Chapter IX: Milton, Taylor, Clarendon, Browne, Hobbes (1)

During the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, or (to take literary rather than chronological dates) between the death of Bacon and the publication of _Absalom and Achitophel_, there existed in England a quintet of men of letters, of such extraordinary power and individuality, that it may be doubted whether any other period of our own literature can show a group equal to them; while it is certain that no other literature, except, perhaps, in the age of Pericles, can match them. They were all, except Hobbes (who belonged by birth, though not by date and character of writing, to an earlier generation than the rest), born, and they all died, within a very few years of each other. All were prose writers of the very highest merit; and though only one was a poet, yet he had poetry enough to spare for all the five. Of the others, Clarendon, in some of the greatest characteristics of the historian, has been equalled by no Englishman, and surpassed by few foreigners. Jeremy Taylor has been called the most eloquent of men; and if this is a bold saying, it is scarcely too bold. Hobbes stands with Bacon and Berkeley at the head of English-speaking philosophers, and is, if not in general grasp, in range of ideas, or in literary polish, yet in acuteness of thought and originality of expression, perhaps the superior of both his companions. The excellence of Browne is indeed more purely literary and intensely artistic first of all--a matter of expression rather than of substance,--while he is perhaps more flawed than any of them by the fashionable vices of his time. Yet, as an artist, or rather architect, of words in the composite and florid style, it is vain to look anywhere for his superior.

John Milton--the greatest, no doubt, of the five, if only because of his mastery of either harmony--was born in London on 9th December 1608, was educated at Cambridge, studied at home with unusual intensity and control of his own time and bent; travelled to Italy, returned, and engaged in the somewhat unexpected task of school-keeping; was stimulated, by the outbreak of the disturbances between king and parliament, to take part with extraordinary bitterness in the strife of pamphlets on the republican and anti-prelatical side, defended the execution of the king in his capacity of Latin secretary to the Government (to which he had been appointed in 1649); was struck with blindness, lay hid at the Restoration for some time in order to escape the Royalist vengeance (which does not seem very seriously to have threatened him), composed and published in 1667 the great poem of _Paradise Lost_, followed it with that of _Paradise Regained_, did not a little other work in prose and poetry, and died on 8th November 1674. He had been thrice married, and his first wife had left him within a month of her marriage, thereby occasioning the singular series of pamphlets on divorce, the theories of which, had she not returned, he had, it is said, intended to put into practice on his own responsibility. The general abstinence from all but the barest biographical outline which the scale of this book imposes is perhaps nowhere a greater gain than in the case of Milton. His personal character was, owing to political motives, long treated with excessive rigour. The reaction to Liberal politics early in the nineteenth century substituted for this rigour a somewhat excessive admiration, and even now the balance is hardly restored, as may be seen from the fact that a late biographer of his stigmatises his first wife, the unfortunate Mary Powell, as "a dull and common girl," without a tittle of evidence except the bare fact of her difference with her husband, and some innuendoes (indirect in themselves, and clearly tainted as testimony) in Milton's own divorce tracts. On the whole, Milton's character was not an amiable one, nor even wholly estimable. It is probable that he never in the course of his whole life did anything that he considered wrong; but unfortunately, examples are not far to seek of the facility with which desire can be made to confound itself with deliberate approval. That he was an exacting, if not a tyrannical husband and father, that he held in the most peremptory and exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the superiority of man to woman, that his egotism in a man who had actually accomplished less would be half ludicrous and half disgusting, that his faculty of appreciation beyond his own immediate tastes and interests was small, that his intolerance surpassed that of an inquisitor, and that his controversial habits and manners outdid the license even of that period of controversial abuse,--these are propositions which I cannot conceive to be disputed by any competent critic aware of the facts. If they have ever been denied, it is merely from the amiable but uncritical point of view which blinks all a man's personal defects in consideration of his literary genius. That we cannot afford to do here, especially as Milton's personal defects had no small influence on his literary character. But having honestly set down his faults, let us now turn to the pleasanter side of the subject without fear of having to revert, except cursorily, to the uglier.

The same prejudice and partisanship, however, which have coloured the estimate of Milton's personal character have a little injured the literary estimate of him. It is agreed on all hands that Johnson's acute but unjust criticism was directed as much by political and religious prejudice as by the operation of narrow and mistaken rules of prosody and poetry; and all these causes worked together to produce that extraordinary verdict on _Lycidas_, which has been thought unintelligible. But it would be idle to contend that there is not nearly as much bias on the other side in the most glowing of his modern panegyrists--Macaulay and Landor. It is, no doubt, in regard to a champion so formidable, both as ally and as enemy, difficult to write without fear or favour, but it must be attempted.

