No More Learning

It is held to be responsible for
a great outbreak of tree-planting. The introduction to Nisbet's
edition gives figures which demonstrate the shortage in the avail-
able supply of oak timber during the seventeenth century. The
charm of Evelyn's style and the practical nature of his book, which
ran into four editions before the author's death, arrested this
decline ('be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when
ye're sleeping' as the laird of Dumbiedykes counselled his son),
and to the Sylva of John Evelyn is largely due the fact that the
oaken timber used for the British ships which fought the French in
the eighteenth century sufficed, but barely sufficed, for the national
needs.
Pepys, whose naïve and frank self-revelations have made him the
most popular and the most frequently read of diarists, was not quite
of the same class of student to which lord Herbert of Cherbury or
John Evelyn belonged. But, gifted as he was with an undying and
insatiable curiosity, nothing was too trivial or too odd for his
notice and his record; and, being an exceptionally able and hard-
working government servant, he took great interest in anything
which was likely to affect the navy. He discoursed with the
ingenious Dr Kuffler "about his design to blow up ships' noticed
the strange nature of the sea-water in a dark night, that it seemed
like fire upon every stroke of the oar'-an effect due, of course, to
phosphorescent organisms floating near the surface—and interested
himself incessantly in marine matters. His troubled eyesight and
his love of music account for the attention he paid to optical
appliances, the structure of the eye, musical instruments of every
kind and musical notation; for this last, he seems to have invented
a system which is still preserved at Magdalene college, but which
no one now understands.
Physiology and mortuary objects had, for him, an interest which
was almost morbid. He is told that 'negroes drounded look white,
and lose their blackness, which I never heard before,' describes how
‘one of a great family was. . . hanged with a silken halter. . . of his
own preparing, not for the honour only' but because it strangles
more quickly. He attended regularly the early meetings of the
Royal Society at Gresham college, and showed the liveliest interest
in various investigations on the transfusion of blood, respiration
under reduced air pressure and many other ingenious experiments
1 See ante, chap. . .
a
23-2


## p. 356 (#378) ############################################

356
The Progress of Science
2
and observations by Sir George Ent and others. On 20 January
1665, he took home Micrographia, Hooke's book on microscopy-
'a most excellent piece, of which I am very proud. '
Although Pepys had no scientific training-he only began to
learn the multiplication table when he was in his thirtieth year,
but, later, took the keenest pleasure in teaching it to Mrs Pepys-
he, nevertheless, attained to the presidentship of the Royal Society.
He had always delighted in the company of the virtuosos' and, in
1662, three years after he began to study arithmetic, he was
admitted a fellow of their—the Royal Society. In 1681, he was
elected president. This post he owed, not to any genius for science,
or to any great invention or generalisation, but to his very ex-
ceptional powers as an organiser and as a man of business, to his
integrity and to the abiding interest he ever showed in the cause
of the advancement of knowledge.
If we pass from the interest taken in scientific progress by men
of superior intelligence to the obstacles opposed to it by popular
ignorance and superstition, we are brought face to face with the
long-lived crew of witches, wizards and alchemists. It is often
said that the more rationalistic outlook of the seventeenth century,
due to Hobbes and others, did much to discredit these practitioners.
But the observant dwellers in our cities or remote country villages,
pestered as they are with advertisements of those who practise
palmistry, and of those who predict the future by crystal-gazing
or by the fall of sand, of followers of the sporting prophet,
and of far more presumptuous and more dangerous impostors,
or confronted by the silent, indomitable belief of the rustic in
the witchery of his ancestors, may well hold the opinion that the
stock of superstition is a constant stock and permeates now, as it
did in Elizabeth's time, every class of society. What improvement
there was in the seventeenth century, and it is extremely doubtful
if there was much, was largely due to the advent of James I and
the later rise of puritanism, associated as they were with the most
cruel and most inhuman torture of sorcerers. When the alchemist
and the astrologer ran the risk of suffering as a sorcerer or a
warlock, he paused before publicly embarking on the trade.
Under the Tudors, the laws against witchcraft were milder than
those of other countries, but, under James I, these laws were
repealed and he himself took-as he had done before in Scotland -
an active part in this cruel and senseless persecution. During the
first eighty years of the seventeenth century, no less than 70,000
men and women are said to have been executed for alleged offences


