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.
John Dryden.
Of course we know John Dryden’s name a great deal better than we know Sir William Temple’s; better, perhaps, than we know any other name of that period. And yet do we know his poems well? Are there any that you specially cherish and doat upon? any that kindle your sympathies easily into blaze? any that give electric expression to your own poetic yearnings, and put you upon quick and enchanting drift into that empyrean of song whereto the great poets decoy us? I doubt if there is much of Dryden which has this subtle influence upon you; certainly it has not upon me.
There are the great Cecilia odes, which hold their places in the reading-books, with their
“Double—double—double beat
Of the thundering drum;”