No More Learning

In 1671, Clarendon's son Lawrence (afterwards earl of Rochester)
visited him in his exile, bringing with him the unfinished MS of
the Rebellion, mainly written in Jersey. It was now that Clarendon
made up his mind to a process of contamination for which, con-
sidering the scale on which it was conducted and the rare im-
portance of the writings to which it was applied, a parallel cannot
easily be found in literary history? Taking the MS History, so
far as it went, as the framework of his book, he inserted into it a
great number of passages from the portion of the Life which he
had recently written; and then added, as books x—XVI of the
work, the whole of the latter part of the Life, from the restoration
to his days of exile. By way of a link between the earlier and
later parts of the work, he wrote book viII and part of book ix,
as more or less new matter, and then, after putting the whole into
a shape which, so far as possible, concealed the operations by which
it was joined together, he left the whole History of the Restoration
in the condition in which, after his death, it was given to the
world (in 1702).
Inasmuch as the original History and the first part of the Life,
as has been seen, were written with different ends in view, the
1 The process summarised by Firth in his lecture on Clarendon is detailed by him
in three articles contributed to The English Historical Review, 1904.


## p. 219 (#235) ############################################

Clarendon's Characters
219
result of the dovetailing process could not but be what Firth,
perhaps rather sternly, calls patchwork. It is, however, equally
clear that, in the whole work, we shall find some of the qualities
which belong to a reasoned history, and some of those that
belong to a personal memoir, fresh from the hands of an actor
in the scenes and events narrated by him. Among the former is
the faculty of taking and conveying a comprehensive view of an
entire situation or conjuncture in the affairs of the nation, or of
the court, or of a party or influential section of the community.
The picture of happy England (before the outbreak of the great
civil war) is, indeed, more or less conventional, and will be found
in the Life as well as in the History. But how excellent, in the
History, is the connected and succinct narrative of the Spanish
journey of the prince of Wales and Buckingham, and of the triumph
of the latter over the better judgment of his master king James ;
how persuasive, without any attempt at a whole-hearted defence, is
the pleading for the action of king Charles I in the critical matter of
Strafford's catastrophe ; how ingenious is the sketch of the attitude
of the foreign powers after the death of Charles I himself; how
masterly, too, in the later portion of the Life, is the description of
the jealousies and other foibles of the royalist party in the period
preceding the restoration !
Of some of the characters in the early portion of the Life,
mention has already been made; others, in the History, are
Buckingham, Coventry, Weston, Arundel and Pembroke; Hampden
(very skilfully drawn), archbishop Williams (very bitter), the two
Vanes (a touch of high comedy in the midst of tragic action); and,
at a much later stage of the History, the cruelly antithetical
labelling of Lauderdale, and the vignettes in acid of Bradshaw and
Harrison. Excellent, too, in the Life, is the note that St Albans
(Jermyn) 'had that kindness for himself that he thought everybody
did believe him,' and the sly remark that the duke of Albemarle
(Monck) 'knew that his wife was no wiser than she was born
to be. There are many touches of this kind in Clarendon, which,
to the observant reader, are hardly less attractive than are the
elaborate portraits in which he delighted.
The final character of Charles I (in vol. vi of the History) is
very tender, and at the same time, probably, not far from being
just. On the other hand (in vol. 1 of the Life and elsewhere), the
weaknesses of Charles II are suggested with considerable tact and
(in a remarkable passage of vol. 111) the transmitted failings of the
Stewart family-their tendency to follow the advice of inferior


## p. 220 (#236) ############################################

220
Historical and Political Writings
men, and their inability to refuse favours to those who asked them
—are pointed out with admirable insight. Clarendon is least
tolerable when he appears as an apologist for himself—a task
which he seems incapable of performing without an excess of
protests and an inordinate flow of unction. His defence of his
conduct in the matter of his daughter Anne's marriage is detestable
in tone ; the history of his actual downfall he could not be expected
to relate without taxing the patience of his readers.
Clarendon's style, like every style that attracts or interests, is
the man; and it would not be what it is without the constant
desire to please which had animated him as a member of parlia-
ment and a courtier, or without the consciousness of his own
dignity and rectitude which made him stand erect through mis-
fortune and obloquy. He sometimes comes near true wit, and
occasionally has a picturesque turn; but he very rarely rises into
actual eloquence. For this, he lacked the power of imagination in
which he showed himself wanting in more ways than one-more
especially in his incapacity of recognising the virtue or the great-
ness of an adversary or of appreciating the standpoint of a
political party or a religious denomination other than his own.
Even in the characters of his dramatic dialogues (which, in detail,
are happy enough), he could not travel beyond the range of
those who had been born about his own time, and who, more or
less, thought as he thought. But the style proper to nearly every-
thing written by him, from his History to his occasional tracts, is
never out of keeping with itself, always deliberate without being
dull, and dignified without being (except on fit occasions) solemn,
and, more frequently than it is the custom to assume, breaking
into a ripple of pleasantry which prevents it from growing tedious.
Few memoir writers have succeeded in so steadily sustaining the
attention of their readers as has Clarendon ; few historians have
been less pretentious or mannered than he. His style is not a
literary style in the sense in which this, in different ways, can be
predicated of the style of Gibbon or of that of Macaulay ; if it has
a model, this has still to be sought as with all the prose of the
age, in Latin literature rather than our own. In his dialogue On
Education, he argues in favour of the conversational (not the
vulgar colloquial) practice of Latin in schools, whether by means
of discourse or the acting of plays and the like; and how such a
training can inform the style of a writer is shown by Clarendon's
own prose, which Latin influence helped to mould, without pro-
claiming its presence as in the case of the magnificent but exotic


## p. 221 (#237) ############################################

Carey. Naunton. Manningham 221
Latinisms of Milton. It has been pointed out that, in Clarendon's
later writing, the influence of his long residence in France and
familiarity with the French tongue is very distinctly perceptible ;
and this may help to account for the fact that the Life, as
well as some of the detached Essays, is particularly readable.
In any case, Clarendon was original enough, in essentials, to
form his own style; and the first great historical writer in
our literature is, at the same time, a great writer of English
prose.
The memoir literature proper of the earlier Stewart period is
far too extensive to admit of more than a cursory survey, though
one or two works may be singled out as having, by their literary
qualities, secured to themselves a wider remembrance. The list
may be headed by a well known short production, of which the
most interesting portion carries us back into Elizabethan days.
The Memoirs of Robert Carey, earl of Monmouth, written by him-
self, have always enjoyed a certain popularity, if only because of the
account they furnish of queen Elizabeth's last moments and of her
successor's reception of the great news of her death; the writer
having been an eye-witness in both cases. He survived into a
third reign ; but the entire record, though brightly written, would
not fill a hundred folio pages. Fragmata Regalia, or Observa-
tions on the late Queen Elizabeth, her Times and Favourites, by
Sir Robert Naunton, are still more compendious, and were,
accordingly, reprinted with Carey's Memoirs and other works in
succession. There is considerable force, and not a little malice, in
some of the short characters making up the collection of secretary
Naunton, of whom Bacon said that he forgot nothing. '
From the reign of Elizabeth, though from its very last year,
dates, also, the Diary of John Manningham, barrister-at-law of the
Inner Temple. Among the eminently miscellaneous entries in this
there chances to be one which has a special interest for students
of Shakespeare. Whether in this connection or generally, the
opening sentence of this celebrated repository of anecdotes and
witty sayings, as well as of extracts from sermons', sufficiently
illustrates the miscellaneous nature of the writer's interests, and
his unwillingness to narrow their range.
In the reign of Charles I, the stream of memoir literature
flows copiously. Precedence may be allowed to two autobio-
graphical works by men of high intellectual eminence, of which
1. A puritan is a curious corrector of things indifferent. '