## p. 357 (#379) ############################################

Witches, Astrologers and Alchemists 357
under the new act. The king even wrote a book on demonology,
attacking the more sensible and reasonable views of Scot and
Wier. It must be remembered, however, that, in these times, the
generality of learned and able men believed in the maleficent effects
of sorcery and the black art. The bench of bishops and the bench
of judges alike took part in what seems to us a hideous and wanton
brutality. Even so great a writer as Sir Thomas Browne, who tells
us, ‘for the sorrows of others he has quick sympathy,' gave evidence
against two unhappy women charged before Sir Matthew Hale at
Bury St Edmunds, and his evidence helped to secure their iniquitous
conviction.
Browne, like many of his day, was a firm believer in horoscopes—
'I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn and I think I have a
piece of that leaden planet in me. ' He was, however, perhaps
a little in advance of some of his contemporaries; at any rate, he
recognised that foretellings based on star-gazing do not always
'make good. We deny not the influence of the stars but often
suspect the due application thereof. During the civil war, both
sides used astrologers and acted on their prognostications ; but, on
the whole, the firm belief that future events could be foretold by a
study of the planetary system was waning. They' (i. e. the stars)
'incline but do not compel. . . and so gently incline that a wise man
may resist them; sapiens dominabitur astris : they rule but God
rules them? ' This was said by Robert Burton, and it probably
represents the average opinion of the more educated in our period.
The part played by alchemy in the life of the times can be
judged by Ben Jonson’s Alchemist, first acted in 1610%, which
affords a true insight into the fashionable craze of the time. The
play was constantly presented from that date until the closing of
the theatres and, on the restoration, was one of the first plays to
be revived. Jonson certainly had mastered the jargon of this form
of quackery, and showed a profound knowledge of the art of its
professors. In Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, he refers to the
love philtres of one Forman, a most flagrant rascal who was mixed
up with the Overbury trial.
It has been said that a competent man of science should be able
to put into language 'understanded of the people’ any problem, no
matter how complex, at which he is working. This seems hardly
possible in the twentieth century. To explain to a trained histologist
1 Anatomy of Melancholy, part 1, sec, 11, Mem. 1, seo. ,
2 Cf. ante, vol. vi, chap. I, pp. 22–23.


## p. 358 (#380) ############################################

358 The Progress of Science
double functions or to a skilled mathematician the intricacies of
karyokinesis would take a very long time. The introduction in all
the sciences of technical words is not due to any spirit of per-
verseness on the part of modern savants; these terms, long as they
usually are, serve as the shorthand of science. In the Stewart
times, however, an investigator could explain in simple language
to his friends what he was doing and the advance of natural science
was keenly followed by all sorts and conditions of men.
Whatever were the political and moral deficiencies of the
Stewart kings, no one of them lacked intelligence in things artistic
and scientific. The pictures at Windsor and at Buckingham palace
which the nation owes to Charles I and Charles II are only
approached by those it owes to the knowledge and taste of queen
Victoria's consort. At Whitehall, Charles II had his little elabo-
'
ratory, under bis closet, a pretty place',' and was working there but
a day or two before his death, his illness disinclining him for his
wonted exercise. The king took a curious interest in anatomy; on
11 May 1663, Pierce, the surgeon, tells Pepys that the other day
Dr Clerke and he did dissect two bodies, a man and a woman
before the King with which the King was highly pleased. ' Pepys
also records, 17 February 1662/3, on the authority of Edward
Pickering, another story of a dissection in the royal closet by the
king's own hands.
It has, I think, seldom been pointed out that Charles II's
ancestry accounts for many of his qualities and especially for his
interest in science. He was very unlike his father, but his mother
was the daughter of a Medici princess, and the characteristics of
that family are strongly marked in the 'merry monarch. ' His gaiety
and wit and his skill in money matters when he chose to apply
himself, all bring to mind the Italian family from which he sprang?
Another royal personage, prince Rupert, 'full of spirit and
action, full of observation and judgement,' about this time invented
his 'chemical glasses which break all to dust by breaking off a
little small end: which is a great mystery to me? ' He had,
6
1 Pepys, 15 Jan. 1669.
Even the swarthy complexion of Charles II was probably due to his Italian blood,
and his fondness for outdoor sports is another trait which is often observed in the
Medici themselves. There is an old engraving of a portrait of Lorenzo (d. 1648),
the brother of Cosimo II, which shows an astonishing resemblance to Charles II; and
it is interesting to remember that Cosimo II earned his chief claim to the gratitude
of posterity by his courageous encouragement, protection and support of Galileo, who
owed to him the opportunity and means of making his famous astronomical discoveries.
3 Pepys, 13 Jan. 1662.


## p. 359 (#381) ############################################

Worcester. Kenelm Digby.
Wallis 359
says Gramont, quelques talens for chemistry and invented a new
method for making gunpowder, for making 'hails hot' and for
boring cannon. His traditional invention of the almost lost art of
mezzotint is probably due to the fact that, at an early date, the real
inventor, Ludwig von Siegen, explained to him his process and that
prince Rupert demonstrated with his own hands this new method
of engraving to Evelyn.
Another aristocratic inventor, Edward Somerset, second marquis
of Worcester, has received more credit than he deserved. He was
interested in mechanics and employed a skilled mechanician, one
Kaltoff, in his laboratory, but his claims to have invented a steam-
engine do not bear critical investigation, and his well known Cen-
tury of Inventions does not rise to the level of The Boy's Own
Book of the last century. Many of his suggestions, though ingenious,
are based on fallacies, and comparatively few of them were practical.
A curiously versatile amateur in science was Sir Kenelm Digby,
of whom mention has already been made elsewhere? . Like most
prominent men of his time, he intervened in theological questions,
besides playing an active part in public affairs. He was an original
member of the Royal Society, but, although he is reported to have
been the first to record the importance of the 'vital air'—we now
call it oxygen—to plants, and although he had gifts of observation,
his work lay largely in the paths of alchemy and astrology, and he
seems to have had recourse to a lively imagination in estimating
the results of his experiments. He trafficked in the transmutation
of metals, and his name was long associated with a certain powder
of sympathy' which, like the 'absent treatment of the twentieth
century practitioners of Christian science, 'acted at a distance. '
Evelyn looked on him as a quack, 'a teller of strange things,' and
lady Fanshawe refers to his infirmity of lying; he was certainly a
great talker. Still, other men of his epoch spoke well of him and
his conversation was doubtless stimulating if profuse.
6
3
6
>
In mathematics, John Wallis was, to some extent, a forerunner
of Newton. At Felsted school and at Emmanuel college, he re-
ceived the curiously wide education of his age. He was a skilled
linguist; although he had taken holy orders, he was the first of
Francis Glisson's pupils to proclaim in public Harvey's discovery
of the circulation of the blood, but his bent was towards mathe-
matics, and he possessed an extraordinary memory for figures. His
Arithmetica Infinitorum is described as “the most stimulating
See ante, vol. VII, chap. IX, pp. 222—3.
6


