Chapter XVI: Preface: And Critical List of Authors From Select British Poets 365 (16)

‘But a little way off they saw the mast (of the vessel) whose proud
height now lay along, like a widow having lost her mate, of whom she
held her honour;’ [This needed explanation] ‘but upon the mast they
saw a young man (at least if it were a man) bearing show of about
eighteen years of age, who sat (as on horseback) having nothing upon
him but his shirt, which being wrought with blue silk and gold, had a
kind of resemblance to the sea’ [This is a sort of alliteration in
natural history] ‘on which the sun (then near his western home) did
shoot some of his beams. His hair, (which the young men of Greece used
to wear very long) was stirred up and down with the wind, which seemed
to have a sport to play with it, as the sea had to kiss his feet;
himself full of admirable beauty, set forth by the strangeness both of
his seat and gesture; for holding his head up full of unmoved majesty,
he held a sword aloft with his fair arm, which often he waved about
his crown, as though he would threaten the world in that extremity.’

If the original sin of alliteration, antithesis, and metaphysical conceit could be weeded out of this passage, there is hardly a more heroic one to be found in prose or poetry.

Here is one more passage marred in the making. A shepherd is supposed to say of his mistress,

‘Certainly, as her eyelids are more pleasant to behold, than two white
kids climbing up a fair tree and browsing on his tenderest branches,
and yet are nothing, compared to the day-shining stars contained in
them; and as her breath is more sweet than a gentle south-west wind,
which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the
extreme heat of summer; and yet is nothing compared to the
honey-flowing speech that breath doth carry; no more all that our eyes
can see of her (though when they have seen her, what else they shall
ever see is but dry stubble after clover grass) is to be matched with
the flock of unspeakable virtues, laid up delightfully in that
best-builded fold.’

Now here are images of singular beauty and of Eastern originality and daring, followed up with enigmatical or unmeaning common-places, because he never knows when to leave off, and thinks he can never be too wise or too dull for his reader. He loads his prose Pegasus, like a pack-horse, with all that comes and with a number of little trifling circumstances, that fall off, and you are obliged to stop to pick them up by the way. He cannot give his imagination a moment’s pause, thinks nothing done, while any thing remains to do, and exhausts nearly all that can be said upon a subject, whether good, bad, or indifferent. The above passages are taken from the beginning of the Arcadia, when the author’s style was hardly yet formed. The following is a less favourable, but fairer specimen of the work. It is the model of a love-letter, and is only longer than that of Adriano de Armada, in Love’s Labour Lost.

‘Most blessed paper, which shalt kiss that hand, whereto all
blessedness is in nature a servant, do not yet disdain to carry with
thee the woeful words of a miser now despairing: neither be afraid to
appear before her, bearing the base title of the sender. For no sooner
shall that divine hand touch thee, but that thy baseness shall be
turned to most high preferment. Therefore mourn boldly my ink: for
while she looks upon you, your blackness will shine: cry out boldly my
lamentation, for while she reads you, your cries will be music. Say
then (O happy messenger of a most unhappy message) that the too soon
born and too late dying creature, which dares not speak, no, not look,
no, not scarcely think (as from his miserable self unto her heavenly
highness), only presumes to desire thee (in the time that her eyes and
voice do exalt thee) to say, and in this manner to say, not from him,
oh no, that were not fit, but of him, thus much unto her sacred
judgment. O you, the only honour to women, to men the only admiration,
you that being armed by love, defy him that armed you, in this high
estate wherein you have placed me’ [_i.e._ the letter] ‘yet let me
remember him to whom I am bound for bringing me to your presence: and
let me remember him, who (since he is yours, how mean soever he be) it
is reason you have an account of him. The wretch (yet your wretch)
though with languishing steps runs fast to his grave; and will you
suffer a temple (how poorly built soever, but yet a temple of your
deity) to be rased? But he dyeth: it is most true, he dyeth: and he in
whom you live, to obey you, dyeth. Whereof though he plain, he doth
not complain, for it is a harm, but no wrong, which he hath received.
He dies, because in woeful language all his senses tell him, that such
is your pleasure: for if you will not that he live, alas, alas, what
followeth, what followeth of the most ruined Dorus, but his end? End,
then, evil-destined Dorus, end; and end thou woeful letter, end: for
it sufficeth her wisdom to know, that her heavenly will shall be
accomplished.’

