No More Learning

'
These conditions were hardly favourable to the production
of literature, but Latimer did valuable service in testing the
possibilities of the language. None of his predecessors ever
carried the art of story-telling to a higher point. He can take
the most familiar narrative in the Bible and retell it with pointed
allusions to current events. During the weeks that Latimer
preached first before Edward VI, the lord high admiral, lord
Seymour of Sudeley, lay in the Tower under sentence of death.
Latimer hated the man and did not spare him. His hearers must
have recognised in an instant what was his purpose when he


## p. 231 (#253) ############################################

Latimer as a Preacher
231
>
began telling the story of Adonijah, 'a man full of ambition,
desirous of honour, always climbing, climbing. ' This stout-
stomached child'had Joab to help him,'a by-walker, that would
not walk the king's highway. ' And so he went on climbing till,
after David's death, he aspired to marry queen Abishag. The
story, as told by Latimer, fills several pages, and yet the interest
is throughout intense and dramatic, without ever a direct mention
of Seymour and queen Catherine Parr.
Latimer reveals very little of the poetry and imaginative feeling
which are conspicuous in Fisher's writing. There is seldom any
illustration from nature, or any flights of what can be called
eloquence. The personification which he makes of Faith—'a
noble duchess with her gentleman usher going before her, and
a train after her'-is not a characteristic feature of his style ; but
he is seemingly pleased with it, and uses it again a few weeks
later to the same audience. The allegories which had been the
stock-in-trade of earlier preachers he explicitly rejects; if he
wants illustration, he draws from his experience of the market-
place and the court. He prefers the wherryman's 'good natural
reason' to the arguments of the whole college of cardinals. Ever
since his conversation with little Bilney, he 'forsook the school-
doctors and such fooleries. At the end of his great Lenten course,
he claims that he has walked 'in the brode filde of scripture and
used my libertie. ' He has no taste for theological subtleties ;
'as for curiouse braynes nothinge can content them. ' There is
some rough sledge-hammer controversy with papists and ana-
baptists, but his real bent is towards practical questions; and
that is one reason why he continues to interest readers of a
later day. No one today stands where Latimer did in doctrinal
theology but bribery is still bribery. One cannot imagine a more
telling point in a discourse on bribery than when the preacher
said, 'He that took the silver basin and ewer for a bribe, thinketh
that it will never come out; but he may now know that
I know it'
It is his passionate desire to right social wrongs which gives
Latimer his highest claim to be called a great preacher. He is
never belabouring sin in the abstract but accurately diagnoses
and fearlessly exposes the injustices of his time. The decay of
discipline and reverence, and the wholesale spirit of greed, which
accompanied the breaking up of the old order, are faithfully
dealt with by the prophet of the new order. The lay landlords
who have supplanted monastic landowners he calls step-lords ;
6


## p. 232 (#254) ############################################

232 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
6
rent-raising, enclosures, idleness, covetousness and all the other
faults of the rich are denounced to their faces : 'be you never
so great lords and ladies,' the preacher will rub you on the gall. '
The impoverishment of schools and universities, the corruption
of judges, and the tricks of the trades are unsparingly treated, and
Latimer has the preacher's best reward of seeing some wrongs
redressed as a result of his agitation. The poor and the op-
pressed have had no truer friend at court than Latimer preaching
before Edward VI.
Bishop Hooper, who succeeded Latimer as court preacher, had
equal courage, but less human sympathy. For his Lenten course
in 1550, he chose a very suitable subject, namely the prophet
Jonas, which will enable me freely to touch upon the duties of
individuals. ' His chief aim was to urge the king to use the art
of the law against unpreaching clergy, covetous lawyers, thieves,
adulterers, swearers and other offenders. The king must show no
'preposterous pity. ' The ship of the commonwealth cannot sail in
quiet waters, until the mariners cast out all Jonases. Into the
sea with them,' cries this vehement orator. There is a native
vigour about his denunciations, but he takes no pains to make
his message attractive. His grammar is often faulty and his
illustrations are trite: he uses the stock story of Cambyses and
the judge's skin, which Latimer used to the same audience the
previous Lent, and which Fisher used before either of them. His
humour, when he shows any, is of the broadest kind; if the newly-
ordained priest according to the first reformed ordinal is to be
given the chalice to hold, why do they not as well give him the
font?
The older generation of reformers was soon finding valuable
recruits for the work of preaching. Bishop Ridley had particular
success in discovering able men and promoting them. In 1550, he
ordained two Lancashire and Cambridge men-John Bradford
of Pembroke, the converted lawyer, whom he made his chaplain
and a prebendary of St Paul's, and Thomas Lever, fellow and,
afterwards, master of St John's college. Ridley grouped Bradford
and Lever with Latimer and Knox as the most incisive preachers
of the age. Bradford's short career was ended by his imprison-
ment and martyrdom in 1555. Lever lived on far into Elizabeth's
reign, and was among the most distinguished of the first non-
conformists. Three fruitful sermons of the year 1550 remain to
vindicate his right to be remembered as a preacher to Edward VI.
The 'yonge simple scholar,' as he describes himself, shows remark-