## p. 360 (#382) ############################################

360 The Progress of Science
mathematical work so far published in England. ' It contained the
germs of the differential calculus, and it suggested to Newton, who
'read it with delight,' the binomial theorem. In it was evaluated,
and it must not be forgotten that to Wallis we owe the symbol for
infinity, co. Living in troublesome times, under many rulers, he con-
trived, not without some loss of popularity, to remain on good terms
with all. His services were, indeed, indispensable to a succession
of governments, for he had a power of deciphering which was
almost miraculous. Cromwell, who seems to have had a great
respect for his powers, appointed him Savilian professor of geometry
at Oxford in 1649.
Another mathematical ecclesiastic was Seth Ward, bishop of
Exeter and afterwards of Salisbury. Ward was educated at
Sidney Sussex college and. in 1643, was chosen as mathematical
lecturer to the university at Cambridge. But, like Wallis, he
was appointed, and in the same year, to a Savilian professor-
ship, that of astronomy-another instance, not uncommon at
the time, of men educated at Cambridge but recognised and
promoted at Oxford. He took the place of the ejected John
Greaves, who magnanimously used his influence in his successor's
favour. Ward was renowned as a preacher; but his later fame
rested chiefly on his contributions to the science of astronomy, and
he is remembered in the world of science mainly for his theory of
planetary motion. Ward and Wallis—but the burden of the attack
was borne by the latter-laid bare Hobbes's attempted proof of the
squaring of the circle; there was also a little controversy 'on the
duplication of the cube,' and mixed up with these criticisms in the
realm of pure reason were political motives. Hobbes had not
begun to study Euclid until he was forty; and, after Sir Henry
Savile had founded his professorships at Oxford, Wood says that
not a few of the foolish gentry ‘kept back their sons' in order not
'to have them smutted by the black art'-80 great was the fear
and the ignorance of the powers of mathematics. Ward was a
pluralist, as was the manner of the times, and Burnet tells us 'he
was a profound statesman but a very indifferent clergyman. ' Yet,
what money he got he lavishly spent on ecclesiastical and other
purposes
1 As bishop of Exeter, he restored, at the cost of £25,000, the cathedral; repaired
the palace; considerably increased the value of the poorer benefices of his diocese and
of the prebends of his cathedral; and gave a considerable sum of money towards the
cost of making the river navigable from his cathedral city to the sea. He founded the
Seth Ward almshouses at Salisbury, and he gave certain farms and fee-farm rents for
scholarships at Christ's college, Cambridge.
a


## p. 361 (#383) ############################################

Newton and Harvey
361
Like the distinguished mathematicians just mentioned, Isaac
Newton took a keen interest in certain forms of theology current in
his day; but in his intellectual powers he surpassed not only them
but all living mathematicians and those who lived after him. His
supreme genius
has ensured him a place in the very small list of the
world's thinkers of the first order. He, too, exercised a certain
influence in affairs, and, during his later years, he took a keen interest
in theological speculations; but his activities in these fields are com-
pletely overshadowed by the far-reaching importance of his great
discoveries as a natural philosopher and a mathematician. As the
discoverer of the decomposition of white light in the spectrum, he
may be regarded as the founder of the modern science of optics.
His discovery of the law of gravitation, and his application of it to 2
the explanation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion and of the
principal inequalities in the orbital motion of the moon made him
the founder of the science of gravitational astronomy. His dis-
covery of the method of fluxions entitles him to rank with Leibniz
as one of the founders of mathematical analysis. All these great 3
discoveries gave rise to long and sometimes acrimonious con-
troversies among his contemporaries, relating both to the subjects
themselves and to priority of discovery. In a letter to Halley
referring to one of these disputes, Newton writes :
Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady, that a man has as
good be engaged in lawsuits, as have to do with her. I found it so formerly,
and now I am no sooner come near her again, but she gives me warning.
His chief work, Principia, has been described by dean Peacock as
'the greatest single triumph of the human mind. '
The second man of outstanding genius in British science in the
seventeenth century was Harvey, who, like Newton, worked in one
of the two sciences which, in Stewart times, were, to some extent,
ahead of all the others. Harvey, 'the little choleric man' as
Aubrey calls him, was educated at Cambridge and at Padua and
was in his thirty-eighth year when, in his lectures on anatomy, he
expounded his new doctrine of the circulation of the blood to the
college of Physicians, although his Exercitatio on this subject did
not appear till 1628. His notes for the lectures are now in the
British Museum. He was physician to Charles I; and it is on record
how, during the battle of Edgehill, he looked after the young
princes as he sat reading a book under a hedge a little removed
from the fight.
In the chain of evidence of his convincing demonstration of the
1 Newton held the office of president of the Royal Society for the last twenty-five
years of his life, a period exceeded only in the case of one president, Sir Joseph Banks.
9


