This is, practically, the only document of the kind that we have for the text
of a very great English poet before the eighteenth century: and it can hardly
be prized too highly.
of a very great English poet before the eighteenth century: and it can hardly
be prized too highly.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v07
On another great
general feature, there is not, nor can there be, any difference of
opinion as to fact; and this is that Milton pays no attention to the
supposed necessity, or, at least, propriety, of putting a pause near
>
## p. 135 (#151) ############################################
Versification and Style 135
the middle of the line, and that his freedom of handling here is vital
to his versification. On the propriety, as distinguished from the
fact, of the variation, such unanimity has not prevailed. The more
rigid eighteenth century critics regarded the central or centripetal
pause as an absolute law, the breach of which was to be justified
by no success of result. Johnson was not quite so strait-laced as
this; but as, with him, regularity of correspondence was the main
article of poetry, he objected to such confusions of the methods
of the poet and the declaimer’; and, consistently enough, disliked
blank verse altogether. It is, at any rate, certain, that it is by
variety of line material (attained by whatever means), and by
further variation of pause, that Milton achieves the extraordinary
freedom from monotony, and the force of character, which dis-
tinguish his verse. And it has been recognised, with increasing
decision, that he does not employ these means in a fashion merely
continuous or strung together, that his verse construction is really
periodic or paragraphic—the sections corresponding in division of
sense and substance, as it were, to long but unequal stanzas or
strophes of verses identical at first sight, but individually variable.
If the reader will compare the sketches of the progress of
English prosody given at intervals in this History; if he will
remember that Milton was a careful scholar and a fluent writer
of Latin verse; and if he will pay particular attention to the
Rous ode in Latin, and to Samson in English-he will not have
much difficulty in appreciating the position of the poet in regard
to quality of versification. So far as Milton's historical position is
concerned, he is almost the central figure in the whole history of
our verse. Brought into definite form as that verse had been,
after two centuries of experiment, by Chaucer; restored and re-
formed, after nearly two more of disarray, by Spenser; enormously
varied and advanced by Shakespeare and the later Elizabethans
Milton found it liable to fresh disorders. He did not so much
directly attack these as elaborate, for non-dramatic poetry, a
medium practically involving all the order and all the freedom
possible in English verse—yet without rime. And, in Samson, he
returned to rime itself in choruses, though not universally or
regularly, but, rather, with an extension of the occasional use
which he had tried in Lycidas.
In the larger sense of style, Milton holds so great a place that
we may almost let the arrangement of this chapter pass here
into a conclusion-summary. He is, admittedly, in the least
disputed sense of that much debated term, 'the grand style,' the
## p. 136 (#152) ############################################
136
Milton
grandest-styled of English poets. He never, indeed, attains to
the absolute zenith of expression-As does Shakespeare often and,
perhaps, Dante sometimes. He is, unlike them, strangely un-
modern; he has, indeed, it has been quite correctly said,
little even of the renascence about him, except those tricks and
fashions of form which have been noticed. Biblical, classical
and medieval influences almost alone work on him—especially the
former two. Under their joint pressure, he has elaborated a
manner so all-pervading, that, if it were not also great, it might,
or must, be called a mannerism. But it is always a mannerism of
grandeur and never-this is another of the points in which Milton
is unique one of grandiosity. It does break down sometimes,
though rarely, when he attempts humour ; when he lets himself
prose, and so forth ; but, even then, it does not become grandiose,
still less bombastic: it is merely flat and dull or, sometimes,
grotesque. Almost everywhere, the magnificent state and cere-
mony covers and carries off the occasion, the subject, resistlessly,
This manner has some modes and phases which are worth
particularising, especially in the attempt to complete the presenta-
tion in little of the work and figure of so great a poet. One of the
most remarkable of these is the famous ‘Miltonic vague'-the
preference of vast but rather indeterminate pictures, tinted with a
sort of dim gorgeousness or luridity, as the case may be—to sharper
outlines and more definite colours. Another—as it may seem in a
different sphere of thought—is the peculiar moral atmosphere of a
kind of magnanimous intransigeance which pervades the whole.
The common saying that 'Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost' is
merely a way of expressing this wider truth to the vulgar mind.
It is not at all probable that Milton meant anything of the kind ;
according to 'the rules,' a hero ought to be victorious, and Satan's
victory is exceedingly Pyrrhic; according to 'the rules,' he ought to
be good, if not faultless, and certainly Milton did not think Satan
good. But he has made Satan the most interesting person, and
his unflinching nonconformity the most interesting thing, in the
poem. In Paradise Regained, he enjoys a double presentation of
this kind the persistence of Satan, unconquered by past or future
certainty of defeat, and the resistance of Christ, to which Milton's
semi-Arian views must, as has been said, have given a peculiar
interest. As regards Agonistes, the other common saying, that
'Samson is Milton,' contains the general truth again. Samson
is incarnate resistance; he has resisted grace and the Philistines
alike, in the past ; his repentance and atonement consist in re-
## p. 137 (#153) ############################################
Poetical Quality
137
sisting his father, the chorus, Harapha, the officer, the lords,
Dalila, everybody; and his final simulated compliance is only to
obtain the means of making this resistance triumph. Even some
forty years earlier, the centre of Comus is the invincible resolution
of the Lady; and the real inspiration of Lycidas, apart from the
poetry, is the defiant denunciation-utterly different from the
parallel and, no doubt, suggesting passage in Dante
of St Peter.
Now this pervading irreconcilableness, wherein Milton and Dante,
to some extent, come together again, can only be made poetical by
a style of severe splendour; and it meets this eminently in both,
but more exclusively and restrictively in Milton.
It is almost a necessary consequence of this peculiar kind of
magnificence that Milton has always been more admired and
written about than loved and read, except in his earlier and
smaller poems. Some have been bold enough to say that even
1 Penseroso is generally known only in a few passages of its
brightest purple; and the extraordinary beauty of the latter part
of Comus has not prevented persons who united cultivation with
frankness from pronouncing it heavy. That this is unfortunate
need hardly be said. To begin with, it is a loss, to him who does
not read it, of some of the greatest poetry in the world-of poetry
which scarcely ever declines below a level that most poets scarcely
ever reach. But the loss is greater than this. Careless folk are
sometimes found who decry the historic estimate altogether, and
who maintain that a minor poet of the twentieth century is better
worth reading than a minor poet of the thirteenth, though the
later, for the most part, is simply a hand at the machine which
the earlier had helped to construct. But Milton is not a minor
poet, and his influence is omnipresent in almost all later English
poetry, and in not a little of later prose English literature. At
first, at second, at third, hand, he has permeated almost all his
successors. Without Milton, you cannot understand, in the real
sense of understanding, writers so different as Landor and Tennyson,
as Thomson and Wordsworth. He might walk through English
letters and, like the unwelcome apparition in one of Dickens's
shorter stories, ejaculate ‘Mine ! ' as he laid his hand on rhythm
after rhythm, phrase after phrase, design after design, in poetical
arrangement. Although there was some plagiarism, even from his
early poems, by men like Baron and Benlowes, he was not much
followed immediately ; but, as usual, the long germinating seed
took the deeper and wider hold, and bore the most abundant and
perennial crops. In particular, he, with Shakespeare, maintained
a
## p. 138 (#154) ############################################
138
Milton
the citadel of true English prosody through all the deviations and
shortcomings of the eighteenth century. With whatever allowance,
in however grudging a manner, the greatness of these two was
always allowed, and could be taken as pattern when the time came.
But this reflected and incidental glory, of course, is not the
whole, or, with most people, the main, glory of Milton. His praises
have been the theme of many excellent discourses ; and it is quite
superfluous, especially in such a place as this, to be rhetorical in
regard to him. But the indication—if only the reindication of
the special quality and quiddity of writers great and small cannot
be superfluous in a history of literature.
Although Dryden was merely repeating the common criticism
on Homer and Vergil in ascribing ‘loftiness of mind’ to the first
and ‘majesty' to the second, and although his claim for a com-
bination of the two in Milton is a sufficiently obvious figure of
rhetoric, yet there was more of his own great critical genius in
the hyperbole. One would, perhaps, rather choose 'variety' and
'nature' for Homer, 'grace' and 'perfection of art' for Vergil.
But 'loftiness of mind' and 'majesty' (of expression, which, no
doubt, was understood) remain true and keep their combination in
regard to Milton. Great variety he has not; in his longer and later
poems certainly not; while the contrast of later and earlier only
supplies it to a limited extent. Although he is never unnatural,
nature is never the first thing that suggests itself in him ; and,
though he is never (except in the rare instances often referred to)
ungraceful, yet grace is too delicate a thing to be attributed to his
work, at least after Comus. But in loftiness-sublimity-of thought
and majesty of expression, both sustained at almost superhuman
pitch, he has no superior, and no rival except Dante. That, despite
this, he has had few admirers out of England and those few (like
Scherer for instance) for more or less special reasons, is not sur-
prising. For, in order to appreciate Milton, it is necessary to
know the English language not merely, as has sometimes been
said, with more than usual acquired scholarship, but thoroughly,
and with a native intimacy. His subjects may attract or repel;
his temper may be repellent and can hardly be very attractive
though it may have its admirers. But the magnificence of his
poetical command of the language in which he writes has only
to be perceived in order to carry all before it.
-
## p. 139 (#155) ############################################
APPENDIX
A CONSPECTUS OF Milton's PROSE WORKS, WITH A NOTE ON THE
TEXT OF THE POEMS.
:
It has been thought that, considering the number of these prose works,
and the fact that there are very few modern editions of them, something more
than merely bibliographical notice and the critical remarks in the text should
be supplied.
1641. Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in England. (English. )
Generally against Episcopacy: monarchy not attacked, although some
stress is laid on the liberty of the subject. No small part occupied by
instances of bishops being troublesome to rulers.
Of Prelatical Episcopacy. (English. )
Against the patristio arguments for it; James Archbishop of Ar-
magh'(Ussher) being expressly cited in the title, but not definitely named
or very specially attacked in the text.
Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's defence · Against Smectymnuus.
(English. )
Milton's temper here gets ruffled by fighting,' and the tract (in form
of dialogue between the Remonstrant (Bishop Hall] and an Answerer) is,
on the Answerer's side, entirely written in a savage and jeering tone.
Not completely intelligible without the previous documents in the
Smectymnuus controversy.
The Reason of Church-Government urg'd against Prelaty. (English. )
The argument against Episcopacy continued, chiefly on Biblical
grounds. Tone more personal; 'bishop Andrews' and 'the primate of
Armagh' named and both of them roughly handled; Milton's peculiar
form of dialectic sarcasm here appearing, with invective against some of
his poetio contemporaries and exaltation of his own studies and purposes.
