FOOTNOTES:

Lady Temple’s letters (1652-1654).

Sir William Temple is so thoroughly identified with the Restoration period, that although the Lady Temple’s charming letters of his betrothed, Dorothy Osborne, were written in 1652-54, and not published until 1888, they may be regarded as belonging to it. The young lady was well known from Macaulay’s account of her in his essay upon her husband, and many of her letters had been published in Courtenay’s life of her husband, ere the whole, so far as preserved, recently became accessible in the edition of Mr. Edward Abbott Parry. Intended for no other eyes than her lover’s, these letters have given Lady Temple high rank among English epistolographers. Though they are exceedingly well written, their charm is personal rather than literary. No biographer or novelist has painted a truer picture of the English maiden, high-minded and high spirited, heroically constant and at the same time full of engaging frailties and arch teasing ways, than is depicted in these artless self-revelations. Temple seems to have behaved perfectly well throughout their protracted engagement; and his fulfilment of it after Dorothy’s beauty had been destroyed by the smallpox may be reasonably believed to have been the effect of inclination, no less than of honour and duty. The very slight glimpse we obtain of their married life reveals Lady Temple’s interest in his political career; had this been guided by her his life would probably have been less comfortable, and his memory more glorious.

Dean Prideaux’s letters (1674-1710).

The letters of Humphrey Prideaux, Dean of Norwich, to John Ellis, Secretary of the Treasury, edited for the Camden Society by Sir Edward Maunde Thompson,though ordinary familiar correspondence, are too curious a repertory of gossip to be passed over without notice. They are mostly written from Oxford, and retail the scandal of the university in a lively fashion, although the writer, a middling classical and oriental scholar, known by his edition of theArundel Marblesand hisLife of Mahomet, seems rather a matter-of-fact personage. His relish for scandal, however, occasionally makes him humorous, as when he describes the deportment of his predecessor in the Norwich deanery: ‘His whole life is the pot and the pipe, and, go to him when you will, you will find him walking about his room with a pipe in his mouth and a bottle of claret and a bottle of old strong beer (which in this country they call nog) upon the table, and every other turn he takes a glass of one or the other of them.’ The book is rich in such vignettes; its more serious interest consists in its illustration of the practical refutation of the theory of divine right previously held by the majority of the clergy by James II.’s misgovernment. The beginning and the end of the correspondence are in violent political contrast; and the metamorphosis is entirely effected during the last two years of James’s reign.

Literary history is necessarily among the latest developments of literature. The nearest approach to it in the England of the seventeenth century was the younger Gerard Langbaine’s (1656-92)Account of the English Dramatic Poets, Oxford, 1691. Langbaine laid himself out particularly to discover the sources from which dramatists had borrowed their plots, and is styled by Dr. Johnson ‘the great detector of plagiarism.’ He has been accused of having read poetry for no other purpose, but is vindicated by Mr. Sidney Lee. The value of his work is much increased by the manuscript notes and additions ofOldys and others, copies of which are in the British Museum and Bodleian. The literary compilations of Edward Phillips are so poor that they would have deserved no notice if he had not been Milton’s nephew, and the first English author to mentionParadise Lost.

FOOTNOTES:[12]All the editions havePlatonic, but this must be a misprint.

[12]All the editions havePlatonic, but this must be a misprint.

Anthony à Wood (1632-1695).

The pursuit of antiquarianism has always flourished in England since her inhabitants have enjoyed sufficient culture to be aware that they possessed a past. Even the poetry of Layamon is in a certain measure antiquarian, and Chaucer, Spenser, Milton appear progressively more and more leavened with antiquarian sentiment, which, as a factor of literary inspiration, attains perhaps its highest conceivable development in the works of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. The Restoration period produced no such examples of antiquarian men of genius; but several excellent antiquarian writers, whose works are of sufficient compass and intrinsic importance, and are distinguished by sufficient attention to diction, to bring them within the domain of literature. It may be said of all the principal of these laborious men, that they have erected imperishable monuments to themselves, and have left little room for successors, except in the capacity of editors and annotators. Of Anthony à Wood, the historian and biographer of Oxford, it is almost enough praise to say that two centuries have elapsed without producing anyone capable either of continuing his Oxonian labours on the same scale, or, since the late Mr. C. H. Cooper’s work has remained incomplete, of performing the like for the sister university. A terribletoiler, a loyalist and high churchman, as beseemed the Oxonian of his day, but apparently with few serious interests in life except the fame of his beloved Alma Mater, he sat down at thirty in his college (Merton), and delved resolutely until he had produced hisHistory and Antiquities(1674) and hisAthenae Oxonienses(1691). The former was originally published in a Latin version made by one Peers, and seriously garbled at the instigation of Dr. Fell. The original English text, however, was published in the eighteenth century. The labours of Wood’s nineteenth century editor, Dr. Bliss, upon theAthenae, are universally known. Wood is not a pure or elegant writer, but his works will last as long as Oxford.

