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"And as it is fit to read the best authors to youth first, so let them be of the openest and clearest. As Livy before Sallust, Sidney before Donne: and beware of letting them taste Gower or Chaucer at first, lest falling too much in love with antiquity, and not apprehending the weight, they grow rough and barren in language only."

"Periods are beautiful when they are not too long: for so they have their strength too, as in a pike or javelin."

The following is partly an anticipation of Carlyle's metaphor about a plethoric style:

"We say it is a fleshy style when there is much periphrasis and circuit of words: and when with more than enough, it grows fat and corpulent. It hath blood and juice when the words are proper and apt, their sound sweet, and the phrase neat and packed."

His criticism of Shakspeare is often quoted, almost always. without the qualification, and too often as an evidence of Ben's jealousy :

"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakspeare, that, in his writing (whatsoever be penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer has always been, Would he had blotted out a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance who chose that circumstance to comniend their friend by, wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour: for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any."

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In the Reliquiæ Wottonianæ,' the remains of Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639),—a wit of more polish than Overbury, King James's favourite diplomatist, and author of the definition of an ambassador as an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country". we find a weighty balance of sentence almost as finished as Johnson's. The following is a sample:

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"Sometimes the possibility of preferment prevailing with the credulous, expectation of less expense with the covetous, opinion of ease with the fond, and assurance of remoteness with the unkind parents, have moved them, without discretion, to engage their children in adventures of learning, by whose return they have received but small contentment: but they who are deceived in their first designs deserve less to be condemned, as such who, after sufficient trial, persist in their wilfulness are noway to be pitied."

The use of the abstract noun makes the resemblance to the Johnsonian structure all the more complete. Here is another specimen :

"The fashion of commending our friends' abilities before they come to trial sometimes takes good effect with the common sort, who, building their belief on authority, strive to follow the conceit of their betters; but usually, amongst men of independent judgments, this bespeaking of opinion breeds a purpose of stricter examination, and if the report be answered, procures only a bare acknowledgment, whereas," &c.

Among the miscellaneous writers of the period may be mentioned two travellers: George Sandys (1577-1643), son of Archbishop Sandys, translator of Ovid, and author of a book of Travels in the East' (1615); and William Lithgow (d. 1640), a Scotsman, who, during the reign of James, spent nineteen years in walking through "the most famous kingdoms in Europe, Asia, and Africa." Sandys was an accomplished traveller, with a constant eye to literary effect; his 'Travels' went through many editions. Lithgow seems to have walked more for adventure, and for the pleasure of boasting how many places he had visited, and how many miles he had walked on foot.

We must also mention the author of the 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' the recluse student of Christ Church, Oxford, Robert Burton (1576-1640). A grave dyspeptic man, and a great reader— confusedly tumbling over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment "—he was eccentric and original, and picked out of various authors an enormous mass of quotations suiting his peculiar moods. With an immense parade of divisions and subdivisions, there is no method in his book; the heading of a section is little clue to its contents. His enumeration of the acts characteristic of different forms of melancholy is wide enough to include every son of Adam in the category of gloom. The leading features of his style, if style it may be called, are profuse quotation-several authorities being quoted for the most trivial remark-and long strings of particular words by way of exhausting a general subject, poured out in successive sentences without break. Part of his account of himself may be quoted as a sample:

"I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have nothing, I want nothing all my treasure is in Minerva's tower. Greater preferment as I could never get, so am I not in debt for it, I have a competence (laus Deo) from my noble and munificent patrons, though I live still a collegiate student, as Democritus in his garden, and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum, sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world, Et tanquam in specula positus (as he said) in some high place above you all, like Stoicus Sapiens, omnia sæcula, præterita præsentiaque videns, uno velut intuitu. A mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me as from a common theatre or scene. I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks," &c.

The enumeration would stretch on through one of our pages. To the modern writer Burton is of use only as a quarry, and to this purpose he has been turned by many. Sterne is not the only

writer that has used the 'Anatomy of Melancholy' as raw material. The passage we have quoted is probably the germ of Steele and Addison's Spectator.'

