Burton.
Robert Burton, author of "The Anatomy of Melancholy," would have been despised by Overbury both as "a mere Fellow of a House" and as "a melancholy man," while to Milton he must have seemed one of those spiritual pastors whose "hungry sheep look up and are not fed," with sufficiency of sermons. Burton (born 1577) was of a landholding family, in Leicestershire, was educated at the grammar schools of Nuneaton and Sutton Coldfield, went to Brasenose, Oxford, in 1593, and got a "studentship" (the House\'s name for a fellowship) at Christ Church. He never married, though he professes himself not ignorant of love, and he held one living in Leicestershire, and another in Oxford. He lived to do the work that he was born to do, "The Anatomy of Melancholy," first published in 1621, with great success and with a following of later and amplified editions. He escaped the Civil War, which hit no class of men harder than the clergy, by dying in 1640.
Melancholy, we have seen, was then a literary and social fashion. Burton analysed it, reduced it to a vast number of classes or categories, explored all its causes, physical, pathological, amorous, magical (witchcraft), and "immediately from God"; all its cures, lawful and unlawful—incantation, prayer, diet, exercise; all its moral alleviations; all medical prescriptions—blood-letting, purging, herbs; everything. He made an encyclop?dia of melancholy. The reader had but to ask, "What kind of melancholy is mine, amorous, worldly, witch-sent, or religious?" look up the right chapter, and forget his gloom in the[Pg 304] huge collection of anecdotes and curious, vast, classic, medical and pleasantly useless learning. "The Anatomy" was what Thackeray called "a bedside book," but for the inconvenience of the edition in folio. The modern reader escapes trouble by using Mr. Shilleto\'s edition in three handy volumes. To the modern reader trouble is otherwise caused by the abundance of Latin, and by endless names of authors whom all the world has, for the most part not unjustly, forgotten.
Under "Exercise Rectified" will be found matter for Izaak Walton, matter on angling, from which pastime, says Nic. Heinselius, in his Silesiographia, the Silesians are so eccentric as to suck great pleasure. James Dubravius, an author dear to Walton, once met a Moravian nobleman in waders, "booted up to the groins," but this unworthy Earl was not angling, he was netting; or, as he described his pitiful pastime, "hunting carps". In England, says Burton, many gentlemen wade "up to the armholes," but not after salmon, not in Frank\'s "glittering and resolute streams of Tweed" with salmon rod in hand. They are "hunting carps," a fish that loves the mud, a kind of ground-game. Burton admires "false flies," he does not appear to have used them much. But he is always wise, so much so that he steals the contemplative man\'s consolation (when his creel is empty) without acknowledgment, from the charming passage in the "treatise pertaining to fish," printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496. This treatise influences all angling books, Leonard Mascal\'s, Walton\'s, and the rest.
Burton cannot have been a melancholy man; he was too laborious in omnivorous reading, and in writing was so copious and so pleasantly successful. His face, if his portrait at Brasenose be authentic (the ruff seems of an earlier date), is that of a pleasant old humorist. He is charitably disposed towards suicides; we know so little! He leaves them to the measureless mercy of Him who, understanding all, can pardon all. He is a very serious consoler of persons under religious despair; perhaps Cowper studied him unavailingly, Bunyan probably did not try his cures. It is vain, he says, to reason with the insane, the hallucinated, "who hear and see, many times, devils, bugbears, and Mormeluches,[Pg 305] noisome smells, etc.". He has prescribed for these curses when they arise from normal "internal causes". Sapphires, chrysolites, carbuncles may be worn by the afflicted: "Pennyroyal, Rue, Mint, Angelica, Piony" may be exhibited. There is no harm in trying St. John\'s wort. The physician of the Emperor Augustus relied on betony. Where spirits haunt, fumigations are useful.
A stout Protestant, Burton has no belief in exorcisms, though Presbyterians used them in the eighteenth century. The clerical father of the poet James Thomson tried exorcism on a ghost, but failed, and was slain by a ball of fire, says legend.
Ye wretched, Hope!
Ye that are happy, Beware!
ends Burton.
Burton\'s style is admirable, if we do not weary of very long sentences, weighted with a dozen references to his queer authorities. But the art of skipping can meet the occasion, and Burton can write as tersely as any man when he pleases. If Burton left his rural parish to a curate, he preached well and wisely to the largest of congregations. If he really were, at heart, a melancholy moping man, he found happiness in the long task of his life; the book which teaches the lesson of the Vanity of Melancholy.