## p. 233 (#255) ############################################

Lever's Sermons
233
6
6
able self-confidence, and is prepared to be thought 'sumwhat
saucye' for his hitting out freely. "Thus hath God by Esaye in
his tyme, and by me at this tyme, described Rulers Faultes, with
a way how to amend them. ' Parsons who do not reside on their
cures, covetous landlords who let their labourers' cottages go into
decay and turn all to pasture,''covitous carles' who ‘forstall the
markettes and bye corn at all tymes, to begynne and encrease a
dearth,' judges who take bribes and give wrong judgments, all
come under Lever's lash, especially when he is preaching before
the king. It is particularly to his credit that he does not blink his
eyes to the evils which have grown up out of the reformation. If
the abolition of abbeys, chantries and guilds has only enriched
covetous men, and actually set back the condition of schools and
universities, then it is time to look to these Judases which have
the bag. Lever does not resemble Latimer only in his fiery de-
nunciation of social wrongs, but has also something of his rough
humour and racy vernacular. In such a passage as the following,
where he attacks those lay-rectors who put in an incompetent and
underpaid curate to serve the parish, we might believe ourselves
to be reading Latimer himself.
Yes, forsoth, he ministreth Gods sacramentes, he sayeth his servyce, and
he readeth the homilies, as you fyne flatring courtiers, which speake by
imagination, tearme it: But the rude lobbes of the countrey, whiche be to
symple to paynte a lye, speake foule and truly as they fynde it, and saye: He
ministreth Gods sacraments, he slubbers up his service, and he cannot reade
the humbles.
But Lever does not maintain our interest like his predecessor, and
he has some irritating affectations. Few writers before or since
can have abused more completely the habit of grouping words
in triplets. He will pursue this same trick through clause after
clause:
From whence shal we that be governors, kepers, and feders, bye and provide
with our own costes, labor and diligence, bread, foode, and necessaryes, etc. ?
John Bradford's preaching is represented by two sermons,
which afford an interesting contrast to one another. The first,
on repentance, unlike most of the other extant sermons of that
period, was not a London sermon, but was delivered 'as I was
abroad preaching in the country. ' He was with much difficulty
persuaded to print it. Once before, when he had been diffident
about his preaching, Bucer had counselled him, “If thou have not
fine manchet bread, give the pore people barley bread. ' He had


## p. 234 (#256) ############################################

234 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
considerable learning, but he was probably not a practised writer,
and he certainly gets into difficulties with long sentences. He
tries to satisfy the prevailing taste for alliteration, and produces
astounding examples with as many as eight words in sequence.
The most interesting literary feature is his free use of colloquial
and provincial words. More than any preacher of his age, he
requires a glossary for the modern reader. He has a plentiful
supply of similes and metaphors, but they are often tasteless and
undignified. Still, he is always forcible and, upon fitting occasion,
can be eloquent.
This death of Christ therefore look on as the very pledge of God's love
toward thee, whosoever thou art, how deep soever thou hast sinned. See,
God's hands are nailed, they cannot strike thee: his feet also, he cannot run
from thee: his arms are wide open to embrace thee: his head hangs down to
kiss thee: his very heart is open.
Bradford's other sermon was not published till nearly twenty years
after his death. It was, perhaps, preached to his fellow-prisoners
in queen Mary's reign before they took the Sacrament together,
as their gaolers suffered them to do. It was, at any rate, written
where he had no access to books, as he expressly says. The
sermon was sent in manuscript, with other of Bradford's writings,
to his friend Ridley for corrections. Whether the older writer
pruned away any extravagances of style, or whether Bradford had
himself learnt better, there are few traces left of the tricks and
provincialisms which had disfigured his first sermon. His theme,
the Lord's Supper, almost necessitated controversial treatment,
but he sets out his argument with clearness and learning and
religious feeling.
Another famous preacher made a single appearance at king
Edward's court, and, like many of his immediate predecessors,
found empty benches. Yet no one had arisen since Latimer who
deserved a hearing better than Bernard Gilpin. If the courtiers
had attended, they would have heard a sermon as free from
literary affectations and almost as entertaining as the sermon
on the Plough.
In the more settled times of Elizabeth's reign, there begin
to appear sermons of a different order. Hitherto, the typical
vernacular sermon has been a popular harangue. If it is to
make a hit, it must aim low. A sermon at Paul's cross before
a demonstrative crowd must use the methods of the hustings
rather than of the lecture-room. But, since the reformation began,
a generation had grown up which was habituated to theological
a


## p. 235 (#257) ############################################

Elizabethan Preachers
235
controversy, and was interested in its technicalities. Such men
as Jewel, Hooker, Perkins and Rainolds address their appeal, with
what success they may, to the best intelligence in the country.
Tirades and appeals to prejudice must make way for arguments
and appeals to antiquity. The fathers and doctors are cited, and
doctrinal statements are minutely analysed and discussed. The
effects of this change on literature are both favourable and un-
favourable. Undoubtedly, the progress of controversy taught men
to express themselves clearly upon difficult topics. It may occasion
surprise that men like Jewel and Sandys should have so soon
acquired facility of expression. Their style may lack distinction or
charm, but at least it is adequate. Latimer can keep straight with
his short sentences and concrete themes. Elizabethan preachers
have to grapple with deep points of theology, and yet can present
them lucidly and methodically, without losing their way in their
more involved sentences. On the other hand, the very weight of
the matter, its technical character and its array of authorities, are
unfavourable to the production of an attractive prose-style. There
is little room for grace or fancy in these learned and scholastic
performances. Still, it is much that they should have worked out
for themselves the means of expressing their thoughts in perfectly
clear and unmannered English. It is a pleasure, for instance, to
read anything which says what it means so exactly and so easily
as does Jewel's famous Challenge sermon. Sandys was induced at
the close of his life to write out for publication twenty-two of his
sermons. The literary ability which distinguished his sons is not
absent from the father's writing. His sentences are well-built,
with a strict avoidance of any mannerism or exaggeration. There
is never any excess of ornament, nor any lapse from good taste,
except when the Roman controversy proves too much for him.
His frequent quotations from St Bernard and St Chrysostom,
from Horace and Terence, indicate the newer style of literary
preaching
The friendship of Sandys and Jewel, who were once 'com-
panions at bed and board in Germany' had important consequences
for a greater than either, Richard Hooker. Jewel, himself a
Devonshire man, befriended the promising Exeter boy, and sent
him to his old college of Corpus Christi at Oxford, where another
Devonian and famous preacher, John Rainolds, was his tutor.
Jewel died when Hooker was in his nineteenth year, but he had
already commended him to the notice of bishop Sandys, who sent
his son Edwin to be under Hooker's tuition, and, afterwards,