1642. An Apology against a Pamphlet call'd a Modest Confutation of the
Animadversions of the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus. (English. )
Begins with something in the more good-natured sense of its title, but
quickly turns to an attack on Hall more violent than the former, diversified
by fierce vindications of Milton himself, and bitter criticisms of the bishop's
earlier literary work.
(Of Education, 1644, and Areopagitica, same year, are generally accessible,
and are discussed in the text. They are in a more dignified tone of
controversy, and are mentioned here in anticipation of their strict
chronological order. )
1643-4. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. (English. )
The first of the Divorce Tracts, and much the longest. Deals with
the subject from various points of view, and is written with evidently
restrained passion, but without arowing a personal interest.
## p. 140 (#156) ############################################
140
Appendix to Chapter V
1644. The Judgement of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce. (English. )
A sort of appendix to Doctrine and Discipline. Milton here sometimes
translates bodily, and sometimes summarises his author, of whose agree-
ment with his own views he represents himself as having been ignorant
when he wrote the larger tract.
1644-5. Tetrachordon. (English. )
This, more widely known from the sonnet upon it than in itself,
is the third divorce pamphlet and deals (whence its name) with four
passages or batches of passages from Genesis, Denteronomy, the Gospel
of St Matthew and the First Epistle to the Corinthians.
1645. Colasterion. (English. )
The fourth and last piece on divorce, replying, touchily and with
much abuse, to a critic of Doctrine and Discipline.
1649. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. (English. )
Milton's first defence (thongh begun before the event) the execution
of Charles I. Being addressed to those members of the parliamentary and
presbyterian party who had stopped short of regicide, it is, with a few
outbreaks, for the most part written civilly and in a tone of sober argument.
Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels. (English. )
The articles themselves and some documents appartenant are first
printed. Milton's comment is not long; and, like The Tenure, seems to
have been written with some self-restraint, which, however, breaks down
with relatively greater frequency than in the earlier piece.
Eikonoklastes. (English. )
In this reply to Eikon Basilike (the effect of which was greatly
disturbing the regicides) a very few lines at the beginning seem to
promise a continnance of the comparative moderation of the two previous
pamphlets. But this is soon dropped, and every opportunity is taken of
invective and innuendo furnished by a continuous analysis of Eikon,
from the king's reading of Shakespeare and Sidney, through his political
conduct, to his affection for his wife, and the ill-hap of his grandmother;
from his writing Oglio for Olla' to his repentance for the death of
Strafford. Except in the preface, this line of bit-by-bit comment with
hostile discnssion is preserved throughont: there is no summary or
peroration. As to Eikon Basilike, see post, chap. VI.
(It is supposed that, during 1651, Milton may have written some articles
for the Mercurius Politicus which he apparently censured; but they have
never been anthoritatively identified. See post, chap. xv. )
1651. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. (Latin. ) On this and the next three
or four items, see text.
1654. Defensio Secunda. (Latin. ) Followed by Pro se Defensio, 1655, and a
Supplementum.
1658-9. A Treatise on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes. (English. )
1659. Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings out of
the Church. (English. )
A Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth.
(English)
1660. The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.
(English. )
Preceded by a letter on the same subject to Monck, and in the later
printed form acknowledging that 'since the writing . . . the face of things
hath had some change. Argument against monarchy, with a good deal
about the Areopagus and the Ephors.
6
## p. 141 (#157) ############################################
Appendix to Chapter V
141
6
1660. Brief Notes upon a late Sermon . . . by Matthew Griffith. (English. )
Opens with a reference to the last-named piece, and comments on
the text in the style (a little softened) of the Answer to the Remonstrant
and the Eikonoklastes.
1670. Written at uncertain dates.
The History of Britain. · History of Moscovia. Both English; see text.
1673. Of True Religion, etc. against the growth of Popery. (English. )
Very brief and rather ambiguous in its attitude to “toleration. '
'Popery . . . is not to be tolerated in public or private. But, later, it
seems that Papists may write at least in Latin. '
1674. Letters Patents of the Election of this present King of Poland, John
the third. (Translated from Latin. )
1649–59. Letters of State. (Latin. ) Published 1694.
1655. A Manifesto of the Lord Protector. (Latin. )
1625-66. Familiar Epistles (published 1674), including Milton's college
Prolusiones. (Latin. )
(Posthumous. ) De Doctrina Christiana. (Latin. )
Further light was thrown on the curious history of this after Sumner's
publication of it (see post and ante) by Smith’s Letters of Pepys, David
Skinner, the depositary who handed over the MS to Williamson, having
been one of the diarist's numerous clients.
Besides these, Milton made collections, utilised by Phillips, for a Latin
dictionary. He also issued the following compilations:
1669. Accedence commenc't Grammar (English, but on Latin, not English,
grammar).
1672. Artis Logicæ Plenior Institutio. (Latin, and based on Ramus. )
With regard to the text of the poems, it may be useful to enumerate the
The whole (except the four sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane and
Cyriack Skinner (2), which were kept back for political reasons) was printed
in Milton's lifetime; but the vast majority of the verses did not appear till
after his blindness and, therefore, cannot possibly have been corrected by his
own hand. For, however carefully he may have had read to him his dictated
matter, the fair copies of it and the proofs, is it reasonably possible that
every word can have been spelt to him at length and his alterations (if any)
antomatically and infallibly recorded? The importance, therefore, which was
attached to the censor's copy (see ante) of Paradise Lost, Bk. I, recently
sold by descendants of Tonson, could be hardly more than an importance
of curiosity.
On the other hand, the Cambridge MS, already referred to, is of the
highest possible interest: for, with very few exceptions and those almost
entirely subsequent to the blindness), it is in Milton's own hand. There are
also large corrections in that hand: so that, altogether, it is invaluable—not
least so in regard to questions of versification and spelling. It gives us the
whole of Arcades, Comus and Lycidas; all the sonnets except four (the
'O Nightingale,''On the late Massacher in Piemont,' 'When I consider' and
the one to Lawrence), one or two minor things and the valuable notes of early
planned or suggested subjects, to which reference has been made above.
This is, practically, the only document of the kind that we have for the text
of a very great English poet before the eighteenth century: and it can hardly
be prized too highly.
Perhaps it should be added that, in some editions, translations, not Milton's
own,
of scraps of Latin verse in the pamphlets have been included without
warning.
sources.
## p. 142 (#158) ############################################
CHAPTER VI
CAROLINE DIVINES
In the earlier years of Charles I, when, according to the view
of intelligent contemporaries, there was the rare and happy union
of imperium and libertas and few perceived the approach of the
troubles which should lead to civil war, the English interest in
preaching was, perhaps, at its greatest. The stormiest controversies
of the reformation seemed, for a time, to have spent themselves.
The church of England was in settled possession, with a king who
was her devoted son. The wide interests of the Elizabethan age,
which inspired theologians as well as men of affairs, had tuned the
pulpits to themes of universal concern. As men thought and wrote,
so men preached, of matters beyond the ken of the cloister; and the
massive dignity of their fathers' prose was reflected from the lips
and the pens of those who were set to give God's message to men.
Nothing is more remarkable in an age of fading literary excellence
than the way in which the thoughts and methods of the great poets
and prose writers of the preceding generation were taken up and
handled by the clergy of the national church. The earlier age of
the Caroline divines was especially an age of great preachers.
For the most part, this development was confined to the
church of England. Roman Catholics, obscure when they were
not persecuted, did not seriously affect the national literature.
Their training as theologians was exclusive and foreign. They
did not write English very easily; and what they wrote had
not a large audience. Roman Catholic writers, where they had
influence at all, influenced English authors directly, as the
Spanish school influenced Crashaw and Vaughan. In every
sense, their English writings were exotic. But, apart though
this influence stands, it has not a little interest and charm, as
may be seen in Sancta Sophia, or Holy Wisdom . . . extracted out
## p. 143 (#159) ############################################
Thomas Traherne
143
of more than forty Treatises written by the Venerable Father
Augustin Baker by Father Cressy, first published in 1657.
Augustin Baker was a Welshman, who was taught at Christ's
hospital and at Broadgates hall in Oxford and who, after a few
years in practice as a country lawyer, became a Roman Catholic and,
at the age of thirty-one, a Benedictine. In England and while he
was at Cambridge, he wrote a number of ascetic treatises which,
after his death, the more famous Father Cressy (an Englishman,
and, at one time, chaplain to Falkland) collected and 'extracted'
into a devotional treatise of much beauty, to which he gave the
name Sancta Sophia, a study of contemplation and prayer. The
style is involved, and yet it is not cumbrous. There is a certain
exactness, as it were of legalism, which affects the language with
an obvious restraint. But, on the other hand, there are felicities
of thought, and, more rarely, of expression, which give the book
a definite place in the literature of devotion. Yet it is only
necessary to compare it with the Meditations of Traherne to
see how much the wider outlook of the English churchman has
affected the literary expression given to thoughts that were
common to meditative souls. The matter of Sancta Sophia
is an instruction in the method of meditation, or the prayer of
contemplation, owing a good deal to foreign mystics, whether
orthodox like Saint Teresa or quietist, and, by a systematic rule,
proceeding at last
unto the top of the mountain, where God is seen: a mountain, to us that
stand below, environed with clouds and darkness, but to them who have
their dwelling there it is peace and serenity and light. It is an intellectual
heaven, where there is no sun nor moon, but God and the Lamb are the light
of it.
The nearest parallel, in the English literature of the time,
to the Sancta Sophia of Baker is the centuries of Meditations
of Thomas Traherne? ; yet Traherne, above all things, is an
Anglican. His residence at the university in times of puritan
dominance did not give him any tincture of Calvinism. He
set himself to supply a private friend (as it appears) with
thoughts for divine contemplation, in his Centuries of Medita-
tions, a book which had the strange fortune to remain in manu-
script for nearly two hundred and fifty years. What strikes
the reader most, after the spiritual intensity of this remarkable
volume, is the wide scope of the writer's survey. All heaven
and earth he takes for the province of the pious soul, and the
1 See ante, pp. 42–44.
## p. 144 (#160) ############################################
144
Caroline Divines
:
breadth of his conception of true religion is reflected in the
richness of his style. From a book long undiscovered and
still little known, it may be well to quote a passage which
illustrates the freedom of the Anglican school to which Traherne
belonged no less than the characteristic manner of his own
English writing.