Herbert of Cherbury.
Born in 1583, the brother of George Herbert, the poet, Lord Herbert of Cherbury is best remembered for his curious and amusing autobiography (edited and published by Horace Walpole in 1764). Wealthy, beautiful, and, by his own account a desperate swordsman, Herbert was deaf in childhood, spoke late, and then asked his nurse how he had come into this world; for an answer to this problem "I could not imagine," and no wonder. He pursued his reflections on the theme of birth and death in Latin verse\' and in prose. His soul, he averred, had developed faculties "almost useless for this life," hope, faith, love, and joy. They must therefore be destined to higher employment upon subjects not transitory, "the perfect, eternal, and infinite". But he was[Pg 306] not orthodox, his "De Veritate," and "Religio Laici," both in Latin, are deemed heretical.
He was privately educated till he went to University College, Oxford, where he preferred Greek to Latin composition. While he was a very young undergraduate his father died, and he was married. He was all accomplished; astrology and medicine, many languages and music were mastered by him, with fencing, of course: he dilates on the fencer\'s need of good feet and eyes, on the "lunge," and on equestrian duels. Having provided himself with a family, Herbert went abroad, distinguished himself at the siege of Juliers under the Prince of Orange, snubbed de Balagny, a great French duellist, behaved like a paladin, and writes of himself like a Bobadil. His triumphs with the sex are equally celebrated, and a husband who deemed himself to be, but was not "injured," lurked, to murder Herbert, in Scotland Yard, not now a favourite ambush for criminals. In the fight that followed of one man against five, Herbert, with a broken sword, fought in a manner to be described only by himself or Alexandre Dumas. If he fought like le brave Bussy, he was also favoured by a miracle like Colonel Gardiner, a miracle sanctioning the publication of his book, "De Veritate" (1624).
In 1629 he became a peer of England: in later politics he deserted the cause of Charles I: finding himself at 60 (1643) extremely debilitated, and quite disinclined to draw his sword. He died in 1648: his "History of Henry VIII," much praised by Horace Walpole, was published in the following year. His verses, in which he uses the metre of "In Memoriam," were never so popular as his brother George\'s, but his autobiography is highly diverting in its exhibition of character.
Browne.
Thomas Browne, best known as Sir Thomas Browne, came of a Cheshire family. He was born in London on 19 October, 1605. Early left fatherless, "he was, according to the common fate of orphans," says Dr. Johnson, "defrauded by one of his guardians," who seems to have lacked opportunity to strip the orphan absolutely bare. Browne was educated at Winchester,[Pg 307] went on to Broadgates Hall, Oxford, graduated (1629), travelled in Ireland, took a doctor\'s degree at Leyden; is said to have practised medicine at Halifax, and about 1637 settled at Norwich for the fifty remaining years of his life.
His earliest and probably his most popular book, the "Religio Medici," appears to have been written about 1635-1637. Several transcripts existed; in 1642 one of them, imperfect enough, was printed without Browne\'s knowledge and consent, and was criticized by Sir Kenelm Digby and others. Browne therefore issued an authorized edition, and the work was extremely successful both in England and on the Continent.
Naturally this confessor of his private ideas about religion was attacked on all sides, as an atheist, a papist, a deist, by the scribblers of the hostile sects. Browne, in fact, was a Christian who did not, as at that time was especially common, regard hatred of all who differed with him about a surplice or a sermon as a holier thing than the virtue of charity.
In his preface he says that almost every man suffers by the Press, and that he "has lived to behold the highest perversion of that excellent invention," the King defamed, the honour of Parliament impaired, a flood of printed falsehoods submerging everything, and carrying erroneous copies of Browne\'s private papers into the market. Browne opens his work by declaring that, in spite of his profession (and of the proverb, "one doctor out of three is an atheist"), he is a Christian, and a tolerant Christian. "Holy water and crucifix (dangerous to the common people) deceive not my judgment, nor abuse my devotion at all. ...I should violate my own arm rather than a church; nor willingly deface the name of saint or martyr. At the sight of a cross or crucifix I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour."
At Norwich in the Cathedral the Puritans publicly destroyed and burned all works of art (including the organ), which they were pleased to regard as monuments of idolatry: a bitter sight for Browne. "I have no genius to dispute in religion," says he. As for "sturdy doubts and boisterous objections, wherewith the unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us, more of these[Pg 308] no man hath known than myself; which I confess I conquered, not in a martial posture, but on my knees". In that world of frenzied pamphleteers, "hating each other for the love of God," the charm and fragrance of Browne\'s style, the "peace! peace!" which, like Falkland, he "ingeminates," his refined humour, and smiling pitying sympathy, and curiosity about all things knowable, made his book delightful; and delightful to readers tolerant of exquisiteness in manner the "Religio Medici" can never cease to be.