Rymer’sFoedera.

Thomas Rymer has already been mentioned with due disrespect among critics, and his more useful and honourable labours as an antiquary do not, strictly speaking, entitle him to be named among men of letters, being mainly those of an editor. It is impossible, however, to pass over in silence a collection of such unspeakable value as hisFoedera, ten folio volumes of most precious documents relating to English history from 1102 to 1654. Rymer the Dryasdust, however, cannot quite forget Rymer the Longinus; his work is graced with a Latin address to Queen Anne, more like a dithyrambic than a dedication.

Sir William Dugdale (1605-1686).

Elias Ashmole (1617-1692).

Next to Wood, the most important antiquary of the age was Sir William Dugdale, of little account as author, but whom his industry and the assistance he was successful in enlisting from various quarters, enabled to achieve several works, any one of which would have sufficed to gain him immortal renown as an antiquarian. These were his monumentalMonasticon Anglicanum(1655-1673), a gigantic work, but founded in great part upon the collections ofRoger Dodsworth; hisAntiquities of Warwickshire(1656), an immense improvement upon everything that had previously been effected in the department of county history, and the model of all that has been accomplished since; hisHistory of St. Paul’s Cathedral(1658), and hisBaronage of England(1675-1676). He was also the author of several other works. So eminent a genealogist was naturally a Cavalier, and, when he lost his appointment as Chester herald during the Civil Wars, is said to have made his living by the deaths of persons of quality, whose funerals he conductedsecundum artem. Private patrons and employers helped him on until the Restoration, when, as successively Norroy and Garter King-at-Arms, he attained great prosperity, making numerous visitations, and approving himself a terror to heraldic pretenders. He died at eighty, of a fever contracted ‘by attendance too much on his worldly concerns.’ His son-in-law, Elias Ashmole, was an eminent antiquary of a different order, although his principal work,Institution, Laws, and Ceremonies of the Order of the Garter, might well have proceeded from Dugdale’s pen. His turn, however, was rather for the collection of curiosities, ‘the greatest virtuoso and curioso that ever was known or read of in England before his time.’ In this capacity he collected the Ashmolean Museum, which has preserved his name more effectually than anything he wrote or was capable of writing. He was also an astrologer, the friend of Lilly and Booker, and in his younger days an alchemist. This latter pursuit was so far serviceable, that it led him to preserve by printing twenty-nine rare old alchemical books. After his history of the order of the Garter, his principal work is his diary, which briefly but amusingly records the vicissitudes of his generally prosperous life; his gain of estate and loss of quiet by his second marriage; hisacquaintance with old Mr. Backhouse, the Rosicrucian, ‘who told me, in syllables, the true matter of the philosopher’s stone;’ his prosperity under Charles II. as Windsor herald and holder of several other offices; his third marriage, with the daughter of his friend Dugdale; above all, his acquisition of the Tradescant antiquities, which formed the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum. This and his collection of manuscripts were bequeathed to the University of Oxford; the catalogue of the latter forms a goodly volume.

John Aubrey (1626-1697).

Of far less importance than Dugdale or Ashmole as an antiquary, John Aubrey is better remembered as an author. His strictly literary qualifications are few; setting aside his collections for local history, his writings consist of little else than detached memoranda. Their merit lies partly in the interest of their themes, but still more in their artless simplicity and the transparent revelation of the amiable if not dignified character of one who might have sat to Addison for Will Wimble. Aubrey remarks concerning himself that he might have succeeded in life if he had been a painter. Of his artistic powers we cannot judge, but the simple, cheerful, social temper that befits the itinerant landscape painter was his beyond question. For all more serious careers he was totally unfit. He had lost money and estate before middle life, and spent the remainder of his days with much more satisfaction to himself in visiting, or, when pressed by pecuniary difficulties, ‘delitescing’ at the mansions of country friends, a welcome and innocent parasite. The guiding spirit of his literary work is charmingly expressed by himself: ‘Methinks it shows a kind of gratitude and good nature to revive the memories and memorials of the pious and charitable benefactors long since dead and gone.’ In the same spirit, after relating how hehad seen Venetia Digby’s bust ‘standing at a stall at the Golden Crosse, a brasier’s shop,’ he exclaims, ‘How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellows as I am put them down!’ He has hence retrieved from oblivion a number of highly curious and interesting particulars about men of letters from Shakespeare downwards, and a most entertaining collection of stories of apparitions, warnings, prophecies, and similar matters. Much of the charm consists in the credulity and simplicity of the narrator, who is nevertheless by no means incapable of just and penetrating reflections on occasion, as when he says of Shakespeare: ‘His comedies will remain wit as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handlesmores hominum; now our present writers reflect so much upon particular persons and coxcombeities, that twenty years hence they will not be understood.’ Though exceedingly industrious as a collector, ‘my head,’ he says, ‘was always working, never idle, and even travelling did glean some observations, some whereof to be valued,’ he lacked the patience or the ability to reduce these observations into form, and they have been mostly incorporated with the works of succeeding antiquaries. He was born at Easton Pierse, in Wiltshire, in 1626, and died at Oxford in 1697. He is entitled to much credit for having brought to light the Druidical remains at Avebury in his native county, unnoticed before his time.