## p. 222 (#238) ############################################

222
Historical and Political Writings
a
that of lord Herbert of Cherbury has already received
noticel. The other, likewise, is a book sui generis, but of a
strange fantastic character, such as cannot be said to belong to
lord Herbert's monument of his own excellences. The Private
Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber
to King Charles the First, are a narrative of Digby's wooing,
and finally wedding, a celebrated beauty, the names of persons
and places being veiled under more or less fictitious disguises.
This, together with the long sentimental dialogues, gives an
appearance of unreality to the book (which the author calls
'Loose Fantasies,' and which he states himself to have written
in order to preserve his virtue by evoking the remembrance of his
heroine, when beset by the favours of certain ladies in the 'island
of Milo').
The result is a production as unreadable to modern generations
as a Scudéry romance, which, indeed, in form it very much
resembles. To the curiosity of contemporaries, however, these
Memoirs, though they can have circulated in manuscript only,
must have commended themselves in more ways than one.
Sir Kenelm Digby had in him something of the genius of Ralegh
and something of the impudence of Dr Dee (Digby's celebrated
'sympathy powders' make the comparison permissible); but he
was also a fine gentleman, an able diplomatist? and, on occasion, a
successful naval commander3. In person he was of 'gigantic' pro-
portions, but, according to Clarendon, ‘marvellously graceful’; and,
in accordance with the fashion of the times, he was an eager
duellist. He was vainglorious in other respects also, and per-
suaded himself that Mary de' Medici was in love with him. Digby
was master of six languages and well seen in divinity-in 1636 he
returned to the church of Rome of which he had originally been a
member; and he seems to have possessed genuine scientific insight
as well as philosophising acumen. (He sat on the council of the
Royal Society when it was first incorporated. ) His political in-
stability was more signal than that of his religious opinions; and,
indeed, his attitude towards causes and persons was a strange
mixture of knight-errantry and criticism, the passion of action
running through all. In his Memoirs, he is Theagenes and Venetia
Stanley is Stelliana. Mardontius, her other lover, is now held to
be Sir Edward Sackville. The narrative is embedded in a great
Ante, pp. 204, 205.
? He was in Spain during the stay of Charles and Buckingham in 1623.
3 See his Journal of a Voyage into the Mediterranean.


## p. 223 (#239) ############################################

Wallington. Sir Simonds d'Ewes 223
deal of moralising and speculative writing, which, here and there,
assumes a tone of impassioned ardour. The manuscript is stated
to contain several sensuous passages, which have been excised
from the published edition but which should not be left out of
account in estimating Digby's strange idiosyncrasy.
We re-enter a homelier sphere in mentioning among records
covering the earlier, as well as the later, years of Charles I's fateful
reign, the Historical Notices of Nehemiah Wallington of St
Leonard's, Eastcheap, London, which, indeed, go back as far as
1623, and occasionally refer to much earlier dates. This worthy
annalist, a London shopkeeper without family connections of
a higher social order, was, at the same time, bookish in his
tastes and a great reader of tracts, which he constantly quotes.
His chronicle is of a miscellaneous sort, noting all kinds of unusual
sights and occurrences, and remarkable judgments of God, as, for
instance, upon those that break the Sabbath day. Public events
he notes in the same strain ; on the meeting of the Long parlia-
ment, he recognises the flow of God's mercies in the judgments
done upon Strafford and Laud; the troubles in Ireland are brought
home to him by the sufferings there of his wife's brother Zechariah;
and the memoranda end with the execution of the king, on which
he comments: “Whatever may be unjust with men, God is righteous
and just in whatever he doth. '
Of more importance, though in some respects not very
different in spirit, is the Autobiography and Correspondence
of Sir Simonds d'Ewes, Bart. After serving as high sheriff
of Suffolk in 1640, he in 1642 entered parliament as member
for Sudbury.
He took the covenant. The Autobiography,
which becomes a record of affairs abroad (the great German
war in particular) as well as at home, shows forth a man who is
not a violent partisan. He judges the character of James I fairly,
without ignoring his vices and deviations, and, in the following
reign, wished for mutual concession and reconciliation between
king and parliament, but was equally opposed to Rome and to the
Anglicanism of Laud. He bad in him something of the genuine
spirit of puritanism, and disliked his own university, Cambridge,
not only because of the licence of life, but, also, because of the
‘hatred of all piety and virtue under false and adulterate nick-
names,' which he found obtaining there. There are touches of
other kinds which go some way towards reconciling us to the
1 The family letters subjoined to the Autobiography in some instances touch on
public affairs during the period 1600——49.


## p. 224 (#240) ############################################

224
Historical and Political Writings
pedantry of a man who, though no great orator', was probably an
excellent specimen of the average member of parliament in his
day. For the rest, the Autobiography ends in 1636, some years
before he took his seat, with the pathetic mention of the death of
the writer's “sweet and only surviving son, 'whose delicate favour
and bright grey eyes were deeply imprinted in our hearts. '
In contrast to the Autobiography of Sir Simonds d'Ewes may
be mentioned that of Sir Henry Slingsby of Scriven, who, after
being created a Nova Scotia baronet in 1638, sat for Knares-
borough in both the Short and Long parliaments, and in 1641 was
one of the fifty-nine members who voted against the bill for the
attainder of Strafford. In 1642, he appears to have ceased to
attend; but his Diary, which begins in 1638, continues to 1649,
the death of Charles I being the last public event noted in it? .
Slingsby's estates, though sequestered, were bought in for him by
friendly trustees; but he had to live in privacy, and having been
involved in a plot for a northern rising, underwent imprisonment
at Hull. He was afterwards entrapped into mixing himself up
with Ormonde's design, and, after being tried in London, was
beheaded on Tower hill, June 1658. His Diary is interesting as
exhibiting the life of a country gentleman, as well as on account of
its political memoranda. He writes with businesslike directness
but not without feeling, and can rise to saying of life here and
hereafter: 'Every man loves his Inn rather than his home. '
A special interest belongs to the Diary of John Rous, in-
cumbent, from 1625 to 1643, of Santon Downham, Suffolk. John
Rous, educated at Emmanuel college, Cambridge, was, for the last
third of his life, minister of a village or hamlet adjoining the
parish of which his father was rector. Thus, nothing could have
been more humdrum than the course of his life; but his Diary,
which seems to have been intended entirely for private use, pro-
bably gained, rather than lost, from the conditions of his existence.
For, while paying much attention to political and religious
controversy, he was a lover of literature, and thus he was led to
preserve, from no party point of view, an amount of contemporary
satirical verse which, considering the limits of his Diary, is
curiously large”, besides occasional political and other documents.
· He mentions with pride the compliments paid to him on one of his speeches by
the earl of Holland (vol. II, p. 289).
2 'He end'd his good life upon the 20th of January, 1648—9, I hear: heu me, quid
heu me? humana perpessi sumus. '
"I hate these following, railing rimes
Yet kepe them for president (precedent) of the times' (p. 109).
6
3


