CHAPTER XIV.
ESSAYISTS AND LETTER WRITERS, LITERARY HISTORIANS
The most important part of the posthumous papers of Samuel Butler, the discovery of which in the eighteenth century has been mentioned, was his Characters, composed upon the model of Theophrastus, and fairly entitling him to the appellation of the English Theophrastus, which is not the highest encomium imaginable. As the only work of the kind which has come down to us from antiquity, the Characters of Theophrastus, which are in reality much later than the time of that successor of Aristotle, have passed as models, a reputation in excess of their desert. They offer an acute and entertaining enumeration of various peculiarities of character, but do not succeed in presenting the personage as a whole, and have much the air of being compiled from traits delineated with a real truth of representation by the comic poets. Butler’s Characters are of just the same kind, and his work is rather a museum of particulars than a gallery of portraits. The age of Charles II. by no means lives in him as the age of Anne lives in Addison. La Bruyère, Butler’s more celebrated French successor, who certainly never read and probably never heard of him, fell into precisely the same error from too timid an adherence to Theophrastus; and the improvement upon him effected by Addison may be compared to the service rendered to sculpture by Dædalus, the first, it is said, to show the human form in motion. Isolated remarks in Butler’s essays are frequently very shrewd and pregnant; as when he says of the newsmonger, ‘He would willingly bear his share in any public calamity to have the pleasure of hearing and telling it;’ or of the hunter, ‘Let the hare take which way she will, she seldom fails to lead him at long-running to the alehouse;’ or the description of a prince’s unworthy favourite as ‘a fog raised by the sun to obscure his own brightness.’ Many of Butler’s miscellaneous thoughts, appended to the Characters, are highly acute, and exhibit a happy talent for illustrating abstract ideas by comparison with sensible objects, as for instance: ‘Oaths and obligations in the affairs of the world are like ribands and knots in dressing, that seem to tie something, but do not.’ In politics Butler is, of course, a loyalist, and one whose loyalty is intensified by his æsthetic dislike to Puritanism, in which he was constitutionally incapable of seeing anything but cant. At the same time, the contempt which as a man of understanding he could not help entertaining for the conduct of affairs under the Restoration, and disappointment at the neglect with which he was himself treated, seem to have almost reduced him to a condition of political scepticism. ‘The worst governments are the best when they light in good hands; and the best the worst, when they fall into bad ones’ – a remark condensed into a famous couplet by Pope, who appears to have become acquainted with Butler’s MS. through Atterbury. It is worth observing that Butler not only prefers Ben Jonson to Shakespeare, but seems to take his superiority for granted: ‘Virgil, who wanted much of that natural easiness of wit that Ovid had, did nevertheless with hard labour and long study arrive at a higher perfection than the other with all his dexterity of wit, but less industry, could attain to. The same we may observe of Jonson and Shakespeare; for he that is able to think long and judge well will be sure to find out better things than another man can hit upon suddenly, though of more quick and ready parts, which is commonly but chance, and the other art and judgment.’ One special distinction of Butler’s is to have been perhaps the first English satirist of mark who made parody a political weapon, or at least showed its capabilities for this purpose, as it does not appear that any of his political parodies were printed in his lifetime. Jack Cade’s speeches in Shakespeare are, indeed, a sufficient model, but Butler worked out the hint elaborately in his fictitious speeches in the Rump Parliament; his mock eulogium of this body or segment of a body in the oration supposed to be delivered at Harrington’s Rota; and the parody of Prynne’s style in the imaginary correspondence between him and John Audland, the Quaker.
Butler’s remains were only partially printed in 1759, but the MSS. from which Thyer’s publication was drawn were acquired in 1885 by the British Museum. His selection seems to have been in general exceedingly judicious, but the opportunity may be taken of giving some examples of Butler’s unpublished thoughts:
‘There is no better argument to prove that the Scriptures were written by divine inspiration than that excellent saying of our Saviour, If any man will go to law with thee for thy cloak, give him thy coat also.
‘Birds are taken with pipes that imitate their own voices, and men with those sayings that are most agreeable to their own opinions.