Lib. ii. p. 117.

This style relishes neither of the lover nor the poet. Nine-tenths of the work are written in this manner. It is in the very manner of those books of gallantry and chivalry, which, with the labyrinths of their style, and ‘the reason of their unreasonableness,’ turned the fine intellects of the Knight of La Mancha. In a word (and not to speak it profanely), the Arcadia is a riddle, a rebus, an acrostic in folio: it contains about 4000 far-fetched similes, and 6000 impracticable dilemmas, about 10,000 reasons for doing nothing at all, and as many more against it; numberless alliterations, puns, questions and commands, and other figures of rhetoric; about a score good passages, that one may turn to with pleasure, and the most involved, irksome, improgressive, and heteroclite subject that ever was chosen to exercise the pen or patience of man. It no longer adorns the toilette or lies upon the pillow of Maids of Honour and Peeresses in their own right (the Pamelas and Philocleas of a later age), but remains upon the shelves of the libraries of the curious in long works and great names, a monument to shew that the author was one of the ablest men and worst writers of the age of Elizabeth.

His Sonnets, inlaid in the Arcadia, are jejune, far-fetched and frigid. I shall select only one that has been much commended. It is to the High Way where his mistress had passed, a strange subject, but not unsuitable to the author’s genius.

‘High-way, since you my chief Parnassus be,
And that my Muse (to some ears not unsweet)
Tempers her words to trampling horses’ feet
More oft than to a chamber melody;
Now blessed you bear onward blessed me
To her, where I my heart safe left shall meet;
My Muse, and I must you of duty greet
With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully.
Be you still fair, honour’d by public heed,
By no encroachment wrong’d, nor time forgot;
Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed;
And that you know, I envy you no lot
Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss,
Hundreds of years you Stella’s feet may kiss.’

The answer of the High-way has not been preserved, but the sincerity of this appeal must no doubt have moved the stocks and stones to rise and sympathise. His Defence of Poetry is his most readable performance; there he is quite at home, in a sort of special pleader’s office, where his ingenuity, scholastic subtlety, and tenaciousness in argument stand him in good stead; and he brings off poetry with flying colours; for he was a man of wit, of sense, and learning, though not a poet of true taste or unsophisticated genius.

LECTURE VII
CHARACTER OF LORD BACON’S WORKS—COMPARED AS TO STYLE WITH SIR THOMAS
BROWN AND JEREMY TAYLOR.

Lord Bacon has been called (and justly) one of the wisest of mankind. The word _wisdom_ characterises him more than any other. It was not that he did so much himself to advance the knowledge of man or nature, as that he saw what others had done to advance it, and what was still wanting to its full accomplishment. He stood upon the high ‘vantage ground of genius and learning; and traced, ‘as in a map the voyager his course,’ the long devious march of human intellect, its elevations and depressions, its windings and its errors. He had a ‘large discourse of reason, looking before and after.’ He had made an exact and extensive survey of human acquirements: he took the gauge and meter, the depths and soundings of the human capacity. He was master of the comparative anatomy of the mind of man, of the balance of power among the different faculties. He had thoroughly investigated and carefully registered the steps and processes of his own thoughts, with their irregularities and failures, their liabilities to wrong conclusions, either from the difficulties of the subject, or from moral causes, from prejudice, indolence, vanity, from conscious strength or weakness; and he applied this self-knowledge on a mighty scale to the general advances or retrograde movements of the aggregate intellect of the world. He knew well what the goal and crown of moral and intellectual power was, how far men had fallen short of it, and how they came to miss it. He had an instantaneous perception of the quantity of truth or good in any given system; and of the analogy of any given result or principle to others of the same kind scattered through nature or history. His observations take in a larger range, have more profundity from the fineness of his tact, and more comprehension from the extent of his knowledge, along the line of which his imagination ran with equal celerity and certainty, than any other person’s, whose writings I know. He however seized upon these results, rather by intuition than by inference: he knew them in their mixed modes, and combined effects rather than by abstraction or analysis, as he explains them to others, not by resolving them into their component parts and elementary principles, so much as by illustrations drawn from other things operating in like manner, and producing similar results; or as he himself has finely expressed it, ‘by the same footsteps of nature treading or printing upon several subjects or matters.’ He had great sagacity of observation, solidity of judgment and scope of fancy; in this resembling Plato and Burke, that he was a popular philosopher and a philosophical declaimer. His writings have the gravity of prose with the fervour and vividness of poetry. His sayings have the effect of axioms, are at once striking and self-evident. He views objects from the greatest height, and his reflections acquire a sublimity in proportion to their profundity, as in deep wells of water we see the sparkling of the highest fixed stars. The chain of thought reaches to the centre, and ascends the brightest heaven of invention. Reason in him works like an instinct: and his slightest suggestions carry the force of conviction. His opinions are judicial. His induction of particulars is alike wonderful for learning and vivacity, for curiosity and dignity, and an all-pervading intellect binds the whole together in a graceful and pleasing form. His style is equally sharp and sweet, flowing and pithy, condensed and expansive, expressing volumes in a sentence, or amplifying a single thought into pages of rich, glowing, and delightful eloquence. He had great liberality from seeing the various aspects of things (there was nothing bigotted or intolerant or exclusive about him) and yet he had firmness and decision from feeling their weight and consequences. His character was then an amazing insight into the limits of human knowledge and acquaintance with the landmarks of human intellect, so as to trace its past history or point out the path to future enquirers, but when he quits the ground of contemplation of what others have done or left undone to project himself into future discoveries, he becomes quaint and fantastic, instead of original. His strength was in reflection, not in production: he was the surveyor, not the builder of the fabric of science. He had not strictly the constructive faculty. He was the principal pioneer in the march of modern philosophy, and has completed the education and discipline of the mind for the acquisition of truth, by explaining all the impediments or furtherances that can be applied to it or cleared out of its way. In a word, he was one of the greatest men this country has to boast, and his name deserves to stand, where it is generally placed, by the side of those of our greatest writers, whether we consider the variety, the strength or splendour of his faculties, for ornament or use.

