The prose writers may be considered in four sets. First we have the purely literary authors, the critics and novelists such as Lyly, Sidney, Greene, Nash, and others, of whose style, with its "brave conceits," euphuism, and metaphors we have already, spoken. Next (2) we have the controversial pamphleteers, who wrangled mainly about religion and Church government, defending or attacking the Established Church with its usages; or Puritanism with its love of Presbyterian discipline, and hatred of the cross in baptism, the surplice, and other "rags of Rome". While Government supported the cause of the Established Church and severely handled recalcitrant ministers of the Puritan party, some Puritan writers went so far as to threaten war against the cause of the detested Bishops. On both sides temper rose to fever-heat, and the controversy was conducted in a prose style which was full of abuse and satire. Meanwhile (3) Hooker wrote on the same disputed themes in a style lofty, logical, and harmonious; and in his "History of the World," Sir Walter Raleigh often played on language with the effect of "a solemn music". Lastly (4) Bacon in his essays touched on familiar themes in a style of brief sentences, witty, or poetic, or philosophical, which was all his own; which came home, as he says, "to men's business and bosoms"; and, of all the manners which we have described, that of Bacon remains by far the most easily and most commonly appreciated.
Meanwhile the common fault of men who wrote in prose was the inability to tell a plain tale; to say succinctly, distinctly, and unmistakably what they meant. Perhaps they did not always wish to be understood, but even when Elizabethan and Jacobean writers were anxious to be lucid, their fanciful tropes and long sentences often detain or defy the modern reader.
This defect arose partly from imitation of the structure of stately Latin sentences in Roman literature. But in Latin the nature of the grammar does not permit the meaning to be lost. When books were comparatively rare, and leisure was plentiful, readers did not grudge the time passed over tall and massive folios and long stately involved periods. Now and again, in the age of Elizabeth as in the Restoration, the lighter authors took refuge in a style lax, colloquial, and charged with current slang. A century must pass before we arrive at the unadorned plain manner of Dean Swift.
It was not that the Elizabethans lacked the power to write tersely, simply, and clearly. So luxuriant a poet as Spenser was the master of a perfectly clear and unadorned prose style, deeply interesting in his work on the condition of Ireland. The letters of such diplomatists as Randolph, Queen Elizabeth's envoy to the Court of Mary, Queen of Scots, are as clear and amusing, or, once or twice, as pathetic, to-day, as when they were written. But the prose of literature was entangled and encumbered by the search of ornament, of esprit at all costs, and by copious antitheses and, among the lighter writers, by "clenches" and even by slang.
Hooker.
"It is not to be doubted but that Richard Hooker was born at Heavytree" (near Exeter), says Izaak Walton, about 1553. But sceptics have averred that he was born in Southgate Street, in Exeter. His parents were not rich, and, aided by Bishop Jewel, he entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1567, as a Bible Clerk. In 1577 he obtained a Fellowship; in 1579 was Reader in Hebrew, a tongue with which few Oxford men were, or are, familiarly acquainted. About four years later he took holy orders, had a severe cold, and married a wife recommended by the lady who had nursed him in his illness. "The good man," says Walton, "had no cause to rejoice in the wife of his youth," for "the contentions of a wife" (at least of Mrs. Hooker), "are a continual dropping." He took a living in Buckinghamshire, and experienced "the corroding cares that attend a married priest". Among these was reading Horace while he watched his sheep, and rocking his child's cradle.
A friend, Edwin Sandys, finding him in these distressful circumstances, obtained for him the Mastership of the Temple (1585) during the "Martin Marprelate" controversy, in which the boisterous Nash bore a part. A lecturer, Travers, opposed Hooker's theological positions, for Hooker, it seems, had maintained that all Catholics are not necessarily damned to all eternity. In 1591 Hooker obtained the living of Boscombe in Wilts, and in 1595 moved to that of Bishopsbourne near Canterbury, where he died in 1600.
The first four books of his "Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity" appeared in 1594, the fifth in 1597, the rest was posthumously published. The book was admired by James VI, who read it in Scotland, and by the Pope and Cardinal Allen. Hooker was a good, devout, simple man, a most laborious parish minister, and so short-sighted that Walton accounts for his choice of a wife (if he could be said to choose her), by this defect of vision.
The great work of Hooker, "The Ecclesiastical Polity," is an argument against the Puritans who, from matters like the surplice to matters like the Liturgy, desired in all things to imitate the "discipline" of Geneva and of Presbyterian Scotland. In the Martin Marprelate controversy, as in all old controversy, the style, as we shall see, had been extremely scurrilous on both sides. Hooker, on the other hand, writes like a gentleman, a scholar, and a Christian. As the dispute was really between men of two opposed temperaments and characters, arguments, however learned, moderate, and logical, could not make converts. The Reformation had brought not peace but a sword. Religious differences, mingled with political differences, soon broke into civil war under Charles I.
Hooker begins by stating that the opponents of the Church of England, "right well affected and most religiously inclined minds," must, he supposed, "have had some marvellous reasonable inducements" for desiring to upset the existing ecclesiastical settlement. He therefore studied the subject diligently, and could find "no law of God or reason of man" against the attitude of the defenders of the settlement, and no proof that the Presbyterian "discipline," "by error and misconceit named 'the ordinance of Jesus Christ,'" was so in very deed.