100. Webster belongs to the first part of the reign of James. He

possessed very considerable powers, and ought to be ranked, I think,

the next below Ford. With less of poetic grace than Shirley, he had

incomparably more vigour; with less of nature and simplicity than

Heywood, he had a more elevated genius, and a bolder pencil. But the

deep sorrows and terrors of tragedy were peculiarly his province. “His

imagination,” says his last editor, “had a fond familiarity with

objects of awe and fear. The silence of the sepulchre, the sculptures

of marble monuments, the knolling of church bells, the cearments of

the corpse, the yew that roots itself in dead men’s graves, are the

illustrations that most readily present themselves to his

imagination.” I think this well-written sentence a little one-sided,

and hardly doing justice to the variety of Webster’s power; but, in

fact, he was as deeply tainted as any of his contemporaries with the

savage taste of the Italian school, and in the Duchess of Malfy,

scarcely leaves enough on the stage to bury the dead.

|His Duchess of Malfy.|

101. This is the most celebrated of Webster’s dramas. The story is

taken from Bandello, and has all that accumulation of wickedness and

horror, which the Italian novelists perversely described, and our

tragedians as perversely imitated. But the scenes are wrought up with

skill, and produce a strong impression. Webster has a superiority in

delineating character above many of the old dramatists; he is seldom

extravagant beyond the limits of conceivable nature; we find the

guilt, or even the atrocity, of human passions, but not that

incarnation of evil spirits which some more ordinary dramatists loved

to exhibit. In the character of the Duchess of Malfy herself there

wants neither originality nor skill of management, and I do not know

that any dramatist after Shakspeare would have succeeded better in the

difficult scene where she discloses her love to an inferior. There is,

perhaps, a little failure in dignity and delicacy, especially towards

the close; but the Duchess of Malfy is not drawn as an Isabella or a

Portia; she is a lovesick widow, virtuous and true-hearted, but more

intended for our sympathy than our reverence.

|Vittoria Corombona.|

102. The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona, is not much inferior in

language and spirit to the Duchess of Malfy; but the plot is more

confused, less interesting, and worse conducted. Mr. Dyce, the late

editor of Webster, praises the dramatic vigour of the part of

Vittoria, but justly differs from Lamb, who speaks of “the innocence,

resembling boldness” she displays in the trial scene. It is rather a

delineation of desperate guilt, losing in a counterfeited audacity all

that could seduce or conciliate the tribunal. Webster’s other plays

are less striking; in Appius and Virginia he has done, perhaps, better

than any one who has attempted a subject not, on the whole, very

promising for tragedy; several of the scenes are dramatic and

effective; the language, as is usually the case with Webster, is

written so as to display an actor’s talents, and he has followed the

received history sufficiently to abstain from any excess of slaughter

at the close. Webster is not without comic wit, as well as a power of

imagination; his plays have lately met with an editor of taste enough

to admire his beauties, and not very over-partial in estimating them.

103. Below Webster we might enumerate a long list of dramatists under

the first Stuarts. Marston is a tumid and ranting tragedian, a

wholesale dealer in murders and ghosts. Chapman, who assisted Ben

Jonson and some others in comedy, deserves no great praise for his

Bussy d’Amboise. The style in this, and in all his tragedies, is

extravagantly hyperbolical; he is not very dramatic, nor has any power

of exciting emotion, except in those who sympathize with a tumid pride

and self-confidence. Yet he has more thinking than many of the old

dramatists; and the praise of one of his critics, though strongly

worded, is not without some foundation, that we “seldom find richer

contemplations on the nature of man and the world.” There is also a

poetic impetuosity in Chapman, such as has redeemed his translation of

Homer, by which we are hurried along. His tragi-comedies, All Fools

and The Gentleman-usher, are, perhaps, superior to his tragedies.[553]

Rowley and Le Tourneur, especially the former, have occasionally good

lines, but we cannot say that they were very superior dramatists.

Rowley, however, was often in comic partnership with Massinger. Dekker

merits a higher rank; he co-operated with Massinger in some of his

plays, and in his own displays some energy of passion and some comic

humour. Middleton belongs to this lower class of dramatic writers; his

tragedy entitled “Women beware Women,” is founded on the story of

Bianca Cappello; it is full of action, but the characters are all too

vicious to be interesting, and the language does not rise much above

mediocrity. In comedy, Middleton deserves more praise. “A Trick to

catch the Old One,” and several others that bear his name are amusing

and spirited. But Middleton wrote chiefly in conjunction with others,

and sometimes with Jonson and Massinger.

[553] Chapman is well reviewed and at length, in an article of

the Retrospective Review, vol. iv., p. 333, and again in vol. v.

CHAPTER XXIV.

HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE PROM 1600 TO 1650.

SECT. I.

_Italian Writers--Boccalini--Grammatical and Critical Works--Gracian--

French Writers--Balzac--Voiture--French Academy--Vaugelas--Patru and

Le Maistre--Style of English Prose--Earl of Essex--Knolles--Several

other English Writers_.

|Decline of taste in Italy.|

1. It would be vain, probably, to inquire from what general causes we

should deduce the decline of taste in Italy. None, at least, have

occurred to my mind, relating to political or social circumstances,

upon which we could build more than one of those sophistical theories,

which assume a causal relation between any concomitant events. Bad

taste, in fact, whether in literature or the arts, is always ready to

seize upon the public, being, in many cases, no more than a pleasure

in faults which are really fitted to please us, and of which it can

only be said that they hinder or impair the greater pleasure we should

derive from beauties. Among these critical sins, none are so dangerous

as the display of ingenious and novel thoughts, or turns of phrase.

For as such enter into the definition of good writing, it seems very

difficult to persuade the world that they can ever be the

characteristics of bad writing. The metes and bounds of ornament, the

fine shades of distinction which regulate a judicious choice, are only

learned by an attentive as well as a naturally susceptible mind; and

it is rarely, perhaps, that an unprepared multitude does not prefer

the worse picture, the worse building, the worse poem, the worse

speech to the better. Education, an acquaintance with just criticism,

and still more the habitual observation of what is truly beautiful in

nature or art, or in the literature of taste, will sometimes generate

almost a national tact that rejects the temptations of a meretricious

and false style; but experience has shown that this happy state of

public feeling will not be very durable. Whatever might be the cause

of it, this age of the Italian seicentisti has been reckoned almost as

inauspicious to good writing in prose as in verse. “If we except,”

says Tiraboschi, “the Tuscans and a very few more, never was our

language so neglected as in this period. We can scarce bear to read

most of the books that were published, so rude and full of barbarisms

is their style. Few had any other aim than to exercise their wit in

conceits and metaphors; and, so long as they could scatter them

profusely over their pages, cared nothing for the choice of phrases or

the purity of grammar. Their eloquence on public occasions was

intended only for admiration and applause, not to persuade, or

move.”[554] And this, he says, is applicable alike to their Latin and

Italian, their sacred and profane harangues. The academical

discourses, of which Dati has collected many in his Prose Fiorentine,

are poor in comparison with those of the sixteenth.[555]

[554] Vol. xi., p. 415.

[555] Vol. xi., p. 415.

2. A later writer than Tiraboschi has thought this sentence against

the seicentisti a little too severe, and condemning equally with him

the bad taste characteristic of that age, endeavours to rescue a few

from the general censure.[556] It is, at least, certain that the

insipidity of the cinque cento writers, their long periods void of any

but the most trivial meaning, their affectation of the faults of

Cicero’s manner in their own language, ought not to be overlooked or

wholly pardoned, while we dwell on an opposite defect of their

successors, the perpetual desire to be novel, brilliant, or profound.

These may, doubtless, be the more offensive of the two; but they are,

perhaps, not less likely to be mingled with something really worth

reading.

[556] Salfi, xiv., 11.

|Style of Galileo.|

3. It will not be expected that we can mention many Italian books,

after what has been said, which come very precisely within the class

of polite literature, or claim any praise on the ground of style.

Their greatest luminary, Galileo, wrote with clearness, elegance, and

spirit; no one among the moderns had so entirely rejected a dry and

technical manner of teaching, and thrown such attractions round the

form of truth. Himself a poet and a critic, he did not hesitate to

ascribe his own philosophical perspicuity to the constant perusal of

Ariosto. This I have mentioned in another place; but we cannot too

much remember that all objects of intellectual pursuit are as bodies

acting with reciprocal forces in one system, being all in relation to

the faculties of the mind, which is itself but one; and that the most

extensive acquaintance with the various provinces of literature will

not fail to strengthen our dominion over those we more peculiarly deem

our own. The school of Galileo, especially Torricelli and Redi, were

not less distinguished than himself for their union of elegance with

philosophy.[557]

[557] Salfi, xiv., 12.

|Bentivoglio.|

4. The letters of Bentivoglio are commonly known. This epistolary art

was always cultivated by the Italians, first in the Latin tongue, and

afterwards in their own. Bentivoglio has written with equal dignity

and ease. Galileo’s letters are also esteemed on account of their

style as well as of what they contain. In what is more peculiarly

called eloquence, the Italians of this age are rather emulous of

success than successful; the common defects of taste in themselves,

and in those who heard or read them, as well as, in most instances,

the uninteresting nature of their subjects exclude them from our

notice.

|Boccalini’s News from Parnassus.|

5. Trajan Boccalini was by his disposition inclined to political

satire, and possibly to political intrigue; but we have here only to

mention the work by which he is best known, Advices from Parnassus

(Ragguagli di Parnaso). If the idea of this once popular and

celebrated book is not original, which I should rather doubt, though

without immediately recognising a similarity to anything earlier

(Lucian, the common prototype, excepted), it has at least been an

original source. In the general turn of Boccalini’s fictions, and

perhaps in a few particular inventions, we may sometimes perceive what

a much greater man has imitated; they bear a certain resemblance to

those of Addison, though the vast superiority of the latter in

felicity of execution and variety of invention may almost conceal it.

The Ragguagli are a series of despatches from the court of Apollo on

Parnassus, where he is surrounded by eminent men of all ages. This

fiction becomes in itself very cold and monotonous; yet there is much

variety in the subjects of the decisions made by the god, with the

advice of his counsellors, and some strokes of satire are well

hit, though more perhaps fail of effect. But we cannot now catch the

force of every passage. Boccalini is full of allusions to his own

time, even where the immediate subject seems ancient. This book was

published at Venice in 1612; at a time when the ambition of Spain was

regarded with jealousy by patriotic Italians, who thought that pacific

republic their bulwark and their glory. He inveighs, therefore,

against the military spirit and the profession of war, “necessary

sometimes, but so fierce and inhuman that no fine expressions can make

it honourable.”[558] Nor is he less severe on the vices of kings, nor

less ardent in his eulogies of liberty; the government of Venice,

being reckoned, and not altogether untruly, an asylum of free-thought

and action, in comparison with that of Spain. Aristotle, he reports in

one of his despatches, was besieged in his villa on Parnassus by a

number of armed men belonging to different princes, who insisted on

his retracting the definition he had given of a tyrant, that he was

one who governed for his own good and not that of the people, because

it would apply to every prince, all reigning for their own good. The

philosopher, alarmed by this demand, altered his definition; which was

to run thus, that tyrants were certain persons of old time, whose race

was now quite extinct.[559] Boccalini, however, takes care, in

general, to mix something of playfulness with his satire, so that it

could not be resented without apparent ill-nature. It seems, indeed,

to us free from invective, and rather meant to sting than to wound.

But this, if a common rumour be true, did not secure him against a

beating of which he died. The style of Boccalini is said by the

critics to be clear and fluent, rather than correct or elegant; and he

displays the taste of his times by extravagant metaphors. But to

foreigners, who regard this less, his News from Parnassus, unequal, of

course, and occasionally tedious, must appear to contain many

ingenious allusions, judicious criticisms, and acute remarks.

[558] Ragg, 75.

[559] Ragg, 76.

|His Pietra del Paragone.|

6. The Pietra del Paragone by the same author is an odd, and rather

awkward mixture of reality and fiction, all levelled at the court of

Spain, and designed to keep alive a jealousy of its ambition. It is a

kind of episode or supplement to the Ragguagli di Parnaso, the leading

invention being preserved. Boccalini is an interesting writer on

account of the light he throws on the history and sentiments of Italy.