## p. 225 (#241) ############################################

The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow 225
At the same time, he was a thinking man, and one who expressed
his opinions, temperate as they were, with distinctness ; so that,
notwithstanding his moderation, it is clear that he believed time
to be on the side of the parliament rather than on that of the king.
What remains of his Diary has, accordingly, a flavour and value
of its own, while forming a sort of repertory of contemporary
satirical literature.
Leaving aside, as referred to elsewhere in this volume, the
personal records of archbishop Laud, and merely mentioning,
together with the vindictive Memoirs of Denzil, lord Holles,
the modest account of his own services written by Fairfax,
we are constrained to pause on the Memoirs of Edmund
Ludlow, which, though those of a contemporary, are not always
those of an eye-witness; thus, he was in Ireland during the
period after Worcester, in which, in his opinion, Cromwell's
designs first clearly manifested themselves. Of these designs,
and of everything which made for the superiority of the military
over the civil power, and of the monarchical over the de-
mocratic principle, he was a consistent adversary; and the
simple strength of his convictions invests his narrative with a
moral interest wbich neither the dogmatism of some of his later
utterances nor his occasional lack of intellectual sincerity can, in
the long run, obscure. His censures on Charles I and on Oliver
Cromwell necessarily gave rise to a great deal of controversy, in-
cluding a Just Defence of the Royal Martyr King Charles I from
the many false and malicious aspersions in Ludlow's Memoirs, etc.
(1699), and a Vindication of Oliver Cromwell from the accusations
of Lieutenant General Ludlow (1698). The latter of these tracts
was honoured by a brief 'moral' from the pen of Carlyle, who
could not, perhaps, be expected to recognise the fact that it is
on the completeness with which they are assimilated by partly
wooden men’ that the enduring influence of great currents of
opinion 'partly' depends. Ludlow's Memoirs form one of the
historical documents of English republicanism.
From a literary point of view, however, no biographical work of
the time equals in interest the life of yet another parliamentary
officer, written, in this instance, by his wife. The Memoirs of the
Life of Colonel Hutchinson, Governor of Nottingham Castle and
Town, etc. , etc. Written by his Widow Lucy, daughter of Sir Allen
Apsley, Governor of the Town, etc. , are inseparable from The Life
of Mrs Lucy Hutchinson, written by herself, albeit the latter is
i See ante, chap. VI.
2 See bibliography.
15
>
E. L. VII.
CH. IX.


## p. 226 (#242) ############################################

226 · Historical and Political Writings
only a fragment. It extends in fact over only a few pages; but
it is an excellent piece of writing, descriptive of the authoress's
birth and parentage, and giving a curious picture of an overtrained
but self-controlled girl who, when about seven years of age, ‘had at
one time eight tutors in several qualities, languages, music, dancing,
writing and needlework, but her genius was quite averse from all her
book. ' The picture of her mother has much charm, and proves
what a woman's kindness can do in any surroundings—for the wife
of the governor was 'a mother to all the prisoners that came into
the Tower. ' The character of her husband which is subjoined, and
which she drew up for her children, opens with a nobly worded
reference to his dying command to her ‘not to grieve at the
common rate of desolate women,' and purports to be 'a naked,
undressed narrative, speaking the simple truth of him. ' But it
appears that Mrs Hutchinson was so dissatisfied with what she had
written that she made another essay, which, however, her husband's
descendant Julius Hutchinson suppressed in favour of what he
thought the less laboured and more characteristic effort of the two.
It certainly brings out with much force colonel Hutchinson's deep
religiosity, his perfect veracity, his piety in his affections—which
seemed his most distinctive qualities to his sorrowing widow, who
says of herself that all that she is now at best is his pale shadow. '
The biography proper of colonel Hutchinson is a work com-
posed with great care and elaboration. We see him at Peter
House, where he was constant at their chapel,' and 'began to
take notice of their stretching superstition to idolatry. ' We follow
him to Lincoln's inn and witness his courtship, in which he gained
the hand of a woman, at first sight terribly superior to himself,
'after about fourteen months' various exercise of his mind, in the
pursuit of his love. ' Then we have an account of the condition of
the kingdom before the outbreak of the civil war-not very
original, or more fair in one way than Clarendon's is in another,
but of great interest as a direct apology for the puritans. They
were not, as they were believed to be, 'an illiterate, morose,
melancholy, discontented, crazed sort of men. ' On the other
hand, the moral purity of the king's court is acknowledged. At
the end of this disquisition, the writer refers her readers to May's
History, on which, indeed, it is largely based. The account of the
civil conflict in Notts (one of the counties whence the godly
bad to emigrate, and where the castle and adjoining town alone
remained in the hands of the parliament) is full of interest.
Hutchinson was long in expectation of a siege, first by Newcastle
6


## p. 227 (#243) ############################################

The Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson 227
and then by prince Rupert; but he held his own both against these
dangers and against the perpetual worrying of the parliamentary
committee, till times changed after Marston moor. Yet his
worst troubles began after he had come up to London, as a
member of parliament; and his wife's story now has to accompany
him through a tortuous course, which, after bringing him into
relations of deep mutual distrust with Cromwell, finally exposed
him, as one of the 'regicides,' to the vengeance of the restoration.
Although, with the skilful aid of his wife's exertions, he escaped
with his life and with most of his estate, he became suspect in
connection with the so-called Yorkshire plot, and was finally
brought home from prison to his grave. His ‘murderers,' writes
his uncompromising biographer, had confined him in Sandown
castle, where the place had killed him. '
The character of colonel Hutchinson, as drawn by his widow,
need not be accepted exactly as presented by her. It was some
time after the outbreak of the civil war that, as he phrases it, he
found 'a clear call from the Lord' to take up arms on the side
of his choice; and, again, he retained his seat in the House of
Commons even after proceedings to which his wife states him to
have objected. According to the same authority, he was a regicide
on compulsion; and this, perhaps, made it easier for her, at the
restoration, to plead in his name a 'signal' and not inopportune
repentance. ' She may have gone rather far in asserting that
‘ '
'there was nothing he durst not do but sin against God'; in return,
her high spirit and enthusiasm, together with her learning and
ability, more than justify her husband's dying commendation of
her above the pitch of ordinary women,' while her heroic devotion
to him, during a long succession of perils and trials, entitles her to
a place near that of Alcestis among the good women' of all time.
The form of her book is worthy of its spirit, and contributes to
illustrate the supreme force which belonged to religious conceptions
and associations as determining conduct in the age of which she
was a representative. The dignity of her style does not interfere
with its candour; on the other hand, the general sobriety of her
narrative is not out of harmony with occasional passages of deep
personal feeling and, now and then, of emotion almost passionate
in its directness.
The only royalist commander who played an important part in
the civil war and of whom a contemporary biography remains to
us was not less fortunate than colonel Hutchinson in the fact that
this record is from the hand of his wife. The Life of William
اد
15-2


