25. Though the notices in the Journal des Sçavans are very short, and

when they give any character, for the most part of a laudatory tone,

Sallo did not fail to raise up enemies by the mere assumption of power

which a reviewer is prone to affect. Menage, on a work of whose he had

made some criticism, and by no means, as it appears, without justice,

replied in wrath; Patin and others rose up as injured authors against

the self-erected censor; but he made more formidable enemies by some

rather blunt declarations of a Gallican feeling, as became a

counsellor of the parliament of Paris, against the court of Rome; and

the privilege of publication was soon withdrawn from Sallo.[1037] It

is said that he had the spirit to refuse the offer of continuing the

journal under a previous censorship; and it passed into other hands,

those of Gallois, who continued it with great success.[1038] It is

remarkable that the first review, within a few months of its origin,

was silenced for assuming too imperious an authority over literature,

and for speaking evil of dignities. “In cunis jam Jove dignus erat.”

The Journal des Sçavans, incomparably the most ancient of living

reviews, is still conspicuous for its learning, its candour, and its

freedom from those stains of personal and party malice which deform

more popular works.

[1037] Camusat, p. 28. Sallo had also attacked the Jesuits.

[1038] Eloge de Gallois, par Fontenelle, in the latter’s works,

vol. v., p. 168. Biographie Universelle, arts. Sallo and Gallois.

Gallois is said to have been a coadjutor of Sallo from the

beginning, and some others are named by Camusat as its

contributors, among whom were Gomberville and Chapelain.

|Reviews established by Bayle.|

|And Le Clerc|

26. The path thus opened to all that could tempt a man who made

writing his profession--profit, celebrity, a perpetual appearance in

the public eye, the facility of pouring forth every scattered thought

of his own, the power of revenge upon every enemy, could not fail to

tempt more conspicuous men than Sallo or his successor Gallois. Two of

very high reputation, at least of reputation that hence became very

high, entered it, Bayle and Le Clerc. The former, in 1684, commenced a

new review, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres. He saw and was

well able to improve the opportunities which periodical criticism

furnished to a mind eminently qualified for it; extensively, and in

some points, deeply learned; full of wit, acuteness, and a happy

talent of writing in a lively tone without the insipidity of affected

politeness. The scholar and philosopher of Rotterdam had a rival, in

some respects, and ultimately an adversary, in a neighbouring city. Le

Clerc, settled at Amsterdam as professor of belles lettres and of

Hebrew in the Arminister seminary, undertook in 1686, at the age of

twenty-nine, the first of those three celebrated series of reviews, to

which he owes so much of his fame. This was the Bibliothèque

Universelle, in all the early volumes of which La Croze, a much

inferior person, was his coadjutor, published monthly in a very small

form. Le Clerc had afterwards a disagreement with La Croze, and the

latter part of the Bibliothèque Universelle (that after the tenth

volume) is chiefly his own. It ceased to be published in 1693, and the

Bibliothèque Choisie, which is perhaps even a more known work of Le

Clerc, did not commence till 1708. But the fulness, the variety, the

judicious analysis and selection, as well as the value of the original

remarks, which we find in the Bibliothéque Universelle, renders it of

signal utility to those who would embrace the literature of that

short, but not unimportant period which it illustrates.

|Leipsic Acts.|

27. Meantime a less brilliant, but by no means less erudite, review,

the Leipsic Acts, had commenced in Germany. The first volume of this

series was published in 1682. But being written in Latin, with more

regard to the past than to the growing state of opinions, and

consequently almost excluding the most attractive, and indeed the most

important, subject, with a Lutheran spirit of unchangeable orthodoxy

in religion, and with an absence of anything like philosophy or even

connected system in erudition, it is one of the most unreadable books,

relatively to its utility in learning, which has ever fallen into my

hands. Italy had entered earlier on this critical career; the Giornale

de’ Litterati was begun at Rome in 1668; the Giornale Veneto de’

Litterati, at Venice in 1671. They continued for some time; but with

less conspicuous reputation than those above mentioned. The Mercure

Savant, published at Amsterdam in 1684, was an indifferent production,

which induced Bayle to set up his own Nouvelles de la Republique des

Lettres in opposition to it. Two reviews were commenced in the German

language within the seventeenth century, and three in English. The

first of these latter was the “Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious,”

London, 1682. This, I believe, lasted but a short time. It was

followed by one, entitled “The Works of the Learned,” in 1691; and by

another “History of the Works of the Learned,” in 1699. I have met

with none of these, nor will any satisfactory account of them, I

believe, be readily found.[1039]

[1039] Jugler, Hist. Litteraria, cap. 9. Bibliothèque

Universelle, xiii. 41.

|Bayle’s Thoughts on the Comet.|

28. Bayle had first become known in 1682, by the Pensées Diverses sur

la Comète de 1680; a work which I am not sure that he ever

decidedly surpassed. Its purpose is one hardly worthy, we should

imagine, to employ him; since those who could read and reason were not

likely to be afraid of comets, and those who could do neither would be

little the better for his book. But with this ostensible aim Bayle had

others in view; it gave scope to his keen observation of mankind, if

we may use the word observation for that which he chiefly derived from

modern books, and to the calm philosophy which he professed. There is

less of the love of paradox, less of a cavilling pyrrhonism, and

though much diffuseness, less of pedantry and irrelevant instances in

the Pensées Diverses than in his greater work. It exposed him,

however, to controversy; Jurieu, a French minister in Holland, the

champion of Calvinistic orthodoxy, waged a war that was only

terminated with their lives; and Bayle’s defence of the Thoughts on

the Comet is fully as long as the original performance, but far less

entertaining.

|His Dictionary.|

29. He now projected an immortal undertaking, the Historical and

Critical Dictionary. Moreri, a laborious scribe, had published in 1673

a kind of encyclopedic dictionary, biographical, historical, and

geographical; Bayle professed to fill up the numerous deficiencies,

and to rectify the errors of this compiler. It is hard to place his

dictionary, which appeared in 1694, under any distinct head in a

literary classification which does not make a separate chapter for

lexicography. It is almost equally difficult to give a general

character of this many-coloured web, that great erudition and still

greater acuteness and strength of mind wove for the last years of the

seventeenth century. The learning of Bayle was copious, especially in

what most required it, the controversies, the anecdotes, the

miscellaneous facts and sentences, scattered over the vast surface of

literature for two preceding centuries. In that of antiquity he was

less profoundly versed, yet so quick in application of his classical

stores, that he passes for even a better scholar than he was. His

original design may have been only to fill up the deficiencies of

Moreri; but a mind so fertile and excursive could not be restrained in

such limits. We may find however in this an apology for the numerous

omissions of Bayle, which would, in a writer absolutely original, seem

both capricious and unaccountable. We never can anticipate with

confidence that we shall find any name in his dictionary. The notes

are most frequently unconnected with the life to which they are

appended; so that, under a name uninteresting to us, or inapposite to

our purpose, we may be led into the richest vein of the author’s fine

reasoning or lively wit. Bayle is admirable in exposing the fallacies

of dogmatism, the perplexities of philosophy, the weaknesses of those

who affect to guide the opinions of mankind. But, wanting the

necessary condition of good reasoning, an earnest desire to reason

well, a moral rectitude from which the love of truth must spring, he

often avails himself of petty cavils, and becomes dogmatical in his

very doubts. A more sincere spirit of inquiry could not have suffered

a man of his penetrating genius to acquiesce, even contingently; in so

superficial a scheme as the Manichean. The sophistry of Bayle,

however, bears no proportion to his just and acute observations. Less

excuse can be admitted for his indecency, which almost assumes the

character of monomania, so invariably does it recur, even where there

is least pretext for it.

|Baillet.--Morhof.|

30. The Jugemens des Sçavans by Baillet, published in 1685 and 1686,

the Polyhistor of Morhof in 1689, are certainly works of criticism as

well as of bibliography. But neither of these writers, especially the

latter, are of much authority in matters of taste; their erudition was

very extensive, their abilities respectable, since they were able to

produce such useful and comprehensive works; but they do not greatly

serve to enlighten or correct our judgments; nor is the original

matter in any considerable proportion to that which they have derived

from others. I have taken notice of both these in my preface.

|The Ana.|

31. France was very fruitful of that miscellaneous literature which,

desultory and amusing, has the advantage of remaining better in the

memory than more systematic books, and in fact is generally found to

supply the man of extensive knowledge with the materials of his

conversation, as well as to fill the vacancies of his deeper studies.

The memoirs, the letters, the travels, the dialogues and essays, which

might be ranged in so large a class as that we now pass in review, are

too numerous to be mentioned, and it must be understood that most of

them are less in request even among the studious than they were in the

last century. One group has acquired the distinctive name of Ana; the

reported conversation, the table-talk of the learned. Several belong

to the last part of the sixteenth century, or the first of the next;

the Scaligerana, the Perroniana, the Pithæana, the Naudæana, the

Casauboniana; the last of which are not conversational, but fragments

collected from the common-place books and loose papers of Isaac

Casaubon. Two collections of the present period are very well known;

the Menagiana, and the Mélanges de Littérature par Vigneul-Marville;

which differs indeed from the rest in not being reported by others,

but published by the author himself; yet comes so near in spirit and

manner, that we may place it in the same class. The Menagiana has the

common fault of these Ana, that it rather disappoints expectation, and

does not give us as much new learning as the name of its author seems

to promise; but it is amusing, full of light anecdote of a literary

kind, and interesting to all who love the recollections of that

generation. Vigneul-Marville is an imaginary person; the author of the

Mélanges de Littérature is D’Argonne, a Benedictine of Rouen. This

book has been much esteemed; the mask gives courage to the author, who

writes, not unlike a Benedictine, but with a general tone of

independent thinking, united to good judgment and a tolerably

extensive knowledge of the state of literature. He had entered into

the religious profession rather late in life. The Chevræana and

Segraisiana, especially the latter, are of little value. The

Parrhasiana of Le Clerc are less amusing and less miscellaneous than

some of the Ana; but in all his writings there is a love of truth and

a zeal against those who obstruct inquiry, which to congenial spirits

is as pleasing as it is sure to render him obnoxious to opposite

tempers.

|English style in this Period.|

32. The characteristics of English writers in the first division of

the century were not maintained in the second, though the change, as

was natural, did not come on by very rapid steps. The pedantry of

unauthorized Latinisms, the affectation of singular and not generally

intelligible words from other sources, the love of quaint phrases,

strange analogies, and ambitious efforts at antithesis, gave way by

degrees; a greater ease of writing was what the public demanded, and

what the writers after the Restoration sought to attain; they were

more strictly idiomatic and English than their predecessors. But this

ease sometimes became negligence and feebleness, and often turned to

coarseness and vulgarity. The language of Sevigné and Hamilton is

eminently colloquial; scarce a turn occurs in their writings which

they would not have used in familiar society; but theirs was the

colloquy of the gods, ours of men; their idiom, though still simple

and French, had been refined in the saloons of Paris, by that

instinctive rejection of all that is low which the fine tact of

accomplished women dictates; while in our own contemporary writers,

with little exception, theirs is what defaces the dialogue of our

comedy, a tone not so much of provincialism, or even of what is called

the language of the common people, as of one much worse, the dregs of

vulgar ribaldry, which a gentleman must clear from his conversation

before he can assert that name. Nor was this confined to those who led

irregular lives; the general manners being unpolished, we find in the

writings of the clergy, wherever they are polemic or satirical, the

same tendency to what is called _slang_; a word which, as itself

belongs to the vocabulary it denotes, I use with some unwillingness.

The pattern of bad writing in this respect was Sir Roger L’Estrange;

his Æsop’s Fables will present everything that is hostile to good

taste; yet by a certain wit and readiness in raillery L’Estrange was a

popular writer and may even now be read, perhaps, with some amusement.

The translation of Don Quixote, published in 1682, may also be

specified as incredibly vulgar, and without the least perception of

the tone which the original author has preserved.

|Hobbes.|

33. We can produce nevertheless several names of those who laid the

foundations at least, and indeed furnished examples, of good style;

some of them among the greatest, for other merits, in our literature.