He is in this work a still bolder writer than in the former; not only

censuring Spain without mercy, but even the Venetian aristocracy,

observing upon the insolence of the young nobles towards the citizens,

though he justifies the senate for not punishing the former more

frequently with death by public execution, which would lower the

nobility in the eyes of the people. They were, however, he says, as

severely punished, when their conduct was bad, by exclusion from

offices of trust. The Pietra del Paragone is a kind of political, as

the Ragguagli is a critical miscellany.

|Ferrante Pallavicino.|

7. About twenty years after Boccalini, a young man appeared, by name

Ferrante Pallavicino, who, with a fame more local and transitory, with

less respectability of character, and probably with inferior talents,

trod to a certain degree in his steps. As Spain had been the object of

satire to the one, so was Rome to the other. Urban VIII., an ambitious

pontiff, and vulnerable in several respects, was attacked by an

imprudent and self-confident enemy, safe, as he imagined, under the

shield of Venice. But Pallavicino, having been trepanned into the

power of the pope, lost his head at Avignon. None of his writings have

fallen in my way; that most celebrated at the time, and not wholly

dissimilar in the conception to the News from Parnassus, was entitled

The Courier robbed; a series of imaginary letters which such a fiction

gave him a pretext for bringing together. Perhaps we may consider

Pallavicino as rather a counterpart to Jordano Bruno, in the satirical

character of the latter, than to Boccalini.[560]

[560] Corniani, viii., 205. Salfi, xiv., 46.

|Dictionary Della Crusca.|

8. The Italian language itself, grammatically considered, was still

assiduously cultivated. The Academicians of Florence published the

first edition of their celebrated Vocabolario della Crusca, in 1613.

It was avowedly founded on Tuscan principles, setting up the

fourteenth century as the Augustan period of the language, which they

disdained to call Italian; and though not absolutely excluding the

great writers of the sixteenth age whom Tuscany had not produced,

giving in general a manifest preference to their own. Italy has

rebelled against this tyranny of Florence, as she did, in the Social

War, against that of Rome. Her Lombard, and Romagnol, and Neapolitan

writers, have claimed the rights of equal citizenship, and fairly won

them in the field of literature. The Vocabulary itself was not

received as a legislative code. Beni assailed it by his Anti-Crusca

the same year; many invidiously published marginal notes to point out

the inaccuracies; and in the frequent revisions and enlargements of

this dictionary, the exclusive character it affected has, I believe,

been nearly lost.

|Grammatical works.--Buonmattei Bartoli.|

9. Buonmattei, himself a Florentine, was the first who completed an

extensive and methodical grammar, “developing,” says Tiraboschi, “the

whole economy and system of our language.” It was published entire,

after some previous impressions of parts, with the title, Della Lingua

Toscana, in 1643. This has been reckoned a standard work, both for its

authority, and for the clearness, precision, and elegance with which

it is written; but it betrays something of an academical and

Florentine spirit in the rigour of its grammatical criticism.[561]

Bartoli, a Ferrarese Jesuit, and a man of extensive learning, attacked

that dogmatic school, who were accustomed to proscribe common phrases

with a Non si può (It cannot be used), in a treatise entitled Il torto

ed il diritto del Non si può. His object was to justify many

expressions thus authoritatively condemned, by the examples of the

best writers. This book was a little later than the middle of the

century.[562]

[561] Tiraboschi, xi., 409. Salfi, xiii., 398.

[562] Corniani, vii., 259. Salfi, xiii., 417.

|Tassoni’s remarks on Petrarch.|

10. Petrarch had been the idol, in general, of the preceding age; and

above all, he was the peculiar divinity of the Florentines. But this

seventeenth century was in the productions of the mind a period of

revolutionary innovation; men dared to ask why, as well as what, they

ought to worship; and sometimes the same who rebelled against

Aristotle, as an infallible guide, were equally contumacious in

dealing with the great names of literature. Tassoni published in 1609

his Observations on the Poems of Petrarch. They are not written, as we

should now think, adversely to one whom he professes to honour above

all lyric poets in the world, and though his critical remarks are

somewhat minute, they seem hardly unfair. A writer like Petrarch,

whose fame has been raised so high by his style, is surely amenable to

this severity of examination. The finest sonnets Tassoni generally

extols, but gives a preference, on the whole, to the odes; which, even

if an erroneous judgment, cannot be called unfair upon the author of

both.[563] He produces many parallel passages from the Latin poems of

Petrarch himself, as well as from the ancients and from the earlier

Italians and Provençals. The manner of Tassoni is often humorous,

original, intrepid, satirical on his own times; he was a man of real

taste, and no servile worshipper of names.

[563] Tutte le rime, tutti i versi in generale del Petrarca lo

fecero poeta; ma le canzoni, per quanto a mi ne pare, furono

quelle, che poeta grande e famoso lo fecero, p. 46.

|Galileo’s remarks on Tasso.|

|Sforza Pallavicino.|

|And other critical writers.|

11. Galileo was less just in his observations upon Tasso. They are

written with severity and sometimes an insulting tone towards the

great poet, passing over generally the most beautiful verses, though

he sometimes bestows praise. The object is to point out the imitations

of Tasso from Ariosto, and his general inferiority. The Observations

on the Art of Writing by Sforza Pallavicino, the historian of the

council of Trent, published at Rome, 1646, is a work of general

criticism containing many good remarks. What he says of imitation is

worthy of being compared with Hurd; though he will be found not to

have analysed the subject with anything like so much acuteness, nor

was this to be expected in his age. Pallavicino has an ingenious

remark, that elegance of style is produced by short metaphors, or

_metaforette_ as he calls them, which give us a more lively

apprehension of an object than its proper name. This seems to mean

only single words in a figurative sense, as opposed to phrases of the

same kind. He writes in a pleasing manner, and is an accomplished

critic without pedantry. Salfi has given rather a long analysis of

this treatise.[564] The same writer, treading in the steps of Corniani

has extolled some Italian critics of this period, whose writings I

have never seen; Beni, author of a prolix commentary in Latin on the

poetics of Aristotle; Peregrino, not inferior, perhaps, to

Pallavicino, though less known, whose theories are just and deep, but

not expressed with sufficient perspicuity; and Fioretti, who assumed

the fictitious name of Udeno Nisieli, and presided over an academy at

Florence denominated the Apatisti. The Progymnasmi Poetici of this

writer, if we may believe Salfi, ascend to that higher theory of

criticism which deduces its rules, not from precedents or arbitrary

laws, but from the nature of the human mind, and has, in modern times,

been distinguished by the name of æsthetic.[565]

[564] Vol. xiii., p. 440.

[565] Corniani, vii., 156; Salfi, xiii., 426.

|Prolusiones of Strada.|

12. In the same class of polite letters as these Italian writings, we

may place the Prolusiones Academicæ of Famianus Strada. They are

agreeably written, and bespeak a cultivated taste. The best is the

sixth of the second book, containing the imitations of six Latin

poets, which Addison has made well known (as I hope) to every reader

in the 115th and 119th numbers of the Guardian. It is here that all

may judge of this happy and graceful fiction; but those who have read

the Latin imitations themselves, will perceive that Strada has often

caught the tone of the ancients with considerable felicity. Lucan and

Ovid are, perhaps, best counterfeited, Virgil not quite so well, and

Lucretius worst of the six. The other two are Statius and

Claudian.[566] In almost every instance the subject chosen is

appropriated to the characteristic peculiarities of the poet.

[566] A writer quoted in Blount’s Censura Autorum, p. 859,

praises the imitation of Claudian above the rest, but thinks all

excellent.

|Spanish prose. Gracian.|

13. The style of Gongora which deformed the poetry of Spain extended

its influence over prose. A writer named Gracian (it seems to be

doubtful which of two brothers, Lorenzo and Balthazar) excelled

Gongora himself in the affectation, the refinement, the obscurity of

his style. “The most voluminous of his works,” says Bouterwek, “bears

the affected title of El Criticón. It is an allegorical picture of the

whole course of human life divided into Crises, that is, sections

according to fixed points of view, and clothed in the formal garb of a

pompous romance. It is scarcely possible to open any page of this book

without recognising in the author a man who is in many respects far

from common, but who, from the ambition of being entirely uncommon in

thinking and writing, studiously and ingeniously, avoids nature and

good taste. A profusion of the most ambiguous subtleties expressed in

ostentatious language, are scattered throughout the work; and these

are the more offensive, in consequence of their union with the really

grand view of the relationship of man to nature and his Creator, which

forms the subject of the treatise. Gracian would have been an

excellent writer had not he so anxiously wished to be an extraordinary

one.”[567]

[567] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 533.

14. The writings of Gracian seem in general to be the quintessence of

bad taste. The worst of all, probably, is El Eroe, which is admitted

to be almost unintelligible by the number of far-fetched expressions,

though there is more than one French translation of it. El político

Fernando, a panegyric on Ferdinand the catholic, seems as empty as it

is affected and artificial. The style of Gracian is always pointed,

emphatic, full of that which looks like profundity or novelty, though

neither deep nor new. He seems to have written on a maxim he

recommends to the man of the world: “if he desires that all should

look up to him, let him permit himself to be known, but not to be

understood.”[568] His treatise entitled Agudeza y arte di ingenio is a

system of concetti, digested under their different heads, and selected

from Latin, Italian, and Spanish writers of that and the preceding

age. It is said in the Biographie Universelle that this work, though

too metaphysical, is useful in the critical history of literature.

Gracian obtained a certain degree of popularity in France and England.

[568] Si quiere que le veneren todos, permítase al conocimiento,

no a la comprehensión.

|French prose. Du Vair.|

15. The general taste of French writers in the sixteenth century, as

we have seen, was simple and lively, full of sallies of natural wit

and a certain archness of observation, but deficient in those higher

qualities of language which the study of the ancients had taught men

to admire. In public harangues, in pleadings, and in sermons, these

characteristics of the French manner were either introduced out of

place, or gave way to a tiresome pedantry. Du Vair was the first who

endeavoured to bring in a more elaborate and elevated diction. Nor was

this confined to the example he gave. In 1607, he published a treatise

on French eloquence, and on the causes through which it had remained

at so low a point. This work relates chiefly to the eloquence of the

bar, or at least that of public speakers, and the causes which he

traces are chiefly such as would operate on that kind alone. But some

of his observations are applicable to style in the proper sense; and

his treatise has been reckoned the first which gave France the rules

of good writing, and the desire to practice them.[569] A modern critic

who censures the Latinisms of Du Vair’s style, admits that his

treatise on eloquence makes an epoch in the language.[570]

[569] Gibert, Jugemens des Savans sur les auteurs qui ont traité

de la rhétorique. This work is annexed to some editions of

Baillet. Goujet has copied or abridged Gibert, without distinct

acknowledgement, and not always carefully preserving the sense.

[570] Neufchateau, préface aux Œuvres de Pascal, p. 181.

|Balzac.|

|Character of his writings.|

16. A more distinguished æra, however, is dated from 1625, when the

letters of Balzac were published.[571] There had indeed been a few

intermediate works, which contributed, though now little known, to the

improvement of the language. Among these, the translation of Florus by

Coeffeteau was reckoned a masterpiece of French style, and Vaugelas

refers more frequently to this than to any other book. The French were

very strong in translations from the classical writers; and to this

they are certainly much indebted for the purity and correctness they

reached in their own language. These translators, however, could only

occupy a secondary place. Balzac himself is hardly read. “The polite

world,” it was said a hundred years since, “knows nothing now of these

works, which were once its delight.”[572] But his writings are not

formed to delight those, who wish either to be merry or wise, to laugh

or to learn; yet he has real excellencies, besides those which may be

deemed relative to the age in which he came. His language is polished,

his sentiments are just but sometimes common, the cadence of his

periods is harmonious, but too artificial and uniform; on the whole,

he approaches to the tone of a languid sermon, and leaves a tendency

to yawn. But in his time superficial truths were not so much

proscribed as at present; the same want of depth belongs to almost all

the moralists in Italian and in modern Latin. Balzac is a moralist

with a pure heart and a love of truth and virtue, somewhat alloyed by

the spirit of flattery towards persons, however he may declaim about

courts and courtiers in general, a competent erudition and a good deal

of observation of the world. In his Aristippe, addressed to Christina,

and consequently a late work, he deals much in political precepts and

remarks, some of which might be read with advantage. But he was

accused of borrowing his thoughts from the ancients, which the author

of an Apology for Balzac seems not wholly to deny. This apology indeed

had been produced by a book on the Conformity of the eloquence of M.

Balzac with that of the ancients.

