There were some unsavory names which crept into the opening of our last chapter; but they were sweet in the nostrils of Charles II. Of such were Buckingham, Rochester, Etherege, Dorset, and the Castelmaine. And we made a little moral counterpoise by the naming of Baxter’s Saints’ Rest, and of Tillotson, and of the healthful, noble verse of Andrew Marvell, by which we wished to impress upon our readers the fact that the whole world of England in that day was not given over to French court-dances and to foul-mouthed poets; but that the Puritan leaven was still working, even in literary ways, and that there were men of dignity, knowledge, culture, and rank, who never bowed down to such as the pretty Duchess of Portsmouth.
We had our glimpse of that witty buffoon Samuel Butler, who made clever antics in rhyme; and I think, we listened with a curious eagerness to what Samuel Pepys had to say of his play-going, and of the black patches with which his pretty wife set forth her beauty. Then came Bunyan, with his great sermonizing in barns and woods, and that far finer sermonizing which in the days of his jailhood took shape in the immortal story of Christian and Great-heart. He died over a grocer’s shop, in Snow Hill, London (its site now all effaced by the great Holborn Viaduct), whither he had gone on a preaching bout in the year 1688, only a few months before James II. was driven from his throne. It is worth going out by the City Road—only a short walk from Finsbury Square—to the cemetery of Bunhill Fields, where Bunyan was buried—to see the marble figure of the tinker preacher stretched upon the monument modern admirers have built, and to see Christian toiling below, with his burden strapped to his back.
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.”