was
naturally a Cavalier, and, when he lost his appointment as Chester
herald during the Civil Wars, is said to have made his living by the
deaths of persons of quality, whose funerals he conducted _secundum
artem_. Private patrons and employers helped him on until the
Restoration, when, as successively Norroy and Garter King-at-Arms, he
attained great prosperity, making numerous visitations, and approving
himself a terror to heraldic pretenders. He died at eighty, of a fever
contracted 'by attendance too much on his worldly concerns.' His
son-in-law, Elias Ashmole, was an eminent antiquary of a different
order, although his principal work, _Institution, Laws, and Ceremonies
of the Order of the Garter_, might well have proceeded from Dugdale's
pen. His turn, however, was rather for the collection of curiosities,
'the greatest virtuoso and curioso that ever was known or read of in
England before his time.' In this capacity he collected the Ashmolean
Museum, which has preserved his name more effectually than anything he
wrote or was capable of writing. He was also an astrologer, the friend
of Lilly and Booker, and in his younger days an alchemist. This latter
pursuit was so far serviceable, that it led him to preserve by printing
twenty-nine rare old alchemical books. After his history of the order of
the Garter, his principal work is his diary, which briefly but amusingly
records the vicissitudes of his generally prosperous life; his gain of
estate and loss of quiet by his second marriage; his acquaintance with
old Mr. Backhouse, the Rosicrucian, 'who told me, in syllables, the true
matter of the philosopher's stone;' his prosperity under Charles II. as
Windsor herald and holder of several other offices; his third marriage,
with the daughter of his friend Dugdale; above all, his acquisition of
the Tradescant antiquities, which formed the nucleus of the Ashmolean
Museum. This and his collection of manuscripts were bequeathed to the
University of Oxford; the catalogue of the latter forms a goodly volume.
[Sidenote: John Aubrey (1626-1697).]
Of far less importance than Dugdale or Ashmole as an antiquary, John
Aubrey is better remembered as an author. His strictly literary
qualifications are few; setting aside his collections for local history,
his writings consist of little else than detached memoranda. Their merit
lies partly in the interest of their themes, but still more in their
artless simplicity and the transparent revelation of the amiable if not
dignified character of one who might have sat to Addison for Will
Wimble. Aubrey remarks concerning himself that he might have succeeded
in life if he had been a painter. Of his artistic powers we cannot
judge, but the simple, cheerful, social temper that befits the itinerant
landscape painter was his beyond question. For all more serious careers
he was totally unfit. He had lost money and estate before middle life,
and spent the remainder of his days with much more satisfaction to
himself in visiting, or, when pressed by pecuniary difficulties,
'delitescing' at the mansions of country friends, a welcome and innocent
parasite. The guiding spirit of his literary work is charmingly
expressed by himself: 'Methinks it shows a kind of gratitude and good
nature to revive the memories and memorials of the pious and charitable
benefactors long since dead and gone.' In the same spirit, after
relating how he had seen Venetia Digby's bust 'standing at a stall at
the Golden Crosse, a brasier's shop,' he exclaims, 'How these
curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellows as I am put
them down!' He has hence retrieved from oblivion a number of highly
curious and interesting particulars about men of letters from
Shakespeare downwards, and a most entertaining collection of stories of
apparitions, warnings, prophecies, and similar matters. Much of the
charm consists in the credulity and simplicity of the narrator, who is
nevertheless by no means incapable of just and penetrating reflections
on occasion, as when he says of Shakespeare: 'His comedies will remain
wit as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles
_mores hominum_; now our present writers reflect so much upon particular
persons and coxcombeities, that twenty years hence they will not be
understood.' Though exceedingly industrious as a collector, 'my head,'
he says, 'was always working, never idle, and even travelling did glean
some observations, some whereof to be valued,' he lacked the patience or
the ability to reduce these observations into form, and they have been
mostly incorporated with the works of succeeding antiquaries. He was
born at Easton Pierse, in Wiltshire, in 1626, and died at Oxford in
1697. He is entitled to much credit for having brought to light the
Druidical remains at Avebury in his native county, unnoticed before his
time.
[Sidenote: Sprat's _History of the Royal Society_.]