Hobbes is perhaps the first of whom we can say that he is a good

English writer; for the excellent passages of Hooker, Sydney, Raleigh,

Bacon, Taylor, Chillingworth, and others of the Elizabethan or the

first Stuart period are not sufficient to establish their claim; a

good writer being one whose composition is nearly uniform, and who

never sinks to such inferiority or negligence as we must confess in

most of these. To make such a writer, the absence of gross fault is

full as necessary as actual beauties; we are not judging as of poets,

by the highest flight of their genius, and forgiving all the rest, but

as of a sum of positive and negative quantities, where the latter

counterbalance and efface an equal portion of the former. Hobbes is

clear, precise, spirited, and, above all, free, in general, from the

faults of his predecessors; his language is sensibly less obsolete; he

is never vulgar, rarely, if ever, quaint or pedantic.

|Cowley.|

34. Cowley’s prose, very unlike his verse, as Johnson has observed, is

perspicuous and unaffected. His few essays may even be reckoned among

the earliest models of good writing. In that, especially, on the death

of Cromwell, till, losing his composure, he falls a little into the

vulgar style towards the close, we find an absence of pedantry, an

ease and graceful choice of idiom, an unstudied harmony of periods,

which had been perceived in very few writers of the two preceding

reigns. “His thoughts,” says Johnson, “are natural, and his style has

a smooth and placid equability which has never yet obtained its due

commendation. Nothing is far-sought or hard-laboured; but all is easy

without feebleness, and familiar without grossness.”

|Evelyn.|

35. Evelyn wrote in 1651 a little piece, purporting to be an account

of England by a Frenchman. It is very severe on our manners,

especially in London; his abhorrence of the late revolutions in church

and state conspiring with his natural politeness which he had lately

improved by foreign travel. It is worth reading as illustrative of

social history; but I chiefly mention it here on account of the polish

and gentlemanly elegance of the style, which very few had hitherto

regarded in such light compositions. An answer by some indignant

patriot has been reprinted together with this pamphlet of Evelyn, and

is a good specimen of the bestial ribaldry which our ancestors seem to

have taken for wit.[1040] The later writings of Evelyn are such as his

character and habits would lead us to expect, but I am not aware that

they often rise above that respectable level, nor are their subjects

such as to require an elevated style.

[1040] Both these will be found in the late edition of Evelyn’s

Miscellaneous Works.

|Dryden.|

36. Every poem and play of Dryden, as they successively appeared, was

ushered into the world by those prefaces and dedications which

have made him celebrated as a critic of poetry and a master of the

English language. The Essay on Dramatic Poesy, and its subsequent

Defence, the Origin and Progress of Satire, the Parallel of Poetry and

Painting, the Life of Plutarch, and other things of minor importance,

all prefixed to some more extensive work, complete the catalogue of

his prose. The style of Dryden was very superior to any that England

had seen. Not conversant with our old writers, so little, in fact, as

to find the common phrases of the Elizabethan age unintelligible,[1041]

he followed the taste of Charles’s reign, in emulating the politest

and most popular writers in the French language. He seems to have

formed himself on Montaigne, Balzac, and Voiture; but so ready was his

invention, so vigorous his judgment, so complete his mastery over his

native tongue, that, in point of style, he must be reckoned above all

the three. He had the ease of Montaigne without his negligence and

embarrassed structure of periods; he had the dignity of Balzac with

more varied cadences, and without his hyperbolical tumour, the

unexpected turns of Voiture without his affectation and air of effort.

In the dedications especially, we find paragraphs of extraordinary

gracefulness, such as possibly have never been surpassed in our

language. The prefaces are evidently written in a more negligent

style; he seems, like Montaigne, to converse with the reader from his

arm-chair, and passes onward with little connection from one subject

to another.[1042] In addressing a patron, a different line is

observable; he comes with the respectful air which the occasion seems

to demand; but, though I do not think that Dryden ever, in language,

forgets his own position, we must confess that the flattery is

sometimes palpably untrue, and always offensively indelicate. The

dedication of the Mock Astrologer to the Duke of Newcastle is a

masterpiece of fine writing; and the subject better deserved these

lavish commendations than most who received them. That of the State of

Innocence to the Duchess of York is also very well written; but the

adulation is excessive. It appears to me that, after the Revolution,

Dryden took less pains with his style; the colloquial vulgarisms, and

these are not wanting even in his earlier prefaces, become more

frequent; his periods are often of more slovenly construction; he

forgets even in his dedications that he is standing before a lord.

Thus, remarking on the account Andromache gives to Hector of her own

history, he observes, in a style rather unworthy of him, “The devil

was in Hector if he knew not all this matter as well as she who told

it him, for she had been his bed-fellow for many years together; and

if he knew it then, it must be confessed that Homer in this long

digression has rather given us his own character, than that of the

fair lady whom he paints.”[1043]

[1041] Malone has given several proofs of this. Dryden’s Prose

Works, vol. i., part 2, p. 136, et alibi. Dryden thought

expressions wrong and incorrect in Shakspeare and Johnson which

were the current language of their age.

[1042] This is his own account. “The nature of a preface is

rambling, never wholly out of the way, nor in it.... This I have

learned from the practice of honest Montaigne.” Vol. iii.,

p. 605.

[1043] Vol. iii., p. 286. This is in the dedication of his third

Miscellany to Lord Ratcliffe.

|His Essay on Dramatic Poesy.|

37. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy, published in 1668, was reprinted

sixteen years afterwards, and it is curious to observe the changes

which Dryden made in the expression. Malone has carefully noted all

these; they show both the care the author took with his own style, and

the change which was gradually working in the English language.[1044]

The Anglicism of terminating the sentence with a preposition is

rejected.[1045] Thus “I cannot think so contemptibly of the age I live

in,” is exchanged for “the age in which I live.” “A deeper expression

of belief than all the actor can persuade us to,” is altered, “can

insinuate into us.” And, though the old form continued in use long

after the time of Dryden, it has of late years been reckoned inelegant

and proscribed in all cases, perhaps with an unnecessary fastidiousness,

to which I have not uniformly deferred, since our language is of a

Teutonic structure, and the rules of Latin or French grammar are not

always to bind us.

[1044] Vol. i., p. 136-142.

[1045] “The preposition in the end of the sentence, a common

fault with him (Ben Johnson), and which I have but lately

observed in my own writings,” p. 237. The form is, in my opinion,

sometimes emphatic and spirited, though its frequent use appears

slovenly. I remember my late friend, Mr. Richard Sharp, whose

good taste is well known, used to quote an interrogatory of

Hooker: “Shall there be a God to swear by, and none to pray to?”

as an instance of the force which this arrangement, so eminently

idiomatic, sometimes gives. It is unnecessary to say that it is

derived from the German; and nothing but Latin prejudice can make

us think it essentially wrong. In the passive voice, I think it

better than in the active; nor can it always be dispensed with,

unless we choose rather the feeble encumbering pronoun _which_.

|Improvements in his style.|

38. This Essay on Dramatic Poesy is written in dialogue; Dryden

himself, under the name of Neander, being probably one of the

speakers. It turns on the use of rhyme in tragedy, on the observation

of the unities, and on some other theatrical questions. Dryden, at

this time, was favourable to rhymed tragedies, which his practice

supported. Sir Robert Howard having written some observations on that

essay and taken a different view as to rhyme, Dryden published a

defence of his essay in a masterly style of cutting scorn, but one

hardly justified by the tone of the criticism, which had been very

civil towards him; and, as he was apparently in the wrong, the air of

superiority seems the more misplaced.

|His critical character.|

39. Dryden, as a critic, is not to be numbered with those who have

sounded the depths of the human mind, hardly with those who analyse

the language and sentiments of poets, and teach others to judge by

showing why they have judged themselves. He scatters remarks,

sometimes too indefinite, sometimes too arbitrary; yet his

predominating good sense colours the whole; we find in them no

perplexing subtlety, no cloudy nonsense, no paradoxes and heresies in

taste to revolt us. Those he has made on translation in the preface to

that of Ovid’s Epistles are valuable. “No man,” he says, “is capable

of translating poetry, who besides a genius to that art, is not a

master both of his author’s language and of his own. Nor must we

understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of

thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish,

and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers.”[1046] We

cannot pay Dryden the compliment of saying that he gave the example as

well as precept, especially in his Virgil. He did not scruple to copy

Segrais in his discourse on Epic Poetry. “Him I follow, and what I

borrow from him am ready to acknowledge to him; for, impartially

speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English as

they are worse poets.”[1047]

[1046] Vol. iii., p. 19.

[1047] P. 460. The quotations in this paragraph present two

instances of the word _to_ in an unauthorised usage; the second is

a Gallicism; but the first has not even that excuse.

40. The greater part of his critical writings relates to the drama; a

subject with which he was very conversant; but he had some

considerable prejudices; he seems never to have felt the transcendent

excellence of Shakspeare; and sometimes, perhaps, his own opinions, if

not feigned, are biased by that sort of self-defence to which he

thought himself driven in the prefaces to his several plays. He had

many enemies on the watch; the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, a

satire of great wit, had exposed to ridicule the heroic tragedies,[1048]

and many were afterwards ready to forget the merits of the poet in the

delinquencies of the politician. “What Virgil wrote,” he says, “in the

vigour of his age, in plenty and in ease, I have undertaken to

translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed by

sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I

write; and my judges, if they are not very equitable, already

prejudiced against me by the lying character which has been given them

of my morals.”[1049]

[1048] This comedy was published in 1672; the parodies are

amusing; and though parody is the most unfair weapon that

ridicule can use, they are in most instances warranted by the

original. Bayes, whether he resembles Dryden or not, is a very

comic personage: the character is said by Johnson to have been

sketched for Davenant; but I much doubt this report; Davenant had

been dead some years before the Rehearsal was published, and

could have been in no way obnoxious to its satire.

[1049] Vol. iii., p. 557.

|Rymer on Tragedy.|

41. Dryden will hardly be charged with abandoning too hastily our

national credit, when he said the French were better critics than the

English. We had scarcely anything worthy of notice to alledge beyond

his own writings. The Theatrum Poetarum by Philips, nephew of Milton,

is superficial in every respect. Thomas Rymer, best known to mankind

as the editor of the Fœdera, but a strenuous advocate for the

Aristotelian principles in the drama, published, in 1678, “The

Tragedies of the last Age considered and examined by the Practice of

the Ancients, and by the common Sense of all Ages.” This contains a

censure of some plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakspeare and Jonson.

“I have chiefly considered the fable or plot which all conclude to be

the soul of a tragedy, which with the ancients is always found to be a

reasonable soul, but with us for the most part a brutish, and often

worse than brutish.”[1050] I have read only his criticisms on the

Maid’s Tragedy, King and no King, and Rollo; and as the conduct and

characters of all three are far enough from being invulnerable, it is

not surprising that Rymer has often well exposed them.

[1050] P. 4.

|Sir William Temple’s Essays.|

42. Next to Dryden, the second place among the polite writers of the

period, from the Restoration to the end of the century, has commonly

been given to Sir William Temple. His Miscellanies, to which,

principally, this praise belongs, are not recommended by more

erudition than a retired statesman might acquire, with no great

expense of time, nor by much originality of reflection. But if Temple

has not profound knowledge, he turns all he possesses well to account;

if his thoughts are not very striking, they are commonly just. He has

less eloquence than Bolingbroke, but is also free from his

restlessness and ostentation. Much, also, which now appears

superficial in Temple’s historical surveys, was far less familiar in

his age; he has the merit of a comprehensive and a candid mind. His

style, to which we should particularly refer, will be found in

comparison with his contemporaries highly polished, and sustained with

more equability than they preserve, remote from anything either

pedantic or humble. The periods are studiously rhythmical; yet they

want the variety and peculiar charm that we admire in those of Dryden.

|Style of Locke.|

43. Locke is certainly a good writer, relatively to the greater part

of his contemporaries; his plain and manly sentences often give us

pleasure by the wording alone. But he has some defects; in his Essay

on the Human Understanding he is often too figurative for the subject.