We are astonished, to-day, as much by the things which Browne knows, or believes, as by those which he does not know and does not believe. "I do now know that there are witches" has a surprise in it, but what does he precisely mean by "witches"? "I think at first a great part of philosophy" (science) "was witchcraft." Here he agrees with modern writers who regard magic as an early and uninstructed sort of science. He believes in guardian angels, but his "metaphysics of them are very shallow," and, in modern terms, what he believes in is "the subconscious self". As for hell, "the heart of a man is the place the devils dwell in... Lucifer keeps his court in my breast. Legion is revived in me."
In short this good physician is a mystic: "we must therefore say that there is something in us that is not in the jurisdiction of Morpheus... we are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleep; and the slumbering of the body seems to be but the wakening of the soul!" a very old belief of the Greeks.
In "Pseudodoxia Epidemica," "Vulgar Errors" (1646), Browne\'s manner somewhat resembles that of Burton, but his medley of strange stories, scientific, pseudo-scientific, or plainly superstitious, is even more entertaining and much more carefully and artfully written than "The Anatomy of Melancholy". He consciously aims at harmony and balance of style, and at selecting the right word (le mot propre), while he ranges over all ancient knowledge and modern fable. "Many and false conceptions there are of mandrakes," and Browne thinks but little of them, and less of the false etymologies from which his age had not delivered itself. He is engaged, like the scholar in Lytton\'s novel "The Caxtons," on a "History of Human Error," and with his[Pg 309] humour, sympathy, learning, and irony, he makes a most entertaining book.
His "Urn Burial" with "The Garden of Cyrus" (1658) begins with antiquarianism, and ends with the famous passages on the vanity of desiring "to subsist in lasting monuments". "But Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnising nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy" (infimy?) "of his nature." "The Garden of Cyrus" concerning the mystic virtues of the quincunx (like cinq in dice) is more fantastic and Pythagorean. The motto for the posthumously published "Christian Morals" might be selected from one line in its counsels,
Yet hold thou unto old Morality.
It wears better than the new article!
To know Browne\'s works is no small part of a liberal education. He lived in quiet and opulence, "his whole house and garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities," says Evelyn; he was much occupied in correspondence with the learned and with his eldest son, and with local history, till his death on 19 October, 1682.
Charles II had dubbed him knight at Norwich in 1671. Charles, in Dr. Johnson\'s phrase, had skill to discover excellence, and virtue to reward it, with such honorary distinctions, at least, as cost him nothing.
CAROLINE PROSE.
Milton.
The greater part of Milton\'s prose works is so deeply concerned with politics, mainly religious or concerned with Church government, that it cannot easily be criticized without controversial interruptions, here out of place. His earliest important piece (1641) treats of the Reformation in England. It had never come up to Strafford\'s standard, Thorough, never shaken off "the rags of Rome"—that is Milton\'s theme. Nor, in Scotland, had reformation really been more successful, for the preachers claimed at least all the powers of the priests over the liberties of the subject.
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Milton at once attacks that which, to Laud, was part of "the beauty of Holiness," Jewish and Catholic survivals of "fantastic dresses, palls and mitres, gold and gewgaws fetched from Aaron\'s old wardrobe". "The piebald frippery and ostentation of ceremonies" the Church styled "decency"; Henry VIII "stuck where he did". Under Edward VI, if his sister Mary were not to be persecuted most righteously, who were the slaves that interfered to secure for her liberty of conscience? Who but Bishops! Bishops were therefore "followers of this world," they always were and always will be. You reply that they, Cranmer and Latimer, were also martyrs? Well, says Milton, "What then?" A man may "give his body to the burning and yet not have charity". The Bishops had not charity, clearly, or they would have aided in depriving the Princess of freedom of conscience. Elizabeth, aided by Bishops, persecuted Puritans, but then Puritans have a right to freedom of conscience, for themselves, and a right to prevent other people from exercising the same privilege. If there are to be Bishops they must be of popular election, but when preachers with powers in some respects greater were elected by the people in Scotland, Milton did not approve of them either.