His Advancement of Learning is his greatest work; and next to that, I like the Essays; for the Novum Organum is more laboured and less effectual than it might be. I shall give a few instances from the first of these chiefly, to explain the scope of the above remarks.

The Advancement of Learning is dedicated to James I. and he there observes, with a mixture of truth and flattery, which looks very much like a bold irony,

‘I am well assured that this which I shall say is no amplification at
all, but a positive and measured truth; which is, that there hath not
been, since Christ’s time, any king or temporal monarch, which hath
been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human (as
your majesty). For let a man seriously and diligently revolve and
peruse the succession of the Emperours of Rome, of which Cæsar the
Dictator, who lived some years before Christ, and Marcus Antoninus
were the best-learned; and so descend to the Emperours of Grecia, or
of the West, and then to the lines of France, Spain, England,
Scotland, and the rest, and he shall find his judgment is truly made.
For it seemeth much in a king, if by the compendious extractions of
other men’s wits and labour, he can take hold of any superficial
ornaments and shews of learning, or if he countenance and prefer
learning and learned men: but to drink indeed of the true fountain of
learning, nay, to have such a fountain of learning in himself, in a
king, and in a king born, is almost a miracle.’

To any one less wrapped up in self-sufficiency than James, the rule would have been more staggering than the exception could have been gratifying. But Bacon was a sort of prose-laureat to the reigning prince, and his loyalty had never been suspected.

In recommending learned men as fit counsellors in a state, he thus points out the deficiencies of the mere empiric or man of business in not being provided against uncommon emergencies.—‘Neither,’ he says, ‘can the experience of one man’s life furnish examples and precedents for the events of one man’s life. For as it happeneth sometimes, that the grand-child, or other descendant, resembleth the ancestor more than the son: so many times occurrences of present times may sort better with ancient examples, than with those of the latter or immediate times; and lastly, the wit of one man can no more countervail learning, than one man’s means can hold way with a common purse.’—This is finely put. It might be added, on the other hand, by way of caution, that neither can the wit or opinion of one learned man set itself up, as it sometimes does, in opposition to the common sense or experience of mankind.

