cCHAPTER V.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

1. The First Half. —Under the wise and able rule of Queen Elizabeth, this country had enjoyed a long term of peace. The Spanish Armada had been defeated in 1588; the Spanish power had gradually waned before the growing might of England; and it could be said with perfect truth, in the words of Shakespeare:—

The country was at peace; and every peaceful art and pursuit prospered. As one sign of the great prosperity and outstretching enterprise of commerce, we should note the foundation of the East India Company on the last day of the year 1600. The reign of James I. (1603-1625) was also peaceful; and the country made steady progress in industries, in commerce, and in the arts and sciences. The two greatest prose-writers of the first half of the seventeenth century were Raleigh and Bacon ; the two greatest poets were Shakespeare and Ben Jonson .

2. Sir Walter Raleigh ( 1552-1618 ).— Walter Raleigh , soldier, statesman, coloniser, historian, and poet, was born in Devonshire, in the year 1552. He was sent to Oriel College, Oxford; but he left at the early age of seventeen to fight on the side of the Protestants in France. From that time his life is one long series of schemes, plots, adventures, and misfortunes—culminating in his execution at Westminster in the year 1618. He spent “the evening of a tempestuous life” in the Tower, where he lay for thirteen years; and during this imprisonment he wrote his greatest work, the History of the World , which was never finished. His life and adventures belong to the sixteenth; his works to the seventeenth century. Raleigh was probably the most dazzling figure of his time; and is “in a singular degree the representative of the vigorous versatility of the Elizabethan period.” Spenser, whose neighbour he was for some time in Ireland, thought highly of his poetry, calls him “the summer’s nightingale,” and says of him—

Raleigh is the author of the celebrated verses, “Go, soul, the body’s guest;” “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet;” and of the lines which were written and left in his Bible on the night before he was beheaded:—

Raleigh’s prose has been described as “some of the most flowing and modern-looking prose of the period;” and there can be no doubt that, if he had given himself entirely to literature, he would have been one of the greatest poets and prose-writers of his time. His style is calm, noble, and melodious. The following is the last sentence of the History of the World :—

“O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words Hic jacet .”

3. Francis Bacon ( 1561-1626 ), one of the greatest of English thinkers, and one of our best prose-writers, was born at York House, in the Strand, London, in the year 1561. He was a grave and precocious child; and Queen Elizabeth, who knew him and liked him, used to pat him and call him her “young Lord Keeper”—his father being Lord Keeper of the Seals in her reign. At the early age of twelve he was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for three years. In 1582 he was called to the bar; in 1593 he was M.P. for Middlesex. But his greatest rise in fortune did not take place till the reign of James I.; when, in the year 1618, he had risen to be Lord High Chancellor of England. The title which he took on this occasion—for the Lord High Chancellor is chairman of the House of Lords—was Baron Verulam ; and a few years after he was created Viscount St Albans . His eloquence was famous in England; and Ben Jonson said of him: “The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end.” In the year 1621 he was accused of taking bribes, and of giving unjust decisions as a judge. He had not really been unconscientious, but he had been careless; was obliged to plead guilty; and he was sentenced to pay a fine of £40,000, and to be imprisoned in the Tower during the king’s pleasure. The fine was remitted; Bacon was set free in two days; a pension was allowed him; but he never afterwards held office of any kind. He died on Easter-day of the year 1626, of a chill which he caught while experimenting on the preservative properties of snow.

4. His chief prose-works in English—for he wrote many in Latin—are the Essays , and the Advancement of Learning . His Essays make one of the wisest books ever written; and a great number of English thinkers owe to them the best of what they have had to say. They are written in a clear, forcible, pithy, and picturesque style, with short sentences, and a good many illustrations, drawn from history, politics, and science. It is true that the style is sometimes stiff, and even rigid; but the stiffness is the stiffness of a richly embroidered cloth, into which threads of gold and silver have been worked. Bacon kept what he called a Promus or Commonplace-Book; and in this he entered striking thoughts, sentences, and phrases that he met with in the course of his reading, or that occurred to him during the day. He calls these sentences “salt-pits, that you may extract salt out of, and sprinkle as you will.” The following are a few examples:—

“That that is Forced is not Forcible.”

“No Man loveth his Fetters though they be of Gold.”

“Clear and Round Dealing is the Honour of Man’s Nature.”

“The Arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty Flatterers have intelligence, is a Man’s Self.”

“If Things be not tossed upon the Arguments of Counsell, they will be tossed upon the Waves of Fortune.”

The following are a few striking sentences from his Essays :—

“Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.”

“A man’s nature runs either to herbs or weeds; therefore, let him seasonably water the one, and destroy the other.”

“A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, when there is no love.”