[571] The same writer fixes on this as an epoch, and it was

generally admitted in the seventeenth century. The editor of

Balzac’s Works in 1665, says, after speaking of the unformed

state of the French language, full of provincial idioms and

incorrect phrases: M. de Balzac est venu en ce temps de confusion

et de désordre, où toutes les lectures qu’il faisoit, et toutes

les actions qu’il entendoit lui devoient être suspectes, où il

avoit à se défier de tous les maîtres et de tous les exemples; et

où il ne pouvoit arriver à son but qu’en s’éloignant de tous les

chemins battus, ni marcher dans la bonne route qu’après se l’être

ouverte à lui même. Il l’a ouverte en effet, et pour lui et pour

les autres; il y a fait entrer un grand nombre d’heureux génies,

dont il étoit le guide et le modèle: et si la France voit

aujourd’hui que ses écrivains sont plus polis et plus réguliers,

que ceux d’Espagne et d’Italie, il faut qu’elle en rende

l’honneur à ce grand homme, dont la mémoire lui doit être en

vénération.... La même obligation que nous avons a M. de Malherbe

pour la poésie, nous l’avons a M. de Balzac pour la prose; il lui

a prescrit des bornes et des régles; il lui a donné de la douceur

et de la force, il a montré que l’éloquence doit avoir des

accords, aussi bien que la musique, et il a sçu mêler si

adroitement cette diversité de sons et de cadences, qu’il n’est

point de plus délicieux concert que celui de ses paroles. C’est

en plaçant tous les mots avec tant d’ordre et de justesse qu’il

ne laisse rien de mol ni de foible dans son discours, &c. This

regard to the cadence of his periods is characteristic of Balzac.

It has not, in general, been much practised in France,

notwithstanding some splendid exceptions, especially in Bossuet.

Olivet observes, that it was the peculiar glory of Balzac to have

shown the capacity of the language for this rhythm. Hist. de

l’Acad. Française, p. 84. But has not Du Vair some claim also?

Neufchateau gives a much more limited eulogy of Balzac. Il avoit

pris à la lettre les reflections de Du Vair sur la trop grande

bassesse de notre éloquence. Il s’en forma une haute idée; mais

il se trompe d’abord dans l’application, car il porta dans le

style épistolaire qui doit être familier et leger, l’enflure

hyperbolique, la pompe, et le nombre, qui ne convient qu’aux

grandes déclamations et aux harangues oratoires.... Ce défaut de

Balzac contribua peut être à son succès; car le gout n’étoit pas

formé; mais il se corrigea dans la suite, et en parcourant son

recueil on s’aperçoit des progrès sensibles qu’il faisoit avec

l’age. Ce recueil si précieux pour l’histoire de notre

littérature a eu long temps une vogue extraordinaire. Nos plus

grands auteurs l’avoient bien étudié. Molière lui a emprunté

quelques idées.

[572] Goujet, i., 426.

|His letters.|

17. The letters of Balzac are in twenty-seven books; they begin in

1620 and end about 1653; the first portion having appeared in 1625.

“He passed all his life,” says Vigneul-Marville, “in writing letters,

without ever catching the right characteristics of that style.”[573]

This demands a peculiar ease and naturalness of expression, for want

of which they seem no genuine exponents of friendship or gallantry,

and hardly of polite manners. His wit was not free from pedantry, and

did not come from him spontaneously. Hence, he was little fitted to

address ladies, even the Rambouillets; and indeed he had acquired so

laboured and artificial a way of writing letters, that even those to

his sister, though affectionate, smell too much of the lamp. His

advocates admit that they are to be judged rather by the rules of

oratorical than epistolary composition.

[573] Mélanges de Littérature, vol. i., p. 126. He adds, however,

that Balzac had “un talent particulier pour embellir notre

langue.” The writer whom I quote under the name of

Vigneul-Marville which he assumed was D’Argonne, a Benedictine of

Rouen.

18. In the moral dissertations, such as that entitled the Prince, this

elaborate manner is of course not less discernible, but not so

unpleasant or out of place. Balzac has been called the father of the

French language, the master and model of the great men who have

followed him. But it is confessed by all that he wanted the fine taste

to regulate his style according to the subject. Hence, he is pompous

and inflated upon ordinary topics; and in a country so quick to seize

the ridiculous as his own, not all his nobleness, purity, and vigour

of style, not the passages of eloquence which we often find, have been

sufficient to redeem him from the sarcasms of those who have had more

power to amuse. The stateliness, however, of Balzac is less offensive

and extravagant than the affected intensity of language which

distinguishes the style of the present age on both sides of the

Channel, and which is in fact a much worse modification of the same

fault.

|Voiture.--Hotel Rambouillet.|

19. A contemporary and rival of Balzac, though very unlike in most

respects, was Voiture. Both one and the other were received with

friendship and admiration in a celebrated society of Paris, the first

which, on this side of the Alps, united the aristocracy of rank and of

genius in one circle, that of the Hotel Rambouillet. Catherine de

Vivonne, widow of the Marquis de Rambouillet, was the owner of this

mansion. It was frequented, during the long period of her life, by all

that was distinguished in France, by Richelieu and Condé, as much as

by Corneille, and a long host of inferior men of letters. The heiress

of this family, Julie d’Angennes, beautiful and highly accomplished,

became the central star of so bright a galaxy. The love of

intellectual attainments, both in mother and daughter, the sympathy

and friendship they felt for those who displayed them, as well as

their moral worth, must render their names respectable; but these were

in some measure sullied by false taste and what we may consider an

habitual affectation even in their conduct. We can scarcely give

another name to the caprice of Julia, who, in the fashion of romance,

compelled the Duke of Montausier to carry on a twelve years’

courtship, and only married him in the decline of her beauty. This

patient lover, himself one of the most remarkable men in the court of

Louis XIV., had many years before presented her with what has been

called The Garland of Julia, a collection to which the poets and wits

of Paris had contributed. Every flower, represented in a drawing, had

its appropriate little poem, and all conspired to the praise of Julia.

20. Voiture is chiefly known by his letters; his other writings, at

least, are inferior. These begin about 1627, and are addressed to

Madame de Rambouillet and to several other persons of both sexes.

Though much too laboured and affected, they are evidently the original

type of the French epistolary school, including those in England who

have formed themselves upon it. Pope very frequently imitated Voiture,

Walpole not so much in his general correspondence, but he knew how to

fall into it. The object was to say what meant little with the utmost

novelty in the mode, and with the most ingenious compliment to the

person addressed; so that he should admire himself, and admire the

writer. They are, of course, very tiresome after a short time; yet

their ingenuity is not without merit. Balzac is more solemn and

dignified, and it must be owned that he has more meaning. Voiture

seems to have fancied that good sense spoils a man of wit. But he has

not so much wit as _esprit_; and his letters serve to exemplify

the meaning of that word. Pope, in addressing ladies, was nearly the

ape of Voiture. It was unfortunately thought necessary, in such a

correspondence, either to affect despairing love, which was to express

itself with all possible gaiety, or where love was too presumptuous,

as with the Rambouillets, to pour out a torrent of nonsensical

flattery, which was to be rendered tolerable by far-fetched turns of

thought. Voiture has the honour of having rendered this style

fashionable. But if the bad taste of others had not perverted his own,

Voiture would have been a good writer. His letters, especially those

written from Spain, are sometimes truly witty, and always vivacious.

Voltaire, who speaks contemptuously of Voiture, might have been glad

to have the author of some of his jeux d’esprit; that, for example,

addressed to the Prince of Condé in the character of a pike, founded

on a game where the Prince had played that fish. We should remember

also, that Voiture held his place in good society upon the tacit

condition that he should always strive to be witty.[574]

[574] Nothing, says Olivet, could be more opposite than Balzac

and Voiture. L’un se portoit toujours au sublime, l’autre

toujours au délicat. L’un avoit une imagination enjouée, qui

faisoit prendre à toutes ses pensées un air de galanterie. L’un

même lorsqu’il vouloit plaisanter, étoit toujours grave; l’autre,

dans les occasions même sérieuses, trouvoit à rire. Hist. de

l’Académie, p. 83.

|Establishment of French Academy.|

21. But the Hotel Rambouillet, with its false theories of taste

derived in a great measure from the romances of Scudery and

Calprenede, and encouraged by the agreeably artificial manner of

Voiture, would have produced, in all probability, but a transient

effect. A far more important event was the establishment of the French

Academy. France was ruled by a great minister who loved her glory and

his own. This, indeed, has been common to many statesmen, but it was a

more peculiar honour to Richelieu, that he felt the dignity which

letters confer on a nation. He was himself not deficient in literary

taste; his epistolary style is manly and not without elegance; he

wrote theology in his own name, and history in that of Mezeray; but,

what is most to the present purpose, his remarkable fondness for the

theatre led him not only to invent subjects for other poets, but, as

it has been believed, to compose one forgotten tragi-comedy, Mirame,

without assistance.[575] He availed himself fortunately of an

opportunity which almost every statesman would have disregarded, to

found the most illustrious institution in the annals of polite

literature.

[575] Fontenelle, Hist. du Thèatre, p. 96.

22. The French Academy sprang from a private society of men of letters

at Paris, who, about the year 1629, agreed to meet once a week, as at

an ordinary visit, conversing on all subjects and especially on

literature. Such among them as were authors communicated their works,

and had the advantage of free and fair criticism. This continued for

three or four years with such harmony and mutual satisfaction, that

the old men, who remembered this period, says their historian,

Pelisson, looked back upon it as a golden age. They were but nine in

number, of whom Gombauld and Chapelain are the only names by any means

famous, and their meetings were at first very private. More by degrees

were added, among others Boisrobert, a favourite of Richelieu, who

liked to hear from him the news of the town. The Cardinal, pleased

with the account of this society, suggested their public

establishment. This, it is said, was unpleasing to every one of them,

and some proposed to refuse it; but the consideration that the offers

of such a man were not to be slighted overpowered their modesty; and

they consented to become a royal institution. They now enlarged their

numbers, created officers, and began to keep registers of their

proceedings. These records commence on March 13, 1634, and are the

basis of Pelisson’s history. The name of French Academy was chosen

after some deliberation. They were established by letters patent in

January, 1635; which the parliament of Paris enregistered with great

reluctance, requiring not only a letter from Richelieu, but an express

order from the king; and when this was completed in July, 1637, it was

with a singular proviso that the Academy should meddle with nothing

but the embellishment and improvement of the French language, and such

books as might be written by themselves, or by others who should

desire their interference. This learned body of lawyers had some

jealousy of the innovations of Richelieu; and one of them said it

reminded him of the satire of Juvenal, where the senate, after ceasing

to bear its part in public affairs, was consulted about the sauce for

a turbot.[576]

[576] Pelisson, Hist. de l’Acadèmie Française.

|Its objects and constitution.|

23. The professed object of the Academy was to purify the language

from vulgar, technical, or ignorant usages, and to establish a fixed

standard. The Academicians undertook to guard scrupulously the

correctness of their own works, examining the arguments, the method,

the style, the structure of each particular word. It was proposed by

one that they should swear not to use any word which had been rejected

by a plurality of votes. They soon began to labour in their vocation,

always bringing words to the test of good usage, and deciding

accordingly. These decisions are recorded in their registers. Their

number was fixed by the letters patent at forty, having a director,

chancellor, and secretary; the two former changed every two,

afterwards every three months, the last chosen for life. They

read discourses weekly; which by the titles of some that Pelisson has

given us, seem rather trifling and in the style of the Italian

Academies; but this practise was soon disused. Their more important

and ambitious occupations were to compile a dictionary and a grammar:

Chapelain drew up the scheme of the former, in which it was

determined, for the sake of brevity, to give no quotations, but to

form it from about twenty-six good authors in prose, and twenty in

verse. Vaugelas was entrusted with the chief direction of this work.

|It publishes a critique on the Cid.|

24. The Academy was subjected in its very infancy, to a severe trial

of that literary integrity without which such an institution can only

escape from being pernicious to the republic of letters, by becoming

too despicable and odious to produce mischief. On the appearance of

the Cid, Richelieu, who had taken up a strong prejudice against it,

insisted that the Academy should publish their opinion on this play.

The more prudent part of that body were very loth to declare

themselves at so early a period of their own existence; but the

Cardinal was not apt to take excuses; and a committee of three was

appointed to examine the Cid itself and the observations upon it which

Scudery had already published. Five months elapsed before the

Sentimens de l’Académie Française sur la Tragédie du Cid were made

public in November, 1637.[577] These are expressed with much respect

for Corneille, and profess to be drawn up with his assent, as well as

at the instance of Scudery. It has been not uncommon to treat this

criticism as a servile homage to power. But a perusal of it will not

lead us to confirm so severe a reproach. The Sentimens de l’Académie

are drawn up with great good sense and dignity. The spirit indeed of

critical orthodoxy is apparent; yet this was surely pardonable in an

age when the violation of rules had as yet produced nothing but such

pieces as those of Hardy. It in easy to sneer at Aristotle when we

have a Shakspeare; but Aristotle formed his rules on the practice of

Sophocles. The Academy could not have done better than by inculcating

the soundest rules of criticism, but they were a little too narrow in

their application. The particular judgments which they pass on each

scene of the play, as well as those on the style, seem for the most

part very just, and such as later critics have generally adopted; so

that we can really see little ground for the allegation of undue

compliance with the Cardinal’s prejudices, except in the frigid tone

of their praise, and in their omission to proclaim that a great

dramatic genius had arisen in France.[578] But this is so much the

common vice or blindness of critics, that it may have sprung less from

baseness, than from a fear to compromise their own superiority by

vulgar admiration. The Academy had great pretensions, and Corneille

was not yet the Corneille of France and of the world.