## p. 236 (#258) ############################################

236 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
furthered his promotion to the mastership of the Temple. There
is no need to deal in detail with Hooker's sermons, because they
reflect the same great qualities, both in thought and expression,
which have been already discussed in another volume of the
present work? . But no account of Elizabethan preachers would
be complete without some mention of the only name among them
which has an assured place in the first rank. Hooker published
none of his sermons; as Izaak Walton says, it was only the felix
error of Travers's opposition which caused him to write out for
private circulation some of the sermons to which the Reader had
taken exception. Though Hooker's fame depends chiefly on his
Ecclesiastical Polity, we should have been immeasurably the
poorer for the loss of his sermons on the certainty of faith, justi-
fication and the nature of pride, which have more permanent
value than any sermons of the reign. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
wrote of the first:
I can remember no other discourse, that sinks into and draws up comfort
from the depths of our being below our own distinct consciousness, with the
clearness and godly loving-kindness of this truly evangelical and God-to-be-
thanked-for sermon;
and he declared that one paragraph should be written in letters
of gold. This testimony is valuable as showing that, in his
sermons, Hooker could appeal to the feeling and the conscience,
as successfully as in his book he appealed to the reason.
There is yet a further service which Hooker rendered to the
contemporary pulpit. Here, as in his book, he set the tone of a
controversialist who was not content to be barely just to an
opponent but sought to find common ground with him. Jewel,
for instance, though he abandons the scurrility of earlier pro-
testant champions, fights hard to maintain the scandal of pope
Joan, and even takes as an axiom, 'let us remember to do the
contrary' of what those before the reformation had done. The
puritan divine Edward Dering could say outright, 'Now we know
the Pope to be anti-christ, and his prayers to be evill’; and similar
bitterness mars the sermons of Rainolds. While such language
was still prevalent, Hooker had the courage and the breadth of
mind to assert that the Church of Rome is a true Church of
Christ, and a sanctified Church. ' He reverenced truth, as he
conceived it, wherever he found it. This attitude in itself could
not fail to affect the methods of the pulpit. When Hooker set
himself to persuade, and not to denounce or 'frighten men into
· See vol. III, pp. 405 ff.


## p. 237 (#259) ############################################

Henry Smith
237
piety,' it led him, as his biographer acutely observed, to use
another kind of rhetoric.
Probably Henry Smith, alone among Elizabethan preachers,
shares with Hooker the distinction of finding modern readers.
Hooker's sermons were as well suited to the learned auditory
of the Temple as Smith's were to the popular congregation of
St Clement Danes. But the silver-tongued preacher' knew that
'to preach simply is not to preach rudely, nor unlearnedly, nor
confusedly. ' He had no patience with the drones who 'by their
slubbering of the word (for want of study and meditation) do make
men think that there is no more wisdom in the word of God than
they shew out of it. ' We find ourselves in a different atmosphere
from that of the controversial sermon, and hear instead plain
moral duties set out with homely illustrations and playful turns:
"The devil is afraid that one sermon will convert us, and we are
not moved with twenty; so the devil thinketh better of us than
we are. ' Some of his sermons, printed during his life-time, are
described on the title-page as 'taken by characterie and after
examined. ' Whether in separate or in collected form, no sermons
of the age were more frequently printed.
The strict enforcement of the penal laws, and the limited and
furtive nature of their opportunities of church worship, prevented
Roman Catholics in England from contributing to the general
store of printed sermons. Controversial and devotional writings
exist in sufficient quantity to show that there were men who
might have made good use of happier times. Edmund Campion's
letters are attractive, Parsons's Christian Directory received the
compliment of many protestant editions, and the rich fancy of
Robert Southwell's tracts won the praise of Francis Bacon.
The puritan tendency to exalt the sermon was not without its
dangers to religious life, and had not an altogether wholesome
influence on the sermon itself. In the times when religion
flourished most, said Hooker, men ‘in the practice of their
religion wearied chiefly their knees and hands, we especially our
ears and tongues. ' Bishop Andrewes, in an earnest sermon on
the text, 'Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only,' urged
that St James's teaching was specially needed in an age 'when
hearing of the word is growen into such request, that it hath got
the start of all the rest of the parts of God's service'; 'sermon-
hearing is the Consummatum est of all Christianitie. ' It affected
the preaching of Andrewes himself adversely, when the pedantic
king James I and his courtiers crowded to hear a sermon as an
.