Milton's periods of literary production were three. In each of them he produced work of the highest literary merit, but at the same time singularly different in kind. In the first, covering the first thirty years of his life, he wrote no prose worth speaking of, but after juvenile efforts, and besides much Latin poetry of merit, produced the exquisite poems of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, the _Hymn on the Nativity_, the incomparable _Lycidas_, the _Comus_ (which I have the audacity to think his greatest work, if scale and merit are considered), and the delicious fragments of the _Arcades_. Then his style abruptly changed, and for another twenty years he devoted himself chiefly to polemical pamphlets, relieved only by a few sonnets, whose strong originality and intensely personal savour are uniform, while their poetical merit varies greatly. The third period of fifteen years saw the composition of the great epics of _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_, and of the tragedy of _Samson Agonistes_, together with at least the completion of a good deal of prose, including a curious _History of England_, wherein Milton expatiates with a singular gusto over details which he must have known, and indeed allows that he knew, to be fabulous. The production of each of these periods may be advantageously dealt with separately and in order.

Milton's Latin compositions both in prose and verse lie rather outside of our scope, though they afford a very interesting subject. It is perhaps sufficient to say that critics of such different times, tempers, and attitudes towards their subject as Johnson and the late Rector of Lincoln,--critics who agree in nothing except literary competence,--are practically at one as to the remarkable excellence of Milton's Latin verse at its best. It is little read now, but it is a pity that any one who can read Latin should allow himself to be ignorant of at least the beautiful _Epitaphium Damonis_ on the poet's friend, Charles Diodati.

The dates of the few but exquisite poems of the first period are known with some but not complete exactness. Milton was not an extremely precocious poet, and such early exercises as he has preserved deserve the description of being rather meritorious than remarkable. But in 1629, his year of discretion, he struck his own note first and firmly with the hymn on the "Nativity." Two years later the beautiful sonnet on his three-and-twentieth year followed. _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ date not before, but probably not much after, 1632; _Comus_ dating from 1634, and _Lycidas_ from 1637. All these were written either in the later years at Cambridge, or in the period of independent study at Horton in Buckinghamshire--chiefly in the latter. Almost every line and word of these poems has been commented on and fought over, and I cannot undertake to summarise the criticism of others. Among the greater memorabilia of the subject is that wonderful Johnsonism, the description of _Lycidas_ as "harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing;" among the minor, the fact that critics have gravely quarrelled among themselves over the epithet "monumental" applied to the oak in _Il Penseroso_, when Spenser's "Builder Oak" (Milton was a passionate student of Spenser) would have given them the key at once, even if the same phrase had not occurred, as I believe it does, in Chaucer, also a favourite of Milton's. We have only space here for first-hand criticism.

This body of work, then, is marked by two qualities: an extraordinary degree of poetic merit, and a still more extraordinary originality of poetic kind. Although Milton is always Milton, it would be difficult to find in another writer five poems, or (taking the _Allegro_ and its companion together) four, so different from each other and yet of such high merit. And it would be still more difficult to find poems so independent in their excellence. Neither the influence of Jonson nor the influence of Donne--the two poetical influences in the air at the time, and the latter especially strong at Cambridge--produced even the faintest effect on Milton. We know from his own words, and should have known even if he had not mentioned it, that Shakespere and Spenser were his favourite studies in English; yet, save in mere scattered phrases none of these poems owes anything to either. He has teachers but no models; masters, but only in the way of learning how to do, not what to do. The "certain vital marks," of which he somewhat arrogantly speaks, are indeed there. I do not myself see them least in the poem on the "Nativity," which has been the least general favourite. It shows youth in a certain inequality, in a slight overdose of ornament, and especially in a very inartistic conclusion. But nowhere even in Milton does the mastery of harmonies appear better than in the exquisite rhythmical arrangement of the piece, in the almost unearthly beauty of the exordium, and in the famous stanzas beginning "The oracles are dumb." It must be remembered that at this time English lyric was in a very rudimentary and ill-organised condition. The exquisite snatches in the dramatists had been snatches merely; Spenser and his followers had chiefly confined themselves to elaborate stanzas of full length lines, and elsewhere the octo-syllabic couplet, or the quatrain, or the dangerous "eights and sixes," had been chiefly affected. The sestines and canzons and madrigals of the sonneteers, for all the beauty of their occasional flashes, have nothing like the gracious and sustained majesty of the "Nativity" piece. For technical perfection in lyric metre, that is not so much to be sung as said, this ode has no precedent rival. As for _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, who shall praise them fitly? They are among the few things about which there is no difference of opinion, which are as delightful to childhood as to criticism, to youth as to age. To dwell on their technical excellences (the chief of which is the unerring precision with which the catalectic and acatalectic lines are arranged and interchanged) has a certain air of impertinence about it. Even a critical King Alfonso El Sabio could hardly think it possible that Milton might have taken a hint here, although some persons have, it seems, been disturbed because skylarks do not come to the window, just as others are troubled because the flowers in _Lycidas_ do not grow at the same time, and because they think they could see stars through the "star-proof" trees of the _Arcades_.