When he goes on to vindicate the superiority of the scholar over the mere politician in disinterestedness and inflexibility of principle, by arguing ingeniously enough—‘The corrupter sort of mere politiques, that have not their thoughts established by learning in the love and apprehension of duty, nor never look abroad into universality, do refer all things to themselves, and thrust themselves into the centre of the world, as if all times should meet in them and their fortunes, never caring in all tempests what becomes of the ship of estates, so they may save themselves in the cock-boat of their own fortune, whereas men that feel the weight of duty, and know the limits of self-love, use to make good their places and duties, though with peril’—I can only wish that the practice were as constant as the theory is plausible, or that the time gave evidence of as much stability and sincerity of principle in well-educated minds as it does of versatility and gross egotism in self-taught men. I need not give the instances, ‘they will receive’ (in our author’s phrase) ‘an open allowance:’ but I am afraid that neither habits of abstraction nor the want of them will entirely exempt men from a bias to their own interest; that it is neither learning nor ignorance that thrusts us into the centre of our own little world, but that it is nature that has put a man there!

His character of the school-men is perhaps the finest philosophical sketch that ever was drawn. After observing that there are ‘two marks and badges of suspected and falsified science; the one, the novelty or strangeness of terms, the other the strictness of positions, which of necessity doth induce oppositions, and so questions and altercations’—he proceeds—‘Surely like as many substances in nature which are solid, do putrify and corrupt into worms: so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome, and (as I may term them) _vermiculate_ questions: which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality. This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the school-men, who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading; but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of no great quantity of matter, and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning, which are extant in their books. For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff, and is limited thereby: but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.’

And a little further on, he adds—‘Notwithstanding, certain it is, that if those school-men to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit, had joined variety and universality of reading and contemplation, they had proved excellent lights, to the great advancement of all learning and knowledge; but as they are, they are great undertakers indeed, and fierce with dark keeping. But as in the inquiry of the divine truth, their pride inclined to leave the oracle of God’s word, and to varnish in the mixture of their own inventions; so in the inquisition of nature, they ever left the oracle of God’s works, and adored the deceiving and deformed images, which the unequal mirror of their own minds, or a few received authors or principles did represent unto them.’

One of his acutest (I might have said profoundest) remarks relates to the near connection between deceiving and being deceived. Volumes might be written in explanation of it. ‘This vice therefore,’ he says, ‘brancheth itself into two sorts; delight in deceiving, and aptness to be deceived, imposture and credulity; which although they appear to be of a diverse nature, the one seeming to proceed of cunning, and the other of simplicity, yet certainly they do for the most part concur. For as the verse noteth _Percontatorem fugito, nam garrulus idem est_; an inquisitive man is a prattler: so upon the like reason, a credulous man is a deceiver; as we see it in fame, that he that will easily believe rumours, will as easily augment rumours, and add somewhat to them of his own, which Tacitus wisely noteth, when he saith, _Fingunt simul creduntque_, so great an affinity hath fiction and belief.’

I proceed to his account of the causes of error, and directions for the conduct of the understanding, which are admirable both for their speculative ingenuity and practical use.

‘The first of these,’ says Lord Bacon, ‘is the extreme affection of
two extremities; the one antiquity, the other novelty, wherein it
seemeth the children of time do take after the nature and malice of
the father. For as he devoureth his children; so one of them seeketh
to devour and suppress the other; while antiquity envieth there should
be new additions, and novelty cannot be content to add, but it must
deface. Surely, the advice of the prophet is the true direction in
this respect, _state super vias antiquas, et videte quænam sit via
recta et bona, et ambulate in ea_. Antiquity deserveth that reverence,
that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the best
way, but when the discovery is well taken, then to take progression.
And to speak truly,’ he adds, ‘_Antiquitas seculi juventus mundi_.
These times are the ancient times when the world is ancient; and not
those which we count ancient _ordine retrogrado_, by a computation
backwards from ourselves.

‘Another error induced by the former, is a distrust that any thing
should be now to be found out which the world should have missed and
passed over so long time, as if the same objection were to be made to
time that Lucian makes to Jupiter and other the Heathen Gods, of which
he wondereth that they begot so many children in old age, and begot
none in his time, and asketh whether they were become septuagenary, or
whether the law _Papia_ made against old men’s marriages had
restrained them. So it seemeth men doubt, lest time was become past
children and generation: wherein contrary-wise, we see commonly the
levity and unconstancy of men’s judgments, which till a matter be
done, wonder that it can be done, and as soon as it is done, wonder
again that it was done no sooner, as we see in the expedition of
Alexander into Asia, which at first was prejudged as a vast and
impossible enterprise, and yet afterwards it pleaseth Livy to make no
more of it than this, _nil aliud quam bene ausus vana contemnere_. And
the same happened to Columbus in his western navigation. But in
intellectual matters, it is much more common; as may be seen in most
of the propositions in Euclid, which till they be demonstrate, they
seem strange to our assent, but being demonstrate, our mind accepteth
of them by a kind of relation (as the lawyers speak) as if we had
known them before.

