No More Learning

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
16


## p. 242 (#258) ############################################

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.


## p. 243 (#259) ############################################

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
>
16-2


## p. 244 (#260) ############################################

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


## p. 245 (#261) ############################################

Thomas Fuller
245
Salisbury, following it, two years later, with the living of
Broadwindsor in that of Bristol. Between the two appointments,
in 1632, Fuller's father died; but he was already provided for,
and had begun the process of making friends with persons of
quality which afterwards stood him in good stead. In 1635, he
took the degree of B. D. , and, before 1638, he married. Up to this
time, he seems to have been—as, indeed, would have been usual
enough-chiefly or frequently absent from his prebend and his
rectory, for he speaks of himself, later, as being ‘seventeen years
[apparently 1621-38]resident in Cambridge. ' But Fuller's language
is so much subdued to special antithetic and other quips that it
does not do to take it too literally. Indeed, the context stating
that his seventeen weeks in Oxford cost him more than these
seventeen years at the other university shows, almost certainly,
that he is speaking figuratively-of his prosperity during the one
period, and of the loss of his benefices during, or about, the
other.
However this may be, the quiet part of his life was over, or
nearly so, by 1638. In 1640, the year after he had published his
first important book, The Holy War, he became a member of
convocation and, though already taking the moderate line for
which he was afterwards famous, he signed the much contested
canons of that year; and, if the House of Commons could have
had its way, would have been fined £200. In 1641, a son was born
to him, but his wife died; and in this year he published The Holy
and Profane State. When the struggle actually broke out, he
further illustrated that rather willowy policy of his by voluntarily
abandoning—though, of course, not formally resigning-his pre-
ferments in the west; he went, at first, not to the royalist
camp but to London, where, for some time, he was preacher at
the Savoy. However, he could not stay there, and retired to
Oxford (Lincoln college) and then to Hopton's army, where he
became chaplain, and, fixing himself for a time in Exeter, was
also titular of the same office to the baby princess Henrietta-the
ill-fated “Madame' of the next generation. Good Thoughts in Bad
Times was published here (1645). When Exeter had to surrender,
he went once more to London; and the protection of divers
powerful friends who were members of the other party, or had
made their peace with it, not only saved him from molestation,
but enabled him, with certain breaks and difficulties, to continue
his ministration. In 1651, he married Mary Roper, daughter of
viscount Baltinglas. He wrote, as well as preached, busily during


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246
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this time; but was rather harassed by members of his own party,
such as South and Heylyn, who disliked his moderation, objected
to his fantastic style and made some fun of him personally. He
seems, however, to have been reconciled to Heylyn, if not to the
far greater and more formidable South.
The restoration (which he had advocated by a pamphlet for
'a free parliament') seemed likely to do him much good. He
proceeded D. D.
by king's letters; he recovered his prebend and
his rectory, in which latter, however, he characteristically left
the intruder as curate; and he was made chaplain extraordinary
to the king. But he caught a fever, died of it at his lodgings
in Covent Garden on 15 August 1661 and was buried at Cranford.
His great collection The Worthies of England was posthumously
published.
Nothing that has been said about Fuller's moderation must
be construed into a charge against him of truckling or time-
serving. It is true that, if not exactly (what some have called him)
a puritan, he was probably more definitely anti-Roman than was
usual on the cavalier side. But he not only saw active service
in the non-combatant way at Basing, at Oxford with Hopton and a
at Exeter; his London residence in 1643 gave opportunity for
hardly less active exercise in the royalist cause, for several of his
sermons at the Savoy were strong, and, in the circumstances, not
very safe, advocacies of that cause, and of the indissolubly allied
cause of prelacy. He publicly and, for him, pretty sharply rebuked
Milton's anonymous tractate Of Reformation . . . in England; was
in his turn sharply taken to task by a Yorkshire puritan divine,
John Saltmarsh; and was actually stopped (i. e. arrested) for a
time by the Commons' orders, when proceeding to Oxford with
a safe conduct from the Lords. And his later Appeal of Injured
Innocence, when Heylyn had attacked his Church History, though
much too long and hampered by its scholastic arrangement of
regularly scheduled objection and reply, is an effective vindication
of his general position! As a man, he seems to have been perfectly
honest and sincere; a better Christian than most men on either
side; not quite destitute, perhaps, of a certain innocent vanity
and busybodiness; but without a drop of bad blood in his
1 It is, perhaps, not quite so effective as an actual defence of the book; he was, as
will be pointed out again, an early user of the document' in history, but his wandering
life and bis habit of subordinating everything to sallies of wit made him rather an
inaccurate one. Still, the concluding letter to Heylyn (which was taken in a manner
highly creditable to its recipient) is a model of courtesy, dignity and good feeling.