You never ſhe says) enjoy the world aright. . . . Till you can sing and
rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres,
you never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world,
and the stars are your jewels: till you are as familiar with the ways of
God in all ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately
acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till
you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal
of your own: till you delight in God for ing good to all: you never enjoy
the world. Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more
present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties there,
than in your own house: till you remember how lately you were made, and
how wonderful it was when you came into it: and more rejoice in the palace
of your glory, than if it had been made but today morning.
Fancy and insight are the masters of Traherne's imagination.
From a well-stored mind, and an experience of men and things
beyond that of his cloistered contemporaries, and equally remote
from the jarring contentions of school and camp, from controversies
about predestination or militia, he looks upon the hidden things
of the soul, and, in them, he sees the image of the glory and
love of God. The style is that of a poet who is also a master
of prose; and there is no monotony in the richness of medita-
tion after meditation on the eternal theme of the goodness and
the splendour of God. Traherne is markedly the product of his
age, in its ardour of expansion. He rivals Jeremy Taylor in
richness of imagery, but has not Taylor's learning. He even
suggests the style of the poet of two centuries later who brought
into his prose the ardour of his poetry, Algernon Charles
Swinburne.
Baker and Traherne may be compared, but, perhaps, as obviously
contrasted. Another contrast is equally significant of the interests of
the age of Charles I. If Roman Catholics lived and wrote apart from
the general life of the nation, no one could say that this was true
of the greater part of that large and ill-defined class to which the
name of puritan was given. The secrecy of Martin Marprelate was
a thing of the past, and, with it, for the most part, its scurrility
and vulgarity. But there were puritans and puritans. The puritan
literature of the earlier years of Charles I ranged, even in its
theological aspect, from the solemn and pedantic extravagance
## p. 145 (#161) ############################################
Richard Baxter
145
of Prynne (notably in Histriomastix, 1632)" through ponderous
verbiage with an occasional touch of humour, like The Dipper
Dipt, or the Anabaptist Duck’t and Plung'd over Head and Ears
in a Disputation by Daniel Featley, D. D. (1645), to the rough
force of Burton and Bastwick, and the mere ribaldry of the verses
and fly-sheets against prelacy such as Rot amongst the Bishops
and Rome for Canterbury or a true relation of the Birth and
Life of William Laud (1641). And, when this is said, there is still
.
omitted the solemn dignity of sermons like those of Stephen Marshall
(printed in A Brief Vindication of Mr Stephen Marshal by Giles
Firmin, 1681) and the impressive mass of the whole literature
produced by Richard Baxter.
To epitomise Baxter would be impossible--it was attempted
for one of his works by Edmund Calamy: almost equally impossible
is it to characterise in brief an author so stupendously prolific.
Reliquiae Baxterianae is a storehouse of information for the
religious and social history of the time, and it bears throughout
the impress of the writer's energetic, restless and masterful mind.
He describes the puritanism of his youth, exemplified in his own
father, as not nonconformist but set in contrast to the loose living
and laxity of the village where, on Sundays,
the reader read the Common Prayer briefly, and the rest of the day, even till
dark night almost, except eating-time, was spent in dancing under a May-pole
and a great tree, not far from my father's door, where all the town met
together;
and his father, who 'never scrupled the Common Prayer,' was yet
called puritan because he read the Scripture when the rest were
dancing, and quoted it, too, to the reproof of the drunkards and
profane. The clergy seemed to him lax, and, when one parish priest,
being old, said the prayers by heart and got two working men to
read the lessons, this employment of the laity was resented by the
scrupulous young man, himself the son of a freeholder. He grew
up with little education save what his own perseverance won, but
with knowledge of life in the country and at court, eventually
becoming a schoolmaster. He was ordained by bishop Thornborough
of Worcester in 1638. Gradually, he adopted views of semi-con-
formity; there were things the church allowed which he could not
approve. When he came to minister at Bridgnorth, he would not
make the sign of the cross in baptism or wear a surplice. Thence,
he went to Kidderminster, and, when the war broke out, he held,
at different times, different posts of chaplain in the parliamentary
1 See ante, vol. vi, chap. XIV.
E. L. VII. CH, VI.
10
## p. 146 (#162) ############################################
146
Caroline Divines
forces. He came to deplore the growth of sectarianism; he worked
as a pastor again at Kidderminster; be passed much time in
country retirement, writing the book which made him famous.
At the restoration, he was first offered a bishopric and, twenty
years later, he was put in prison'; and he lived to see the revolution
settlement. This varied life coloured the writing of one whose
senses were peculiarly acute and whose sympathies were wider than
his intellectual outlook. 'I was but a pen,' he said of himself,
and what praise is due to a pen ? ' He felt, indeed, of himself,
what Shakespeare's editors thought was characteristic of their
hero's work. Most probably, in all his voluminous writings, he
never blotted a line. His style was himself. He wrote simply
and naturally, with a choice of good phrases, sound words, straight-
forward constructions, as a man speaks who is well educated but
not a pedant. It is this which makes The Saints' Everlasting Rest
(1649/50) an English classic.
That book, which we all call immortal, though it is gradually
sinking into the limbo whither much of seventeenth century prose,
for all save scholars, has gone before, is, in many respects, 'modern'
in tone; and yet it is not so modern as Jeremy Taylor, because it
has, or seems to have, much less art, as it certainly has much less
glow. It is serious and direct; it is eloquent, after a simple, godly
and appealing sort. Yet, after all, it is the matter not the manner
which gives the book its place in English literature. There is no
special thing in which you can say that Baxter influenced other
writers; there is no individual influence on himself which you can
trace from writers who preceded him. He would not have written
as he did if Hooker had not written before him; but, then, that is
true of the whole succession of post-Elizabethan prose.
Baxter's fame rests on other and better work than that of the
pulpit; but it must not be thought that the influence of the preacher
had ceased. It had its fluctuations, but it was still important so
long as Charles I was on the throne. While sermons still stood
midway between the learned world and the mob, and it was hoped
that what suited the one would attract, instruct, or even amaze,
the other into goodness and obedience to the ordered system of
the national church, the pulpit in St Paul's churchyard managed
to hold something of its old position. 'In an age when men read
few books and had no newspapers, the sermon at Paul's cross or
the Spital was the most exciting event of the week? ' Times were
1 He was in prison for a short time, illegally, in 1665, and, again, for a year and
a half in 1685.
• Ante, vol. iv, chap. XII, p. 225.
## p. 147 (#163) ############################################
Henry Hammond
147
changing: books were multiplied, there was a large manufacture
of pamphlets to catch the popular ear and newspapers were just
beginning, with a supply of suitable, selected or invented facts;
but the sermon, spoken not read, died hard, and there was always an
audience till men began to turn their ploughshares into swords.
At Paul's cross, Laud preached on the anniversary of Charles's
coronation; in 1640, Hammond delivered the striking discourse
which he called The Poor Man's Tithing; in 1641, Frank
preached a famous sermon on obedience. This last marked the
beginning of the end. When bishops had suffered 'the tumults
about their houses and the riots upon their persons' and the
'whole clergy' met with daily insolences in your streets,' the
open pulpit had ceased to influence, it rather accepted the violence
which it should have set itself to redress, and free speech was
replaced by what the Londoners loved to hear. Paul's cross
ceased to give Englishmen literature when they wanted only
polemics. In May 1643, the cross was torn down by the mob.
A notable sermon by Steward, who was nominated dean in 1641,
was among the last that was preached there. It was a de-
nunciation of that Christianity which was of the lip not of the
life, which kept plantations for criminals and did nothing to spread
the gospel beyond the seas; when usury flourished (familiar
lament) in spite of the banishment of Jews, when men might say
'those words of Æschines, els mapadočiavě uuer, we are born
the Paradox and Riddle of our times, a Reformed Church without
a Reformation. Over against preachers such as these should be
placed notable puritans such as Stephen Marshall, whose noble
funeral eulogy of Pym is worthy to be placed high in the prose of
his age.
Not all the preachers were theologians or men of letters;
but few Caroline theologians were not famous preachers, and
many men of letters were found among the ministers and preachers
of the church. To these we may now pass. Henry Hammond,
who has been called “the father of English Biblical criticism,'
is now chiefly remembered by Keble's beautiful eulogy; but,
in his own time, no man had a more beneficent influence on
the religious literature of the age. His own works were voluminous:
his Paraphrase and Annotations on the New Testament (1653)
was an achievement in English theological scholarship; his
Practical Catechism (1644) occupies a position to some extent
between the Devotions of Cosin and of Lewes Baily (The Practice
of Piety, dedicated to Charles I when prince of Wales), and The
1042
## p. 148 (#164) ############################################
148
Caroline Divines
Whole Duty of Man, with the origin of which he was undoubtedly
acquainted. But the most valuable of all his work, as literature,
are his sermons, models of the best Caroline prose in its simplicity,
restraint, clarity, distinction. In his absence of conceits, he shows
himself typically a Caroline rather than an Elizabethan. In his avoid-
ance of anything approaching rhetorical adornment, he forms a
marked contrast to the school in which we may place the gloomy
splendour of Donne and the oriental exuberance of Jeremy Taylor.
To write of charity, patience, toleration, befits him better than any
other man of his age; and, when theologians and statesmen were
wrangling over the limits of the church and the rights or wrongs
of the individual in religion, his was almost the first, and certainly
the clearest, voice to be lifted up in assertion of toleration as
a plain Christian duty and in denunciation of the persecuting
spirit as an enemy to religion and truth.
Parallel to Hammond's influence is that of another eminent
theologian who was never a party man. James Ussher stands
somewhat apart in principles from the dominant school of his time.
He was an Irishman, a distinguished son of the great Irish
university. In his own family, he had closer acquaintance with
Roman Catholicism than had his English contemporaries, and the
Calvinism of Dublin was much more definitely puritan than that
of Oxford or Cambridge. His experience, as learner, as divinity
professor, as bishop, was almost wholly Irish. Yet he, too, fell under
the influence of Laud, was his constant correspondent for twelve
years, was active in winning for him the chancellorship of Trinity
college, Dublin, and shared his aims of anti-Roman defence and
traditional reverence for Catholic antiquity. It was he who most
boldly advised Charles not to consent to Strafford's execution and
reproached him for yielding. Yet Cromwell ordered him a public
funeral. “Learned to a miracle,' as Selden calls him, Ussher,
perhaps, was the last of the Calvinists in high place. His influence
was very great, and it was all exercised in favour of peace and
charity. Of his sermons, it was as true as of his personal influence
that ‘he had a way of gaining people's hearts and touching their
consciences that look'd like somewhat of the Apostolical age
reviv'd. ' He was a voluminous writer, learned and exact; in
manner an Elizabethan, who did not mark any important step in
English letters. His contributions were to learning rather than
to literature. Men used his information and incorporated it
in their own works, but they did not copy his style ; and it is
significant, perhaps, that, while his contributions to historical
## p. 149 (#165) ############################################
Robert Sanderson
149
study, in regard to subjects so different as the Ignatian letters and
the early history of Ireland, have never lost their value, the only
book of his which can reasonably be described as popular was A
Body of Divinitie (1645), which was little else but a commonplace
book that by no means always represented his own opinions. The
prominent place which Ussher's name occupies in contemporary
accounts of the literature of the seventeenth century is a proof, if
one were needed, how much more influential, at the period of
crisis which led to the civil war, were personal than literary
influences. Learning pursued its way and scholars paid attention
to it and, after their manner, unduly exalted its achievements.