## p. 228 (#244) ############################################

228
Historical and Political Writings
Cavendish, duke of Newcastle, too, may be regarded as one of the
lesser classics of English biographical literature, and contains, like
its counterpart, a supplementary True Relation of the Birth,
Breeding and Life of his faithful companion in adversity as well
as in prosperity. It is true that many different estimates have
been formed by different critics of the literary claims of Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, who, as became a loyal wife, has left
behind her a biography of her husband which may be described
as ample, but only a brief relation of what was personal to herself.
Among her contemporaries, at a season when the university of
Cambridge was prostrating itself in corpore before both their
graces, Pepys confided to his cipher that the writer of this
biography was 'a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman,' and the duke
'an ass to suffer her to write what she writes to him and of him'-
for her literary monument to her husband, singularly enough, was
erected during his lifetime. On the other hand, Charles Lamb
said of the book that ‘no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently
durable, to honour and keep such a jewel,' and indulged in other
paradoxes of praise with regard to the letters' of 'that princely
woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle. ' Her 'output,' if
such a phrase be permissible, amounts to thirteen volumes in
print besides a great deal more in manuscript, and what is ac-
cessible to posterity in prose or verse, and in most known species
of either-dramatic, narrative, didactic and, above all, aphoristic-
reveals, with much queer philosophy and other eccentric cleverness,
not a little genuine mother-wit and occasional felicity of gnomic
phrase. She cherished a scorn, which she did not care to conceal,
for any fetters upon the most active part of her nature, her mind;
and, though she had what might be called 'anti-suffragist' leanings,
she confessed that in all things, from essays in natural philosophy
and plays in which she ignored Aristotle to mere 'accoutrements
of habits,' originality was her foible as well as her forte. Thus,
while she illustrates the force of natural talent, however thinly
beaten out, and the irresistible impulse of the pen", she proves
even more signally the value of that orderly training which she
never underwent and openly contemned.
But it is only the biography of her husband and the devotion
which it displays that have secured her the niche which she
occupies among the unforgotten writers of her age. The first
i No doubt The ccri Sociable Letters (1664).
3 • That little wit I have, it delights me to scribble it out and to disperse it about,'
Autobiography, p. 307.
6


## p. 229 (#245) ############################################

Bulstrode Whitelocke's Memorials 229
>
duke of Newcastle, who played a prominent part in the great civil
war, who bore himself gallantly till his withdrawal to the continent
after Marston moor and who sacrificed a vast fortune for the king's
cause, was a most honourable and accomplished', but far from
extraordinary, man; in fact, he was manifestly born to be master
of the horse, though Monck deprived him of that phase of greatness.
In his life, as in that of his wife, there was much moral dignity,
and in her personality, as it stands forth from her brief auto-
biography, there was something which, if less than heroic, is more
than merely attractive. The fortunate conformity of tastes and
dispositions between the pair, enabled them to weather bravely
the protracted storm and, in the end, cheered the rural solitude to
which they were relegated by a callous sovereign. The duchess, to
alter slightly her own words, ‘had been bred to elevated thoughts,
not to a dejected spirit; her life was ruled with honesty, attended
by modesty, and directed by truth. ' These qualities give a charm
to her portraiture of herself and her husband from which all her
vanities and oddities of thought and style glance off harmlessly ;
and if literature, arduously as she pursued it, was to her only
a noble diversion, it was, nevertheless, an organic part of a noble
life.
Turning from military men to statesmen, we find an important
contribution to history in Bulstrode Whitelocke's Memorials of the
English Afairs from the accession of Charles I to the restoration,
first published in 1682, with a somewhat pretentious preface (by
the earl of Anglesea). Though in these Memorials the writer does
not make any apparent attempt to disguise his opinions, he betrays
no intention of colouring his statement of facts either to suit those
opinions or to gratify any demand for literary display. By the
Whig writers of the earlier part of the eighteenth century he was
contrasted to his advantage with Clarendonº; but, in point of fact,
there is no basis of comparison between them; for the substance
of Whitelocke's Memorials was not put together till after the
restoration, and their form admitted of their being extracted at
secondhand from the most ordinary sources. At the same time,
they are, to make debates more easily understood, interspersed
with some more or less verbatim reports of speeches delivered by
the writer, as well as with detailed accounts of transactions in
which he was personally engaged (such as the Oxford peace
negotiations in 1644), together with other fragments of his various
a
1 Though hardly, as his wife calls him (Life, ed. Firth, p. 201), 'the best lyric and
dramatic poet of his age. '
2 See Oldmixon, Clarendon and Whitelocke compared (1729).


## p. 230 (#246) ############################################

230 Historical and Political Writings
6
autobiographical productions. Thus, the spirit has not entirely
gone out of the compilation, and these Memorials retain a value
not only for lawyers and students of constitutional history, though
their importance as an actual narrative of facts has probably, from
more points of view than one, been greatly overrated. Whitelocke
occasionally deviates into subjects of less severity—such as his
long account of the Inns of court masque in October 16331,
ending with the telling phrase: These dreams passed and
these pomps vanished. ' The Memorials, of course, increase in
interest as the times become more and more critical; the account
of the king's trial is full of sympathy, which may or may not have
been ex post facto. Indeed, in general, Whitelocke showed
throughout the civil troubles, the moderation which accorded
with his training and his disposition ; and this quality which, at
the restoration, preserved to him the bulk of his fortune, is
impressed upon the character and style of his Memorials at large.
Equally well known is Whitelocke's Journal of his Swedish
Embassy in the years 1653 and 1654. Here, the narrative is
carried on throughout in the third person, but is interspersed
with a number of conversations with Oxenstjerna and others,
given in direct dialogue form. The Journal is extremely interesting
and entertaining, and offers a picture at firsthand of that most
extraordinary woman, queen Christina. She received Whitelocke
very politely and, according to English custom, was his valentine
on 14 February, when he presented her with a very large looking-
glass. Their conversation was at times varied by the offering of
copies of Latin verse, which on one occasion the ambassador
translated into indifferent English. In the course of his embassy,
the queen’s design of giving up her crown was communicated
to Whitelocke, who witnessed the ceremony of her resignation
and the coronation of her successor (30 May 1654) and departed
‘rejoicing' on the following day. For his experiences had not
been altogether agreeable, and, at night time, there had been
occasional disturbances outside his house, and shouts of Come
out, ye English dogs, ye king-killers, rogues. '
Whitelocke, who had tried to anticipate Monck's fateful march
to London by inducing Lambert to attack him, did not attend the
Long parliament on its reassembling, but, after sending the great
seal to the Speaker, withdrew into the country, where he sur-
vived for many years. His Notes upon the King's Writt for
choosing members of parliament (1662), which occupied him for
some three or four years, and in which Scriptural arguments
1 Vol. 1, pp. 53–62.


## p. 231 (#247) ############################################

Robert Munro
231
hold a prominent place, form a most elaborate comment on the
system of English constitutional government. To an earlier date
belongs his share in the conference held by him and other heads
of the law with the protector and a committee of parliament
(April 1657), which ended with Cromwell's declining the title of
king. The report of this was published in 1660 under the title
Monarchy Asserted to be the best, most Ancient and legall form of
Government. Whitelocke left behind him manuscripts, still un-
printed and preserved in the British Museum, which are auto-
biographical in their contents and addressed to his children'.
In the period under notice, the number was necessarily large of
narratives dealing with campaigns or other episodes of military
and naval life.
Several of these are noted elsewhere? ; but one of
them may, in conclusion, find mention here, both because it
typifies at once the military and the religious spirit of the age,
and because the remembrance of it is evoked in one of the most
famous of English books 3.
Colonel Robert Munro's-Robertus robore Munro-narrative
of his Expedition with the worthy Scots Regiment called M Keyes
Regiment levied in August 1626 was published four years after his
death, in 1637, with a dedication to Charles Lewis elector Palatine,
'as it was through the line of his mother that Munro's comrades
went out to war. ' The regiment served under Christian IV of
Denmark in the Lower Saxon war, and then under Gustavus
Adolphus, and, after his death, under Oxenstjerna and his generals.
After the unfortunate battle of Nördlingen the regiment, as the
title-page proceeds to say, was reduced to a single company.
Colonel Munro, like the great king whom he served, was as pious
as he was brave; and the appendixes to his celebrated book
comprise together with an ‘Abridgment of Exercises, and divers
practical observations, for the younger Officer his Consideration,'
' the Souldiers meditations going on service. ' The narrative itself
is characteristically divided into sections called 'Duties discharged
(for instance, “The twenty-fourth Duty discharged of our March
to Mentz, etc. ”) and Observations thereon'—the soldier's life being
thus treated as a sort of pilgrim's progress.
6
1 See bibliography.
3 See ibid.
3 In Waverley, vol. 11, chap. XXXVI, where the baron of Bradwardine excuses the
devastation of the house of his ancestors by the reflection that doubtless officers
cannot always keep the soldier's hand from depredation and spuilzie ; and Gustavus
Adolphus himself, as ye may read in Colonel Munro his Expedition with the worthy
Scotch regiment called Mackay's regiment, did often permit it. ' "Tavie' (Gustavus)
is, or was recently, still a familiar name in Sutherlandshire.