## p. 238 (#260) ############################################

238 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
intellectual entertainment. Andrewes spoke out of bitter ex-
perience when he said of Ezekiel's contemporaries,
they seemed to reckon of sermons no otherwise than of songs: to give them
the hearing, to commend the aire of them, and so let them goe. The Musike
of a song, and the Rhetorique of a sermon, all is one.
If this common attitude towards the sermon encouraged the
preacher to spend pains upon the literary workmanship of his
sermon, it also robbed him of that which gives wings to his
rhetoric and can alone make it tolerable, namely, the force of
conviction. Ingenious types and metaphors, paradoxical illustra-
tions, verbal conceits, grammatical subtleties, may be useful allies;
but, in the sermons of the period, they were apt to be valued for
themselves. Exquisite pains were lavished upon the exposition,
but the application was not pressed home.
Happily, there can be no question of bishop Andrewes's per-
sonal piety and earnestness. The witness of his contemporaries
agrees with the witness of his Private Devotions. In his preaching,
he gave in too much to the mannerisms of the day and the taste of
his audience, but the holiness of his inner life and the sincerity
of his aims were not doubted by the most frivolous, or without
influence upon a corrupt court. His life forms a link between
several ages. He was born in the year that Latimer was burnt,
he lived to see Charles I crowned and Milton wrote a Latin elegy
upon his death. Few men have owed more to their schoolmasters
and few have acknowledged their debt more handsomely. Samuel
Ward of Ratcliffe, to whom he afterwards gave the rectory of
Waltham, discovered his merit, and prevented his parents from
making a prentice of him. Richard Mulcaster, the first head-
master of Merchant Taylors' school, secured him for the new
school. Andrewes 'ever loved and honoured his Master Mulcaster
. . . and placed his picture over the doore of his Studie; whereas
in all the rest of the house, you could scantly see a picture. '
At Pembroke hall, Cambridge, he became, in succession, scholar,
fellow and master. He was always 'a singular lover and en-
courager of learning and learned men,' and his friendship with
Casaubon and their enthusiastic studies at Ely form one of the
most attractive pictures in the history of scholarship. His stores
of erudition and his knowledge of many languages were fitly
employed in the translation of the Pentateuch for the Authorised
Version; they were less felicitously used in his sermons, where
they sometimes cumber the ground. His knowledge of the fathers
was wider than his knowledge of men, and his one intrusion into


## p. 239 (#261) ############################################

Andrewes's Sermons
239
secular life, in the matter of the Essex divorce, was disastrous and
bitterly repented.
His sermons were collected for publication by the command
of Charles I, who was 'graciously pleased to thinke a paper-life
better than none,' though the editors, Laud and Buckeridge, were
well aware that the printed sermons 'could not live with all that
elegancie which they had upon his tongue. ' His preaching owed
as much to his perfect delivery as Hooker's lost by his diffidence.
After-ages will always find the contemporary opinion of Andrewes's
sermons extravagant, but, in spite of the most exasperating faults
of style, there is much to praise. He prefers to tread the well-
worn highway of common Christianity, and will not easily be
drawn either into the Roman controversy or into the insoluble
“deep points' of predestination and the like, in which puritan
preachers often lost themselves. The determination to extract
the most possible from the sacred text leads him into over-nice
distinctions, till he can only express himself with the help of
brackets, and even of brackets within brackets. Yet, notwith-
standing his clumsy apparatus, finicking exegesis and tortuous
language, he commonly rewards the reader's patience. The re-
mark of the presbyterian lord to James I at Holyrood, ‘No doubt
your Majesty's bishop is a learned man, but he cannot preach.
He rather plays with his text than preaches on it,' is not the
whole truth. The texts which Andrewes took for his great series
of Christmas and Good Friday sermons are permanently enriched
by the musings of his devout mind.
It is unfortunately easy to trace the influence of Andrewes
upon the younger preachers of his times. The Andrewes tradition
lasted far on into the century, and, in the hands of lesser men, it
lost the life which the genius of Andrewes had been able to infuse
into it. When, at last, it was superseded by preaching of a plainer
and sincerer style, bishop Burnet wrote its epitaph :
The impertinent way of dividing texts is laid aside; the needless setting
out of the originals and the vulgar version is worn out. The trifling shews of
learning, in many quotations of passages, that very few can understand, do
no more flat the auditory.
John Donne, although eighteen years younger than Andrewes,
survived him only six years. While Laud, Montagu, Ussher and
Hall were destined to preach to another age, Donne preached only
to the age which knew Andrewes. From the first, it must have
been inevitable to compare the two most famous preachers of
James I's reign. Both are deeply read in the fathers and love


## p. 240 (#262) ############################################

240 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
6
to quote them in their original languages. Neither can resist the
fanciful imagery and verbal conceits that their age loved. Yet,
though they work with the same clay, the one achieves a success
in spite of his clumsiness, the other is a finished artist. Andrewes
is read with difficulty for the sake of his matter; Donne is read
by many who care little for his theology. Yet Donne was not
simply a man of letters caring more for his style than for his
matter. He impressed his own age, as he impresses the reader
of today, with his tremendous earnestness. Whether the reasons
which brought him to enter the ministry in his forty-second year
were adequate or not, he gave himself to his new calling with an
evergrowing sense of his responsibility. He took the most exacting
view of the preacher's office, and would excuse 'no man's laziness,
that will not employ his whole time upon his calling. ' In one of
his Candlemas sermons, he discusses the preacher's business and
maintains the need of preaching to the educated and the court
in a different style from that which will suit the simple. It was
Donne's métier, more than that of any man then alive, to preach
to the learneder and more capable auditories' that the times
had produced. The honourable society of Lincoln's inn got the
preacher they wanted, and parted from him with regrets and
fervent gratitude. At St Paul's, he gave himself more preaching
duties than had fallen to previous deans, and a sermon from him
was an occasion of which fashionable London took advantage.
It is a little surprising that a man of his literary experience
published only a few occasional sermons, such as the first sermon
preached to king Charles, printed by royal command, or the
sermon in commemoration of George Herbert's mother, lady
Danvers. A partial explanation is that his sermons, for the most
part, were not ready for the press. It was not till the plague
of 1625 drove him out of London and gave him some months'
leisure, that he set to work upon them. In a letter of this year
(25 November) he wrote:
I have revised as many of my sermons as I have kept any note of, and
I have written out a great many, and hope to do more. I am already come
to the number of 80, of which my son, who, I hope, will take the same
profession, or some other in the world of understanding, may hereafter make
some use.
Again, in 1630, he utilised a time of sickness at Abrey Hatch in
‘revising my short notes. Doubtless, this free revision enabled
the author to write at greater length than he had preached.
Nine years after his father's death, John Donne the younger