No man could say wiser things in pithier words; and we may well say of his thoughts, in the words of Tennyson, that they are—

5. William Shakespeare ( 1564-1616 ) has been already treated of in the chapter on the sixteenth century. But it may be noted here that his first two periods—as they are called—fall within the sixteenth, and his last two periods within the seventeenth century. His first period lies between 1591 and 1596; and to it are ascribed his early poems, his play of Richard II. , and some other historical plays. His second period, which stretches from 1596 to 1601 holds the Sonnets, the Merchant of Venice , the Merry Wives of Windsor , and a few historical dramas. But his third and fourth periods were richer in production, and in greater productions. The third period, which belongs to the years 1601 to 1608, produced the play of Julius Cæsar , the great tragedies of Hamlet , Othello , Lear , Macbeth , and some others. To the fourth period, which lies between 1608 and 1613, belong the calmer and wiser dramas,— Winter’s Tale , The Tempest , and Henry VIII. Three years after—in 1616—he died.

6. The Second Half. —The second half of the great and unique seventeenth century was of a character very different indeed from that of the first half. The Englishmen born into it had to face a new world! New thoughts in religion, new forces in politics, new powers in social matters had been slowly, steadily, and irresistibly rising into supremacy ever since the Scottish King James came to take his seat upon the throne of England in 1603. These new forces had, in fact, become so strong that they led a king to the scaffold, and handed over the government of England to a section of Republicans. Charles I. was executed in 1649; and, though his son came back to the throne in 1660, the face, the manners, the thoughts of England and of Englishmen had undergone a complete internal and external change. The Puritan party was everywhere the ruling party; and its views and convictions, in religion, in politics, and in literature, held unquestioned sway in almost every part of England. In the Puritan party, the strongest section was formed by the Independents—the “root and branch men”—as they were called; and the greatest man among the Independents was Oliver Cromwell, in whose government John Milton was Foreign Secretary. Milton was certainly by far the greatest and most powerful writer, both in prose and in verse, on the side of the Puritan party. The ablest verse-writer on the Royalist or Court side was Samuel Butler , the unrivalled satirist—the Hogarth of language,—the author of Hudibras . The greatest prose-writer on the Royalist and Church side was Jeremy Taylor , Bishop of Down, in Ireland, and the author of Holy Living , Holy Dying , and many other works written with a wonderful eloquence. The greatest philosophical writer was Thomas Hobbes , the author of the Leviathan . The most powerful writer for the people was John Bunyan , the immortal author of The Pilgrim’s Progress . When, however, we come to the reigns of Charles II. and James II., and the new influences which their rule and presence imparted, we find the greatest poet to be John Dryden , and the most important prose-writer, John Locke .

7. The Poetry of the Second Half. —The poetry of the second half of the seventeenth century was not an outgrowth or lineal descendant of the poetry of the first half. No trace of the strong Elizabethan poetical emotion remained; no writer of this half-century can claim kinship with the great authors of the Elizabethan period. The three most remarkable poets in the latter half of this century are John Milton , Samuel Butler , and John Dryden . But Milton’s culture was derived chiefly from the great Greek and Latin writers; and his poems show few or no signs of belonging to any age or generation in particular of English literature. Butler’s poem, the Hudibras , is the only one of its kind; and if its author owes anything to other writers, it is to France and not to England that we must look for its sources. Dryden, again, shows no sign of being related to Shakespeare or the dramatic writers of the early part of the century; he is separated from them by a great gulf; he owes most, when he owes anything, to the French school of poetry.

8. John Milton ( 1608-1674 ), the second greatest name in English poetry, and the greatest of all our epic poets, was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, London, in the year 1608—five years after the accession of James I. to the throne, and eight years before the death of Shakespeare. He was educated at St Paul’s School, and then at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He was so handsome—with a delicate complexion, clear blue eyes, and light-brown hair flowing down his shoulders—that he was known as the “Lady of Christ’s.” He was destined for the Church; but, being early seized with a strong desire to compose a great poetical work which should bring honour to his country and to the English tongue, he gave up all idea of becoming a clergyman. Filled with his secret purpose, he retired to Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had bought a small country seat. Between the years 1632 and 1638 he studied all the best Greek and Latin authors, mathematics, and science; and he also wrote L’Allegro and Il Penseroso , Comus , Lycidas , and some shorter poems. These were preludes, or exercises, towards the great poetical work which it was the mission of his life to produce. In 1638-39 he took a journey to the Continent. Most of his time was spent in Italy; and, when in Florence, he paid a visit to Galileo in prison. It had been his intention to go on to Greece; but the troubled state of politics at home brought him back sooner than he wished. The next ten years of his life were engaged in teaching and in writing his prose works. His ideas on teaching are to be found in his Tractate on Education . The most eloquent of his prose-works is his Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644)—a plea for the freedom of the press, for relieving all writings from the criticism of censors. In 1649—the year of the execution of Charles I.—Milton was appointed Latin or Foreign Secretary to the Government of Oliver Cromwell; and for the next ten years his time was taken up with official work, and with writing prose-volumes in defence of the action of the Republic. In 1660 the Restoration took place; and Milton was at length free, in his fifty-third year, to carry out his long-cherished scheme of writing a great Epic poem. He chose the subject of the fall and the restoration of man. Paradise Lost was completed in 1665; but, owing to the Plague and the Fire of London, it was not published till the year 1667. Milton’s young Quaker friend, Ellwood, said to him one day: “Thou hast said much of Paradise Lost, what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?” Paradise Regained was the result—a work which was written in 1666, and appeared, along with Samson Agonistes , in the year 1671. Milton died in the year 1674—about the middle of the reign of Charles II. He had been three times married.