[577] Pelisson. The printed edition bears the date of 1638.

[578] They conclude by saying that in spite of the faults of this

play, la naïveté et la véhémence de les passions, la force et la

délicatesse de plusieurs de ses pensées, et cet agrément

inexplicable qui se mêle dans tous ses défauts lui ont acquis un

rang considérable entre les poèmes Français de ce genre qui ont

le plus donné de satisfaction. Si l’auteur ne doit pas toute sa

réputation à son mérite il ne la doit pas toute à son bonheur, et

la nature lui a été assez libérale pour excuser la fortune si

elle lui a été prodigue.

The Academy justly, in my opinion, blame Corneille for making

Chimène consent to marry Rodrigue the same day that he had killed

her father. Cela surpasse toute sorte de créance, et ne peut

vraisemblablement tomber dans l’ame non seulement d’une sage

fille, mais d’une qui seroit le plus dépouillée d’honneur et

d’humanité, &c., p. 49.

|Vaugelas’s remarks on the French language.|

25. Gibert, Goujet, and other writers enumerate several works on the

grammar of the French language in this period. But they were

superseded, and we may almost say that an æra was made in the national

literature, by the publication of Vaugelas, Rémarques sur la Langue

Française, in 1649. Thomas Corneille, who, as well as Patru, published

notes on Vaugelas, observes that the language has only been written

with politeness since the appearance of these remarks. They were not

at first received with general approbation, and some even in later

times thought them too scrupulous; but they gradually became of

established authority. Vaugelas is always clear, modest, and ingenuous

in stating his opinion. His remarks are 547 in number, no gross fault

being noticed, nor any one which is not found in good authors. He

seldom mentions those whom he censures. His test of correct language

is the manner of speaking in use with the best part (la plus saine

partie) of the court, conformably with the manner of writing in the

best part of contemporary authors. But though we must have recourse to

good authors in order to establish an indisputably good usage, yet the

court contributes incomparably more than books; the consent of

the latter being as it were the seal and confirmation of what is

spoken at court, and deciding what is there doubtful. And those who

study the best authors get rid of many faults common at court, and

acquire a peculiar purity of style. None, however, can dispense with a

knowledge of what is reckoned good language at court, since much that

is spoken there will hardly be found in books. In writing, it is

otherwise, and he admits that the study of good authors will enable us

to write well, though we shall write still better by knowing how to

speak well. Vaugelas tells us that his knowledge was acquired by long

practice at court, and by the conversation of Cardinal Perron and of

Coeffeteau.

|La Mothe le Vayer.|

26. La Mothe le Vayer in his Considérations sur l’Eloquence Française,

1647, has endeavoured to steer a middle course between the old and the

new schools of French style, but with a marked desire to withstand the

latter. He blames Du Vair for the strange and barbarous words he

employs. He laughs also at the nicety of those who were beginning to

object to a number of common French words. One would not use the

conjunction Car; against which folly Le Vayer wrote a separate

treatise.[579] He defends the use of quotations in a different

language, which some purists in French style had in horror. But this

treatise seems not to contain much that is valuable, and it is very

diffuse.

[579] This was Gomberville, in whose immense romance, Polexandre,

it is said that this word only occurs three times; a discovery

which does vast honour to the person who took the pains to make

it.

|Legal speeches of Patru.|

27. Two French writers may be reckoned worthy of a place in this

chapter, who are, from the nature of their works, not generally known

out of their own country, and whom I cannot refer with absolute

propriety to this rather than to the ensuing period, except by a

certain character and manner of writing, which belongs more to the

antecedent than the later moiety of the seventeenth century. These

were two lawyers, Patru and Le Maistre. The pleadings of Patru appear

to me excellent in their particular line of forensic eloquence,

addressed to intelligent and experienced judges. They greatly resemble

what are called the private orations of Demosthenes, and those of

Lysias and Isæus, especially, perhaps, the last. No ambitious

ornament, no appeal to the emotions of the heart, no bold figures of

rhetoric are permitted in the Attic severity of this style; or, if

they ever occur, it is to surprise us as things rather uncommon in the

place where they appear than in themselves. Patru does not even employ

the exordium usual in speeches, but rushes instantaneously, though

always perspicuously, into his statement of the case. In the eyes of

many this is no eloquence at all, and it requires perhaps some taste

for legal reasoning to enter fully into its merit. But the Greek

orators are masters whom a modern lawyer need not blush to follow, and

to follow, as Patru did, in their respect for the tribunal they

addressed. They spoke to rather a numerous body of judges; but those

were Athenians, and, as we have reason to believe, the best and most

upright, the salt of that vicious city. Patru again spoke to the

parliament of Paris, men too well versed in the ways of law and

justice to be the dupes of tinkling sound. He is, therefore, plain,

lucid, well-arranged, but not emphatic or impetuous; the subjects of

his published speeches would not admit of such qualities; though Patru

is said to have employed on some occasions the burning words of the

highest oratory. His style has always been reckoned purely and rigidly

French; but I have been led rather to praise what has struck me in the

substance of his pleadings; which, whether read at this day in France

or not, are, I may venture to say, worthy to be studied by lawyers,

like those to which I have compared them, the strictly forensic

portion of Greek oratory. In some speeches of Patru which are more

generally praised, that on his own reception in the Academy, and one

complimentary to Christina, it has seemed to me that he falls very

short of his judicial style; the ornaments are common-place, and such

as belong to the panegyrical department of oratory, in all ages less

important and valuable than the other two. It should be added, that

Patru was not only one of the purest writers, but one of the best

critics whom France possessed.[580]

[580] Perrault says of Patru in his Hommes Illustres de France,

vol. ii., p. 66. Ses plaidoyers servent _encore aujourd’hui_ de

modèle pour écrire correctement en notre langue. Yet they were

not much above thirty years old--so much had the language

changed, as to rules of writing, within that time.

|And of Le Maistre.|

28. The forensic speeches of Le Maistre are more eloquent, in a

popular sense of the word, more ardent, more imaginative, than those

of Patru; the one addresses the judges alone, the other has a view to

the audience; the one seeks the success of his cause alone, the other,

that and his own glory together. The one will be more prized by the

lovers of legal reasoning, the other by the majority of mankind. The

one more resembles the orations of Demosthenes for his private

clients, the others those of Cicero. Le Maistre is fervid and

brilliant, he hurries us with him; in all his pleadings, warmth is his

first characteristic, and a certain elegance is the second. In the

power of statement, I do not perceive that he is inferior to Patru;

both are excellent. Wherever great moral or social topics, or

extensive views of history and human nature can be employed, Le

Maistre has the advantage. Both are concise, relatively to the common

verbosity of the bar; but Le Maistre has much more that might be

retrenched; not that it is redundant in expression, but unnecessary in

substance. This is owing to his ambitious display of general

erudition; his quotations are too frequent and too ornamental, partly

drawn from the ancients, but more from the fathers. Ambrose, in fact,

Jerome and Augustin, Chrysostom, Basil, and Gregory, were the models

whom the writers of this age were accustomed to study; and hence, they

are often, and Le Maistre among the rest, too apt to declaim where

they should prove, and to use arguments from analogy, rather striking

to the common hearer, than likely to weigh much with a tribunal. He

has less simplicity, less purity of taste than Patru; his animated

language would, in our courts, be frequently effective with a jury,

but would seem too indefinite and common-place to the judges; we

should crowd to hear Le Maistre, we should be compelled to decide with

Patru. They are both, however, very superior advocates, and do great

honour to the French bar.

|Improvement in English style.|

29. A sensible improvement in the general style of English writers had

come on before the expiration of the sixteenth century; the rude and

rough phrases, sometimes requiring a glossary, which lie as spots of

rust on the pages of Latimer, Grafton, Aylmer, or even Ascham, had

been chiefly polished away; if we meet in Sydney, Hooker, or the prose

of Spenser, with obsolete expressions or forms, we find none that are

unintelligible, none that give us offence. But to this next period

belong most of those whom we commonly reckon our old English writers;

men often of such sterling worth for their sense, that we might read

them with little regard to their language, yet, in some instances at

least, possessing much that demands praise in this respect. They are

generally nervous and effective, copious to redundancy in their

command of words, apt to employ what seemed to them ornament with much

imagination rather than judicious taste, yet seldom degenerating into

common-place and indefinite phraseology. They have, however, many

defects; some of them, especially the most learned, are full of

pedantry, and deform their pages by an excessive and preposterous

mixture of Latinisms unknown before;[581] at other times we are

disgusted by colloquial and even vulgar idioms or proverbs; nor is it

uncommon to find these opposite blemishes not only in the same author,

but in the same passages. Their periods, except in a very few, are

ill-constructed and tediously prolonged; their ears (again with some

exceptions) seem to have been insensible to the beauty of rhythmical

prose; grace is commonly wanting, and their notion of the artifices of

style, when they thought at all about them, was not congenial to our

own language. This may be deemed a general description of the English

writers under James and Charles; we shall now proceed to mention some

of the most famous, and who may, in a certain degree, be deemed to

modify this censure.

[581] In Pratt’s edition of Bishop Hall’s works, we have a

glossary of obsolete or unusual words employed by him. They

amount to more than 1,100, the greater part being of Latin or

Greek origin; some are Gallicisms.

|Earl of Essex.|

30. I will begin with a passage of very considerable beauty, which is

here out of its place, since it was written in the year 1598. It is

found in the Apology for the Earl of Essex, published among the works

of Lord Bacon, and passing, I suppose, commonly for his. It seems,

nevertheless, in my judgment, far more probably genuine. We have

nowhere in our early writers a flow of words so easy and graceful, a

structure so harmonious, a series of antitheses so spirited without

affectation, an absence of quaintness, pedantry, and vulgarity, so

truly gentleman-like, a paragraph so worthy of the most brilliant man

of his age. This could not have come from Bacon, who never divested

himself of a certain didactic formality, even if he could have

counterfeited that chivalrous generosity which it was not in his

nature to feel. It is the language of a soldier’s heart, with the

unstudied grace of a noble courtier.[582]

[582] “A word for my friendship with the chief men of action, and

favour generally to the men of war; and then I come to their main

objection, which is my crossing of the treaty in hand. For most

of them that are accounted the chief men of action, I do confess,

I do entirely love them. They have been my companions both abroad

and at home; some of them began the wars with me, most have had

place under me, and many have had me a witness of their rising

from captains, lieutenants, and private men, to those charges,

which since by their virtue they have obtained. Now that I have

tried them, I would choose them for friends, if I had them not;

before I had tried them, God, by his providence, chose them for

me. I love them for mine own sake; for I find sweetness in their

conversation, strong assistance in their employments with me, and

happiness in their friendship. I love them for their virtues’

sake, and for their greatness of mind (for little minds, though

never so full of virtue, can be but a little virtuous); and for

their great understanding; for to understand little things, or

things not of use, is little better than to understand nothing at

all. I love them for their affections; for self-loving men love

ease, pleasure, and profit; but they that love pains, danger, and

fame, show that they love public profit more than themselves. I

love them for my country’s sake; for they are England’s best

armour of defence and weapons of offence. If we may have peace,

they have purchased it; if we must have war, they must manage it.

Yet, while we are doubtful and in treaty, we must value ourselves

by what may be done, and the enemy will value us by what hath

been done by our chief men of action.

“That generally I am affected to the men of war, it should not

seem strange to any reasonable man. Every man doth love them of

his own profession. The grave judges favour the students of the

law; the reverend bishops the labourers in the ministry; and I

(since her Majesty hath yearly used my service in her late

actions) must reckon myself in the number of her men of war.