In all his writings, and especially in the Treatise on Education, he

is occasionally negligent, and though not vulgar, at least according

to the idiom of his age, slovenly in the structure of his sentences as

well as the choice of his words; he is not, in mere style, very

forcible, and certainly not very elegant.

|Sir George Mackenzie’s Essays.|

|Andrew Fletcher.|

44. The Essays of Sir George Mackenzie are empty and diffuse; the

style is full of pedantic words to a degree of barbarism; and though

they were chiefly written after the Revolution, he seems to have

wholly formed himself on the older writers, such as Sir Thomas Browne,

or even Feltham. He affects the obsolete and unpleasing termination of

the third person of the verb in _eth_, which was going out of use

even in the pulpit, besides other rust of archaism. Nothing can be

more unlike the manner of Dryden, Locke, or Temple. In his matter he

seems a mere declaimer, as if the world would any longer endure the

trivial morality which the sixteenth century had borrowed from Seneca,

or the dull ethics of sermons. It is probable that, as Mackenzie was a

man who had seen and read much, he must have some better passages than

I have found in glancing shortly at his works. His countryman, Andrew

Fletcher, is a better master of English style; he writes with purity,

clearness, and spirit; but the substance is so much before his eyes,

that he is little solicitous about language. And a similar character

may be given to many of the political tracts in the reign of William.

They are well expressed for their purpose; their English is

perspicuous, unaffected, often forcible, and, upon the whole, much

superior to that of similar writings in the reign of Charles; but they

do not challenge a place of which their authors never dreamed; they

are not to be counted in the polite literature of England.

|Walton’s Complete Angler.|

45. I may have overlooked, or even never known, some books of

sufficient value to deserve mention; and I regret that the list of

miscellaneous literature should be so short. But it must be confessed

that our golden age did not begin before the eighteenth century, and

then with him who has never since been rivalled in grace, humour, and

invention. Walton’s Complete Angler, published in 1653, seems by the

title a strange choice out of all the books of half a century; yet its

simplicity, its sweetness, its natural grace, and happy intermixture

of graver strains with the precepts of angling, have rendered this

book deservedly popular, and a model which one of the most famous

among our late philosophers, and a successful disciple of Isaac Walton

in his favourite art, has condescended to imitate.

|Wilkin’s New World.|

46. A book, not indeed remarkable for its style, but one which I could

hardly mention in any less miscellaneous chapter than the present,

though, since it was published in 1638, it ought to have been

mentioned before, is Wilkin’s “Discovery of a New World, or a

Discourse tending to prove that it is probable there may be another

habitable World in the Moon, with a Discourse concerning the

Possibility of a Passage thither.” This is one of the births of that

inquiring spirit, that disdain of ancient prejudice, which the

seventeenth century produced. Bacon was undoubtedly the father of it

in England; but Kepler, and above all Galileo, by the new truths they

demonstrated, made men fearless in investigation and conjecture. The

geographical discoveries indeed of Columbus and Magellan had prepared

the way for conjectures, hardly more astonishing in the eyes of the

vulgar than those had been. Wilkins accordingly begins by bringing a

host of sage writers who had denied the existence of antipodes. He

expressly maintains the Copernican theory, but admits that it was

generally reputed a novel paradox. The arguments on the other side he

meets at some length, and knew how to answer, by the principles of

compound motion, the plausible objection that stones falling from a

tower were not left behind by the motion of the earth. The spots in

the moon he took for sea, and the brighter parts for land. A lunar

atmosphere he was forced to hold, and gives reasons for thinking it

probable. As to inhabitants, he does not dwell long on the subject.

Campanella, and long before him Cardinal Cusanus, had believed the sun

and moon to be inhabited,[1051] and Wilkins ends by saying: “Being

content for my own part to have spoken so much of it, as may conduce

to show the opinion of others concerning the inhabitants of the moon,

I dare not myself affirm anything of these Selenites, because I know

not any ground whereon to build any probable opinion. But I think that

future ages will discover more, and our posterity perhaps may invent

some means for our better acquaintance with those inhabitants.” To

this he comes as his final proposition, that it may be possible for

some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world;

and if there be inhabitants there, to have communication with them.

But this chapter is the worst in the book, and shows that Wilkins,

notwithstanding his ingenuity, had but crude notions on the principles

of physics. He followed this up by what I have not seen, a “Discourse

concerning a new planet; tending to prove that it is possible our

earth is one of the planets.” This appears to be a regular vindication

of the Copernican theory, and was published in 1640.

[1051] Suspicamur in regione solis magis esse solares, claros et

illuminatos intellectuales habitatores, spiritualiores etiam quam

in luna, ubi magis lunatici, et in terra magis materiales et

crassi, ut illi intellectualis naturæ solares sint multum in actu

et parum in potentiâ, terreni vero magis in potentia et parum in

actu, lunares in medio fluctuantes, &c. Cusanus apud Wilkins,

p. 103 (edit. 1802).

|Antiquity defended by Temple.|

|Wotton’s Reflections.|

47. The cause of antiquity, so rudely found support in Sir William

Temple, assailed abroad by Perrault and Fontenelle, who has defended

it in one of his essays with more zeal than prudence or knowledge of

the various subjects on which he contends for the rights of the past.

It was in fact such a credulous and superficial view as might have

been taken by a pedant of the sixteenth century. For it is in science,

taking the word largely, full as much as in works of genius, that he

denies the ancients to have been surpassed. Temple’s Essay, however,

was translated into French, and he was supposed by many to have made a

brilliant vindication of injured antiquity. But it was soon refuted in

the most solid book that was written in any country upon this famous

dispute. William Wotton published in 1694 his Reflections on ancient

and modern Learning.[1052] He draws very well in this the line between

Temple and Perrault, avoiding the tasteless judgment of the latter in

poetry and eloquence, but pointing out the superiority of the moderns

in the whole range of physical science.

[1052] Wotton had been a boy of astonishing precocity; at six

years old he could readily translate Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; at

seven he added some knowledge of Arabic and Syriac. He entered

Catherine Hall, Cambridge, in his tenth year; at thirteen, when

he took the degree of bachelor of arts, he was acquainted with

twelve languages. There being no precedent of granting a degree

to one so young, a special record of his extraordinary

proficiency was made in the registers of the university. Monk’s

Life of Bentley, p. 7.

SECT. II.

ON FICTION.

_French Romances--La Fayette and others--Pilgrim’s Progress--Turkish

Spy._

|Quevedo’s Visions.|

48. Spain had about the middle of this century a writer of various

literature, who is only known in Europe by his fictions, Quevedo. His

visions and his life of the great Tacaño, were early translated, and

became very popular.[1053] They may be reckoned superior to anything

in comic romance, except Don Quixote, that the seventeenth century

produced; and yet this commendation is not a high one. In the

picaresque style, the life of Tacaño is tolerably amusing; but

Quevedo, like others, has long since been surpassed. The Sueños, or

Visions, are better; they show spirit and sharpness with some

originality of invention. But Las Zahurdas de Pluton, which, like the

other sueños, bears a general resemblance to the Pilgrim’s Progress,

being an allegorical dream, is less powerfully and graphically

written; the satire is also rather too obvious. “Lucian,” says

Bouterwek, “furnished him with the original idea of satirical visions;

but Quevedo’s were the first of their kind in modern literature. Owing

to frequent imitations, their faults are no longer disguised by the

charm of novelty, and even their merits have ceased to interest.”[1054]

[1053] The translation of this, “made English by a person of

honour” takes great liberties with the original, and endeavours

to excel it in wit by means of frequent interpolation.

[1054] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 471.

|French heroic romances.|

49. No species of composition seems less adapted to the genius of the

French nation in the reign of Louis XIV. than the heroic romances so

much admired in its first years. It must be confessed that this was

but the continuance, and in some respect possibly, an improvement of a

long established style of fiction. But it was not fitted to endure

reason or ridicule, and the societies of Paris knew the use of both

weapons. Molière sometimes tried his wit upon the romances; and

Boileau, rather later in the day, when the victory had been won,

attacked Mademoiselle Scudery with his sarcastic irony in a dialogue

on the heroes of her invention.

|Novels of Madame La Fayette.|

50. The first step in descending from the heroic romance was to ground

not altogether dissimilar. The feats of chivalry were replaced by less

wonderful adventures; the love became less hyperbolical in expression,

though not less intensely engrossing the personages; the general tone

of manners was lowered down better to that of nature, or at least of

an ideality which the imagination did not reject; a style already

tried in the minor fictions of Spain. The earliest novels that demand

attention in this line are those of the Countess de la Fayette,

celebrated while Mademoiselle de la Vergne under the name of Laverna

in the Latin poetry of Menage.[1055] Zayde, the first of these, is

entirely in the Spanish style; the adventures are improbable, but

various and rather interesting to those who carry no scepticism into

fiction; the language is polished and agreeable, though not very

animated; and it is easy to perceive that while that kind of novel was

popular, Zayde would obtain a high place. It has, however, the usual

faults; the story is broken by intervening narratives, which occupy

too large a space; the sorrows of the principal characters excite, at

least as I should judge, little sympathy; and their sentiments and

emotions are sometimes too much refined in the alembic of the Hôtel

Rambouillet. In a later novel, the Princess of Cleves, Madame La

Fayette threw off the affectation of that circle to which she had once

belonged, and though perhaps Zayde is, or was in its own age, the more

celebrated novel, it seems to me that in this she has excelled

herself. The story, being nothing else than the insuperable and

insidious, but not guilty, attachment of a married lady to a lover,

required a delicacy and correctness of taste which the authoress has

well displayed in it. The probability of the incidents, the natural

course they take, the absence of all complication and perplexity, give

such an inartificial air to this novel, that we can scarcely help

believing it to shadow forth some real event. A modern novelist would

probably have made more of the story; the style is always calm,

sometimes almost languid; a tone of decorous politeness, like that of

the French stage, is never relaxed; but it is precisely by this means

that the writer has kept up a moral dignity, of which it would have

been so easy to lose sight. The Princess of Cleves is perhaps the

first work of mere invention (for though the characters are

historical, there is no known foundation for the story) which brought

forward the manners of the aristocracy; it may be said, the

contemporary manners; for Madame La Fayette must have copied her own

times. As this has become a popular theme of fiction, it is just to

commemorate the novel which introduced it.

[1055] The name Laverna, though well-sounding, was in one respect

unlucky, being that given by antiquity to the goddess of thieves.

An epigram on Menage, almost, perhaps, too trite to be quoted, is

_piquant_ enough:

Lesbia nulla tibi, nulla est tibi dicta Corinna;

Carmine laudatur Cynthia nulla tuo.

Sed cum doctorum compilas scrinia vatum,

Nil mirum, si sit culta Laverna tibi.

|Scarron’s Roman Comique.|

51. The French have few novels of this class in the seventeenth

century which they praise; those of Madame Villedieu, or Des Jardins,

may deserve to be excepted; but I have not seen them. Scarron,

a man deformed and diseased, but endowed with vast gaiety, which

generally exuberated in buffoon jests, has the credit of having struck

out into a new path by his Roman Comique. The Spaniards, however, had

so much like this that we cannot perceive any great originality in

Scarron. The Roman Comique is still well known, and if we come to it

in vacant moments, will serve its end in amusing us; the story and

characters have no great interest, but they are natural; yet, without

the least disparagement to the vivacity of Scarron, it is still true

that he has been left at an immense distance in observation of

mankind, in humorous character, and in ludicrous effect by the

novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is said that

Scarron’s romance is written in a pure style; and some have even

pretended that he has not been without effect in refining the

language. The Roman Bourgeois of Furetière appears to be a novel of

middle life; it had some reputation, but I cannot speak of it with any

knowledge.

|Cyrano de Bergerac.|

|Segrais.|

52. Cyrano de Bergerac had some share in directing the public taste

towards those extravagances of fancy which were afterwards highly

popular. He has been imitated himself, as some have observed, by Swift

and Voltaire, and I should add, to a certain degree, by Hamilton; but

all the three have gone far beyond him. He is not himself a very

original writer. His Voyage to the Moon and History of the Empire of

the Sun are manifestly suggested by the True History of Lucian; and he

had modern fictions, especially the Voyage to the Moon by Godwin,

mentioned in our last volume, which he had evidently read, to imp the

wings of an invention not perhaps eminently fertile. Yet Bergerac has

the merit of being never wearisome; his fictions are well conceived,

and show little effort, which seems also the character of his language

in this short piece; though his letters had been written in the worst

style of affectation, so as to make us suspect that he was turning the

manner of some contemporaries into ridicule. The novels of Segrais

such at least as I have seen, are mere pieces of light satire,

designed to amuse by transient allusions the lady by whom he was

patronized, Mademoiselle de Montpensier. If they deserve any regard at

all, it is as links in the history of fiction between the mock-heroic

romance, of which Voiture had given an instance, and the style of

fantastic invention, which was perfected by Hamilton.

|Perrault.|

53. Charles Perrault may, so far as I know, be said to have invented a

kind of fiction which became extremely popular, and has had, even

after it ceased to find direct imitators, a perceptible influence over

the lighter literature of Europe. The idea was original, and happily

executed. Perhaps he sometimes took the tales of children, such as the

tradition of many generations had delivered them; but much of his

fairy machinery seems to have been his own, and I should give him

credit for several of the stories, though it is hard to form a guess.