## p. 247 (#263) ############################################

Fuller's Wit'
247
composition. It is, however, as a man of letters that we are
here principally concerned with him.
His verse is quite negligible and, fortunately, there is little
of it; of the very large and never yet collectively edited body of
his prose, certain features are pretty generally known. They have
been characterised concisely (but with something of that want of
accuracy and adequacy combined which conciseness often carries
with it) in Coleridge's famous dictum that 'wit was the stuff and
substance of Fuller's intellect. ' Hairsplitting criticism may ask
whether wit is not rather a form, a habit, a bent of the intellect,
than, in any case, its stuff and substance. But, undoubtedly, in the
wide and contemporary, as well as in the more modern and narrow
sense, 'wit' is the most prominent characteristic of Fuller's writing.
Although it was apparently the subject of an acrid rebuke from South
as a feature of our author's sermons, it cannot, since the collected
presentation of these by Bailey and Axon, be said to be specially
prevalent there. Indeed, he seems to have been conscious of his
foible and to have tried to avoid giving way to it in the pulpit.
But, in all his other work, from The Holy War (1639) to the
posthumous Worthies of England, even in definitely 'divine'
examples like Good Thoughts in Bad Times and its sequels, he
either does not make any attempt at resistance or fails entirely
to resist. St Monica's maid is 'her partner in potting'; in the case
of another (crippled) saint 'God, who denied her legs, gave her
wings. These things please some of us well enough; but, in times
when there is a straitlaced notion of dignity and decency, or when
(neither of these being specially attended to) the sense of humour
is sterilised and specialised, they have been, and are, looked on
with little favour.
It is said, though statements of the kind are very difficult to
check or control, that The Holy and Profane State has been
Fuller's most popular work. If it be so, popular taste has not gone
far wrong in this instance. The book does not, indeed, give so
much room as others for the exhibition of one very creditable
quality which was by no means common in Fuller's time—attention
to documents and appreciation of their comparative value. Part
of the cause of Heylyn's attack on The Church History (1655)
is supposed to be Fuller's observation that 'no Historian hath
avouched' a certain anecdote of Henry VI, though both Brian
Twyne and Heylyn himself had given it. Fuller was by no means
incapable of mischief; but it is more than probable that, by ‘his-
torian,' he meant contemporary historian, and, of course, Twyne


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248
Antiquaries
a
6
and Heylyn did not stand in that relation to the times of
Henry VI. The fact, of course, is that, to the present day, both
in history and literature, it is the most difficult thing in the world
to get people to attend to this simple distinction of evidence.
Fuller, with slips and errors, no doubt, did try to attend to it,
especially in his Church History and the Worthies, but, everywhere,
more or less. It is, however, not a popular attempt; and, though he
did not fail to make it to some extent in The Holy and Profane
State itself, as well as in The Holy War earlier and in the
biographies he contributed to Abel Redivivus, these three works
gave scope for a far more popular talent, and one in which he was
to take and give one of his own ‘Pisgah Sights' of a yet unexploited
and almost unexplored province of English literature. In all",
but in The Holy and Profane State especially, the narrative
faculty is specially in evidence. This curious book is a sort of
blend of the abstract character' popular at the time, and of
examples which are practically short stories with real heroes and
heroines, Monica or Joan of Naples, Andronicus Comnenus or Drake.
Andronicus was actually published separately; and one can see
that Fuller's fingers unwittingly itched (as Gibbon's did afterwards)
to make the not yet born historical novel out of it. Even in the
enormous miscellanies or collectanea of the Church History, of
its part conclusion part sequel The History of the University of
Cambridge and of The Worthies of England the narrative impetus
is no more to be checked than witticisms or antiquarian details.
Lists of sheriffs, of heads of colleges, of country gentlemen at
the last visitation, alternate with stories about some of them (or
about somebody or something else) and with dry observations as
to wax, being yellow by nature [it] is by art made white, red and
green-which I take to be the clearest colours especially when
appendant on parchment.
Undoubtedly, however, it is the witticisms themselves which,
for the most part, delight or disgust readers of Fuller, and, though
they take the benefit of the above quoted dictum as to the purpose
of 'wit' at this time being not merely comical, they require more
'benefit of clergy' in this kind than those of most other writers.
He has been called epigrammatic, even 'the father of English
epigram'; but this does not seem very appropriate either to the
Greek or to the modern sense of the term. The famous idea of
'images of God cut by him in ebony not ivory' is not an epigram,
d
1 Heylyn makes this (and the introduction of verse) a general objection to the
Church History-- rather like a Church romance,' quoth he, disdainfully.
a