## p. 232 (#248) ############################################

CHAPTER X
ANTIQUARIES
SIR THOMAS BROWNE. THOMAS FULLER IZAAK WALTON.
SIR THOMAS URQUHART
-
THE three writers to whom it is proposed to devote the bulk
of the present chapter, more particularly Sir Thomas Browne and
Fuller, agree in being men who, while showing a lively interest in
the present, devoted especial attention to the past; they agree still
more--and here without any qualification—in being, though in ways
distinctly different, exponents of that extraordinary gift of prose-
writing which distinguished the mid-seventeenth century in English
literature. The fourth, Sir Thomas Urquhart, had great schemes
for the improvement, as he thought it, of the future; but he, also,
'catched the opportunity to write of old things'; and, with a
special Scottish differentia, represented the learned and intensely
anti-' modern' quaintness of the time in thought and style.
The first and greatest of them—who has been held by certain
good wits to have hardly a superior in one kind of English prose,
and whose matter, as is not always the case, fully matches his
manner--was of a good Cheshire family; but his father had
gone
into trade as a mercer, and Thomas Browne was born in London
on 19 October 1605, in the parish of St Michael-le-Quern,
Cheapside. His mother was Anne Garraway, of a Sussex family.
There were three other children, but the father died early, and
the mother married again, her second husband being Sir Thomas
Dutton, apparently the opponent and slayer of Sir Hatton Cheke
in a fierce, and rather famous, duel on Calais sands. It is said that
the youthful Thomas was defrauded by his guardian; but his step-
father seems to have been guiltless in the matter, and there are
not at any time in Browne's life any signs of straitened means,
though, towards the close, he complains, like other rich fellows


## p. 233 (#249) ############################################

Sir Thomas Browne
233
a
enough, of losses. He was admitted to a scholarship at Winchester
on 20 August 1616; and, in 1623, being then eighteen, went, not to
New college, but to Broadgates hall, Oxford, which, during his
own residence, was erected into Pembroke college. Here, he
graduated B. A. on 30 June 1626, and M. A. on 11 June 1629.
Somewhere about this time, he seems to have accompanied his
stepfather to Ireland, where Dutton held a post as inspector of
fortresses,
The future author of Religio Medici began his professional
studies at Oxford, and is said to have actually practised in the
county; but this must have been later. Then, and for long
afterwards, it was customary to supplement home training in
physic by visits to famous foreign schools ; and to the two most
famous of these, Montpellier and Padua, Browne proceeded-as
well as later to the younger school of Leyden, where he took his
first doctor's degree. He was abroad three years in all, spending,
probably, a year at each place; and he returned home in 1633.
After an unknown interval—which may have been occupied by
the Oxfordshire practice above referred to-he established him-
self in a dale south-east of Halifax in Yorkshire, in a house, no
longer in existence, named Upper Shebden hall. Here he is
supposed to have written or finished Religio Medici; but the
circumstances of his books will be dealt with later. On 10 July
1637 he took his M. D. degree at Oxford; and, in the same year
(apparently at the suggestion of some old Oxford friends), he
moved to Norwich, where he passed the rest of his life. Two
years earlier, while at Halifax, he had become a member of the
college of physicians; and, four years later, in 1641, he married
Dorothy Mileham, daughter of a Norfolk gentleman, with whom
he lived for more than forty years and who survived him. Of
their numerous children_ten, or eleven, or, according to the best
authorities, twelve-only one son, Edward Browne, himself a man
of distinction, and three daughters, survived their father. Few
details of his life are known, though we have a relatively large
number of letters from and to him ; but the chief biographical
points may be conveniently separated from the story of his books.
The civil war broke out shortly after his marriage; Browne was
a royalist, and a sincere one, refusing subscriptions for parlia-
mentary purposes at the beginning, and rejoicing heartily in the
restoration at the end. But a man of his temperament could
hardly have been a violent partisan, or an extravagant self-
sacrificer; and it was, perhaps, lucky for him that the district


## p. 234 (#250) ############################################

234
Antiquaries
a
in which he lived was so generally disaffected as to make overt
royalist enterprise almost impossible ; while his personal popu-
larity, and the respect in which he was held, prevented any
persecution of him for mere opinion. For the better part of
twenty years he seems to have practised, read, collected and
written in the most even tenor of life; and during this time all
his principal finished work was executed. From the restoration
to his death, we hear a little more of him. His younger son Tom,
after some business experience in France, entered the royal navy,
and distinguished himself in the Dutch war: what became of him
later we do not know. In 1664, came the famous trial at Bury
St Edmunds in which, before Sir Matthew Hale, Browne incurred
the indignation of certain persons by giving—not on his own
motion but when directly appealed to by the judge—testimony
as to his belief in the reality of witchcraft, an expression of belief
in which ninety-nine out of every hundred of his best educated
contemporaries in England would probably have agreed with him.
At the end of that year, he was made honorary fellow of the
college of physicians, receiving his diploma next year; and, in
the year after, 1666, he made a present of fossil bones to the
Royal Society, of which, however (contrary to what used to be
stated), he was never a fellow. On 28 September 1671, Charles II,
visiting Norwich, knighted him. Eleven years later, on his birth-
day, 19 October 1682, he died and was buried in the church of
St Peter Mancroft, Norwich.
Browne had thus enjoyed nearly half a century of quiet pro-
fessional life, and five and forty years of it in the same place.
He was well off; he had plenty of books and collections round
him; and he was in correspondence with many learned men of
tastes similar to his own-Evelyn being the chief of them so far
as England was concerned, though even Iceland was reached by
his curiosity. He had read very widely; to speak disrespectfully
of Browne's learning would be more than a little rash, and might
provoke doubts as to the coextensiveness of the speaker's own
erudition. Above all, he had an intense idiosyncrasy of mental
attitude, and a literary gift hardly surpassed in its own special
way. It was impossible that such a combination of gift and cir-
cumstance should not find its expression.
The first instance of that expression, and, in some eyes, the
most considerable, Religio Medici, appeared in a fashion which
could not but provoke comment, but which, perhaps, has actually
provoked it to an unnecessary extent. That Browne may have


