It was rptd with the first title The
Mistaken
Beuuty in 1685.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
Among English or Teutonic folk, the Royal
Society was the earliest to appear, and, even if we include the
scientific societies of the world, it has had the most continuous
existence. Indeed, before its birth, it underwent a long period of
incubation, and its inception was in reality in 1645. At that date,
a society known as the Philosophical, or, as Boyle called it, the
## p. 365 (#387) ############################################
Cowley and the Royal Society 365
>
'Invisible,' college came into being, which met from time to
time at Gresham college and elsewhere in London, During
the civil war, this society was split in two, some members
meeting in London, some at Oxford, but the meetings, wher-
ever held, were at irregular intervals. On the restoration, the
meetings were resumed in London and, in 1662, the society
received the royal charter.
Of all the poets of the time, Cowley took, perhaps, the greatest
interest in science. He had, indeed, like Evelyn and at about the
same date, developed a plan for the institution of a college of
science. Evelyn explains his scheme in a letter addressed to Robert
Boyle, dated 3 September 1659 from Sayes court, which contains
minute details as to the buildings, the maintenance, and the
government of his college, the inmates of which were to preserve
science and cultivate themselves. ' Cowley's scheme was also
elaborately thought out, and had the original and admirable
suggestion that, out of the twenty salaried professors, sixteen
should be always resident and four always travelling in the four
quarters of the world, in order that they might 'give a constant
account of all things that belong to the learning and especially
Natural Experimental Philosophy, of those parts. ' To his 'Philo-
sophical Colledge' was to be attached a school of two hundred
boys. Both these schemes, according to bishop Sprat, hastened
the foundation of the Royal Society, of which both projectors were
original members.
Cowley's poems were greatly admired during his lifetime, later
critics have considered him affected, perhaps because, like Donne,
he understood, and was not afraid to use the technical language of
the schools. We have quoted some of his lines on Harvey, and
may add a few from the ode with which he greeted the birth of
the Royal Society :
From . . all long Errors of the way,
In which our Praedecessors went,
And like th’ old Hebrews many years did stray
In Desarts but of small extent,
Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last
The barren Wilderness he past,
Did on the very Border stand
Of the blest promis'd Land,
And from the Mountains Top of his Exalted Wit,
Saw it himself, and shewed us it.
But Life did never to one Man allow
Time to Discover Worlds, and Conquer too;
Nor can so short a Line sufficient be
To fadome the vast depths of Natures Sea:
## p. 366 (#388) ############################################
366
The Progress of Science
The work he did we ought t'admire,
And were unjust if we should more require
From his few years, divided 'twixt th’ Excess
Of low Affliction, and high Happiness.
For who on things remote can fix his sight,
That's alwayes in a Triumph, or a Fight?
Donne, who, like Cowley, indulged in quaint poetical conceits
and who founded a new school of poetry, abjuring classical con-
ventions and classical characters, and treating of topics and objects
of everyday life, was not afraid of realism. 'Upon common objects,
Dr Johnson tells us, he was ‘unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle. '
Space limits us to one quotation:
Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee.
Donne did not of course foresee the appalling part that these insects,
by the habits he mentions, play in the spread of such diseases
as bubonic plague and many epizootics in animals.
The dramatists of the Stewart period hardly afford us the help
we need in estimating the position occupied by science and by men
of science in the world of the seventeenth century. The astrologer
and the alchemist were then stock characters of the drama of
everyday life, just as the company promoter is now. "The Gentle-
“
men of Trinity Colledge' presented before the King's Majesty'a
comedy entitled Albumazar, which takes its name from the chief
character, an astrologer, a very arrant knave, and the type of the
false man of science. This play, originally printed in 1615, was soon
forgotten, but it was revived in 1668 and met with great success.
Samuel Butler, who was not a fellow of the Royal Society, for
some reason difficult to explain, spent much time in attacking it.
He wrote his entertaining satire on the virtuosi entitled The
Elephant in the Moon in short verse, and was so pleased with
it that he wrote it over again in long verse? Though this 'Satire
upon the Royal Society' remains a fragment, enough of it is extant
to show Butler did not appreciate what even in these days is not
always appreciated, that the minute investigation of subjects and
objects which to the ordinary man seem trivial and vain often lead
to discoveries of the profoundest import to mankind.
Ben Jonson, with his flair for presenting what zoologists
call 'type species,' showed, as has been seen, in his Alchemist
6
Cf. ante, chap. II.
## p. 367 (#389) ############################################
Political Economists
367
a
an unusual, but a thorough, mastery of the half scientific and
half quack jargon of the craft, so that this play is a quarry for
all interested in the history of chemical and physical studies.
To the play-writer of the time, the man of science or of pseudo-
science was a vague, peevish pedant, much occupied with physio-
gnomies, dreams and fantastic ideas as to the properties and powers
of various substances. But there seems to have been a clear
distinction drawn between a real and a false astrology, as is shown
in Dryden's An Evening's Love (1668)".
The political economists of the seventeenth century
were greatly influenced by the Baconian enthusiasm for empirical study;
they were eager to accumulate and interpret facts, and to apply inductive
methods to political phenomena. They therefore concerned themselves with
the anatomy of the body politic, and with numerical observations which
served as the best available substitute for experiment. They followed the
analogy of the biological rather than of the mathematical science of their
day; hence, their mode of thought has a close affinity with that which has
become current since the decline of the classical school of Political Economy.
Sir William Petty and the philosopher Locke are the best
known names in this group of political economists. Locke, in
particular, was interested in questions concerning the currency and
the rate of interest. Sir William Petty, who was among the first to
state clearly the nature of rent, wrote a celebrated Treatise of
Taxes and Contributions Captain John Graunt's Natural and
Political Observations marked the beginning of that interest in
statistical data concerning health and population which is a dis-
tinguishing feature of modern economic research. Another writer,
Samuel Fortrey, followed Petty in his endeavour to go behind the
mere art of taxation and analyse the ultimate sources of national
wealth in the land and labour of the country. In general, it may
be said that, in the seventeenth century, political economy was still
an art rather than a science. Between these writings and Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), there was a great gap; but the
practical observations of the seventeenth century were not without
use in supplying material for his scholarly and impartial analysis.
i Cf. ante, chap. I.
? Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. a1, p. 380.
? Cf. ante, chap. xiv.
## p. 368 (#390) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
THE ESSAY AND THE BEGINNING OF MODERN
ENGLISH PROSE
PERHAPS the most important literary achievement that falls
within the period covered by this volume is the creation of a prose
style, which, in structure if not in vocabulary, is essentially the
same as that of today. Caroline prose, the prose of Milton and
Taylor, of Browne and Clarendon, had produced, in the hands of
genius, some of the noblest passages in our literature. But, at the
restoration, men began to feel the need of an instrument upon
which the everyday performer might play-an instrument suited
to an age of reason, possessing, before all things, the homely virtues
of simplicity, correctness, lucidity and precision. These qualities,
indeed, were not unknown to English prose before the restoration.
They are to be found in private letters, not meant for the public
eye. Above all, they are to be found in the writings of the veteran
Hobbes, who, like Bacon and Ben Jonson, with both of whom he
had literary relations, disdained all superfluity of ornament, and
was content to make his prose a terse and pregnant expression of
a clear and vigorous intellect. But even Hobbes is by no means
free from the besetting sins of the older prose-careless construc-
tion and trailing relative clauses.
The new prose was the work of a multiplicity of causes, all
more or less reflecting the temper of the age. One of these was
the growing interest in science, and the insistence of the new
Royal Society on the need of a clear and plain style for scientific
exposition.
There is one thing more about which the Society has been most solicitous;
and that is the manner of their Discourse: which, unless they had been only
watchful to keep in due temper, the whole spirit and vigour of their Design
had been soon eaten out by the luxury and redundance of speech. . . . And, in
few words, I dare say that of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner
obtain'd than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this
volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. . . . It will
suffice my present purpose to point out what has been done by the Royal
## p. 369 (#391) ############################################
Demand for Simplicity and Clearness 369
j
Society towards the correcting of excesses in Natural Philosophy, to which
it is of all others, a most profest enemy. They have therefore been most
vigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this
extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all ampli-
fication, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive
purity and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things almost in an equal
number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked,
natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native eas'ness,
bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and
preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before
that of Wits or Scholars.
So writes Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society. Almost
at the same time, in December 1664, his colleagues gave effect to
their views by appointing a committee for the improvement of the
English language, which included, besides himself, Waller, Dryden
and Evelyn'. Doubtless, it was out of this committee that the idea
arose of founding an English academy for the 'improvement of
speaking and writing' on the model of the French one. This idea
was discussed at three or four meetings held at Gray's inn, where,
in addition to the above, Cowley and the duke of Buckingham,
also members of the Royal Society, were present. But, in con-
sequence of the plague and 'other circumstances intervening,' the
plan came to nothing? '
The same need for greater plainness and simplicity of language
was felt in pulpit oratory so far back as 1646, when Wilkins, after-
wards bishop of Chester, one of the founders of the Royal Society,
and its first secretary, had recommended, in his popular Eccle-
siastes or the Gift of Preaching, that the style of preaching should
be plain and without rhetorical flourishes. After the restoration,
these views found an adequate exponent in his friend John
Tillotson, whose sermons at Lincoln's inn and St Lawrence Jewry
attracted large congregations. His St Paul's sermon, preached
before the lord mayor, in March 1664, and printed by request
under the title The Wisdom of being religious, is, in its perfect
plainness and absence of rhetoric, an instructive contrast to the
brilliantly imaginative discourse which Jeremy Taylor delivered,
only eight months earlier, at the funeral of archbishop Bramhall.
But the reformation of pulpit oratory was not the work of one
2
1 Evelyn embodied his views in a letter to the chairman, Sir Peter Wyche, which
is printed in J. E. Spingarn’s Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, vol. II,
pp. 310 ff.
Evelyn to Pepys (op. cit. vol. II, pp. 327 ff. ). As to the origin of the Royal Society
see, also, ante, chap. xv.
3 Cf. , as to the change in the style of pulpit oratory, ante, chap. XII.
* See ante, ib.
E. L. VIII. CH, XVI.
24
## p. 370 (#392) ############################################
370 The Essay and Modern English Prose
.
sermon or one man. Both Stillingfleet, reader at the Temple, who
was even more popular than Tillotson, and South, public orator at
Oxford, who was made a prebendary of Westminster in 1663,
belonged to the modern school. In a sermon preached on Ascen-
sion day 1667, the latter divine commended apostolic preaching for
its plainness and simplicity :
nothing here of the finger of the North-star . . . nothing of the door of angel's
wings or the beautiful locks of cherubims: no starched similitudes, intro-
duced with a 'thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion,' and
the like.
