2. Prose. In prose also we see the opposing tendencies. The principal movement is toward ornate prose, in Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Clarendon, and in the Scottish writer William Drummond (1585–1649), whose Cypress Grove (1616) is in the fashionable funereal vein. In the middle style we have the precision of Hobbes in The Leviathan. At the other extreme from the ornate, the miscellaneous writers adopt great simplicity. Of this class, which includes Howell and Felltham, the best example is Isaac Walton, whose artless prose is shown in the following specimen:
Piscator. O sir, doubt not but that angling is an art. Is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly? a trout that is more sharp-sighted than any hawk you have named, and more watchful and timorous than your high-mettled merlin is bold! and yet I doubt not to catch a brace or two to-morrow for a friend’s breakfast. Doubt not, therefore, sir, but that angling is an art, and an art worth your learning; the question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it? for angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so—I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice; but he that hopes to be a good angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practised it, then doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove to be like virtue, a reward to itself.
The Compleat Angler
EXERCISES
1. The following extracts illustrate the good and bad features of the “metaphysical” style in poetry. Comment upon each feature as it appears to you, and estimate the value of the style as a literary medium.
(1) Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so