## p. 362 (#384) ############################################

362 The Progress of Science
>
circulation of the blood, one link, only to be supplied by the
invention of the compound microscope, was missing. This, the
discovery of the capillaries, was due to Malpighi, who was amongst
the earliest anatomists to apply the compound microscope to
animal tissues. Still, as Dryden has it,
The circling streams once thought but pools of blood
(Whether life's fuel or the body's food),
From dark oblivion Harvey's name shall save 1.
Harvey was happy in two respects as regards his discovery,
It was, in the main and especially in England, recognised as proven
in his own lifetime, and, again, no one of credit claimed or asserted
the claim of others to priority. In research, all enquirers stand on
steps others have built up; but, in this, the most important of
single contributions to physiology, the credit is Harvey's and almost
Harvey's alone. His other great work, Exercitationes de Genera-
tione Animalium, is of secondary importance. It shows marvellous
powers of observation and very laborious research ; but, although,
to a great extent, it led the way in embryology, it was shortly
superseded by works of those who had the compound microscope at
their command. Cowley, a man of wide culture, wrote an Ode on
Harvey in which his achievement was contrasted with a failing
common to scientific men of his own time, and, so far as we can see,
of all time:
Harvey sought for Truth in Truth's own Book
The Creatures, which by God Himself was writ;
And wisely thought 'twas fit,
Not to read Comments only upon it,
But on th' original it self to look.
Methinks in Arts great Circle, others stand
Lock't up together, Hand in Hand,
Every one leads as he is led,
The same bare path they tread,
A Dance like Fairies a Fantastick round,
But neithor change their motion, nor their ground:
Had Harvey to this Road confin'd his wit,
His noble Circle of the Blood, had been untroden yet.
Harvey's death is recorded in a characteristic seventeenth
century sentence, taken from the unpublished pages of Baldwin
Harvey's Bustorum Aliquot Reliquiae :
Of William Harvey, the most fortunate anatomist, the blood ceased to
move on the third day of the Ides of June, in the year 1657, the continuous
movement of which in all men, moreover he had most truly asserted . . .
"Εν τι τροχώ πάντες και εν πάσι τροχοί.
1 Epistle to Dr Charleton.
? The writer is indebted for this quotation to Dr Norman Moore's History of the
Study of Medicine in the British Isles, Oxford, 1908.


## p. 363 (#385) ############################################

Mayerne. Mayow. Sydenham. Glisson 363
Among other great physiologists and physicians, Sir Theodore
Turquet de Mayerne (godson of Theodore Beza), who settled in
London in 1611, has left us Notes of the diseases of the great which,
to the medically minded, are of the greatest interest. He almost
diagnosed enteric, and his observations on the fatal illness of
Henry, prince of Wales, and the memoir he drew up in 1623 on
the health of James I, alike leave little to be desired in complete-
ness or in accuracy of detail.
Before bringing to a close these short notices of those who studied
and wrote on the human body, whole or diseased, a few lines must
be given to John Mayow of Oxford, who followed the law,'especially
in the summer time at Bath. Yet, from his contributions to
science, one might well suppose that he had devoted his whole
time to research in chemistry and physiology. He it was who
showed that, in respiration, not the whole air but a part only of the
air breathed in takes an active part in respiration, though he called
this part by a different name, he meant what we now call oxygen. '
Thomas Sydenham was one of the first physicians who was
convinced of the importance of constant and prolonged observation
at the bedside of the patient. He passed by all authority but
one-'the divine old man Hippocrates,' whose medicine rested also
on observation. He, first in England, 'attempted to arrive at
general laws about the prevalence and the course and the treat-
ment of disease from clinical observation. He was essentially
'
a physician occupied in diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. When
he was but 25 years old, he began to suffer from gout, and his
personal experience enabled him to write a classic on this disease,
which is even now unsurpassed.
Francis Glisson, like Sydenham, was essentially English in his
upbringing, and did not owe anything to foreign education. His
work on the liver has made 'Glisson's capsule' known to every
medical student, and he wrote an authoritative book on rickets.
He, like Harvey, was educated at Gonville and Caius college, and,
in 1636, became regius professor of physic at Cambridge, but the
greater part of his life he spent at Colchester. We must perforce
pass by the fashionable Thomas Willis and his more capable
assistant Richard Lower, with Sir George Ent, and others.
Great as were the seventeenth century philosophers in the
biological and medical sciences, they were paralleled if not
surpassed by workers on the physical and mathematical side.
Robert Boyle was, even as a boy of eighteen, one of the
· Foster, Sir Michael, The History of Physiology, Cambridge, 1901.
6