This ungenerous hit at Jeremy Taylor, who was lately dead, well
marks the antithesis between the new age and the old, between wit
and poetry, between reason and imagination.
Dryden's statement that‘if he had any talent for English prose
it was owing to his having often read the writings of the great
archbishop Tillotson' must be regarded as a piece of generous
exaggeration. At the most, he can only have learnt from him the
virtues of clear and logical statement, and of short, well coordi-
nated sentences. In the epistle dedicatory of The Rival-Ladies
(1664), and in the earlier part of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie
written in the summer of 1665, his management of the clause is
still somewhat uncertain. It is not till Neander, who represents
Dryden, joins in the discussion that we recognise our first master
of modern prose.
In the Essay of Dramatick Poesie, the conversational character
of Dryden's style is, also, already apparent. This, of course, is
due, in part, to the dialogue form, but we may also trace in it the
influence of Will's coffee-house, where, though he was 'not very
conversible? ,' he was listened to as an oracle. The statement sug-
gests a man who talked with unusual deliberation and precision, and
with a nice choice of words, and whose written style was thus a more
exact copy of his talk than is ordinarily the case. Moreover, that
style is always refined and well bred, reflecting, in this, the tone of the
court and, particularly, that of the king. "The desire,' says Dryden
in his Defence of the Epilogue (1672), ‘of imitating so great a
pattern loosened' the English from their stiff forms of conversa-
tion, and made them easy and pliant to each other in discourse. '
And, of Charles II, Halifax says that his wit 'consisted chiefly in
the quickness of his apprehension. ' It was a trait which he
inherited-with others—from his grandfather Henri IV, and
he gave expression to it with a refinement of language and a
1 Pope on Spence, sec. VII, p. 261 (Singer's ed. ).
## p. 371 (#393) ############################################
Early French Influence. Heroic Romances 371
conversational ease natural to one who had spent five years in
Paris society.
The influx of French fashions at the restoration has become a
commonplace with historians; but, so far as regards literature, it
had begun at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. The marriage
of Charles I with Henrietta Maria (1625) gave a fresh impulse to
the movement, and it was under the queen's auspices, i not by her
actual command, that an English version of Corneille's Cid was put
on the stage in 1638, little more than a year after its publication in
French. In the same year, three volumes of Balzac's. Letters
appeared in an English translation, one of them in a second edition.
The vogue of a rhetorician like Balzac, whose style is more important
than his thought, is a striking testimony to the high estimation in
which the language and literature of France were then held. It
must be remembered that Richelieu's great design of making France
the first power in Europe was just beginning to be successful, and
that it was partly in furtherance of this that, in 1634, he had
founded the Académie française. Though the civil war (1642—8)
checked, for a time, the French studies of Englishmen, it ultimately
contributed to their diffusion. For it sent most leading English men
of letters to Paris. In 1646, Hobbes, 'the first of all that fled,'
Waller, D'Avenant, Denham, Cowley and Evelyn were all gathered
together in the French capital. Cowley remained there till 1656;
D'Avenant returned, a prisoner, in 1650, the others in 1652.
In 1651, D'Avenant published his unfinished heroic poem
Gondibert, which he had written at Paris, and which, in general
conception and tone, shows the influence of the heroic romances ? .
Their popularity in England is well known? Gomberville's Polex-
andre appeared in an English dress in 1647 but ‘so disguised' that
Dorothy Osborne, that ardent reader of romances,'hardly knew it. '
A translation of La Calprenède's Cléopâtre, and two translations of
his Cassandre, began to appear in 1652 (Sir Charles Cottrell's
translation of the former was published in 1676) English
versions of Madeleine de Scudéry's Ibrahim, Le Grand Cyrus and
Clélie followed in 1652, 1653–5 and 1656–61. There was a sub-
sequent version of the last named in 1678, and translations by
John Phillips of La Calprenède's Pharamond and of Madeleine
de Scudéry's Almahide in the previous year. English imitations
.
also appeared, such as lord Broghill (Orrery)'s Parthenissa (first
1 See, as to Gondibert, ante, vol. vii, chap, m, and cf. p. 9 of the present volume.
2 Cf. ante, chap. I, as to their influence upon the English drama, and upon heroic
plays in particular.
24--2
## p. 372 (#394) ############################################
372 The Essay and Modern English Prose
6
part) in 1654, with which, in spite of its “handsome language,'
Dorothy Osborne was not very much taken, and Sir George Mac-
kenzie's Aretina or the Serious Romance in 1661. A complete
edition of Parthenissa in three volumes was published in 1665 and
1667. The most active translator at this time was John Davies
of Kidwelly. Besides Clélie (1652) and the last four parts of
Cléopâtre (1658–60), he translated novels by Scarron (1657—67);
Voiture's Letters (1657), which soon eclipsed Balzac's in favour
and are recommended by Locke as a pattern for 'letters of
compliment, mirth, railery or conversation’; Sorel's Le Berger
extravagant (1653); and Scarron's Nouvelles tragi-comiques
(1657—62). The same author's Don Japhet d Arménie and Les
trois Dorothées were translated in 1657, and his Roman comique
in 1676. But it was his burlesques which had the greatest vogue
in this country and produced numerous imitators. Charles Cotton
led the way with his Scarronides, a burlesque of the first book of
Vergil, in 1664, and followed it up with the fourth book in 1665.
Other writers burlesqued Homer and Ovid, all outdoing Scarron in
coarseness and vulgarity. In the words of Dryden, Parnassus spoke
the cant of Billingsgate.
But, to return to the days of the commonwealth, there appeared,
in 1653, the translation of a more famous work, which, in one sense,
was a burlesque. This was Sir Thomas Urquhart's remarkable
version of the first two books of Rabelais's great romance. It
apparently fell flat, for the third book was not published till forty
years later? Greater success attended the translation of another
monument of French prose, Pascal's Lettres Provinciales, which,
under the title The Mysterie of Jesuitisme, discovered in certain
letters, was published in 1657, the year in which Pascal wrote the
last of the letters, a new edition being called for in the following
year. And a translation of Descartes's Traité des passions de
Tôme (1650) testifies to an interest in that psychological analysis
which was to be a brilliant feature of the new school of French
writers.
At the restoration, there was a decided falling off in this work
of translation. In fact, all the translations from the French pro-
duced during the twenty-five years of Charles II's reign hardly
surpass in number those which appeared during the last eight
years of the commonwealth. The first decade after the restoration
was marked chiefly by a fairly successful attempt to acclimatise
1 Cf. vol. iv, p. 8; and see, as to Urquhart, vol. YII, pp. 253 ff. As to Butler
and Rabelais, see ante, chap. II.
## p. 373 (#395) ############################################
Later French Influence. Boileau 373
6
Corneille, the details of which have been given in a previous
chapter? The psychological tragedies of Racine were less to the
taste of English audiences, and it was not till nearly the close of
queen Anne's reign that they secured a footing on the English
stage with Ambrose Philips's Distrest Mother (Andromaque).
The unparalleled debt to Molière has been pointed out in an
earlier chapter? It need only be said here that, of all his thirty-
one plays, only about half-a-dozen escaped the general pillages.
La Fontaine was not translated into English till the next century;
but he was read and admired by the English wits, and it was
only his growing infirmities which, towards the end of his life,
prevented him from accepting an invitation sent by some of his
English admirers, who 'engaged to find him an honourable sub-
sistence' in London.
To Boileau, the remaining member of this illustrious group of
friends, Dryden refers in 1677, three years after the publication
of L'Art Poétique, as one of the chief critics of his age; while, in
the Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire
(1693), he pays a splendid tribute to him, as 'the admirable
Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose expressions are
noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose
satire is pointed and whose sense is close. ' His Lutrin appeared
in English in 1682; his Art Poétique, translated by Sir William
Soames and revised by Dryden, in 1683; and, about the same
time, Oldham imitated two of his satires, the fifth and the
-eighth. The second had been already translated by Butler, and
the third by Buckingham and Rochester. Bossuet is represented
by some of his controversial writings, such as his Exposition de la
Doctrine de l Église catholique and Conférence avec M. Claude,
and by his great Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, which was
translated in 1686. Malebranche's Recherche de la Vérité and La
Rochefoucauld's Maximes both appeared in English in 1694, and,
of the latter, there had been an earlier translation by Mrs Aphra
Behn. Pascal's Pensées and La Bruyère's Caractères, which Dryden
couples together as two of the most entertaining books that modern
French can boast of,' were translated in 1688 and 1699 respectively;
in 1688, too, appeared an English version of Mme de la Fayette's
Princesse de Cleves. But a mere record of translations from a
1 See ante, chap. VII. Le Menteur was acted and printed in London under the title
The Lyer in 1671.
It was rptd with the first title The Mistaken Beuuty in 1685.
? See ante, chap. v.
3 See Jacob, Giles, Poetical Register, vol. I, p. 292; Ward, A. W. , History of
English Dramatic Literature, vol. II, p. 315 8.
9
## p. 374 (#396) ############################################
374 The Essay and Modern English Prose
- foreign literature is far from constituting a measure of its influence.
The real influence which French literature exercised upon our own
between the restoration and the close of the seventeenth century
may be classified under four heads: that of Corneille and the
heroic romances upon tragedy, that of Molière upon comedy, that
of Montaigne upon the essay and that of French criticism upon
English criticism. Neither the first nor the second of these in-
fluences is really important: for the fashion of the riming heroic
play soon passed away; and, though our comedy borrowed its
materials from Molière, it took over little of his form, and nothing
of his spirit. The influence of Montaigne upon the essay will be
discussed later. But it may be well, in the first instance, to con-
sider the influence which is the most important of all, because it
affected our whole literature and not merely some special depart-
ment of it.
The debt of English literature to French criticism begins with
D'Avenant's laboured and longwinded preface to Gondibert, written
in Paris and there published, with an answer by Hobbes, in 1650.
It was, no doubt, suggested by Chapelain's turgid and obscure
preface to Marino's Adone (1623). "In 1650, Chapelain was at the
height of his authority as a critic, and the whole tone of this piece
of writing, with the talk about nature and the insistence on the
need of criticism as well as inspiration in poetry, is thoroughly
French. Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, is perfectly
independent in his views; but he must have written it with a copy
of the 1660 edition of Corneille's plays, which contain his Examens
and Discours, by his side'. Among the French critics of the next
generation, Boileau stands out prominent, but his authority in
England during the last quarter of the seventeenth century was
balanced by that of Rapin, whose Réflexions sur la poétique
d'Aristote was translated by Rymer in the same year in which
it appeared in French (1674), and of whom Dryden says that he 'is
alone sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach anew the rules
of writing? ' Le Bossu and Dacier were also highly esteemed.
