Sir William Temple’s Essays. 42. Next to Dryden, the second place among the polite writers of the period, from the Restoration to the end of the century, has commonly been given to Sir William Temple. His Miscellanies, to which, principally, this praise belongs, are not recommended by more erudition than a retired statesman might acquire, with no great expense of time, nor by much originality of reflection. But if Temple has not profound knowledge, he turns all he possesses well to account; if his thoughts are not very striking, they are commonly just. He has less eloquence than Bolingbroke, but is also free from his restlessness and ostentation. Much, also, which now appears superficial in Temple’s historical surveys, was far less familiar in his age; he has the merit of a comprehensive and a candid mind. His style, to which we should particularly refer, will be found in comparison with his contemporaries highly polished, and sustained with more equability than they preserve, remote from anything either pedantic or humble. The periods are studiously rhythmical; yet they want the variety and peculiar charm that we admire in those of Dryden.
Style of Locke. 43. Locke is certainly a good writer, relatively to the greater part of his contemporaries; his plain and manly sentences often give us pleasure by the wording alone. But he has some defects; in his Essay on the Human Understanding he is often too figurative for the subject. In all his writings, and especially in the Treatise on Education, he is occasionally negligent, and though not vulgar, at least according to the idiom of his age, slovenly in the structure of his sentences as well as the choice of his words; he is not, in mere style, very forcible, and certainly not very elegant.
Sir George Mackenzie’s Essays. 44. The Essays of Sir George Mackenzie are empty and diffuse; the style is full of pedantic words to a degree of barbarism; and though they were chiefly written after the Revolution, he seems to have wholly formed himself on the older writers, such as Sir Thomas Browne, or even Feltham. He affects the obsolete and unpleasing termination of the third person of the verb in eth, which was going out of use even in the pulpit, besides other rust of archaism. Nothing can be more unlike the manner of Dryden, Locke, or Temple. In his matter he seems a mere declaimer, as if the world would any longer endure the trivial morality which the sixteenth century had borrowed from Seneca, or the dull ethics of sermons. It is probable that, as Mackenzie was a man who had seen and read much, he must have some better passages than I have found in glancing shortly at his works. |Andrew Fletcher.| His countryman, Andrew Fletcher, is a better master of English style; he writes with purity, clearness, and spirit; but the substance is so much before his eyes, that he is little solicitous about language. And a similar character may be given to many of the political tracts in the reign of William. They are well expressed for their purpose; their English is perspicuous, unaffected, often forcible, and, upon the whole, much superior to that of similar writings in the reign of Charles; but they do not challenge a place of which their authors never dreamed; they are not to be counted in the polite literature of England.
Walton’s Complete Angler. 45. I may have overlooked, or even never known, some books of sufficient value to deserve mention; and I regret that the list of miscellaneous literature should be so short. But it must be confessed that our golden age did not begin before the eighteenth century, and then with him who has never since been rivalled in grace, humour, and invention. Walton’s Complete Angler, published in 1653, seems by the title a strange choice out of all the books of half a century; yet its simplicity, its sweetness, its natural grace, and happy intermixture of graver strains with the precepts of angling, have rendered this book deservedly popular, and a model which one of the most famous among our late philosophers, and a successful disciple of Isaac Walton in his favourite art, has condescended to imitate.
Wilkin’s New World. 46. A book, not indeed remarkable for its style, but one which I could hardly mention in any less miscellaneous chapter than the present, though, since it was published in 1638, it ought to have been mentioned before, is Wilkin’s “Discovery of a New World, or a Discourse tending to prove that it is probable there may be another habitable World in the Moon, with a Discourse concerning the Possibility of a Passage thither.” This is one of the births of that inquiring spirit, that disdain of ancient prejudice, which the seventeenth century produced. Bacon was undoubtedly the father of it in England; but Kepler, and above all Galileo, by the new truths they demonstrated, made men fearless in investigation and conjecture. The geographical discoveries indeed of Columbus and Magellan had prepared the way for conjectures, hardly more astonishing in the eyes of the vulgar than those had been. Wilkins accordingly begins by bringing a host of sage writers who had denied the existence of antipodes. He expressly maintains the Copernican theory, but admits that it was generally reputed a novel paradox. The arguments on the other side he meets at some length, and knew how to answer, by the principles of compound motion, the plausible objection that stones falling from a tower were not left behind by the motion of the earth. The spots in the moon he took for sea, and the brighter parts for land. A lunar atmosphere he was forced to hold, and gives reasons for thinking it probable. As to inhabitants, he does not dwell long on the subject. Campanella, and long before him Cardinal Cusanus, had believed the sun and moon to be inhabited,[1051] and Wilkins ends by saying: “Being content for my own part to have spoken so much of it, as may conduce to show the opinion of others concerning the inhabitants of the moon, I dare not myself affirm anything of these Selenites, because I know not any ground whereon to build any probable opinion. But I think that future ages will discover more, and our posterity perhaps may invent some means for our better acquaintance with those inhabitants.” To this he comes as his final proposition, that it may be possible for some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world; and if there be inhabitants there, to have communication with them. But this chapter is the worst in the book, and shows that Wilkins, notwithstanding his ingenuity, had but crude notions on the principles of physics. He followed this up by what I have not seen, a “Discourse concerning a new planet; tending to prove that it is possible our earth is one of the planets.” This appears to be a regular vindication of the Copernican theory, and was published in 1640.
[1051] Suspicamur in regione solis magis esse solares, claros et illuminatos intellectuales habitatores, spiritualiores etiam quam in luna, ubi magis lunatici, et in terra magis materiales et crassi, ut illi intellectualis naturæ solares sint multum in actu et parum in potentiâ, terreni vero magis in potentia et parum in actu, lunares in medio fluctuantes, &c. Cusanus apud Wilkins, p. 103 (edit. 1802).
Antiquity defended by Temple. 47. The cause of antiquity, so rudely found support in Sir William Temple, assailed abroad by Perrault and Fontenelle, who has defended it in one of his essays with more zeal than prudence or knowledge of the various subjects on which he contends for the rights of the past. It was in fact such a credulous and superficial view as might have been taken by a pedant of the sixteenth century. For it is in science, taking the word largely, full as much as in works of genius, that he denies the ancients to have been surpassed. Temple’s Essay, however, was translated into French, and he was supposed by many to have made a brilliant vindication of injured antiquity. But it was soon refuted in the most solid book that was written in any country upon this famous dispute. |Wotton’s Reflections.| William Wotton published in 1694 his Reflections on ancient and modern Learning.[1052] He draws very well in this the line between Temple and Perrault, avoiding the tasteless judgment of the latter in poetry and eloquence, but pointing out the superiority of the moderns in the whole range of physical science.
[1052] Wotton had been a boy of astonishing precocity; at six years old he could readily translate Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; at seven he added some knowledge of Arabic and Syriac. He entered Catherine Hall, Cambridge, in his tenth year; at thirteen, when he took the degree of bachelor of arts, he was acquainted with twelve languages. There being no precedent of granting a degree to one so young, a special record of his extraordinary proficiency was made in the registers of the university. Monk’s Life of Bentley, p. 7.
Sect. II.
ON FICTION.