He gave to them all a real interest, as far as could be, with a

naturalness of expression, an arch naïveté, a morality neither too

obvious nor too refined, and a slight poignancy of satire on the

world, which render the Tales of Mother Goose almost a counterpart in

prose to the Fables of La Fontaine.

|Hamilton.|

54. These amusing fictions caught the fancy of an indolent but not

stupid nobility. The court of Versailles and all Paris resounded with

fairy tales; it became the popular style for more than half a century.

But few of these fall within our limits. Perrault’s immediate

followers, Madame Murat and the Countess D’Aunoy, especially the

latter, have some merit; but they come very short of the happy

simplicity and brevity we find in Mother Goose’s Tales. It is possible

that Count Antony Hamilton may have written those tales which have

made him famous before the end of the century, though they were

published later. But these with many admirable strokes of wit and

invention, have too forced a tone in both these qualities; the labour

is too evident, and, thrown away on such trifling, excites something

like contempt; they are written for an exclusive coterie, not for the

world; and the world in all such cases will sooner or later take its

revenge. Yet Hamilton’s tales are incomparably superior to what

followed; inventions alternately dull and extravagant, a style

negligent or mannered, an immorality passing onward from the

licentiousness of the Regency to the debased philosophy of the ensuing

age, became the general characteristics of these fictions, which

finally expired in the neglect and scorn of the world.

|Télémaque of Fenelon.|

55. The Télémaque of Fenelon, after being suppressed in France,

appeared in Holland clandestinely without the author’s consent

in 1699. It is needless to say that it soon obtained the admiration of

Europe, and perhaps there is no book in the French language that has

been more read. Fenelon seems to have conceived that, metre not being

essential, as he assumed, to poetry, he had, by imitating the Odyssey

in Télémaque, produced an epic of as legitimate a character as his

model. But the boundaries between epic poetry, especially such epics

as the Odyssey, and romance were only perceptible by the employment of

verse in the former; no elevation of character, no ideality of

conception, no charm of imagery or emotion had been denied to romance.

The language of poetry had for two centuries been seized for its use.

Télémaque must therefore take its place among romances; but still it

is true that no romance had breathed so classical a spirit, none had

abounded so much with the richness of poetical language, much in fact

of Homer, Virgil, and Sophocles having been woven in with no other

change than verbal translation, nor had any preserved such dignity in

its circumstances, such beauty, harmony, and nobleness in its diction.

It would be as idle to say that Fenelon was indebted to D’Urfé and

Calprenede, as to deny that some degree of resemblance may be found in

their poetical prose. The one belonged to the morals of chivalry,

generous but exaggerated; the other to those of wisdom and religion.

The one has been forgotten because its tone is false; the other is

ever admired, and is only less regarded because it is true in excess;

because it contains too much of what we know. Télémaque, like some

other of Fenelon’s writings, is to be considered in reference to its

object; an object of all the noblest, being to form the character of

one to whom many must look up for their welfare, but still very

different from the inculcation of profound truth. The beauties of

Télémaque are very numerous; the descriptions, and indeed the whole

tone of the book, have a charm of grace, something like the pictures

of Guido; but there is also a certain languor which steals over us in

reading, and though there is no real want of variety in the narration,

it reminds us so continually of its source, the Homeric legends, as to

become rather monotonous. The abandonment of verse has produced too

much diffuseness; it will be observed, if we look attentively, that

where Homer is circumstantial, Fenelon is more so; in this he

sometimes approaches the minuteness of the romancers. But these

defects are more than compensated by the moral, and even æsthetic

excellence of this romance.

|Deficiency of English romances.|

56. If this most fertile province of all literature, as we have now

discovered it to be, had yielded so little even in France, a nation

that might appear eminently fitted to explore it, down to the close of

the seventeenth century, we may be less surprised at the greater

deficiency of our own country. Yet the scarcity of original fiction in

England was so great as to be inexplicable by any reasoning. The

public taste was not incapable of being pleased; for all the novels

and romances of the continent were readily translated. The manners of

all classes were as open to humorous description, the imagination was

as vigorous, the heart as susceptible as in other countries. But not

only we find nothing good; it can hardly be said that we find anything

at all that has ever attracted notice in English romance. The

Parthenissa of Lord Orrery, in the heroic style, and the short novels

of Afra Behn, are nearly as many, perhaps, as could be detected in old

libraries. We must leave the beaten track before we can place a single

work in this class.

|Pilgrim’s Progress.|

57. The Pilgrim’s Progress essentially belongs to it, and John Bunyan

may pass for the father of our novelists. His success in a line of

composition like the spiritual romance or allegory, which seems to

have been frigid and unreadable in the few instances where it had been

attempted, is doubtless enhanced by his want of all learning and his

low station in life. He was therefore rarely, if ever, an imitator; he

was never enchained by rules. Bunyan possessed in a remarkable degree

the power of representation; his inventive faculty was considerable,

but the other is his distinguishing excellence. He saw, and makes us

see, what he describes; he is circumstantial without prolixity, and in

the variety and frequent change of his incidents, never loses sight of

the unity of his allegorical fable. His invention was enriched, and

rather his choice determined, by one rule he had laid down to himself,

the adaptation of all the incidental language of scripture to his own

use. There is scarce a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament

which does not find a place, bodily and literally, in the story of the

Pilgrim’s Progress; and this peculiar artifice has made his own

imagination appear more creative than it really is. In the

conduct of the romance no rigorous attention to the propriety of the

allegory seems to have been uniformly preserved. Vanity Fair, or the

cave of the two giants, might, for anything we see, have been placed

elsewhere; but it is by this neglect of exact parallelism that he

better keeps up the reality of the pilgrimage, and takes off the

coldness of mere allegory. It is also to be remembered that we read

this book at an age when the spiritual meaning is either little

perceived or little regarded. In his language, nevertheless, Bunyan

sometimes mingles the signification too much with the fable; we might

be perplexed between the imaginary and the real Christian; but the

liveliness of narration soon brings us back, or did at least when we

were young, to the fields of fancy. Yet, the Pilgrim’s Progress, like

some other books, has of late been a little over-rated; its excellence

is great, but it is not of the highest rank, and we should be careful

not to break down the landmarks of fame by placing the John Bunyans

and the Daniel De Foes among the Dii Majores of our worship.

|Turkish spy.|

58. I am inclined to claim for England not the invention, but, for the

most part, the composition of another book which, being grounded on

fiction, may be classed here, The Turkish Spy. A secret emissary of

the Porte is supposed to remain at Paris in disguise for above forty

years, from 1635 to 1682. His correspondence with a number of persons,

various in situation, and with whom therefore his letters assume

various characters, is protracted through eight volumes. Much, indeed

most, relates to the history of those times and to the anecdotes

connected with it; but in these we do not find a large proportion of

novelty. The more remarkable letters are those which run into

metaphysical and theological speculation. These are written with an

earnest seriousness, yet with an extraordinary freedom, such as the

feigned garb of a Mohammedan could hardly have exempted from censure

in catholic countries. Mahmud, the mysterious writer, stands on a sort

of eminence above all human prejudice; he was privileged to judge as a

stranger of the religion and philosophy of Europe; but his bold spirit

ranges over the field of Oriental speculation. The Turkish Spy is no

ordinary production, but contains as many proofs of a thoughtful, if

not very profound mind, as any we can find. It suggested the Persian

Letters to Montesquieu and the Jewish to Argens; the former deviating

from his model with the originality of talent, the latter following it

with a more servile closeness. Probability, that is, a resemblance to

the personated character of an Oriental, was not to be attained, nor

was it desirable, in any of these fictions; but Mahmud has something

not European, something of a solitary insulated wanderer, gazing on a

world that knows him not, which throws, to my feelings, a striking

charm over the Turkish Spy; while the Usbek of Montesquieu has become

more than half Parisian; his ideas are neither those of his

birthplace, nor such as have sprung up unbidden from his soul, but

those of a polite, witty, and acute society; and the correspondence

with his harem in Persia, which Montesquieu has thought attractive to

the reader, is not much more interesting than it is probable, and ends

in the style of a common romance. As to the Jewish Letters of Argens,

it is far inferior to the Turkish Spy, and, in fact, rather an insipid

book.

|Chiefly of English origin.|

59. It may be asked why I dispute the claim made by all the foreign

biographers in favour of John Paul Marana, a native of Genoa, who is

asserted to have published the first volume of the Turkish Spy at

Paris in 1684, and the rest in subsequent years.[1056] But I am not

disputing that Marana is the author of the thirty letters, published

in 1684, and of twenty more in 1686, which have been literally

translated into English, and form about half the first volume in

English of our Turkish spy.[1057] Nor do I doubt in the least that the

remainder of that volume had a French original; though it happens that

I have not seen it. But the later volumes of the Espion Turc, in the

edition of 1696, with the date of Cologne, which, according to

Barbier, is put for Rouen,[1058] are avowedly translated from the

English. And to the second volume of our Turkish Spy, published in

1691, is prefixed an account, not very credible, of the manner in

which the volumes subsequent to the first had been procured by a

traveller in the original Italian; no French edition, it is declared,

being known to the booksellers. That no Italian edition ever existed,

is, I apprehend, now generally admitted; and it is to be shown by

those who contend for the claims of Marana, to seven out of the eight

volumes, that they were published in France before 1691 and the

subsequent years, when they appeared in English. The Cologne or Rouen

edition of 1696 follows the English so closely that it has not given

the original letters of the first volume, published with the name of

Marana, but rendered them back from the translation.

[1056] This first portion was published at Paris and also at

Amsterdam. Bayle gives the following account. Cet ouvrage a été

contrefait à Amsterdam du consentement du libraire de Paris, qui

l’a le premier imprimé. Il sera composé de plusieurs petits

volumes qui contiendront les événemens les plus considérables de

la chrétienté en général, et de la France en particulier, depuis

l’année 1637 jusqu’en 1682. Un Italien natif de Gênes, Marana,

donne ces rélations pour des lettres écrites aux ministres de la

Porte par un espion Turc qui se tenoit caché à Paris. Il prétend

les avoir traduites de l’Arabe en Italien: et il raconte fort en

long comment il les a trouvées. On soupçonne avec beaucoup

d’apparence, que c’est un tour d’esprit Italien, et une fiction

ingénieuse semblable à celle dont Virgile s’est servi pour louer

Auguste, &c. Nouvelles de la République des Lettres; Mars, 1684;

in Œuvres diverses de Bayle, vol. i., p. 20. The Espion Turc is

not to be traced in the index to the Journal des Sçavans; nor is

it noticed in the Bibliothèque Universelle.

[1057] Salfi, xiv., 61. Biograph. Univers.

[1058] Dictionnaire des Anonymes, vol. i., p. 406. Barbier’s

notice of L’Espion dans les cours des princes Chrétiens ascribes

four volumes out of six, which appear to contain as much as our

eight volumes, to Marana, and conjectures that the last two are

by another hand; but does not intimate the least suspicion of an

English original. And as his authority is considerable, I must

fortify my own opinion by what evidence I can find.

The preface to the second volume (English) of the Turkish Spy

begins thus: “Three years are now elapsed since the first volume

of letters written by a Spy at Paris was published in English.