Dryden speaks of Le Bossu as 'the best of modern critics,' and the
greater part of his Discourse concerning the Original and Progress
of Satire (1693) is little more than an adaptation of Dacier's Essai
sur la Satire. A translation of this treatise, which consists of
only a few pages, was printed in an appendix to one of Le Bossu's,
Du poème épique, in 1695. 'I presume your Ladyship has read
1 Cf. ante, p. 23.
? Apology for Heroick Poetry (1677) (Essays, ed. Ker, W. P. , vol. I, p. 181).
## p. 375 (#397) ############################################
Le Bossu and Rymer
375
Bossu,' says Brisk to lady Froth, in Congreve's Double-Dealer
(1693)'. 'O Yes, and Rapin and Dacier upon Aristotle and
Horace'; and, in Dennis's The Impartial Critic, produced in the
same year as Congreve's play, frequent appeals are made to
Dacier's translation of Aristotle's Poetics, which he had published,
avec des Remarques, in the previous year.
j
Of these three Frenchmen, all of whom have now passed into
oblivion, it may be said that, like Boileau, they express in their
literary criticism the absolutist ideas of their age. But their
outlook is narrower, and their attitude towards the ancients less
independent, than Boileau's. Conform to the Precepts of Aristotle
and Horace and to the Practice of Homer and Virgil,' is the sum-
mary of Le Bossu's longwinded treatise. Rapin says that 'to
.
please against the rules is a bad principle,' and he defines art as
'good sense reduced to method. ' In Thomas Rymer, who prefixed
to his translation a characteristic preface, he found an interpreter
who, with equal respect for Aristotle, laid even greater emphasis
on commonsense. He aspired to be “the Plain Dealer' of criticism,
and, having examined modern epic poems in the preface to Rapin,
proceeded, four years later (1678), to 'handle' The Tragedies of
the Last Age 'with the same liberty. He was answered in verse by
Butler (Upon Critics who judge of modern plays by the rules of
the Ancients), and in prose by Dryden, who, in his preface to All
for Love, the play in which he renounced rime, rebels against the
authority of our Chedreux critics,' and, while he admits that the
Ancients as Mr Rymer has judiciously observed, are and ought to
be our masters,' qualifies his admission with the remark that,
'though their models are regular, they are too little for English
tragedy. ' The earl of Mulgrave (afterwards marquis of Normanby
and duke of Buckinghamshire), in his much admired Essay upon
Poetry (1682), drew largely from Boileau's 'Art Poétique; and, in
1684, the authority of the rules' was reinforced by a translation
of the abbé d'Aubignac's Pratique du théâtre:
Then, 'tis the mode of France; without whose rules
None must presume to set up here as fools.
Rymer's Short view of Tragedy (1693), with its famous criticism of
Othello, roused Dryden to another spirited defence of English
tragedy? But the authority of Rymer continued to stand high,
1 Act II, sc. 2.
2 Dryden, Prologue to Albion and Albanius (1685).
3 Dedication of Examen Poeticum (vol. 111 of Miscellany Poems) (1693). As to
Rymer, cf. ante, chaps. vi and vii.
6
6
## p. 376 (#398) ############################################
376 The Essay and Modern English Prose
J even with Dryden. It was well, therefore, for English literature
that there were critics in France who paid little or no respect to
the rules, and who believed that individual taste was a better
criterion than Rymer's 'common-sense of all ages. ' Such were the
chevalier (afterwards marquis) de Méré, whose letters, containing
a good deal of scattered criticism, were published in 1687 ; the père
Bouhours, whose Manière de penser sur les ouvrages de l'esprit
appeared in the same year; and La Bruyère, whose Caractères,
with the admirable opening chapter Des Ouvrages de l'esprit,
followed at the beginning of the next. All these three writers,
of whom the second and third were known in England before the
close of the century, may be said to belong to the school of taste,
when taste was still a matter of individual judgment, and had not
yet stiffened into the narrow code of an oligarchy.
But there was another critic of the same school who exercised
a far greater influence on writers, for he was living in our midst.
This was Saint-Évremond, who, exiled from his own country, made
England his home from 1662 to 1665 and, again, from 1670 to his
death in 1703. He was on intimate terms with the English wits
and courtiers, with Hobbes, Waller and Cowley, with Buckingham,
Arlington and St Albans, and his conversational powers were
highly appreciated at Wills and other places of resort. His
occasional writings were translated from time to time into English,
the first to appear being a small volume of essays on the drama,
including one on English comedy (1685). Regarded as an oracle
on both sides of the Channel, he had a marked influence on
English literary criticism. But, though he had a real critical gift,
he was neither catholic nor profound. He clung to the favourites
of his youth, to Montaigne, Malherbe, Corneille, Voiture, and,
having been exiled from France at the close of la bonne Régence,
he had little sympathy for the age of Louis XIV. Molière and La
Fontaine barely found favour in his eyes; he was unjust to Racine,
and he detested Boileau. Yet much should be pardoned in a man
who ventured to say, in the year 1672, that there is nothing so
perfect in the Poetics of Aristotle that it should be a rule to all
nations and all ages. '
It was possibly owing to Saint-Évremond that Montaigne's
popularity in this country, which had lain dormant for a season,
blossomed afresh after the restoration, and gave a new stimulus to
the literary essay, which owed to him its name and original in-
spiration. For, after 1625, the year in which Bacon's Essays
received their final form, the essay began to lose its popularity.
## p. 377 (#399) ############################################
Abraham Cowley
377
Then, at the beginning of the commonwealth, a versatile writer,
named Thomas Forde, produced a volume of essays, Luisus For-
tunae (1649), the common topic of which, the mutability of man
and human affairs, strongly suggests Montaigne; and, on the eve
of the restoration, Francis Osborne published A Miscellany of
Sundry Essayes Paradoxes and Problematical Discourses,
Letters and Characters (1659), of which the style has all the
faults, and none of the virtues, of the older prose? The author,
who was master of the horse to Shakespeare's patron William
Herbert, earl of Pembroke, is best known for his Advice to a Son,
which, first published in 1656, went through numerous editions.
It is a strange admixture of platitude and paradox, much of which
might have come straight from the lips of Polonius. The style,
when it is not terse and apophthegmatic, as of one trying to
imitate Bacon, is stiff with conceits and longwinded sentences.
It was Abraham Cowley, a friend of Saint-Évremond, who
gave a new turn to the essay. Cowley has often been called a
transitional writer; but he is one in the sense, not that he dallied
in a halfway house, but that, both in prose and verse, he made a
complete transit from the old school to the new. It is particularly
interesting to trace this progress in his prose writings. In the
earliest of these, the preface to the 1656 edition of his poems, his
sentences are at first cumbrous and involved, and though, when he
warms to his work, they become shorter and better balanced, there
remains a certain stiffness in the style quite unlike the con-
versational ease of his later essays. It is nearer to Jeremy Taylor
(who was only five years Cowley's senior, and who died in the
same year) than to Dryden. To the older school also belongs the
Discourse by way of Vision concerning the Government of Oliver
Cromwell (1661), of which the latter part is a fine example of
rhetorical prose. Even in the preface to Cutter of Coleman-
Street? (1663), though the sentences, as a rule, are short and
well coordinated, Cowley has by no means shaken himself free
from the old mannerism. The essays proper, eleven in number,
were all written during the last four or five years of his life, and,
to most of them, a more approximate date can be assigned.
In 1663, having been disappointed of the mastership of the Savoy
hospital, he accomplished his design of withdrawing himself from
all tumults and business of the world,' by retiring to Barn Elms
on the Thames, then a favourite resort of Londoners. Before this,
6
1 Cf. ante, vol. VII, chap. VIII.
? As to Cowley's poetry, see ante, vol. vii, chap. II, pp. 61 ff.
## p. 378 (#400) ############################################
378 The Essay and Modern English Prose
I
he must have written the essay entitled The danger of Procrasti-
nation, in which he refers to his design'as only in contemplation.
It is not without charm, but long sentences still occur. Transitional
in style, also, is the essay Of Agriculture, in which he proposes
that‘one college in each University should be erected and appro-
priated to this Study,' and the short essay entitled The Garden,
dedicated to his friend Evelyn, which was written in 1664, between
the publication of Evelyn's Kalendarium Hortense and that of his
Gardening. Cowley speaks of himself as 'sticking still in the inn
of a hired house and a garden. ' In April 1665, he moved to the
Porch House, Chertsey, and there he died two, years later.
To these last two years of his life belong the essays Of Obscurity,
Of My Self and that entitled The dangers of an Honest man in
such Company; and to the same period we may with all probability
assign Of Solitude, of Greatness and The Shortness of Life and un-
certainty of Riches. In these six essays, Cowley has found his style
and his method. The influence of Montaigne is unmistakable. In the
two essays in which he is mentioned by name, Of Solitude and Of.
Greatness, not only the titles, but some of the contents, are borrowed
from him. Of those chief characteristics which mark the essai of
Montaigne in its final phase of development—the examples from
classical and other authors, the personal element and the artistic
workmanship—none is wanting in Cowley. Yet he is no mere
satellite of Montaigne. He is saved from this by the personal
element in his writings. In the words of his biographer, his essays
are a real chronicler of his own thoughts upon the point of his
retirement. ' In spite of The Spectator's sneer that 'he praised
solitude when he despaired of shining in a court,' there is no reason
to doubt his earnest affection for obscurity and retirement. We
can see, too, in his essays, the other qualities ascribed to him by
Sprat—his lack of affectation, his modesty and humility, and, above
all, the pleasant gravity of his speech. The essay Of Greatness may
be taken as an example of his method. Here we find, not the
solitary self-communing of a Burton or a Browne, but a friendly
interchange of confidence between author and reader—an anecdote
freely translated from the elder Seneca, a few examples from
Suetonius of the foibles of the Roman emperors; a pointed
reference to the late giant of our nation'; a quotation or two
from the Latin poets; and a few lines of the author's own. There
is no disdain of commonplaces; but they are dressed up as
' ridiculous paradoxes,' before being stripped and presented to
the reader as brand-new truths. - As for the style, it is neither stiff
## p. 379 (#401) ############################################
Cowley. Sprat. Sir William
Temple 379
」
nor slovenly; neither a court suit, nor a dressing gown and slippers.