The fragments of the masque just mentioned consist only of three songs and an address in rhymed couplets. Of the songs, those ending--

Such a rural queen,
All Arcadia hath not seen,

are equal to anything that Milton has done; the first song and the address, especially the latter, do not fall far below them. But it is in _Comus_ that, if I have any skill of criticism, Milton's poetical power is at its greatest height. Those who judge poetry on the ground of bulk, or of originality of theme, or of anything else extra-poetical,--much more those (the greater number) who simply vary transmitted ideas,--may be scandalised at this assertion, but that will hardly matter much. And indeed the indebtedness of _Comus_ in point of subject (it is probably limited to the Odyssey, which is public property, and to George Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_, which gave little but a few hints of story) is scarcely greater than that of _Paradise Lost_; while the form of the drama, a kind nearly as venerable and majestic as that of the epic, is completely filled. And in _Comus_ there is none of the stiffness, none of the _longueurs_, none of the almost ludicrous want of humour, which mar the larger poem. Humour indeed was what Milton always lacked; had he had it, Shakespere himself might hardly have been greater. The plan is not really more artificial than that of the epic; though in the latter case it is masked to us by the scale, by the grandeur of the personages, and by the familiarity of the images to all men who have been brought up on the Bible. The versification, as even Johnson saw, is the versification of _Paradise Lost_, and to my fancy at any rate it has a spring, a variety, a sweep and rush of genius, which are but rarely present later. As for its beauty in parts, _quis vituperavit_? It is impossible to single out passages, for the whole is golden. The entering address of Comus, the song "Sweet Echo," the descriptive speech of the Spirit, and the magnificent eulogy of the "sun-clad power of chastity," would be the most beautiful things where all is beautiful, if the unapproachable "Sabrina fair" did not come later, and were not sustained before and after, for nearly two hundred lines of pure nectar. If poetry could be taught by the reading of it, then indeed the critic's advice to a poet might be limited to this: "Give your days and nights to the reading of _Comus_."

The sole excuses for Johnson's amazing verdict on _Lycidas_ are that it is not quite so uniformly good, and that in his strictures on its "rhyme" and "numbers" he was evidently speaking from the point of view at which the regular couplet is regarded as the _ne plus ultra_ of poetry. There are indeed blotches in it. The speech of Peter, magnificently as it is introduced, and strangely as it has captivated some critics, who seem to think that anything attacking the Church of England must be poetry, is out of place, and in itself is obscure, pedantic, and grotesque. There is some over-classicism, and the scale of the piece does not admit the display of quite such sustained and varied power as in _Comus_. But what there is, is so exquisite that hardly can we find fault with Mr. Pattison's hyperbole when he called _Lycidas_ the "high-water mark of English poetry." High-water mark even in the physical world is a variable limit. Shakespere constantly, and some other poets here and there in short passages go beyond Milton. But in the same space we shall nowhere find anything that can outgo the passage beginning "Alas what boots it," down to "head of thine," and the whole conclusion from "Return Alpheus." For melody of versification, for richness of images, for curious felicity of expression, these cannot be surpassed.

"But O the heavy change"--to use an irresistible quotation, the more irresistible that the change is foreshadowed in _Lycidas_ itself--from the golden poetry of these early days to the prose of the pamphlets. It is not that Milton's literary faculty is less conspicuous here, or less interesting. There is no English prose before him, none save Taylor's and Browne's in his time, and absolutely none after him that can compare with the finest passages of these singular productions. The often quoted personal descriptions of his aims in life, his early literary studies, his views of poetry and so forth, are almost equal in the "other harmony of prose" to _Comus_ and _Lycidas_. The deservedly famous _Areopagitica_ is full of the most splendid concerted pieces of prose-music, and hardly anywhere from the _Tractate of Reformation Touching Church Discipline_ to the _History of Britain_, which he revised just before his death, is it possible to read a page without coming across phrases, passages, and even whole paragraphs, which are instinct with the most splendid life. But the difference between Milton's poetry and his prose is, that in verse he is constantly under the restraint (sometimes, in his later work especially, too much under the restraint) of the sense of style; while in his prose he seems to be wholly emancipated from it. Even in his finest passages he never seems to know or to care how a period is going to end. He piles clause on clause, links conjunction to conjunction, regardless of breath, or sense, or the most ordinary laws of grammar. The second sentence of his first prose work contains about four hundred words, and is broken in the course of them like a wounded snake. In his very highest flights he will suddenly drop to grotesque and bathos; and there is no more difficult task (_haud inexpertus loquor_) than the selection from Milton of any passage of length which shall not contain faults of which a modern schoolboy or gutter-journalist would be ashamed. Nor is the matter made much better by the consideration that it is not so much ignorance as temper which is the cause of this deformity. Lest it be thought that I speak harshly, let me quote from the late Mr. Mark Pattison, a strong sympathiser with Milton's politics, in complete agreement if not with his religious views, yet with his attitude towards dominant ecclesiasticism, and almost an idolater of him from the purely literary point of view. In "_Eikonoclastes_," Milton's reply to _Eikon Basilike_, Mr. Pattison says, and I do not care to attempt any improvement on the words, "Milton is worse than tedious: his reply is in a tone of rude railing and insolent swagger which would have been always unbecoming, but which at this moment was grossly indecent." Elsewhere (and again I have nothing to add) Mr. Pattison describes Milton's prose pamphlets as "a plunge into the depths of vulgar scurrility and libel below the level of average gentility and education." But the Rector of Lincoln has not touched, or has touched very lightly, on the fault above noted, the profound lack of humour that these pamphlets display. Others have been as scurrilous, as libellous, as unfair; others have prostituted literary genius to the composition of paid lampoons; but some at least of them have been saved by the all-saving sense of humour. As any one who remembers the dreadful passage about the guns in _Paradise Lost_ must know, the book of humour was to Milton a sealed book. He has flashes of wit, though not many; his indignation of itself sometimes makes him really sarcastic. But humorous he is never.