## p. 249 (#265) ############################################

Fuller's Style
249
but it is very much of an emblem ; and, perhaps because of the
immense abundance of emblem literature in those days, Fuller's
conceits were constantly emblematic. “The soldier at the same
"
time shoot[ing] out his prayer to God and his pistol at his enemy';
the question 'Who hath sailed about the world of his own heart,
sounded each creek, surveyed each corner, but that there still remains
much terra incognita to himself ? ' both appeal vividly to the mind's
eye. Indeed, the conceit almost necessarily, even in similes of the
most solemn cast, leads to witticism intended or unintentional;
for each is intimately concerned with the discovery, elaborate or
spontaneous, of similarity or dissimilarity. Even the serious
Browne, in his most serious work, has become almost Fullerian
in his remark on the deluge that 'fishes could not wholly have
escaped, except the salt ocean were handsomely contempered by a
mixture of the fresh element. ' But Fuller himself positively
aims at these things; or, at least, certainly in his less professional
work, and sometimes elsewhere, never spares a jest when it
presents itself to him.
It is almost unavoidable that such a style should incline less to
the continuous harmonic cadence than to shorter moulds and
measures. Fuller is by no means jerky, and he would not have
been of his time if he had never used long sentences. But he
does not incline to them; and his paragraphs are apt to be even
shorter proportionally than their constituents. He has all the
love of his day for an aphoristic and apophthegmatic delivery;
though an occasional cause of lengthening in his sentences is his
habit of shading or tailing off a serious statement of fact or axiom
of opinion into a jest.
Fuller invites selection and has had his share of it. Hardly
any book of his has so formal a plan or such consecutiveness of
argument that piecemeal citation injures it; and it may well seem
that the process of 'creaming' can be justly and safely applied to
a writer who is both desultory and jocular. But it may be doubted
whether such selections give the reader a fair idea of his author,
even if that reader be well disposed towards both the mid-
seventeenth century and its characteristic quaintness. For, we
must once more remember that the conceits and the quips were
by no means intended merely to amuse; they were meant, partly,
to act as sugarplums for the serious passages, and, partly, to
drive these passages closer home by humorous application or
illustration. To expect all or many readers to read all Fuller's
books would be unreasonable; but nobody should think that he
a