‘If the French nobility should follow our fashions, and send their children over to learn our language, and receive their education from us, we should have as glorious an opinion of ourselves, and as mean a value of them, as they have of us; and therefore we have no reason to blame them, but our own folly for it.’
It is interesting to learn Butler’s opinion of Dryden as a critic:
‘Dryden weighs poets in his virtuoso’s scales that will weigh to the hundredth part of a grain, as curiously as Juvenal’s lady pedantess —
“Committit vates, et comparat inde Maronem,
Atque alia parte in trutina suspendit Homerum.”
He complained of Ben Jonson for stealing scenes out of Plautus. Set a thief to find out a thief.’
George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, who ranks with Shaftesbury and Temple among the few politicians of that age entitled to the appellation of statesman, enriched English literature with a small volume of essays, the most important of which are his vindication of his own political course and principles in The Character of a Trimmer and The Anatomy of an Equivalent. Of these Macaulay justly says: ‘What particularly strikes us is the writer’s passion for generalization. He was treating of the most exciting subjects in the most agitated times; he was himself placed in the very thick of the civil conflict; yet there is no acrimony, nothing inflammatory, nothing personal. He treats every question as an abstract question, begins with the widest propositions, argues these propositions on general grounds, and often, when he has brought out his theorem, leaves the reader to make the application, without adding an allusion to particular men or to passing events.’ The effect of this remarkable breadth of view was not with Halifax, as so frequently the case, to paralyze energy, and render the comprehensive mind unfit for practical action. He was not retained in equilibrium by the difficulty of deciding between two courses, but was an enthusiast for the via media, as great a zealot for compromise as zealots commonly are for strong measures; and, though sometimes too yielding or too speculative for the unquiet times in which his lot was cast, would have made an almost ideal prime minister for the nineteenth century. His praise of trimming, which to more fiery spirits must have seemed an ignoble policy, rings with the eloquence and passion of the most genuine conviction:
‘Our Trimmer adores the Goddess Truth, though in all ages she has been scurvily used, as well as those that worshipped her. ’Tis of late become such a ruining virtue that mankind seems to be agreed to commend and avoid it; yet the want of practice, which repeals the other laws, has no influence upon the law of truth, because it has root in heaven, and an intrinsic value in itself that can never be impaired. She shows her greatness in this, that her enemies, even when they are successful, are ashamed to own it. Nothing but power full of truth has the prerogative of triumphing, not only after victories, but in spite of them, and to put conquest herself out of countenance. She may be kept under and suppressed, but her dignity still remains with her, even when she is in chains. Falsehood with all her impudence has not enough to speak ill of her before her face. Such majesty she carries about her that her most prosperous enemies are fain to whisper their treason, all the power upon the earth can never extinguish her. She has lived in all ages, and let the mistaken zeal of prevailing authority christen any opposition to her with what name they please, she makes it not only an ugly and an unmannerly, but a dangerous thing to persist. She has lived very retired indeed, nay, sometimes so buried that only some few of the discerning part of mankind could have a glimpse of her; with all that, she has eternity in her, she knows not how to die, and from the darkest clouds that shade and cover her she breaks from time to time with triumph for her friends, and terror to her enemies.
‘Our Trimmer, therefore, inspired by this divine virtue, thinks fit to conclude with these assertions, That our climate is a trimmer between that part of the world where men are roasted and that part where they are frozen: That our Church is a trimmer between the phrenzy of phanatic12 visions and the lethargic ignorance of Popish dreams: That our laws are trimmers between the excess of unbounded power and the extravagance of liberty not enough restrained: That true virtue has ever been thought a trimmer, and to have its dwelling in the middle between the two extremes: That even God Almighty himself is divided between his two great attributes, his mercy and his justice.
‘In such company our Trimmer is not ashamed of his name, and willingly leaves to the bold champions of either extreme the honour of contending with no less adversaries than nature, religion, liberty, prudence, humanity, and common sense.’
Burnet might well be puzzled by a man who ‘seemed to have his head full of Commonwealth notions,’ and yet concurred in the worst measures of Charles II.