And it was expected that a second should have come out long

before this. The favourable reception which that found amongst

all sorts of readers would have encouraged a speedy translation

of the rest, had there been extant any French edition of more

than the first part. _But after the strictest inquiry none

could be heard of_; and, as for the Italian, our booksellers

have not that correspondence in those parts as they have in the

more neighbouring countries of France and Holland. So that it was

a work despaired of to recover any more of this Arabian’s

memoirs. We little dreamed that the Florentines had been so busy

in printing, and so successful in selling the continued

translation of these Arabian epistles, till it was the fortune of

an English gentleman to travel in those parts last summer, and

discover the happy news. I will not forestall his letter which is

annexed to this preface.” A pretended letter with the signature

of Daniel Saltmarsh follows, in which the imaginary author tells

a strange tale of the manner in which a certain learned physician

of Ferrara, Julio de Medici, descended from the Medicean family,

put these volumes, in the Italian language, into his hands. This

letter is dated Amsterdam, Sept. 9, 1690, and as the preface

refers it to the last summer, I hence conclude that the first

edition of the second volume of the Turkish Spy was in 1691; for

I have not seen that, nor any other edition earlier than the

fifth, printed in 1702.

Marana is said by Salfi and others to have left France in 1689,

having fallen into a depression of spirits. Now the first thirty

letters, about one thirty-second part of the entire work, were

published in 1684, and about an equal length in 1686. I admit

that he had time to double these portions, and thus to publish

one-eighth of the whole; but is it likely that between 1686 and

1689 he could have given the rest to the world? If we are not

struck by this, is it likely that the English translator should

have fabricated the story above mentioned, when the public might

know that there was actually a French original which he had

rendered? The invention seems without motive. Again, how came the

French edition of 1696 to be an avowed translation from the

English, when, according to the hypothesis of M. Barbier, the

volumes of Marana had all been published in France? Surely, till

these appear, we have reason to suspect their existence; and the

_onus probandi_ lies _now_ on the advocates of Marana’s

claim.

60. In these early letters, I am ready to admit, the scheme of the

Turkish Spy may be entirely traced. Marana appears not only to have

planned the historical part of the letters, but to have struck out the

more original and striking idea of a Mohammedan wavering with

religious scruples, which the English continuator has followed up with

more philosophy and erudition. The internal evidence for their English

origin, in all the latter volumes, is to my apprehension exceedingly

strong; but I know the difficulty of arguing from this to convince a

reader. The proof we demand is the production of these volumes in

French, that is, the specification of some public or private library

where they may be seen, in any edition anterior to 1691, and nothing

short of this can be satisfactory evidence.[1059]

[1059] I shall now produce some direct evidence for the English

authorship of seven out of eight parts of the Turkish Spy.

“In the Life of Mrs. Manley, published under the title of ‘The

Adventures of Rivella,’ printed in 1714, in pages 14 and 15, it

is said, That her father, Sir Roger Manley, was the genuine

author of the first volume of the Turkish Spy. Dr. Midgley, an

ingenious physician, related to the family by marriage, had the

charge of looking over his papers, among which he found that

manuscript, which he easily reserved to his proper use: and both

by his own pen and the assistance of some others, continued the

work until the eighth volume, without ever having the justice to

name the author of the first.” MS. note in the copy of the

Turkish Spy (edit. 1732), in the British Museum.

Another MS. note in the same volume gives the following extract

from Dunton’s Life and Errors. “Mr. Bradshaw is the best

accomplished hackney writer I have met with; his genius was quite

above the common size, and his style was incomparably fine.... So

soon as I saw the first volume of the Turkish Spy, the very style

and manner of writing convinced me that Bradshaw was the

author.... Bradshaw’s wife owned that Dr. Midgley had engaged him

in a work which would take him some years to finish, for which

the Doctor was to pay him 40s. per sheet.... So that ’tis very

probable (for I cannot swear I saw him write it), that Mr.

William Bradshaw was the author of the Turkish Spy; were it not

for this discovery, Dr. Midgley had gone off with the honour of

that performance.” It thus appears that in England it was looked

upon as an original work; though the authority of Dunton is not

very good for the facts he tells, and that of Mrs. Manley much

worse. But I do not quote them as evidence of such facts, but of

common report. Mrs. Manley, who claims for her father the first

volume, certainly written by Marana, must be set aside; as to Dr.

Midgley and Mr. Bradshaw, I know nothing to confirm or refute

what is here said.

|Swift’s Tale of a Tub.|

61. It would not, perhaps, be unfair bring within the pale of the

seventeenth century an effusion of genius, sufficient to redeem our

name in its annals of fiction. The Tale of a Tub, though not published

till 1704, was chiefly written, as the author declares, eight years

before; and the Battle of the Books subjoined to it, has every

appearance of recent animosity against the opponents of Temple and

Boyle, is the question of Phalaris. The Tale of a Tub is, in my

apprehension, the masterpiece of Swift; certainly Rabelais has nothing

superior, even in invention, nor anything so condensed, so pointed, so

full of real meaning, of biting satire, of felicitous analogy. The

Battle of the Books is such an improvement of the similar combat in

the Lutrin, that we can hardly own it is an imitation.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

HISTORY OF PHYSICAL AND OTHER LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.

SECT. I.

ON EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

_Institutions for Science at Florence--London--Paris--Chemistry--Boyle

and others._

|Reasons for omitting mathematics.|

1. We have now arrived, according to the method pursued in

corresponding periods, at the history of mathematical and physical

science in the latter part of the seventeenth century. But I must here

entreat my readers to excuse the omission of that which ought to

occupy a prominent situation in any work that pretends to trace the

general progress of human knowledge. The length to which I have found

myself already compelled to extend these volumes, might be an adequate

apology; but I have one more insuperable in the slightness of my own

acquaintance with subjects so momentous and difficult, and upon which

I could not write without presumptuousness and much peril of betraying

ignorance. The names, therefore, of Wallis and Huygens, Newton and

Leibnitz, must be passed with distant reverence.

|Academy del Cimento.|

2. This was the age, when the experimental philosophy, to which Bacon

had held the torch, and which had already made considerable progress,

especially in Italy, was finally established on the ruins of arbitrary

figments and partial inductions. This philosophy was signally indebted

to three associations, the eldest of which did not endure long; but

the others have remained to this day, the perennial fountains of

science; the Academy del Cimento at Florence, the Royal Society of

London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris. The first of these was

established in 1657, with the patronage of the Grand Duke Ferdinand

II., but under the peculiar care of his brother Leopold. Both were, in

a manner at that time remarkable, attached to natural philosophy; and

Leopold, less engaged in public affairs, had long carried on a

correspondence with the learned of Europe. It is said that the advice

of Viviani, one of the greatest geometers that Europe has produced,

led to this institution. The name this Academy assumed, gave promise

of their fundamental rule, the investigation of truth by experiment

alone. The number of Academicians was unlimited, and all that was

required as an article of faith was the abjuration of all faith, a

resolution to inquire into truth without regard to any previous sect

of philosophy. This Academy lasted, unfortunately, but ten years in

vigour; it is a great misfortune for any literary institution to

depend on one man, and especially on a prince, who, shedding a

factitious, as well as sometimes a genuine lustre round it, is not

easily replaced without a diminution of the world’s regard. Leopold,

in 1667, became a cardinal, and was thus withdrawn from Florence;

others of the Academy del Cimento died or went away, and it rapidly

sunk into insignificance. But a volume containing reports of the

yearly experiments it made, among others, the celebrated one showing

the incompressibility of water, is generally esteemed.[1060]

[1060] Galluzzi, Storia del Gran Ducato, vol. vii., p. 240.

Tiraboschi, xi., 204. Corniani, viii., 29.

|Royal Society.|

3. The germ of our Royal Society may be traced to the year 1645, when

Wallis, Wilkins, Glisson, and others less known, agreed to meet weekly

at a private house in London, in order to converse on subjects

connected with natural, and especially experimental philosophy. Part

of these soon afterwards settled in Oxford; and thus arose two little

societies in connection with each other, those at Oxford being

recruited by Ward, Petty, Willis, and Bathurst. They met at Petty’s

lodgings till he removed to Ireland in 1652; afterwards at those of

Wilkins, in Wadham College, till he became Master of Trinity College,

Cambridge, in 1659; about which time most of the Oxford philosophers

came to London, and held their meetings in Gresham College. They

became more numerous after the Restoration, which gave better hope of

a tranquillity indispensable for science; and, on the 28th of

November, 1660, agreed to form a regular society which should meet

weekly for the promotion of natural philosophy; their registers are

kept, from this time.[1061] The king, rather fond himself of their

subjects, from the beginning afforded them his patronage; their first

charter is dated 15th July, 1662, incorporating them by the style of

the Royal Society, and appointing Lord Brouncker the first president,

assisted by a council of twenty, the conspicuous names among which are

Boyle, Kenelm Digby, Wilkins, Wren, Evelyn, and Oldenburg.[1062] The

last of these was secretary, and editor of the Philosophical

Transactions, the first number of which appeared March 1, 1665,

containing sixteen pages in quarto. These were continued monthly, or

less frequently, according to the materials he possessed. Oldenburg

ceased to be the editor in 1677, and was succeeded by Grew, as he was

by Hooke. These early transactions are chiefly notes of conversations

and remarks made at the meetings, as well as of experiments either

then made or reported to the Society.[1063]

[1061] Birch’s Hist. of Royal Society, vol. i., p. 1.

[1062] Birch’s Hist. of Royal Society, vol. i., p. 88.

[1063] Id. vol. ii., p. 18. Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society,

p. 7.

|Academy of Sciences at Paris.|

4. The Academy of Sciences at Paris was established in 1666, under the

auspices of Colbert. The king assigned to them a room in the royal

library for their meetings. Those first selected were all

mathematicians; but other departments of science, especially chemistry

and anatomy, afterwards furnished associates of considerable name. It

seems, nevertheless, that this Academy did not cultivate experimental

philosophy with such unremitting zeal as the Royal Society, and that

abstract mathematics have always borne a larger proportion to the rest

of their inquiries. They published in this century ten volumes, known

as Anciens Mémoires de l’Academie. But near its close, in 1697, they

received a regular institution from the king, organising them in a

manner analogous to the two other great literary foundations, the

French Academy, and that of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres.[1064]

[1064] Fontenelle, vol. v., p. 23. Montucla, Hist. des

Mathématiques, vol. ii., p. 557.

|State of Chemistry.|

5. In several branches of physics, the experimental philosopher is

both guided and corrected by the eternal laws of geometry. In others

he wants this aid, and, in the words of his master, knows and

understands no more concerning the order of nature, than, as her

servant and interpreter, he has been taught by observation and

tentative processes. All that concerns the peculiar actions of bodies

on each other was of this description; though, in our own times, even

this has been, in some degree, brought under the omnipotent control of

the modern analysis. Chemistry, or the science of the molecular

constituents of bodies, manifested in such peculiar and reciprocal

operations, had never been rescued from empirical hands till this

period. The transmutation of metals, the universal medicine, and other

inquiries utterly unphilosophical in themselves, because they assumed

the existence of that which they sought to discover, had occupied the

chemists so much that none of them had made any further progress than

occasionally by some happy combination or analysis, to contribute an

useful preparation to pharmacy, or to detect an unknown substance.