## p. 250 (#266) ############################################

250
Antiquaries
understands Fuller until he has read at least one of them as
a book.
>
Except in regard to Reliquiae Wottonianae, and, perhaps,
even to this in most points beyond its title, the work of Izaak
Walton, by which he is almost universally known, may not seem to
'intrude him upon antiquaries' as Browne has it; but he was no
mean example of the temperament, then common, which creates
the antiquarian tendency. Born in East Gate street, Stafford, on
9 August 1593, he represented, through his father James, a family
of yeomen; but he was early sent to London to be apprenticed
to Thomas Grinsell and became a freeman of the Ironmongers'
company on 12 November 1618, having previously settled down
in the neighbourhood of Fleet street and Chancery lane. His
residence near St Dunstan's brought him into contact with Donne.
Jonson, Drayton, bishops Hall and King, Sir Henry Wotton and
others were, also, his friends; and, by 1619, his connection with
literature is, to some extent, shown by the dedication to him of
the poems of a certain ‘S. B. ' For a long time, we hear nothing
of him ; but, in 1640, he published his life of Donne, and, four
years later, left London, though he was back at the time of Laud's
execution. In 1650, he is found living at Clerkenwell, and, next
year, published Reliquiae. In an unobtrusive way, he seems to
have been a trusted member of the royalist party; and he had
Charles II's 'lesser George' confided to his care after Worcester.
In 1653, The Compleat Angler (not yet complete) appeared ; five
years later, he wrote his name on Casaubon's tablet in West-
minster abbey; and, in 1662, took up his abode, after the
hospitable fashion of great households in those days, with his
friend bishop Morley of Winchester. His other Lives followed
의 ​at intervals. In 1682, he published Chalkhill's Thealma and
Clearchus, and he died at the house of his son-in-law Hawkins
(a Winchester prebendary who had married his daughter Anne)
on 15 December 1683. He had been twice married : first, in 1626,
to Rachel Floud (a collateral descendant of archbishop Cranmer),
who died in 1640; then, in 1646, to Anne Ken, half and elder
sister to the future bishop who wrote Walton's epitaph. His
second wife died twenty years before him.
Walton's long life was thus divided into two periods; and it was
only in the later of these that he had full leisure. But this was a
leisure of forty unbroken years; and it is not likely that the work
i See ante, chap. iv.


## p. 251 (#267) ############################################

Izaak Walton
251
2
of the earlier time was very severe or strenuous. That his tastes,
his avocations, his associations were thoroughly literary, there is
no doubt; but they do not seem to have prompted him to any ex-
tensive or frequent literary exercise. The world-famous Compleat
Angler and the widely known Lives go together in one moderate
sized volume (even with Cotton's part of the firstnamed). There
is no valid reason whatever for crediting bim with the authorship
of Thealma and Clearchus. And the minor works and anecdota,
which the diligence of R. H. Shepherd collected some thirty years
ago, are of little importance and less bulk.
It has generally been conceded that the absence of quantity is
more than made up by the presence of quality, but the quantity
of that quality itself has been made the subject of dispute, some-
times unnecessarily (and, in reference to Walton, most inappro-
priately) ill-tempered. In The Compleat Angler, it has been
pronounced by some to be the result of consummate literary
art; while, to others, it seems to be—there almost exclusively,
and, in the Lives, to no small extent-purely natural and unpre-
meditated, the spontaneous utterance of a 'happy old man' (as
Flatman, with complete felicity, if not complete originality, called
him), who has lived with men of letters, and is familiar with
letters themselves, but who no more thinks of picking words and
turning phrases than a nurse does in telling tales to a child. But
this dispute could hardly be settled without settling what 'literary
art' is, and that would be a long process. Nor is the settlement
of the actual quarrel a matter of absorbing interest. The fact
remains that the singular and golden simplicity of Walton's style
-in The Compleat Angler more especially but, except when the
occasion seems to insist on more ceremony, also in the Lives
is matter of common ground and of no dispute whatever. Walton
was a man of no inconsiderable reading; and he could not have
been a man of his time if he had been shy of showing it, however
completely his character might lack pretension. But not Bunyan
himself can use a plainer and purer vernacular than Walton when
he chooses, as he generally does choose. On the much rarer
occasions when he talks book' a little (as in the passage about
the silver stream gliding towards the tempestuous sea,' which
preludes the scene with Maudlin and 'Come live with me and be
my love'), he may, possibly, be aiming higher, but he goes much
wider of his mark.
If this naturalness of style be duly considered, it will, perhaps,
be found to diminish, if not to remove altogether, any surprise
a


