[580] Perrault says of Patru in his Hommes Illustres de France, vol. ii., p. 66. Ses plaidoyers servent encore aujourd’hui de modèle pour écrire correctement en notre langue. Yet they were not much above thirty years old—so much had the language changed, as to rules of writing, within that time.
And of Le Maistre. 28. The forensic speeches of Le Maistre are more eloquent, in a popular sense of the word, more ardent, more imaginative, than those of Patru; the one addresses the judges alone, the other has a view to the audience; the one seeks the success of his cause alone, the other, that and his own glory together. The one will be more prized by the lovers of legal reasoning, the other by the majority of mankind. The one more resembles the orations of Demosthenes for his private clients, the others those of Cicero. Le Maistre is fervid and brilliant, he hurries us with him; in all his pleadings, warmth is his first characteristic, and a certain elegance is the second. In the power of statement, I do not perceive that he is inferior to Patru; both are excellent. Wherever great moral or social topics, or extensive views of history and human nature can be employed, Le Maistre has the advantage. Both are concise, relatively to the common verbosity of the bar; but Le Maistre has much more that might be retrenched; not that it is redundant in expression, but unnecessary in substance. This is owing to his ambitious display of general erudition; his quotations are too frequent and too ornamental, partly drawn from the ancients, but more from the fathers. Ambrose, in fact, Jerome and Augustin, Chrysostom, Basil, and Gregory, were the models whom the writers of this age were accustomed to study; and hence, they are often, and Le Maistre among the rest, too apt to declaim where they should prove, and to use arguments from analogy, rather striking to the common hearer, than likely to weigh much with a tribunal. He has less simplicity, less purity of taste than Patru; his animated language would, in our courts, be frequently effective with a jury, but would seem too indefinite and common-place to the judges; we should crowd to hear Le Maistre, we should be compelled to decide with Patru. They are both, however, very superior advocates, and do great honour to the French bar.
Improvement in English style. 29. A sensible improvement in the general style of English writers had come on before the expiration of the sixteenth century; the rude and rough phrases, sometimes requiring a glossary, which lie as spots of rust on the pages of Latimer, Grafton, Aylmer, or even Ascham, had been chiefly polished away; if we meet in Sydney, Hooker, or the prose of Spenser, with obsolete expressions or forms, we find none that are unintelligible, none that give us offence. But to this next period belong most of those whom we commonly reckon our old English writers; men often of such sterling worth for their sense, that we might read them with little regard to their language, yet, in some instances at least, possessing much that demands praise in this respect. They are generally nervous and effective, copious to redundancy in their command of words, apt to employ what seemed to them ornament with much imagination rather than judicious taste, yet seldom degenerating into common-place and indefinite phraseology. They have, however, many defects; some of them, especially the most learned, are full of pedantry, and deform their pages by an excessive and preposterous mixture of Latinisms unknown before;[581] at other times we are disgusted by colloquial and even vulgar idioms or proverbs; nor is it uncommon to find these opposite blemishes not only in the same author, but in the same passages. Their periods, except in a very few, are ill-constructed and tediously prolonged; their ears (again with some exceptions) seem to have been insensible to the beauty of rhythmical prose; grace is commonly wanting, and their notion of the artifices of style, when they thought at all about them, was not congenial to our own language. This may be deemed a general description of the English writers under James and Charles; we shall now proceed to mention some of the most famous, and who may, in a certain degree, be deemed to modify this censure.
[581] In Pratt’s edition of Bishop Hall’s works, we have a glossary of obsolete or unusual words employed by him. They amount to more than 1,100, the greater part being of Latin or Greek origin; some are Gallicisms.