‘Another is an impatience of doubt and haste to assertion without due
and mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation
are not unlike the two ways of action, commonly spoken of by the
Ancients. The one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end
impassable: the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after
a while fair and even; so it is in contemplation, if a man will begin
with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to
begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

‘Another error is in the manner of the tradition or delivery of
knowledge, which is for the most part magistral and peremptory, and
not ingenuous and faithful; in a sort, as may be soonest believed, and
not easiliest examined. It is true, that in compendious treatises for
practice, that form is not to be disallowed. But in the true handling
of knowledge, men ought not to fall either on the one side into the
vein of Velleius the Epicurean; _nil tam metuens quam ne dubitare
aliqua de re videretur_: nor on the other side, into Socrates his
ironical doubting of all things, but to propound things sincerely,
with more or less asseveration; as they stand in a man’s own judgment,
proved more or less.’

Lord Bacon in this part declares, ‘that it is not his purpose to enter into a laudative of learning or to make a Hymn to the Muses,’ yet he has gone near to do this in the following observations on the dignity of knowledge. He says, after speaking of rulers and conquerors:

‘But the commandment of knowledge is yet higher than the commandment
over the will; for it is a commandment over the reason, belief, and
understanding of man, which is the highest part of the mind, and
giveth law to the will itself. For there is no power on earth which
setteth a throne or chair of estate in the spirits and souls of men,
and in their cogitations, imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but
knowledge and learning. And therefore we see the detestable and
extreme pleasure that arch-heretics and false prophets and impostors
are transported with, when they once find in themselves that they have
a superiority in the faith and conscience of men: so great, as if they
have once tasted of it, it is seldom seen that any torture or
persecution can make them relinquish or abandon it. But as this is
that which the author of the Revelations calls the depth or
profoundness of Satan; so by argument of contraries, the just and
lawful sovereignty over men’s understanding, by force of truth rightly
interpreted, is that which approacheth nearest to the similitude of
the Divine Rule.... Let us conclude with the dignity and excellency of
knowledge and learning in that whereunto man’s nature doth most
aspire, which is immortality or continuance: for to this tendeth
generation, and raising of houses and families; to this tendeth
buildings, foundations, and monuments; to this tendeth the desire of
memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect, the strength of all
other humane desires; we see then how far the monuments of wit and
learning are more durable than the monuments of power or of the hands.
For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years
and more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time
infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and
demolished? It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of
Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, no, nor of the kings, or great personages of
much later years. For the originals cannot last; and the copies cannot
but lose of the life and truth. But the images of men’s wits and
knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and
capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called
images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds
of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in
succeeding ages. So that, if the invention of the ship was thought so
noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and
consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits,
how much more are letters to be magnified, which as ships, pass
through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate
of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions the one of the other?’

Passages of equal force and beauty might be quoted from almost every page of this work and of the Essays.