## p. 364 (#386) ############################################

364 The Progress of Science
leaders in the comparatively new pursuit of experimental science.
His first love was chemistry, 'Vulcan has so transported and
bewitched me as to make me fancy my laboratory a kind of
Elysium,' thus he wrote in 1649. A few years later (1652–3), in
Ireland, where he was called to look after the family estates, he
found it hard to have any Hermetic thoughts,' and occupied his
mind with anatomy and confirming Harvey's discovery of the
circulation of the blood. A year later, he settled at Oxford, where
he arranged a laboratory and had as assistant Robert Hooke.
Meetings were held alternately at Boyle's lodgings and at John
Wilkins's lodge at Wadham, and were frequented by Seth Ward
and Christopher Wren and by many others.
Stimulated by Otto von Guericke's contrivance for exhausting
air from a vessel, Boyle, aided by Hooke, invented what was called
the 'machina Boyliana,' which comprised the essentials of the air-
pump of today. At this time, Boyle busied himself with the
weight, with the pressure and with the elasticity of air—the part
it played in respiration and in acoustics. Like Newton, he took a
deep interest in theology, and not only spent considerable sums in
translating the Bible into foreign tongues, but learnt Greek, Hebrew,
Syriac and Chaldee so that he might read it at first hand. He
was, indeed, a very notable character. Suffering under continued
ill-health, with weak eyes, a slight stammer, and a memory
treacherous to the last degree, he was yet one of the most helpful
of friends and universally popular alike at the court of three
kings, and in the society of men of letters, men of business and
men of science. In spite of the fact that he was the first to
distinguish a mixture from a compound, to define an element, to
prepare hydrogen, though he did not recognise its nature, he had
in him the touch of an amateur, but an amateur of genius. His
style in writing was unusually prolix and he seldom followed out
his discoveries to their ultimate end.
It was men such as these that reestablished the Royal Society
in 1660. Exactly a century earlier, the first scientific society, the
Academia Secretorum Naturae of Naples had its origin. This
was followed by several others, most of them but shortlived, in
Italy and in France. Among English or Teutonic folk, the Royal
Society was the earliest to appear, and, even if we include the
scientific societies of the world, it has had the most continuous
existence. Indeed, before its birth, it underwent a long period of
incubation, and its inception was in reality in 1645. At that date,
a society known as the Philosophical, or, as Boyle called it, the


## p. 365 (#387) ############################################

Cowley and the Royal Society 365
>
'Invisible,' college came into being, which met from time to
time at Gresham college and elsewhere in London, During
the civil war, this society was split in two, some members
meeting in London, some at Oxford, but the meetings, wher-
ever held, were at irregular intervals. On the restoration, the
meetings were resumed in London and, in 1662, the society
received the royal charter.
Of all the poets of the time, Cowley took, perhaps, the greatest
interest in science. He had, indeed, like Evelyn and at about the
same date, developed a plan for the institution of a college of
science. Evelyn explains his scheme in a letter addressed to Robert
Boyle, dated 3 September 1659 from Sayes court, which contains
minute details as to the buildings, the maintenance, and the
government of his college, the inmates of which were to preserve
science and cultivate themselves. ' Cowley's scheme was also
elaborately thought out, and had the original and admirable
suggestion that, out of the twenty salaried professors, sixteen
should be always resident and four always travelling in the four
quarters of the world, in order that they might 'give a constant
account of all things that belong to the learning and especially
Natural Experimental Philosophy, of those parts. ' To his 'Philo-
sophical Colledge' was to be attached a school of two hundred
boys.
Both these schemes, according to bishop Sprat, hastened
the foundation of the Royal Society, of which both projectors were
original members.
Cowley's poems were greatly admired during his lifetime, later
critics have considered him affected, perhaps because, like Donne,
he understood, and was not afraid to use the technical language of
the schools. We have quoted some of his lines on Harvey, and
may add a few from the ode with which he greeted the birth of
the Royal Society :
From . . all long Errors of the way,
In which our Praedecessors went,
And like th’ old Hebrews many years did stray
In Desarts but of small extent,
Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last
The barren Wilderness he past,
Did on the very Border stand
Of the blest promis'd Land,
And from the Mountains Top of his Exalted Wit,
Saw it himself, and shewed us it.
But Life did never to one Man allow
Time to Discover Worlds, and Conquer too;
Nor can so short a Line sufficient be
To fadome the vast depths of Natures Sea:


## p. 366 (#388) ############################################

366
The Progress of Science
The work he did we ought t'admire,
And were unjust if we should more require
From his few years, divided 'twixt th’ Excess
Of low Affliction, and high Happiness.
For who on things remote can fix his sight,
That's alwayes in a Triumph, or a Fight?
Donne, who, like Cowley, indulged in quaint poetical conceits
and who founded a new school of poetry, abjuring classical con-
ventions and classical characters, and treating of topics and objects
of everyday life, was not afraid of realism. 'Upon common objects,
Dr Johnson tells us, he was ‘unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle. '
Space limits us to one quotation:
Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee.
Donne did not of course foresee the appalling part that these insects,
by the habits he mentions, play in the spread of such diseases
as bubonic plague and many epizootics in animals.
The dramatists of the Stewart period hardly afford us the help
we need in estimating the position occupied by science and by men
of science in the world of the seventeenth century. The astrologer
and the alchemist were then stock characters of the drama of
everyday life, just as the company promoter is now. "The Gentle-
“
men of Trinity Colledge' presented before the King's Majesty'a
comedy entitled Albumazar, which takes its name from the chief
character, an astrologer, a very arrant knave, and the type of the
false man of science. This play, originally printed in 1615, was soon
forgotten, but it was revived in 1668 and met with great success.
Samuel Butler, who was not a fellow of the Royal Society, for
some reason difficult to explain, spent much time in attacking it.
He wrote his entertaining satire on the virtuosi entitled The
Elephant in the Moon in short verse, and was so pleased with
it that he wrote it over again in long verse? Though this 'Satire
upon the Royal Society' remains a fragment, enough of it is extant
to show Butler did not appreciate what even in these days is not
always appreciated, that the minute investigation of subjects and
objects which to the ordinary man seem trivial and vain often lead
to discoveries of the profoundest import to mankind.
Ben Jonson, with his flair for presenting what zoologists
call 'type species,' showed, as has been seen, in his Alchemist
6
Cf. ante, chap. II.