The most important of Halifax’s other essays are his advice to his daughter, excellent for sense and curious as an illustration of the manners of the age, and his character of Charles II., nicely balanced between half-sincere censure and half-sarcastic apology. There is nothing in Charles’s history to refute Halifax’s view of him as a man whose master passion was the selfish love of ease; but much to prove that his abilities and discernment were far greater than Halifax chooses to allow. Halifax’s aphorisms, as usual, are too numerous to attain a uniformly high standard, but some are exceedingly good.
‘A fool hath no dialogue within himself.
‘Malice may be sometimes out of breath, Envy never. A man may make peace with hatred, but never with envy.
‘An old man concludeth from his knowing mankind that they know him too, and that maketh him very wary.
‘He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.’
An allusion in these aphorisms to the Bank of England proves that Halifax went on writing till nearly the hour of his death in 1695. Of his other writings, the most remarkable is the Advice to a Dissenter (1687), a masterly dissuasive against abetting the illegalities of James.
Possibly, when Halifax penned the last-quoted aphorism, he was thinking of Sir William Temple, well known to him at the council-board, of whom Macaulay says, ‘It was his constitution to dread failure more than he desired success.’ This elegant writer, whom we have already met as an historian and as a speculator upon government, for once did a rash thing when he entered into the controversy respecting the comparative merits of the ancient and modern writers, knowing little of either. Macaulay has done full justice to the ignorance and carelessness of this well-worded composition; but Macaulay has said nothing of its extraordinary want of insight. Temple need not be blamed for having been unable to make up his mind whether the blood circulated, and whether the earth went round the sun (the Grand Duke Cosmo found Cambridge disputing against the latter proposition in 1669); what is really astonishing is that he should have been utterly blind to the stupendous consequences which Giordano Bruno had pointed out a century before. ‘If they are true,’ he says, ‘yet these two great discoveries have made no change in the conclusions of astronomy, nor in the practice of physic, and so have been of little use to the world, though perhaps of much honour to the authors.’ After this, Temple’s essays are not likely to be referred to in quest of intellectual wisdom, and their chief value, apart from the purity and elegance of their style, consists in their illustrations of contemporary opinions and practices. This is especially the case with the essay on Health and Long Life. Temple enumerates with suppressed amusement the various sanatory fads he has known, among which he seems to reckon tea and coffee. Unconsciously confirming an anecdote of Charles II. and his physicians, related by Evelyn, he tells us that Peruvian bark was at first received with prejudice and suspicion, but was becoming rehabilitated in his day, and fairly confounds us by his faith in ‘that little insect called millepedes; the powder whereof, made up into little balls with fresh butter, I never knew fail of curing any sore throat.’
The letter-writers of the age who have any claim to a place in literature as such are but few, and none of their epistles were intended for publication. Dryden, as elsewhere, takes the lead, and his letters, though scanty and occasional, occupy a pleasant chamber in the edifice of his prose writings. The first, dated 1655, and addressed to a female cousin in language of complimentary gallantry, is of especial interest as showing how early his prose style was formed. Notwithstanding the strain of high-flown sentiment enforced by the occasion, it is far less fanciful and involved than similar compositions of the early Caroline period, and is in all essential respects an example of the sound, clear prose of the Restoration. The letters to the two Rochesters, the man of letters and the man of office, are models of ingenious flattery in different styles; those to his publisher, Jacob Tonson, apart from their personal interest, are important for the light they throw upon the relations between publishers and authors at a period when publishers were as yet mere tradesmen, and the most popular author could hardly subsist by authorship. The latest of all, addressed to his Northamptonshire kindred, are mellow as with the light of a setting sun, and afford pleasant glimpses of the occasional ruralizings of the most urban of poets.
Lady Temple’s letters (1652-1654).
Sir William Temple is so thoroughly identified with the Restoration period, that although the Lady Temple’s charming letters of his betrothed, Dorothy Osborne, were written in 1652-54, and not published until 1888, they may be regarded as belonging to it. The young lady was well known from Macaulay’s account of her in his essay upon her husband, and many of her letters had been published in Courtenay’s life of her husband, ere the whole, so far as preserved, recently became accessible in the edition of Mr. Edward Abbott Parry. Intended for no other eyes than her lover’s, these letters have given Lady Temple high rank among English epistolographers. Though they are exceedingly well written, their charm is personal rather than literary. No biographer or novelist has painted a truer picture of the English maiden, high-minded and high spirited, heroically constant and at the same time full of engaging frailties and arch teasing ways, than is depicted in these artless self-revelations. Temple seems to have behaved perfectly well throughout their protracted engagement; and his fulfilment of it after Dorothy’s beauty had been destroyed by the smallpox may be reasonably believed to have been the effect of inclination, no less than of honour and duty. The very slight glimpse we obtain of their married life reveals Lady Temple’s interest in his political career; had this been guided by her his life would probably have been less comfortable, and his memory more glorious.