Sir Thomas Brown and Bishop Taylor were two prose-writers in the succeeding age, who, for pomp and copiousness of style, might be compared to Lord Bacon. In all other respects they were opposed to him and to one another.—As Bacon seemed to bend all his thoughts to the practice of life, and to bring home the light of science to ‘the bosoms and businesses of men,’ Sir Thomas Brown seemed to be of opinion that the only business of life, was to think, and that the proper object of speculation was, by darkening knowledge, to breed more speculation, and ‘find no end in wandering mazes lost.’ He chose the incomprehensible and impracticable as almost the only subjects fit for a lofty and lasting contemplation, or for the exercise of a solid faith. He cried out for an _ob altitudo_ beyond the heights of revelation, and posed himself with apocryphal mysteries, as the pastime of his leisure hours. He pushes a question to the utmost verge of conjecture, that he may repose on the certainty of doubt; and he removes an object to the greatest distance from him, that he may take a high and abstracted interest in it, consider it in its relation to the sum of things, not to himself, and bewilder his understanding in the universality of its nature and the inscrutableness of its origin. His is the sublime of indifference; a passion for the abstruse and imaginary. He turns the world round for his amusement, as if it was a globe of paste-board. He looks down on sublunary affairs as if he had taken his station in one of the planets. The Antipodes are next-door neighbours to him, and Dooms-day is not far off. With a thought he embraces both the poles; the march of his pen is over the great divisions of geography and chronology. Nothing touches him nearer than humanity. He feels that he is mortal only in the decay of nature, and the dust of long forgotten tombs. The finite is lost in the infinite. The orbits of the heavenly bodies or the history of empires are to him but a point in time or a speck in the universe. The great Platonic year revolves in one of his periods. Nature is too little for the grasp of his style. He scoops an antithesis out of fabulous antiquity, and rakes up an epithet from the sweepings of Chaos. It is as if his books had dropt from the clouds, or as if Friar Bacon’s head could speak. He stands on the edge of the world of sense and reason, and gains a vertigo by looking down at impossibilities and chimeras. Or he busies himself with the mysteries of the Cabbala, or the enclosed secrets of the heavenly quincunxes, as children are amused with tales of the nursery. The passion of curiosity (the only passion of childhood) had in him survived to old age, and had superannuated his other faculties. He moralizes and grows pathetic on a mere idle fancy of his own, as if thought and being were the same, or as if ‘all this world were one glorious lie.’ For a thing to have ever had a name is sufficient warrant to entitle it to respectful belief, and to invest it with all the rights of a subject and its predicates. He is superstitious, but not bigotted: to him all religions are much the same, and he says that he should not like to have lived in the time of Christ and the Apostles, as it would have rendered his faith too gross and palpable.—His gossipping egotism and personal character have been preferred unjustly to Montaigne’s. He had no personal character at all but the peculiarity of resolving all the other elements of his being into thought, and of trying experiments on his own nature in an exhausted receiver of idle and unsatisfactory speculations. All that he ‘differences himself by,’ to use his own expression, is this moral and physical indifference. In describing himself, he deals only in negatives. He says he has neither prejudices nor antipathies to manners, habits, climate, food, to persons or things; they were alike acceptable to him as they afforded new topics for reflection; and he even professes that he could never bring himself heartily to hate the Devil. He owns in one place of the _Religio Medici_, that ‘he could be content if the species were continued like trees,’ and yet he declares that this was from no aversion to love, or beauty, or harmony; and the reasons he assigns to prove the orthodoxy of his taste in this respect, is, that he was an admirer of the music of the spheres! He tells us that he often composed a comedy in his sleep. It would be curious to know the subject or the texture of the plot. It must have been something like Nabbes’s Mask of Microcosmus, of which the _dramatis personæ_ have been already given; or else a misnomer, like Dante’s Divine Comedy of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. He was twice married, as if to shew his disregard even for his own theory; and he had a hand in the execution of some old women for witchcraft, I suppose, to keep a decorum in absurdity, and to indulge an agreeable horror at his own fantastical reveries on the occasion. In a word, his mind seemed to converse chiefly with the intelligible forms, the spectral apparitions of things, he delighted in the preternatural and visionary, and he only existed at the circumference of his nature. He had the most intense consciousness of contradictions and non-entities, and he decks them out in the pride and pedantry of words as if they were the attire of his proper person: the categories hang about his neck like the gold chain of knighthood, and he ‘walks gowned’ in the intricate folds and swelling drapery of dark sayings and impenetrable riddles!

I will give one gorgeous passage to illustrate all this, from his Urn-Burial, or Hydriotaphia. He digs up the urns of some ancient Druids with the same ceremony and devotion as if they had contained the hallowed relics of his dearest friends; and certainly we feel (as it has been said) the freshness of the mould, and the breath of mortality, in the spirit and force of his style. The conclusion of this singular and unparalleled performance is as follows:

‘What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid
himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all
conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entered the
famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors,
might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietors of these
bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above
antiquarianism: not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by
spirits, except we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary
observators. Had they made as good provision for their names, as they
have done for their reliques, they had not so grossly erred in the art
of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally
extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of
names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a
fruitless continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as emblems
of mortal vanities; antidotes against pride, vain glory, and madding
vices. Pagan vain-glories, which thought the world might last for
ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the
immortality of their names, were never dampt with the necessity of
oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the
attempts of their vain glories, who, acting early, and before the
probable meridian of time, have, by this time, found great
accomplishment of their designs, whereby the ancient heroes have
already outlasted their monuments, and mechanical preservations. But
in this latter scene of time we cannot expect such mummies unto our
memories, when ambition may fear the prophecy of Elias, and Charles
the Fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselah’s of Hector.

