THE PROSE OF THE PURITAN AGE
Variety of Subject.—Prose showed development in several directions during this Puritan age:—
I. The use of prose in argument and controversy was largely extended. Questions of government and of religion were the living issues of the time. Innumerable pamphlets and many larger books were written to present different views. We may instance as types of this class almost all the prose writings of John Milton (1608-1674).
II. English prose dealt with a greater variety of philosophical subjects. Shakespeare had voiced the deepest philosophy in poetry, but up to this time such subjects had found scant expression in prose.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is the great philosophical writer of the age. In his greatest work, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, he considers questions of metaphysical philosophy and of government in a way that places him on the roll of famous English philosophers.
III. History had an increasing fascination for prose writers. Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1614) and Lord Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion, begun in 1646, are specially worthy of mention.
IV. Prose was developing its capacity for expressing delicate shades of humor. In Chaucer and in Shakespeare, poetry had already excelled in this respect. Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), an Episcopal clergyman, displays an almost inexhaustible fund of humor in his History of the Worthies of England. We find scattered through his works passages like these:—
"A father that whipped his son for swearing, and swore at him while he whipped him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction."
[Illustration: THOMAS FULLER.]
Speaking of a pious short person, Fuller says:—