Destitute of this, the one saving grace of polemical literature, he plunged at the age of thirty-three into pamphlet writing. With a few exceptions his production in this kind may be thrown into four classes,--the _Areopagitica_ and the _Letter to Hartlib_ (much the best of the whole) standing outside. The first class attacks prelatical government, and by degrees glides, under the guise of apologetics for the famous _Smectymnuus_, into a fierce and indecent controversy with Bishop Hall, containing some of the worst examples of the author's deplorable inability to be jocular. Then comes the divorce series, which, with all its varied learning, is chiefly comic, owing to Milton's unfortunate blindness to the fact that he was trying to make a public question out of private grievances of the particular kind which most of all demand silence. Next rank the pieces composing the Apologia of regicide, the _Eikonoclastes_, the controversy with Salmasius (written in Latin), and the postscript thereto, devoted to the obscure Morus. And lastly come the pamphlets in which, with singular want of understanding of the course of events, Milton tried to argue Monk and the weary nation out of the purpose to shake off the heavy yoke of so-called liberty. The _History of Britain_, the very agreeable fragment on the _History of Muscovy_, the late _Treatise Against Popery_, in which the author holds out a kind of olive branch to the Church of England, in the very act of proclaiming his Arianism, and the two little masterpieces already referred to, are independent of any such classification. Yet even in them sometimes, as always in the others, _furor arma ministrat_; and supplies them as badly as if he were supplying by contract.

Nevertheless both Milton's faults and his merits as a prose writer are of the most remarkable and interesting character. The former consist chiefly in the reckless haste with which he constructs (or rather altogether neglects the construction of) his periods and sentences, in an occasional confusion of those rules of Latin syntax which are only applicable to a fully inflected language with the rules necessary in a language so destitute of inflections as English, and in a lavish and sometimes both needless and tasteless adaptation of Latin words. All these were faults of the time, but it is true that they are faults which Milton, like his contemporaries Taylor and Browne, aggravated almost wilfully. Of the three Milton, owing no doubt to the fury which animated him, is by far the most faulty and uncritical. Taylor is the least remarkable of the three for classicisms either of syntax or vocabulary; and Browne's excesses in this respect are deliberate. Milton's are the effect of blind passion. Yet the passages which diversify and relieve his prose works are far more beautiful in their kind than anything to be found elsewhere in English prose. Though he never trespasses into purely poetical rhythm, the solemn music of his own best verse is paralleled in these; and the rugged and grandiose vocabulary (it is particularly characteristic of Milton that he mixes the extremest vernacular with the most exquisite and scholarly phrasing) is fused and moulded with an altogether extraordinary power. Nor can we notice less the abundance of striking phrase, now quaint, now grand, now forcible, which in short clauses and "jewels five words long" occurs constantly, even in the passages least artistically finished as wholes. There is no English prose author whose prose is so constantly racy with such a distinct and varied savour as Milton's. It is hardly possible to open him anywhere after the fashion of the _Sortes Virgilianae_ without lighting on a line or a couple of lines, which for the special purpose it is impossible to improve. And it might be contended with some plausibility that this abundance of jewels, or purple patches, brings into rather unfair prominence the slips of grammar and taste, the inequalities of thought, the deplorable attempts to be funny, the rude outbursts of bargee invective, which also occur so numerously. One other peculiarity, or rather one result of these peculiarities, remains to be noticed; and that is that Milton's prose is essentially inimitable. It would be difficult even to caricature or to parody it; and to imitate it as his verse, at least his later verse, has been so often imitated, is simply impossible.