‘And therefore restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories
unto present considerations, seems a vanity almost out of date, and
superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our
names as some have done in their persons: one face of Janus holds no
proportion unto the other. ’Tis too late to be ambitious. The great
mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our
designs. To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily
pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our
expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to
our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of
time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being
necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally
constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excuseably
decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids
pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.

‘Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal
right-lined circle, must conclude and shut up all. There is no
antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all
things; our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly
tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth
scarce forty years: generations pass while some trees stand, and old
families last not three oaks. To be read by bare inscriptions like
many in Gruter, to hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets, or first
letters of our names, to be studied by antiquaries, who we were, and
have new names given us like many of the mummies, are cold
consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting
languages.

‘To be content that times to come should only know there was such a
man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition
in Cardan: disparaging his horoscopal inclination and judgment of
himself, who cares to subsist like Hippocrates’ patients, or Achilles’
horses in Homer, under naked nominations without deserts and noble
acts, which are the balsam of our memories, the Entelechia and soul of
our subsistences. To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous
history. The Canaanitish woman lives more happily without a name, than
Herodias with one. And who had not rather have been the good thief,
than Pilate?

‘But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals
with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who
can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt
the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it; time hath spared
the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we
compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad
have equal durations: and Thersites is like to live as long as
Agamemnon, without the favour of the everlasting register. Who knows
whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more
remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known
account of time? the first man had been as unknown as the last, and
Methuselah’s long life had been his only chronicle.

‘Oblivion is not to be hired: the greater part must be content to be
as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not
in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story, and
the recorded names ever since, contain not one living century. The
number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of
time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? Every
hour adds unto that current arithmetic, which scarce stands one
moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans
could doubt

whether thus to live, were to die: since our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementos, and time that grows old itself, bids us hope no long duration: diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.

‘Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities, miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls. A good way to continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural successions, they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of beings, and enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make accumulation of glory unto their last durations. Others, rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and make one particle of the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return into their unknown and divine original again. Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, conserving their bodies in sweet consistences, to attend the return of their souls. But all was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.

‘In vain do individuals hope for immortality, or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the moon: Men have been deceived even in their flatteries above the sun, and studied conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven. The various cosmography of that part hath already varied the names of contrived constellations; Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osyris in the Dog-star. While we look for incorruption in the heavens, we find they are but like the earth; durable in their main bodies, alterable in their parts: whereof beside comets and new stars, perspectives begin to tell tales. And the spots that wander about the sun, with Phaeton’s favour, would make clear conviction.

‘There is nothing immortal, but immortality; whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end. All others have a dependent being, and within the reach of destruction, which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy itself; and the highest strain of omnipotency to be so powerfully constituted, as not to suffer even from the power of itself. But the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death, makes a folly of posthumous memory. God who can only destroy our souls, and hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of chance, that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustration; and to hold long subsistence, seems but a scape in oblivion. But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature.

‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus; but the wisdom of funeral laws found the folly of prodigal blazes, and reduced undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn.

‘Five languages secured not the epitaph of Gordianus; the man of God lives longer without a tomb than any by one, invisibly interred by Angels, and adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing humane discovery. Enoch and Elias without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous state of being, are the great examples of perpetuity, in their long and living memory, in strict account being still on this side death, and having a late part yet to act on this stage of earth. If in the decretory term of the world we shall not all die but be changed, according to received translation; the last day will make but few graves; at least quick resurrections will anticipate lasting sepultures; some graves will be opened before they be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared to die shall groan that they can die but once, the dismal state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the covering of mountains, not of monuments, and annihilation shall be courted.

‘While some have studied monuments, others have studiously declined them: and some have been so vainly boisterous, that they durst not acknowledge their graves; wherein Alaricus seems most subtle, who had a river turned to hide his bones at the bottom. Even Sylla that thought himself safe in his urn, could not prevent revenging tongues, and stones thrown at his monument. Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so with men in this world, that they are not afraid to meet them in the next, who when they die, make no commotion among the dead, and are not touched with that poetical taunt of Isaiah.