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Political Economists
367
a
an unusual, but a thorough, mastery of the half scientific and
half quack jargon of the craft, so that this play is a quarry for
all interested in the history of chemical and physical studies.
To the play-writer of the time, the man of science or of pseudo-
science was a vague, peevish pedant, much occupied with physio-
gnomies, dreams and fantastic ideas as to the properties and powers
of various substances. But there seems to have been a clear
distinction drawn between a real and a false astrology, as is shown
in Dryden's An Evening's Love (1668)".
The political economists of the seventeenth century
were greatly influenced by the Baconian enthusiasm for empirical study;
they were eager to accumulate and interpret facts, and to apply inductive
methods to political phenomena. They therefore concerned themselves with
the anatomy of the body politic, and with numerical observations which
served as the best available substitute for experiment. They followed the
analogy of the biological rather than of the mathematical science of their
day; hence, their mode of thought has a close affinity with that which has
become current since the decline of the classical school of Political Economy.
Sir William Petty and the philosopher Locke are the best
known names in this group of political economists. Locke, in
particular, was interested in questions concerning the currency and
the rate of interest. Sir William Petty, who was among the first to
state clearly the nature of rent, wrote a celebrated Treatise of
Taxes and Contributions Captain John Graunt's Natural and
Political Observations marked the beginning of that interest in
statistical data concerning health and population which is a dis-
tinguishing feature of modern economic research. Another writer,
Samuel Fortrey, followed Petty in his endeavour to go behind the
mere art of taxation and analyse the ultimate sources of national
wealth in the land and labour of the country. In general, it may
be said that, in the seventeenth century, political economy was still
an art rather than a science. Between these writings and Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), there was a great gap; but the
practical observations of the seventeenth century were not without
use in supplying material for his scholarly and impartial analysis.
i Cf. ante, chap. I.
? Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. a1, p. 380.
? Cf. ante, chap. xiv.


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CHAPTER XVI
THE ESSAY AND THE BEGINNING OF MODERN
ENGLISH PROSE
PERHAPS the most important literary achievement that falls
within the period covered by this volume is the creation of a prose
style, which, in structure if not in vocabulary, is essentially the
same as that of today. Caroline prose, the prose of Milton and
Taylor, of Browne and Clarendon, had produced, in the hands of
genius, some of the noblest passages in our literature. But, at the
restoration, men began to feel the need of an instrument upon
which the everyday performer might play-an instrument suited
to an age of reason, possessing, before all things, the homely virtues
of simplicity, correctness, lucidity and precision. These qualities,
indeed, were not unknown to English prose before the restoration.
They are to be found in private letters, not meant for the public
eye. Above all, they are to be found in the writings of the veteran
Hobbes, who, like Bacon and Ben Jonson, with both of whom he
had literary relations, disdained all superfluity of ornament, and
was content to make his prose a terse and pregnant expression of
a clear and vigorous intellect. But even Hobbes is by no means
free from the besetting sins of the older prose-careless construc-
tion and trailing relative clauses.
The new prose was the work of a multiplicity of causes, all
more or less reflecting the temper of the age. One of these was
the growing interest in science, and the insistence of the new
Royal Society on the need of a clear and plain style for scientific
exposition.
There is one thing more about which the Society has been most solicitous;
and that is the manner of their Discourse: which, unless they had been only
watchful to keep in due temper, the whole spirit and vigour of their Design
had been soon eaten out by the luxury and redundance of speech. . . . And, in
few words, I dare say that of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner
obtain'd than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this
volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. . . . It will
suffice my present purpose to point out what has been done by the Royal


## p. 369 (#391) ############################################

Demand for Simplicity and Clearness 369
j
Society towards the correcting of excesses in Natural Philosophy, to which
it is of all others, a most profest enemy. They have therefore been most
vigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this
extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all ampli-
fication, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive
purity and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things almost in an equal
number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked,
natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native eas'ness,
bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and
preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before
that of Wits or Scholars.
So writes Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society. Almost
at the same time, in December 1664, his colleagues gave effect to
their views by appointing a committee for the improvement of the
English language, which included, besides himself, Waller, Dryden
and Evelyn'. Doubtless, it was out of this committee that the idea
arose of founding an English academy for the 'improvement of
speaking and writing' on the model of the French one. This idea
was discussed at three or four meetings held at Gray's inn, where,
in addition to the above, Cowley and the duke of Buckingham,
also members of the Royal Society, were present. But, in con-
sequence of the plague and 'other circumstances intervening,' the
plan came to nothing? '
The same need for greater plainness and simplicity of language
was felt in pulpit oratory so far back as 1646, when Wilkins, after-
wards bishop of Chester, one of the founders of the Royal Society,
and its first secretary, had recommended, in his popular Eccle-
siastes or the Gift of Preaching, that the style of preaching should
be plain and without rhetorical flourishes. After the restoration,
these views found an adequate exponent in his friend John
Tillotson, whose sermons at Lincoln's inn and St Lawrence Jewry
attracted large congregations. His St Paul's sermon, preached
before the lord mayor, in March 1664, and printed by request
under the title The Wisdom of being religious, is, in its perfect
plainness and absence of rhetoric, an instructive contrast to the
brilliantly imaginative discourse which Jeremy Taylor delivered,
only eight months earlier, at the funeral of archbishop Bramhall.
But the reformation of pulpit oratory was not the work of one
2
1 Evelyn embodied his views in a letter to the chairman, Sir Peter Wyche, which
is printed in J. E. Spingarn’s Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, vol. II,
pp. 310 ff.
Evelyn to Pepys (op. cit. vol. II, pp. 327 ff. ). As to the origin of the Royal Society
see, also, ante, chap. xv.
3 Cf. , as to the change in the style of pulpit oratory, ante, chap. XII.
* See ante, ib.
E. L. VIII. CH, XVI.
24