Glauber and Van Helmont were the most active and ingenious of these

elder chemists; but the former has only been remembered by having long

given his name to sulphate of soda, while the latter wasted his time

on experiments from which he knew not how to draw right inferences,

and his powers on hypotheses which a sounder spirit of the inductive

philosophy would have taught him to reject.[1065]

[1065] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry, i., 183.

|Becker.|

6. Chemistry, as a science of principles, hypothetical, no doubt, and

in a great measure unfounded, but cohering in a plausible system, and

better than the reveries of the Paracelsists and Behmenists, was

founded by Becker, in Germany, by Boyle and his contemporaries of the

Royal Society in England. Becker, a native of Spire, who, after

wandering from one city of Germany to another, died in London in 1685,

by his Physica Subterranea, published in 1669, laid the foundation of

a theory, which having in the next century been perfected by Stahl,

became the creed of philosophy till nearly the end of the last

century. “Becker’s theory,” says an English writer, “stripped of

everything but the naked statement, may be expressed in the following

sentence: besides water and air there are three other substances,

called earths, which enter into the composition of bodies; namely the

fusible or vitrifiable earth, the inflammable or sulphureous, and the

mercurial. By the intimate combination of earths with water is formed

an universal acid, from which proceed all other acid bodies; stones

are produced by the combination of certain earths, metals by the

combination of all the three earths in proportions which vary

according to the metal.”[1066]

[1066] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 468.

|Boyle.|

7. No one Englishman of the seventeenth century, after Lord Bacon,

raised to himself so high a reputation in experimental philosophy as

Robert Boyle; it has even been remarked, that he was born in the year

of Bacon’s death, as the person destined by nature to succeed him. An

eulogy which would be extravagant, if it implied any parallel between

the genius of the two; but hardly so, if we look on Boyle as the most

faithful, the most patient, the most successful disciple who carried

forward the experimental philosophy of Bacon. His works occupy six

large volumes in quarto. They may be divided into theological or

metaphysical, and physical or experimental. Of the former, we may

mention, as the most philosophical, his Disquisition into the Final

Causes of Natural Things, his Free Inquiry into the Received Notion of

Nature, his Discourse of Things above Reason, his Considerations about

the Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion, his Excellency of

Theology, and his Considerations on the Style of the Scriptures; but

the latter, his chemical and experimental writings, form more than two

thirds of his prolix works.

|His metaphysical works.|

8. The metaphysical treatises, to use that word in a large sense, of

Boyle, or rather those concerning Natural Theology, are very

perspicuous, very free from system, and such as bespeak an independent

lover of truth. His Disquisition on Final Causes, was a well-timed

vindication of that palmary argument against the paradox of the

Cartesians, who had denied the validity of an inference from the

manifest adaptation of means to ends in the universe to an intelligent

Providence. Boyle takes a more philosophical view of the principle of

final causes than had been found in many theologians, who weakened the

argument itself by the presumptuous hypothesis, that man was the sole

object of Providence in the Creation.[1067] His greater knowledge of

physiology led him to perceive that there are both animal, and what he

calls cosmical ends, in which man has no concern.

[1067] Boyle’s Works, vol. v., p. 394.

|Extract from one of them.|

9. The following passage is so favourable a specimen of the

philosophical spirit of Boyle, and so good an illustration of the

theory of _idols_ in the Novum Organum, that, although it might

better, perhaps, have deserved a place in a former chapter, I will not

refrain from inserting it. “I know not,” he says, in his Free Inquiry

into the received Notion of Nature, “whether it be a prerogative in

the human mind, that, as it is itself a true and positive being, so is

it apt to conceive all other things as true and positive beings also;

but whether or no this propensity to frame such kind of ideas supposes

an excellency, I fear it occasions mistakes, and makes us think and

speak after the manner of true and positive beings, of such things as

are but chimerical, and some of them negations or privations

themselves; as death, ignorance, blindness, and the like. It concerns

us, therefore, to stand very carefully upon our guard, that we be not

insensibly misled by such an innate and unheeded temptation to error,

as we bring into the world with us.”[1068]

[1068] Vol. v., p. 161.

|His merits in physics and chemistry.|

10. Boyle improved the air-pump and the thermometer, though the latter

was first made an accurate instrument of investigation by Newton. He

also discovered the law of the air’s elasticity, namely, that its bulk

is inversely as the pressure. For some of the principles of

hydrostatics we are indebted to him, though he did not possess much

mathematical knowledge. The Philosophical Transactions contain several

valuable papers by him on this science.[1069] By his “Sceptical

Chemist,” published in 1661, he did much to overturn the theories of

Van Helmont’s school, that commonly called of the iatro-chemists,

which was in its highest reputation; raising doubts as to the

existence, not only of the four elements of the peripatetics, but of

those which these chemists had substituted. Boyle holds the elements

of bodies to be atoms of different shapes and sizes, the union of

which gives origin to what are vulgarly called elements.[1070] It is

unnecessary to remark that this is the prevailing theory of the

present age.

[1069] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 400, 411.

[1070] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry, i. 205.

|General character of Boyle.|

11. I shall borrow the general character of Boyle and of his

contemporaries in English chemistry from a modern author of credit.

“Perhaps Mr. Boyle may be considered as the first person neither

connected with pharmacy nor mining, who devoted a considerable degree

of attention to chemical pursuits. Mr. Boyle, though in common with

the literary men of his age he may be accused of credulity, was both

very laborious and intelligent; and his chemical pursuits, which were

various and extensive, and intended solely to develop the truth

without any regard to previously conceived opinions, contributed

essentially to set chemistry free from the trammels of absurdity and

superstition, in which it had been hitherto enveloped, and to

recommend it to philosophers as a science deserving to be studied on

account of the important information which it was qualified to convey.

His refutation of the alchemistical opinions respecting the

constituents of bodies, his observations on cold, on the air, on

phosphorus, and on ether, deserve particularly to be mentioned as

doing him much honour. We have no regular account of any one substance

or of any class of bodies in Mr. Boyle, similar to those which at

present are considered as belonging exclusively to the science of

chemistry. Neither did he attempt to systematize the phenomena, or to

subject them to any hypothetical explanation.

|Of Hooke and others.|

12. But his contemporary, Dr. Hooke, who had a particular predilection

for hypothesis, sketched in his Micrographia a very beautiful

theoretical explanation of combustion, and promised to develop his

doctrine more fully in a subsequent book; a promise which he never

fulfilled; though in his Lampas, published about twenty years

afterwards, he has given a very beautiful explanation of the way in

which a candle burns. Mayow, in his Essays, published at Oxford about

ten years after the Micrographia, embraced the hypothesis of Dr. Hooke

without acknowledgment; but clogged it with so many absurd additions

of his own as greatly to obscure its lustre and diminish its beauty.

Mayow’s first and principal Essay contains some happy experiments on

respiration and air, and some fortunate conjectures respecting the

combustion of the metals; but the most valuable part of the whole is

the chapter on affinities; in which he appears to have gone much

farther than any other chemist of his day, and to have anticipated

some of the best established doctrines of his successors. Sir Isaac

Newton, to whom all the sciences lie under such great obligations,

made two most important contributions to chemistry, which constitute,

as it were, the foundation stones of its two great divisions. The

first was pointing out a method of graduating thermometers, so as to

be comparable with each other in whatever part of the world

observations with them are made. The second was by pointing out the

nature of chemical affinity, and showing that it consisted in an

attraction by which the constituents of bodies were drawn towards each

other and united; thus destroying the previous hypothesis of the

hooks, and points, and rings, and wedges, by means of which the

different constituents of bodies were conceived to be kept

together.”[1071]

[1071] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 466.

|Lemery.|

13. Lemery, a druggist at Paris, by his Cours de Chymie in 1675, is

said to have changed the face of the science; the change,

nevertheless, seems to have gone no deeper. “Lemery,” says Fontenelle,

“was the first who dispersed the real or pretended obscurities of

chemistry, who brought it to clearer and more simple notions, who

abolished the gross barbarisms of its language, who promised nothing

but what he knew the art could perform; and to this he owed the

success of his book. It shows not only a sound understanding, but some

greatness of soul, to strip one’s own science of a false pomp.”[1072]

But we do not find that Lemery had any novel views in chemistry, or

that he claims with any irresistible pretension the title of a

philosopher. In fact, his chemistry seems to have been little more

than pharmacy.

[1072] Eloge de Lemery, in Œuvres de Fontenelle, v. 361.

Biog. Universelle.

SECT. II.

ON NATURAL HISTORY.

_Zoology--Ray--Botanical Classifications--Grew--Geological Theories._

|Slow Progress of Zoology.|

14. The accumulation of particular knowledge in Natural History must

always be progressive, where any regard is paid to the subject; every

traveller in remote countries, every mariner may contribute some

observation, correct some error, or bring home some new species. Thus

zoology had made a regular advance from the days of Conrad Gesner;

yet, with so tardy a step, that, reflecting on the extensive

intercourse of Europe with the Eastern and Western world, we may be

surprised to find how little Jonston in the middle of the seventeenth

century, had added, even in the most obvious class, that of

quadrupeds, to the knowledge collected one hundred years before. But

hitherto zoology, confined to mere description, and that often

careless or indefinite, unenlightened by anatomy, unregulated by

method, had not merited the name of a science. That name it owes to

John Ray.

|Before Ray.|

15. Ray first appeared in Natural History as the editor of the

Ornithology of his highly accomplished friend Francis Willoughby, with

whom he had travelled over the continent. This was published in 1676;

and the History of Fishes followed in 1686. The descriptions are

ascribed to Willoughby, the arrangement to Ray, who might have

considered the two works as in great part his own, though he has not

interfered with the glory of his deceased friend. Cuvier observes,

that the History of Fishes is the more perfect work of the two, that

many species are described which will not be found in earlier

ichthyologists, and that those of the Mediterranean especially are

given with great precision.[1073]

[1073] Biographie Universelle, art. Ray.

|His Synopsis of Quadrupeds.|

16. Among the original works of Ray we may select the Synopsis

Methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis, published in

1693. This book makes an epoch in zoology, not for the additions of

new species it contains, since there are few wholly such, but as the

first classification of animals that can be reckoned both general and

grounded in nature. He divides them into those with blood and without

blood. The former are such as breathe through lungs, and such as

breathe through gills. Of the former of these again some have a heart

with two ventricles, some with one only. And among the former class of

these some are viviparous, some oviparous. We thus come to the proper

distinction of Mammalia. But in compliance with vulgar prejudice, Ray

did not include the cetacea in the same class with quadrupeds, though

well aware that they properly belonged to it, and left them as an

order of fishes.[1074] Quadrupeds he was the first to divide into

_ungulate_ and _unguiculate_, hoofed and clawed, having himself

invented the Latin words.[1075] The former are _solidipeda_,

_bisulca_, or _quadrisulca_; the latter are _bifida_ or _multifida_;

and these latter with undivided, or with partially divided toes; which

latter again may have broad claws, as monkeys, or narrow claws; and

these with narrow claws he arranges according to their teeth, as

either carnivora, or leporina, now generally called rodentia. Besides

all these quadrupeds which he calls analoga, he has a general division

called anomala, for those without teeth, or with such peculiar

arrangements of teeth as we find in the insectivorous genera, the

hedgehog and mole.[1076]

[1074] Nos ne a communi hominum opinione nimis recedamus, et ut

affectatæ novitatis notam evitemus, cetaceum aquatilium genus,

quamvis cum quadrupedibus viviparis in omnibus fere præter, quam

in pilis et pedibus et elemento in quo degunt convenire

videantur, piscibus annumerabimus, p. 55.

[1075] P. 50.

[1076] P. 56.

|Merits of this work.|

17. Ray was the first zoologist who made use of comparative anatomy;

he inserts at length every account of dissections that he could find;

several had been made at Paris. He does not appear to be very anxious

about describing every species; thus in the simian family he omits

several well known.[1077] I cannot exactly determine what quadrupeds

he has inserted that do not appear in the earlier zoologists;

according to Linnæus, in the twelfth-edition of the Systema Naturæ, if

I have counted rightly, they amount to thirty-two; but I have found

him very careless in specifying the synonyms of his predecessors, and

many for which he only quotes Ray, are in Gesner or Jonston. Ray has

however much the advantage over these in the brevity and closeness of

his specific characters. The particular distinction of his labours,

says Cuvier, consists in an arrangement more clear, more determinate

than those of any of his predecessors, and applied with more

consistency and precision. His distribution of the classes of

quadrupeds and birds have been followed by the English naturalists

almost to our own days; and we find manifest traces of that he has

adopted as to the latter class in Linnæus, in Brisson, in Buffon, and

in all other ornithologists.[1078]

[1077] Hoc genus animalium tum caudatorum tum cauda carentium

species valde numerosæ sunt; non tamen multos apud autores fide

dignos descriptæ occurrunt. He only describes those species he

has found in Clusius or Marcgrave, and what he calls Parisienses,

such, I presume, as he had found in the Memoirs of the Académie

des Sciences. But he does not mention the Simia Inuus, or the S.

Hamadryas, and several others of the most known species.