Earl of Essex. 30. I will begin with a passage of very considerable beauty, which is here out of its place, since it was written in the year 1598. It is found in the Apology for the Earl of Essex, published among the works of Lord Bacon, and passing, I suppose, commonly for his. It seems, nevertheless, in my judgment, far more probably genuine. We have nowhere in our early writers a flow of words so easy and graceful, a structure so harmonious, a series of antitheses so spirited without affectation, an absence of quaintness, pedantry, and vulgarity, so truly gentleman-like, a paragraph so worthy of the most brilliant man of his age. This could not have come from Bacon, who never divested himself of a certain didactic formality, even if he could have counterfeited that chivalrous generosity which it was not in his nature to feel. It is the language of a soldier’s heart, with the unstudied grace of a noble courtier.[582]
[582] “A word for my friendship with the chief men of action, and favour generally to the men of war; and then I come to their main objection, which is my crossing of the treaty in hand. For most of them that are accounted the chief men of action, I do confess, I do entirely love them. They have been my companions both abroad and at home; some of them began the wars with me, most have had place under me, and many have had me a witness of their rising from captains, lieutenants, and private men, to those charges, which since by their virtue they have obtained. Now that I have tried them, I would choose them for friends, if I had them not; before I had tried them, God, by his providence, chose them for me. I love them for mine own sake; for I find sweetness in their conversation, strong assistance in their employments with me, and happiness in their friendship. I love them for their virtues’ sake, and for their greatness of mind (for little minds, though never so full of virtue, can be but a little virtuous); and for their great understanding; for to understand little things, or things not of use, is little better than to understand nothing at all. I love them for their affections; for self-loving men love ease, pleasure, and profit; but they that love pains, danger, and fame, show that they love public profit more than themselves. I love them for my country’s sake; for they are England’s best armour of defence and weapons of offence. If we may have peace, they have purchased it; if we must have war, they must manage it. Yet, while we are doubtful and in treaty, we must value ourselves by what may be done, and the enemy will value us by what hath been done by our chief men of action.
“That generally I am affected to the men of war, it should not seem strange to any reasonable man. Every man doth love them of his own profession. The grave judges favour the students of the law; the reverend bishops the labourers in the ministry; and I (since her Majesty hath yearly used my service in her late actions) must reckon myself in the number of her men of war. Before, action providence makes me cherish them for what they can do; in action, necessity makes me value them for the service they do; and, after action, experience and thankfulness makes me love them for the service they have done.”
Knolles’s History of the Turks. 31. Knolles, already known by a spirited translation of Bodin’s Commonwealth, published in 1610 a copious History of the Turks, bringing down his narrative to the most recent times. Johnson in a paper of the Rambler has given him the superiority over all English historians. “He has displayed all the excellencies that narration can admit. His style, though somewhat obscured by time, and vitiated by false wit, is pure, nervous, elevated, and clear.... Nothing could have sunk this author into obscurity but the remoteness and barbarity of the people whose story he relates. It seldom happens that all circumstances concur to happiness or fame. The nation which produced this great historian has the grief of seeing his genius employed upon a foreign and uninteresting subject; and that writer who might have secured perpetuity to his name by a history of his own country, has exposed himself to the danger of oblivion by recounting enterprises and revolutions of which none desire to be informed.”[583] The subject, however, appeared to Knolles, and I know not how we can say erroneously, one of the most splendid he could have selected. It was the rise and growth of a mighty nation, second only to Rome in the constancy of success, and in the magnitude of empire; a nation fierce and terrible, the present scourge of half Christendom, and though from our remoteness not very formidable to ourselves, still one of which not the bookish man in his closet or the statesman in council had alone heard, but the smith at his anvil, and the husbandman at his plough. A long decrepitude of the Turkish empire on one hand, and our frequent alliance with it on the other, have obliterated the apprehensions and interests of every kind which were awakened throughout Europe by its youthful fury and its mature strength. The subject was also new in England, yet rich in materials; various, in comparison with ordinary history, though not perhaps so fertile of philosophical observation as some others, and furnishing many occasions for the peculiar talents of Knolles. These were displayed, not in depth of thought, or copiousness of collateral erudition, but in a style and in a power of narration which Johnson has not too highly extolled. His descriptions are vivid and animated; circumstantial, but not to feebleness; his characters are drawn with a strong pencil. It is indeed difficult to estimate the merits of an historian very accurately without having before our eyes his original sources: he may probably have translated much that we admire, and he had shown that he knew how to translate. In the style of Knolles there is sometimes, as Johnson has hinted, a slight excess of desire to make every phrase effective; but he is exempt from the usual blemishes of his age; and his command of the language is so extensive, that we should not err in placing him among the first of our elder writers. Comparing as a specimen of Knolles’s manner, his description of the execution of Mustapha, son of Solyman, with that given by Robertson, where the latter historian has been as circumstantial as his limits would permit, we shall perceive that the former paints better his story, and deepens better its interest.[584]
[583] Rambler, No. 122.
[584] Knolles, p. 515. Robertson, book xi.