Men who had won the public ear kept it even when they had
ceased very definitely to teach their age. The 'gentle soul' of
Ussher made men love him and attach more importance to his
writings than they deserved: such may well be the view of
posterity, and it would not be wholly unfair.
Robert Sanderson, who lived to become a bishop at the
restoration, and is embalmed in the exquisite prose of Izaak
Walton, was another of the Elizabethans who made the church of
England notable for its preaching power. The famous saying
of Charles I is, perhaps, his chief title to distinction : 'I carry
my ears to hear other preachers, but I carry my conscience
to hear Dr Sanderson'; and, with it, Walton's inimitable
description of the talk 'in a corner under a pent house’ till the
rain forced them “into a cleanly house,' where they spoke 'to my
great comfort and advantage. ' Both show him a man of wisdom
and piety, ‘his learning methodical and exact, his wisdom useful,
his integrity visible. ' The sermons are plain sober things, with
‘no improper rhetoric,' indeed, as Walton notes, nor much of the
fire which belongs to the earlier masters of his school : didactic,
mildly argumentative, modestly learned, whether ad aulam
(preached at court), or ad clerum, or ad populum. The last-
named were preached and printed some thirty years before the
others, and they show how consistent were his position and method.
He wrote clearly and without affectation; but he does not rank
high among the prose writers of his time. He was at his best in
the revision of The Book of Common Prayer, where the General
Thanksgiving (perhaps erroneously) has been ascribed to him and
for which he certainly wrote the admirable preface which begins 'It
hath been the wisdom of the Church. ' It is significant, perhaps,
that he wrote as easily and simply in Latin as in English.
Next to Sanderson may very fitly be named 'his dear old friend
## p. 150 (#166) ############################################
150
Caroline Divines
Dr Sheldon,' one of those capable and strenuous men of business
who, from time to time, have seemed marked out early in life-as
Clarendon tells us was said of him—for the primacy of all England.
No man was more bitterly criticised during the later years of his
life than he, for he was a masterful exponent of the Clarendon
policy. His literary remains, which are almost exclusively letters,
still rest, for the most part in manuscript, in the Bodleian library ;
they are thoroughly in keeping, as regards manner and style, with
the acute sobriety of his character, and a most valuable volume
might be compiled from them. His only printed work is a sermon
preached before Charles II just after the restoration, markedly in
the style of Laud.
It is more than literature that links the names of Laud, Sanderson
and Sheldon. The latter, who, early in life, had opposed the great
archbishop in some of his university reforms and had been
prominent, for example, in resisting the appointment of Jeremy
Taylor to an Oxford fellowship, lived not only to carry on with a
certain rigid determination the policy of the earlier primate but to
assist in the preservation and publication of the memorials of his
life. The association had been earlier, and in friendliness :
for both Laud and Sheldon were concerned in the conversion from
Roman Catholicism of the most conspicuous controversialist of the
age of Charles I. This was William Chillingworth, who was an
Oxford citizen, Laud's godson, a scholar of Trinity, a logician and
disputant, a friend of the brilliant company which gathered at
Great Tew. In an immortal passage, Clarendon has described the
wits and theologians who were intimate with the fascinating Lucius
Cary, viscount Falkland. In his Oxfordshire house, he loved to
consort with scholars of Oxford, he who had been the disciple of
the last poets of the Elizabethan age, had himself written pretty
verses and, perhaps, more than dabbled in acute theological
difficulties. His mother Elizabeth (Tanfield) became a Roman
Catholic, and it was in her house that Lucius met Chillingworth,
when he, too, in search of an infallible guide, had abandoned his
protestantism. Their talk, there is evidence to show, was often of
Socinus and his rationalistic treatment of theology, and theological
interests became more and more supreme in Falkland's mind.
*His whole conversation,' says Clarendon, was one continued
convivium philosophicum or convivium theologicum'; and the
literary result was his Discourse of Infallibility, published after
the restoration, in 1660. The literary coterie at Great Tew did
not entirely abandon poetry: there was also, indeed, as of old
6
6
## p. 151 (#167) ############################################
William Chillingworth 151
in London, the session of the Poets. But the main interests were
theological. Lettice, lord Falkland's wife, was a typical product of
the religious revival associated with Charles l's days. Her Life by
her chaplain Duncon, one of the most interesting biographies of
the time, shows her exact and scrupulous in all the devotional
rules of the church ; yet, in her religious, almost ascetic, household,
the widest speculation was allowed her thoughtful and impression-
able husband. There were Morley and Hammond; the former
afterwards a notable bishop, the latter a preacher and devotional
writer of singular charm and sweetness ; Earle, author of Micro-
cosmographie, who said that he'got more useful learning by his
conversation at Tew than he had at Oxford’; Sheldon, Hales and
Chillingworth. It is not unnatural to suppose that the foundations
of The Religion of Protestants were laid at Great Tew: Falkland's
book shows indebtedness to the same thoughts of rational disbelief
in papal infallibility.
The Religion of Protestants a safe way to Salvation; or an
Answer to a book Entituled Mercy and Truth or Charity Maintained
by Catholiques ; which pretends to prove the contrary (1637) was
the summing up of a long controversy which was begun as early as
1630 by a Jesuit named Edward Knott. It is hampered by a
minute and complicated method, now of defence now of attack;
but, out of pages of singularly complicated and involved discussion,
there emerges a most clear and dogmatic assertion. Chillingworth's
religion is to be found only in the Bible, insomuch that he will
have no anathemas that he cannot find there, and his
desire is to go the right way to eternal happiness; but whether this way lie
on the right hand, or on the left, or straightforward; whether it be by
following a living guide, or by seeking my direction in a book, or by hearken-
ing to the secret whisper of some private spirit, to me is indifferent.
A ‘safe way to Salvation' was to be found in free enquiry. The
literary merit of Chillingworth, popular though his work became,
is not conspicuous: his style is that of the sledge-hammer, dealing
repeated blows. The arrangement of the book depends upon that
which it is its aim to attack; we have to wait some time before the
author emerges from the clouds that beset him; but, when his own
thought comes directly before the reader it is conspicuously clear,
and it is expressed very directly, in simple and forcible English,
with a limited vocabulary but with trenchant emphasis. He is logical
and he is tolerant, and there is in him, at his best, a remarkable
breadth of charity. He cries for liberty, liberty which the times
denied him and the search for which the puritan persecutor of his
## p. 152 (#168) ############################################
152
Caroline Divines
deathbed regarded as blasphemous : yet he is content to abide
within the English fold and to ratify its apostolic claim. And all
this comes out in clear-cut sentences, which men did not readily
forget.
The difference between a Papist and a Protestant is this, that the one
judges his guide to be infallible, the other his way to be manifest.
6
6
>
6
Another of those who frequented the 'academy' of Falkland
at Great Tew was the quiet but attractive John Hales, whose
friends, after his death, caught the literary world's ear with their
name for him of the ever-memorable. ' A scholar, a recluse, a
hesitating thinker and reluctant writer, he was yet a man whose
words and character influenced all who knew him, and Laud
left him, once Greek professor at Oxford, undisturbed at Eton,
where he was happily at home : 'a master of Polite, Various, and
Universal Learning. ' And, to this, he added the rare perfection of
character which made bishop Pearson say that it was 'near as easy
a task for every one to become so knowing, as so obliging' as he.
His friend ‘that Reverend and Worthy Person, Mr Farindon' tells
us that, in his youth, he was a Calvinist till, at the synod of Dort, he
said, 'There, I bid John Calvin Good night. ' His breadth, as con-
temporaries record it, anticipates Thomas Arnold, for he would bring
all Englishmen together by a common liturgy from which "all
doctrinal points on which men differed in their opinions' were to
be omitted. Yet Laud cherished and promoted him.
The Golden Remains of Hales (in the second edition, with
Additions from the Authour's own copy,' 1673) contains many
pleas for religious peace and arguments of the 'great and ir-
remediable inconvenience this free and uncontroulable venturing
upon Theological Disputes hath brought upon us. ' But he was a
positive teacher as well as one who dissuaded from extremes. His
sermons, which, with a number of lively letters to Dudley
Carleton, ambassador at the Hague, and a few fragmentary
thoughts somewhat after Pascal's manner, constitute the precious
volume, have a fine clarity and directness. The learning which
men admired in him is almost laid aside or comes in only where it
fitly illustrates the religious thought, unlike most of the sermons
of his contemporaries. He speaks very plainly, at Eton, of the
responsibility of riches, or, at the Hague, of the crime of duelling;
he tells men how to know and love and worship God, as one
whose simple object it was to find it out. His writing is straight-
forward and effective, as the writing of men is apt to be who, like
## p. 153 (#169) ############################################
John Hales
153
6
himself, will not ‘pen anything till they needs must. ' But, behind
it there lies, easy to be perceived, a depth of philosophic interest.