The choice of words is fastidious, without being affected; the use
of metaphor is restrained; sentences are well turned, but not all
cut to the same pattern. The artist, in short, has concealed his art.
Cowley, we are told, intended to publish a discourse upon style,
It would have been agreeable reading; but it would doubtless
have revealed as little of his secret as have similar treatises by
later masters of the art of prose.
Cowley's essays were first printed, under the title Several
Discourses, by way of Essays, in Verse and Prose, in 1668, the year
after his death. In the same year, his friend Thomas Sprat (after-
wards bishop of Rochester) wrote an elegant'account of his life
and writings, which, unfortunately, is as sparing of facts as the same
writer's History of the Royal Society. Worse than this, having
told us that Cowley excelled in his letters to his private friends-
as we can well believe from the one letter of this sort which has
escaped destruction:-Sprat declines to publish them on the ground
that 'in such letters the souls of men should appear undressed;
and in that negligent habit, they may be fit to be seen by one or
two in a chamber, but not to go abroad into the street. '
Happily, one collection of private letters of this period has
been preserved, which reveals a‘native tenderness and innocent
gaiety of mind' equal to Cowley's. These are the letters of
Dorothy Osborne, niece of Francis Osborne, written to her future
husband, Sir William Temple, between the autumn of 1652 and
that of 1654. She not only writes delightful letters, full of good
sense, penetration and humour, but she has views of her own
about the epistolary style. 'All letters, methinks, should be free
and easy as one's discourse: not studied as an oration, not made
up of hard words like a charm. ' This criticism she does not
consider applicable to the letters of her lover.
Nothing is more pleasant than to trace through the records of
Temple's political life the services rendered to him, and, through
him, to the public interest, by this most devoted of women, though
the title has been held to be disputable on behalf of Temple's
sister, lady Giffard, whom he commemorated with his wife and
himself on his tombstone. Lady Giffard gave up the whole of
her long widowhood to the companionship and service of her
beloved brother, and wrote anonymously the brief Life and
1 A letter to Sprat is printed in Johnson's Life of Cowley. The letters written to
Henry Bennet (afterwards earl of Arlington), from Paris, in 1650, which are printed
in Miscellanea Aulica, contain only public news.
## p. 380 (#402) ############################################
380 The Essay and Modern English Prose
admirable character of him, afterwards prefixed to the folio edition
of his works (1750). But, although, at times, it was more convenient
for lady Giffard to be the companion of her brother's journeys
than it was for his wife, the latter was by no means, as has been
suggested, thrown into the shade by her, and a complete harmony
of purpose and feeling seems to have existed among the trio.
Lady Temple was taken into her husband's confidence as com-
pletely in his public, as in his private, business, except when he
was under obligations of absolute secrecy; when left behind at
the Hague, she was able to give him trustworthy information as to
Buckingham's negotiations with France; and she had the principal
share in the confidential enquiries as to what 'concern'd the
Person, Humour and Dispositions' of the young princess Mary of
York whose hand William of Orange thereupon made up his mind
to ask in marriage? . Lady Giffard's own letters, which have been
recently published, lack the rare charm which attaches to those of
her sister-in-law, after, as well as before, marriage, even at seasons
when, according to lady Temple's own description, she felt ‘as weary
as a dog without his Master. ' The greatest tragedy of her life, the
death by his own hand of the son of whom, in his babyhood, she
had written as 'the quietest best little boy that ever was borne,'
seems to school her into a calm solemnity of expression which has
a pathos of its own, unlike that which mingles with the humour
of her earlier writing.
Temple's own letters-not including those to Dorothy-were
published after his death by his quondam secretary Swift (whose
reverence for his patron certainly did not go deep), the first two
volumes appearing in 1700, and the third in 17033. This corre-
spondence, which includes many letters from Arlington, lord keeper
Bridgeman, and others (with Clifford, notwithstanding their con-
nection through lady Temple, her husband was quite out of touch
1 See Temple's Memoirs (ed. 1692), p. 155; and cf. the volume cited in the next
note, pp. 129–130.
? By Miss Julia Longe (1911). The collection includes, besides a few letters from
lady Temple to her husband, several letters by lady Giffard and her correspondents,
extending over the long period of years from 1664 to 1722. Among these correspondents
are Mrs Katherine Philips ('the Matchless Orinda') in a rather longwinded letter,
Sir William Godolphin (an admirer of Sacharissa), the mad lord Lincoln, lady Berkeley
(afterwards countess of Portland), the duchess of Somerset and Edward Young (author
of Night Thoughts). The length of time covered by this correspondence deprives it of
value as characteristic of any particular period; but the collection, as a whole, s an
interesting supplement to the Dorothy Osborne series.
The volume of letters of 1668 and 1669, published in 1699 by Jones, D. , was
unauthorised; but there is no reason for doubting the authenticity of its contents.
See Courtenay, T. P. , The Life of Sir William Temple, vol. II, p. 142.
## p. 381 (#403) ############################################
Temple's Letters
381
from the first), fails to warrant the statement of its title-page, that it
contains 'an account of the most Important Transactions that pass'd
in Christendom' during the period which the earlier volumes cover
(1665—72)'; but it furnishes a lucid survey of unusual interest.
In his Letters, even more conspicuously than in his Memoirs,
Temple's style is wholly unaffected and unambitious, and the
early letter to his father in Ireland, giving an account of his visit
to the slippery bishop of Münster, is an admirable specimen of
lively narrative. It is worth noticing that not only Temple but
most of the men of affairs who correspond with him write in the
same straightforward and simple style—it was a period when much
importance had begun to be attached in France to the clearness
and readableness of diplomatic despatches, and it was natural that
the same habit should have become more common in English diplo-
matic correspondence. In 1666, Temple was, as he says, “Young and
Very New in Business’; but it was not long before he was engaged
in the negotiations of which the result was a diplomatic master-
piece, the famous Triple Alliance of 1668, and in those which
accompanied its break-up. A considerable number of Temple’s
letters and other papers are in French, Latin or Spanish, in all of
which tongues he was a proficient; but he naturally finds few
opportunities for a display of literary taste as well as of linguistic
ability. The personal interest of some of his letters is, however,
considerable; not only his trust in his wife, but his modest and
unaffected estimate of the value of his own public services, even
in so exceptional an instance as the carrying through of the Triple
Alliance, and bringing "Things drawn out of their Center' back
'to their Center again,' cannot fail to engage the sympathy of the
reader.
The distinctive qualities of Temple as a writer of clear and
agreeable prose are even more distinctive of his Memoirs, which
are concerned with the later years of his career-from 1674,
when the conclusion of peace with the Dutch and the general
i Swift makes & similar criticism of the title originally given to Temple's Memoirs
when published without his authority. See Preface to part ti (ed. 1709).
? In a letter dated August 1667 (vol. I, p. 117), Temple expresses a wish that Cowley
could sing the heroio death of captain Douglas in his burning ship at Chatham, and,
generally, that something could be done 'to turn the Vein of Wits,' and 'to raise up
the Esteem of some Qualities, above their real value, rather than bring everything,'
even the poetry of Mr Waller, 'to Burlesque. ' As it is, he says, in offering this curious
though unconscious contribution to the 'heroio' tendency in contemporary literature,
we 'neither act Things worth Relating, nor relate Things worth the Reading. ' It would
almost seem as if Temple’s absence from home had left him in ignorance of the
appearance, in this very year 1667, of Annus Mirabilis.
## p. 382 (#404) ############################################
382 The Essay and Modern English Prose
desire of inducing the French government to follow the example
of the English brought him again to the front, to the con-
clusion of the peace of Nymegen, in 1678, and thence to his final
withdrawal, at the very height of political agitation at home,
from all further open share in public affairs. The second part
professes to begin in 1672 (though it cannot really be said to go
back beyond 1674), and was preceded by a first part beginning
with 1665, which, at some unknown period of his life, and for reasons
which can only be conjectured', was destroyed by the author himself.
Thus, only the second part, published without authority in 1691
and republished by Swift in 1692, and the third part, published by
him on his own motion, remain to us. But they are among the
1
best examples of a class of literature which was as yet new in
England-memoirs of affairs, as well as of personal experiences,
conveying the information and instruction which they are designed
to impart in a thoroughly readable and often highly attractive
style. It would not be easy to find a more lucid account of the
political results of the declaration of war by England against the
Dutch, with which the narrative opens, or of the impasse to
which the selfishness of party purposes and personal interests had
reduced English politics when Temple bade them a long farewell.
On the other hand, few memoirs or diaries of the time succeed
better in suggesting a lifelike, and, at the same time, reasonable,
conception of both the ways of talking and the ways of thinking
of two princes so different from one another as were Charles II
and William III (before his accession to the English throne). It is
not a little to Temple's credit as a diplomatist that he should have
been able, in a very uncommon degree, to gain the confidence
of both; it is hardly less to his credit as a writer that, especially
in the case of Charles II, to none of whose weaknesses he was
blind, he should have been able to show what there was in him
that fitted him for his destiny.
In the preface to part III of these Memoirs, Swift is at pains
to refute the objections taken against them 'first, as to the Matter;
that the Author speaks too much of himself; next, as to the Style;
that he affects the Use of French Words, as well as some Turns
of Expression peculiar to that Language. ' Temple's nature, no
doubt, was, in a sense, self-centred, but his Memoirs preserve a due
1 See Courtenay, 4. 6. vol. 11, p. 110; and ibid. pp. 242—3 as to the protest of lady
Giffard against the publication of part in and Swift's angry rejoinder. The whole
story of Swift's relations with the Temple family, and, more especially, with lady
Giffard, whom he hated, is discussed by Miss Longe, u. s. pp. 179 ff. , but belongs to
the history of Swift rather than to that of his patron.
## p. 383 (#405) ############################################
Temple's Memoirs and Observations 383
balance between egotism and a reticence about himself which would
have detracted from the impression of veracity conveyed by them,
besides depriving them of much of the human interest without
which many valuable political memoirs have become virtually closed
> books. - Temple's Gallicisms of vocabulary and expression Swift
seeks to excuse by more or less ingenious pleas; but, to modern
English readers, Temple's style will not seem to stand in need of
defence, whether or not there were many French words which he
blotted out, as Swift states, in order to put English in their place.
On the other hand, if we may ourselves be guilty of the fault
imputed to him, he was an excellent raconteur; and his good
stories are all the better because they are neither too long nor too
numerous. They often point a characteristic trait in princes or
statesmen or, like the anecdote of Richelieu's wrathful outburst
against Charles I, illustrate the genesis of a whole Iliad of truths;
a
occasionally, they are merely amusing 'problems, like the story of
the old count of Nassau and the parrot.