Along with the works of the antiquarians may be mentioned a book of
great interest, and in its way of great merit, the _History of the Royal
Society_ by the convivial and facetious Dean of Westminster and Bishop
of Rochester, Thomas Sprat (1636-1713), whom we have already met as a
bad poet on his own account, but as the efficient coadjutor of
Buckingham in the _Rehearsal_. Cautious, pliant, and self-indulgent, he
almost incurred infamy and deprivation by his unworthy compliances under
James II.; but he retracted just in time, rallied to the new order of
things, and recovered credit through the sympathy excited for him as the
object of a most diabolical plot in the manner of Oates and Bedloe.[13]
Of his _History of the Royal Society_ Johnson says: 'The _History of the
Royal Society_ is now read, not with the wish to know what they were
then doing, but how their transactions are exhibited by Sprat.' If this
was true at the time, it is true no more. Sprat's name is no longer a
magnet; and, in truth, although his enthusiasm for scientific research
is highly honourable to him, his style exceedingly lively, and many of
his observations replete with good sense, his work as a whole is
discursive and ill-digested, and so little of a history that it hardly
ever gives a date. The writer himself confesses that it is only the
second of his three books has any proper claim to the title of history.
But it is important on grounds of its own, which render it of more real
value than the more exact and pragmatical narratives which have
superseded it. The glow of youth is upon it. It paints vividly the great
scientific awakening which coincided with the accession of Charles II.
The mere list of the experiments which the Royal Society had performed,
or proposed to perform, attests the devouring scientific curiosity of
the age, and shows at once the reaction of men's minds in the direction
of the tangibly useful after a long series of fruitless theological and
political controversies, and how deep in the long run had been the
influence of the great man who had lost his life in performing an
experiment. At the same time there is a humorous side to the picture:
much of the curiosity of the time was idle, much was founded on
credulity. Many of the queries which Sprat catalogues with such
complacency would now be thought too trivial to engage the attention of
a learned society, and some are not a little absurd. In the main,
however, they are most significant of the new spirit that had come into
the world. A counter spirit was necessarily called into being also.
Sprat combats the objections of churchmen by proving that enthusiasts
cannot be natural philosophers, and propitiates wits like Butler by
promising them new ideas for their writings. His demonstration that the
design of the society was in no respect prejudicial to the Church of
England may raise a smile now, but was probably by no means superfluous
at the time. His remarks upon the utility of experiments display the
most vigorous common sense; he would evidently have subscribed heartily
to a modern definition of a fool as 'a man who never made an experiment
in his life.' 'If,' he says of the opponents of experimental philosophy,
'they will persist in contemning all experiments except those which
bring with them immediate gain and a present harvest, they may as well
cavil at the providence of God that he has not made all the seasons of
the year to be times of mowing, reaping, and vintage.' He enumerates
eleven classes of experiments actually instituted by the Royal Society,
comprising a very large number of separate essays, one of which, it is
to be feared, may not have perfectly succeeded, 'Of making a deaf and
dumb man to speak.' His observations upon the prospects of human
improvement, the advantages of transplantation and immigration, the
national gain from encouraging inventors and projectors, are conceived
in the same bold and liberal spirit, contrasting forcibly with his
timid and time-serving politics. In his advocacy of the claims of London
to rank as the metropolis of science, and his exhortations to the
English gentry to turn the leisure and opportunity afforded by a country
life to account for the study of nature, he becomes what he never is
when writing verse--something bordering upon a poet.
[Sidenote: Evelyn's _Sylva_, 1664.]