Before, action providence makes me cherish them for what they can

do; in action, necessity makes me value them for the service they

do; and, after action, experience and thankfulness makes me love

them for the service they have done.”

|Knolles’s History of the Turks.|

31. Knolles, already known by a spirited translation of Bodin’s

Commonwealth, published in 1610 a copious History of the Turks,

bringing down his narrative to the most recent times. Johnson in a

paper of the Rambler has given him the superiority over all English

historians. “He has displayed all the excellencies that narration can

admit. His style, though somewhat obscured by time, and vitiated by

false wit, is pure, nervous, elevated, and clear.... Nothing could

have sunk this author into obscurity but the remoteness and barbarity

of the people whose story he relates. It seldom happens that all

circumstances concur to happiness or fame. The nation which produced

this great historian has the grief of seeing his genius employed upon

a foreign and uninteresting subject; and that writer who might have

secured perpetuity to his name by a history of his own country, has

exposed himself to the danger of oblivion by recounting enterprises

and revolutions of which none desire to be informed.”[583] The

subject, however, appeared to Knolles, and I know not how we can say

erroneously, one of the most splendid he could have selected. It was

the rise and growth of a mighty nation, second only to Rome in the

constancy of success, and in the magnitude of empire; a nation fierce

and terrible, the present scourge of half Christendom, and though from

our remoteness not very formidable to ourselves, still one of which

not the bookish man in his closet or the statesman in council had

alone heard, but the smith at his anvil, and the husbandman at his

plough. A long decrepitude of the Turkish empire on one hand, and our

frequent alliance with it on the other, have obliterated the

apprehensions and interests of every kind which were awakened

throughout Europe by its youthful fury and its mature strength. The

subject was also new in England, yet rich in materials; various, in

comparison with ordinary history, though not perhaps so fertile of

philosophical observation as some others, and furnishing many

occasions for the peculiar talents of Knolles. These were displayed,

not in depth of thought, or copiousness of collateral erudition, but

in a style and in a power of narration which Johnson has not too

highly extolled. His descriptions are vivid and animated;

circumstantial, but not to feebleness; his characters are drawn with a

strong pencil. It is indeed difficult to estimate the merits of an

historian very accurately without having before our eyes his original

sources: he may probably have translated much that we admire, and he

had shown that he knew how to translate. In the style of Knolles there

is sometimes, as Johnson has hinted, a slight excess of desire to make

every phrase effective; but he is exempt from the usual blemishes of

his age; and his command of the language is so extensive, that we

should not err in placing him among the first of our elder writers.

Comparing as a specimen of Knolles’s manner, his description of the

execution of Mustapha, son of Solyman, with that given by Robertson,

where the latter historian has been as circumstantial as his

limits would permit, we shall perceive that the former paints better

his story, and deepens better its interest.[584]

[583] Rambler, No. 122.

[584] Knolles, p. 515. Robertson, book xi.

|Raleigh’s History of the World.|

32. Raleigh’s History of the World is a proof of the respect for

laborious learning that had long distinguished Europe. We should

expect from the prison-hours of a soldier, a courtier, a busy

intriguer in state affairs, a poet and man of genius, something well

worth our notice; but hardly a prolix history of the ancient world,

hardly disquisitions on the site of Paradise and the travels of Cain.

These are probably translated with little alteration from some of the

learned writings of the Continent; they are by much the least valuable

portion of Raleigh’s work. The Greek and Roman story is told more

fully and exactly than by any earlier English author, and with a plain

eloquence, which has given this book a classical reputation in our

language, though from its length and the want of that critical sifting

of facts which we now justly demand, it is not greatly read. Raleigh

has intermingled political reflections, and illustrated his history by

episodes from modern times, which perhaps are now the most interesting

passages. It descends only to the second Macedonian war; the

continuation might have been more generally valuable; but either the

death of Prince Henry, as Raleigh himself tells us, or the new schemes

of ambition which unfortunately opened upon his eyes, prevented the

execution of the large plan he had formed. There is little now

obsolete in the words of Raleigh, nor, to any great degree, in his

turn of phrase; the periods, when pains have been taken with them,

show that artificial structure which we find in Sydney and Hooker; he

is less pedantic than most of his contemporaries, seldom low, never

affected.[585]

[585] Raleigh’s History was so little known, that Warburton, in

the preface to his Julian, took from it a remarkable passage

without acknowledgment; and Dr. Parr, though a man of very

extensive reading, extolled it as Warburton’s not knowing, what

he afterwards discovered, the original source. The passage is as

follows in Raleigh, Warburton of course having altered some of

the expressions. “We have left it (the Roman empire) flourishing

in the middle of the field, having rooted up or cut down all that

kept it from the eyes and admiration of the world. But after some

continuance, it shall begin to lose the beauty it had; the storms

of ambition shall beat her great boughs and branches one against

another; her leaves shall fall off, her limbs wither, and a

rabble of barbarous nations enter the field and cut her down.”

Raleigh’s History, ad finem.

Notwithstanding the praise that has been bestowed on this

sentence, it is open to some censure; the simile and subject are

too much confounded; a rabble of barbarous nations might be

required to subvert the Roman empire, but make an odd figure in

cutting down a tree. The rhythm and spirit indeed are admirable.

|Daniel’s History of England.|

33. Daniel’s History of England from the Conquest to the Reign of

Edward III., published in 1618, is deserving of some attention on

account of its language. It is written with a freedom from all

stiffness, and a purity of style which hardly any other work of so

early a date exhibits. These qualities are indeed so remarkable that

it would require a good deal of critical observation to distinguish it

even from writings of the reign of Anne; and where it differs from

them (I speak only of the secondary class of works, which have not

much individuality of manner), it is by a more select idiom, and by an

absence of the Gallicism or vulgarity which are often found in that

age. It is true that the merits of Daniel are chiefly negative; he is

never pedantic or antithetical or low, as his contemporaries were apt

to be; but his periods are ill constructed, he has little vigour or

elegance; and it is only by observing how much pains he must have

taken to reject phrases which were growing obsolete, that we give him

credit for having done more than follow the common stream of easy

writing. A slight tinge of archaism, and a certain majesty of

expression, relatively to colloquial usage, were thought by Bacon and

Raleigh congenial to an elevated style; but Daniel, a gentleman of the

king’s household, wrote as the court spoke, and his facility would be

pleasing if his sentences had a less negligent structure. As an

historian, he has recourse only to common authorities; but his

narration is fluent and perspicuous, with a regular vein of good

sense, more the characteristic of his mind, both in verse and prose,

than any commanding vigour.

|Bacon.|

34. The style of Bacon has an idiosyncracy which we might expect from

his genius. It can rarely indeed happen, and only in men of secondary

talents, that the language they use is not, by its very choice and

collocation, as well as its meaning, the representative of an

individuality that distinguishes their turn of thought. Bacon is

elaborate, sententious, often witty, often metaphorical; nothing could

be spared; his analogies are generally striking and novel; his

style is clear, precise, forcible; yet there is some degree of

stiffness about it, and in mere language he is inferior to Raleigh.

The History of Henry VII., admirable as many passages are, seems to be

written rather too ambitiously, and with too great an absence of

simplicity.

|Milton.|

35. The polemical writings of Milton, which chiefly fall within this

period, contain several bursts of his splendid imagination and

grandeur of soul. They are, however, much inferior to the

Areopagitica, or Plea for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. Many

passages in this famous tract are admirably eloquent; an intense love

of liberty and truth glows through it, the majestic soul of Milton

breathes such high thoughts as had not been uttered before; yet even

here he frequently sinks in a single instant, as is usual with our old

writers, from his highest flights to the ground; his intermixture of

familiar with learned phraseology is unpleasing, his structure is

affectedly elaborate, and he seldom reaches any harmony. If he turns

to invective, as sometimes in this treatise, and more in his Apology

for Smectymnuus, it is mere ribaldrous vulgarity blended with

pedantry; his wit is always poor and without ease. An absence of

idiomatic grace, and an use of harsh inversions violating the rules of

the language, distinguish, in general, the writings of Milton, and

require, in order to compensate them, such high beauties as will

sometimes occur.

|Clarendon.|

36. The History of Clarendon may be considered as belonging rather to

this than to the second period of the century, both by the probable

date of composition and by the nature of its style. He is excellent in

everything that he has performed with care; his characters are

beautifully delineated, his sentiments have often a noble gravity

which the length of his periods, far too great in itself, seems to

befit; but in the general course of his narration he is negligent of

grammar and perspicuity, with little choice of words, and therefore

sometimes idiomatic without ease or elegance. The official papers on

the royal side, which are generally attributed to him, are written in

a masculine and majestic tone, far superior to those of the

parliament. The latter had, however, a writer who did them honour:

May’s History of the Parliament is a good model of genuine English; he

is plain, terse, and vigorous, never slovenly, though with few

remarkable passages, and is, in style as well as substance, a kind of

contrast to Clarendon.

|The Icon Basilice.|

37. The famous Icon Basilice, ascribed to Charles I., may deserve a

place in literary history. If we could trust its panegyrists, few

books in our language have done it more credit by dignity of sentiment

and beauty of style. It can hardly be necessary for me to express my

unhesitating conviction that it was solely written by Bishop Gauden,

who, after the Restoration, unequivocally claimed it as his own. The

folly and impudence of such a claim, if it could not be substantiated,

are not to be presumed as to any man of good understanding, fair

character, and high station, without stronger evidence than has been

alleged on the other side; especially when we find that those who had

the best means of inquiry, at a time when it seems impossible that the

falsehood of Gauden’s assertion should not have been demonstrated, if

it were false, acquiesced in his pretensions. We have very little to

place against this, except secondary testimony, vague, for the most

part, in itself, and collected by those whose veracity has not been

put to the test like that of Gauden.[586] The style, also, of the Icon

Basilice has been identified by Mr. Todd with that of Gauden, by the

use of several phrases, so peculiar that we can hardly conceive them

to have suggested themselves to more than one person. It is,

nevertheless, superior to his acknowledged writings. A strain of

majestic melancholy is well kept up; but the personated sovereign is

rather too theatrical for real nature, the language is too rhetorical

and amplified, the periods too artificially elaborated. None but

scholars and practised writers employ such a style as this.

[586] There is only one claimant, in a proper sense, for the Icon

Basilice, which is Gauden himself; the king neither appears by

himself or representative. And, though we may find several

instances of plagiarism in literary history (one of the grossest

being the publication by a Spanish friar, under another title, of

a book already in print with the name of Hyperius of Marpurg, its

real author), yet I cannot call to mind any, where a man known to

the world has asserted in terms his own authorship of a book not

written by himself, but universally ascribed to another, and

which had never been in his possession. A story is told, and, I

believe, truly, that a young man assumed the credit of

Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, while it was still anonymous. But

this is widely different from the case of the Icon Basilice. We

have had an interminable discussion as to the Letters of Junius.

But no one has ever claimed this derelict property to himself, or

told the world, I am Junius.

|Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.|

38. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy belongs, by its systematic

divisions and its accumulated quotations, to the class of mere

erudition; it seems, at first sight, like those tedious Latin folios,

into which scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries threw

the materials of their Adversaria, or common-place books, painfully

selected and arranged by the labour of many years. But writing,

fortunately, in English, and in a style not by any means devoid of

point and terseness, with much good sense and observation of men as

well as of books, and having also the skill of choosing his quotations

for their rareness, oddity, and amusing character, without losing

sight of their pertinence to the subject, he has produced a work of

which, as is well known, Johnson said, that it was the only one which

had ever caused him to leave his bed earlier than he had intended.

Johnson, who seems to have had some turn for the singularities of

learning, which fill the Anatomy of Melancholy, may perhaps have

raised the credit of Burton higher than his desert. He is clogged by

excess of reading, like others of his age, and we may peruse entire

chapters without finding more than a few lines that belong to himself.

This becomes a wearisome style, and, for myself, I have not found much

pleasure in glancing over the Anatomy of Melancholy. It may be added

that he has been a collector of stories far more strange than true,

from those records of figments, the old medical writers of the

sixteenth century, and other equally deceitful sources. Burton lived

at Oxford, and his volumes are apparently a great sweeping of

miscellaneous literature from the Bodleian library.

|Earle’s Characters.|

39. John Earle, after the Restoration bishop of Worcester, and then of

Salisbury, is author of “Microcosmographia, or a Piece of the Worlde

discovered in Essays and Characters,” published anonymously in 1628.