Society was the earliest to appear, and, even if we include the
scientific societies of the world, it has had the most continuous
existence. Indeed, before its birth, it underwent a long period of
incubation, and its inception was in reality in 1645. At that date,
a society known as the Philosophical, or, as Boyle called it, the
## p. 365 (#387) ############################################
Cowley and the Royal Society 365
>
'Invisible,' college came into being, which met from time to
time at Gresham college and elsewhere in London, During
the civil war, this society was split in two, some members
meeting in London, some at Oxford, but the meetings, wher-
ever held, were at irregular intervals. On the restoration, the
meetings were resumed in London and, in 1662, the society
received the royal charter.
Of all the poets of the time, Cowley took, perhaps, the greatest
interest in science. He had, indeed, like Evelyn and at about the
same date, developed a plan for the institution of a college of
science. Evelyn explains his scheme in a letter addressed to Robert
Boyle, dated 3 September 1659 from Sayes court, which contains
minute details as to the buildings, the maintenance, and the
government of his college, the inmates of which were to preserve
science and cultivate themselves. ' Cowley's scheme was also
elaborately thought out, and had the original and admirable
suggestion that, out of the twenty salaried professors, sixteen
should be always resident and four always travelling in the four
quarters of the world, in order that they might 'give a constant
account of all things that belong to the learning and especially
Natural Experimental Philosophy, of those parts. ' To his 'Philo-
sophical Colledge' was to be attached a school of two hundred
boys. Both these schemes, according to bishop Sprat, hastened
the foundation of the Royal Society, of which both projectors were
original members.
Cowley's poems were greatly admired during his lifetime, later
critics have considered him affected, perhaps because, like Donne,
he understood, and was not afraid to use the technical language of
the schools. We have quoted some of his lines on Harvey, and
may add a few from the ode with which he greeted the birth of
the Royal Society :
From . . all long Errors of the way,
In which our Praedecessors went,
And like th’ old Hebrews many years did stray
In Desarts but of small extent,
Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last
The barren Wilderness he past,
Did on the very Border stand
Of the blest promis'd Land,
And from the Mountains Top of his Exalted Wit,
Saw it himself, and shewed us it.
But Life did never to one Man allow
Time to Discover Worlds, and Conquer too;
Nor can so short a Line sufficient be
To fadome the vast depths of Natures Sea:
## p. 366 (#388) ############################################
366
The Progress of Science
The work he did we ought t'admire,
And were unjust if we should more require
From his few years, divided 'twixt th’ Excess
Of low Affliction, and high Happiness.
For who on things remote can fix his sight,
That's alwayes in a Triumph, or a Fight?
Donne, who, like Cowley, indulged in quaint poetical conceits
and who founded a new school of poetry, abjuring classical con-
ventions and classical characters, and treating of topics and objects
of everyday life, was not afraid of realism. 'Upon common objects,
Dr Johnson tells us, he was ‘unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle. '
Space limits us to one quotation:
Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee.
Donne did not of course foresee the appalling part that these insects,
by the habits he mentions, play in the spread of such diseases
as bubonic plague and many epizootics in animals.
The dramatists of the Stewart period hardly afford us the help
we need in estimating the position occupied by science and by men
of science in the world of the seventeenth century. The astrologer
and the alchemist were then stock characters of the drama of
everyday life, just as the company promoter is now. "The Gentle-
“
men of Trinity Colledge' presented before the King's Majesty'a
comedy entitled Albumazar, which takes its name from the chief
character, an astrologer, a very arrant knave, and the type of the
false man of science. This play, originally printed in 1615, was soon
forgotten, but it was revived in 1668 and met with great success.
Samuel Butler, who was not a fellow of the Royal Society, for
some reason difficult to explain, spent much time in attacking it.
He wrote his entertaining satire on the virtuosi entitled The
Elephant in the Moon in short verse, and was so pleased with
it that he wrote it over again in long verse? Though this 'Satire
upon the Royal Society' remains a fragment, enough of it is extant
to show Butler did not appreciate what even in these days is not
always appreciated, that the minute investigation of subjects and
objects which to the ordinary man seem trivial and vain often lead
to discoveries of the profoundest import to mankind.
Ben Jonson, with his flair for presenting what zoologists
call 'type species,' showed, as has been seen, in his Alchemist
6
Cf. ante, chap. II.
## p. 367 (#389) ############################################
Political Economists
367
a
an unusual, but a thorough, mastery of the half scientific and
half quack jargon of the craft, so that this play is a quarry for
all interested in the history of chemical and physical studies.
To the play-writer of the time, the man of science or of pseudo-
science was a vague, peevish pedant, much occupied with physio-
gnomies, dreams and fantastic ideas as to the properties and powers
of various substances. But there seems to have been a clear
distinction drawn between a real and a false astrology, as is shown
in Dryden's An Evening's Love (1668)".
The political economists of the seventeenth century
were greatly influenced by the Baconian enthusiasm for empirical study;
they were eager to accumulate and interpret facts, and to apply inductive
methods to political phenomena. They therefore concerned themselves with
the anatomy of the body politic, and with numerical observations which
served as the best available substitute for experiment. They followed the
analogy of the biological rather than of the mathematical science of their
day; hence, their mode of thought has a close affinity with that which has
become current since the decline of the classical school of Political Economy.
Sir William Petty and the philosopher Locke are the best
known names in this group of political economists. Locke, in
particular, was interested in questions concerning the currency and
the rate of interest. Sir William Petty, who was among the first to
state clearly the nature of rent, wrote a celebrated Treatise of
Taxes and Contributions Captain John Graunt's Natural and
Political Observations marked the beginning of that interest in
statistical data concerning health and population which is a dis-
tinguishing feature of modern economic research. Another writer,
Samuel Fortrey, followed Petty in his endeavour to go behind the
mere art of taxation and analyse the ultimate sources of national
wealth in the land and labour of the country. In general, it may
be said that, in the seventeenth century, political economy was still
an art rather than a science. Between these writings and Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), there was a great gap; but the
practical observations of the seventeenth century were not without
use in supplying material for his scholarly and impartial analysis.
i Cf. ante, chap. I.
? Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. a1, p. 380.
? Cf. ante, chap. xiv.
## p. 368 (#390) ############################################
CHAPTER XVI
THE ESSAY AND THE BEGINNING OF MODERN
ENGLISH PROSE
PERHAPS the most important literary achievement that falls
within the period covered by this volume is the creation of a prose
style, which, in structure if not in vocabulary, is essentially the
same as that of today. Caroline prose, the prose of Milton and
Taylor, of Browne and Clarendon, had produced, in the hands of
genius, some of the noblest passages in our literature. But, at the
restoration, men began to feel the need of an instrument upon
which the everyday performer might play-an instrument suited
to an age of reason, possessing, before all things, the homely virtues
of simplicity, correctness, lucidity and precision. These qualities,
indeed, were not unknown to English prose before the restoration.
They are to be found in private letters, not meant for the public
eye. Above all, they are to be found in the writings of the veteran
Hobbes, who, like Bacon and Ben Jonson, with both of whom he
had literary relations, disdained all superfluity of ornament, and
was content to make his prose a terse and pregnant expression of
a clear and vigorous intellect. But even Hobbes is by no means
free from the besetting sins of the older prose-careless construc-
tion and trailing relative clauses.
The new prose was the work of a multiplicity of causes, all
more or less reflecting the temper of the age. One of these was
the growing interest in science, and the insistence of the new
Royal Society on the need of a clear and plain style for scientific
exposition.
There is one thing more about which the Society has been most solicitous;
and that is the manner of their Discourse: which, unless they had been only
watchful to keep in due temper, the whole spirit and vigour of their Design
had been soon eaten out by the luxury and redundance of speech. . . . And, in
few words, I dare say that of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner
obtain'd than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this
volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. . . . It will
suffice my present purpose to point out what has been done by the Royal
## p. 369 (#391) ############################################
Demand for Simplicity and Clearness 369
j
Society towards the correcting of excesses in Natural Philosophy, to which
it is of all others, a most profest enemy. They have therefore been most
vigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this
extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all ampli-
fication, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive
purity and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things almost in an equal
number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked,
natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native eas'ness,
bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and
preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before
that of Wits or Scholars.
So writes Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society. Almost
at the same time, in December 1664, his colleagues gave effect to
their views by appointing a committee for the improvement of the
English language, which included, besides himself, Waller, Dryden
and Evelyn'. Doubtless, it was out of this committee that the idea
arose of founding an English academy for the 'improvement of
speaking and writing' on the model of the French one. This idea
was discussed at three or four meetings held at Gray's inn, where,
in addition to the above, Cowley and the duke of Buckingham,
also members of the Royal Society, were present. But, in con-
sequence of the plague and 'other circumstances intervening,' the
plan came to nothing? '
The same need for greater plainness and simplicity of language
was felt in pulpit oratory so far back as 1646, when Wilkins, after-
wards bishop of Chester, one of the founders of the Royal Society,
and its first secretary, had recommended, in his popular Eccle-
siastes or the Gift of Preaching, that the style of preaching should
be plain and without rhetorical flourishes. After the restoration,
these views found an adequate exponent in his friend John
Tillotson, whose sermons at Lincoln's inn and St Lawrence Jewry
attracted large congregations. His St Paul's sermon, preached
before the lord mayor, in March 1664, and printed by request
under the title The Wisdom of being religious, is, in its perfect
plainness and absence of rhetoric, an instructive contrast to the
brilliantly imaginative discourse which Jeremy Taylor delivered,
only eight months earlier, at the funeral of archbishop Bramhall.
But the reformation of pulpit oratory was not the work of one
2
1 Evelyn embodied his views in a letter to the chairman, Sir Peter Wyche, which
is printed in J. E. Spingarn’s Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, vol. II,
pp. 310 ff.
Evelyn to Pepys (op. cit. vol. II, pp. 327 ff. ). As to the origin of the Royal Society
see, also, ante, chap. xv.
3 Cf. , as to the change in the style of pulpit oratory, ante, chap. XII.
* See ante, ib.
E. L. VIII. CH, XVI.
24
## p. 370 (#392) ############################################
370 The Essay and Modern English Prose
.
sermon or one man. Both Stillingfleet, reader at the Temple, who
was even more popular than Tillotson, and South, public orator at
Oxford, who was made a prebendary of Westminster in 1663,
belonged to the modern school. In a sermon preached on Ascen-
sion day 1667, the latter divine commended apostolic preaching for
its plainness and simplicity :
nothing here of the finger of the North-star . . . nothing of the door of angel's
wings or the beautiful locks of cherubims: no starched similitudes, intro-
duced with a 'thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion,' and
the like.