## p. 235 (#251) ############################################

Religio Medici
235
conceived the idea, or parts of the idea, of the book during his
foreign tour is highly probable; but there is not any reason to
doubt the tradition—supported by or founded upon, a positive
chronological reference of his own, which throws it back seven
years from 1642—that it was written during his residence at
Halifax, in or about 1635. Like much of the literature of the
age-a fact which Dr Johnson somewhat sceptically ignored-it
was copied in manuscript again and again. There still exist some
half dozen of such copies; and one of these, getting into the
hands of a printer, Crooke, was published in the year above
mentioned, 1642. A copy having fallen in the way of the earl
of Dorset was by him recommended to Sir Kenelm Digby; and
that remarkable Amadis-Paracelsus made it the subject of Obser-
vations, written in the space of considerably less than twenty-four
hours, which came to Browne's knowledge and extracted an
elaborately courteous reply from him, part explanation, part
disavowal—at least of the thing having been authorised. He then
took it into his own hands and, in 1643, issued 'a true and full
coppy of that which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously
printed before. '
If Johnson was unduly suspicious of this transaction, Browne's
excellent editor, Simon Wilkin—it is rare luck for any man to
have two such editors as Wilkin and Greenhill—has been justly
thought to have been unnecessarily indignant at the suspicion.
Very likely Browne did not instigate the publication; it is equally
likely that he was not wholly sorry for it. The book, not un-
assisted by the discussion with Digby, became popular; and, being
translated (again, it would seem, without Browne's direct privity)
into Latin by John Merryweather in 1644, it achieved a continental
reputation extremely uncommon in those days in the case of the
work of an English author. Guy Patin’s notice, with the curious
but not inappropriate description of Browne as un mélancolique
agréable en ses pensées is one of the commonplaces of the subject.
The book's combination of theology and physics exactly suited the
bent of the time, and, though its great literary excellence could
only be perceived by readers of the original, and those not the first-
comers, the peculiarity of the mental attitude was of wider appeal.
In both respects, some special notice must be taken of it.
The original cause of the book, at least the ostensible cause, is,
of course, clear enough : a defence of himself, if not, also, of his
brethren, from the ancient imputation of irreligion which Chaucer
has epigrammatised. But those circumstances of the time which


## p. 236 (#252) ############################################

236
Antiquaries
in being
already have been glanced at complicated the conditions. On the
one hand, there was the still raging battle of sects and churches,
as obstinate and as confused as the famous conflict in Spenser,
where the knights are constantly changing their allies and their
enemies ; on the other, there was the steady rise of what was not
yet called materialism or anti-supernaturalism. Browne took in
all these things and, of course, was (as he could not but have
anticipated) claimed as a partisan, or denounced as an enemy, by
the most opposite parties. Nor has there ever yet been reached
any distinct or complete agreement as to his position, of which we
shall ourselves, perhaps, be able to take a clearer view when we
consider his Vulgar Errors. In reading Religio, a man need not
have been-need not even be an absolute fool if he is somewhat
irresolute between Browne's apparently inconsistent declarations,
or, rather, between his positive declarations on the one hand, and
the qualifications—still more the atmosphere and background of
thought—by which they are accompanied, surrounded and thrown
into relief. He proclaims, almost ostentatiously, belief in some
literal interpretations of the Bible, and in some general acceptances
of the supernatural which, even at his time, were not uncommonly
questioned by the knowing. Yet, in some cases, even of these,
he hints ‘new and not authentic interpretations' (such as those to
which, he says, a Jesuit once objected), and his whole attitude and
atmosphere are those, rather, of a man arguing for his own right
to believe if he lists, than of an Athanasian positiveness. Against
such a man, it is sure to be a case of Hinc movet Euphrates, illinc
Germania permanere-bellum. Eastern dogmatism will doubt the
logician and western scepticism will contemn the believer.
The success, however, of the expression of this attitude can
hardly be hidden from anyone who has the slightest appreciation
of the beauties of English prose, unless that appreciation be as
one-sided as it is slight. Coleridge, who was nevertheless a
warm, and might have been expected to be a thorough-going,
admirer of Browne, does, indeed, accuse him of being a corrupter
of the language. But the passage in which the accusation occurs
is a mass of anachronisms; it was evidently written in one of the
well known Coleridgean fits of 'fun,' as Lamb called them, that is
to say, of one-sided crotchet; and the corruption alleged is that
of a purely fanciful standard of Elizabethan English which appears
to have been blended for himself by the critic out of two such
isolated, anything but contemporary, and singularly different,
exemplars as Latimer and Hooker.


## p. 237 (#253) ############################################

Browne's Style and Vocabulary
237
a
As a matter of fact, Browne does not corrupt, but develops, the
principal tendencies of his predecessors—-rhythmical elaboration,
highly coloured language and conceit. His special characteristic
in the lower aspects of style may, indeed, be called a corruption,
if anyone chooses, and an audacious, but often real, improvement,
at the pleasure of anyone else. In that lower aspect, it is the
adoption, or, if need be, the manufacture, of Latin or, sometimes,
Greek compounds with English terminations, in fuller indulgence
than any other known case supplies, except that of his con-
temporary, namesake and fellow in knight-hood Sir Thomas
Urquhart. These manufactured words appear to annoy some
people very much ; but there are few of them which, with a
moment's thought, will give much trouble to any decently edu-
cated person, while, for others (as Sir Thomas might even have
said, though he rarely reached the quip modest), he did not write.
There is, however, a further peculiarity, the approval or dis-
approval of which may, once more, be a matter of taste, but which
does make a somewhat heavy demand, not merely on the erudition,
but on the strength and quickness of intellect, of the reader.
Browne is not quite content with using an uncommonly Latinised
vocabulary. He must, in many cases, employ that vocabulary
itself with a peculiar sort of catachresis ; so that its plain and
straightforward meaning, even if known, will not fully illuminate
the passage. A phrase of his own, contrasting 'to construe' with
'to understand,' is often very applicable to himself; and a man
might not merely be able to construe but, to some extent, to
understand, the meaning of every word in such a sentence as
'commutatively iniquous in the valuation of transgressions' with-
out apprehending the true drift of the whole phrase.
In Religio Medici, however, he had not arrived at this pitch ;
while, if he had, likewise, not attained the utter magnificence of
combined rhythmical cadence and imaginative illustration which
distinguishes Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus, there were
good foretastes of it. How much importance he himself attached
to the book is not very clear. His later references to it are rather
slighting, and yet not quite in the way either of mock humility, or
of that mannerly deprecation which was not the worst point of
old-fashioned courtesy. He may have been annoyed by the com-
ments and controversies upon it; or he may have repented of a
certain youthful egotism which certainly does characterise it, and
of such unguarded confessions to the vulgar as that of his dislike
(very rare and suspicious then, very intelligible and common now)


## p. 238 (#254) ############################################

238
Antiquaries
of the word 'protestant,' of his fits of Origenism and of belief in
prayers for the dead and so forth. At any rate, his next and largest
work (1646) is of a much less esoteric character. Its Greek and
English titles Pseudodoxia Epidemica and (for short) Vulgar
Errors are not, as has been sometimes erroneously thought,
translations of each other. “Pseudodoxy' is opposed, in the
abstract, to 'orthodoxy’; but the treatise, after a few chapters
on the general subject, divagates, with most obvious gusto, into
an enormous collection of particular examples which Browne
subjects to treatment with the mild but potent acid of his peculiar
scepticism.
Perhaps, though it is less attractive to purely modern tastes of
the most diverse kinds than the smaller works, an appreciation
of Pseudodoxia is the real touchstone of appreciation of Browne
generally. It is not unnatural that, to the mere man of science or
the mere modernist of any kind, it should seem a scrap-heap of
out-of-date observations, and its criticism hardly more valuable
than its credulity. But it is surprising that even Walter Pater
should have complained of Browne's having ‘no true sense of natural
law,' as Bacon had, of his having achieved ‘no real logic of fallacies. '
If recrimination were argument, or if argument of any kind on the
subject were in place here, one might retort that Bacon's true sense
of natural law did not prevent him from being as much of an
anti-Copernican as Browne was, and that an elaborate exposure of
fallacies, nearly always on strict logical principles, is no bad
preparation for that 'real logic' of them which can probably only
be achieved when the last human being has achieved his last
example of fallacy itself.
The fact is that Browne's obvious and, indeed, almost ostenta-
tious desultoriness, and the subtle ‘two-sidedness' of his scepticism,
have led too many modern critics into the opposite and comple-
mentary error to that of some of his contemporaries. These latter
were suspicious of him, or indignant with him, because he doubted
or denied some things; the former are contemptuously, or, at least,
compassionately, surprised, because he admits or, at least, does not
question other things. But it may be very seriously questioned
whether his attitude, when the conditions of his time and his oppor-
tunities are duly weighed, does not become a far more reasonable one
than that of either set of censors. Browne had mastered the fact
which the Alexander Rosses' and even the Kenelm Digbys had
1 Butler's famous couplet about the sage philosopher, that had read Alexander
Ross over,' and, perhaps, some remarks in editions and notices of Browne, have
6
6