## p. 241 (#263) ############################################

Donne's Sermons
241
published Eighty Sermons; but they cannot be identical (as
Gosse suggests) with the eighty mentioned by Donne in 1625,
since many of this first folio belong to a later date.
A second
volume and a third appeared later, forming together a larger
library of sermons than Andrewes or any other divine had yet
furnished.
“There is some degree of eloquence required in the delivery
of God's messages,' wrote Donne, and he intended to use all the
literary craft he had learnt to give life to his sermons. Some-
times, his rich fancy leads him into sheer extravagance or paradox.
Sometimes, his delight in assonant words will make him speak of
‘a comminatory or commonitory cross,' or he will end a paragraph
with portentous sesquipedalians, 'irreparably, irrevocably, irre-
coverably, irremediably. Coleridge disliked 'a patristic leaven'in
him, and Hallam said roundly that he had perverted his learning
'to cull every impertinence of the fathers and schoolmen. ' Yet few
readers would willingly spare the penitent's fond references to
'that blessed and sober father,' St Augustine. His wit, his learning
and his poetic feeling are far more often turned to profit than
used for display. The old wit has still its use when he can write,
*The devil is no recusant; he will come to church, and he will lay
his snares there. ' And his poetic fancy can take unceasing delight
in the metaphors of the Bible and marshal his rhythmical periods.
The obscurity of Donne's sermons has been often exaggerated.
No doubt they would be difficult to follow with the ear only, but
we have no means of knowing how closely the printed sermon
recalls the preacher's words. In spite of his profusion of metaphors
and similes, he seldom leaves us in any doubt of his meaning, and
he can be as simple as any man without being ordinary. It is
less easy to say that we always know whither he is taking us.
Every reader must be conscious of a certain arbitrariness in his
treatment. And we must particularly notice how his sombre cast
of thought, and his severe view of his own past failings, are apt to
assert themselves in unexpected quarters. Andrewes and he begin
a Christmas sermon on the same text, but Donne soon loses the
Christmas feeling and brings us face to face with death and
judgment to come. Death has been called the preacher's great
commonplace. Donne repeatedly comes back to this topic, but,
with him, it is never commonplace. Never does he hold us more
in thrall than when he warns in solemn, measured and impassioned
tones of that which comes equally to us all, and makes us all
equal when it comes. '
16
L. L. IV.
CH. XII.


## p. 242 (#264) ############################################

CHAPTER XIII
ROBERT BURTON, JOHN BARCLAY AND JOHN OWEN
It has been rightly observed that the first half of the seven-
teenth century may be reckoned eminently the learned age, and
the authors who form the subject of the present chapter carry,
each in his own way, this mark of the period. Two of these, the
epigrammatist Owen and Barclay the writer of satire and romance,
delivered themselves in Latin, one producing the best known body
of Latin epigram since Martial, the other the most famous work in
Latin prose fiction since Apuleius. From Burton, we have his own
confession that it was not his original intention to 'prostitute his
muse in English,' but, could a printer have been found, to publish
his huge medical and moral treatise in Latin. Yet, while the
frame of the book is in his native English, Latin is never far away.
We find it in phrases interwoven with the text, in formal citation
on page or margent, visible through the paraphrase of the sources
from which he drew. Composition in Latin, at a time when that
language was still international, was, in itself, no special sign of
learning, but Barclay and Owen give proof of wide and apt
knowledge, and possess an individual style and flavour. In their
day, they are remarkable instances of men of real literary in-
spiration, who chose to speak in a past tongue. For width of
reading, rather than precise scholarship, Burton may count among
the most learned of English men of letters. The study of all
three was Man. To a modern mind, the way in which tradition
and direct experience often lie side by side unblended in
seventeenth century literature is strange. An eager interest in
human character and activity consorted with something that
is hard to distinguish from pedantry. But the impulse of the
classics was then stronger if less delicate, and the relation between
life and books has been variously apprehended at various epochs.
The three differ in their lives, literary performance and subse-
quent fate. Owen, a Welshman, educated at Winchester and Oxford,
showed, while devoid of the higher qualities of a poet, a surprising