This ungenerous hit at Jeremy Taylor, who was lately dead, well
marks the antithesis between the new age and the old, between wit
and poetry, between reason and imagination.
Dryden's statement that‘if he had any talent for English prose
it was owing to his having often read the writings of the great
archbishop Tillotson' must be regarded as a piece of generous
exaggeration. At the most, he can only have learnt from him the
virtues of clear and logical statement, and of short, well coordi-
nated sentences. In the epistle dedicatory of The Rival-Ladies
(1664), and in the earlier part of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie
written in the summer of 1665, his management of the clause is
still somewhat uncertain. It is not till Neander, who represents
Dryden, joins in the discussion that we recognise our first master
of modern prose.
In the Essay of Dramatick Poesie, the conversational character
of Dryden's style is, also, already apparent. This, of course, is
due, in part, to the dialogue form, but we may also trace in it the
influence of Will's coffee-house, where, though he was 'not very
conversible? ,' he was listened to as an oracle. The statement sug-
gests a man who talked with unusual deliberation and precision, and
with a nice choice of words, and whose written style was thus a more
exact copy of his talk than is ordinarily the case. Moreover, that
style is always refined and well bred, reflecting, in this, the tone of the
court and, particularly, that of the king. "The desire,' says Dryden
in his Defence of the Epilogue (1672), ‘of imitating so great a
pattern loosened' the English from their stiff forms of conversa-
tion, and made them easy and pliant to each other in discourse. '
And, of Charles II, Halifax says that his wit 'consisted chiefly in
the quickness of his apprehension. ' It was a trait which he
inherited-with others—from his grandfather Henri IV, and
he gave expression to it with a refinement of language and a
1 Pope on Spence, sec. VII, p. 261 (Singer's ed. ).
## p. 371 (#393) ############################################
Early French Influence. Heroic Romances 371
conversational ease natural to one who had spent five years in
Paris society.
The influx of French fashions at the restoration has become a
commonplace with historians; but, so far as regards literature, it
had begun at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. The marriage
of Charles I with Henrietta Maria (1625) gave a fresh impulse to
the movement, and it was under the queen's auspices, i not by her
actual command, that an English version of Corneille's Cid was put
on the stage in 1638, little more than a year after its publication in
French. In the same year, three volumes of Balzac's. Letters
appeared in an English translation, one of them in a second edition.
The vogue of a rhetorician like Balzac, whose style is more important
than his thought, is a striking testimony to the high estimation in
which the language and literature of France were then held. It
must be remembered that Richelieu's great design of making France
the first power in Europe was just beginning to be successful, and
that it was partly in furtherance of this that, in 1634, he had
founded the Académie française. Though the civil war (1642—8)
checked, for a time, the French studies of Englishmen, it ultimately
contributed to their diffusion. For it sent most leading English men
of letters to Paris. In 1646, Hobbes, 'the first of all that fled,'
Waller, D'Avenant, Denham, Cowley and Evelyn were all gathered
together in the French capital. Cowley remained there till 1656;
D'Avenant returned, a prisoner, in 1650, the others in 1652.
In 1651, D'Avenant published his unfinished heroic poem
Gondibert, which he had written at Paris, and which, in general
conception and tone, shows the influence of the heroic romances ? .
Their popularity in England is well known? Gomberville's Polex-
andre appeared in an English dress in 1647 but ‘so disguised' that
Dorothy Osborne, that ardent reader of romances,'hardly knew it. '
A translation of La Calprenède's Cléopâtre, and two translations of
his Cassandre, began to appear in 1652 (Sir Charles Cottrell's
translation of the former was published in 1676) English
versions of Madeleine de Scudéry's Ibrahim, Le Grand Cyrus and
Clélie followed in 1652, 1653–5 and 1656–61. There was a sub-
sequent version of the last named in 1678, and translations by
John Phillips of La Calprenède's Pharamond and of Madeleine
de Scudéry's Almahide in the previous year. English imitations
.
also appeared, such as lord Broghill (Orrery)'s Parthenissa (first
1 See, as to Gondibert, ante, vol. vii, chap, m, and cf. p. 9 of the present volume.
2 Cf. ante, chap. I, as to their influence upon the English drama, and upon heroic
plays in particular.
24--2
## p. 372 (#394) ############################################
372 The Essay and Modern English Prose
6
part) in 1654, with which, in spite of its “handsome language,'
Dorothy Osborne was not very much taken, and Sir George Mac-
kenzie's Aretina or the Serious Romance in 1661. A complete
edition of Parthenissa in three volumes was published in 1665 and
1667. The most active translator at this time was John Davies
of Kidwelly. Besides Clélie (1652) and the last four parts of
Cléopâtre (1658–60), he translated novels by Scarron (1657—67);
Voiture's Letters (1657), which soon eclipsed Balzac's in favour
and are recommended by Locke as a pattern for 'letters of
compliment, mirth, railery or conversation’; Sorel's Le Berger
extravagant (1653); and Scarron's Nouvelles tragi-comiques
(1657—62). The same author's Don Japhet d Arménie and Les
trois Dorothées were translated in 1657, and his Roman comique
in 1676. But it was his burlesques which had the greatest vogue
in this country and produced numerous imitators. Charles Cotton
led the way with his Scarronides, a burlesque of the first book of
Vergil, in 1664, and followed it up with the fourth book in 1665.
Other writers burlesqued Homer and Ovid, all outdoing Scarron in
coarseness and vulgarity. In the words of Dryden, Parnassus spoke
the cant of Billingsgate.
But, to return to the days of the commonwealth, there appeared,
in 1653, the translation of a more famous work, which, in one sense,
was a burlesque. This was Sir Thomas Urquhart's remarkable
version of the first two books of Rabelais's great romance. It
apparently fell flat, for the third book was not published till forty
years later? Greater success attended the translation of another
monument of French prose, Pascal's Lettres Provinciales, which,
under the title The Mysterie of Jesuitisme, discovered in certain
letters, was published in 1657, the year in which Pascal wrote the
last of the letters, a new edition being called for in the following
year. And a translation of Descartes's Traité des passions de
Tôme (1650) testifies to an interest in that psychological analysis
which was to be a brilliant feature of the new school of French
writers.
At the restoration, there was a decided falling off in this work
of translation. In fact, all the translations from the French pro-
duced during the twenty-five years of Charles II's reign hardly
surpass in number those which appeared during the last eight
years of the commonwealth. The first decade after the restoration
was marked chiefly by a fairly successful attempt to acclimatise
1 Cf. vol. iv, p. 8; and see, as to Urquhart, vol. YII, pp. 253 ff. As to Butler
and Rabelais, see ante, chap. II.
## p. 373 (#395) ############################################
Later French Influence. Boileau 373
6
Corneille, the details of which have been given in a previous
chapter? The psychological tragedies of Racine were less to the
taste of English audiences, and it was not till nearly the close of
queen Anne's reign that they secured a footing on the English
stage with Ambrose Philips's Distrest Mother (Andromaque).
The unparalleled debt to Molière has been pointed out in an
earlier chapter? It need only be said here that, of all his thirty-
one plays, only about half-a-dozen escaped the general pillages.
La Fontaine was not translated into English till the next century;
but he was read and admired by the English wits, and it was
only his growing infirmities which, towards the end of his life,
prevented him from accepting an invitation sent by some of his
English admirers, who 'engaged to find him an honourable sub-
sistence' in London.
To Boileau, the remaining member of this illustrious group of
friends, Dryden refers in 1677, three years after the publication
of L'Art Poétique, as one of the chief critics of his age; while, in
the Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire
(1693), he pays a splendid tribute to him, as 'the admirable
Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose expressions are
noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose
satire is pointed and whose sense is close. ' His Lutrin appeared
in English in 1682; his Art Poétique, translated by Sir William
Soames and revised by Dryden, in 1683; and, about the same
time, Oldham imitated two of his satires, the fifth and the
-eighth. The second had been already translated by Butler, and
the third by Buckingham and Rochester. Bossuet is represented
by some of his controversial writings, such as his Exposition de la
Doctrine de l Église catholique and Conférence avec M. Claude,
and by his great Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, which was
translated in 1686. Malebranche's Recherche de la Vérité and La
Rochefoucauld's Maximes both appeared in English in 1694, and,
of the latter, there had been an earlier translation by Mrs Aphra
Behn. Pascal's Pensées and La Bruyère's Caractères, which Dryden
couples together as two of the most entertaining books that modern
French can boast of,' were translated in 1688 and 1699 respectively;
in 1688, too, appeared an English version of Mme de la Fayette's
Princesse de Cleves. But a mere record of translations from a
1 See ante, chap. VII. Le Menteur was acted and printed in London under the title
The Lyer in 1671.
It was rptd with the first title The Mistaken Beuuty in 1685.
? See ante, chap. v.
3 See Jacob, Giles, Poetical Register, vol. I, p. 292; Ward, A. W. , History of
English Dramatic Literature, vol. II, p. 315 8.
9
## p. 374 (#396) ############################################
374 The Essay and Modern English Prose
- foreign literature is far from constituting a measure of its influence.
The real influence which French literature exercised upon our own
between the restoration and the close of the seventeenth century
may be classified under four heads: that of Corneille and the
heroic romances upon tragedy, that of Molière upon comedy, that
of Montaigne upon the essay and that of French criticism upon
English criticism. Neither the first nor the second of these in-
fluences is really important: for the fashion of the riming heroic
play soon passed away; and, though our comedy borrowed its
materials from Molière, it took over little of his form, and nothing
of his spirit. The influence of Montaigne upon the essay will be
discussed later. But it may be well, in the first instance, to con-
sider the influence which is the most important of all, because it
affected our whole literature and not merely some special depart-
ment of it.
The debt of English literature to French criticism begins with
D'Avenant's laboured and longwinded preface to Gondibert, written
in Paris and there published, with an answer by Hobbes, in 1650.
It was, no doubt, suggested by Chapelain's turgid and obscure
preface to Marino's Adone (1623). "In 1650, Chapelain was at the
height of his authority as a critic, and the whole tone of this piece
of writing, with the talk about nature and the insistence on the
need of criticism as well as inspiration in poetry, is thoroughly
French. Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, is perfectly
independent in his views; but he must have written it with a copy
of the 1660 edition of Corneille's plays, which contain his Examens
and Discours, by his side'. Among the French critics of the next
generation, Boileau stands out prominent, but his authority in
England during the last quarter of the seventeenth century was
balanced by that of Rapin, whose Réflexions sur la poétique
d'Aristote was translated by Rymer in the same year in which
it appeared in French (1674), and of whom Dryden says that he 'is
alone sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach anew the rules
of writing? ' Le Bossu and Dacier were also highly esteemed.