## p. 370 (#392) ############################################

370 The Essay and Modern English Prose
.
sermon or one man. Both Stillingfleet, reader at the Temple, who
was even more popular than Tillotson, and South, public orator at
Oxford, who was made a prebendary of Westminster in 1663,
belonged to the modern school. In a sermon preached on Ascen-
sion day 1667, the latter divine commended apostolic preaching for
its plainness and simplicity :
nothing here of the finger of the North-star . . . nothing of the door of angel's
wings or the beautiful locks of cherubims: no starched similitudes, intro-
duced with a 'thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion,' and
the like.
This ungenerous hit at Jeremy Taylor, who was lately dead, well
marks the antithesis between the new age and the old, between wit
and poetry, between reason and imagination.
Dryden's statement that‘if he had any talent for English prose
it was owing to his having often read the writings of the great
archbishop Tillotson' must be regarded as a piece of generous
exaggeration. At the most, he can only have learnt from him the
virtues of clear and logical statement, and of short, well coordi-
nated sentences. In the epistle dedicatory of The Rival-Ladies
(1664), and in the earlier part of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie
written in the summer of 1665, his management of the clause is
still somewhat uncertain. It is not till Neander, who represents
Dryden, joins in the discussion that we recognise our first master
of modern prose.
In the Essay of Dramatick Poesie, the conversational character
of Dryden's style is, also, already apparent. This, of course, is
due, in part, to the dialogue form, but we may also trace in it the
influence of Will's coffee-house, where, though he was 'not very
conversible? ,' he was listened to as an oracle. The statement sug-
gests a man who talked with unusual deliberation and precision, and
with a nice choice of words, and whose written style was thus a more
exact copy of his talk than is ordinarily the case. Moreover, that
style is always refined and well bred, reflecting, in this, the tone of the
court and, particularly, that of the king. "The desire,' says Dryden
in his Defence of the Epilogue (1672), ‘of imitating so great a
pattern loosened' the English from their stiff forms of conversa-
tion, and made them easy and pliant to each other in discourse. '
And, of Charles II, Halifax says that his wit 'consisted chiefly in
the quickness of his apprehension. ' It was a trait which he
inherited-with others—from his grandfather Henri IV, and
he gave expression to it with a refinement of language and a
1 Pope on Spence, sec. VII, p. 261 (Singer's ed. ).


## p. 371 (#393) ############################################

Early French Influence. Heroic Romances 371
conversational ease natural to one who had spent five years in
Paris society.
The influx of French fashions at the restoration has become a
commonplace with historians; but, so far as regards literature, it
had begun at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. The marriage
of Charles I with Henrietta Maria (1625) gave a fresh impulse to
the movement, and it was under the queen's auspices, i not by her
actual command, that an English version of Corneille's Cid was put
on the stage in 1638, little more than a year after its publication in
French. In the same year, three volumes of Balzac's. Letters
appeared in an English translation, one of them in a second edition.
The vogue of a rhetorician like Balzac, whose style is more important
than his thought, is a striking testimony to the high estimation in
which the language and literature of France were then held. It
must be remembered that Richelieu's great design of making France
the first power in Europe was just beginning to be successful, and
that it was partly in furtherance of this that, in 1634, he had
founded the Académie française. Though the civil war (1642—8)
checked, for a time, the French studies of Englishmen, it ultimately
contributed to their diffusion. For it sent most leading English men
of letters to Paris. In 1646, Hobbes, 'the first of all that fled,'
Waller, D'Avenant, Denham, Cowley and Evelyn were all gathered
together in the French capital. Cowley remained there till 1656;
D'Avenant returned, a prisoner, in 1650, the others in 1652.
In 1651, D'Avenant published his unfinished heroic poem
Gondibert, which he had written at Paris, and which, in general
conception and tone, shows the influence of the heroic romances ? .
Their popularity in England is well known? Gomberville's Polex-
andre appeared in an English dress in 1647 but ‘so disguised' that
Dorothy Osborne, that ardent reader of romances,'hardly knew it. '
A translation of La Calprenède's Cléopâtre, and two translations of
his Cassandre, began to appear in 1652 (Sir Charles Cottrell's
translation of the former was published in 1676) English
versions of Madeleine de Scudéry's Ibrahim, Le Grand Cyrus and
Clélie followed in 1652, 1653–5 and 1656–61. There was a sub-
sequent version of the last named in 1678, and translations by
John Phillips of La Calprenède's Pharamond and of Madeleine
de Scudéry's Almahide in the previous year. English imitations
.
also appeared, such as lord Broghill (Orrery)'s Parthenissa (first
1 See, as to Gondibert, ante, vol. vii, chap, m, and cf. p. 9 of the present volume.
2 Cf. ante, chap. I, as to their influence upon the English drama, and upon heroic
plays in particular.
24--2