## p. 243 (#265) ############################################

Robert Burton
243
à
readiness and dexterity in sallies of verbal wit. Barclay, courtier
and cosmopolitan, born in Lorraine of a Scottish father, spending
his manhood in London and Rome, after writing a satirical fiction
in his youth, combined, later, in a romance of elevated and serious
tone, imaginative power with an acute judgment in the treatment
of political questions. Burton the Englishman, an Oxford resident
and priest in the Anglican church, ‘by profession a divine, by
inclination a physician,' devoted his large leisure to the elaboration
of a work which, while technical in its immediate aim, became,
because of its author's vast reading, a storehouse of multifarious
learning; because of his disposition, a book of satirical though
kindly humour; and, because of the subject itself, a panorama and
criticism of human life.
The success achieved by each was remarkable. Owen's first
volume was reprinted within the month. Six editions of Burton's
voluminous treatise appeared within thirty years. Barclay's chief
work, which was posthumous, was reissued on an average once
a year during the half century that followed the author's death.
The sphere and period of their popularity were not the same. Owen
and Barclay, composing in Latin, quickly attained a continental
reputation, and were translated into the principal languages of
Europe; Burton, writing in English, was practically unknown
across the Channel. The fame of all suffered eclipse, at one time,
through changes of literary fashion. Owen, though his production
is less bulky and his merit more on the surface, is still strangely
neglected. Barclay, since 1874, has been the subject of many
learned monographs. The Anatomy of Melancholy, revived by
.
men of genius in the early years of the nineteenth century, the
haunt of the literary, rather than the province of professed
students, alone continues to be reprinted. It is Burton, beyond
doubt, who, of the three, has best preserved his vitality.
Robert Burton is often spoken of as though his personality
were quite exceptional, his book an unparalleled piece of
eccentricity. But much which might seem peculiar to him is,
in reality, shared with other writers of his time. It is no paradox
to assert that Burton is representative of the nation and period to
which he belongs. He was of English ancestry in the fullest sense,
a native of that midland district which has given us his great con-
temporary, Shakespeare. His family had been settled there for
many generations, and an ancestor in the fifth degree had borne king
Henry VIs standard in France. Burton's own career was normal
16-2


## p. 244 (#266) ############################################

244
Robert Burton
and uneventful. He was a permanent resident in Oxford at a time
when the number of students at our English universities bore a
higher proportion to the population of the country than at any
subsequent period? . In his large interest in life, his humorous,
half-ironical sympathy with his fellow men and his shrewd common-
sense, he was a typical Englishman; English, also, in his tendency
to overflow the channels of his thought, in his want of that
delicate sense of measure more commonly associated with the
Latin races.
Before entering Oxford, Burton had acquired the usual grammar
school training of his day, which did not include a belief in a rigid
canon of Latin authors. While ability to read and write Latin
was a chief aim of school education, the classics were regarded as
sources of wisdom and not merely as models of literary form, and
writers of the renascence were even admitted to a place beside
those of the Roman republic and empire.
As a student of Christ Church and keeper of his college library,
enjoying, too, the advantages of the newly founded Bodleian,
Burton had ample opportunity for study. He held some small
ecclesiastical preferments, and there are indications that he would
have been glad to obtain more substantial promotion. Anecdotes
about him must be received with caution. His book became so
much better known than himself that there was probably a tendency
to draw inferences from his work to his person, and to emphasise
such details of his life as seemed most in keeping with his character
as an author.
The whisper of suicide which Anthony à Wood
mentions was, presumably, based on the last lines of the ‘Abstract
of Melancholy' prefixed to the third and later editions of The
Anatomy, or on a phrase on his monument in Christ Church.
Burton, who was ‘by profession a divine,' declared that he might,
had he chosen, have published sermons, but he had 'ever been
desirous to suppress his labours in this kind. ' The nature of his
. '
sermons may fairly be inferred from the section on ‘Religious
Melancholy. His extant minor works consist of his academic
Latin play Philosophaster and occasional Latin verse—elegies,
epithalamia and the like-scattered through university collections.
His Latin comedy, the theme of which is the trickery and exposure
of pretenders to learning in a Spanish university, the arch-villain
being a Jesuit, is ingenious and diverting and of special interest as
containing, in many places, thoughts and expressions that can be
paralleled in The Anatomy. The lyrics, few but effective, are
i Venn, Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College, vol. 1, pp. xx, xxi.
6


## p. 245 (#267) ############################################

The Anatomy
245
>
in rime. The metre of the dialogue, even after allowance has been
made for inevitable ignorance of Plautine and Terentian prosody,
is rough.
The first edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy appeared
in 1621, in the same year as Barclay's Argenis. In modern days,
at least, The Anatomy has been read rather in parts than as a
whole, and some misunderstanding has prevailed as to its purpose.
It has been regarded as a mere conglomerate of miscellaneous
excerpts, as a colossal jest, and the synopsis prefixed to each
of the three parts as nothing but a parody. A study of the work
in its entirety should convince a reader that, however curious in
some of its developments, Burton's main object was the practical
one that he himself proclaimed. The present Regius professor of
medicine at Oxford, while speaking with keen appreciation of its
literary qualities, has pronounced The Anatomy “a great medical
treatise, orderly in arrangement, serious in purpose? '
The introduction, 'Democritus Junior to the Reader,' after
justifying the assumed name, the title, the choice of subject and the
method, shows, by 'a brief survey of the world,' that melancholy
is 'an inbred malady in every one of us. The first partition deals
with the definition, causes, symptoms and properties of melancholy;
the second and shortest) with the cure; the third, in its final
form by far the longest, with the definition, symptoms and cure of
the two distinct species, love melancholy and religious melan-
choly. "The Conclusion of the Author to the Reader,' with which
the first edition ends, did not appear again; but it has not always
been observed that a large proportion was incorporated in the
introduction.
Though the book is primarily a treatise on melancholy, the
elasticity of the term, the universality of the disease and the
elaboration with which Burton tracks its several phases, extend
the subject to the life of man. The writer's temperament, matched
with his theme, exhibits him not merely as the physician of body
and soul, but as a satirist, a humorist and a social and political
reformer, in which last character he constructs the ideal Utopia
of his introduction. The general literary aspect of The Anatomy
has so far overpowered the medical, that Fuller could speak of it
as a 'book of philology. '
Burton's is one of those minds whose interest in human emotion,
conduct and character expresses itself in a meditative, rather than
in a dramatic, form. But he is not confined to man's nature in the
1 Unpublished lecture on Robert Burton by W. Osler.