Sprat’sHistory of the Royal Society.

Along with the works of the antiquarians may be mentioned a book of great interest, and in its way of great merit, theHistory of the Royal Societyby the convivial and facetious Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Rochester, Thomas Sprat (1636-1713), whom we have already met as a bad poet on his own account, but as the efficientcoadjutor of Buckingham in theRehearsal. Cautious, pliant, and self-indulgent, he almost incurred infamy and deprivation by his unworthy compliances under James II.; but he retracted just in time, rallied to the new order of things, and recovered credit through the sympathy excited for him as the object of a most diabolical plot in the manner of Oates and Bedloe.[13]Of hisHistory of the Royal SocietyJohnson says: ‘TheHistory of the Royal Societyis now read, not with the wish to know what they were then doing, but how their transactions are exhibited by Sprat.’ If this was true at the time, it is true no more. Sprat’s name is no longer a magnet; and, in truth, although his enthusiasm for scientific research is highly honourable to him, his style exceedingly lively, and many of his observations replete with good sense, his work as a whole is discursive and ill-digested, and so little of a history that it hardly ever gives a date. The writer himself confesses that it is only the second of his three books has any proper claim to the title of history. But it is important on grounds of its own, which render it of more real value than the more exact and pragmatical narratives which have superseded it. The glow of youth is upon it. It paints vividly the great scientific awakening which coincided with the accession of Charles II. The mere list of the experiments which the Royal Society had performed, or proposed to perform, attests the devouring scientific curiosity of the age, and shows at once the reaction of men’s minds in the direction of the tangibly useful after a long series of fruitless theological and political controversies, and how deep in the long run had been the influence of the great man who had lost his life in performing an experiment. At the same time there is a humorous side to the picture: much of the curiosity of the time was idle, much was founded on credulity. Many of the queries which Sprat catalogues with such complacency would now be thought too trivial to engage the attention of a learned society, and some are not a little absurd. In the main, however, they are most significant of the new spirit that had come into the world. A counter spirit was necessarily called into being also. Sprat combats the objections of churchmen by proving that enthusiasts cannot be natural philosophers, and propitiates wits like Butler by promising them new ideas for their writings. His demonstration that the design of the society was in no respect prejudicial to the Church of England may raise a smile now, but was probably by no means superfluous at the time. His remarks upon the utility of experiments display the most vigorous common sense; he would evidently have subscribed heartily to a modern definition of a fool as ‘a man who never made an experiment in his life.’ ‘If,’ he says of the opponents of experimental philosophy, ‘they will persist in contemning all experiments except those which bring with them immediate gain and a present harvest, they may as well cavil at the providence of God that he has not made all the seasons of the year to be times of mowing, reaping, and vintage.’ He enumerates eleven classes of experiments actually instituted by the Royal Society, comprising a very large number of separate essays, one of which, it is to be feared, may not have perfectly succeeded, ‘Of making a deaf and dumb man to speak.’ His observations upon the prospects of human improvement, the advantages of transplantation and immigration, the national gain from encouraging inventors and projectors, are conceived in thesame bold and liberal spirit, contrasting forcibly with his timid and time-serving politics. In his advocacy of the claims of London to rank as the metropolis of science, and his exhortations to the English gentry to turn the leisure and opportunity afforded by a country life to account for the study of nature, he becomes what he never is when writing verse—something bordering upon a poet.

Evelyn’sSylva, 1664.