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252
Antiquaries
that might otherwise be felt at the production of so little work in
so long a life; at the remarkable excellence of the product; and
at its curious variety. Personal interest, and nothing else, appears
to have been the sole starting influence, so far as matter goes, in
every case, even in that of the life of Hooker? ; and personal quality,
and nothing else, to have been the fashioner of the style. Anything
-country, scenery, old-fashioned manners, piety, the strange com-
plexity of Donne, the simplicity (patient in life, massive and
independent in letters) of Hooker, the various characteristics of
Wotton and Herbert and Sanderson, the pastoral-romantic fairy-
land of Chalkhill-all these things, in one way or another, were
brought directly home to him, and he made them at home without
parade, and, with perfect homeliness and ease, as Philemon and
Baucis did the gods who visited them, to speak in the manner of
his own time.
The result was what ease generally brings with it-charm.
There have been, from his own time downwards, fishermen who
were contemptuous of his fishing; and recent biographers have
been contemptuous of anyone who should be content with the
facts of his biographies. The competent orbis terrarum of readers
has always been careless of either contempt. In his case, as in
almost all, the charm is not really to be analysed, or, rather, it is
possible to distinguish the parts, but necessary to recognise that
the whole is much greater than these parts put together. The
angling directions might fail to interest, and the angling erudition
succeed in boring; as to the subjects of the Lives, though they
were all remarkable men in their different ways, only Donne can
be said to have an intense interest of personality. The source
of attraction is Walton, not the 'chub or chavender,' or the
Hertfordshire meadows and streams, or Maudlin and 'red cow,'
or the decent joviality of my brother Peter, or Hooker's mis-
fortunes in marriage, or Sir Henry Wotton's scholarly urbanity,
but these things, as Walton shows them to us, with art so un-
premeditated, that, as has been said, some would deny it to be
art at all, yet with the effect of consummate mimesis of
presentation of nature with something of the individual presenter
added. But it will hardly be denied that his grace is positively
enhanced by the characteristic which he shares with the other
subjects of this chapter—the quaint, and, in him, almost un-
expected seasoning of learning. He has it, no doubt, least of the
1 Walton quotes from Hooker the words 'as discernible as a natural from an
artificial beauty. They were not without application in his own case.


## p. 253 (#269) ############################################

The Compleat Angler 253
four; and what he has he neither obtrudes and caricatures like
Urquhart, nor makes his main canvas like Browne, nor associates
pell-mell with play of conceit and purpose of instruction, as does
Fuller. With him, it is a sort of silver or gold lacing to the sober
grey garment of his thought and diction, though it should always
be remembered that grey is capable of almost more fascinating
shades than any other colour, and sets off the most delicate
textures admirably.
To dwell at any length on the fashion in which this sober grace
is brought out in The Compleat Angler would be superfluous; but
a word or two may be permitted. No book so well deserves as
a motto that stanza of The Palace of Art which describes the
'English home,' 'a haunt of ancient Peace,' with 'dewy pas-
tures, dewy trees. ' There is no dulness and no stagnation ; the
characters walk briskly, talk vigorously and argumentatively, fish,
eat, drink like men of this world, and like cheerful and active
men of a world that is going pretty well after all. But there is
also no worry; nothing ugly, vulgar or jarring. It is the landscape
and the company of The Faerie Queene passed through a slight
sieve of realism, and crimeless; only, in the distance, perhaps, an
erring gentleman, who reprehensibly derives his jests from Scripture
or from want of decency. A land of Beulah in short—with a
somewhat less disquieting atmosphere of lack of permanence, which
the land of Beulah itself must have carried with it.
!
The birth-year of Thomas, afterwards Sir Thomas, Urquhart,
or Urchard1_the best Scottish representative of the peculiar
seventeenth century character which was exhibited in different
ways in England by Burton earlier, and by Browne and Fuller in his
own time-used to be assigned to the same date as Browne's, 1605.
But this date has now, on good evidence, been shifted six years
later, to 1611. His father, another Sir Thomas, represented the
Urquharts of Cromarty, a family whose pedigree has been verified
to the year 1300, while it may reasonably be extended to Adam,
though the acceptance of the particulars (supplied, with character-
istic pedantry and humour mingled, by the subject of this notice)
may be facultative. The younger Thomas's mother was Christian
Livingstone of the noble family of that name. His father suc-
ceeded to considerable estates; but was either a determined
spendthrift or a very bad manager; and, in his later years (1637 to
1 He sometimes, if not always, signed himself so; using, as well, the initials 'C. P. ',
i. e. Christianus Presbyteromastix. '
6