## p. 246 (#268) ############################################

246
Robert Burton
abstract. The Anatomy is peopled with men and women. Many
a great name from history is there; and instances, various and
picturesque, of affliction and healing, gathered by Burton from
physicians' records——the young maid in Amatus Lusitanus that
would wash her hair in the heat of the day; the strange malady of
Katherine Gualter, a cooper's daughter; the country fellow that
had four knives in his belly, with other baggage; the merchant
from Nordeling that fancied he had lost his money at the fair; the
painful preacher at Alkmaar in Holland and countless other cases.
Panoramic effects are frequent, arising from the author's
fertility and readiness in enumeration. In this impression of
multitudinousness, he recalls in different ways both Rabelais
and Whitman. A most characteristic example of the torrential
manner in which Burton's memories are poured forth is his
rhapsody of the world of books in the member on 'Exercise
rectified. '
Burton's humour is pervasive and inseparably intertwined
with his irony and the kindly commonsense of his attitude to
life. Comparisons are dangerous, but it may safely be said that
in Burton there are touches of Montaigne, and contact in his
character with the most English of our writers, Chaucer and
Fielding. Jusserand points to his kinship with Izaak Walton
in his susceptibility to the charm of country life.
Neither in thought nor in style can he rival the subtlety of
Sir Thomas Browne, to whom he has been compared and with
whom he certainly has this in common that the same readers
seem drawn to both. Though he cannot pretend to the serene
impartiality of Religio Medici, Burton, in his theological views,
shows a widely tolerant spirit. We see him at his highest
in 'Religious Melancholy,' especially in "The cure of despair,
though this is not the only place in which his grave pathos is felt,
and his tenderness for the fear and sorrow' of others that he must
have known himself.
The extent to which the words and names of other authors
appear in The Anatomy of Melancholy is, undoubtedly, its most
striking external feature. But the practice of profuse quotation
was not peculiar to Burton. It was an age when appeal lay to
tradition and authority, and the tendency was fostered by the
formation of libraries. The attitude of a typical scholar of the
day has been summed up by his modern biographer, “If a great
writer has said a thing, it is so? ' It was the fashion of the time
* Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, p. 442.


## p. 247 (#269) ############################################

His Reading
247
to quote by way of proof or illustration, in talk, in writing, from
the pulpit. No exposition or argument could be conducted 'With-
out refreshment on the road From Jerome or from Athanasius. '
In enforcing the most familiar of truisms, men appealed to the
classics without fear of consequences. The pretender to learning
had perforce ‘his sentences for Company, some scatterings of
Seneca and Tacitus' The difference between Burton and his
1.
contemporaries is one of degree:
No man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dextrous inter-
larding his common discourses among them with verses from the poets, or
sentences from classical authors. Which being then all the fashion in the
university made his company more acceptable.
Indeed, if the occasion be considered, the wealth of ancient in-
stances, of Greek and Latin in Taylor's sermon, "The House of
Feasting,' is as surprising a phenomenon as anything in Burton.
Taine, 'superseding the facts by a statement of his own subjective
consciousness,' has spoken of Burton's casting on paper 'a folio
column of heraldry' and 'the history of the particle que,' but, though
Burton modestly spoke of his work as a 'cento' that he had
‘collected out of divers writers,' there is always reason and method
in his borrowings. He never flung bis commonplace book in the
face of the public.
Undoubtedly, Burton possessed an inordinate appetite for
books, a cacoethes legendi. He confesses to a 'want of art' and
'order' in his reading ; 'I have confusedly tumbled over divers
authors in our libraries,' 'rambling amongst authors (as often
I do). ' So Boswell wrote of Johnson in his youth, ‘he read a great
deal in a desultory manner, without any scheme of study, as chance
threw books in his way and inclination directed him through them. '
But Burton in his ramblings must have been ready to suck
melancholy out of all that he met. For all his omnivorous reading,
he was no bookworm. It was the human interest in the printed
page for which his eye was open. Modern critics, unversed in
a literature familiar to Burton's day, have dwelt pleasantly on
dusty folios, and made merry over the names of authors of whose
works they were ignorant, as though what is obsolete for us was
already rare and far-fetched in the 'seventeenth century. Taine
pictured Burton sporting with antediluvian monsters, the first
being Besler of Nürnberg! and an English writer seems to
imagine that Codronchus was a special find for him. There was
1 Earle, Micro-Cosmographie, character 31.
? Anthony · Wood, Ath. Ox. ed. Bliss, 11, 653.