The third and, in popular estimation, the most important period of Milton's production was again poetical. The characteristics of the poetry of the three great works which illustrate it are admittedly uniform, though in _Samson Agonistes_ they exhibit themselves in a harder, drier, more ossified form than in the two great epics. This relation is only a repetition of the relation between _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_ themselves on the one hand, and the poems of twenty years earlier, especially _Comus_ and _Lycidas_, on the other. The wonderful Miltonic style, so artificial and yet such a triumph of art, is evident even so early as the ode on the "Nativity," and it merely developed its own characteristics up to the _Samson_ of forty years later. That it is a real style and not merely a trick, like so many others, is best shown by the fact that it is very hard, if not impossible, to analyse it finally into elements. The common opinion charges Milton with Latinising heavily; and so he does. But we open _Paradise Lost_ at random, and we find a dozen lines, and not the least beautiful (the Third Day of Creation), without a word in them that is not perfectly simple English, or if of Latin origin, naturalised long before Milton's time, while the syntax is also quite vernacular. Again it is commonly thought that the habits of antithesis and parallelism, of omission of articles, of reversing the position of adjectives and adverbs, are specially Miltonic. Certainly Milton often indulges in them; yet in the same way the most random dipping will find passages (and any number of them) where no one of these habits is particularly or eminently present, and yet which every one would recognise as Miltonic. As far as it is possible to put the finger on one peculiarity which explains part of the secret of Milton's pre-eminence, I should myself select his unapproached care and felicity in building what may be called the verse-paragraph. The dangers of blank verse (Milton's preference for which over rhyme was only one of his numerous will-worships) are many; but the two greatest lie in easily understood directions. With the sense generally or frequently ending as the line ends (as may be seen in the early dramatists and in many bad poets since), it becomes intolerably stiff and monotonous. With the process of _enjambement_ or overlapping, promiscuously and unskilfully indulged (the commonest fault during the last two centuries), it is apt to degenerate into a kind of metrical and barely metrical prose, distinguished from prose proper by less variety of cadence, and by an occasional awkward sacrifice of sense and natural arrangement to the restrictions which the writer accepts, but by which he knows not how to profit. Milton has avoided both these dangers by adhering to what I have ventured to call the verse-paragraph--that is to say, by arranging the divisions of his sense in divisions of verse, which, albeit identical and not different in their verse integers, are constructed with as much internal concerted variety as the stanzas or strophes of a so-called Pindaric ode. Of the apparently uniform and monotonous blank verse he has made an instrument of almost protean variety by availing himself of the infinite permutations of cadence, syllabic sound, variety of feet, and adjustment of sense to verse. The result is that he has, it may almost be said, made for himself out of simple blank verse all the conveniences of the line, the couplet, and the stanza, punctuating and dividing by cadence, not rhyme. No device that is possible within his limits--even to that most dangerous one of the pause after the first syllable of a line which has "enjambed" from the previous one--is strange to him, or sparingly used by him, or used without success. And it is only necessary to contrast his verse with the blank verse of the next century, especially in its two chief examples, Thomson and Young,--great verse-smiths both of them,--to observe his superiority in art. These two, especially Thomson, try the verse-paragraph system, but they do it ostentatiously and clumsily. Thomson's trick of ending such paragraphs with such lines as "And Thule bellows through her utmost isles," often repeated with only verbal substitutions, is apt to make the reader think with a smile of the breath of relief which a man draws after a serious effort. "Thank heaven that paragraph's done!" the poet seems to be saying. Nothing of the kind is ever to be found in Milton. It is only on examination that the completeness of these divisions is perceived. They are linked one to another with the same incomparably artful concealment of art which links their several and internal clauses. And thus it is that Milton is able to carry his readers through (taking both poems together) sixteen books of epic, without much narrative interest, with foregone conclusions, with long passages which are merely versifications of well-known themes, and with others which the most favourable critics admit to be, if not exactly dull, yet certainly not lively. Something the same may be said of _Samson_, though here a decided stiffening and mannerising of the verse is to some extent compensated by the pathetic and human interest of the story. It is to be observed, however, that Milton has here abused the redundant syllable (the chief purely poetical mistake of which he has been guilty in any part of his work, and which is partly noticeable in _Comus_), and that his choric odes are but dry sticks in comparison with _Lycidas_.

It may be thought strange that I should say little or nothing of the subject of these immortal poems. But, in the first place, those critics of poetry who tell us that "all depends on the subject" seem to forget that, according to this singular dictum, there is no difference between poetry and prose--between an epic and a blue-book. I prefer--having been brought up at the feet of Logic--to stick to the genus and differentia of poetry, and not to its accidents. Moreover, the matter of _Paradise Lost_ and its sequel is so universally known that it becomes unnecessary, and has been so much discussed that it seems superfluous, to rediscuss it. The inquiries into Milton's indebtedness to forerunners strike me as among the idlest inquiries of the kind--which is saying a great deal. Italians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen even, had doubtless treated the Creation and the Fall, Adam and Satan, before him. Perhaps he read them; perhaps he borrowed from them. What then? Does any one believe that Andreini or Vondel, Sylvester or Du Bartas, could have written, or did in any measurable degree contribute to the writing of _Paradise Lost_? If he does he must be left to his opinion.

Reference may perhaps be made to some remarks in Chapter IV. on the comparative position of Milton in English poetry with the only two writers who can be compared to him, if bulk and majesty of work be taken into consideration, and not merely occasional bursts of poetry. Of his own poetical powers I trust that I shall not be considered a niggard admirer, because, both in the character of its subject (if we are to consider subjects at all) and in its employment of rhyme, that greatest mechanical aid of the poet, _The Faerie Queene_ seems to me greater, or because Milton's own earlier work seems to me to rank higher than _Paradise Lost_. The general opinion is, of course, different; and one critic of no mean repute, Christopher North, has argued that _Paradise Lost_ is the only "great poem" in existence. That question need not be argued here. It is sufficient to say that Milton is undoubtedly one of the few great poets in the history of the world, and that if he falls short of Homer, Dante, and Shakespere, it is chiefly because he expresses less of that humanity, both universal and quintessential, which they, and especially the last, put into verse. Narrowness is his fault. But the intense individuality which often accompanies narrowness is his great virtue--a virtue which no poet, which no writer either in verse or prose, has ever had in greater measure than he, and which hardly any has been able to express with more varied and exquisite harmony.

