note, being only a fragment of that vast mass of disputatious
literature, which now seems grotesque, excitable or dull.
Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594–1597), an accepted defence of the Anglican position against Geneva and Rome, is the first theological work of note in the English tongue, and the first of note since Wycliffe written by an Englishman. It is a plea for reason as one of the Hooker. safe and lawful guides to the faith; but it also speaks with admirable temper and large feeling to the ceremonial and aesthetic sense. The First Book, the scaffolding of the treatise, discusses the nature of law at large; but Hooker hardly has pure speculative power, and the language had not yet learnt to move easily in abstract trains of thought. In its elaboration of clause and period, in its delicate resonant eloquence, Hooker’s style is Ciceronian; but his inversions and mazes of subordinate sentence somewhat rack the genius of English. Later divines like Jeremy Taylor had to disintegrate, since they could not wield, this admirable but over-complex eloquence. The sermons (1621–1631) of Donne have the mingled strangeness and intimacy of his verse, and their subtle flame, imaginative tenacity, and hold upon the springs of awe make them unique. Though without artificial symmetry, their sentences are intricately harmonized, in strong contrast to such pellet-like clauses as those of the learned Lancelot Andrewes, who was Donne’s younger contemporary and the subject of Milton’s Latin epitaph.
With Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosophy began its unbroken course and took its long-delayed rank in Europe. His prose, of which he is the first high and various master in English, was shaped and coloured by his bent as orator and pleader, by his immixture in affairs, by his Bacon. speculative brain, and by his use and estimate of Latin. In his conscious craftsmanship, his intellectual confidence and curiosity, his divining faith in the future of science, and his resolve to follow the leadings of nature and experience unswervingly; in his habit of storing and using up his experience, and in his wide wordly insight, crystallized in maxim, he suggests a kind of Goethe, without the poetic hand or the capacity for love and lofty suffering. He saw all nature in a map, and wished to understand and control her by outwitting the “idols,” or inherent paralysing frailties of the human judgment. He planned but could not finish a great cycle of books in order to realize this conception. The De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) expanded from the English Advancement of Knowledge (1605) draws the map; the Novum Organum (1620) sets out the errors of scholasticism and the methods of inductive logic; the New Atlantis sketches an ideally equipped and moralized scientific community. Bacon shared with the great minds of his century the notion that Latin would outlast any vernacular tongue, and committed his chief scientific writings to a Latin which is alive and splendid and his own, and which also disciplined and ennobled his English. The Essays (1597, 1612, 1625) are his lifelong, gradually accumulated diary of his opinions on human life and business. These famous compositions are often sadly mechanical. They are chippings and basketings of maxims and quotations, and of anecdotes, often classical, put together inductively, or rather by “simple enumeration” of the pros and cons. Still they are the honest notes of a practical observer and statesman, disenchanted—why not?—with mankind, concerned with cause and effect rather than with right and wrong, wanting the finer faith and insight into men and women, but full of reality, touched with melancholy, and redeeming some arid, small and pretentious counsels by many that are large and wise. Though sometimes betraying the workshop, Bacon’s style, at its best, is infallibly expressive; like Milton’s angels, it is “dilated or condensed” according to its purposes. In youth and age alike, Bacon commanded the most opposite patterns and extremes of prose—the curt maxim, balanced in antithesis or triplet, or standing solitary; the sumptuous, satisfying and brocaded period; the movements of exposition, oratory, pleading and narrative. The History of Henry VII. (1622), written after his fall from office, is in form as well as insight and mastery of material the one historical classic in English before Clarendon. Bacon’s musical sense for the value and placing of splendid words and proper names resembles Marlowe’s. But the master of mid-Renaissance prose is Shakespeare; with him it becomes the voice of finer and more impassioned spirits than Bacon’s—the voice of Rosalind and Hamlet. And the eulogist of both men, Ben Jonson, must be named in their company for his senatorial weight and dignity of ethical counsel and critical maxim.
As the Stuart rule declined and fell, prose became enriched from five chief sources: from philosophy, whether formal or unmethodical; from theology and preaching and political dispute; from the poetical contemplation of death; from the observation of men and manners; and from antiquarian scholarship and history. As in France, where the first three of these kinds of writings flourished, it was a time rather of individual great writers than of any admitted pattern or common ideal of prose form, although in France this pattern was always clearlier defined. The mental energy, meditative depth, and throbbing brilliant colour of the English drama passed with its decay over into prose. But Latin was still often the supplanter: the treatise of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate, of note in the early history of Deism, and much of the writing of the ambidextrous Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes, are in Latin. In this way Latin disciplined English once more, though it often tempted men of genius away from English. The Leviathan (1651) with its companion books on Human Nature and Liberty, and Hobbes’ explosive dialogue on the civil wars, Behemoth (1679), have the bitter concision of Tacitus and the clearness of a half-relief in bronze. Hobbes’ speculations on the human animal, the social contract, the absolute power of the sovereign, and the subservience owed to the sovereign by the Church or “Kingdom of Darkness,” enraged all parties, and left their track on the thought and controversial literature of the century. With Ben Jonson and the jurist Selden (whose English can be judged from his Table Talk), Hobbes anticipates the brief and clear sentence-structure of the next age, though not its social ease and amenity of form. But his grandeur is not that of a poet, and the poetical Funereal prose. prose is the most distinctive kind of this period. It is eloquent above all on death and the vanity of human affairs; its solemn tenor prolongs the reflections of Claudio, of Fletcher’s Philaster, or of Spenser’s Despair. It is exemplified in Bacon’s Essay Of Death, in the anonymous descant on the same subject wrongly once ascribed to him, in Donne’s plea for suicide, in Raleigh’s History of the World, in Drummond’s Cypress Grove (1623), in Jeremy Taylor’s sermons and Holy Dying (1651), and in Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn-Burial (1658) and Letter to a Friend. Its usual vesture is a long purple period, freely Latinized, though Browne equally commands the form of solemn and monumental epigram. He is also free from the dejection that wraps round the other writers on the subject, and a holy quaintness and gusto relieve his ruminations. The Religio Medici (1642), quintessentially learned, wise and splendid, is the fullest memorial of his power. Amongst modern prose writers, De Quincey is his only true rival in musical sensibility to words.
Jeremy Taylor, the last great English casuist and schoolman,
and one of the first pleaders for religious tolerance (in his Liberty
of Prophesying, 1647), is above all a preacher; tender,
intricate, copious, inexhaustible in image and
picturesque quotation. From the classics, from the
Jeremy Taylor.
Burton.
East, from the animal world, from the life of men and children,
his illustrations flow, without end or measure. He is a master of
the lingering cadence, which soars upward and onward on its
coupled clauses, as on balanced iridescent wings, and is found
long after in his scholar Ruskin. Imaginative force of another
kind pervades Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621), where the humorous medium refracts and
colours every ray of the recluse’s far-travelled spirit. The mass
of Latin citation, woven, not quilted, into Burton’s style, is
another proof of the vitality of the cosmopolitan language.
Burton and Browne owe much to the pre-critical learning of
their time, which yields up such precious savours to their fancy,
that we may be thankful for the delay of more precise science and