Hales looked much further behind life than men like Sheldon,
further, perhaps, than the piercing eye of Chillingworth ; he had a
basis of philosophy like Herbert or Traherne ; he saw differences
between earth and heaven, it may be, where they saw only
correspondences; yet, while, like the former, he was the friend of
courtiers and men of wit, he was, like the latter, a lover of
solitude in the soul. He saw life whole and was original as a
thinker in theology and philosophy: so he could not be a Calvinist.
a
He was transparently sincere, and he came to have that sort of
influence on the men who were making English literature as well
as English politics which has often been exercised from the cloister,
the college, or the country parsonage. The man who made the
funeral oration of Sir Thomas Bodley, studied Shakespeare and
belonged to Suckling's 'session of the Poets,' was a theologian
who taught the next age in many subtle ways. He taught it
breadth of view, and a passion for unity; he taught it to be
critical and yet religious ; and he taught it to pursue its specula-
tions in the study and the church rather than in the market and
the House of Commons.
general feature, there is not, nor can there be, any difference of
opinion as to fact; and this is that Milton pays no attention to the
supposed necessity, or, at least, propriety, of putting a pause near
>
## p. 135 (#151) ############################################
Versification and Style 135
the middle of the line, and that his freedom of handling here is vital
to his versification. On the propriety, as distinguished from the
fact, of the variation, such unanimity has not prevailed. The more
rigid eighteenth century critics regarded the central or centripetal
pause as an absolute law, the breach of which was to be justified
by no success of result. Johnson was not quite so strait-laced as
this; but as, with him, regularity of correspondence was the main
article of poetry, he objected to such confusions of the methods
of the poet and the declaimer’; and, consistently enough, disliked
blank verse altogether. It is, at any rate, certain, that it is by
variety of line material (attained by whatever means), and by
further variation of pause, that Milton achieves the extraordinary
freedom from monotony, and the force of character, which dis-
tinguish his verse. And it has been recognised, with increasing
decision, that he does not employ these means in a fashion merely
continuous or strung together, that his verse construction is really
periodic or paragraphic—the sections corresponding in division of
sense and substance, as it were, to long but unequal stanzas or
strophes of verses identical at first sight, but individually variable.
If the reader will compare the sketches of the progress of
English prosody given at intervals in this History; if he will
remember that Milton was a careful scholar and a fluent writer
of Latin verse; and if he will pay particular attention to the
Rous ode in Latin, and to Samson in English-he will not have
much difficulty in appreciating the position of the poet in regard
to quality of versification. So far as Milton's historical position is
concerned, he is almost the central figure in the whole history of
our verse. Brought into definite form as that verse had been,
after two centuries of experiment, by Chaucer; restored and re-
formed, after nearly two more of disarray, by Spenser; enormously
varied and advanced by Shakespeare and the later Elizabethans
Milton found it liable to fresh disorders. He did not so much
directly attack these as elaborate, for non-dramatic poetry, a
medium practically involving all the order and all the freedom
possible in English verse—yet without rime. And, in Samson, he
returned to rime itself in choruses, though not universally or
regularly, but, rather, with an extension of the occasional use
which he had tried in Lycidas.
In the larger sense of style, Milton holds so great a place that
we may almost let the arrangement of this chapter pass here
into a conclusion-summary. He is, admittedly, in the least
disputed sense of that much debated term, 'the grand style,' the
## p. 136 (#152) ############################################
136
Milton
grandest-styled of English poets. He never, indeed, attains to
the absolute zenith of expression-As does Shakespeare often and,
perhaps, Dante sometimes. He is, unlike them, strangely un-
modern; he has, indeed, it has been quite correctly said,
little even of the renascence about him, except those tricks and
fashions of form which have been noticed. Biblical, classical
and medieval influences almost alone work on him—especially the
former two. Under their joint pressure, he has elaborated a
manner so all-pervading, that, if it were not also great, it might,
or must, be called a mannerism. But it is always a mannerism of
grandeur and never-this is another of the points in which Milton
is unique one of grandiosity. It does break down sometimes,
though rarely, when he attempts humour ; when he lets himself
prose, and so forth ; but, even then, it does not become grandiose,
still less bombastic: it is merely flat and dull or, sometimes,
grotesque. Almost everywhere, the magnificent state and cere-
mony covers and carries off the occasion, the subject, resistlessly,
This manner has some modes and phases which are worth
particularising, especially in the attempt to complete the presenta-
tion in little of the work and figure of so great a poet. One of the
most remarkable of these is the famous ‘Miltonic vague'-the
preference of vast but rather indeterminate pictures, tinted with a
sort of dim gorgeousness or luridity, as the case may be—to sharper
outlines and more definite colours. Another—as it may seem in a
different sphere of thought—is the peculiar moral atmosphere of a
kind of magnanimous intransigeance which pervades the whole.
The common saying that 'Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost' is
merely a way of expressing this wider truth to the vulgar mind.
It is not at all probable that Milton meant anything of the kind ;
according to 'the rules,' a hero ought to be victorious, and Satan's
victory is exceedingly Pyrrhic; according to 'the rules,' he ought to
be good, if not faultless, and certainly Milton did not think Satan
good. But he has made Satan the most interesting person, and
his unflinching nonconformity the most interesting thing, in the
poem. In Paradise Regained, he enjoys a double presentation of
this kind the persistence of Satan, unconquered by past or future
certainty of defeat, and the resistance of Christ, to which Milton's
semi-Arian views must, as has been said, have given a peculiar
interest. As regards Agonistes, the other common saying, that
'Samson is Milton,' contains the general truth again. Samson
is incarnate resistance; he has resisted grace and the Philistines
alike, in the past ; his repentance and atonement consist in re-
## p. 137 (#153) ############################################
Poetical Quality
137
sisting his father, the chorus, Harapha, the officer, the lords,
Dalila, everybody; and his final simulated compliance is only to
obtain the means of making this resistance triumph. Even some
forty years earlier, the centre of Comus is the invincible resolution
of the Lady; and the real inspiration of Lycidas, apart from the
poetry, is the defiant denunciation-utterly different from the
parallel and, no doubt, suggesting passage in Dante
of St Peter.
Now this pervading irreconcilableness, wherein Milton and Dante,
to some extent, come together again, can only be made poetical by
a style of severe splendour; and it meets this eminently in both,
but more exclusively and restrictively in Milton.
It is almost a necessary consequence of this peculiar kind of
magnificence that Milton has always been more admired and
written about than loved and read, except in his earlier and
smaller poems. Some have been bold enough to say that even
1 Penseroso is generally known only in a few passages of its
brightest purple; and the extraordinary beauty of the latter part
of Comus has not prevented persons who united cultivation with
frankness from pronouncing it heavy. That this is unfortunate
need hardly be said. To begin with, it is a loss, to him who does
not read it, of some of the greatest poetry in the world-of poetry
which scarcely ever declines below a level that most poets scarcely
ever reach. But the loss is greater than this. Careless folk are
sometimes found who decry the historic estimate altogether, and
who maintain that a minor poet of the twentieth century is better
worth reading than a minor poet of the thirteenth, though the
later, for the most part, is simply a hand at the machine which
the earlier had helped to construct. But Milton is not a minor
poet, and his influence is omnipresent in almost all later English
poetry, and in not a little of later prose English literature. At
first, at second, at third, hand, he has permeated almost all his
successors. Without Milton, you cannot understand, in the real
sense of understanding, writers so different as Landor and Tennyson,
as Thomson and Wordsworth. He might walk through English
letters and, like the unwelcome apparition in one of Dickens's
shorter stories, ejaculate ‘Mine ! ' as he laid his hand on rhythm
after rhythm, phrase after phrase, design after design, in poetical
arrangement. Although there was some plagiarism, even from his
early poems, by men like Baron and Benlowes, he was not much
followed immediately ; but, as usual, the long germinating seed
took the deeper and wider hold, and bore the most abundant and
perennial crops. In particular, he, with Shakespeare, maintained
a
## p. 138 (#154) ############################################
138
Milton
the citadel of true English prosody through all the deviations and
shortcomings of the eighteenth century. With whatever allowance,
in however grudging a manner, the greatness of these two was
always allowed, and could be taken as pattern when the time came.
But this reflected and incidental glory, of course, is not the
whole, or, with most people, the main, glory of Milton. His praises
have been the theme of many excellent discourses ; and it is quite
superfluous, especially in such a place as this, to be rhetorical in
regard to him. But the indication—if only the reindication of
the special quality and quiddity of writers great and small cannot
be superfluous in a history of literature.
Although Dryden was merely repeating the common criticism
on Homer and Vergil in ascribing ‘loftiness of mind’ to the first
and ‘majesty' to the second, and although his claim for a com-
bination of the two in Milton is a sufficiently obvious figure of
rhetoric, yet there was more of his own great critical genius in
the hyperbole. One would, perhaps, rather choose 'variety' and
'nature' for Homer, 'grace' and 'perfection of art' for Vergil.
But 'loftiness of mind' and 'majesty' (of expression, which, no
doubt, was understood) remain true and keep their combination in
regard to Milton. Great variety he has not; in his longer and later
poems certainly not; while the contrast of later and earlier only
supplies it to a limited extent. Although he is never unnatural,
nature is never the first thing that suggests itself in him ; and,
though he is never (except in the rare instances often referred to)
ungraceful, yet grace is too delicate a thing to be attributed to his
work, at least after Comus. But in loftiness-sublimity-of thought
and majesty of expression, both sustained at almost superhuman
pitch, he has no superior, and no rival except Dante. That, despite
this, he has had few admirers out of England and those few (like
Scherer for instance) for more or less special reasons, is not sur-
prising. For, in order to appreciate Milton, it is necessary to
know the English language not merely, as has sometimes been
said, with more than usual acquired scholarship, but thoroughly,
and with a native intimacy. His subjects may attract or repel;
his temper may be repellent and can hardly be very attractive
though it may have its admirers. But the magnificence of his
poetical command of the language in which he writes has only
to be perceived in order to carry all before it.
-
## p. 139 (#155) ############################################
APPENDIX
A CONSPECTUS OF Milton's PROSE WORKS, WITH A NOTE ON THE
TEXT OF THE POEMS.
:
It has been thought that, considering the number of these prose works,
and the fact that there are very few modern editions of them, something more
than merely bibliographical notice and the critical remarks in the text should
be supplied.
1641. Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in England. (English. )
Generally against Episcopacy: monarchy not attacked, although some
stress is laid on the liberty of the subject. No small part occupied by
instances of bishops being troublesome to rulers.
Of Prelatical Episcopacy. (English. )
Against the patristio arguments for it; James Archbishop of Ar-
magh'(Ussher) being expressly cited in the title, but not definitely named
or very specially attacked in the text.
Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's defence · Against Smectymnuus.
(English. )
Milton's temper here gets ruffled by fighting,' and the tract (in form
of dialogue between the Remonstrant (Bishop Hall] and an Answerer) is,
on the Answerer's side, entirely written in a savage and jeering tone.
Not completely intelligible without the previous documents in the
Smectymnuus controversy.
The Reason of Church-Government urg'd against Prelaty. (English. )
The argument against Episcopacy continued, chiefly on Biblical
grounds. Tone more personal; 'bishop Andrews' and 'the primate of
Armagh' named and both of them roughly handled; Milton's peculiar
form of dialectic sarcasm here appearing, with invective against some of
his poetio contemporaries and exaltation of his own studies and purposes.