As has been remarked, the latter half of the seventeenth century was in
England pre-eminently a scientific age. The ideas of Bacon were
generally acted upon, and it was universally recognized that the only
safe path to physical knowledge was through experiment. Newton and
Hooke, in natural philosophy; Mayow, in chemistry; Sydenham, in
medicine; Grew, in vegetable anatomy; Ray, in the classification of
plants and animals, carried the fame of their country to greater heights
than even Bacon's 'eagle-spirit' could have soared to imagine. But these
illustrious men did little or nothing for literature, for such was not
their design. The art of blending scientific research with elegant
disquisition remained to be invented. Many of their works were composed
in Latin; none were intended for a miscellaneous public. Science, in
consequence, was far from exerting that influence upon creed and conduct
which she exercises in our day, and an age of scientific discovery till
then unexampled passed away without enriching literature by a single
classic. Two books alone, neither of which can strictly be termed
scientific, but both of which touch outlying provinces of natural
history, added--one very considerably--to the literary wealth of the
age. They are Evelyn's _Sylva_ and Walton's _Complete Angler_--both by
authors of whom we have previously had occasion to speak. If any reader
of Evelyn's _Diary_ should feel prejudiced by the carping criticisms of
De Quincey, he may be safely referred to his _Sylva_ (originally
published in 1664, much augmented in later editions). The writer here
displays himself in a character most alien of all others to that of a
time-server or a prig, that of an English country gentleman. His work is
further inspired by a genuine love of nature, whose formality is
justified by the stateliness of the theme, and tempered by the almost
personal affection of the author for the trees he has known from a boy,
or himself called into being. The scholar is everywhere apparent. 'I did
not,' he says, 'altogether compile this work for the sake of our
ordinary rustics, mere foresters and woodmen, but for the benefit and
diversion of gentlemen and persons of quality, who often refresh
themselves in the agreeable toils of planting and gardening.' It may be
that Evelyn thought too much of the requisites of this class of readers,
but, had he limited himself to a mere technical manual, he would not now
be read. We do not know how his precepts are rated by the foresters and
landscape gardeners of the present age; but even if he has not always
shown the way, he has powerfully stimulated the wish to become a
miniature creator by embellishing the countenance of Nature. His prose,
more elaborate here than in his _Diary_, entitles him to rank among the
refiners of the language.
The literature of England has this among other points in common with
ancient literature, that it reckons books on fishing among its classics.
Oppian, who sang of the sea and its inhabitants to Caracalla, is far
from the worst among the Greek poets, and has in particular expressed
the successful angler's exultation with a truth and terseness which no
successor will surpass:
[Greek: polle gar blepharoisi kai en phresi terpsis idesthai
pallomenon kai elissomenon pepedemenon ichthyn.]
Half a century later Nemesian gained equal fame among the Latins by a
poem on the same theme, which has not come down to us. The piscatorial
eclogues of Sanazzaro are an ornament of Italian literature, and were
imitated by Milton in his _Lycidas_;[14] but the first and best modern
poem on the technicalities of angling (_The Secrets of Angling_, by John
Dennys, 1630) is English, and is one of the most pleasing didactic poems
in the language. The subject was next to have been taken up by a better
known writer, Sir Henry Wotton, but his intended work was never
completed, and it remained for Izaak Walton, whom we have already met as
an ecclesiastical biographer, to render it equally interesting to the
professional fisherman and charming to the lover of idyllic pastoral.
The first edition (1653) is wellnigh the most prized of all rare old
English books. It had four more editions in the author's lifetime, all
with additions and amendments, and it is needless to observe that it has
retained its popularity to our day as completely as _Paradise Lost_ or
_Pilgrim's Progress_. The technical details are no doubt sound, except
for the author's defective acquaintance with fly-fishing; but the
preservative against time has not been the didactic skill which others
might rival or surpass, but the accompaniment of natural description and
song and pictures of country life, conveyed in a style whose quaint
simplicity, at once transparent and formal, is a survival from the old
Elizabethan days, to which, with their pastorals and poetry, he himself
looks back with so much affection:
'Look, under the broad beech-tree, I sat down, when I was last
this way a-fishing, and the birds in the adjoining grove
seemed to have a friendly contention with an echo, whose dead
voice seemed to live in a hollow tree, near to the brow of that
primrose-hill; there I sat viewing the silver streams glide
silently towards their centre, the tempestuous sea; yet
sometimes opposed by rugged roots and pebble-stones, which
broke their waves, and turned them into foam: and sometimes I
beguiled time by viewing the harmless lambs, some leaping
securely in the cool shade, whilst others sported themselves in
the cheerful sun; and saw others craving comfort from the
swollen udders of their bleating dams. As I sat there, these
and other sights had so fully possessed my soul with content,
that I thought, as the poet has happily exprest it,
"I was for that time lifted above earth;
And possessed joys not promis'd in my birth."