Jeremy Taylor, the ornament and glory of the English pulpit, was born at Cambridge in 1613. He was the son of a barber, but was well educated, and was able to enter Caius College as a sizar at thirteen. He spent seven years there, and took both degrees and orders at an unusually early age. Apparently, however, no solid endowment was offered him in his own university, and he owed such preferment as he had (it was never very great) to a chance opportunity of preaching at St. Paul's and a recommendation to Laud. That prelate--to whom all the infinite malignity of political and sectarian detraction has not been able to deny the title of an encourager, as few men have encouraged them, of learning and piety--took Taylor under his protection, made him his chaplain, and procured him incorporation at Oxford, a fellowship at All Souls, and finally the rectory of Uppingham. To this Taylor was appointed in 1638, and next year he married a lady who bore him several sons, but died young. Taylor early joined the king at Oxford, and is supposed to have followed his fortunes in the field; it is certain that his rectory, lying in a Puritan district, was very soon sequestrated, though not by any form of law. What took him into Wales and caused him to marry his second wife, Joanna Brydges (an heiress on a small scale, and said to have been a natural daughter of Charles I.), is not known. But he sojourned in the principality during the greater part of the Commonwealth period, and was much patronised by the Earl of Carbery, who, while resident at Golden Grove, made him his chaplain. He also made the acquaintance of other persons of interest, the chief of whom were, in London (which he visited not always of his own choice, for he was more than once imprisoned), John Evelyn, and in Wales, Mrs. Katherine Philips, "the matchless Orinda," to whom he dedicated one of the most interesting of his minor works, the _Measure and Offices of Friendship_. Not long before the Restoration he was offered, and strongly pressed to accept, the post of lecturer at Lisburn, in Ireland. He does not seem to have taken at all kindly to the notion, but was over-persuaded, and crossed the Channel. It was perhaps owing to this false step that, when the Restoration arrived, the preferment which he had in so many ways merited only came to him in the tents of Kedar. He was made Bishop of Down and Connor, held that see for seven years, and died (after much wrestling with Ulster Presbyterians and some domestic misfortune) of fever in 1667.

His work is voluminous and always interesting; but only a small part of it concerns us directly here, as exhibiting him at his best and most peculiar in the management of English prose. He wrote, it should be said, a few verses by no means destitute of merit, but they are so few, in comparison to the bulk of his work, that they may be neglected. Taylor's strong point was not accuracy of statement or logical precision. His longest work, the _Ductor Dubitantium_, an elaborate manual of casuistry, is constantly marred by the author's inability to fix on a single point, and to keep his argumentation close to that. In another, the _Unum Necessarium_, or Discourse on Repentance, his looseness of statement and want of care in driving several horses at once, involved him in a charge of Pelagianism, or something like it, which he wrote much to disprove, but which has so far lasted as to justify modern theologians in regarding his ideas on this and other theological points as, to say the least, confused. All over his work inexact quotation from memory, illicit argumentation, and an abiding inconsistency, mar the intellectual value, affecting not least his famous _Liberty of Prophesying_, or plea for toleration against the new Presbyterian uniformity,--the conformity of which treatise with modern ideas has perhaps made some persons slow to recognise its faults. These shortcomings, however, are not more constant in Taylor's work than his genuine piety, his fervent charity, his freedom from personal arrogance and pretentiousness, and his ardent love for souls; while neither shortcomings nor virtues of this kind concern us here so much as the extraordinary rhetorical merits which distinguish all his work more or less, and which are chiefly noticeable in his Sermons, especially the Golden Grove course, and the funeral sermon on Lady Carbery, in his _Contemplations of the State of Man_, and in parts of his _Life of Christ_, and of the universally popular and admirable tractates on _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_.

Jeremy Taylor's style is emphatically and before all things florid and ornate. It is not so elaborately quaint as Browne's; it is not so stiffly splendid as Milton's; it is distinguished from both by a much less admixture of Latinisms; but it is impossible to call it either verbally chastened or syntactically correct. Coleridge--an authority always to be differed with cautiously and under protest--holds indeed a different opinion. He will have it that Browne was the corruptor, though a corruptor of the greatest genius, in point of vocabulary, and that, as far as syntax is concerned, in Jeremy Taylor the sentences are often extremely long, and yet are generally so perspicuous in consequence of their logical structure that they require no reperusal to be understood. And he will have the same to be true not only of Hooker (which may pass), but of Milton, in reference to whom admirers not less strong than Coleridge hold that he sometimes forgets the period altogether.