Dryden speaks of Le Bossu as 'the best of modern critics,' and the
greater part of his Discourse concerning the Original and Progress
of Satire (1693) is little more than an adaptation of Dacier's Essai
sur la Satire. A translation of this treatise, which consists of
only a few pages, was printed in an appendix to one of Le Bossu's,
Du poème épique, in 1695. 'I presume your Ladyship has read
1 Cf. ante, p. 23.
? Apology for Heroick Poetry (1677) (Essays, ed. Ker, W. P. , vol. I, p. 181).
## p. 375 (#397) ############################################
Le Bossu and Rymer
375
Bossu,' says Brisk to lady Froth, in Congreve's Double-Dealer
(1693)'. 'O Yes, and Rapin and Dacier upon Aristotle and
Horace'; and, in Dennis's The Impartial Critic, produced in the
same year as Congreve's play, frequent appeals are made to
Dacier's translation of Aristotle's Poetics, which he had published,
avec des Remarques, in the previous year.
j
Of these three Frenchmen, all of whom have now passed into
oblivion, it may be said that, like Boileau, they express in their
literary criticism the absolutist ideas of their age. But their
outlook is narrower, and their attitude towards the ancients less
independent, than Boileau's. Conform to the Precepts of Aristotle
and Horace and to the Practice of Homer and Virgil,' is the sum-
mary of Le Bossu's longwinded treatise. Rapin says that 'to
.
please against the rules is a bad principle,' and he defines art as
'good sense reduced to method. ' In Thomas Rymer, who prefixed
to his translation a characteristic preface, he found an interpreter
who, with equal respect for Aristotle, laid even greater emphasis
on commonsense. He aspired to be “the Plain Dealer' of criticism,
and, having examined modern epic poems in the preface to Rapin,
proceeded, four years later (1678), to 'handle' The Tragedies of
the Last Age 'with the same liberty. He was answered in verse by
Butler (Upon Critics who judge of modern plays by the rules of
the Ancients), and in prose by Dryden, who, in his preface to All
for Love, the play in which he renounced rime, rebels against the
authority of our Chedreux critics,' and, while he admits that the
Ancients as Mr Rymer has judiciously observed, are and ought to
be our masters,' qualifies his admission with the remark that,
'though their models are regular, they are too little for English
tragedy. ' The earl of Mulgrave (afterwards marquis of Normanby
and duke of Buckinghamshire), in his much admired Essay upon
Poetry (1682), drew largely from Boileau's 'Art Poétique; and, in
1684, the authority of the rules' was reinforced by a translation
of the abbé d'Aubignac's Pratique du théâtre:
Then, 'tis the mode of France; without whose rules
None must presume to set up here as fools.
Rymer's Short view of Tragedy (1693), with its famous criticism of
Othello, roused Dryden to another spirited defence of English
tragedy? But the authority of Rymer continued to stand high,
1 Act II, sc. 2.
2 Dryden, Prologue to Albion and Albanius (1685).
3 Dedication of Examen Poeticum (vol. 111 of Miscellany Poems) (1693). As to
Rymer, cf. ante, chaps. vi and vii.
6
6
## p. 376 (#398) ############################################
376 The Essay and Modern English Prose
J even with Dryden. It was well, therefore, for English literature
that there were critics in France who paid little or no respect to
the rules, and who believed that individual taste was a better
criterion than Rymer's 'common-sense of all ages. ' Such were the
chevalier (afterwards marquis) de Méré, whose letters, containing
a good deal of scattered criticism, were published in 1687 ; the père
Bouhours, whose Manière de penser sur les ouvrages de l'esprit
appeared in the same year; and La Bruyère, whose Caractères,
with the admirable opening chapter Des Ouvrages de l'esprit,
followed at the beginning of the next. All these three writers,
of whom the second and third were known in England before the
close of the century, may be said to belong to the school of taste,
when taste was still a matter of individual judgment, and had not
yet stiffened into the narrow code of an oligarchy.
But there was another critic of the same school who exercised
a far greater influence on writers, for he was living in our midst.
This was Saint-Évremond, who, exiled from his own country, made
England his home from 1662 to 1665 and, again, from 1670 to his
death in 1703. He was on intimate terms with the English wits
and courtiers, with Hobbes, Waller and Cowley, with Buckingham,
Arlington and St Albans, and his conversational powers were
highly appreciated at Wills and other places of resort. His
occasional writings were translated from time to time into English,
the first to appear being a small volume of essays on the drama,
including one on English comedy (1685). Regarded as an oracle
on both sides of the Channel, he had a marked influence on
English literary criticism. But, though he had a real critical gift,
he was neither catholic nor profound. He clung to the favourites
of his youth, to Montaigne, Malherbe, Corneille, Voiture, and,
having been exiled from France at the close of la bonne Régence,
he had little sympathy for the age of Louis XIV. Molière and La
Fontaine barely found favour in his eyes; he was unjust to Racine,
and he detested Boileau. Yet much should be pardoned in a man
who ventured to say, in the year 1672, that there is nothing so
perfect in the Poetics of Aristotle that it should be a rule to all
nations and all ages. '
It was possibly owing to Saint-Évremond that Montaigne's
popularity in this country, which had lain dormant for a season,
blossomed afresh after the restoration, and gave a new stimulus to
the literary essay, which owed to him its name and original in-
spiration. For, after 1625, the year in which Bacon's Essays
received their final form, the essay began to lose its popularity.
## p. 377 (#399) ############################################
Abraham Cowley
377
Then, at the beginning of the commonwealth, a versatile writer,
named Thomas Forde, produced a volume of essays, Luisus For-
tunae (1649), the common topic of which, the mutability of man
and human affairs, strongly suggests Montaigne; and, on the eve
of the restoration, Francis Osborne published A Miscellany of
Sundry Essayes Paradoxes and Problematical Discourses,
Letters and Characters (1659), of which the style has all the
faults, and none of the virtues, of the older prose? The author,
who was master of the horse to Shakespeare's patron William
Herbert, earl of Pembroke, is best known for his Advice to a Son,
which, first published in 1656, went through numerous editions.
It is a strange admixture of platitude and paradox, much of which
might have come straight from the lips of Polonius. The style,
when it is not terse and apophthegmatic, as of one trying to
imitate Bacon, is stiff with conceits and longwinded sentences.
It was Abraham Cowley, a friend of Saint-Évremond, who
gave a new turn to the essay. Cowley has often been called a
transitional writer; but he is one in the sense, not that he dallied
in a halfway house, but that, both in prose and verse, he made a
complete transit from the old school to the new. It is particularly
interesting to trace this progress in his prose writings. In the
earliest of these, the preface to the 1656 edition of his poems, his
sentences are at first cumbrous and involved, and though, when he
warms to his work, they become shorter and better balanced, there
remains a certain stiffness in the style quite unlike the con-
versational ease of his later essays. It is nearer to Jeremy Taylor
(who was only five years Cowley's senior, and who died in the
same year) than to Dryden. To the older school also belongs the
Discourse by way of Vision concerning the Government of Oliver
Cromwell (1661), of which the latter part is a fine example of
rhetorical prose. Even in the preface to Cutter of Coleman-
Street? (1663), though the sentences, as a rule, are short and
well coordinated, Cowley has by no means shaken himself free
from the old mannerism. The essays proper, eleven in number,
were all written during the last four or five years of his life, and,
to most of them, a more approximate date can be assigned.
In 1663, having been disappointed of the mastership of the Savoy
hospital, he accomplished his design of withdrawing himself from
all tumults and business of the world,' by retiring to Barn Elms
on the Thames, then a favourite resort of Londoners. Before this,
6
1 Cf. ante, vol. VII, chap. VIII.
? As to Cowley's poetry, see ante, vol. vii, chap. II, pp. 61 ff.
## p. 378 (#400) ############################################
378 The Essay and Modern English Prose
I
he must have written the essay entitled The danger of Procrasti-
nation, in which he refers to his design'as only in contemplation.
It is not without charm, but long sentences still occur. Transitional
in style, also, is the essay Of Agriculture, in which he proposes
that‘one college in each University should be erected and appro-
priated to this Study,' and the short essay entitled The Garden,
dedicated to his friend Evelyn, which was written in 1664, between
the publication of Evelyn's Kalendarium Hortense and that of his
Gardening. Cowley speaks of himself as 'sticking still in the inn
of a hired house and a garden. ' In April 1665, he moved to the
Porch House, Chertsey, and there he died two, years later.
To these last two years of his life belong the essays Of Obscurity,
Of My Self and that entitled The dangers of an Honest man in
such Company; and to the same period we may with all probability
assign Of Solitude, of Greatness and The Shortness of Life and un-
certainty of Riches. In these six essays, Cowley has found his style
and his method. The influence of Montaigne is unmistakable. In the
two essays in which he is mentioned by name, Of Solitude and Of.
Greatness, not only the titles, but some of the contents, are borrowed
from him. Of those chief characteristics which mark the essai of
Montaigne in its final phase of development—the examples from
classical and other authors, the personal element and the artistic
workmanship—none is wanting in Cowley. Yet he is no mere
satellite of Montaigne. He is saved from this by the personal
element in his writings. In the words of his biographer, his essays
are a real chronicler of his own thoughts upon the point of his
retirement. ' In spite of The Spectator's sneer that 'he praised
solitude when he despaired of shining in a court,' there is no reason
to doubt his earnest affection for obscurity and retirement. We
can see, too, in his essays, the other qualities ascribed to him by
Sprat—his lack of affectation, his modesty and humility, and, above
all, the pleasant gravity of his speech. The essay Of Greatness may
be taken as an example of his method. Here we find, not the
solitary self-communing of a Burton or a Browne, but a friendly
interchange of confidence between author and reader—an anecdote
freely translated from the elder Seneca, a few examples from
Suetonius of the foibles of the Roman emperors; a pointed
reference to the late giant of our nation'; a quotation or two
from the Latin poets; and a few lines of the author's own. There
is no disdain of commonplaces; but they are dressed up as
' ridiculous paradoxes,' before being stripped and presented to
the reader as brand-new truths. - As for the style, it is neither stiff
## p. 379 (#401) ############################################
Cowley. Sprat. Sir William
Temple 379
」
nor slovenly; neither a court suit, nor a dressing gown and slippers.
The choice of words is fastidious, without being affected; the use
of metaphor is restrained; sentences are well turned, but not all
cut to the same pattern. The artist, in short, has concealed his art.