‘Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride, and sits on the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity, unto which all others must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of contingency.

‘Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of pre-ordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.

‘To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to
exist in their names, and prædicament of Chimeras, was large
satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their
Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the metaphysicks of true belief.
To live indeed is to be again ourselves, which being not only an hope
but an evidence in noble believers: ’tis all one to lie in St.
Innocent’s church-yard, as in the sands of Egypt: ready to be any
thing, in the extasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as
the moles of Adrianus.’

I subjoin the following account of this extraordinary writer’s style, said to be written in a blank leaf of his works by Mr. Coleridge.

‘Sir Thomas Brown is among my first favourites. Rich in various knowledge, exuberant in conceptions and conceits; contemplative, imaginative, often truly great and magnificent in his style and diction, though, doubtless, too often big, stiff, and _hyperlatinistic_: thus I might, without admixture of falshood, describe Sir T. Brown; and my description would have this fault only, that it would be equally, or almost equally, applicable to half a dozen other writers, from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth to the end of the reign of Charles the Second. He is indeed all this; and what he has more than all this, and peculiar to himself, I seem to convey to my own mind in some measure, by saying, that he is a quiet and sublime _enthusiast_, with a strong tinge of the _fantast_; the humourist constantly mingling with, and flashing across the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his head, which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the brains. He sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne; but from no other than the general circumstance of an egotism common to both, which, in Montaigne, is too often a mere amusing gossip, a chit-chat story of whims and peculiarities that lead to nothing; but which, in Sir Thomas Brown, is always the result of a feeling heart, conjoined with a mind of active curiosity, the natural and becoming egotism of a man, who, loving other men as himself, gains the habit and the privilege of talking about himself as familiarly as about other men. Fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangenesses, while he conceives himself with quaint and humorous gravity, an useful inquirer into physical truths and fundamental science, he loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found by comparison with other men’s, that _they_, too, were curiosities; and so, with a perfectly graceful interesting ease, he put _them_, too, into his museum and cabinet of rarities. In very truth, he was not mistaken, so completely does he see every thing in a light of his own; reading nature neither by sun, moon, or candle-light, but by the light of the fairy glory around his own head; that you might say, that nature had granted to _him_ in perpetuity, a patent and monopoly for all his thoughts. Read his _Hydriotaphia_ above all, and, in addition to the peculiarity, the exclusive _Sir Thomas Browne-ness_, of all the fancies and modes of illustration, wonder at, and admire, his _entireness_ in every subject which is before him. He is _totus in illo_, he follows it, he never wanders from it, and he has no occasion to wander; for whatever happens to be his subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that Hydriotaphia, or treatise on some urns dug up in Norfolk—how _earthy_, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is every line! You have now dark mould; now a thigh-bone; now a skull; then a bit of a mouldered coffin; a fragment of an old tombstone, with moss in its _hic jacet_; a ghost, a winding sheet; or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind: and the gayest thing you shall meet with, shall be a silver nail, or gilt _anno domini_, from a perished coffin top!—The very same remark applies in the same force, to the interesting, though far less interesting treatise on the Quincuncial Plantations of the Ancients, the same _entireness_ of subject! Quincunxes in heaven above; quincunxes in earth below; quincunxes in deity; quincunxes in the mind of man; quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in every thing! In short, just turn to the last leaf of this volume, and read out aloud to yourself the seven last paragraphs of chapter 5th, beginning with the words “_More considerable_.” But it is time for me to be in bed. In the words of Sir T. Brown (which will serve as a fine specimen of his manner), “But the quincunxes of Heaven (the _hyades, or five stars about the horizon, at midnight at that time_) run low, and it is time we close the five parts of knowledge; we are unwilling to spin out our waking thoughts into the phantoms of sleep, which often continue precogitations, making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome groves. To keep our eyes open longer, were to _act_ our antipodes! The huntsmen are up in Arabia; and they have already passed their first sleep in Persia.” Think you, that there ever was such a reason given before for going to bed at midnight; to wit, that if we did not, we should be _acting_ the part of our antipodes! And then, “THE HUNTSMEN ARE UP IN ARABIA,”—what life, what fancy! Does the whimsical knight give us thus, the _essence_ of gunpowder tea, and call it an _opiate_?‘[38]