1642. An Apology against a Pamphlet call'd a Modest Confutation of the
Animadversions of the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus. (English. )
Begins with something in the more good-natured sense of its title, but
quickly turns to an attack on Hall more violent than the former, diversified
by fierce vindications of Milton himself, and bitter criticisms of the bishop's
earlier literary work.
(Of Education, 1644, and Areopagitica, same year, are generally accessible,
and are discussed in the text. They are in a more dignified tone of
controversy, and are mentioned here in anticipation of their strict
chronological order. )
1643-4. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. (English. )
The first of the Divorce Tracts, and much the longest. Deals with
the subject from various points of view, and is written with evidently
restrained passion, but without arowing a personal interest.
## p. 140 (#156) ############################################
140
Appendix to Chapter V
1644. The Judgement of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce. (English. )
A sort of appendix to Doctrine and Discipline. Milton here sometimes
translates bodily, and sometimes summarises his author, of whose agree-
ment with his own views he represents himself as having been ignorant
when he wrote the larger tract.
1644-5. Tetrachordon. (English. )
This, more widely known from the sonnet upon it than in itself,
is the third divorce pamphlet and deals (whence its name) with four
passages or batches of passages from Genesis, Denteronomy, the Gospel
of St Matthew and the First Epistle to the Corinthians.
1645. Colasterion. (English. )
The fourth and last piece on divorce, replying, touchily and with
much abuse, to a critic of Doctrine and Discipline.
1649. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. (English. )
Milton's first defence (thongh begun before the event) the execution
of Charles I. Being addressed to those members of the parliamentary and
presbyterian party who had stopped short of regicide, it is, with a few
outbreaks, for the most part written civilly and in a tone of sober argument.
Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels. (English. )
The articles themselves and some documents appartenant are first
printed. Milton's comment is not long; and, like The Tenure, seems to
have been written with some self-restraint, which, however, breaks down
with relatively greater frequency than in the earlier piece.
Eikonoklastes. (English. )
In this reply to Eikon Basilike (the effect of which was greatly
disturbing the regicides) a very few lines at the beginning seem to
promise a continnance of the comparative moderation of the two previous
pamphlets. But this is soon dropped, and every opportunity is taken of
invective and innuendo furnished by a continuous analysis of Eikon,
from the king's reading of Shakespeare and Sidney, through his political
conduct, to his affection for his wife, and the ill-hap of his grandmother;
from his writing Oglio for Olla' to his repentance for the death of
Strafford. Except in the preface, this line of bit-by-bit comment with
hostile discnssion is preserved throughont: there is no summary or
peroration. As to Eikon Basilike, see post, chap. VI.
(It is supposed that, during 1651, Milton may have written some articles
for the Mercurius Politicus which he apparently censured; but they have
never been anthoritatively identified. See post, chap. xv. )
1651. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. (Latin. ) On this and the next three
or four items, see text.
1654. Defensio Secunda. (Latin. ) Followed by Pro se Defensio, 1655, and a
Supplementum.
1658-9. A Treatise on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes. (English. )
1659. Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings out of
the Church. (English. )
A Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth.
(English)
1660. The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.
(English. )
Preceded by a letter on the same subject to Monck, and in the later
printed form acknowledging that 'since the writing . . . the face of things
hath had some change. Argument against monarchy, with a good deal
about the Areopagus and the Ephors.
6
## p. 141 (#157) ############################################
Appendix to Chapter V
141
6
1660. Brief Notes upon a late Sermon . . . by Matthew Griffith. (English. )
Opens with a reference to the last-named piece, and comments on
the text in the style (a little softened) of the Answer to the Remonstrant
and the Eikonoklastes.
1670. Written at uncertain dates.
The History of Britain. · History of Moscovia. Both English; see text.
1673. Of True Religion, etc. against the growth of Popery. (English. )
Very brief and rather ambiguous in its attitude to “toleration. '
'Popery . . . is not to be tolerated in public or private. But, later, it
seems that Papists may write at least in Latin. '
1674. Letters Patents of the Election of this present King of Poland, John
the third. (Translated from Latin. )
1649–59. Letters of State. (Latin. ) Published 1694.
1655. A Manifesto of the Lord Protector. (Latin. )
1625-66. Familiar Epistles (published 1674), including Milton's college
Prolusiones. (Latin. )
(Posthumous. ) De Doctrina Christiana. (Latin. )
Further light was thrown on the curious history of this after Sumner's
publication of it (see post and ante) by Smith’s Letters of Pepys, David
Skinner, the depositary who handed over the MS to Williamson, having
been one of the diarist's numerous clients.
Besides these, Milton made collections, utilised by Phillips, for a Latin
dictionary. He also issued the following compilations:
1669. Accedence commenc't Grammar (English, but on Latin, not English,
grammar).
1672. Artis Logicæ Plenior Institutio. (Latin, and based on Ramus. )
With regard to the text of the poems, it may be useful to enumerate the
The whole (except the four sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane and
Cyriack Skinner (2), which were kept back for political reasons) was printed
in Milton's lifetime; but the vast majority of the verses did not appear till
after his blindness and, therefore, cannot possibly have been corrected by his
own hand. For, however carefully he may have had read to him his dictated
matter, the fair copies of it and the proofs, is it reasonably possible that
every word can have been spelt to him at length and his alterations (if any)
antomatically and infallibly recorded? The importance, therefore, which was
attached to the censor's copy (see ante) of Paradise Lost, Bk. I, recently
sold by descendants of Tonson, could be hardly more than an importance
of curiosity.
On the other hand, the Cambridge MS, already referred to, is of the
highest possible interest: for, with very few exceptions and those almost
entirely subsequent to the blindness), it is in Milton's own hand. There are
also large corrections in that hand: so that, altogether, it is invaluable—not
least so in regard to questions of versification and spelling. It gives us the
whole of Arcades, Comus and Lycidas; all the sonnets except four (the
'O Nightingale,''On the late Massacher in Piemont,' 'When I consider' and
the one to Lawrence), one or two minor things and the valuable notes of early
planned or suggested subjects, to which reference has been made above.
This is, practically, the only document of the kind that we have for the text
of a very great English poet before the eighteenth century: and it can hardly
be prized too highly.
Perhaps it should be added that, in some editions, translations, not Milton's
own,
of scraps of Latin verse in the pamphlets have been included without
warning.
sources.
## p. 142 (#158) ############################################
CHAPTER VI
CAROLINE DIVINES
In the earlier years of Charles I, when, according to the view
of intelligent contemporaries, there was the rare and happy union
of imperium and libertas and few perceived the approach of the
troubles which should lead to civil war, the English interest in
preaching was, perhaps, at its greatest. The stormiest controversies
of the reformation seemed, for a time, to have spent themselves.
The church of England was in settled possession, with a king who
was her devoted son. The wide interests of the Elizabethan age,
which inspired theologians as well as men of affairs, had tuned the
pulpits to themes of universal concern. As men thought and wrote,
so men preached, of matters beyond the ken of the cloister; and the
massive dignity of their fathers' prose was reflected from the lips
and the pens of those who were set to give God's message to men.
Nothing is more remarkable in an age of fading literary excellence
than the way in which the thoughts and methods of the great poets
and prose writers of the preceding generation were taken up and
handled by the clergy of the national church. The earlier age of
the Caroline divines was especially an age of great preachers.
For the most part, this development was confined to the
church of England. Roman Catholics, obscure when they were
not persecuted, did not seriously affect the national literature.
Their training as theologians was exclusive and foreign. They
did not write English very easily; and what they wrote had
not a large audience. Roman Catholic writers, where they had
influence at all, influenced English authors directly, as the
Spanish school influenced Crashaw and Vaughan. In every
sense, their English writings were exotic. But, apart though
this influence stands, it has not a little interest and charm, as
may be seen in Sancta Sophia, or Holy Wisdom . . . extracted out
## p. 143 (#159) ############################################
Thomas Traherne
143
of more than forty Treatises written by the Venerable Father
Augustin Baker by Father Cressy, first published in 1657.
Augustin Baker was a Welshman, who was taught at Christ's
hospital and at Broadgates hall in Oxford and who, after a few
years in practice as a country lawyer, became a Roman Catholic and,
at the age of thirty-one, a Benedictine. In England and while he
was at Cambridge, he wrote a number of ascetic treatises which,
after his death, the more famous Father Cressy (an Englishman,
and, at one time, chaplain to Falkland) collected and 'extracted'
into a devotional treatise of much beauty, to which he gave the
name Sancta Sophia, a study of contemplation and prayer. The
style is involved, and yet it is not cumbrous. There is a certain
exactness, as it were of legalism, which affects the language with
an obvious restraint. But, on the other hand, there are felicities
of thought, and, more rarely, of expression, which give the book
a definite place in the literature of devotion. Yet it is only
necessary to compare it with the Meditations of Traherne to
see how much the wider outlook of the English churchman has
affected the literary expression given to thoughts that were
common to meditative souls. The matter of Sancta Sophia
is an instruction in the method of meditation, or the prayer of
contemplation, owing a good deal to foreign mystics, whether
orthodox like Saint Teresa or quietist, and, by a systematic rule,
proceeding at last
unto the top of the mountain, where God is seen: a mountain, to us that
stand below, environed with clouds and darkness, but to them who have
their dwelling there it is peace and serenity and light. It is an intellectual
heaven, where there is no sun nor moon, but God and the Lamb are the light
of it.
The nearest parallel, in the English literature of the time,
to the Sancta Sophia of Baker is the centuries of Meditations
of Thomas Traherne? ; yet Traherne, above all things, is an
Anglican. His residence at the university in times of puritan
dominance did not give him any tincture of Calvinism. He
set himself to supply a private friend (as it appears) with
thoughts for divine contemplation, in his Centuries of Medita-
tions, a book which had the strange fortune to remain in manu-
script for nearly two hundred and fifty years. What strikes
the reader most, after the spiritual intensity of this remarkable
volume, is the wide scope of the writer's survey. All heaven
and earth he takes for the province of the pious soul, and the
1 See ante, pp. 42–44.
## p. 144 (#160) ############################################
144
Caroline Divines
:
breadth of his conception of true religion is reflected in the
richness of his style. From a book long undiscovered and
still little known, it may be well to quote a passage which
illustrates the freedom of the Anglican school to which Traherne
belonged no less than the characteristic manner of his own
English writing.