Cowley, we are told, intended to publish a discourse upon style,
It would have been agreeable reading; but it would doubtless
have revealed as little of his secret as have similar treatises by
later masters of the art of prose.
Cowley's essays were first printed, under the title Several
Discourses, by way of Essays, in Verse and Prose, in 1668, the year
after his death. In the same year, his friend Thomas Sprat (after-
wards bishop of Rochester) wrote an elegant'account of his life
and writings, which, unfortunately, is as sparing of facts as the same
writer's History of the Royal Society. Worse than this, having
told us that Cowley excelled in his letters to his private friends-
as we can well believe from the one letter of this sort which has
escaped destruction:-Sprat declines to publish them on the ground
that 'in such letters the souls of men should appear undressed;
and in that negligent habit, they may be fit to be seen by one or
two in a chamber, but not to go abroad into the street. '
Happily, one collection of private letters of this period has
been preserved, which reveals a‘native tenderness and innocent
gaiety of mind' equal to Cowley's. These are the letters of
Dorothy Osborne, niece of Francis Osborne, written to her future
husband, Sir William Temple, between the autumn of 1652 and
that of 1654. She not only writes delightful letters, full of good
sense, penetration and humour, but she has views of her own
about the epistolary style. 'All letters, methinks, should be free
and easy as one's discourse: not studied as an oration, not made
up of hard words like a charm. ' This criticism she does not
consider applicable to the letters of her lover.
Nothing is more pleasant than to trace through the records of
Temple's political life the services rendered to him, and, through
him, to the public interest, by this most devoted of women, though
the title has been held to be disputable on behalf of Temple's
sister, lady Giffard, whom he commemorated with his wife and
himself on his tombstone. Lady Giffard gave up the whole of
her long widowhood to the companionship and service of her
beloved brother, and wrote anonymously the brief Life and
1 A letter to Sprat is printed in Johnson's Life of Cowley. The letters written to
Henry Bennet (afterwards earl of Arlington), from Paris, in 1650, which are printed
in Miscellanea Aulica, contain only public news.
## p. 380 (#402) ############################################
380 The Essay and Modern English Prose
admirable character of him, afterwards prefixed to the folio edition
of his works (1750). But, although, at times, it was more convenient
for lady Giffard to be the companion of her brother's journeys
than it was for his wife, the latter was by no means, as has been
suggested, thrown into the shade by her, and a complete harmony
of purpose and feeling seems to have existed among the trio.
Lady Temple was taken into her husband's confidence as com-
pletely in his public, as in his private, business, except when he
was under obligations of absolute secrecy; when left behind at
the Hague, she was able to give him trustworthy information as to
Buckingham's negotiations with France; and she had the principal
share in the confidential enquiries as to what 'concern'd the
Person, Humour and Dispositions' of the young princess Mary of
York whose hand William of Orange thereupon made up his mind
to ask in marriage? . Lady Giffard's own letters, which have been
recently published, lack the rare charm which attaches to those of
her sister-in-law, after, as well as before, marriage, even at seasons
when, according to lady Temple's own description, she felt ‘as weary
as a dog without his Master. ' The greatest tragedy of her life, the
death by his own hand of the son of whom, in his babyhood, she
had written as 'the quietest best little boy that ever was borne,'
seems to school her into a calm solemnity of expression which has
a pathos of its own, unlike that which mingles with the humour
of her earlier writing.
Temple's own letters-not including those to Dorothy-were
published after his death by his quondam secretary Swift (whose
reverence for his patron certainly did not go deep), the first two
volumes appearing in 1700, and the third in 17033. This corre-
spondence, which includes many letters from Arlington, lord keeper
Bridgeman, and others (with Clifford, notwithstanding their con-
nection through lady Temple, her husband was quite out of touch
1 See Temple's Memoirs (ed. 1692), p. 155; and cf. the volume cited in the next
note, pp. 129–130.
? By Miss Julia Longe (1911). The collection includes, besides a few letters from
lady Temple to her husband, several letters by lady Giffard and her correspondents,
extending over the long period of years from 1664 to 1722. Among these correspondents
are Mrs Katherine Philips ('the Matchless Orinda') in a rather longwinded letter,
Sir William Godolphin (an admirer of Sacharissa), the mad lord Lincoln, lady Berkeley
(afterwards countess of Portland), the duchess of Somerset and Edward Young (author
of Night Thoughts). The length of time covered by this correspondence deprives it of
value as characteristic of any particular period; but the collection, as a whole, s an
interesting supplement to the Dorothy Osborne series.
The volume of letters of 1668 and 1669, published in 1699 by Jones, D. , was
unauthorised; but there is no reason for doubting the authenticity of its contents.
See Courtenay, T. P. , The Life of Sir William Temple, vol. II, p. 142.
## p. 381 (#403) ############################################
Temple's Letters
381
from the first), fails to warrant the statement of its title-page, that it
contains 'an account of the most Important Transactions that pass'd
in Christendom' during the period which the earlier volumes cover
(1665—72)'; but it furnishes a lucid survey of unusual interest.
In his Letters, even more conspicuously than in his Memoirs,
Temple's style is wholly unaffected and unambitious, and the
early letter to his father in Ireland, giving an account of his visit
to the slippery bishop of Münster, is an admirable specimen of
lively narrative. It is worth noticing that not only Temple but
most of the men of affairs who correspond with him write in the
same straightforward and simple style—it was a period when much
importance had begun to be attached in France to the clearness
and readableness of diplomatic despatches, and it was natural that
the same habit should have become more common in English diplo-
matic correspondence. In 1666, Temple was, as he says, “Young and
Very New in Business’; but it was not long before he was engaged
in the negotiations of which the result was a diplomatic master-
piece, the famous Triple Alliance of 1668, and in those which
accompanied its break-up. A considerable number of Temple’s
letters and other papers are in French, Latin or Spanish, in all of
which tongues he was a proficient; but he naturally finds few
opportunities for a display of literary taste as well as of linguistic
ability. The personal interest of some of his letters is, however,
considerable; not only his trust in his wife, but his modest and
unaffected estimate of the value of his own public services, even
in so exceptional an instance as the carrying through of the Triple
Alliance, and bringing "Things drawn out of their Center' back
'to their Center again,' cannot fail to engage the sympathy of the
reader.
The distinctive qualities of Temple as a writer of clear and
agreeable prose are even more distinctive of his Memoirs, which
are concerned with the later years of his career-from 1674,
when the conclusion of peace with the Dutch and the general
i Swift makes & similar criticism of the title originally given to Temple's Memoirs
when published without his authority. See Preface to part ti (ed. 1709).
? In a letter dated August 1667 (vol. I, p. 117), Temple expresses a wish that Cowley
could sing the heroio death of captain Douglas in his burning ship at Chatham, and,
generally, that something could be done 'to turn the Vein of Wits,' and 'to raise up
the Esteem of some Qualities, above their real value, rather than bring everything,'
even the poetry of Mr Waller, 'to Burlesque. ' As it is, he says, in offering this curious
though unconscious contribution to the 'heroio' tendency in contemporary literature,
we 'neither act Things worth Relating, nor relate Things worth the Reading. ' It would
almost seem as if Temple’s absence from home had left him in ignorance of the
appearance, in this very year 1667, of Annus Mirabilis.
## p. 382 (#404) ############################################
382 The Essay and Modern English Prose
desire of inducing the French government to follow the example
of the English brought him again to the front, to the con-
clusion of the peace of Nymegen, in 1678, and thence to his final
withdrawal, at the very height of political agitation at home,
from all further open share in public affairs. The second part
professes to begin in 1672 (though it cannot really be said to go
back beyond 1674), and was preceded by a first part beginning
with 1665, which, at some unknown period of his life, and for reasons
which can only be conjectured', was destroyed by the author himself.
Thus, only the second part, published without authority in 1691
and republished by Swift in 1692, and the third part, published by
him on his own motion, remain to us. But they are among the
1
best examples of a class of literature which was as yet new in
England-memoirs of affairs, as well as of personal experiences,
conveying the information and instruction which they are designed
to impart in a thoroughly readable and often highly attractive
style. It would not be easy to find a more lucid account of the
political results of the declaration of war by England against the
Dutch, with which the narrative opens, or of the impasse to
which the selfishness of party purposes and personal interests had
reduced English politics when Temple bade them a long farewell.
On the other hand, few memoirs or diaries of the time succeed
better in suggesting a lifelike, and, at the same time, reasonable,
conception of both the ways of talking and the ways of thinking
of two princes so different from one another as were Charles II
and William III (before his accession to the English throne). It is
not a little to Temple's credit as a diplomatist that he should have
been able, in a very uncommon degree, to gain the confidence
of both; it is hardly less to his credit as a writer that, especially
in the case of Charles II, to none of whose weaknesses he was
blind, he should have been able to show what there was in him
that fitted him for his destiny.
In the preface to part III of these Memoirs, Swift is at pains
to refute the objections taken against them 'first, as to the Matter;
that the Author speaks too much of himself; next, as to the Style;
that he affects the Use of French Words, as well as some Turns
of Expression peculiar to that Language. ' Temple's nature, no
doubt, was, in a sense, self-centred, but his Memoirs preserve a due
1 See Courtenay, 4. 6. vol. 11, p. 110; and ibid. pp. 242—3 as to the protest of lady
Giffard against the publication of part in and Swift's angry rejoinder. The whole
story of Swift's relations with the Temple family, and, more especially, with lady
Giffard, whom he hated, is discussed by Miss Longe, u. s. pp. 179 ff. , but belongs to
the history of Swift rather than to that of his patron.
## p. 383 (#405) ############################################
Temple's Memoirs and Observations 383
balance between egotism and a reticence about himself which would
have detracted from the impression of veracity conveyed by them,
besides depriving them of much of the human interest without
which many valuable political memoirs have become virtually closed
> books. - Temple's Gallicisms of vocabulary and expression Swift
seeks to excuse by more or less ingenious pleas; but, to modern
English readers, Temple's style will not seem to stand in need of
defence, whether or not there were many French words which he
blotted out, as Swift states, in order to put English in their place.
On the other hand, if we may ourselves be guilty of the fault
imputed to him, he was an excellent raconteur; and his good
stories are all the better because they are neither too long nor too
numerous. They often point a characteristic trait in princes or
statesmen or, like the anecdote of Richelieu's wrathful outburst
against Charles I, illustrate the genesis of a whole Iliad of truths;
a
occasionally, they are merely amusing 'problems, like the story of
the old count of Nassau and the parrot.