## p. 372 (#394) ############################################

372 The Essay and Modern English Prose
6
part) in 1654, with which, in spite of its “handsome language,'
Dorothy Osborne was not very much taken, and Sir George Mac-
kenzie's Aretina or the Serious Romance in 1661. A complete
edition of Parthenissa in three volumes was published in 1665 and
1667. The most active translator at this time was John Davies
of Kidwelly. Besides Clélie (1652) and the last four parts of
Cléopâtre (1658–60), he translated novels by Scarron (1657—67);
Voiture's Letters (1657), which soon eclipsed Balzac's in favour
and are recommended by Locke as a pattern for 'letters of
compliment, mirth, railery or conversation’; Sorel's Le Berger
extravagant (1653); and Scarron's Nouvelles tragi-comiques
(1657—62). The same author's Don Japhet d Arménie and Les
trois Dorothées were translated in 1657, and his Roman comique
in 1676. But it was his burlesques which had the greatest vogue
in this country and produced numerous imitators. Charles Cotton
led the way with his Scarronides, a burlesque of the first book of
Vergil, in 1664, and followed it up with the fourth book in 1665.
Other writers burlesqued Homer and Ovid, all outdoing Scarron in
coarseness and vulgarity. In the words of Dryden, Parnassus spoke
the cant of Billingsgate.
But, to return to the days of the commonwealth, there appeared,
in 1653, the translation of a more famous work, which, in one sense,
was a burlesque. This was Sir Thomas Urquhart's remarkable
version of the first two books of Rabelais's great romance. It
apparently fell flat, for the third book was not published till forty
years later? Greater success attended the translation of another
monument of French prose, Pascal's Lettres Provinciales, which,
under the title The Mysterie of Jesuitisme, discovered in certain
letters, was published in 1657, the year in which Pascal wrote the
last of the letters, a new edition being called for in the following
year. And a translation of Descartes's Traité des passions de
Tôme (1650) testifies to an interest in that psychological analysis
which was to be a brilliant feature of the new school of French
writers.
At the restoration, there was a decided falling off in this work
of translation. In fact, all the translations from the French pro-
duced during the twenty-five years of Charles II's reign hardly
surpass in number those which appeared during the last eight
years of the commonwealth. The first decade after the restoration
was marked chiefly by a fairly successful attempt to acclimatise
1 Cf. vol. iv, p. 8; and see, as to Urquhart, vol. YII, pp. 253 ff. As to Butler
and Rabelais, see ante, chap. II.


## p. 373 (#395) ############################################

Later French Influence. Boileau 373
6
Corneille, the details of which have been given in a previous
chapter? The psychological tragedies of Racine were less to the
taste of English audiences, and it was not till nearly the close of
queen Anne's reign that they secured a footing on the English
stage with Ambrose Philips's Distrest Mother (Andromaque).
The unparalleled debt to Molière has been pointed out in an
earlier chapter? It need only be said here that, of all his thirty-
one plays, only about half-a-dozen escaped the general pillages.
La Fontaine was not translated into English till the next century;
but he was read and admired by the English wits, and it was
only his growing infirmities which, towards the end of his life,
prevented him from accepting an invitation sent by some of his
English admirers, who 'engaged to find him an honourable sub-
sistence' in London.
To Boileau, the remaining member of this illustrious group of
friends, Dryden refers in 1677, three years after the publication
of L'Art Poétique, as one of the chief critics of his age; while, in
the Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire
(1693), he pays a splendid tribute to him, as 'the admirable
Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose expressions are
noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose
satire is pointed and whose sense is close. ' His Lutrin appeared
in English in 1682; his Art Poétique, translated by Sir William
Soames and revised by Dryden, in 1683; and, about the same
time, Oldham imitated two of his satires, the fifth and the
-eighth. The second had been already translated by Butler, and
the third by Buckingham and Rochester. Bossuet is represented
by some of his controversial writings, such as his Exposition de la
Doctrine de l Église catholique and Conférence avec M. Claude,
and by his great Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, which was
translated in 1686. Malebranche's Recherche de la Vérité and La
Rochefoucauld's Maximes both appeared in English in 1694, and,
of the latter, there had been an earlier translation by Mrs Aphra
Behn. Pascal's Pensées and La Bruyère's Caractères, which Dryden
couples together as two of the most entertaining books that modern
French can boast of,' were translated in 1688 and 1699 respectively;
in 1688, too, appeared an English version of Mme de la Fayette's
Princesse de Cleves. But a mere record of translations from a
1 See ante, chap. VII. Le Menteur was acted and printed in London under the title
The Lyer in 1671. It was rptd with the first title The Mistaken Beuuty in 1685.
? See ante, chap. v.
3 See Jacob, Giles, Poetical Register, vol. I, p. 292; Ward, A. W. , History of
English Dramatic Literature, vol. II, p. 315 8.