Dean Prideaux’s letters (1674-1710).
The letters of Humphrey Prideaux, Dean of Norwich, to John Ellis, Secretary of the Treasury, edited for the Camden Society by Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, though ordinary familiar correspondence, are too curious a repertory of gossip to be passed over without notice. They are mostly written from Oxford, and retail the scandal of the university in a lively fashion, although the writer, a middling classical and oriental scholar, known by his edition of the Arundel Marbles and his Life of Mahomet, seems rather a matter-of-fact personage. His relish for scandal, however, occasionally makes him humorous, as when he describes the deportment of his predecessor in the Norwich deanery: ‘His whole life is the pot and the pipe, and, go to him when you will, you will find him walking about his room with a pipe in his mouth and a bottle of claret and a bottle of old strong beer (which in this country they call nog) upon the table, and every other turn he takes a glass of one or the other of them.’ The book is rich in such vignettes; its more serious interest consists in its illustration of the practical refutation of the theory of divine right previously held by the majority of the clergy by James II.’s misgovernment. The beginning and the end of the correspondence are in violent political contrast; and the metamorphosis is entirely effected during the last two years of James’s reign.
Literary history is necessarily among the latest developments of literature. The nearest approach to it in the England of the seventeenth century was the younger Gerard Langbaine’s (1656-92) Account of the English Dramatic Poets, Oxford, 1691. Langbaine laid himself out particularly to discover the sources from which dramatists had borrowed their plots, and is styled by Dr. Johnson ‘the great detector of plagiarism.’ He has been accused of having read poetry for no other purpose, but is vindicated by Mr. Sidney Lee. The value of his work is much increased by the manuscript notes and additions of Oldys and others, copies of which are in the British Museum and Bodleian. The literary compilations of Edward Phillips are so poor that they would have deserved no notice if he had not been Milton’s nephew, and the first English author to mention Paradise Lost.
CHAPTER XV.
ANTIQUARIANS AND MEN OF SCIENCE
Anthony à Wood (1632-1695).
The pursuit of antiquarianism has always flourished in England since her inhabitants have enjoyed sufficient culture to be aware that they possessed a past. Even the poetry of Layamon is in a certain measure antiquarian, and Chaucer, Spenser, Milton appear progressively more and more leavened with antiquarian sentiment, which, as a factor of literary inspiration, attains perhaps its highest conceivable development in the works of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. The Restoration period produced no such examples of antiquarian men of genius; but several excellent antiquarian writers, whose works are of sufficient compass and intrinsic importance, and are distinguished by sufficient attention to diction, to bring them within the domain of literature. It may be said of all the principal of these laborious men, that they have erected imperishable monuments to themselves, and have left little room for successors, except in the capacity of editors and annotators. Of Anthony à Wood, the historian and biographer of Oxford, it is almost enough praise to say that two centuries have elapsed without producing anyone capable either of continuing his Oxonian labours on the same scale, or, since the late Mr. C. H. Cooper’s work has remained incomplete, of performing the like for the sister university. A terrible toiler, a loyalist and high churchman, as beseemed the Oxonian of his day, but apparently with few serious interests in life except the fame of his beloved Alma Mater, he sat down at thirty in his college (Merton), and delved resolutely until he had produced his History and Antiquities (1674) and his Athenae Oxonienses (1691). The former was originally published in a Latin version made by one Peers, and seriously garbled at the instigation of Dr. Fell. The original English text, however, was published in the eighteenth century. The labours of Wood’s nineteenth century editor, Dr. Bliss, upon the Athenae, are universally known. Wood is not a pure or elegant writer, but his works will last as long as Oxford.
Rymer’s Foedera.
