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, 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 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.