His next important tract, The Apology for Smectymnuus (five preachers, Marshal, Calamy, Young, Newcomen and Spurstow, who had attacked Episcopacy), is of 1642. Bishop Hall, who, in youth, had boasted that he was the first English satirist, had replied to the Five in his Defence of the Remonstrance; Milton had answered; Hall in his turn published "A Modest Confutation," and Milton\'s Apology for Smectymnuus ensued. The adversary had made scurrilous remarks, had attacked Milton\'s manners and morals, quite causelessly, in the controversial fashion of the age. Milton replied that his adversary was a "rude scavenger," and then gave that account of his own way of life in youth which lends its value to this passage in the discussion. He had never haunted "bordelloes," houses of ill-fame; he calls the women who keep them "prelatesses". A Bishop, to Milton, is a male of the same species. As for the theatre he had seen his fellow-students act at college, "prostituting the shame of that ministry, which either they had, or were nigh having, to the eyes[Pg 311] of courtiers and court ladies...." He had always, he declares, been a remarkably pure young man; hence his life-long love of romances of chivalry, where every knight is bound by oath to defend, with his life if need be, the chastity of ladies. "The first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul," he says nobly.
We need not dwell on his "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," written, it seems, a few weeks after his hapless marriage in 1643. If all men were Miltons and all women worthy of them, his doctrine of freedom of divorce would not have thorny consequences.
His "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" was published in February, 1649; Charles I had been slain on 30 January of that year. It is desirable, in a history of Literature, to "keep King Charles\'s head out of the Memorial".
In the "Areopagitica" (1644) Milton, defending freedom of printing against these friends of liberty, the then dominant Presbyterians, in many passages gives us the prose of a great poet. Here is a passage which must have irritated the Puritans who were not so after the manner of Milton.
"If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must rectify our recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be thought honest: for such Plato was provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to examine all the lutes, and violins, and the guitars in every house; they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals, that whisper softness in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies must be thought on; there are shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces, set to sale; who shall prohibit them? shall twenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitors to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebeck reads, even to the ballatry, and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these are the countryman\'s Arcadias and his Monte Mayors." The famous sentence "I cannot praise a fugitive and[Pg 312] cloistered virtue" is familiar to all memories, but such things are not common in his prose: the search for the limbs of slain and mutilated Truth compared to the search for the fragments of "the good Osiris" by Isis, might not have been written had Milton remembered the details of that savage fable, common to ancient Egypt and the Australian Arunta. His cause has triumphed, as triumph it must, in a world where no all-wise and infallible Licenser of Books can be found.
"The defence of the people of England" in answer to Salmasius\'s "Defence of the King," had not, perhaps, the right client. It was not the People of England who slew the King. Milton tells his own story of that unhappy reign (in "Eikonoklastes," his reply to "Eikon Basilike," attributed to Charles, really, as is believed, by Gauden) it may be read with more profit in the history of Mr. S. R. Gardiner. Milton declares the charge against the Scots of "selling their king" to be "a foul infamy and dishonour". The Scots, every soul of them who had a touch of chivalry, took up the sword to cleanse the blot, died on the field, or on the scaffold, or were sold as slaves, or were starved to death in Durham Cathedral. There are, in short there could not but be, noble and harmonious and stirring passages in Milton\'s prose; but poetry was his native language, and his themes were such as to place sobriety of view, and delicate discrimination of good and evil almost beyond his power. For, as Argyll said, of himself, he was "a distraught man in distraught times". Otherwise Milton, the proudest of men, would not have answered railing with railing.
Jeremy Taylor.
Among the pulpit orators of the seventeenth century, none has left a name more fragrant than Jeremy Taylor. His devotional works, such as "Holy Living," and still more "Holy Dying," are still in the hands of the devout. But it is not easy to suppose that many readers who are not profound students of style in prose often read the many volumes of sermons, works of casuistry, and works of controversy which Jeremy has left. He is not of our world or way of thinking; he dwells, for example, on "special" and easily distinguishable "providences". Now when a[Pg 313] tempest flooded a river, so that Montrose\'s men could not cross and despoil the lands of a contemporary of Jeremy\'s, Brodie of Brodie, that devout Covenanter confided to his journal the occurrence of this "special providence". But when the river fell, and Montrose crossed and drove the kye, Brodie remarks in his journal that we ought not to interpret the Divine Will, for we may be mistaken. Jeremy insists on his own interpretations. "From Adam to the Flood, by the patriarchs were eleven generations; but by Cain\'s line there were but eight, so that Cain\'s posterity were longer lived: because God, intending to bring the flood upon the world, took delight to rescue his elect from the dangers of the present impurity and the future deluge." In the same way Abraham lived five years less than his son Isaac, and Jeremy knows why. "The Jewish doctors" inform him that the idea was to prevent Abraham from seeing "the iniquity of his grandchild, Esau". Later, speaking of other times and lands, Jeremy says that "such fancies do seldom serve either the ends of truth or charity,"—for which he has the highest Authority in the Gospel.