As has been remarked, the latter half of the seventeenth century was in England pre-eminently a scientific age. The ideas of Bacon were generally acted upon, and it was universally recognized that the only safe path to physical knowledge was through experiment. Newton and Hooke, in natural philosophy; Mayow, in chemistry; Sydenham, in medicine; Grew, in vegetable anatomy; Ray, in the classification of plants and animals, carried the fame of their country to greater heights than even Bacon’s ‘eagle-spirit’ could have soared to imagine. But these illustrious men did little or nothing for literature, for such was not their design. The art of blending scientific research with elegant disquisition remained to be invented. Many of their works were composed in Latin; none were intended for a miscellaneous public. Science, in consequence, was far from exerting that influence upon creed and conduct which she exercises in our day, and an age of scientific discovery till then unexampled passed away without enriching literature by a single classic. Two books alone, neither of which can strictly be termed scientific, but both of which touch outlying provinces of natural history, added—one very considerably—to the literary wealth of the age. They are Evelyn’sSylvaand Walton’sComplete Angler—both by authors of whom we have previously had occasion to speak. If any reader of Evelyn’sDiaryshould feel prejudiced by the carping criticisms of De Quincey, he maybe safely referred to hisSylva(originally published in 1664, much augmented in later editions). The writer here displays himself in a character most alien of all others to that of a time-server or a prig, that of an English country gentleman. His work is further inspired by a genuine love of nature, whose formality is justified by the stateliness of the theme, and tempered by the almost personal affection of the author for the trees he has known from a boy, or himself called into being. The scholar is everywhere apparent. ‘I did not,’ he says, ‘altogether compile this work for the sake of our ordinary rustics, mere foresters and woodmen, but for the benefit and diversion of gentlemen and persons of quality, who often refresh themselves in the agreeable toils of planting and gardening.’ It may be that Evelyn thought too much of the requisites of this class of readers, but, had he limited himself to a mere technical manual, he would not now be read. We do not know how his precepts are rated by the foresters and landscape gardeners of the present age; but even if he has not always shown the way, he has powerfully stimulated the wish to become a miniature creator by embellishing the countenance of Nature. His prose, more elaborate here than in hisDiary, entitles him to rank among the refiners of the language.

The literature of England has this among other points in common with ancient literature, that it reckons books on fishing among its classics. Oppian, who sang of the sea and its inhabitants to Caracalla, is far from the worst among the Greek poets, and has in particular expressed the successful angler’s exultation with a truth and terseness which no successor will surpass:

πολλὴ γὰρ βλεφάροισι καὶ ἐν φρεσὶ τέρψις ιδέσθαιπαλλομενον και ἐλισσομενον πεπεδημενον ἰχθυν.

Half a century later Nemesian gained equal fame among the Latins by a poem on the same theme, which has not come down to us. The piscatorial eclogues of Sanazzaro are an ornament of Italian literature, and were imitated by Milton in hisLycidas;[14]but the first and best modern poem on the technicalities of angling (The Secrets of Angling, by John Dennys, 1630) is English, and is one of the most pleasing didactic poems in the language. The subject was next to have been taken up by a better known writer, Sir Henry Wotton, but his intended work was never completed, and it remained for Izaak Walton, whom we have already met as an ecclesiastical biographer, to render it equally interesting to the professional fisherman and charming to the lover of idyllic pastoral.

The first edition (1653) is wellnigh the most prized of all rare old English books. It had four more editions in the author’s lifetime, all with additions and amendments, and it is needless to observe that it has retained its popularity to our day as completely asParadise LostorPilgrim’s Progress. The technical details are no doubt sound, except for the author’s defective acquaintance with fly-fishing; but the preservative against time has not been the didactic skill which others might rival or surpass, but the accompaniment of natural description and song and pictures of country life, conveyed in a style whose quaint simplicity, at once transparent and formal, is a survival from the old Elizabethan days, to which, with their pastorals and poetry, he himself looks back with so much affection:

‘Look, under the broad beech-tree, I sat down, when I was last this way a-fishing, and the birds in the adjoining grove seemedto have a friendly contention with an echo, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hollow tree, near to the brow of that primrose-hill; there I sat viewing the silver streams glide silently towards their centre, the tempestuous sea; yet sometimes opposed by rugged roots and pebble-stones, which broke their waves, and turned them into foam: and sometimes I beguiled time by viewing the harmless lambs, some leaping securely in the cool shade, whilst others sported themselves in the cheerful sun; and saw others craving comfort from the swollen udders of their bleating dams. As I sat there, these and other sights had so fully possessed my soul with content, that I thought, as the poet has happily exprest it,“I was for that time lifted above earth;And possessed joys not promis’d in my birth.”As I left this place and entered into the next field, a second pleasure entertained me; ’twas a handsome milk-maid, that had not yet attained so much age and wisdom as to load her mind with any fears of many things that will never be, as too many men too often do; but she cast away all care, and sung like a nightingale; her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it: ’twas that smooth song, which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago: and the milk-maid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days.‘They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good, I think much better than the strong lines that are now in fashion in this critical age.’

“I was for that time lifted above earth;And possessed joys not promis’d in my birth.”

As I left this place and entered into the next field, a second pleasure entertained me; ’twas a handsome milk-maid, that had not yet attained so much age and wisdom as to load her mind with any fears of many things that will never be, as too many men too often do; but she cast away all care, and sung like a nightingale; her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it: ’twas that smooth song, which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago: and the milk-maid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days.