Nathaniel Butter, bookseller and pamphleteer, is a personage of some importance, as being the father of newspapers. It used to be supposed that the English Mercury' of 1588 was the first of English printed newspapers, but it is proved to have been a forgery of later date. During the reign of Elizabeth annual summaries of the chief events upon the Continent were printed under the title of Gallo-Belgici.' The proceedings of Continental powers were always interesting, and letters from friends in London containing the latest news were eagerly passed from hand to hand. When the Thirty Years' War broke out, this interest may be supposed to have greatly increased; and express news-letters, written by booksellers and others to their customers in the provinces, were much in request. These occasional productions may sometimes have been printed. Butter is the first known author of a regular series of such printed papers of news; in 1622 he began the 'Weekly News,' which he "purposed to continue weekly by God's assistance, from the best and most certain intelligence." "Whosoever," he said, "will be cunning in the places and persons of Germany, and understand her wars, let him not despise my Corantoes." His "corantoes," or courants, however, were despised, and that intensely, by the wits of the period. There may have been no guile in Nathaniel himself, but his imitators and rivals, who soon became numerous, seem to have published letters from “an eminent Jew merchant in Germany," and other correspondents of doubtful authenticity. And Ben Jonson did not scruple to declare that their pamphlets of news were "made all at home, and no syllable of truth in them." The unfortunate name of Butter made him an inviting butt. Jonson called him the "butter-box," described his news as "rank Irish butter"; and Fletcher made one of his characters say that "the spirit of Butter shall look as if butter would not melt in his mouth." The hostility of the stage may have been partly roused by the dramatic criticisms of these embryonic journalists. Despite his name, Butter seems to have been an industrious and veracious man, and not by any means the fantastic liar that has been represented by the dramatists.1

1 See Cornhill Magazine, July 1868.

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In the exciting days of the first Charles and of the Commonwealth, the life even of a clergyman was subject to danger and adventure, if he happened to be a partisan. Fuller, the son of the Rector of All Winkle, in Northamptonshire, bred up in the usual course of school and college education, and appointed prebend of Salisbury and vicar of Broad Windsor at the age of twentythree, spent the first thirty-three years of his life in the greatest imaginable freedom from care. Up to 1640 he was unmolested in his quiet existence-varying his parish duties with the literary plans that served to fill his hours of leisure. But by 1640 the political atmosphere became troubled; and Fuller was called from his retreat to uphold in the pulpits of the metropolis the duty of obedience to the King. He spent a year with the royal forces in the character of chaplain to Lord Hopton. Growing weary of this irregular life, in 1644 he withdrew to Exeter, and busied himself with his compositions. On the capitulation of Exeter, he removed to London. In 1655 he received from the Protector special permission to preach. He lived to see the Restoration, but did not long enjoy the reward given to his loyalty, dying on the 15th of August 1661.

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His Holy War,' the first of his works, was written in the quiet of the parsonage at Broad Windsor. His other works he com

1 The list of his principal works is as follow: 'History of the Holy War,' 1640; The Holy State,' 1642; 'Good Thoughts in Bad Times,' 1644-45; The Profane State,' 1648; 'Good Thoughts in Worse Times,' 1649; A Pisgah Sight

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posed when his life was more unsettled; though during the excitement of the Civil War his energies were so far from being absorbed in the struggle, that he was quietly occupied in collecting materials for his 'Worthies,' and in laying up a heterogeneous store of anecdotes.

In person1 Fuller seems to have been rather over the middle height, full-bodied, with light curling hair, florid complexion, and clear blue eyes. He had an erect easy carriage, as was natural in a man of confident good spirits. He was careless in his dress. He had an astonishing memory. The anecdotes of his powers are probably, like all anecdotes of the kind, not a little overcoloured; still they show what an impression he made on those that knew him. "It is said that he could repeat five hundred strange words after twice hearing, and could make use of a sermon verbatim if he once heard it. He undertook once, in passing to and fro from Temple Bar to the furthest point of Cheapside, to tell at his return every sign as it stood in order on both sides of the way, repeating them either backwards or forwards; and he did it exactly." His quickness in discovering resemblance was no less remarkable. This power, however, was not exercised on subjects that test intellectual strength; he did not strain his intellect like a great rhetorician to find telling arguments, nor like a great poet to find harmonious images. He wandered at will over the great stores accumulated by his memory, and amused himself in picking out incongruities, playing upon names, making odd comparisons, and suchlike ingenious freaks.

The chief destination of his scholarship is to tickle the sense of the ludicrous; no writer in our literature, except perhaps Burton, applies so much scholarship to so singular a purpose. "Wit," Coleridge said, was the stuff and substance of Fuller's intellect."

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His outward appearance was, to use a phrase of his own, "hung out as a sign" of his disposition; the cheerful, careless, confident nature of the man was legible in his countenance. Though he lived in times of fierce excitement, and was violently thrust out from his quiet home by the Puritans, and not permitted to take even his books with him, yet he shows no stronger feeling towards the triumphant party than sly humorous ridicule of individual sectaries. His attachment to his friends was equally moderate; he probably had a bias for the Church of England, but he does

of Palestine,' 1650; Abel Redivivus' (a Martyrology), 1651; Church History of Britain,' 1656; Mixed Contemplations in Better Times,' 1660; Worthies of England' (posthumous), 1662. Fuller may be said to have been the first "writer of books" by profession. He acknowledges that one of his objects in writing was-"to get some honest profit to himself."

1 It is difficult to make out the personal appearance of some eminent English divines. Even their good looks are overrated by one party and underrated by

another.

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