We are no longer apt to reason as Taylor does about the Patriarchs, or on hundreds of other points, and this cannot but diminish our pleasure in reading his books. But he pleases us, exactly as Burton does in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," by illustrations drawn from his amazing knowledge of books. Thus, immediately after the passage last cited, he says "Pierre Cauchon died under the barber\'s hand: there wanted not some who said it was a judgement upon him for condemning to the fire the famous Pucelle of France, who prophesied the expulsion of the English out of the kingdom. They that thought this believed her to be a prophetess" (as she certainly was), "but others that thought her a witch, were willing to find out another conjecture for the sudden death of the gentleman." "The sudden death of the gentleman" is a courteous phrase to apply to Cauchon; and very unexpected in "The History of the Life and Death of the Holy Jesus". But whence did Jeremy get his story of Cauchon? From the Latin hexameters of Valerandus, a book so entirely out of the common way that perhaps not three persons in the England of to-day have read it.
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So our author runs on, telling of "that famous person and of excellent learning, Giacchettus of Geneva," whose morals were not Genevan, while his death was, in an extreme degree, remarkable. Jeremy more than once insists that many thousand men were slain, in one night, in the Assyrian camp, for committing the offence of that famous person, Giacchettus. Nobody has ever found out his authority for his statement; he may have learned it "from the Jewish doctors". In any case, however entertaining and instructive his divine works may be, he often raises a smile which he never dreamed of provoking. Other times, other tastes!
Jeremy Taylor was born under James VI and I, was the son of a barber in Cambridge, and was baptized on 15 August, 1613. Unless he was christened two years after his birth, it is not plain how he could have been in his fifteenth year when (August, 1626) he was admitted to Caius College as a sizar (at Oxford, "servitor"); Jeremy\'s eloquence attracted the notice of Archbishop Laud, who had him made a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford (1636). At Oxford, a Cavalier University, Jeremy studied casuistry, the topic of his large book "Ductor Dubitantium," a Guide to the Doubting. In 1638, Jeremy obtained the cure of souls at Uppingham, and in the same year preached, in the University pulpit, a Guy Fawkes Day sermon. In 1639 he married. In 1640, Laud was impeached of treason; in 1642, as chaplain, Jeremy served under the standard of King Charles. Parliament abolished Bishops; Jeremy defended Episcopacy ("Of the Sacred Order of Episcopacy"). In February, 1645, he was captured in a Royalist defeat, but was protected by Lord Carbery, and became his private chaplain at Golden Grove in Carmarthenshire, where he was safe from the persecution of the friends of freedom of conscience that called themselves "the godly". At Golden Grove, though far from what had been his library, he wrote "An Apology for Liturgy" (abolished by Parliament in 1645). In 1647 appeared his "Liberty of Prophesying," a plea for toleration. Such pleas always came from the religious party which was being persecuted, though, even when persecuted, the Covenanters always denounced "the vomit of toleration," their aim being, in power or out of power, to force all mankind to be presbyterian covenanters. The frenzy of armed religious[Pg 315] fanatics made Taylor, like Falkland, as described by Clarendon, "ingeminate peace! peace!" But he himself was to be in prisons often, under the persecution of the Commonwealth, and when he unhappily became, under the Restoration, Bishop of Dromore in a covenanting part of Ireland, he replaced the Presbyterian ministers by Anglican clergymen.
Taylor\'s plea for toleration was an offence to all parties. These years of the King\'s disasters and death must have been bitterness to Taylor.
He now composed his work "The Great Exemplar," a Life of Christ, filled with persuasions to godliness, with reflections far fetched but charmingly phrased, and he did not disdain legends destitute of scriptural authority. "In the country of Thebais, whither they first arrived, the child Jesus being by design or providence carried into a temple, all the statues of the Idol gods fell down, like Dagon at the presence of the Ark, and suffered their timely and just dissolution and dishonour." The book makes no attempt at criticism, and is of an immense length: in those days "a great book" was not deemed "a gre............