‘They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good, I think much better than the strong lines that are now in fashion in this critical age.’

Passages like these create for the middle-aged man the joy and charm of Walton’sAngler, which the boy devours as a manual of the piscatorial art. To the more advanced reader the chief use of the fish is as a vehicle for the pastoral; nevertheless, the great success of Walton’s treatise is a proof that he was by no means inefficient from a more utilitarian point of view. Londoners have usually made good anglers, except, from want of opportunity, as fly-fishermen. Here it has been necessary to supplement Walton very largely; and indeed he himself confessesto having relied for such information as he does afford upon another angler. Elsewhere he approves himself master of his profession, and no doubt had trained many a pupil, perhaps made many a convert like the Venator who puts himself so readily under his tuition. Everyone knows the proem of his book, instinct with the freshness of the bright May morning, the otter hunt, a holy war in the eyes of the injured fisherman (O blissful days, when otters were yet to be found in the Lea!), and the earnest rhetoric of Auceps, Venator, and Piscator, contending for the pre-eminence of their favourite sports. It is characteristic of Walton’s simplicity and candour that he should have placed the most beautiful passage of his book in the mouth of one of his opponents.

‘These I will pass by, but not those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.‘As first the lark, when she means to rejoice: to cheer herself and those that hear her, she then quits the earth, and sings as she ascends higher into the air, and having ended her heavenly employment, grows then mute and sad to think she must descend to the dull earth, which she would not touch but for necessity.‘How do the blackbird and thrassel with their melodious voices bid welcome to the cheerful spring, and in their fixed months warble forth such ditties as no art or instrument can reach to?‘Nay, the smaller birds also do the like in their particular seasons, as namely the leverock, the tit-lark, the little linnet, and the honest robin, that loves mankind both alive and dead.‘But the nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say Lord, whatmusic hast thou provided for the saints in heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music on earth!’

‘These I will pass by, but not those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.

‘As first the lark, when she means to rejoice: to cheer herself and those that hear her, she then quits the earth, and sings as she ascends higher into the air, and having ended her heavenly employment, grows then mute and sad to think she must descend to the dull earth, which she would not touch but for necessity.

‘How do the blackbird and thrassel with their melodious voices bid welcome to the cheerful spring, and in their fixed months warble forth such ditties as no art or instrument can reach to?

‘Nay, the smaller birds also do the like in their particular seasons, as namely the leverock, the tit-lark, the little linnet, and the honest robin, that loves mankind both alive and dead.

‘But the nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say Lord, whatmusic hast thou provided for the saints in heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music on earth!’

It has been remarked that it was necessary to supplement Walton’s imperfect knowledge of fly-fishing. This task, a delicate one in his lifetime, was piously and successfully performed by a scholar, Charles Cotton, of Beresford, Derbyshire (1630-1687), whose appendix of dialogues appeared in the fifth edition of Walton’s own treatise (1676) with some graceful introductory lines from Izaak himself, then in his eighty-third year. ‘I have been so obedient to your desires,’ he says, ‘as to endure all the praises you have ventured to fix upon me.’ Cotton, a country gentleman of good family, whose fishing cottage on the Dove stands to this day, obtained some reputation as a man of letters by a translation of Scarron’s burlesque poem, and other versions from the French. He was also an authority upon cards, which possibly accounts for the pecuniary embarrassments which clouded the latter part of his life. His piscatorial teaching is no doubt quite sound; but his book, although a lively dialogue, is no idyll like his master’s, and would be forgotten but for its association with the latter. The best passages are those depicting the horror of the London visitor at the steepness of the Derbyshire hills and the narrowness of the Derbyshire bridges. ‘I would not ride over it for a thousand pounds, nor fall off it for two; and yet I think I dare venture on foot, though if you were not by to laugh at me, I should do it on all four.’

FOOTNOTES:[13]It is strange that Macaulay, who had told this story so graphically in hisHistory, should have forgotten it when he came to write theLife of Atterbury. No English bishop, he says, had been taken into custody between the Seven Bishops and Atterbury, overlooking Sprat.[14]A correspondent of theAthenaeumhas pointed out, but the discovery seems to have been hardly noticed, that Shakespeare took the name of Ophelia from Sanazzaro’sArcadia—another argument for his acquaintance with Italian.

[13]It is strange that Macaulay, who had told this story so graphically in hisHistory, should have forgotten it when he came to write theLife of Atterbury. No English bishop, he says, had been taken into custody between the Seven Bishops and Atterbury, overlooking Sprat.

[14]A correspondent of theAthenaeumhas pointed out, but the discovery seems to have been hardly noticed, that Shakespeare took the name of Ophelia from Sanazzaro’sArcadia—another argument for his acquaintance with Italian.