## p. 248 (#270) ############################################

248
Robert Burton
little remoteness in the newly printed text-books of medicine and
botany.
In the case of a reader so all engulfing as Burton, it is not
easy to sum up his sources with precision, but the following heads
will afford a rough notion of the field covered: medical writers
of all periods, and scientific works; the Bible, the fathers,
theologians; Greek and Latin classics (the former 'cited out of
their interpreters'): some few are largely or wholly neglected,
such as Aeschylus : to others, such as Horace, he has frequent
recourse; historians and chroniclers; travels, descriptions of
cities and countries (Burton was 'ever addicted to the study
of cosmography'); treatises on government and politics; the
miscellanea of scholars and Latin belles lettres from the revival of
learning : poems, orations, epistles, satires, facetiae and the like;
English poetry: Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson,
Daniel, Drayton; Harington's Ariosto, Florio's Montaigne,
Rabelais and others. Interesting light is thrown on Burton's
reading by the list of the books given to the Bodleian in accord-
ance with his will, which includes a large number of pamphlets and
controversial tracts.
Burton was anxious on principle to indicate his obligations.
'I have wronged no Authors,' he protested from the first; 'I cite
and quote mine Authors,' he adds, in the third edition, continuing,
in the fourth, 'which howsoever some illiterate scriblers accompt
pedanticall as a cloake of ignorance, and opposite to their affected
fine stile, I must and will use. ' Burton, it would seem, is here
glancing at writers such as Owen Feltham, who, in the second
edition of Resolves (1628), wrote 'I am to answer two Objections,
One, that I have made use of Story yet not quoted my Authorities,
and this I have purposely done. Yet, while Burton renders to his
medical writers what is theirs, to a great number of the illustrative
and literary quotations in The Anatomy, as is only natural, no
name is attached; to pause at the end of each borrowed phrase to
interject a ‘Shakespeare, ahem ! ' was clearly impossible. But
there is unconscious humour when, in the famous passage conveyed
by Sterne, Burton declares that ‘as Apothecaries we make new
mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another'; and
forgets to refer his readers to Andreae's Menippus. In many
instances, the quotations embedded in Burton's text have not
been drawn directly from their original sources. Not that Burton
had any need to fall back on florilegia, a practice that he
expressly disclaims; but it often happens that what in itself is


## p. 249 (#271) ############################################

His Methods of Quotation 249
a quotation, especially if it be an island of verse in the midst
of prose, has caught his eye as it faced him on the page of another
writer and found its way to his own. Lines that stand out in
Xylander's Latin version of Plutarch's Moralia, in Lilius Gyraldus,
in Cornelius Agrippa, in Cardan, in Lipsius, have thus recruited
his ranks ; English writers, too, are made to pay tribute of their
spoil. At times, we may track him down a whole page of a pre-
decessor. The protest, in the preface to Love-Melancholy, against
forbidding the reading of the Canticles, the Ballade of Ballades,
as 'too light and amorous a tract,' has been borrowed from an
oration of Beroaldus. Elsewhere, successive quotations from
Aulus Gellius, Pliny the elder and the philosopher Seneca hail
from a controversial piece by Justus Baronius, and Burton
commits a curious error through misreading his original. When
he protests in his preface that his collection has been sine injuria,
that he has given every man his own, it can be shown, from
passages he refers to, that he is recalling Camerarius's emblem
under that motto. The insertion of supplementary matter in later
editions has here, by separating these quotations, helped to conceal
their provenance. Burton's reading was so wide and devious, his
paths of association so unexpected, that it is rarely safe to assume
by what road a quotation has reached him. One more example
must suffice. It might be supposed that the two lines
Virgines nondum thalamis jugatae
Et comis nondum positis ephoebi
came directly from Seneca's Hercules Furens. This is not so.
Burton took them from Gaulmin's Latin translation of the Greek
romance of Theodorus Prodromus'. The ways in which he inter-
laces the words of others into his own fabric are very various.
Sometimes, a quotation stands in his text, sometimes, in the
margin; at times, through inadvertence, in both. The margin,
again, may supply the original of the rendering that figures on the
page. His translations often are 'paraphrases rather than inter-
pretations. ' Burton's racy restatements by the side of the Latin
have, at times, a humorous effect akin to that of the advocates'
speeches in The Ring and the Book-or in Calverley's parody.
Burton exercises an author's privilege in taking only what is to
his purpose and in combining separate excerpts into one period.
Naturally, among the thousands of passages that he has occasion
to quote, he has not been able to avoid errors. His memory plays
him false. He slips in a rendering, assigns words of Silius to
· N. and Q. 10 S. x1, 101.


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250
Robert Burton
Statius, is led astray by his authorities. If Lipsius refers a sentence
of Plato to the wrong dialogue, Burton takes it on trust. Lipsius
says 'Horace' when he should have said 'Ovid,' Burton copies his
mistake. The number of reference marks in the text and margin
become a source of error when complicated by fresh insertions
in successive issues. Although each edition has a list of errata,
these bear but an insignificant proportion to what may be detected.
It is obvious that Burton's modus operandi was not always the
same. He often quotes from memory; there are places, apparently,
where the book from which he cites lay open before him; at times,
he made use of memoranda. In his introduction, he represents
himself as writing 'out of a confused company of notes. ' Several
books containing his autograph show strokes of the pen against
words or passages utilised in The Anatomy.
Everywhere there is evidence that Burton's brain was soaked
in literature. In his elegiacs ad librum suum, echoes are to be
heard from Nicholas Gerbelius, Palingenius, Claudian, Ausonius,
Juvenal, Martial, Ovid, Vergil. Elia's 'I cannot sit and think.
Books think for me, can be applied to Burton. His constant
habit was to express himself in terms of quotation. But in this
method lies dizziness for the reader and a danger, at times, that
the real strength and individuality of the author's own thoughts
may be overlooked.
Burton himself describes his style when he confesses that his
book was writ with as small deliberation as I do usually speak. '
What we are listening to is the intimate persuasive ring of
vigorous and unaffected talk. He never shrinks from homely
metaphors:
The whole world belike should be new-moulded when it seemed good to
those all-commanding Powers, and turned inside out as we do haycocks in
harvest . . . , or as we turn apples to the fire, move the world upon his centre.
6
"The world is tossed in a blanket amongst them. ' 'As common
as a barber's chair. ' 'As a tinker stops one hole and makes two.