## p. 239 (#255) ############################################

Browne's • Scepticism'
239
a
>
not mastered—that, where a fact or an opinion previously adopted
by a sufficiently communis sensus is open to trial by experiment,
and experiment does not prove or justify it, you should give it up.
But he had also mastered the fact—which some, at least, of his
modern critics have not mastered—that, where such a fact or an
opinion is not open to experiment, or where experiment has, as
yet, been insufficiently applied, you are at liberty not to give it
up, and to doubt the wisdom of those who do.
There is no space here to follow out this consideration; and,
if there were, it might be improper to do so. It is enough to say
that from Religio Medici to Christian Morals, though the
dissolvent principle may appear uppermost in the one, and the
conservative principle in the other, this double scepticism is the
hinge and centre of Browne's thought; that, naturally enough,
it is as disagreeable or unintelligible to those who hold certain
kinds of modern view, as it was to others of an opposite temper
in his own times; and that, perhaps, there is room for not entirely
unintelligent or uninstructed folk who choose to do so to hold it,
with the adjustments with which Browne would certainly have
held it, today. And it may further be deemed to have some real
connection with the astonishing chiaroscuro, the mixture of shaded
sunlight and half illuminated gloom which makes the charm of his
style and habit of expression; while its connection with the singular
charity and equity of his temper and judgment is quite unmis-
takable.
For the admitted desultoriness, no apology seems to be required,
because the objection, and the want of objection, to it are equally
matters of individual taste. And a tolerably brisk student, under-
taking the task as a matter of postgraduate study, could classify
Browne's materials prettily in any one of half a dozen different
ways, and make it almost a pattern monograph. But Browne did
not choose to adopt this method. He simply took—sometimes in
more or less apparent or real connection, sometimes at haphazard-
examples of pseudo-orthodoxy (as he might, perhaps, have even
better entitled the treatise) and submitted them to the microscope
>
3
occasioned a sort of general idea of Ross as a pattern Dunce or Obscurus Vir. He
was, however, nothing of the kind; but an original, who, with great learning and not
small scuteness, put both at the service of a crotchety conservatism, seeking only, as he
says himself, for causes 'which may stand with the grounds of Divinity and Philosophy. '
John Robinson, of Norwich, 'fellow citizen and colleague,' as he proudly calls himself,
of Browne, to whom he is very polite, was a much duller man. His Endoxa are
chiefly minute technical demurrers. His notion of wit may be gathered from his
remark on sugar: Saccharum, quod per jocum ego soleo sal charum dicere.
6


## p. 240 (#256) ############################################

240
Antiquaries
or aqua fortis of his method-applying now experiment, as in the
case of the kingfisher and its supposed virtue as a vane; now
investigation of historical or other proof or disproof; now con-
siderations of probability, analogy, decency and the like. His
command of these different lines of evidence is remarkable: he
scarcely ever confuses them, or the degree of certainty which they
may be supposed to import; but the immense range of his subject,
natural and other history of almost every conceivable kind except
pure literature, upon which, strangely enough”, he never touches-
and the open flouting of any attempt at consecutiveness, may
afford some excuse for the failure, in some cases, of critics to
recognise this.
On the other hand, in no book has he been so parsimonious
of that nectar of his style which modern readers have been wont
to take as the solace of his supposed sins of desultoriness, credulity
and unscientific conduct generally; and in none is that humour,
which some have strangely ignored or refused to recognise, subtler
and less obtrusive, though it is tolerably pervading. 'It is delivered
with aiunt and ferunt by many,' he says of the story of pope Joan.
Oppian, he informs us,
abating the annual mutation of sexes in the hyaena, the single sex of the
rhinoceros, the antipathy between two drums, of a lamb and a wolf's skin, the
informity of cubs, the venation of Centaures, the copulation of the murena
and the viper, with some few others, he may be read with great delight and
profit.
The quintessential dryness of that ‘with some few others' between
the list of abatements and the commendation can only escape
a palate predestined not to taste it. And it is equally difficult to
understand the missing of the humour in the famous prefatory
declaration—that, 'if elegancy still proceedeth. . . we shall, within
few years, be fain to learn Latin to understand English '-by a man
who, before he had finished, was to observe how something ‘hand-
somely sets forth the efficacy of assuefaction. '
For twelve years—years of the utmost trouble and turmoil to
England but, apparently, unhistorical with him-Browne published
nothing; but, in 1658, when his political redemption was drawing
nigh, he was moved to two wonderful deliverances which may have
occupied him for a longer or shorter time, but which certainly
contain the quintessence both of his thought and of his expression.
8
1 Yet his purely literary knowledge was certainly not small; and he is, perhaps, the
only great Englishman of letters of his day, except Milton, who shows familiarity with
Dante.