Travel was well represented in the literature of the period, as could hardly be otherwise in an age distinguished by the awakening of a spirit of curiosity and intelligent inquiry. The time for systematic scientific exploration had not arrived; no Englishman devoted himself to travel as a profession with the steadiness of the Italian Della Valle, or described a foreign land with such thoroughness as in the Indian monograph of the French jeweller, Tavernier. But if no such monumental work was produced, there was no lack of standard ones. The two which have come nearest to attaining the rank of literary classics, however, were not the production of men of high attainments, but the work, or reputed work, of writers of imperfect education, whose chief claim to attention was the surpassing interest of their narratives.

Robert Knox (1640?-1720).

Robert Knox belongs to the especially interesting class of travellers whose experience of foreign countries has been gained in captivity. Driven by a storm on to the coast of Ceylon in 1659, he was made prisoner and carried into the interior, then almost unknown to Europeans. Here he supported himself for nearly twenty years by knitting caps and hawking goods, resisting all inducements to enter the service of the native sovereign, whose caprice and cruelty he dreadedwith good reason. At length he escaped to a Dutch settlement, and returned safely to England, where he entered the service of the East India Company. After several more voyages to the East he retired, and died in good circumstances in 1720. His letters to his cousin, Strype, preserved in the University Library, Cambridge, show him, it is said, ‘to have been a man of morose temper, rough manners, and a woman-hater.’ The ‘manuscripts of my own life,’ bequeathed by him to his nephew, Knox Ward, have unfortunately gone astray. His account of his captivity was published in 1681, with a preface by the illustrious natural philosopher, Robert Hooke, who no doubt gave Knox much literary assistance, but happily abstained from tampering with the simplicity of his narrative. As a classic of travel this ranks with the similar works of Drury and Mariner, which also received literary form from intelligent collaborators, and it may have served in some measure as an example to Defoe.

William Dampier (1652-1715).

William Dampier fills a more important place than Knox in the history of travel, his experiences having been much more diversified, and his works being of much greater compass. Having gone in 1679 to the West Indies on a commercial adventure, he was persuaded to join a buccaneering expedition, many of the piratical incidents of which, judiciously passed over in his own narrative, are recorded in the manuscripts of his companions. It involved him in a series of adventures which took him all round the world, and from which he returned in 1691 with no other property than an ‘amiable savage, curiously tattooed.’ His voyage was published in 1697-99, and obtained such success that the government, overlooking or ill-informed of his piracies, employed him on a voyage of discovery to Australia. He was subsequently engaged intwo privateering expeditions, in the first as commander, in the second only as pilot. Alexander Selkirk was put on shore on Juan Fernandez in the first of these, and taken off in the second. Dampier’s temper seems to have disqualified him for supreme authority, and he lost much of the reputation which he had formerly acquired. He died in 1715 in good circumstances, with a large amount of prize-money still owing to him. As a traveller he takes high rank from the interest of the occurrences he narrates, the clearness and simplicity of his style, his powers of description, and his practical knowledge. ‘HisDiscourse of the Winds,’ says Professor Laughton, ‘may even now be regarded, so far as it goes, as a text-book of that branch of physical geography.’ His literary merit, however, partly belongs to some unnamed coadjutor. ‘I have,’ says Charles Hatton, in the Hatton correspondence edited by Sir Edward Thompson, ‘discoursed with Dampier. He is a blunt fellow, but of better understanding than would be expected from one of his education. He is a very good navigator, kept his journal exactly, and set down every day what he thought of, but, you must imagine, had assistance in dressing up his history, in which are many mistakes in naming of places.’

Burnet and Molesworth.