You never ſhe says) enjoy the world aright. . . . Till you can sing and
rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres,
you never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world,
and the stars are your jewels: till you are as familiar with the ways of
God in all ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately
acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till
you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal
of your own: till you delight in God for ing good to all: you never enjoy
the world. Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more
present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties there,
than in your own house: till you remember how lately you were made, and
how wonderful it was when you came into it: and more rejoice in the palace
of your glory, than if it had been made but today morning.
Fancy and insight are the masters of Traherne's imagination.
From a well-stored mind, and an experience of men and things
beyond that of his cloistered contemporaries, and equally remote
from the jarring contentions of school and camp, from controversies
about predestination or militia, he looks upon the hidden things
of the soul, and, in them, he sees the image of the glory and
love of God. The style is that of a poet who is also a master
of prose; and there is no monotony in the richness of medita-
tion after meditation on the eternal theme of the goodness and
the splendour of God. Traherne is markedly the product of his
age, in its ardour of expansion. He rivals Jeremy Taylor in
richness of imagery, but has not Taylor's learning. He even
suggests the style of the poet of two centuries later who brought
into his prose the ardour of his poetry, Algernon Charles
Swinburne.
Baker and Traherne may be compared, but, perhaps, as obviously
contrasted. Another contrast is equally significant of the interests of
the age of Charles I. If Roman Catholics lived and wrote apart from
the general life of the nation, no one could say that this was true
of the greater part of that large and ill-defined class to which the
name of puritan was given. The secrecy of Martin Marprelate was
a thing of the past, and, with it, for the most part, its scurrility
and vulgarity. But there were puritans and puritans. The puritan
literature of the earlier years of Charles I ranged, even in its
theological aspect, from the solemn and pedantic extravagance
## p. 145 (#161) ############################################
Richard Baxter
145
of Prynne (notably in Histriomastix, 1632)" through ponderous
verbiage with an occasional touch of humour, like The Dipper
Dipt, or the Anabaptist Duck’t and Plung'd over Head and Ears
in a Disputation by Daniel Featley, D. D. (1645), to the rough
force of Burton and Bastwick, and the mere ribaldry of the verses
and fly-sheets against prelacy such as Rot amongst the Bishops
and Rome for Canterbury or a true relation of the Birth and
Life of William Laud (1641). And, when this is said, there is still
.
omitted the solemn dignity of sermons like those of Stephen Marshall
(printed in A Brief Vindication of Mr Stephen Marshal by Giles
Firmin, 1681) and the impressive mass of the whole literature
produced by Richard Baxter.
To epitomise Baxter would be impossible--it was attempted
for one of his works by Edmund Calamy: almost equally impossible
is it to characterise in brief an author so stupendously prolific.
Reliquiae Baxterianae is a storehouse of information for the
religious and social history of the time, and it bears throughout
the impress of the writer's energetic, restless and masterful mind.
He describes the puritanism of his youth, exemplified in his own
father, as not nonconformist but set in contrast to the loose living
and laxity of the village where, on Sundays,
the reader read the Common Prayer briefly, and the rest of the day, even till
dark night almost, except eating-time, was spent in dancing under a May-pole
and a great tree, not far from my father's door, where all the town met
together;
and his father, who 'never scrupled the Common Prayer,' was yet
called puritan because he read the Scripture when the rest were
dancing, and quoted it, too, to the reproof of the drunkards and
profane. The clergy seemed to him lax, and, when one parish priest,
being old, said the prayers by heart and got two working men to
read the lessons, this employment of the laity was resented by the
scrupulous young man, himself the son of a freeholder. He grew
up with little education save what his own perseverance won, but
with knowledge of life in the country and at court, eventually
becoming a schoolmaster. He was ordained by bishop Thornborough
of Worcester in 1638. Gradually, he adopted views of semi-con-
formity; there were things the church allowed which he could not
approve. When he came to minister at Bridgnorth, he would not
make the sign of the cross in baptism or wear a surplice. Thence,
he went to Kidderminster, and, when the war broke out, he held,
at different times, different posts of chaplain in the parliamentary
1 See ante, vol. vi, chap. XIV.
E. L. VII. CH, VI.
10
## p. 146 (#162) ############################################
146
Caroline Divines
forces. He came to deplore the growth of sectarianism; he worked
as a pastor again at Kidderminster; be passed much time in
country retirement, writing the book which made him famous.
At the restoration, he was first offered a bishopric and, twenty
years later, he was put in prison'; and he lived to see the revolution
settlement. This varied life coloured the writing of one whose
senses were peculiarly acute and whose sympathies were wider than
his intellectual outlook. 'I was but a pen,' he said of himself,
and what praise is due to a pen ? ' He felt, indeed, of himself,
what Shakespeare's editors thought was characteristic of their
hero's work. Most probably, in all his voluminous writings, he
never blotted a line. His style was himself. He wrote simply
and naturally, with a choice of good phrases, sound words, straight-
forward constructions, as a man speaks who is well educated but
not a pedant. It is this which makes The Saints' Everlasting Rest
(1649/50) an English classic.
That book, which we all call immortal, though it is gradually
sinking into the limbo whither much of seventeenth century prose,
for all save scholars, has gone before, is, in many respects, 'modern'
in tone; and yet it is not so modern as Jeremy Taylor, because it
has, or seems to have, much less art, as it certainly has much less
glow. It is serious and direct; it is eloquent, after a simple, godly
and appealing sort. Yet, after all, it is the matter not the manner
which gives the book its place in English literature. There is no
special thing in which you can say that Baxter influenced other
writers; there is no individual influence on himself which you can
trace from writers who preceded him. He would not have written
as he did if Hooker had not written before him; but, then, that is
true of the whole succession of post-Elizabethan prose.
Baxter's fame rests on other and better work than that of the
pulpit; but it must not be thought that the influence of the preacher
had ceased. It had its fluctuations, but it was still important so
long as Charles I was on the throne. While sermons still stood
midway between the learned world and the mob, and it was hoped
that what suited the one would attract, instruct, or even amaze,
the other into goodness and obedience to the ordered system of
the national church, the pulpit in St Paul's churchyard managed
to hold something of its old position. 'In an age when men read
few books and had no newspapers, the sermon at Paul's cross or
the Spital was the most exciting event of the week? ' Times were
1 He was in prison for a short time, illegally, in 1665, and, again, for a year and
a half in 1685.
• Ante, vol. iv, chap. XII, p. 225.
## p. 147 (#163) ############################################
Henry Hammond
147
changing: books were multiplied, there was a large manufacture
of pamphlets to catch the popular ear and newspapers were just
beginning, with a supply of suitable, selected or invented facts;
but the sermon, spoken not read, died hard, and there was always an
audience till men began to turn their ploughshares into swords.
At Paul's cross, Laud preached on the anniversary of Charles's
coronation; in 1640, Hammond delivered the striking discourse
which he called The Poor Man's Tithing; in 1641, Frank
preached a famous sermon on obedience. This last marked the
beginning of the end. When bishops had suffered 'the tumults
about their houses and the riots upon their persons' and the
'whole clergy' met with daily insolences in your streets,' the
open pulpit had ceased to influence, it rather accepted the violence
which it should have set itself to redress, and free speech was
replaced by what the Londoners loved to hear. Paul's cross
ceased to give Englishmen literature when they wanted only
polemics. In May 1643, the cross was torn down by the mob.
A notable sermon by Steward, who was nominated dean in 1641,
was among the last that was preached there. It was a de-
nunciation of that Christianity which was of the lip not of the
life, which kept plantations for criminals and did nothing to spread
the gospel beyond the seas; when usury flourished (familiar
lament) in spite of the banishment of Jews, when men might say
'those words of Æschines, els mapadočiavě uuer, we are born
the Paradox and Riddle of our times, a Reformed Church without
a Reformation. Over against preachers such as these should be
placed notable puritans such as Stephen Marshall, whose noble
funeral eulogy of Pym is worthy to be placed high in the prose of
his age.
Not all the preachers were theologians or men of letters;
but few Caroline theologians were not famous preachers, and
many men of letters were found among the ministers and preachers
of the church. To these we may now pass. Henry Hammond,
who has been called “the father of English Biblical criticism,'
is now chiefly remembered by Keble's beautiful eulogy; but,
in his own time, no man had a more beneficent influence on
the religious literature of the age. His own works were voluminous:
his Paraphrase and Annotations on the New Testament (1653)
was an achievement in English theological scholarship; his
Practical Catechism (1644) occupies a position to some extent
between the Devotions of Cosin and of Lewes Baily (The Practice
of Piety, dedicated to Charles I when prince of Wales), and The
1042
## p. 148 (#164) ############################################
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Caroline Divines
Whole Duty of Man, with the origin of which he was undoubtedly
acquainted. But the most valuable of all his work, as literature,
are his sermons, models of the best Caroline prose in its simplicity,
restraint, clarity, distinction. In his absence of conceits, he shows
himself typically a Caroline rather than an Elizabethan. In his avoid-
ance of anything approaching rhetorical adornment, he forms a
marked contrast to the school in which we may place the gloomy
splendour of Donne and the oriental exuberance of Jeremy Taylor.
To write of charity, patience, toleration, befits him better than any
other man of his age; and, when theologians and statesmen were
wrangling over the limits of the church and the rights or wrongs
of the individual in religion, his was almost the first, and certainly
the clearest, voice to be lifted up in assertion of toleration as
a plain Christian duty and in denunciation of the persecuting
spirit as an enemy to religion and truth.
Parallel to Hammond's influence is that of another eminent
theologian who was never a party man. James Ussher stands
somewhat apart in principles from the dominant school of his time.
He was an Irishman, a distinguished son of the great Irish
university. In his own family, he had closer acquaintance with
Roman Catholicism than had his English contemporaries, and the
Calvinism of Dublin was much more definitely puritan than that
of Oxford or Cambridge. His experience, as learner, as divinity
professor, as bishop, was almost wholly Irish. Yet he, too, fell under
the influence of Laud, was his constant correspondent for twelve
years, was active in winning for him the chancellorship of Trinity
college, Dublin, and shared his aims of anti-Roman defence and
traditional reverence for Catholic antiquity. It was he who most
boldly advised Charles not to consent to Strafford's execution and
reproached him for yielding. Yet Cromwell ordered him a public
funeral. “Learned to a miracle,' as Selden calls him, Ussher,
perhaps, was the last of the Calvinists in high place. His influence
was very great, and it was all exercised in favour of peace and
charity. Of his sermons, it was as true as of his personal influence
that ‘he had a way of gaining people's hearts and touching their
consciences that look'd like somewhat of the Apostolical age
reviv'd. ' He was a voluminous writer, learned and exact; in
manner an Elizabethan, who did not mark any important step in
English letters. His contributions were to learning rather than
to literature. Men used his information and incorporated it
in their own works, but they did not copy his style ; and it is
significant, perhaps, that, while his contributions to historical
## p. 149 (#165) ############################################
Robert Sanderson
149
study, in regard to subjects so different as the Ignatian letters and
the early history of Ireland, have never lost their value, the only
book of his which can reasonably be described as popular was A
Body of Divinitie (1645), which was little else but a commonplace
book that by no means always represented his own opinions. The
prominent place which Ussher's name occupies in contemporary
accounts of the literature of the seventeenth century is a proof, if
one were needed, how much more influential, at the period of
crisis which led to the civil war, were personal than literary
influences. Learning pursued its way and scholars paid attention
to it and, after their manner, unduly exalted its achievements.