## p. 254 (#270) ############################################

2 54
Antiquaries
his death in 1641), appears to have been subjected to rather
peremptory treatment, including personal restraint, by his eldest
son and other members of a self-constituted family council. It
is certain that, all his life, our Sir Thomas himself was the victim
of creditors; though, perhaps—when one considers his foreign
travels, and the fact that, at Worcester, he lost four trunks of
fine clothes besides three of MSS-not entirely without his own
contribution to the difficulties. He entered King's college,
Aberdeen, in 1622, and must have studied there vigorously; while,
after completing his course, he travelled much abroad, learnt
more, acquired accomplishments of various kinds and, according
to his own account, displayed martial and patriotic prowess re-
sembling that of the Admirable Crichton (whose chief celebrator
he himself was), and of 'Squire Meldrum' still earlier. He
emerges into public life at the time of the at first successful but
soon suppressed royalist rising in the north of Scotland which is
known as the Trot of Turriff (1639).
After the failure of this, he went to England, was knighted by
Charles I at Whitehall in 1641, but took no part in the civil
war proper, making another excursion to the continent in 1642–5.
In the last named year, he returned and settled at Cromarty. Three
years later, he was made officer of horse and foot’and, after the
king's execution in 1649, shared in the abortive rising at Inverness,
was declared a traitor, but, in 1650, was dismissed by the General
Assembly after examination. He joined Charles II in the ex-
pedition to England, fought at Worcester, lost the seven trunks
above mentioned, was taken and thrown into the Tower, but
leniently treated, transferred to Windsor and, finally, liberated by
Cromwell. Then he returned to Scotland and, in 1653, published
his great translation of the earlier part of Rabelais. From this
time, we know nothing whatever about him. That he died abroad
of rapture or laughter on hearing of the restoration is a legend.
But, in August 1660, his brother Alexander laid claim to the
hereditary office of sheriff of Cromarty, which practically implies
Sir Thomas's death.
For people who like a clear and consistent character, classi-
fiable under ordinary conventions, Urquhart must be a hopeless
puzzle ; indeed, most of his critics have got out of their difficulties
by the easy suggestion-door of a little mad,' which may be allowed,
but is insufficient. From his portraits-one exhibiting a gentleman
in cavalier dress, spruce, mustachioed, beribboned to the very
“nines' of the irresistible vernacular, and suggesting, in one of his


## p. 255 (#271) ############################################

Sir Thomas Urquhart 255
own admirable phrases, ‘one of the quaintest Romancealists' of the
time; the other, the same gentleman enthroned and crowned by
muses and other mythological personages—the enquirer turns to the
works they adorn, where the coxcomb, though he remains, shows
quite a different kind of coxcombry, and blends it with a pedantry
which is gigantesque and almost incredible. His Epigrams (1642)
are not specially remarkable for this, being mostly sensible enough
commonplaces expressed in hopelessly prosaic verse. But, in the
series of elaborately Greek-named treatises which followed, the
characteristics are quite different. Mathematicians do not seem
quite agreed as to Trissotetras (1645), but at least some competent
authorities are said to have allowed it possible merit, if only it
had been written in a saner lingo. As it is, it informs us that
The axioms of plane triangles are four viz. Rulerst, Eproso,
Grediftal and Bagrediffiu,' while Rulerst branches into Gradesso
and Eradetul, and is under the directory of Uphechet. This mania
for jargonic nomenclature pursues Urquhart throughout, and
seems sometimes to have been the very mainspring or exciting
cause of his lucubrations. The indulgence of it must have counted
for something in his famous and (even in his own time) much
ridiculed genealogy of the Urquharts (Pantochronocanon, 1652)
from Adam, with invented names for all the fathers and mothers
from Seth's wife downwards, whom history does not mention or
whom he cannot borrow from it. It dictated more than the titles
of Logopandecteision (1653), a scheme for a universal language,
and Ekskubalauron (1652), a treatise of his own rescued from
the gutter after the dispersal of his property at Worcester. When
it descends from proper names, it dictates, in its severer moods,
remarks about 'disergetic loxogonosphericals'; in its lighter,
intimations that he will 'proceed to the catheteuretic operation'
of something, and sneers at the ministerian philoplutaries' who
deprived a friend of his of a living for what Urquhart thought
insufficient cause.
Yet he is not mad all round the compass. The best known
passage of his work outside Rabelais, the account of the Ad-
mirable Crichton, though it may somewhat embroider the plain
canvas of truth, is vigorously and effectively written. Intensely
patriotic as he is a very 'bur-thistle’ in his aggressive proclama-
tion of Scottish merits and virtues—he, in the mid-seventeenth
century and in mid-war-time between England and Scotland,
argues stoutly and sensibly for a union parliament, representing
both divisions of the island. When his coxcomb-familiar is not