[1078] Biogr. Univ.

|Redi.|

|Swammerdam.|

18. The bloodless animals, and even those of cold blood, with the

exception of fishes, had occupied but little attention of any good

zoologists till after the middle of the century. They were now studied

with considerable success. Redi, established as a physician at

Florence, had yet time for that various literature which has

immortalized his name. He opposed, and in a great degree disproved by

experiment, the prevailing doctrine of the equivocal generation of

insects, or that from corruption; though where he was unable to show

the means of reproduction, he had recourse to a paradoxical hypothesis

of his own. Redi also enlarged our knowledge of intestinal animals,

and made some good experiments on the poison of vipers.[1079]

Malpighi, who combated like Redi, the theory of the reproduction of

organised bodies from mere corruption, has given one of the most

complete treatises on the silkworm that we possess.[1080] Swammerdam,

a Dutch naturalist, abandoned his pursuits in human anatomy to follow

up that of insects, and by his skill and patience in dissection made

numerous discoveries in their structure. His General History of

Insects 1669, contains a distribution into four classes, founded on

their bodily forms and the metamorphoses they undergo. A posthumous

work, Biblia Naturæ, not published till 1738, contains, says the

Biographie Universelle, “a multitude of facts wholly unknown before

Swammerdam; it is impossible to carry farther the anatomy of these

little animals, or to be more exact in the description of the organs.”

[1079] Biogr. Univ. Tiraboschi, ix. 252.

[1080] Idem.

|Lister.|

19. Lister, an English physician, may be reckoned one of those who

have done most to found the science of conchology by his Historia sive

Synopsis Conchyliorum, in 1685; a work very copious and full of

accurate delineations: and also by his three treatises on English

animals, two of which relate to fluviatile and marine shells. The

third, which is on spiders, is not less esteemed in entomology. Lister

was also perhaps the first to distinguish the specific characters,

such at least as are now reckoned specific, though probably not in his

time, of the Asiatic and African elephant. “His works in natural

history and comparative anatomy are justly esteemed, because he has

shown himself an exact and sagacious observer, and has pointed out

with correctness the natural relations of the animals that he

describes.”[1081]

[1081] Biogr. Univ. Chalmers.

|Comparative anatomy.|

20. The beautiful science which bears the nonsensical name of

comparative anatomy had but casually occupied the attention of the

medical profession.[1082] It was to them, rather than to mere

zoologists, that it owed, and indeed strictly must always owe, its

discoveries, which had hitherto been very few. It was now more

cultivated; and the relations of structure to the capacities of animal

life became more striking, as their varieties were more fully

understood; the grand theories of final causes found their most

convincing arguments. In this period, I believe, comparative anatomy

made an important progress, which in the earlier part of the

eighteenth century was by no means equally rapid. France took the lead

in these researches. “The number of papers on comparative anatomy,”

says Dr. Thomson, “is greater in the memoirs of the French Academy

than in our national publication. This was owing to the pains taken

during the reign of Louis XIV. to furnish the Academy with proper

animals, and the number of anatomists who received a salary, and of

course devoted themselves to anatomical subjects.” There are however

about twenty papers in the Philosophical Transactions before 1700 on

this subject.[1083]

[1082] It is most probable that this term was originally designed

to express a comparison between the human structure and that of

brutes, though it might also mean one between different species

of the latter. In the first sense it is never now used, and the

second is but a small though important part of the science.

_Zootomy_ has been suggested as a better name, but it is not

quite analogical to anatomy; and on the whole it seems as if we

must remain with the old word, protesting against its propriety.

[1083] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 114.

|Botany.|

|Jungius.|

21. Botany, notwithstanding the gleams of philosophical light which

occasionally illustrate the writings of Cæsalpin and Columna, had

seldom gone farther than to name, to describe, and to delineate plants

with a greater or less accuracy and copiousness. Yet it long had the

advantage over zoology, and now when the latter made a considerable

step in advance, it still continued to keep a-head. This is a period

of great importance in botanical science. Jungius of Hamburgh, whose

posthumous Isagoge Phytoscopica was published in 1679, is said to have

been the first in the seventeenth century who led the way to a better

classification than that of Lobel; and Sprengel thinks that the

English botanists were not unacquainted with his writings; Ray indeed

owns his obligations to them.[1084]

[1084] Sprengel, Hist. Rei Herbariæ, vol. ii., p. 32.

|Morison.|

22. But the founder of classification, in the eyes of the world, was

Robert Morison, of Aberdeen, professor of botany at Oxford; who, by

his Hortus Blesensis, in 1669; by his Plantarum Umbelliferarum

Distributio Nova, in 1672; and chiefly by his great work Historia

Plantarum Universalis, in 1678, laid the bases of a systematic

classification, which he partly founded, not on trivial distinctions

of appearance, as the older botanists, but, as Cæsalpin had first

done, on the fructifying organs. He has been frequently charged with

plagiarism from that great Italian, who seems to have suffered, as

others have done, by failing to carry forward his own luminous

conceptions into such details of proof as the world justly demands;

another instance of which has been seen in his very striking passages

on the circulation of the blood. Sprengel, however, who praises

Morison highly, does not impute to him this injustice towards

Cæsalpin, whose writings might possibly be unknown in Britain.[1085]

And it might be observed also, that Morison did not as has sometimes

been alledged, establish the fruit as the sole basis of his

arrangement. Out of fifteen classes, into which he distributes all

herbaceous plants, but seven are characterised by this distinction.[1086]

“The examination of Morison’s works,” says a late biographer, “will

enable us to judge of the service he rendered in the reformation of

botany. The great botanists, from Gesner to the Bauhins, had published

works, more or less useful by their discoveries, their observations,

their descriptions, or their figures. Gesner had made a great step in

considering the fruit as the principal distinction of genera. Fabius

Columna adopted this view; Cæsalpin applied it to a classification

which should be regarded as better than any that preceded the epoch of

which we speak. Morison had made a particular study of fruits, having

collected 1,500 different species of them, though he did not neglect

the importance of the natural affinities of other parts. He dwells on

this leading idea, insists on the necessity of establishing generic

characters, and has founded his chief works on this basis. He has

therefore done real service to the science; nor should the vanity

which has made him conceal his obligations to Cæsalpin induce us to

refuse him justice.”[1087] Morison speaks of his own theory with

excessive vanity, and deprecates all earlier botanists as full of

confusion. Several English writers have been unfavourable to Morison,

out of partiality to Ray, with whom he was on bad terms; but

Tournefort declares that if he had not enlightened botany it would

still have been in darkness.

[1085] Sprengel, p. 34.

[1086] Pulteney, Historical Progress of Botany in England,

vol. i., p. 307.

[1087] Biogr. Universelle.

|Ray.|

23. Ray, in his Methodus Plantarum Nova, 1682, and in his Historia

Plantarum Universalis, in three volumes, the first published in 1686,

the second in 1688, and the third, which is supplemental, in 1704,

trod in the steps of Morison, but with more acknowledgment of what was

due to others, and with some improvements of his own. He described

6,900 plants, many of which are now considered as varieties.[1088] In

the botanical works of Ray we find the natural families of plants

better defined, the difference of complete and incomplete flowers more

precise, and the grand division of monocotyledons and bicotyledons

fully established. He gave much precision to the characteristics of

many classes, and introduced several technical terms, very useful for

the perspicuity of botanical language; finally, he established many

general principles of arrangement which have since been adopted.[1089]

Ray’s method of classification was principally by the fruit, though he

admits its imperfections. “In fact, his method,” says Pulteney,

“though he assumes the fruit as the foundation, is an elaborate

attempt, for that time, to fix natural classes.”[1090]

[1088] Pulteney. The account of Ray’s life and botanical

writings in this work occupies nearly 100 pages.

[1089] Biogr. Universelle.

[1090] P. 259.

|Rivinus.|

24. Rivinus, in his Introductio in Rem Herbariam, Leipsic, 1690, a

very short performance, struck into a new path, which has modified to

a great degree the systems of later botanists. Cæsalpin and Morison

had looked mainly to the fruit as the basis of classification; Rivinus

added the flower, and laid down as a fundamental rule that all plants

which resemble each other both in the flower and in the fruit ought to

bear the same generic name.[1091] In some pages of this Introduction,

we certainly find the basis of the Critica Botanica of Linnæus.[1092]

Rivinus thinks the arrangement of Cæsalpin the best, and that Morison

has only spoiled what he took; of Ray he speaks in terms of eulogy,

but blames some part of his method. His own is primarily founded on

the flower, and thus he forms eighteen classes, which, by considering

the differences of the fruits, he subdivides into ninety-one genera.

The specific distinctions he founded on the general habit and

appearance of the plant. His method is more thoroughly artificial, as

opposed to natural; that is, more established on a single principle,

which often brings heterogeneous plants and families together, than

that of any of his predecessors; for even Ray had kept the distinction

of trees from shrubs and herbs, conceiving it to be founded in their

natural fructification. Rivinus set aside wholly this leading

division. Yet he had not been able to reduce all plants to his method,

and admitted several anomalous divisions.[1093]

[1091] Biogr. Univ.

[1092] Id.

[1093] Biogr. Univ. Sprengel, p. 56.

|Tournefort.|

25. The merit of establishing an uniform and consistent system was

reserved for Tournefort. His Elémens de la Botanique appeared in

1694; the Latin translation, Institutiones Rei Herbariæ, in 1700.

Tournefort, like Rivinus, took the flower, or corolla, as the basis of

his system; and the varieties in the structure, rather than number, of

the petals furnish him with his classes. The genera--for, like other

botanists before Linnæus, he has no intermediate division--are

established by the flower and fruit conjointly, or now and then by

less essential differences, for he held it better to constitute new

genera than, as others had done, to have anomalous species. The

accessory parts of a plant are allowed to supply specific

distinctions. But Tournefort divides vegetables, according to old

prejudice--which it is surprising that, after the precedent of Rivinus

to the contrary, he should have regarded--into herbs and trees; and

thus he has twenty-two classes. Simple flowers, monopetalous or

polypetalous, form eleven of these; composite flowers, three; the

apetalous, one; the cryptogamous, or those without flower or fruit,

make another class; shrubs or _suffrutices_ are placed in the

seventeenth; and trees, in five more, are similarly distributed,

according to their floral characters.[1094] Sprengel extols much of

the system of Tournefort, though he disapproves of the selection of a

part so often wanting as the corolla for the sole basis; nor can its

various forms be comprised in Tournefort’s classes. His orders are

well marked, according to the same author; but he multiplied both his

genera and species too much, and paid too little attention to the

stamina. His method was less repugnant to natural affinities, and more

convenient in practice than any which had come since Lobel. Most of

Tournefort’s generic distinctions were preserved by Linnæus, and some

which had been abrogated without sufficient reason, have since been

restored.[1095] Ray opposed the system of Tournefort, but some have

thought that in his later works he came nearer to it, so as to be

called magis corollista quam fructista.[1096] This, however, is not

acknowledged by Pulteney, who has paid great attention to Ray’s

writings.

[1094] Biogr. Univ. Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 34.

Sprengel, p. 64.

[1095] Biogr. Universelle.

[1096] Id.

|Vegetable physiology.|

|Grew.|

26. The classification and description of plants constitute what

generally is called botany. But these began now to be studied in

connection with the anatomy and physiology of the vegetable world; a

phrase, not merely analogical, because as strictly applicable as to

animals, but which had never been employed before the middle of the

seventeenth century. This interesting science is almost wholly due to

two men, Grew and Malpighi. Grew first directed his thoughts towards

the anatomy of plants in 1664, in consequence of reading several books

of animal anatomy, which suggested to him that plants, being the works

of the same Author, would probably show similar contrivances. Some had

introduced observations of this nature, as Highmore, Sharrock, and

Hooke, but only collaterally; so that the systematic treatment of the

subject, following the plant from the seed, was left quite open for

himself. In 1670, he presented the first book of his work to the Royal

Society, who next year ordered it to be printed. It was laid before

the society in print, December, 1671; and on the same day a manuscript

by Malpighi on the same subject was read. They went on from this time

with equal steps; Malpighi, however, having caused Grew’s book to be

translated for his own use. Grew speaks very honourably of Malpighi,

and without claiming more than the statement of facts permits

him.[1097]

[1097] Pulteney. Chalmers. Biogr. Univ. Sprengel calls Grew’s

book opus absolutum et immortale.

|His Anatomy of Plants.|

27. The first book of his Anatomy of Plants, which is the title given

to three separate works, when published collectively in 1682, contains

the whole of his physiological theory, which is developed at length in

those that follow. The nature of vegetation and its processes seem to

have been unknown when he began; save that common observation, and the

more accurate experience of gardeners and others, must have collected

the obvious truths of vegetable anatomy. He does not quote Cæsalpin,

and may have been unacquainted with his writings. No man, perhaps, who

created a science, has carried it farther than Grew; he is so close

and diligent in his observations, making use of the microscope, that

comparatively few discoveries of great importance have been made in

the mere anatomy of plants since his time;[1098] though some of his

opinions are latterly disputed by Mirbel and others of a new botanical

school.