In some of these short characters, Earle is worthy of comparison with

La Bruyère; in others, perhaps the greater part, he has contented

himself with pictures of ordinary manners, such as the varieties of

occupation, rather than of intrinsic character, supply. In all,

however, we find an acute observation and a happy humour of

expression. The chapter entitled the Sceptic is best known; it is

witty, but an insult throughout on the honest searcher after truth,

which could have come only from one that was content to take up his

own opinions for ease or profit. Earle is always gay and quick to

catch the ridiculous, especially that of exterior appearances; his

style is short, describing well with a few words, but with much of the

affected quaintness of that age. It is one of those books which give

us a picturesque idea of the manners of our fathers at a period now

become remote, and for this reason it would deserve to be read.

|Overbury’s Characters.|

40. But the Microcosmography is not an original work in its plan or

mode of execution; it is a close imitation of the Characters of Sir

Thomas Overbury. They both belong to the favourite style of

apophthegm, in which every sentence is a point or a witticism. Yet the

entire character so delineated produces a certain effect; it is a

Dutch picture, a Gerard Dow, somewhat too elaborate. Earle has more

natural humour than Overbury, and hits his mark more neatly; the other

is more satirical, but often abusive and vulgar. The “Fair and Happy

Milk-maid,” often quoted, is the best of his characters. The wit is

often trivial and flat; the sentiments have nothing in them general,

or worthy of much resemblance; praise is only due to the graphic skill

in delineating character. Earle is as clearly the better, as Overbury

is the more original, writer.

|Jonson’s Discoveries.|

41. A book by Ben Jonson, entitled “Timber, or Discoveries made upon

Men and Matter,” is altogether miscellaneous, the greater part being

general moral remarks, while another portion deserves notice as the

only book of English criticism in the first part of the seventeenth

century. The observations are unconnected, judicious, sometimes witty,

frequently severe. The style is what was called pregnant, leaving much

to be filled up by the reader’s reflection. Good sense and a vigorous

manner of grappling with every subject will generally be found in

Jonson, but he does not reach any very profound criticism. His English

Grammar is said by Gifford to have been destroyed in the conflagration

of his study. What we have, therefore, under that name is, he thinks,

to be considered as properly the materials of a more complete work

that is lost. We have, as I apprehend, no earlier grammar upon so

elaborate a plan; every rule is illustrated by examples, almost to

redundance; but he is too copious on what is common to other

languages, and perhaps not full enough as to our peculiar idiom.

Nothing else deserving of the slightest notice can be added to this

book of Jonson.

SECT. II.

ON FICTION.

_Cervantes--French Romances--Calprenede--Scuderi--Latin and English

Works of Fiction._

|Publication of Don Quixote.|

42. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605. We have no

reason, I believe, to suppose that it was written long before. It

became immediately popular; and the admiration of the world raised up

envious competitors, one of whom, Avellenada, published a continuation

in a strain of invective against the author. Cervantes, who cannot be

imagined to have ever designed the leaving his romance in so

unfinished a state, took time about the second part, which did not

appear till 1615.

|Its reputation.|

43. Don Quixote is the only book in the Spanish language which can now

be said to possess much of an European reputation. It has, however,

enjoyed enough to compensate for the neglect of all the rest. It is to

Europe in general what Ariosto is to Italy, and Shakspeare to England;

the one book to which the slightest allusions may be made without

affectation, but not missed without discredit. Numerous translations

and countless editions of them, in every language, bespeak its

adaptation to mankind; no critic has been paradoxical enough to

withhold his admiration, no reader has ventured to confess a want of

relish for that in which the young and old, in every climate, have,

age after age, taken delight. They have doubtless believed that they

understood the author’s meaning; and, in giving the reins to the

gaiety that his fertile invention and comic humour inspired, never

thought of any deeper meaning than he announces, or delayed their

enjoyment for any metaphysical investigation of his plan.

|New views of its design.|

44. A new school of criticism, however, has of late years arisen in

Germany, acute, ingenious, and sometimes eminently successful in

philosophical, or, as they denominate it, æsthetic analysis of works

of taste, but gliding too much into refinement and conjectural

hypothesis, and with a tendency to mislead men of inferior capacities

for this kind of investigation into mere paradox and absurdity. An

instance is supplied, in my opinion, by some remarks of Bouterwek,

still more explicitly developed by Sismondi, on the design of

Cervantes in Don Quixote, and which have been repeated in other

publications. According to these writers, the primary idea is that of

a “man of elevated character, excited by heroic and enthusiastic

feelings to the extravagant pitch of wishing to restore the age of

chivalry; nor is it possible to form a more mistaken notion of this

work than by considering it merely as a satire, intended by the author

to ridicule the absurd passion for reading old romances.”[587] “The

fundamental idea of Don Quixote,” says Sismondi, “is the eternal

contrast between the spirit of poetry and that of prose. Men of an

elevated soul propose to themselves as the object of life to be the

defenders of the weak, the support of the oppressed, the champions of

justice and innocence. Like Don Quixote, they find on every side the

image of the virtues they worship; they believe that disinterestedness,

nobleness, courage, in short, knight errantry, are still prevalent;

and with no calculation of their own powers, they expose themselves

for an ungrateful world, they offer themselves as a sacrifice to the

laws and rules of an imaginary state of society.”[588]

[587] Bouterwek, p. 334.

[588] Littérature du Midi, vol. iii., p. 339.

45. If this were a true representation of the scheme of Don Quixote,

we cannot wonder that some persons should, as M. Sismondi tells us

they do, consider it as the most melancholy book that has ever been

written. They consider it also, no doubt, one of the most immoral, as

chilling and pernicious in its influence on the social converse of

mankind, as the Prince of Machiavel is on their political intercourse.

“Cervantes,” he proceeds, “has shown us in some measure the vanity of

greatness of soul and the delusion of heroism. He has drawn in Don

Quixote a perfect man (un homme accompli), who is, nevertheless, the

constant object of ridicule. Brave beyond the fabled knights he

imitates, disinterested, honourable, generous, the most faithful and

respectful of lovers, the best of masters, the most accomplished and

well educated of gentlemen, all his enterprises end in discomfiture to

himself, and in mischief to others.” M. Sismondi descants upon the

perfections of the knight of La Mancha with a gravity which is not

quite easy for his readers to preserve.

|Probably erroneous.|

46. It might be answered by a phlegmatic observer, that a mere

enthusiasm for doing good, if excited by vanity, and not accompanied

by common sense, will seldom be very serviceable to ourselves

or to others; that men who, in their heroism and care for the

oppressed, would throw open the cages of lions, and set galley-slaves

at liberty, not forgetting to break the limbs of harmless persons whom

they mistake for wrongdoers, are a class of whom Don Quixote is the

real type; and that the world being much the worse for such heroes, it

might not be immoral, notwithstanding their benevolent enthusiasm, to

put them out of countenance by a little ridicule. This, however, is

not, as I conceive, the primary aim of Cervantes; nor do I think that

the exhibition of one great truth, as the predominant, but concealed,

moral of a long work, is in the spirit of his age. He possessed a very

thoughtful mind and a profound knowledge of humanity; yet the

generalisation which the hypothesis of Bouterwek and Sismondi requires

for the leading conception of Don Quixote, besides its being a little

inconsistent with the valorous and romantic character of its author,

belongs to a more advanced period of philosophy than his own. It will,

at all events, I presume, be admitted that we cannot reason about Don

Quixote except from the book, and I think it may be shown in a few

words that these ingenious writers have been chiefly misled by some

want of consistency which circumstances produced in the author’s

delineation of his hero.

|Difference between the two parts.|

47. In the first chapter of this romance Cervantes, with a few strokes

of a great master, sets before us the pauper gentleman, an early riser

and keen sportsman, who, “when he was idle, which was most part of the

year,” gave himself up to reading books of chivalry till he lost his

wits. The events that follow are in every one’s recollection; his

lunacy consists, no doubt, only in one idea; but this is so absorbing

that it perverts the evidence of his senses, and predominates in all

his language. It is to be observed, therefore, in relation to the

nobleness of soul ascribed to Don Quixote, that every sentiment he

utters is borrowed with a punctilious rigour from the romances of his

library; he resorts to them on every occasion for precedents; if he is

intrepidly brave, it is because his madness and vanity have made him

believe himself unconquerable; if he bestows kingdoms, it is because

Amadis would have done the same; if he is honourable, courteous, a

redresser of wrongs, it is in pursuance of these prototypes, from

whom, except that he seems rather more scrupulous in chastity, it is

his only boast not to diverge. Those who talk of the exalted character

of Don Quixote, seem really to forget that, on these subjects, he has

no character at all; he is the echo of romance; and to praise him is

merely to say, that the tone of chivalry, which these productions

studied to keep up, and, in the hands of inferior artists, foolishly

exaggerated, was full of moral dignity, and has, in a subdued degree

of force, modelled the character of a man of honour in the present

day. But throughout the first two volumes of Don Quixote, though in a

few unimportant passages he talks rationally, I cannot find more than

two in which he displays any other knowledge or strength of mind than

the original delineation of the character would lead us to expect.

48. The case is much altered in the last two volumes. Cervantes had

acquired an immense popularity, and perceived the opportunity, of

which he had already availed himself, that this romance gave for

displaying his own mind. He had become attached to a hero who had made

him illustrious, and suffered himself to lose sight of the clear

outline he had once traced for Quixote’s personality. Hence, we find

in all this second part that, although the lunacy as to knights errant

remains unabated, he is, on all other subjects, not only rational in

the low sense of the word, but clear, acute, profound, sarcastic,

coolheaded. His philosophy is elevated but not enthusiastic, his

imagination is poetical, but it is restrained by strong sense. There

are, in fact, two Don Quixotes; one, whom Cervantes first designed to

draw, the foolish gentleman of La Mancha, whose foolishness had made

him frantic; the other, a highly gifted, accomplished model of the

best chivalry, trained in all the court, the camp, or the college

could impart, but scathed in one portion of his mind by an

inexplicable visitation of monomania. One is inclined to ask why this

Don Quixote, who is Cervantes, should have been more likely to lose

his intellects by reading romances than Cervantes himself. As a matter

of bodily disease, such an event is doubtless possible; but nothing

can be conceived more improper for fiction, nothing more incapable of

affording a moral lesson than the insanity which arises wholly from

disease. Insanity is, in no point of view, a theme for ridicule; and

this is an inherent fault of the romance (for those who have imagined

that Cervantes has not rendered Quixote ridiculous have a strange

notion of the word); but the thoughtlessness of mankind, rather than

their insensibility, for they do not connect madness with misery,

furnishes some apology for the first two volumes. In proportion as we

perceive below the veil of mental delusion a noble intellect, we feel

a painful sympathy with its humiliation; the character becomes more

complicated and interesting, but has less truth and naturalness; an

objection which might also be made, comparatively speaking, to the

incidents in the latter volumes, wherein I do not find the admirable

probability that reigns through the former. But this contrast of

wisdom and virtue with insanity in the same subject would have been

repulsive in the primary delineation; as I think any one may judge by

supposing that Cervantes had, in the first chapter, drawn such a

picture of Quixote as Bouterwek and Sismondi have drawn for him.

49. I must, therefore, venture to think as, I believe, the world has

generally thought for two centuries, that Cervantes had no more

profound aim than he proposes to the reader. If the fashion of reading

bad romances of chivalry perverted the taste of his contemporaries,

and rendered their language ridiculous, it was natural that a zealous

lover of good literature should expose this folly to the world by

exaggerating its effects on a fictitious personage. It has been said

by some modern writer, though I cannot remember by whom, that there

was a _prose side_ in the mind of Cervantes. There was indeed a

side of calm strong sense, which some take for unpoetical. He thought

the tone of those romances extravagant. It might naturally occur how

absurd any one must appear who should attempt to realize in actual

life the adventures of Amadis. Already a novelist, he perceived the

opportunities this idea suggested. It was a necessary consequence that

the hero must be represented as literally insane, since his conduct

would have been extravagant beyond the probability of fiction on any

other hypothesis; and from this happy conception germinated in a very

prolific mind the whole history of Don Quixote. Its simplicity is

perfect; no limit could be found save the author’s discretion, or

sense that he had drawn sufficiently on his imagination; but the death

of Quixote, which Cervantes has been said to have determined upon,

lest some one else should a second time presume to continue the story,

is, in fact, the only possible termination that could be given, after

he had elevated the character to that pitch of mental dignity which we

find in the last two volumes.

|Excellence of this romance.|

50. Few books of moral philosophy display as deep an insight into the

mechanism of the mind as Don Quixote. And when we look also at the

fertility of invention, the general probability of the events, and the

great simplicity of the story, wherein no artifices are practised to

create suspense, or complicate the action, we shall think Cervantes

fully deserving of the glory that attends this monument of his genius.