The times were not ripe for archæological exploration, or for profound investigation of the manners and institutions of foreign nations; and the most gifted travellers of the age wrote with one eye upon things abroad and the other upon affairs at home. Among such itinerant politicians the first place must be given to Burnet, rather, however, for his celebrity in other fields than for the special merit of his travels. He recorded, nevertheless, a number of intelligent observations upon Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Burnet is always lively and sagacious, and much more impartialthan could have been expected in one so deeply concerned in political and theological controversies. His account of Venice is especially interesting. The book, written during his exile, was published in Holland, and was for some time prohibited in England. The somewhat similar work of Lord Molesworth (1656-1725) owes its existence to accident. Molesworth, a theoretical republican of Algernon Sidney’s school, was English envoy at Copenhagen from 1690 to 1692, and was obliged to quit the country in consequence, as was asserted, of an insult offered by him to the king; considering, however, the favourable character he gives of the monarch, this appears hardly probable. Whatever the reason, he threw up his embassy, and avenged himself by a severe indictment of the system of absolute government established in Denmark by the memorable revolution of 1660, which he declared to have entirely impoverished the country. Himself a patrician, he finds the principal cause of this in the abasement of his own class; and he probably wrote rather from regard to the affairs of England than those of Denmark. He is a forcible, but, at the same time, a candid writer, admitting frankly that ‘In Denmark there are no seditions, mutinies, or libels against the government; but all the people either are, or appear to be lovers of their king, notwithstanding their ill treatment, and the hardships they groan under. There are no clippers or coiners, no robbers upon the highway, nor housebreakers; which conveniency of arbitrary government, among the multitude of mischiefs attending it, I have likewise observed in France.’ He is greatly impressed with the merits of the Danish laws, apart from their administration. ‘For justice, brevity, and perspicuity, they exceed all that I know in the world. They are grounded upon equity, and are all contained in one quarto volume, written in the language of the country.’ Suchpassages are conclusive as to his impartiality, and the violent attacks which his book provoked were probably mainly due to its exceedingly plain speaking about individuals. Of the Danes in general he says: ‘I never knew any country where the minds of the people were more of one calibre and pitch than here; you shall meet with none of extraordinary parts or qualifications, or excellent in particular studies and trades; you see no enthusiasts, madmen, natural fools, or fanciful folks; but a certain equality of understanding reigns among them. Every one keeps the ordinary beaten road of sense, which in this country is neither the fairest nor the foulest, without deviating to the right or left.’ Molesworth was a man of parts and independent character, who afterwards rendered his country considerable services in Ireland, where Swift dedicated one of the Drapier’s letters to him as a patriot.

Paul Rycaut.

Paul Rycaut, secretary to the English ambassador at Constantinople, and author of an exceedingly valuable account ofThe Present State of the Ottoman Empire(1668), should perhaps hardly be reckoned among travellers, as he gives no account of his residence, and merely condenses the results of his observation of Ottoman manners and polity. The book must have been highly important at a time when the Ottoman still menaced Europe, and may be read with pleasure even now for its good sense and varied information, which includes a lively description of a palace revolution, and an account of the chief religious sects among the Turks.

Edward Browne.

Doctor Edward Browne, son of Sir Thomas Browne, was a highly accomplished man, whose travels in Eastern Europe (1673) contain a remarkable amount of accurate observation within a surprisingly narrow compass. It seems strange to find him foretelling a great territorial expansion of the Turkishempire at the expense of Christian Europe, but the prophecy came near being fulfilled by the peril of Vienna not long after Browne wrote.

Foreign Travellers in England.

This review of English travellers would not be complete without a brief notice of two foreign visitors to the country, whose narratives, translated into English, have probably been more read here than at home, and from whom much valuable information may be derived. Sorbière, a philosopher of Gassendi’s school, a Protestant by birth, but who had become a nominal Catholic, visited England in 1663. Being, as he admits, entirely ignorant of the language, his attention was principally given to the intellectual aspects of the country, which were not unfamiliar to him, from his acquaintance with the works of Englishmen who had written in Latin. His accounts of Oxford and the Royal Society are neither unamusing nor uninstructive; he has a true veneration for English men of science, especially Bacon, whom he pronounces ‘the greatest man for the interest of natural philosophy that ever was.’ Of English letters he can only say that ‘he understands that all English eloquence consists in mere pedantry.’ Writing in the character of a courtier, Sorbière expresses himself antagonistically to the English constitution, but it is difficult to believe that his remarks are not sometimes ironical. He can hardly have thought it a very extravagant idea on the part of the commons ‘that their king ought to apply himself entirely to maintain the public peace, to promote the happiness of his people, and to advance the honour and reputation of his country abroad, as much as possibly he can.’ We are nevertheless informed that this and similar views arise from ‘a particular inclination they have by nature to supply themselves with such disrespectful arguments.’

The travels in England of Duke Cosmo de’ Medici, heir-apparent to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, were performed in 1669, and described by Signor Magalotti, a member of his suite, whose manuscript account was translated into English, and published in 1821. They are more interesting than most foreign narratives of English travel, in so far as Cosmo, having landed at Plymouth and travelled up to London, and having afterwards made excursions to Oxford, Cambridge, and other places, saw more of English country life than usual, and inasmuch as they are accompanied by excellent sketches taken by artists in his suite. It is most delightful to be thus enabled to see towns and villages and country-houses exactly as they appeared in the days of Charles II., and it is only to be regretted that the artists did not exercise their pencils upon the streets of London. Magalotti is an intelligent and inquisitive traveller; but, voyaging in the train of a prince, and unacquainted with the language, he can tell us little respecting the people. His account of what fell within his sphere is sensible and impartial, with a few errors, such as the strange assertion that Clarendon had been secretly a Presbyterian! He is too much of a courtier to inform us respecting the court of Charles II., except in the enumeration of titled persons and officials, in which he is very exact. He gives a fair account of the Royal Society, and of the theatre; but seems unconscious of the existence of English literature outside the walls of the playhouse.