[1098] Biogr. Univ.

|He discovers the sexual system.|

28. The great discovery ascribed to Grew is of the sexual system in

plants. He speaks thus of what he calls the attire, though rather, I

think, in obscure terms:--“The primary and chief use of the attire is

such as hath respect to the plant itself, and so appears to be very

great and necessary. Because even those plants which have no flower or

foliature, are yet some way or other attired, either with the

seminiform or the floral attire. So that it seems to perform its

service to the seeds as the foliature to the fruit. In discourse,

hereof, with our learned Savilian professor, Sir Thomas Millington, he

told me he conceived that the attire doth serve, as the male, for the

generation of the seed. I immediately replied that I was of the same

opinion, and gave him some reasons for it, and answered some

objections which might oppose them. But withal, in regard every plant

is αρρενοθηλυς [arrenothêlus], or male and female, that I was also of

opinion that it serveth for the separation of some parts as well as

the affusion of others.”[1099] He proceeds to explain his notion of

vegetable impregnation. It is singular that he should suppose all

plants to be hermaphrodite, and this shows he could not have

recollected what had long been known, as to the palm, or the passages

in Cæsalpin relative to the subject.

[1099] Book iv., ch. 1. He had hinted at some “primary and

private use of the attire,” in book i., ch. 5.

|Camerarius confirms this.|

29. Ray admitted Grew’s opinion cautiously at first: Nos ut

verisimilem tantum admittimus. But in his Sylloge Stirpium, 1694, he

fully accedes to it. The real establishment of the sexual theory,

however, is due to Camerarius, professor of botany at Tubingen, whose

letter on that subject, published 1694, in the work of another, did

much to spread the theory over Europe. His experiments, indeed, were

necessary to confirm what Grew had rather hazarded as a conjecture

than brought to a test; and he showed that flowers deprived of their

stamina do not produce seeds capable of continuing the species.[1100]

Woodward, in the Philosophical Transactions, illustrated the nutrition

of plants, by putting sprigs of vegetables in phials filled with

water, and after some time determining the weight they had gained and

the quantity they had imbibed.[1101] These experiments had been made

by Van Helmont, who had inferred from them that water is convertible

into solid matter.[1102]

[1100] Sprengel. Biogr. Univ. Pulteney, p. 338.

[1101] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 58.

[1102] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry.

|Predecessors of Grew.|

|Malpighi.|

30. It is just to observe that some had preceded Grew in vegetable

physiology. Aromatari, in a letter of only four pages, published at

Venice in 1625, on the generation of plants from seeds, which was

reprinted in the Philosophical Transactions, showed the analogy

between grains and eggs, each containing a minute organised embryo,

which employs the substances inclosing it for its own development.

Aromatari has also understood the use of the cotyledons.[1103] Brown,

in his Inquiry into Vulgar Errors, has remarks on the budding of

plants, and on the quinary number they affect in their flower. Kenelm

Digby, according to Sprengel, first explained the necessity in

vegetation for oxygen, or vital air, which had lately been discovered

by Bathurst. Hooke carried the discoveries hitherto made in vegetable

anatomy much farther in his Micrographia. Sharrock and Lister

contributed some knowledge, but they were rather later than Grew. None

of these deserve such a place as Malpighi, who, says Sprengel, was not

inferior to Grew in acuteness, though, probably, through some

illusions of prejudice, he has not so well understood and explained

many things. But the structure and growth of seeds he has explained

better, and Grew seems to have followed him. His book is also better

arranged and more concise.[1104] The Dutch did much to enlarge

botanical science. The Hortus Indicus Malabaricus of Rheede, who had

been a governor in India, was published at his own expense in twelve

volumes, the first appearing in 1686; it contains an immense number of

new plants.[1105] The Herbarium Amboinense of Rumphius was collected

in the seventeenth century, though not published till 1741.[1106]

Several botanical gardens were formed in different countries; among

others that of Chelsea was opened in 1686.[1107]

[1103] Sprengel. Biogr. Univ.

[1104] Sprengel, p. 15.

[1105] Biogr. Univ. The date of the first volume is given

erroneously in the B. U.

[1106] Id.

[1107] Sprengel. Pulteney.

|Early notions of geology.|

31. It was impossible that men of inquiring tempers should not have

been led to reflect on those remarkable phenomena of the earth’s

visible structure, which being in course of time accurately registered

and arranged, have become the basis of that noble science, the boast

of our age, geology. The first thing which must strike the eyes of the

merest clown, and set the philosopher thinking, is the irregularity of

the surface of our globe; the more this is observed, the more signs of

violent disruption, and of a prior state of comparative uniformity

appear. Some, indeed, of whom Ray seems to have been one,[1108] were

so much impressed by the theory of final causes that, perceiving the

fitness of the present earth for its inhabitants, they thought it

might have been created in such a state of physical ruin. But the

contrary inference is almost irresistible. A still more forcible

argument for great revolutions in the history of the earth is drawn

from a second phenomenon of very general occurrence, the marine and

other fossil relics of organised beings, which are dug up in strata

far remote from the places where these bodies could now exist. It was

common to account for them by the Mosaic deluge. But the depth at

which they are found was incompatible with this hypothesis. Others

fancied them to be not really organised, but sports of nature, as they

were called, the casual resemblances of shells and fishes in stone.

The Italians took the lead in speculating on these problems; but they

could only arrive now and then at a happier conjecture than usual, and

do not seem to have planned any scheme of explaining the general

structure of the earth.[1109] The Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius

Kircher, famous for the variety and originality of his erudition,

contains probably the geology of his age, or at least his own. It was

published in 1662. Ten out of twelve books relate to the surface or

the interior of the earth, and to various terrene productions; the

remaining two to alchemy and other arts connected with mineralogy.

Kircher seems to have collected a great deal of geographical

and geological knowledge. In England, the spirit of observation was so

strong after the establishment of the Royal Society, that the

Philosophical Transactions, in this period, contain a considerable

number of geognostic papers, and the genius of theory was aroused,

though not at first in his happiest mood.[1110]

[1108] See Ray’s Three Physico-Theological Discourses on

the Creation, Deluge, and final Conflagration. 1692.

[1109] Lyell’s Principles of Geology, vol. i., p. 25.

[1110] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society.

|Burnet’s Theory of Earth.|

|Other geologists.|

32. Thomas Burnet, master of the Charterhouse, a man fearless and

somewhat rash, with more imagination than philosophy, but ingenious

and eloquent, published in 1694 his Theoria Telluris Sacra, which he

afterwards translated into English. The primary question for the early

geologists had always been how to reconcile the phenomena with which

they were acquainted to the Mosaic narratives of the creation and

deluge. Every one was satisfied that his own theory was the best; but

in every case it has hitherto proved, whatever may take place in

future, that the proposed scheme has neither kept to the letter of

Scripture, nor to the legitimate deductions of philosophy. Burnet

gives the reins to his imagination more than any other writer on that

which, if not argued upon by inductive reasoning, must be the dream of

one man, little better in reality, though it may be more amusing, than

the dream of another. He seems to be eminently ignorant of geological

facts, and has hardly ever recourse to them as evidence. And

accordingly, though his book drew some attention as an ingenious

romance, it does not appear that he made a single disciple. Whiston

opposed Burnet’s theory, but with one not less unfounded, nor with

less ignorance of all that required to be known. Hooke, Lister, Ray,

and Woodward came to the subject with more philosophical minds, and

with a better insight into the real phenomena. Hooke seems to have

displayed his usual sagacity in conjecture; he saw that the common

theory of explaining marine fossils by the Mosaic deluge would not

suffice, and perceived that, at some time or other, a part of the

earth’s crust must have been elevated and another part depressed by

some subterraneous power. Lister was aware of the continuity of

certain strata over large districts, and proposed the construction of

geological maps. Woodward had a still more extensive knowledge of

stratified rocks; he was in a manner the founder of scientific

mineralogy in England, but his geological theory was not less

chimerical than those of his contemporaries.[1111] It was first

published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1695.[1112]

[1111] Lyell, p. 31.

[1112] Thomson, p. 207.

|Protogæa of Leibnitz.|

33. The Protogæa of Leibnitz appears, in felicity of conjecture and

minute attention to facts, far above any of these. But this short

tract was only published in 1749, and on reading it, I have found an

intimation that it was not written within the seventeenth century. Yet

I cannot refrain from mentioning that his hypothesis supposes the

gradual cooling of the earth from igneous fusion; the formation of a

vast body of water to cover the surface, a part of his theory but ill

established, and apparently the weakest of the whole; the subsidence

of the lower parts of the earth, which he takes to have been once on

the level of the highest mountains, by the breaking in of vaulted

caverns within its bosom;[1113] the deposition of sedimentary strata

from inundations, their induration, and the subsequent covering of

these by other strata through fresh inundations; with many other

notions which have been gradually matured and rectified in the process

of the science.[1114] No one can read the Protogæa without perceiving

that of all the early geologists, or indeed of all down to a time not

very remote, Leibnitz came nearest to the theories which are most

received in the English school at this day. It is evident that if the

literal interpretation of Genesis, by a period of six natural days,

had not restrained him, he would have gone much farther in his views

of the progressive revolutions of the earth.[1115] Leibnitz had made

very minute inquiries, for his age, into fossil species, and was aware

of the main facts which form the basis of modern geology.[1116]

[1113] Sect. 21. He admits also a partial elevation by

intumescence, but says, ut vastissimæ Alpes ex solida jam terra

eruptione surrexerint, minus consentaneum puto. Scimus tamen et

in illis deprehendi reliquias maris. Cum ergo alterutrum factum

oporteat, credibilius multo arbitror defluxisse aquas spontaneo

nisu, quam ingentem terrarum partem incredibili violentia tam

alte ascendisse. Sect. 22.

[1114] Facies teneri adhuc orbis sæpius novata est; donec

quiescentibus causis atque æquilibratis, consistentior emergeret

status rerum. Unde jam duplex origo intelligitur firmorum

corporum; una cum ignis fusione refrigescerent, altera cum

reconcrescerent ex solutione aquarum. Neque igitur putandum est

_lapides ex sola esse fusione_. Id enim potissimum de prima

tantum massa ex terræ basi accipio; Nec dubito, postea materiam

liquidam in superficie telluris procurrentem, quiete mox reddita,

ex ramentis subactis ingentem materiæ vim deposuisse, quorum alia

varias terræ species formarunt, alia in saxa induruere, e quibus

strata diversa sibi super imposita diversas præcipitationum vices

atque intervalla testantur. Sect. 4.

This he calls the incunabula of the world, and the basis of a new

science, which might be denominated “naturalis geographia.” But

wisely adds, licet conspirent vestigia veteris mundi in præsenti

facie rerum, tamen rectius omnia definient posteri, ubi

curiositas eo processerit, ut per rejar regiones procurrentia

soli genera et strata describant. Sect. 5.

[1115] See sect. 21, et alibi.

[1116] Sect. 24, et usque ad finem libri.

SECT. III.

ON ANATOMY AND MEDICINE.

34. Portal begins the history of this period, which occupies more than

800 pages of his voluminous work, by announcing it as the epoch most

favourable to anatomy: in less than fifty years the science put on a

new countenance; nature is interrogated, every part of the body is

examined with an observing spirit; the mutual intercourse of nations

diffuses the light on every side; a number of great men appear, whose

genius and industry excite our admiration.[1117] But for this very

reason I must, in these concluding pages, glide over a subject rather

foreign to my own studies and to those of the generality of my readers

with a very brief enumeration of names.

[1117] Hist. de l’Anatomie, vol. iii, p. 1.

|Circulation of blood established.|