It is not merely that he is superior to all his predecessors and

contemporaries. This, though it might account for the European fame of

his romance, would be an inadequate testimony to its desert. Cervantes

stands on an eminence below which we must place the best of his

successors. We have only to compare him with Le Sage or Fielding, to

judge of his vast superiority. To Scott indeed he must yield in the

variety of his power; but in the line of comic romance, we should

hardly think Scott his equal.

|Minor novels of Cervantes.|

|Other novels--Spanish.|

|And Italian.|

51. The moral novels of Cervantes, as he calls them (Novellas

Exemplares), are written, I believe, in a good style, but too short,

and constructed with too little artifice to rivet our interest. Their

simplicity and truth, as in many of the old novels, have a certain

charm; but in the present age, our sense of satiety in works of

fiction cannot be overcome but by excellence. Of the Spanish comic

romances, in the _picaresque_ style, several remain: Justina was

the most famous. One that does not strictly belong to this lower class

is the Marcos de Obregon of Espinel. This is supposed to have

suggested much to Le Sage in Gil Bias; in fact, the first story we

meet with is that of Mergellina the physician’s wife. The style,

though not dull, wants the grace and neatness of Le Sage. This is

esteemed one of the best novels that Spain has produced. Italy was no

longer the seat of this literature. A romance of chivalry by Marini

(not the poet of that name), entitled Il Caloandro (1640), was

translated but indifferently into French by Scuderi, and has been

praised by Salfi as full of imagination, with characters skilfully

diversified, and an interesting well-conducted story.[589]

[589] Salfi, vol. xiv., p. 88.

|French romances--Astrée.|

52. France, in the sixteenth century, content with Amadis de Gaul and

the numerous romances of the Spanish school, had contributed very

little to that literature. But now she had native writers of

both kinds, the pastoral and heroic, who completely superseded the

models they had before them. Their earliest essay was the Astrée of

D’Urfé. Of this pastoral romance the first volume was published in

1610; the second in 1620; three more came slowly forth, that the world

might have due leisure to admire. It contains about 3,500 pages. It

would be almost as discreditable to have read such a book through at

present, as it was to be ignorant of it in the age of Louis XIII.

Allusions, however, to real circumstances served in some measure to

lessen the insipidity of a love-story, which seems to equal any in

absurdity and want of interest. The style, and I can judge no farther,

having read but a few pages, seems easy and not unpleasing; but the

pastoral tone is insufferably puerile, and a monotonous solemnity

makes us almost suspect that one source of its popularity was its

gentle effect, when read in small portions before retiring to rest. It

was, nevertheless, admired by men of erudition, like Camus and Huet,

or even by men of the world like Rochefoucault.[590]

[590] Dunlop’s History of Fiction, vol. iii., p. 184. Biographie

Universelle. Bouterwek, vol. v., p. 295.

|Heroic romances--Gomberville.|

53. From the union of the old chivalrous romance with this newer

style, the courtly pastoral, sprang another kind of notion, the French

heroic romance. Three nearly contemporary writers, Gomberville,

Calprenède, Scuderi, supplied a number of voluminous stories,

frequently historical in some of their names, but utterly destitute of

truth in circumstances, characters, and manners. Gomberville led the

way in his Polexandre, first published in 1632, and reaching in later

editions to about 6,000 pages. “This,” says a modern writer, “seems to

have been the model of the works of Calprenède and Scuderi. This

ponderous work may be regarded as a sort of intermediate production

between the later compositions and the ancient fables of chivalry. It

has, indeed, a close affinity to the heroic romance; but many of the

exploits of the hero are as extravagant as those of a paladin or

knight of the round table.”[591] No romance in the language has so

complex an intrigue, insomuch that it is followed with difficulty; and

the author has in successive editions capriciously remodelled parts of

his story, which is wholly of his own invention.[592]

[591] Dunlop, iii., 230.

[592] Biog. Univ.

|Calprenède.|

54. Calprenède, a poet of no contemptible powers of imagination,

poured forth his stores of rapid invention in several romances more

celebrated than that of Gomberville. The first, which is contained in

ten octavo volumes, is the Cassandra. This appeared in 1642, and was

followed by the Cleopatra, published, according to the custom of

romancers, in successive parts, the earliest in 1646. La Harpe thinks

this unquestionably the best work of Calprenède; Bouterwek seems to

prefer the Cassandra. Pharamond is not wholly his own; five out of

twelve volumes belong to one De Vaumorière, a continuator.[593]

Calprenède, like many others, had but a life-estate in the temple of

fame, and more happy, perhaps, than greater men, lived out the whole

favour of the world, which, having been largely showered on his head,

strewed no memorials on his grave. It became, soon after his death,

through the satire of Boileau and the influence of a new style in

fiction, a matter of course to turn him into ridicule. It is

impossible that his romances should be read again; but those who, for

the purposes of general criticism, have gone back to these volumes,

find not a little to praise in his genius, and in some measure to

explain his popularity. “Calprenède,” says Bouterwek, “belonged to the

extravagant party, which endeavoured to give a triumph to genius at

the expense of taste, and by that very means played into the hands of

the opposite party, which saw nothing so laudable as the observation

of the rules which taste prescribed. We have only to become acquainted

with any one of the prolix romances of Calprenède, such, for instance,

as the Cassandra, to see clearly the spirit which animates the whole

invention. We find there again the heroism of chivalry, the

enthusiastic raptures of love, the struggle of duty with passion, the

victory of magnanimity, sincerity, and humanity over force, fraud, and

barbarism, in the genuine characters and circumstances of romance. The

events are skilfully interwoven, and a truly poetical keeping belongs

to the whole, however extended it may be. The diction of Calprenède is

a little monotonous, but not at all trivial, and seldom affected. It

is like that of old romance, grave, circumstantial, somewhat in the

chronicle style, but picturesque, agreeable, full of sensibility and

simplicity. Many passages might, if versified, find a place in the

most beautiful poem of this class.”[594]

[593] Dunlop, iii., 259.

[594] Bouterwek, vi., 230.

|Scuderi.|

55. The honours of this romantic literature have long been shared by

the female sex. In the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, this was

represented by Mademoiselle de Scuderi, a name very glorious for a

season, but which unfortunately did not, like that of Calprenède,

continue to be such during the whole lifetime of her who bore it. The

old age of Mademoiselle de Scuderi was ignominiously treated by the

pitiless Boileau; and reaching more than her ninetieth year, she

almost survived her only offspring, those of her pen. In her youth she

had been the associate of the Rambouillet circle, and caught, perhaps,

in some measure from them, what she gave back with interest, a tone of

perpetual affectation and a pedantic gallantry, which could not

withstand the first approach of ridicule. Her first romance was

Ibrahim, published in 1635; but the more celebrated were the Grand

Cyrus and the Clelie. Each of these two romances is in ten

volumes.[595] The persons chiefly connected with the Hotel Rambouillet

sat for their pictures, as Persians or Babylonians, in Cyrus. Julie

d’Angennes herself bore the name of Artenice, by which she was

afterwards distinguished among her friends; and it is a remarkable

instance not only of the popularity of these romances, but of the

respectful sentiment, which, from the elevation and purity no one can

deny them to exhibit, was always associated in the gravest persons

with their fictions, that a prelate of eminent taste and eloquence,

Fléchier, in his funeral sermon on this lady, calls her “the

incomparable Artenice.”[596] Such an allusion would appear to us

misplaced; but we may presume that it was not so thought. Scuderi’s

romances seem to have been remarkably the favourites of the clergy;

Huet, Mascaron, Godeau, as much as Fléchier, were her ardent admirers.

“I find,” says the second of these, one of the chief ornaments of the

French pulpit, in writing to Mademoiselle de Scuderi, “so much in your

works calculated to reform the world, that in the sermons I am now

preparing for the court, you will often be on my table by the side of

St. Augustin and St. Bernard.”[597] In the writings of this lady we

see the last footstep of the old chivalrous romance. She, like

Calprenède, had derived from this source the predominant

characteristics of her personages, an exalted generosity, a disdain of

all selfish considerations, a courage which attempts impossibilities

and is rewarded by achieving them, a love outrageously hyperbolical in

pretence, yet intrinsically without passion, all, in short, that

Cervantes has bestowed on Don Quixote. Love, however, or its

counterfeit, gallantry, plays a still more leading part in the French

romance than in its Castilian prototype; the feats of heroes, though

not less wonderful, are less prominent on the canvas, and a

metaphysical pedantry replaces the pompous metaphors in which the

knight of sorrowful countenance had taken so much delight. The

approbation of many persons, far better judges than Don Quixote, makes

it impossible to doubt that the romances of Calprenède and Scuderi

were better than his library. But as this is the least possible

praise, it will certainly not tempt any one away from the rich and

varied repast of fiction which the last and present century have

spread before him. Mademoiselle de Scuderi has perverted history still

more than Calprenède, and changed her Romans into languishing

Parisians. It is not to be forgotten that the taste of her party,

though it did not, properly speaking, infect Corneille, compelled him

to weaken some of his tragedies. And this must be the justification of

Boileau’s cutting ridicule upon this truly estimable woman. She had

certainly kept up a tone of severe and high morality, with which the

aristocracy of Paris could ill dispense; but it was one not difficult

to feign, and there might be Tartuffes of sentiment as well as of

religion. Whatever is false in taste is apt to be allied to what is

insincere in character.

[595] Biogr. Univ. Dunlop. Bouterwek.

[596] Sermons de Fléchier, ii., 825 (edit. 1690). But probably

Bossuet would not have stooped to this allusion.

[597] Biogr. Univ. Mademoiselle de Scuderi was not gifted by

nature with beauty, or, as this biographer more bluntly says,

étoit d’un extrême laideur. She would, probably, have wished this

to have been otherwise, but carried off the matter very well, as

appears by her epigram on her own picture by Nanteuil:

Nanteuil, en faisant mon image,

A de son art divin signalé le pouvoir;

Je hais mes yeux dans mon miroir,

Je les aime dans son ouvrage.

|Argenis of Barclay.|

|His Euphormio.|

56. The Argenis of Barclay, a son of the defender of royal authority

against republican theories, is a Latin romance, superior to those

which the Spanish or French language could boast. It has indeed always

been reckoned among political allegories. That the state of France, in

the last years of Henry III., is partially shadowed in it, can admit

of no doubt; several characters are faintly veiled, either by anagram

or Greek translation of their names; but whether to avoid the

insipidity of servile allegory, or to excite the reader by perplexity,

Barclay has mingled so much of mere fiction with his story, that no

attempts at a regular key to the whole work can be successful, nor in

fact does the fable of this romance run in any parallel stream with

real events. His object seems in great measure to have been the

discussion of political questions in feigned dialogue. But though in

these we find no want of acuteness or good sense, they have not at

present much novelty in our eyes; and though the style is really

pleasing, or, as some have judged, excellent,[598] and the incidents

not ill contrived, it might be hard to go entirely through a Latin

romance of 700 pages, unless, indeed, we had no alternative given but

the perusal of the similar works in Spanish or French. The Argenis was

published at Rome in 1622; some of the personages introduced by

Barclay are his own contemporaries; a proof that he did not intend a

strictly historical allegory of the events of the last age. The

Euphormio of the same author resembles in some degree the Argenis but,

with less of story and character, has a more direct reference to

European politics. It contains much political disquisition, and one

whole book is employed in a description of the manners and laws of

different countries with no disguise of names.

[598] Coleridge has pronounced an ardent, and rather excessive,

eulogy on the language of the Argenis, preferring it to that of

Livy or Tacitus. Coleridge’s Remains, vol. i., p. 257. I cannot

by any means go this length; it has struck me that the Latinity

is more that of Petronius Arbiter, but I am not well enough

acquainted with this writer to speak confidently. The same

observation seems applicable to the Euphormio.

|Campanella’s City of the Sun.|

57. Campanella gave a loose to his fanciful humour in a fiction,

entitled the City of the Sun, published at Frankfort in 1623, in

imitation perhaps of the Utopia. The City of the Sun is supposed to

stand upon a mountain situated in Ceylon, under the equator. A

community of goods and women is established in this republic; the

principal magistrate of which is styled Sun, and is elected after a

strict examination in all kinds of science. Campanella has brought in

so much of his own philosophical system, that we may presume that to

have been the object of this romance. The Solars, he tells us,

abstained at first from flesh, because they thought it cruel to kill

animals. “But afterwards considering that it would be equally cruel to

kill plants, which are not less endowed with sensation, so that they

must perish by famine, they understood that ignoble things were

created for the use of nobler things, and now eat all things without

scruple.” Another Latin romance had some celebrity in its day, the

Monarchia Solipsorum, a satire on the Jesuits in the fictitious name

of Lucius Cornelius Europeus. It has been ascribed to more than one

person; the probable author is one Scotti, who had himself belonged to

the order.[599] This book did not seem to me in the least interesting;

if it is so in any degree, it must be not as mere fiction, but as a

revelation of secrets.

