In his nature Ford had a morbid twist which gave him a strange liking for the horrible and the unnatural. His plays are unequal in quality; but the most powerful of them are prevented from being revolting by their real tragic force and their high literary aims. In The Broken Heart (acted in 1629) he harrows the reader’s feelings almost beyond endurance; his Perkin Warbeck (1634), a historical tragedy, is reckoned to be the best historical drama outside of Shakespeare; and in The Witch of Edmonton (about 1633) he collaborated with Dekker and Rowley to produce a powerful domestic drama. Others of the sixteen plays attributed to him are The Lover’s Melancholy (1629), Love’s Sacrifice (1633), and The Fancies Chaste and Noble (1638).
SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605–82)
Browne may be taken as representative of the best prose-writers of the period.
1. His Life. He was born in London, educated at Winchester and Oxford, and studied medicine. For a time he practiced in Oxfordshire; then he traveled abroad, receiving his degree of M.D. at Leyden. Returning to London (1634), he soon removed to Norwich, where for the remainder of his life he successfully practiced as a doctor.
2. His Works. Almost alone among his contemporaries, Browne seems to have been unaffected by the commotions of the time. His prose works, produced during some of the hottest years of civil contention, are tranquilly oblivious of unrest. His books are only five in number, are individually small in size, and are of great and almost uniform merit. Religio Medici (1642), his confession of faith, is a curious mixture of credulity and skepticism; Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors (1646), shared the same mental inconsistency, resembles the work of Burton in its out-of-the-way learning; Hydriotaphia or Erne Buriall (1658), commonly considered to be his masterpiece, contains reflections on human mortality induced by the discovery of some ancient funeral urns; The Garden of Cyrus (1658) is a treatise on the quincunx. The last work, Christian Morals, was published after his death.
3. His Style. As a philosopher Browne is either obscure and confusing, as in Religio Medici, or unoriginal and obvious, as in Hydriotaphia. His learning, though it is wide and accurate, is too far-fetched and strange to be of much practical use. But as a literary stylist he is very valuable indeed. He shows the ornate style of the time in its richest bloom. His diction is strongly Latinized, sometimes to the limit of obscurity; and he has the scholastic habit of introducing Latin tags and references. In this he resembles Burton; but in other respects he is far beyond the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. His sentences are carefully wrought and artistically combined into paragraphs; and, most important from the purely literary point of view, the diction has a richness of effect unknown among other English prose-writers. The rhythm is harmonious, and finishes with carefully attuned cadences. The prose is sometimes obscure, rarely vivacious, and hardly ever diverting; but the solemnity and beauty of it have given it an enduring fascination. A brief extract will illustrate some of its qualities:
Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of preordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.
To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names and predicament of chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the metaphysics of true belief. To live, indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only an hope, but an evidence in noble believers, ’tis all one to lie in St Innocent’s churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus.
Hydriotaphia