Part 17 (1/2)

The letter-writers of the age who have any claim to a place in literature as such are but few, and none of their epistles were intended for publication. Dryden, as elsewhere, takes the lead, and his letters, though scanty and occasional, occupy a pleasant chamber in the edifice of his prose writings. The first, dated 1655, and addressed to a female cousin in language of complimentary gallantry, is of especial interest as showing how early his prose style was formed. Notwithstanding the strain of high-flown sentiment enforced by the occasion, it is far less fanciful and involved than similar compositions of the early Caroline period, and is in all essential respects an example of the sound, clear prose of the Restoration. The letters to the two Rochesters, the man of letters and the man of office, are models of ingenious flattery in different styles; those to his publisher, Jacob Tonson, apart from their personal interest, are important for the light they throw upon the relations between publishers and authors at a period when publishers were as yet mere tradesmen, and the most popular author could hardly subsist by authors.h.i.+p. The latest of all, addressed to his Northamptons.h.i.+re kindred, are mellow as with the light of a setting sun, and afford pleasant glimpses of the occasional ruralizings of the most urban of poets.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 pa.s.sed over without notice. They are mostly written from Oxford, and retail the scandal of the university in a lively fas.h.i.+on, although the writer, a middling cla.s.sical and oriental scholar, known by his edition of the _Arundel Marbles_ and his _Life 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 gla.s.s of one or the other of them.' The book is rich in such vignettes; its more serious interest consists in its ill.u.s.tration 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 ma.n.u.script notes and additions of Oldys 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 mention _Paradise Lost_.

FOOTNOTES:

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

CHAPTER XV.

ANTIQUARIANS AND MEN OF SCIENCE.

[Sidenote: Anthony a 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 compa.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a 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 terrible toiler, 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 his _History and Antiquities_ (1674) and his _Athenae 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 the _Athenae_, are universally known.

Wood is not a pure or elegant writer, but his works will last as long as Oxford.

[Sidenote: Rymer's _Foedera_.]

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, ent.i.tle him to be named among men of letters, being mainly those of an editor. It is impossible, however, to pa.s.s over in silence a collection of such unspeakable value as his _Foedera_, ten folio volumes of most precious doc.u.ments 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.

[Sidenote: Sir William Dugdale (1605-1686).]

[Sidenote: 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 a.s.sistance 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 monumental _Monasticon Anglicanum_ (1655-1673), a gigantic work, but founded in great part upon the collections of Roger Dodsworth; his _Antiquities of Warwicks.h.i.+re_ (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; his _History of St.

Paul's Cathedral_ (1658), and his _Baronage 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 conducted _secundum 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 princ.i.p.al work, _Inst.i.tution, 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 princ.i.p.al 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; his acquaintance 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 ma.n.u.scripts were bequeathed to the University of Oxford; the catalogue of the latter forms a goodly volume.

[Sidenote: 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 grat.i.tude 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 he had 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 handles _mores hominum_; now our present writers reflect so much upon particular persons and c.o.xcombeities, 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 Wilts.h.i.+re, in 1626, and died at Oxford in 1697. He is ent.i.tled to much credit for having brought to light the Druidical remains at Avebury in his native county, unnoticed before his time.

[Sidenote: Sprat's _History 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, the _History of the Royal Society_ by 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 efficient coadjutor of Buckingham in the _Rehearsal_. 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 his _History of the Royal Society_ Johnson says: 'The _History of the Royal Society_ is 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 t.i.tle 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.