9. L’Allegro (or “The Cheerful Man”) is a companion poem to Il Penseroso (or “The Meditative Man”). The poems present two contrasted views of the life of the student. They are written in an irregular kind of octosyllabic verse. The Comus —mostly in blank verse—is a lyrical drama; and Milton’s work was accompanied by a musical composition by the then famous musician Henry Lawes. Lycidas —a poem in irregular rhymed verse—is a threnody on the death of Milton’s young friend, Edward King, who was drowned in sailing from Chester to Dublin. This poem has been called “the touchstone of taste;” the man who cannot admire it has no feeling for true poetry. The Paradise Lost is the story of how Satan was allowed to plot against the happiness of man; and how Adam and Eve fell through his designs. The style is the noblest in the English language; the music of the rhythm is lofty, involved, sustained, and sublime. “In reading ‘Paradise Lost,’” says Mr Lowell, “one has a feeling of spaciousness such as no other poet gives.” Paradise Regained is, in fact, the story of the Temptation, and of Christ’s triumph over the wiles of Satan. Wordsworth says: “‘Paradise Regained’ is most perfect in execution of any written by Milton;” and Coleridge remarks that “it is in its kind the most perfect poem extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest.” Samson Agonistes (“Samson in Struggle”) is a drama, in highly irregular unrhymed verse, in which the poet sets forth his own unhappy fate—

“Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.”

It is, indeed, an autobiographical poem—it is the story of the last years of the poet’s life.

10. Samuel Butler ( 1612-1680 ), the wittiest of English poets, was born at Strensham, in Worcestershire, in the year 1612, four years after the birth of Milton, and four years before the death of Shakespeare. He was educated at the grammar-school of Worcester, and afterwards at Cambridge—but only for a short time. At the Restoration he was made secretary to the Earl of Carbery, who was then President of the Principality of Wales, and steward of Ludlow Castle. The first part of his long poem called Hudibras appeared in 1662; the second part in 1663; the third in 1678. Two years after, Butler died in the greatest poverty in London. He was buried in St Paul’s, Covent Garden; but a monument was erected to him in Westminster Abbey. Upon this fact Wesley wrote the following epigram:—

11. The Hudibras is a burlesque poem,—a long lampoon, a laboured caricature,—in mockery of the weaker side of the great Puritan party. It is an imaginary account of the adventures of a Puritan knight and his squire in the Civil Wars. It is choke-full of all kinds of learning, of the most pungent remarks—a very hoard of sentences and saws, “of vigorous locutions and picturesque phrases, of strong, sound sense, and robust English.” It has been more quoted from than almost any book in our language. Charles II. was never tired of reading it and quoting from it—

says Butler himself.