[599] Biogr. Univ. arts. Scotti and Inchoffer. Niceron,

vols. xxxv. and xxxix.

|Few books of fiction in England.|

58. It is not so much an extraordinary as an unfortunate deficiency in

our own literary annals, that England should have been destitute of

the comic romance, or that derived from real life, to a late period;

since in fact we may say the same, as has been seen, of France. The

picaresque novels of Spain were thought well worthy of translation;

but it occurred to no one, or no one had the gift of genius, to shift

the scene, and imitate their delineation of native manners. Of how

much value would have been a genuine English novel, the mirror of

actual life in the various ranks of society, written under Elizabeth

or under the Stuarts! We should have seen, if the execution had not

been very coarse, and the delineation absolutely confined to low

characters, the social habits of our forefathers better than by all

our other sources of that knowledge, the plays, the letters, the

traditions and anecdotes, the pictures or buildings of the time.

Notwithstanding the interest all profess to take in the history of

manners, our notions of them are generally meagre and imperfect; and

hence, modern works of fiction are but crude and inaccurate designs

when they endeavour to represent the living England of two centuries

since. Even Scott, who had a fine instinctive perception of truth and

nature, and who had read much, does not appear to have seized the

genuine tone of conversation, and to have been a little misled by the

style of Shakspeare. This is rather elaborate and removed from vulgar

use by a sort of archaism in phrase and a pointed turn in the

dialogue, adapted to theatrical utterance, but wanting the ease of

ordinary speech.

|Mundus Alter et Idem of Hall.|

59. I can only produce two books by English authors in this

first part of the seventeenth century which fall properly under the

class of novels or romances; and of these one is written in Latin.

This is the Mundus Alter et Idem of Bishop Hall, an imitation of the

later and weaker volumes of Rabelais. A country in Terra Australis is

divided into four regions, Crapulia, Viraginia, Moronea, and Lavernia.

Maps of the whole land and of particular regions are given; and the

nature of the satire, not much of which has any especial reference to

England, may easily be collected. It is not a very successful effort.

|Godwin’s Journey to the Moon.|

60. Another prelate, or one who became such, Francis Godwin, was the

author of a much more curious story. It is called the Man in the Moon,

and relates the journey of one Domingo Gonzalez to that planet. This

was written by Godwin, according to Antony Wood, while he was a

student at Oxford.[600] By some internal proofs, it must have been

later than 1599, and before the death of Elizabeth in 1603. But it was

not published till 1638. It was translated into French, and became the

model of Cyrano de Bergerac, as he was of Swift. Godwin himself had no

prototype, as far as I know, but Lucian. He resembles those writers in

the natural and veracious tone of his lays. The fiction is rather

ingenious and amusing throughout; but the most remarkable part is the

happy conjectures, if we must say no more, of his philosophy. Not only

does the writer declare positively for the Copernican system, which

was uncommon at that time, but he has surprisingly understood the

principle of gravitation, it being distinctly supposed that the

earth’s attraction diminishes with the distance. Nor is the following

passage less curious. “I must let you understand that the globe of the

moon is not altogether destitute of an attractive power; but it is far

weaker than that of the earth; as, if a man do but spring upwards with

all his force, as dancers do when they show their activity by

capering, he shall be able to mount fifty or sixty feet high, and then

he is quite beyond all attraction of the moon.” By this device

Gonzalez returns from his sojourn in the latter, though it required a

more complex device to bring him thither. “The moon,” he observes, “is

covered with a sea, except the parts which seem somewhat darker to us,

and are dry land.” A contrary hypothesis came afterwards to prevail;

but we must not expect everything from our ingenious young student.

[600] Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. ii., col. 558. It is remarkable

that Mr. Dunlop has been ignorant of Godwin’s claim to this work,

and takes Dominic Gonzalez for the real author. Hist. of Fiction,

iii. 394.

|Howell’s Dodona’s Grove.|

61. Though I can mention nothing else in English which comes exactly

within our notions of a romance, we may advert to the Dodona’s Grove

of James Howell. This is a strange allegory, without any ingenuity in

maintaining the analogy between the outer and inner story, which alone

can give a reader any pleasure in allegorical writing. The subject is

the state of Europe, especially of England, about 1640, under the

guise of animated trees in a forest. The style is like the

following:--“The next morning the royal olive sent some prime elms to

attend prince Rocolino in quality of officers of state; and a little

after he was brought to the royal palace in the same state Elaiana’s

kings used to be attended the day of their coronation.” The

contrivance is all along so clumsy and unintelligible, the invention

so poor and absurd, the story, if story there be, so dull an echo of

well-known events, that it is impossible to reckon Dodona’s Grove

anything but an entire failure. Howell has no wit, but he has

abundance of conceits, flat and common-place enough. With all this he

was a man of some sense and observation. His letters are entertaining,

but they scarcely deserve consideration in this volume.

|Adventures of Baron de Fæneste.|

62. It is very possible that some small works belonging to this

extensive class have been omitted, which my readers, or myself, on

second consideration, might think not unworthy of notice. It is also

one so miscellaneous that we might fairly doubt as to some which have

a certain claim to be admitted into it. Such are the Adventures of the

Baron de Fæneste, by the famous Agrippa d’Aubigné (whose

autobiography, by the way, has at least the liveliness of fiction); a

singular book written in dialogue, where an imaginary Gascon baron

recounts his tales of the camp and the court. He is made to speak a

patois not quite easy for us to understand, and not perhaps worth the

while; but it seems to contain much that illustrates the state of

France about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Much in this

book is satirical; and the satire falls on the Catholics, whom

Fæneste, a mere foolish gentleman of Gascony, is made to defend

against an acute Hugonot.

CHAPTER XXV.

HISTORY OF MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

SECT. I.

_Invention of logarithms by Napier--New geometry of Kepler and

Cavalieri--Algebra--Harriott--Descartes--Astronomy--Kepler--Galileo--

Copernican system begins to prevail--Cartesian theory of the

world--Mechanical discoveries of Galileo--Descartes--Hydrostatics--

Optics._

|State of science in 16th century.|

1. In the second volume of this work, we have followed the progress of

mathematical and physical science down to the close of the sixteenth

century. The ancient geometers had done so much in their own province

of lines and figures, that little more of importance could be

effected, except by new methods extending the limits of the science,

or derived from some other source of invention. Algebra had yielded a

more abundant harvest to the genius of the sixteenth century; yet

something here seemed to be wanting to give that science a character

of utility and reference to general truth; nor had the formulæ of

letters and radical signs that preceptible beauty which often wins us

to delight in geometrical theorems of as little apparent usefulness in

their results. Meanwhile, the primary laws, to which all mathematical

reasonings, in their relation to physical science, must be

accommodated, lay hidden, or were erroneously conceived; and none of

these sciences, with the exception of astronomy, were beyond their

mere infancy, either as to observation or theory.[601]

[601] In this chapter my obligations to Montucla are so continual

that I shall make no single reference to his Histoire des

Mathématiques, which must be understood to be my principal

authority.

|Tediousness of calculations.|

2. Astronomy, cultivated in the latter part of the sixteenth century

with much industry and success, was repressed, among other more

insuperable obstacles, by the laborious calculations it required. The

trigonometrical tables of sines, tangents, and secants, if they were

to produce any tolerable accuracy in astronomical observation, must be

computed to six or seven places of decimals, upon which the regular

processes of multiplication and division were perpetually to be

employed. The consumption of time, as well as risk of error which this

occasioned, was a serious evil to the practical astronomer.

|Napier’s invention of logarithms.|

3. John Napier, laird of Merchiston, after several attempts to

diminish this labour by devices of his invention, was happy enough to

discover his famous method of logarithms. This he first published at

Edinburgh, in 1614, with the title, Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio,

seu Arithmeticarum Supputationum Mirabilis Abbreviatio. He died in

1618, and in a posthumous edition, entitled Mirifici Logarithmorum

Canonis Descriptio, 1618, the method of construction, which had been

at first withheld, is given; and the system itself, in consequence

perhaps of the suggestion of his friend Briggs, underwent some change.

|Their nature.|

4. The invention of logarithms is one of the rarest instances of

sagacity in the history of mankind; and it has been justly noticed as

remarkable, that it issued complete from the mind of its author, and

has not received any improvement since his time. It is hardly

necessary to say, that logarithms are a series of numbers, arranged in

tables parallel to the series of natural numbers, and of such a

construction, that by adding the logarithms of two of the latter we

obtain the logarithm of their product; by subtracting the logarithm of

one number from that of another we obtain that of their quotient. The

longest processes therefore of multiplication and division are spared,

and reduced to one of mere addition or subtraction.

|Property of numbers discovered by Stifelius.|

5. It has been supposed that an arithmetical fact, said to be

mentioned by Archimedes, and which is certainly pointed out in the

work of an early German writer, Michael Stifelius, put Napier in the

right course for this invention. It will at least serve to illustrate

the principle of logarithms. Stifelius shows that if in a geometrical

progression, we add the indices of any terms in the series, we shall

obtain the index of the products of those terms. Thus, if we compare

the geometrical progression, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, with the

arithmetical one which numbers the powers of the common ratio, namely,

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, we see that by adding two terms of the latter

progression, as 2 and 3, to which 4 and 8 correspond in the

geometrical series, we obtain 5, to which 32, the product of 4 by 8,

corresponds; and the quotient would be obtained in a similar manner.

But though this, which becomes self-evident, when algebraical

expressions are employed for the terms of a series, seemed at the time

rather a curious property of numbers in geometrical progression, it

was of little value in facilitating calculation.

|Extended to magnitudes.|

6. If Napier had simply considered numbers in themselves, as

repetitions of unity, which is their only intelligible definition, it

does not seem that he could ever have carried this observation upon

progressive series any farther. Numerically understood, the terms of a

geometrical progression proceed _per saltum_; and in the series

2, 4, 8, 16, it is as unmeaning to say that 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, in any

possible sense, have a place, or can be introduced to any purpose, as

that ½, ¼, ⅛, 1/16 or other fractions are true numbers at all.[602]

The case, however, is widely different when we use numbers as merely

the signs of something capable of continuous increase or decrease of

space, of duration, of velocity. These are, for our convenience,

divided by arbitrary intervals, to which the numerical unit is made to

correspond. But as these intervals are indefinitely divisible, the

unit is supposed capable of division into fractional parts, each of

them a representation of the ratio which a portion of the interval

bears to the whole. And thus also we must see, that as fractions of

the unit bear a relation to uniform quantity, so all the integral

numbers, which do not enter into the terms of a geometrical

progression, correspond to certain portions of variable quantity. If a

body falling down an inclined plane acquires a velocity at one point

which would carry it through two feet in a second, and at a lower

point one which would carry it through four feet in the same time,

there must, by the nature of a continually accelerated motion, be some

point between these where the velocity might be represented by the

number three. Hence, wherever the numbers of a common geometrical

series, like 2, 4, 8, 16, represent velocities at certain intervals,

the intermediate numbers will represent velocities at intermediate

intervals; and thus it may be said that all numbers are terms of a

geometrical progression, but one which should always be considered as

what it is--a progression of continuous, not discrete quantity,

capable of being indicated by number, but not number itself.

[602] Few books of arithmetic, or even algebra, as far as I know,

draw the reader’s attention at the outset to this essential

distinction between discrete and continuous quantity, which is

sure to be overlooked in all their subsequent reasonings. Wallis

has done it very well; after stating very clearly that there are

no proper numbers but integers he meets the objection, that

fractions are called intermediate numbers. Concedo quidem sic

responderi posse; concedo etiam numeros quos fractos vocant, sive

fractiones, esse quidam uni et nulli quasi intermedios. Sed addo,

quod jam transitur εις αλλο γενος [eis allo genos]. Respondetur

enim non de _quot_, sed de quanto. Pertinet igitur hæc responsio

propriè loquendo, non tam ad quantitatem discretam, seu numerum,

quam ad continuam; prout hora supponitur esse quid continuum in

partes divisibile, quamvis quidem harum partium ad totum ratio

numeris exprimatur. Mathesis Universalis, c. 1.

|By Napier.|

7. It was a necessary consequence, that if all numbers could be

treated as terms of a progression, and if their indices could be found

like those of an ordinary series, the method of finding products of

terms by addition of indices would be universal. The means that Napier

adopted for this purpose were surprisingly ingenious; but it would be

difficult to make them clear to those who are likely to require it,

especially without the use of lines. It may suffice to say that his

process was laborious in the highest degree, consisting of the

interpolation of 6931472 mean proportionals between 1 and 2, and

repeating a similar and still more tedious operation for all prime

numbers. The logarithms of other numbers were easily obtained,

according to the fundamental principle of the invention, by adding

their factors. Logarithms appear to have been so called, because they

are the sum of these mean ratios, λογων αριθμος [logôn arithmos].

|Tables of Napier and Briggs.|