Thomas Rymer has already been mentioned with due disrespect among critics, and his more useful and honourable labours as an antiquary do not, strictly speaking, entitle him to be named among men of letters, being mainly those of an editor. It is impossible, however, to pass over in silence a collection of such unspeakable value as his Foedera, ten folio volumes of most precious documents relating to English history from 1102 to 1654. Rymer the Dryasdust, however, cannot quite forget Rymer the Longinus; his work is graced with a Latin address to Queen Anne, more like a dithyrambic than a dedication.
Sir William Dugdale (1605-1686).
Elias Ashmole (1617-1692).
Next to Wood, the most important antiquary of the age was Sir William Dugdale, of little account as author, but whom his industry and the assistance he was successful in enlisting from various quarters, enabled to achieve several works, any one of which would have sufficed to gain him immortal renown as an antiquarian. These were his monumental Monasticon Anglicanum (1655-1673), a gigantic work, but founded in great part upon the collections of Roger Dodsworth; his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), an immense improvement upon everything that had previously been effected in the department of county history, and the model of all that has been accomplished since; his History of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1658), and his Baronage of England (1675-1676). He was also the author of several other works. So eminent a genealogist was naturally a Cavalier, and, when he lost his appointment as Chester herald during the Civil Wars, is said to have made his living by the deaths of persons of quality, whose funerals he conducted secundum artem. Private patrons and employers helped him on until the Restoration, when, as successively Norroy and Garter King-at-Arms, he attained great prosperity, making numerous visitations, and approving himself a terror to heraldic pretenders. He died at eighty, of a fever contracted ‘by attendance too much on his worldly concerns.’ His son-in-law, Elias Ashmole, was an eminent antiquary of a different order, although his principal work, Institution, Laws, and Ceremonies of the Order of the Garter, might well have proceeded from Dugdale’s pen. His turn, however, was rather for the collection of curiosities, ‘the greatest virtuoso and curioso that ever was known or read of in England before his time.’ In this capacity he collected the Ashmolean Museum, which has preserved his name more effectually than anything he wrote or was capable of writing. He was also an astrologer, the friend of Lilly and Booker, and in his younger days an alchemist. This latter pursuit was so far serviceable, that it led him to preserve by printing twenty-nine rare old alchemical books. After his history of the order of the Garter, his principal work is his diary, which briefly but amusingly records the vicissitudes of his generally prosperous life; his gain of estate and loss of quiet by his second marriage; his acquaintance with old Mr. Backhouse, the Rosicrucian, ‘who told me, in syllables, the true matter of the philosopher’s stone;’ his prosperity under Charles II. as Windsor herald and holder of several other offices; his third marriage, with the daughter of his friend Dugdale; above all, his acquisition of the Tradescant antiquities, which formed the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum. This and his collection of manuscripts were bequeathed to the University of Oxford; the catalogue of the latter forms a goodly volume.
John Aubrey (1626-1697).
Of far less importance than Dugdale or Ashmole as an antiquary, John Aubrey is better remembered as an author. His strictly literary qualifications are few; setting aside his collections for local history, his writings consist of little else than detached memoranda. Their merit lies partly in the interest of their themes, but still more in their artless simplicity and the transparent revelation of the amiable if not dignified character of one who might have sat to Addison for Will Wimble. Aubrey remarks concerning himself that he might have succeeded in life if he had been a painter. Of his artistic powers we cannot judge, but the simple, cheerful, social temper that befits the itinerant landscape painter was his beyond question. For all more serious careers he was totally unfit. He had lost money and estate before middle life, and spent the remainder of his days with much more satisfaction to himself in visiting, or, when pressed by pecuniary difficulties, ‘delitescing’ at the mansions of country friends, a welcome and innocent parasite. The guiding spirit of his literary work is charmingly expressed by himself: ‘Methinks it shows a kind of gratitude and good nature to revive the memories and memorials of the pious and charitable benefactors long since dead and gone.’ In the same spirit, after relating how he had seen Venetia Digby’s bust ‘standing at a stall at the Golden Crosse, a brasier’s shop,’ he exclaims, ‘How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellows as I am put them down!’ He has hence retrieved from oblivion a number of highly curious and interesting particulars about men of letters from Shakespeare downwards, and a most entertaining collection of stories of apparitions, warnings, prophecies, and similar matters. Much of the charm consists in the credulity and simplicity of the narrator, who is nevertheless by no means incapable of just and penetrating reflections on occasion, as when he says of Shakespeare: ‘His comedies will remain wit as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum; now our present writers reflect so much upon particular persons and coxcombeities, that twenty years hence they will not be understood.’ Though exceedingly industrious as a collector, ‘my head,’ he says, ‘was always working, never idle, and even travelling did glean some observations, some whereof to be valued,’ he lacked the patience or the ability to reduce these observations into form, and they have been mostly incorporated with the works of succeeding antiquaries. He was born at Easton Pierse, in Wiltshire, in 1626, and died at Oxford in 1697. He is entitled to much credit for having brought to light the Druidical remains at Avebury in his native county, unnoticed before his time.
