Three Good Prosers.
In the course of that old Pepys’ Diary—out of which we had our regalement—there is several times mention of Thomas Fuller;[87] among others this:
“I sat down reading in Fuller’s English Worthies; being much troubled that (though he had some discourse with me about my family and armes) he says nothing at all. But I believe, indeed, our family were never considerable.”
Honest Pepys! Shrewd Dr. Fuller, and a man not to be forgotten! He was a “Cavalier parson” through the Civil-War days; was born down in Northamptonshire in the same town where John Dryden, twenty-three years later, first saw the light. He was full of wit, and full of knowledges; people called him—as so many have been and are called—“a walking library;” and his stout figure was to be seen many a time, in the Commonwealth days, striding through Fleet Street, and by Paul’s Walk, to Cheapside. There is quaint humor in his books, and quaintness and aptness of language. Coleridge says he was “the most sensible and least prejudiced great man of his time.”
Sir Thomas Browne,[88] a doctor, and the author of the Religio Medici and Urn-Burial, was another delightful author of the Civil-War times, whose life reached almost through the reign of Charles II.; yet he was not a war man—in matter of kings or of churches. Serenities hung over him in all those times wherein cannon thundered, and traitors (so called) were quartered, and cathedrals despoiled. He loved not great cities. London never magnetized him; but after his thorough continental travel and his doctorate at Leyden, he planted himself in that old, crooked-streeted city of Norwich, in Norfolk; and there, under the shadow of the stupendous mound and Keep (which date from the early Henrys) he built up a home, of which he made a museum—served the sick—reared a family of ten children, and followed those meditative ways of thought which led him through sepulchral urns, and the miracles of growth, and the Holy Scriptures, away from all the “decrees of councils and the niceties of the schools” to the altitudes he reaches in the Religio Medici.
I must excerpt something to show the humors of this Norwich doctor, and it shall be this:
“Light that makes things seen makes some things invisible. Were it not for darkness, and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of Creation had remained unseen, and the stars in Heaven as invisible as on the Fourth day when they were created above the horizon with the Sun, and there was not an eye to behold them. The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest part of Jewish types we find the Cherubim shadowing the Mercy Seat. Life itself is but the Shadow of Death, and souls departed but the Shadows of the Living. The sun itself is but the dark Simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God.”
If there were no other reason for our love of the best writings of Sir Thomas Browne, it would be for this—that in some scarce distinguishable way he has inoculated our “Elia” of a later day with something very like his own quaint egoisms and as quaint garniture of speech. How Charles Lamb must have enjoyed him, and joyed in the meditation—of a twilight—on the far-reaching, mystic skeins of thought which so keen a reader would ravel out from the stores of the Urn-Burial! And with what delighted sanction the later writer permits, here and there, the tender solemnities of the elder to shine through and qualify his own periods; not through imitativeness, conscious or unconscious, but because the juices from the mellow fruitage of the old physician have been quietly assimilated by the stuttering clerk of the India House, and so his thought burgeons—by very necessity—into that kindred leafage of phrase which lifts and sways in the gentle breezes of his always gentle purpose.
Another name, of a man far less lovable, but perhaps more widely known, is that of Sir William Temple.[89] He was of excellent family, born in London, highly cultivated, and lived all through the reign of Charles II., and much beyond. He represented England, in diplomatic ways, often upon the Continent, and with great success; he negotiated the so-called Triple Alliance; he also brought about that royal marriage of the daughter of the Duke of York (afterward James II.), with William of Orange, and so gave to England that royal couple, William and Mary. He had great dignity; he had wealth; a sort of earlier Edward Everett—as polished and cold and well-meaning and fastidious; looking rather more to the elegance of his speech than to the burden of it; always making show of Classicism—nothing if not correct; cautious; keeping well out of harm’s way, and all pugnacious expressions of opinion; courteous to strong Churchmen; courteous to Papists; bowing low to my Lady Castelmaine; very considerate of Cromwellians who had power; moulding his habit and speech so as to show no ugly angles of opinion anywhere, but only such convenient roundness as would roll along life’s level easily to the very end. You will not be in the way of encountering much that he wrote, though he had the reputation in those days, and long after, of writing excellently well. “He was the first writer,” said Johnson, “who gave cadence to English prose.”
Among his essays is one on “Ancient and Modern Learning,” showing the pretensions of a scholastic man, whose assumptions brought about a controversy into which Richard Bentley, a rare young critic, entered, and out of which grew eventually Swift’s famous Battle of the Books.
Temple also wrote on gardens, with a safer swing for his learning and his taste; traces of what his taste was in such matters are still discernible about his old home of Moor Park, in Surrey. It lies some forty miles from London, on the way to Southampton and the Isle of Wight, near the old town of Farnham, where there is a venerable bishop’s palace worth the seeing; a mile away one may find the terraces of Sir William’s old garden, and the mossy dial under which he ordered his heart to be buried. Another interest, moreover, attaches to these Moor Park gardens, which will make them doubly worth a visit. On their terraces and under their trees used to pace and meditate that strange creature Jonathan Swift, who was in his young days a protégé or secretary of Sir William Temple; and there, too, in the same shade, and along the same terraces, used to stroll and meditate in different mood, poor Mistress Hester Johnson, the “Stella” of Swift’s life-long love-dream.
We shall meet these people again. But I leave Sir William Temple, commending to your attention a delightful little essay of Charles Lamb, in his volume of Elia, upon “The Genteel Style in Writing.” It gives a fair though flattering notion of the ways of Sir William’s life, and of the way of his work.