[15.] Perhaps his best works are his Holy Living and Holy Dying. His style is rich, even to luxury, full of the most imaginative illustrations, and often overloaded with ornament. He has been called “the Shakespeare of English prose,” “the Spenser of divinity,” and by other appellations. The latter title is a very happy description; for he has the same wealth of style, phrase, and description that Spenser has, and the same boundless delight in setting forth his thoughts in a thousand different ways. The following is a specimen of his writing. He is speaking of a shipwreck:—
“These are the thoughts of mortals, this is the end and sum of all their designs. A dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, a hard rock and a rough wind, dash in pieces the fortune of a whole family; and they that shall weep loudest for the accident are not yet entered into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck.”
His writings contain many pithy statements. The following are a few of them:—
“No man is poor that does not think himself so.”
“He that spends his time in sport and calls it recreation, is like him whose garment is all made of fringe, and his meat nothing but sauce..”
“A good man is as much in awe of himself as of a whole assembly.”
[16.] Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), a great philosopher, was born at Malmesbury in the year 1588. He is hence called “the philosopher of Malmesbury.” He lived during the reigns of four English sovereigns—Elizabeth, James I., Charles I., and Charles II.; and he was twenty-eight years of age when Shakespeare died. He is in many respects the type of the hard-working, long-lived, persistent Englishman. He was for many years tutor in the Devonshire family—to the first Earl of Devonshire, and to the third Earl of Devonshire—and lived for several years at the family seat of Chatsworth. In his youth he was acquainted with Bacon and Ben Jonson; in his middle age he knew Galileo in Italy; and as he lived to the age of ninety-two, he might have conversed with John Locke or with Daniel Defoe. His greatest work is the Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth. His style is clear, manly, and vigorous. He tried to write poetry too. At
the advanced age of eighty-five, he wrote a translation of the whole of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into rhymed English verse, using the same quatrain and the same measure that Dryden employed in his ‘Annus Mirabilis.’ Two lines are still remembered of this translation: speaking of a child and his mother, he says—
“And like a star upon her bosom lay
His beautiful and shining golden head.”