Men who had won the public ear kept it even when they had
ceased very definitely to teach their age. The 'gentle soul' of
Ussher made men love him and attach more importance to his
writings than they deserved: such may well be the view of
posterity, and it would not be wholly unfair.
Robert Sanderson, who lived to become a bishop at the
restoration, and is embalmed in the exquisite prose of Izaak
Walton, was another of the Elizabethans who made the church of
England notable for its preaching power. The famous saying
of Charles I is, perhaps, his chief title to distinction : 'I carry
my ears to hear other preachers, but I carry my conscience
to hear Dr Sanderson'; and, with it, Walton's inimitable
description of the talk 'in a corner under a pent house’ till the
rain forced them “into a cleanly house,' where they spoke 'to my
great comfort and advantage. ' Both show him a man of wisdom
and piety, ‘his learning methodical and exact, his wisdom useful,
his integrity visible. ' The sermons are plain sober things, with
‘no improper rhetoric,' indeed, as Walton notes, nor much of the
fire which belongs to the earlier masters of his school : didactic,
mildly argumentative, modestly learned, whether ad aulam
(preached at court), or ad clerum, or ad populum. The last-
named were preached and printed some thirty years before the
others, and they show how consistent were his position and method.
He wrote clearly and without affectation; but he does not rank
high among the prose writers of his time. He was at his best in
the revision of The Book of Common Prayer, where the General
Thanksgiving (perhaps erroneously) has been ascribed to him and
for which he certainly wrote the admirable preface which begins 'It
hath been the wisdom of the Church. ' It is significant, perhaps,
that he wrote as easily and simply in Latin as in English.
Next to Sanderson may very fitly be named 'his dear old friend
## p. 150 (#166) ############################################
150
Caroline Divines
Dr Sheldon,' one of those capable and strenuous men of business
who, from time to time, have seemed marked out early in life-as
Clarendon tells us was said of him—for the primacy of all England.
No man was more bitterly criticised during the later years of his
life than he, for he was a masterful exponent of the Clarendon
policy. His literary remains, which are almost exclusively letters,
still rest, for the most part in manuscript, in the Bodleian library ;
they are thoroughly in keeping, as regards manner and style, with
the acute sobriety of his character, and a most valuable volume
might be compiled from them. His only printed work is a sermon
preached before Charles II just after the restoration, markedly in
the style of Laud.
It is more than literature that links the names of Laud, Sanderson
and Sheldon. The latter, who, early in life, had opposed the great
archbishop in some of his university reforms and had been
prominent, for example, in resisting the appointment of Jeremy
Taylor to an Oxford fellowship, lived not only to carry on with a
certain rigid determination the policy of the earlier primate but to
assist in the preservation and publication of the memorials of his
life. The association had been earlier, and in friendliness :
for both Laud and Sheldon were concerned in the conversion from
Roman Catholicism of the most conspicuous controversialist of the
age of Charles I. This was William Chillingworth, who was an
Oxford citizen, Laud's godson, a scholar of Trinity, a logician and
disputant, a friend of the brilliant company which gathered at
Great Tew. In an immortal passage, Clarendon has described the
wits and theologians who were intimate with the fascinating Lucius
Cary, viscount Falkland. In his Oxfordshire house, he loved to
consort with scholars of Oxford, he who had been the disciple of
the last poets of the Elizabethan age, had himself written pretty
verses and, perhaps, more than dabbled in acute theological
difficulties. His mother Elizabeth (Tanfield) became a Roman
Catholic, and it was in her house that Lucius met Chillingworth,
when he, too, in search of an infallible guide, had abandoned his
protestantism. Their talk, there is evidence to show, was often of
Socinus and his rationalistic treatment of theology, and theological
interests became more and more supreme in Falkland's mind.
*His whole conversation,' says Clarendon, was one continued
convivium philosophicum or convivium theologicum'; and the
literary result was his Discourse of Infallibility, published after
the restoration, in 1660. The literary coterie at Great Tew did
not entirely abandon poetry: there was also, indeed, as of old
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William Chillingworth 151
in London, the session of the Poets. But the main interests were
theological. Lettice, lord Falkland's wife, was a typical product of
the religious revival associated with Charles l's days. Her Life by
her chaplain Duncon, one of the most interesting biographies of
the time, shows her exact and scrupulous in all the devotional
rules of the church ; yet, in her religious, almost ascetic, household,
the widest speculation was allowed her thoughtful and impression-
able husband. There were Morley and Hammond; the former
afterwards a notable bishop, the latter a preacher and devotional
writer of singular charm and sweetness ; Earle, author of Micro-
cosmographie, who said that he'got more useful learning by his
conversation at Tew than he had at Oxford’; Sheldon, Hales and
Chillingworth. It is not unnatural to suppose that the foundations
of The Religion of Protestants were laid at Great Tew: Falkland's
book shows indebtedness to the same thoughts of rational disbelief
in papal infallibility.
The Religion of Protestants a safe way to Salvation; or an
Answer to a book Entituled Mercy and Truth or Charity Maintained
by Catholiques ; which pretends to prove the contrary (1637) was
the summing up of a long controversy which was begun as early as
1630 by a Jesuit named Edward Knott. It is hampered by a
minute and complicated method, now of defence now of attack;
but, out of pages of singularly complicated and involved discussion,
there emerges a most clear and dogmatic assertion. Chillingworth's
religion is to be found only in the Bible, insomuch that he will
have no anathemas that he cannot find there, and his
desire is to go the right way to eternal happiness; but whether this way lie
on the right hand, or on the left, or straightforward; whether it be by
following a living guide, or by seeking my direction in a book, or by hearken-
ing to the secret whisper of some private spirit, to me is indifferent.
A ‘safe way to Salvation' was to be found in free enquiry. The
literary merit of Chillingworth, popular though his work became,
is not conspicuous: his style is that of the sledge-hammer, dealing
repeated blows. The arrangement of the book depends upon that
which it is its aim to attack; we have to wait some time before the
author emerges from the clouds that beset him; but, when his own
thought comes directly before the reader it is conspicuously clear,
and it is expressed very directly, in simple and forcible English,
with a limited vocabulary but with trenchant emphasis. He is logical
and he is tolerant, and there is in him, at his best, a remarkable
breadth of charity. He cries for liberty, liberty which the times
denied him and the search for which the puritan persecutor of his
## p. 152 (#168) ############################################
152
Caroline Divines
deathbed regarded as blasphemous : yet he is content to abide
within the English fold and to ratify its apostolic claim. And all
this comes out in clear-cut sentences, which men did not readily
forget.
The difference between a Papist and a Protestant is this, that the one
judges his guide to be infallible, the other his way to be manifest.
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Another of those who frequented the 'academy' of Falkland
at Great Tew was the quiet but attractive John Hales, whose
friends, after his death, caught the literary world's ear with their
name for him of the ever-memorable. ' A scholar, a recluse, a
hesitating thinker and reluctant writer, he was yet a man whose
words and character influenced all who knew him, and Laud
left him, once Greek professor at Oxford, undisturbed at Eton,
where he was happily at home : 'a master of Polite, Various, and
Universal Learning. ' And, to this, he added the rare perfection of
character which made bishop Pearson say that it was 'near as easy
a task for every one to become so knowing, as so obliging' as he.
His friend ‘that Reverend and Worthy Person, Mr Farindon' tells
us that, in his youth, he was a Calvinist till, at the synod of Dort, he
said, 'There, I bid John Calvin Good night. ' His breadth, as con-
temporaries record it, anticipates Thomas Arnold, for he would bring
all Englishmen together by a common liturgy from which "all
doctrinal points on which men differed in their opinions' were to
be omitted. Yet Laud cherished and promoted him.
The Golden Remains of Hales (in the second edition, with
Additions from the Authour's own copy,' 1673) contains many
pleas for religious peace and arguments of the 'great and ir-
remediable inconvenience this free and uncontroulable venturing
upon Theological Disputes hath brought upon us. ' But he was a
positive teacher as well as one who dissuaded from extremes. His
sermons, which, with a number of lively letters to Dudley
Carleton, ambassador at the Hague, and a few fragmentary
thoughts somewhat after Pascal's manner, constitute the precious
volume, have a fine clarity and directness. The learning which
men admired in him is almost laid aside or comes in only where it
fitly illustrates the religious thought, unlike most of the sermons
of his contemporaries. He speaks very plainly, at Eton, of the
responsibility of riches, or, at the Hague, of the crime of duelling;
he tells men how to know and love and worship God, as one
whose simple object it was to find it out. His writing is straight-
forward and effective, as the writing of men is apt to be who, like
## p. 153 (#169) ############################################
John Hales
153
6
himself, will not ‘pen anything till they needs must. ' But, behind
it there lies, easy to be perceived, a depth of philosophic interest.
Hales looked much further behind life than men like Sheldon,
further, perhaps, than the piercing eye of Chillingworth ; he had a
basis of philosophy like Herbert or Traherne ; he saw differences
between earth and heaven, it may be, where they saw only
correspondences; yet, while, like the former, he was the friend of
courtiers and men of wit, he was, like the latter, a lover of
solitude in the soul. He saw life whole and was original as a
thinker in theology and philosophy: so he could not be a Calvinist.
a
He was transparently sincere, and he came to have that sort of
influence on the men who were making English literature as well
as English politics which has often been exercised from the cloister,
the college, or the country parsonage. The man who made the
funeral oration of Sir Thomas Bodley, studied Shakespeare and
belonged to Suckling's 'session of the Poets,' was a theologian
who taught the next age in many subtle ways. He taught it
breadth of view, and a passion for unity; he taught it to be
critical and yet religious ; and he taught it to pursue its specula-
tions in the study and the church rather than in the market and
the House of Commons.