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256
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a
playing tricks with him on the one side, or his pedant-familiar on
the other, or both together-sometimes, in flashes, even when they
are doing their worst—he shows himself not merely, what he
always is, a scholar and a gentleman, but a man of most excellent
differences, acute, fanciful, stocked with pregnant ideas and
possessed of a very noteworthy faculty of expression for them,
whenever the fiend of jargon does not simply possess and speak
through him.
It may be questioned, however, whether his most glaring faults
and foibles did not stand him in almost as good stead as his gifts
and graces, when he took it into his head to give an English version
of Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is true that they led him to
exaggerate the peculiarities of his original; and that this exag-
geration has undoubtedly passed into the usual English estimate
of Rabelais himself. But only a man who had practised jargon, ,
largely combined with learning, for years could, even by exag-
gerating it, have excogitated a lingo capable of reproducing the
wonderful genius-galimatias of Master Francis. Urquhart could
coin words as easily as he could write, blenched at no extravagance,
would have scorned to rationalise any apparent nonsense, sym-
pathised thoroughly with, and could understand, his author's
undoubted learning, and had quite enough shrewdness, good
feeling and even exaltation of thought and sentiment to interpret
these qualities when they met him in that author.
The result, as is pretty generally granted, is an almost ideal
translation, perhaps enlarging slightly, as has been said, the moles
and warts of his subject—the gibberish, the 'broad' language, the
torrents of grotesque synonyms (in this last respect, Sir Thomas
was especially lavish) but reproducing the general effect amazingly.
Very often, scholars in originals are the harshest critics of trans-
lations. It may be said with confidence that those who have
known their Rabelais best in his own shape and language have
been the heartiest admirers of his English presenter. Motteux,
Urquhart's successor, did his work very well, but something has
departed in it; and Sir Thomas remains the last and greatest of
the great translators of the larger Elizabethan period.
These four royalist writers--Urquhart, to some extent, but by
no means wholly, being what Browne calls a 'monstrous draught
and caricatured representation’ of what Browne himself presents
magnificently, Fuller ingeniously and Walton in the simplest and
least pretentious fashion-agree in something more than in their


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Summary
257
a
royalism and in that determined attention to the past which un-
doubtedly they all display. They represent their own age, not
merely in the learning which attracted and rewarded that attention,
and in which the earlier seventeenth century probably surpassed
every other period, not merely in the obstinate quaintness which
was also characteristic of it, but in a peculiar command of prose
style which is likely to remain inimitable and unique. To set this
down to something like an accident of time, the dying down or
approaching extinction of the moreʻinsolent and passionate' spirit of
poetry and its temporary taking refuge in prose, is not irrational
and is probably correct, but it is not quite sufficient. More went
to the making of the group—and especially of Browne—than this ;
even if we leave to the idiosyncrasy of the individuals its first and
incalculable value. Perhaps not a little should be allowed for the
.
existence of a body of readers, not very large, perhaps, but not
inconsiderable, interested in learning and thought and not yet
accustomed to 'light' reading of the more modern type. Some-
thing more may be set down to the absence of the restrictions
of conventional grammar, conventional vocabulary, conventional
propriety of various kinds. The revolt of the plain style, the
demand for 'a naked natural way of speaking' and the like may
have been justified even by Browne and Fuller to a certain extent
and more than amply by Urquhart in his serious work. Even
Walton, though he speaks ‘naturally' enough, might be thought
by a man like Sprat not to speak sufficiently nakedly—to dress his
thought with too many tags of learning and flights of fancy. But,
if there was any sin, there was mighty and manifold solace.
Without the liberty of syntax, to some extent; without the un-
restrained abundance and variegated colour of vocabulary to a
much greater; without the endless decoration of learning, and
arabesque of imagination and conceit, the quaint flashing wit of
Fuller would find itself miserably hampered and (which is of far
greater importance) the magnificence of Browne could not exist.
The wit may tease some and the magnificence appear too solemn
and cumbrous, too much a matter of apparatus and circumstantial
peroration to others. If so, these authors are not for those
readers. But, fortunately, there are others for whom they are,
and who should be able to perceive that without what, from
some points of view, may seem their defects, their qualities could
hardly exist. Walton's simplicity would not be what it is without
the contrast of its mannerism; and, though a little of the original
writing of Urquhart may go a very long way, and to read too
17
E. L. VII.
CH. X.