It must be remembered that Coleridge in these remarks was fighting the battle of the recoverers of our great seventeenth century writers against the devotees of "correctness," and that in the very same context he makes the unpardonable assertion that Gibbon's manner is "the worst of all," and that Tacitus "writes in falsetto as compared to Tully." This is to "fight a prize" in the old phrase, not to judge from the catholic and universal standpoint of impartial criticism; and in order to reduce Coleridge's assertions to that standard we must abate nearly as much from his praise of Taylor as from his abuse of Gibbon--an abuse, by the way, which is strangely contrasted with praise of "Junius." It is not true that, except by great complaisance of the reader, Jeremy Taylor's long sentences are at once understandable. They may, of course, and generally can be understood _kata to semaino menon_, as a telegram with half the words left out may at the other end of the scale be understood. But they constantly withstand even a generous parser, even one who is to the fullest extent ready to allow for idiom and individuality. They abuse in particular the conjunction to a most enormous extent--coupling by its means propositions which have no logical connection, which start entirely different trains of thought, and which are only united because carelessness and fashion combined made it unnecessary for the writer to take the little extra trouble necessary for their separation. Taylor will, in the very middle of his finest passages, and with hardly so much as a comma's break, change _oratio obliqua_ to _oratio recta_, interrupt the sequence of tenses, make his verbs agree with the nearest noun, irrespective of the connection, and in short, though he was, while in Wales, a schoolmaster for some time, and author of a grammatical treatise, will break Priscian's head with the calmest unconcern. It is quite true that these faults mainly occur in his more rhetorical passages, in his exercises rather of spoken than of written prose. But that, as any critic who is not an advocate must see, is no palliation. The real palliation is that the time had not yet aroused itself to the consciousness of the fact that letting English grammar at one moment go to the winds altogether, and at the next subjecting it to the most inappropriate rules and licenses of Latin, was not the way to secure the establishment of an accomplished and generally useful English prose. No stranger instance of prejudice can be given than that Coleridge, on the point of asking, and justly, from Dryden "a stricter grammar," should exalt to the skies a writer compared to whom Dryden is grammatically impeccable.

But a recognition of the fact that Taylor distinctly belongs to the antinomians of English prose, or at least to those guiltless heathens who lived before the laws of it had been asserted, can not in any competent critic dull the sense of the wonderful beauty of his style. It has been said that this beauty is entirely of the florid and ornate order, lending itself in this way easily enough to the witty and well-worded, though unjust and ungenerous censure which South pronounced on it after the author's death. It may or may not be that the phrases there censured, "The fringes of the north star," and "The dew of angels' wings," and "Thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion," are not of that "apostolic plainness" that a Christian minister's speech should have. But they and their likes are extremely beautiful--save that in literature no less than in theology South has justly perstringed Taylor's constant and most unworthy affectation of introducing a simile by "so I have seen." In the next age the phrase was tediously abused, and in the age after, and ever since, it became and has remained mere burlesque; but it was never good; and in the two fine specimen passages which follow it is a distinct blot:--

_The Prayers of Anger and of Lust._

"Prayer is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our
thoughts, the evenness of recollection, the seat of meditation,
the rest of our cares, and the calm of our tempest. Prayer is the
issue of a quiet mind, of untroubled thoughts; it is the daughter
of charity and the sister of meekness; and he that prays to God
with an angry--that is a troubled and discomposed--spirit, is
like him that retires into a battle to meditate and sets up his
closet in the outquarters of an army, and chooses a frontier
garrison to be wise in. Anger is a perfect alienation of the mind
from prayer, and therefore is contrary to that attention which
presents our prayers in a right line to God. For so have I seen a
lark rising from his bed of grass, soaring upwards and singing as
he rises and hopes to get to Heaven and climb above the clouds;
but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an
eastern wind and his motion made irregular and inconstant,
descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could
recover by the vibration and frequent weighing of his wings; till
the little creature was forced to sit down and pant and stay till
the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight and did
rise and sing as if it had learned music and motion from an angel
as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here
below. So is the prayer of a good man: when his affairs have
required business, and his business was matter of discipline, and
his discipline was to pass upon a sinning person, or had a design
of charity, his duty met with infirmities of a man and anger was
its instrument, and the instrument became stronger than the prime
agent and raised a tempest and overruled the man; and then his
prayer was broken and his thoughts troubled.

* * * * *

"For so an impure vapour--begotten of the slime of the earth by
the fevers and adulterous heats of an intemperate summer sun,
striving by the ladder of a mountain to climb to heaven and
rolling into various figures by an uneasy, unfixed revolution,
and stopped at the middle region of the air, being thrown from
his pride and attempt of passing towards the seat of the
stars--turns into an unwholesome flame and, like the breath of
hell, is confined into a prison of darkness and a cloud, till it
breaks into diseases, plagues and mildews, stinks and blastings.
So is the prayer of an unchaste person. It strives to climb the
battlements of heaven, but because it is a flame of sulphur salt
and bitumen, and was kindled in the dishonourable regions below,
derived from Hell and contrary to God, it cannot pass forth to
the element of love; but ends in barrenness and murmurs,
fantastic expectations and trifling imaginative confidences; and
they at last end in sorrows and despair."