## p. 241 (#257) ############################################

-
Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus 241
Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial was directly inspired by the discovery
of certain sepulchral vessels in Norfolk; no equally definite origin
is assigned for its singular companion The Garden of Cyrus-
a discussion of the ubiquity and virtues of the quincuncial
arrangement (:. :). Both, however, are, in effect—though the first
not quite so much as the second-occasions, if not occasions merely,
for the outpouring of their author's remarkable learning, of his
strange quietist reflection on the mysteries of the universe, of his
profound though unobtrusive melancholy, of the intensely poetical
feeling which denied itself poetical expression and, above all,
of his unique and splendid style. They were the last things that
he himself published-uniting them, a year after their first appear-
ance, to Pseudodoxia in its third edition, and Religio in its fifth
authorised form. The folio of 1659 may, in a sense, be called his
Works, so far as he published these himself, A Letter to a Friend,
Christian Morals and the various Miscellanies being, in some
cases quite obviously, in almost all probably, destitute of final
revision, though all but a quarter of a century passed between
1658 and his death.
These posthumously published works contain, as will be pointed
out presently, better things than some critics have found in them.
But their author, whatever pains he had taken with them, could
hardly have made any-even the fragment on Dreams-into a thing
more magnificent than Urn Burial. Its companion, like the post-
humous pieces, has sometimes been rather harshly judged. Every-
body of competence admits the splendour of the peroration ‘But
the quincunx of heaven runs low,' with its sign-manual or hall-
mark of Brownism in the observation To keep our eyes open
longer were but to act our Antipodes? ' But the whole of the
fifth or last chapter leads us to this in a fashion which has not
universally been perceived or acknowledged, and chapter i, despite
its touch of the whimsical, is no ordinary prelude. Even the three
central chapters, for all their bewildering hunt of the quincunx
through arts and sciences, buildings and beds, botany and zoology,
are not long enough to be tedious, and, despite the prevailing
1 Browne has left little verse, and that little of less merit. The best, as well as the
best known, is the evening hymn in Religio Medici, 11, $ xii, which recalls to all readers
bishop Ken's later one, and may recall to a few the similar composition of Flatman,
which came, perhaps, between the two. All three, it is worth observing, were Wyke-
bamists, and, as such, accustomed to Latin hymns.
? There are few better examples than this of the truth of Sir Henry Craik's observa.
tion, that the object of seventeenth century wit' was not to excite laughter but to
compel attention. '
E. L. VII. CH. X
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242
Antiquaries
motive, are too various to incur the charge of monotony. But
a certain allowance must always be made in the praise of The
Garden of Cyrus: in that of Urn Burial there is none necessary
or even permissible. That Browne thought his urns older than
they really were is perfectly immaterial, even if true; and no
faults of a more serious nature occur. On the other hand, the
author, on the very first page, has struck, and has maintained with
wonderful fugue-variations to the close, a note at once directly
appealing to ordinary humanity, and susceptible of being played
upon with the strangest and remotest harmonies. This is not
merely derived from the contrast of death and life—it is the result
of a sort of double or triple consideration of the shortness of
individual life, the length of time as contrasted with this and the
shortness, again, of time, as a whole, contrasted with eternity.
Now, one of these sides of the thought is uppermost; now, another;
now, two, or all three, are kept in evidence together, with the most
rapid shifting, while the changes illumine or are illumined by the
phantasmagoria of Browne's imaginative learning. The purely
historical part is much shorter than the corresponding portion of
The Garden of Cyrus; and it seems relatively shorter still because
of the more human interest of the subject, and the comparative,
if not entire, absence of merely trivial scientific detail. But the
really important point is the constant illumination just referred
to-the almost continuous series of imaginative explosions where
the subject catches fire from the author's spirit or vice versa.
The greatest triumph of this pyrotechnical' explosion is, of course,
the famous ‘Now since these dead bones' at the beginning of the
fifth and (for in both these tractates Browne kept to his sacred
number five) last chapter, where the display continues unbroken
to the very conclusion, the longest piece, perhaps, of absolutely
sublime rhetoric to be found in the prose literature of the world.
But the tone has been only a little lower throughout the treatise;
the very first lines 'When the funeral pyre was out and the last
valediction over' set a rhythm which is never too metrical and yet
always cadenced beyond ordinary prose; and the imagination of
the reader is constantly invited to incandescence corresponding
to that of the writer, in such phrases, prodigally scattered over
every page, and in almost every paragraph, as ‘What virtue yet
1 There is no reason why any connotation of artificiality or triviality should be
attached to this word. Summer lightning and the Aurora Borealis are only pyro-
technics on the great scale, and the effect of these against a dark sky is exactly that of
Browne's rhetoric on & smaller.


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Browne's Christian Morals
243
sleeps in this terra damnata and aged cinders' and 'his soul was
viewing the large stations of the dead, which occur within a dozen
lines of each other.
There are few provocatives to a similar enthusiasm in the post-
humous miscellanies, with the exception above noted; and it would
be unreasonable to complain of their absence, seeing that these
miscellanies are somewhat unceremoniously 'gnawed, if not
'knaved,' out of the author's unguarded 'remains' in commonplace-
books, scientific memoranda and the like. But the two major
posthuma are in a different position. They have a curious
interconnection—for certain passages occur in both, and it is
impossible to say whether, if Browne had ever finally decided on
publishing either, he might not have issued the two as one.
Actually, A Letter to a Friend begins by a description-curiously
blended between medical sangfroid and human sympathy-of
(apparently) a case of rapid consumption; which description
passes into remarks on the dying man's thoughts and so forth,
while these, in their turn, fray out into general moral reflections
and precepts; the whole being almost more deeply suffused
than any other piece with Browne's intense, though quiet, melan-
choly.
Of such reflections and precepts, Christian Morals is entirely
composed; and these ingredients, no doubt, have accounted for a
recent tendency to depreciate them, the later nineteenth and
earlier twentieth centuries being, as is well known, in no need
of religious and ethical instruction. But readers who are not
merely of, or for, their own age, may, perhaps, still find profit and
pleasure in the treatise. Its most remarkable characteristic, from
the strictly literary point of view, is an exaggeration of Browne's
habit of Latinising ('Upon a curricle in this world depends a long
course in the next'; 'Trust not too much unto suggestions from
the reminiscential amulets'), while there is a certain deficiency of
his finer cadences and more harmonious rhetoric. Yet, these
last traits appear not unfrequently in such splendid phrases as
'Acquaint thyself with the Choragium of the Stars,' 'Behold thyself
by inward opticks and the Crystalline of thy Soul. ' And, if a more
ungenerous interpretation may assign both exaggeration and
deficiency to failing powers, it is no irrational charity to prefer
the hypothesis of a simple want of revision and ‘making up. '
At any rate, the tractate is no unworthy evensong to a day's work
of hardly surpassed quality.
A few words may, perhaps, be added about his letters. It
>
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244
Antiquaries
should surely not surprise anyone, though it has actually seemed
to surprise some of the very elect, that the style of these is in the
greatest apparent contrast to that of the printed works. About
Browne, there was no pose whatever. When he appeared in public,
he showed respect to himself, and to the public at the same time,
hy assuming the garments of ceremony. He did not 'talk book’ to
his children and his friends. His letters to his son Tom, of whose
actual end, as has been said, we do not know anything, though it
was certainly premature, are delightfully easy, full of matter, not in
any way derogating from the fatherly character, but, while main-
taining this, still the letters of friend to friend. To Edward, they
are the same, with an additional touch of the colleague_the
fellow-experimenter and student. With his learned acquaintances
he is a little more formal, though not much, and, naturally, less
playful. But, throughout, he shows how entirely equal he was to
either function of prose composition; and that, if he had lived in
the next generation and had been disposed rather to adopt the
'middle,' than the sublime, style of that composition, he could have
been little less skilful at it than Addison or Steele. It is fortunate
that he did not so live for, as it is, we have both them and him.
But the correspondence is a special warning not to limit our
classifications too rashly; and, especially, not to think that a great
a
bender of the bow must always bend it.
Thomas Fuller, a curious contemporary, complement and
contrast to Browne, was born three years later, in 1608, at the
village of Aldwinkle, afterwards the birthplace of Dryden, but
in its other parish, St Peter's, of which his father, also a Thomas,
was rector. The mother was Judith Davenant, sister of a divine,
who, becoming president of Queens' college, Cambridge, and bishop
of Salisbury, exercised important influence over his nephew's
career. But, when Fuller, after attendance at a local school, went
to Queens' on 29 June 1621 at the age of thirteen, his uncle had
already been promoted to Salisbury; and, though the nephew
went through the regular course, becoming B. A. in 1624/5 and
M. A. in 1628, he was, despite Davenant's recommendations,
disappointed of a fellowship there, as well as later at Sidney
Sussex, which college he had also entered. He took orders,
however, and obtained the curacy of St Bene't's, where he buried
Hobson, Milton's carrier. His first publication consisted of some
inferior verse entitled Davids Heinous Sin 1631; in the same year,
his uncle gave him the prebend of Netherbury in the diocese of


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Thomas Fuller
245
Salisbury, following it, two years later, with the living of
Broadwindsor in that of Bristol.