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258
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much, even of Fuller consecutively, is not well, the parenthetic
and metaphysical wit of Broadwindsor can be returned to again
and again with satisfaction, and a moderate dose even of Logo-
pandecteision and Ekskubalauron has no unwelcome gust. On
the other hand, the charm of Walton is unfailing and unfading;
and the Rabelais of Sir Thomas of Cromarty has not merely a
borrowed, but an earned and contributory, place in the utterances
of the comic spirit of the world. While, as for those of the graver
genius, the work of Sir Thomas of Norwich, its scepticism tem-
pered by imagination and its style incrusted with the rarest gems
of phrase and rhythm, stands practically alone, even in its own
time—some things in Donne excepted—and without anything
similar or second at any other.


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CHAPTER XI
JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE CRITICISM
THE great names of Jonson and Bacon meet us at the threshold
of the seventeenth century, and the names of Milton and Hobbes
are soon added to theirs; but disappointment awaits the scholar
who expects to find their achievement in poetry and philosophy
matched by a similar achievement in the field of criticism. It is
doubtful whether any of these four justified one of the most
significant of the critic's functions by interpreting a poet to his
contemporaries, or by making an unknown name a real possession
of English literature: not a single author was better understood
because of any light shed by them. The utterances of Jonson con-
cerning Shakespeare impressed themselves upon his countrymen,
and, in a sense, increased Shakespeare's vogue and prestige ; but,
for the most part, they understated rather than illuminated the
contemporary taste which they confirmed. Yet, it would be untrue
to say that these critics did not accomplish anything, for they
changed the attitude of men toward literature and the criticism
of literature; and, by modifying the literary outlook of Englishmen,
they so transformed the spirit of criticism that the transition from
the age of Sidney to the age of Dryden seems not only intelligible
but inevitable.
At the outset, we are met by Bacon, and it is no less true of
him than of the others that his services to contemporary thought
are not the measure of his services to criticism. But he, too,
helped to transform the theory of literature, or, at least, to bring
order out of the chaos of theory; and he created a new conception
of literary history, which served as a touchstone to scholars from
the moment he enunciated it, though its real significance was not
apprehended for many generations to come. It was he who first
defined the relation of poetry to the imagination, and attempted a
classification of the arts and sciences based on the divisions of the
mind, according to which poetry bears the same relation to the
imaginative faculty that history and philosophy bear, respectively,
17-2


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260 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
to memory and reason. The Spaniard Huarte, in his Examen de
Ingenios, had already classified sciences and arts in a similar way,
and Bacon adopted this foreign system. But, in elaborating it, he
gave it a significance for criticism as well as for philosophy; and
his classification became a more or less permanent possession of
English thought and taste. Within the scope of the imagination,
he included allegorical poetry; and, to his rationalising mind, this
seemed the highest expression of poetic genius. He finds no
difficulty in justifying this inclusion, though his conception of the
imagination as a transformation of the realities of life into forms
more sympathetic to the human mind, as external nature idealised,
forces him to separate the lyric from truly imaginative poetry
and to place it with rhetoric and philosophy.