We have now accompanied the literature of the Restoration period from its apparently sudden manifestation contemporaneously with the return of the exiled monarch to its transition into what is so appropriately in one point of view, so unaptly in another, termed England’s Augustan age. We have seen that this apparent abruptness was deceptive,arising from the interruption of English literary development by the Civil War and its consequences; and that the Restoration literature represented tendencies which must inevitably have prevailed without the infusion of any French element. The old Elizabethan mode had become inadequate to the vastly extended needs of the time, and we are now able to recognize the literature of the Restoration in its proper connection as a transition to the thoroughly practical and business-like style of the eighteenth century, which, having worked itself out in its turn, and arrived at an impracticable position through the total negation of imagination by its most characteristic representatives,[15]brought about the revival of the Elizabethan spirit in the imaginative, spiritual, and at the same time intensely human literature of the nineteenth century. This in turn seems threatened with decay from the exaggeration of its characteristic qualities; and the antidote might be sought in less hopeful quarters than in the sound sense, manly vigour, and solid execution of the robust if prosaic writers of the Age of Dryden.

FOOTNOTES:[15]Fox thought that Shakespeare’s reputation would have stood higher if he had never writtenHamlet!

[15]Fox thought that Shakespeare’s reputation would have stood higher if he had never writtenHamlet!

Absalom and Achitophel,10,21-24;

second part of,11,25.

Account of a Conversation for a right Regulation of Governments,174.

Account of the English Dramatic Poets,257.

Adventures of Five Hours,5.

Advice to a Dissenter,254.

Advices to a Painter,52.

Alcibiades,102.

Alexander’s Feast,14,32,35.

All for Love,9,93,94,95,96,97,98,100.

Allestree, Richard,227.

Amboyna,99.

Amphitryon,9,92.

Anatomy of an Equivalent, the,251.

Anne Killigrew, Elegy on,68,69,70,71.

Annus Mirabilis,17-19.

Antiquarians,259-266.

Antiquities of Warwickshire,261.

Apology, the,226.

Archippus,92.

Arnold, Matthew,4.

Arundel Marbles,257.

Ashmole, Elias,261,262.

Astraea Redux,16.

Astro-Theology,229.

Atalanta,246.

Atheist, the,103.

Athenae Oxonienses,260.

Aubrey, John,262,263.

Aurengzebe,9,87,88,89.

Autobiography,195-220.

Barclay, Robert,226.

Baronage of England,261.

Barrow, Isaac,222,223.

Barry, Mrs.,102,103.

Baxter, Richard,226.

Beaux’ Stratagem, the,129,144,145.

Behn, Aphra,146,147,245,246.

Bentley, Richard,153,154,231,232.

Bentley-Boyle controversy,154.

Biography,195-220.

Bold Stroke for a Wife, a,148.

Boyle, Hon. Robert,229.

Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery,119.

Boyle Lectures,154.

Brady, Dr. Nicholas,118.

Britannia Rediviva,31.

Browne, Dr. Edward,276.

Buckingham, Duke of.SeeVilliers, George.

Buckinghamshire, Duke of.SeeSheffield, John.

Bull, George,225,226.

Bunyan, John,233-244;

Grace Abounding,234,243,244;

Some Gospel Truths Opened,234;

Pilgrim’s Progress,235,236-239;

Defence of Justification by Faith,235;

The Life and Death of Mr. Badman,235,242,243;

The Holy War,235;

The Jerusalem Sinner Saved,235.

Burnet, Gilbert,178-183,274,275.

Burnet, Thomas,229-231.

Busy Body, the,148.

Butler, Samuel,53-66,248;

Mola Asinaria,54;

Hudibras,54,55,56-63;

The Elephant in the Moon,63,65;

Characters,248-251.

Byron and Dryden as dramatic authors,100.

Caius Marius,102.

Caligula,115.

Calisto,115.

Call to the Unconverted, a,226.

Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety,227.

Centlivre, Mrs. Susannah,147,148;

The Busy Body,148;

The Wonder,148;

A Bold Stroke for a Wife,148.

Chaplin, Dr.,227.

Character of a Trimmer, the,251.

Characters,248-251.

Charles II.,81;

personal influence of, on letters,2,3;

epitaph on,47.

Chaucer, adaptations from,32.

City Politics,115.

Claudian,39.

Cleomenes,99.

Collier, Jeremy,126,153.

Committee, the,119.

Complete Angler, the,218,219,268.

Confederacy, the,128,140,141-143.

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