As I left this place and entered into the next field, a second
pleasure entertained me; 'twas a handsome milk-maid, that had
not yet attained so much age and wisdom as to load her mind
with any fears of many things that will never be, as too many
men too often do; but she cast away all care, and sung like a
nightingale; her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it:
'twas that smooth song, which was made by Kit Marlow, now at
least fifty years ago: and the milk-maid's mother sung an
answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his
younger days.
'They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good, I think
much better than the strong lines that are now in fashion in
this critical age.'
Passages like these create for the middle-aged man the joy and charm of
Walton's _Angler_, which the boy devours as a manual of the piscatorial
art. To the more advanced reader the chief use of the fish is as a
vehicle for the pastoral; nevertheless, the great success of Walton's
treatise is a proof that he was by no means inefficient from a more
utilitarian point of view. Londoners have usually made good anglers,
except, from want of opportunity, as fly-fishermen. Here it has been
necessary to supplement Walton very largely; and indeed he himself
confesses to having relied for such information as he does afford upon
another angler. Elsewhere he approves himself master of his profession,
and no doubt had trained many a pupil, perhaps made many a convert like
the Venator who puts himself so readily under his tuition. Everyone
knows the proem of his book, instinct with the freshness of the bright
May morning, the otter hunt, a holy war in the eyes of the injured
fisherman (O blissful days, when otters were yet to be found in the
Lea!), and the earnest rhetoric of Auceps, Venator, and Piscator,
contending for the pre-eminence of their favourite sports. It is
characteristic of Walton's simplicity and candour that he should have
placed the most beautiful passage of his book in the mouth of one of his
opponents.
'These I will pass by, but not those little nimble musicians of
the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which
nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.
'As first the lark, when she means to rejoice: to cheer herself
and those that hear her, she then quits the earth, and sings as
she ascends higher into the air, and having ended her heavenly
employment, grows then mute and sad to think she must descend
to the dull earth, which she would not touch but for necessity.
'How do the blackbird and thrassel with their melodious voices
bid welcome to the cheerful spring, and in their fixed months
warble forth such ditties as no art or instrument can reach to?
'Nay, the smaller birds also do the like in their particular
seasons, as namely the leverock, the tit-lark, the little
linnet, and the honest robin, that loves mankind both alive and
dead.
'But the nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes
such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat,
that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased. He
that at midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely,
should hear, as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet
descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and
redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and
say Lord, what music hast thou provided for the saints in
heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music on earth!'
It has been remarked that it was necessary to supplement Walton's
imperfect knowledge of fly-fishing. This task, a delicate one in his
lifetime, was piously and successfully performed by a scholar, Charles
Cotton, of Beresford, Derbyshire (1630-1687), whose appendix of
dialogues appeared in the fifth edition of Walton's own treatise (1676)
with some graceful introductory lines from Izaak himself, then in his
eighty-third year. 'I have been so obedient to your desires,' he says,
'as to endure all the praises you have ventured to fix upon me.' Cotton,
a country gentleman of good family, whose fishing cottage on the Dove
stands to this day, obtained some reputation as a man of letters by a
translation of Scarron's burlesque poem, and other versions from the
French. He was also an authority upon cards, which possibly accounts for
the pecuniary embarrassments which clouded the latter part of his life.
His piscatorial teaching is no doubt quite sound; but his book, although
a lively dialogue, is no idyll like his master's, and would be forgotten
but for its association with the latter. The best passages are those
depicting the horror of the London visitor at the steepness of the
Derbyshire hills and the narrowness of the Derbyshire bridges. 'I would
not ride over it for a thousand pounds, nor fall off it for two; and yet
I think I dare venture on foot, though if you were not by to laugh at
me, I should do it on all four.'
FOOTNOTES:
[13] It is strange that Macaulay, who had told this story so graphically
in his _History_, should have forgotten it when he came to write the
_Life of Atterbury_. No English bishop, he says, had been taken into
custody between the Seven Bishops and Atterbury, overlooking Sprat.
[14] A correspondent of the _Athenaeum_ has pointed out, but the
discovery seems to have been hardly noticed, that Shakespeare took the
name of Ophelia from Sanazzaro's _Arcadia_--another argument for his
acquaintance with Italian.