Indeed, like all very florid writers, Taylor is liable to eclipses of taste; yet both the wording of his flights and the occasion of them (they are to be found _passim_ in the _Sermons_) are almost wholly admirable. It is always a great and universal idea--never a mere conceit--that fires him. The shortness and dangers of life, the weakness of children, the fragility of women's beauty and men's strength, the change of the seasons, the vicissitudes of empires, the impossibility of satisfying desire, the disgust which follows satiety--these are, if any one chooses, commonplace enough; yet it is the observation of all who have carefully studied literature, and the experience of all who have observed their own thoughts, that it is always in relation to these commonplaces that the most beautiful expressions and the noblest sentiments arise. The uncommon thought is too likely if not too certain to be an uncommon conceit, and if not worthless, yet of inferior worth. Among prose writers Taylor is unequalled for his touches of this universal material, for the genius with which he makes the common uncommon. For instance, he has the supreme faculty of always making the verbal and the intellectual presentation of the thought alike beautiful, of appealing to the ear and the mind at the same time, of never depriving the apple of gold of its picture of silver. Yet for all this the charge of over-elaboration which may justly be brought against Browne very rarely hits Taylor. He seldom or never has the appearance which ornate writers of all times, and of his own more especially, so often have, of going back on a thought or a phrase to try to better it--of being stimulated by actual or fancied applause to cap the climax. His most beautiful passages come quite suddenly and naturally as the subject requires and as the thought strikes light in his mind. Nor are they ever, as Milton's so often are, marred by a descent as rapid as their rise. He is never below a certain decent level; he may return to earth from heaven, but he goes no lower, and reaches even his lower level by a quiet and equable sinking. As has been fully allowed, he has grave defects, the defects of his time. But from some of these he was conspicuously free, and on the whole no one in English prose (unless it be his successor here) has so much command of the enchanter's wand as Jeremy Taylor.

Sir Thomas Browne was born in the heart of London in 1605, his father (of whom little is known except one or two anecdotes corresponding with the character of the son) having been a merchant of some property, and claiming descent from a good family in Cheshire. This father died when he was quite young, and Browne is said to have been cheated by his guardians; but he was evidently at all times of his life in easy circumstances, and seems to have had no complaint to make of his stepfather, Sir Thomas Dutton. This stepfather may at least possibly have been the hero of the duel with Sir Hatton Cheeke, which Mr. Carlyle has made famous. With him Browne visited Ireland, having previously been brought up at Winchester and at Broadgates Hall, which became, during his own residence, Pembroke College, at Oxford. Later he made the usual grand tour. Then he took medical degrees; practised it is said, though on no very precise evidence, both in Oxfordshire and Yorkshire; settled, why is not known, at Norwich; married in 1641 Dorothy Mileham, a lady of good family in his adopted county; was a steady Royalist through the troubles; acquired a great name for medical and scientific knowledge, though he was not a Fellow of the Royal Society; was knighted by Charles II. in 1662, and died in 1682. His first literary appearance had been made forty years earlier in a way very common in French literary history, but so uncommon in English as to have drawn from Johnson a rather unwontedly illiberal sneer. At a time unknown, but by his own account before his thirtieth year (therefore before 1635), Browne had written the _Religio Medici_. It was, according to the habit of the time, copied and handed about in MS. (there exist now five MS. copies showing remarkable differences with each other and the printed copies), and in 1642 it got into print. A copy was sent by Lord Dorset to the famous Sir Kenelm Digby, then under confinement for his opinions, and the husband of Venetia wrote certain not very forcible and not wholly complimentary remarks which, as Browne was informed, were at once put to press. A correspondence ensued, and Browne published an authorised copy, in which perhaps a little "economy" might be noticed. The book made an extraordinary impression, and was widely translated and commented on in foreign languages, though its vogue was purely due to its intrinsic merits, and not at all to the circumstances which enabled Milton (rather arrogantly and not with absolute truth) to boast that "Europe rang from side to side" with his defence of the execution of Charles I. Four years later, in 1646, Browne published his largest and in every sense most popular book, the _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_ or _Enquiry into Vulgar Errors_. Twelve more years passed before the greatest, from a literary point of view, of his works, the _Hydriotaphia_ or _Urn-Burial_,--a magnificent descant on the vanity of human life, based on the discovery of certain cinerary urns in Norfolk,--appeared, in company with the quaint _Garden of Cyrus_, a half-learned, half-fanciful discussion of the mysteries of the quincunx and the number five. Nor did he publish anything more himself; but two collections of posthumous works were issued after his death, the most important item of which is the _Christian Morals_, and the total has been swelled since by extracts from his MSS., which at the death of his grandson and namesake in 1710 were sold by auction. Most fortunately they were nearly all bought by Sir Hans Sloane, and are to this day in the British Museum. Browne's good luck in this respect was completed by the devotion of his editor, Simon Wilkin, a Norwich bookseller of gentle blood and good education, who produced (1835) after twelve years' labour of love what Southey has justly called the best edited book in the English language. Not to mention other editions, the _Religio Medici_, which exhibits, owing to its history, an unusual variation of text, has been, together with the _Christian Morals_, separately edited with great minuteness by Dr. Greenhill. Nor is it unimportant to notice that Johnson, during his period of literary hack-work, also edited Sir Thomas Browne, and wrote what Wilkin's good taste has permitted to be still the standard text of his Life.