Sprat’s History of the Royal Society.
Along with the works of the antiquarians may be mentioned a book of great interest, and in its way of great merit, the History of the Royal Society by the convivial and facetious Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Rochester, Thomas Sprat (1636-1713), whom we have already met as a bad poet on his own account, but as the efficient coadjutor of Buckingham in the Rehearsal. Cautious, pliant, and self-indulgent, he almost incurred infamy and deprivation by his unworthy compliances under James II.; but he retracted just in time, rallied to the new order of things, and recovered credit through the sympathy excited for him as the object of a most diabolical plot in the manner of Oates and Bedloe.13 Of his History of the Royal Society Johnson says: ‘The History of the Royal Society is now read, not with the wish to know what they were then doing, but how their transactions are exhibited by Sprat.’ If this was true at the time, it is true no more. Sprat’s name is no longer a magnet; and, in truth, although his enthusiasm for scientific research is highly honourable to him, his style exceedingly lively, and many of his observations replete with good sense, his work as a whole is discursive and ill-digested, and so little of a history that it hardly ever gives a date. The writer himself confesses that it is only the second of his three books has any proper claim to the title of history. But it is important on grounds of its own, which render it of more real value than the more exact and pragmatical narratives which have superseded it. The glow of youth is upon it. It paints vividly the great scientific awakening which coincided with the accession of Charles II. The mere list of the experiments which the Royal Society had performed, or proposed to perform, attests the devouring scientific curiosity of the age, and shows at once the reaction of men’s minds in the direction of the tangibly useful after a long series of fruitless theological and political controversies, and how deep in the long run had been the influence of the great man who had lost his life in performing an experiment. At the same time there is a humorous side to the picture: much of the curiosity of the time was idle, much was founded on credulity. Many of the queries which Sprat catalogues with such complacency would now be thought too trivial to engage the attention of a learned society, and some are not a little absurd. In the main, however, they are most significant of the new spirit that had come into the world. A counter spirit was necessarily called into being also. Sprat combats the objections of churchmen by proving that enthusiasts cannot be natural philosophers, and propitiates wits like Butler by promising them new ideas for their writings. His demonstration that the design of the society was in no respect prejudicial to the Church of England may raise a smile now, but was probably by no means superfluous at the time. His remarks upon the utility of experiments display the most vigorous common sense; he would evidently have subscribed heartily to a modern definition of a fool as ‘a man who never made an experiment in his life.’ ‘If,’ he says of the opponents of experimental philosophy, ‘they will persist in contemning all experiments except those which bring with them immediate gain and a present harvest, they may as well cavil at the providence of God that he has not made all the seasons of the year to be times of mowing, reaping, and vintage.’ He enumerates eleven classes of experiments actually instituted by the Royal Society, comprising a very large number of separate essays, one of which, it is to be feared, may not have perfectly succeeded, ‘Of making a deaf and dumb man to speak.’ His observations upon the prospects of human improvement, the advantages of transplantation and immigration, the national gain from encouraging inventors and projectors, are conceived in the same bold and liberal spirit, contrasting forcibly with his timid and time-serving politics. In his advocacy of the claims of London to rank as the metropolis of science, and his exhortations to the English gentry to turn the leisure and opportunity afforded by a country life to account for the study of nature, he becomes what he never is when writing verse – something bordering upon a poet.