The following are some of his best known lines:—

12. John Dryden ( 1631-1700 ), the greatest of our poets in the second rank, was born at Aldwincle, in Northamptonshire, in the year 1631. He was descended from Puritan ancestors on both sides of his house. He was educated at Westminster School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. London became his settled abode in the year 1657. At the Restoration, in 1660, he became an ardent Royalist; and, in the year 1663, he married the daughter of a Royalist nobleman, the Earl of Berkshire. It was not a happy marriage; the lady, on the one hand, had a violent temper, and, on the other, did not care a straw for the literary pursuits of her husband. In 1666 he wrote his first long poem, the Annus Mirabilis (“The Wonderful Year”), in which he paints the war with Holland, and the Fire of London; and from this date his life is “one long literary labour.” In 1670, he received the double appointment of Historiographer-Royal and Poet-Laureate. Up to the year 1681, his work lay chiefly in writing plays for the theatre; and these plays were written in rhymed verse, in imitation of the French plays; for, from the date of the Restoration, French influence was paramount both in literature and in fashion. But in this year he published the first part of Absalom and Achitophel —one of the most powerful satires in the language. In the year 1683 he was appointed Collector of Customs in the port of London—a post which Chaucer had held before him. (It is worthy of note that Dryden “translated” the Tales of Chaucer into modern English.) At the accession of James II., in 1685, Dryden became a Roman Catholic; most certainly neither for gain nor out of gratitude, but from conviction. In 1687, appeared his poem of The Hind and the Panther , in which he defends his new creed. He had, a few years before, brought out another poem called Religio Laici (“A Layman’s Faith”), which was a defence of the Church of England and of her position in religion. In The Hind and the Panther , the Hind represents the Roman Catholic Church, “a milk-white hind, unspotted and unchanged,” the Panther the Church of England; and the two beasts reply to each other in all the arguments used by controversialists on these two sides. When the Revolution of 1688 took place, and James II. had to flee the kingdom, Dryden lost both his offices and the pension he had from the Crown. Nothing daunted, he set to work once more. Again he wrote for the stage; but the last years of his life were spent chiefly in translation. He translated passages from Homer, Ovid, and from some Italian writers; but his most important work was the translation of the whole of Virgil’s Æneid . To the last he retained his fire and vigour, action and rush of verse; and some of his greatest lyric poems belong to his later years. His ode called Alexander’s Feast was written at the age of sixty-six; and it was written at one sitting. At the age of sixty-nine he was meditating a translation of the whole of Homer—both the Iliad and the Odyssey. He died at his house in London, on May-day of 1700, and was buried with great pomp and splendour in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

13. His best satire is the Absalom and Achitophel ; his best specimen of reasoning in verse is The Hind and the Panther . His best ode is his Ode to the Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew . Dryden’s style is distinguished by its power, sweep, vigour, and “long majestic march.” No one has handled the heroic couplet—and it was this form of verse that he chiefly used—with more vigour than Dryden; Pope was more correct, more sparkling, more finished, but he had not Dryden’s magnificent march or sweeping impulsiveness. “The fire and spirit of the ‘Annus Mirabilis,’” says his latest critic, “are nothing short of amazing, when the difficulties which beset the author are remembered. The glorious dash of the performance is his own.” His prose, though full of faults, is also very vigorous. It has “something of the lightning zigzag vigour and splendour of his verse.” He always writes clear, homely, and pure English,—full of force and point.

Many of his most pithy lines are often quoted:—

“Men are but children of a larger growth.”

“The greatest argument for love is love.”

The great American critic and poet, Mr Lowell, compares him to “an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable, what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or a shorter space, but loving the open plain, where wing and foot help each other to something that is both flight and run at once.”

14. Jeremy Taylor ( 1613-1667 ), the greatest master of ornate and musical English prose in his own day, was born at Cambridge in the year 1613—just three years before Shakespeare died. His father was a barber. After attending the free grammar-school of Cambridge, he proceeded to the University. He took holy orders and removed to London. When he was lecturing one day at St Paul’s, Archbishop Laud was so taken by his “youthful beauty, pleasant air,” fresh eloquence, and exuberant style, that he had him created a Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford. When the Civil War broke out, he was taken prisoner by the Parliamentary forces; and, indeed, suffered imprisonment more than once. After the Restoration, he was presented with a bishopric in Ireland, where he died in 1667.

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—

17. John Bunyan ( 1628-1688 ), one of the most popular of our prose-writers, was born at Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in the year 1628—just three years before the birth of Dryden. He served, when a young man, with the Parliamentary forces, and was present at the siege of Leicester. At the Restoration, he was apprehended for preaching, in disobedience to the Conventicle Act, “was had home to prison, and there lay complete twelve years.” Here he supported himself and his family by making tagged laces and other small-wares; and here, too, he wrote the immortal Pilgrim’s Progress . After his release, he became pastor of the Baptist congregation at Bedford. He had a great power of bringing persons who had quarrelled together again; and he was so popular among those who knew him, that he was generally spoken of as “Bishop Bunyan.” On a journey, undertaken to reconcile an estranged father and a rebellious son, he caught a severe cold, and died of fever in London, in the year 1688 . Every one has read, or will read, the Pilgrim’s Progress ; and it may be said, without exaggeration, that to him who has not read the book, a large part of English life and history is dumb and unintelligible. Bunyan has been called the “Spenser of the people,” and “the greatest master of allegory that ever lived.” His power of imagination is something wonderful; and his simple, homely, and vigorous style makes everything so real, that we seem to be reading a narrative of everyday events and conversations. His vocabulary is not, as Macaulay said, “the vocabulary of the common people;” rather should we say that his English is the English of the Bible and of the best religious writers. His style is, almost everywhere, simple, homely, earnest, and vernacular—without being vulgar. Bunyan’s books have, along with Shakespeare and Tyndale’s works, been among the chief supports of an idiomatic, nervous, and simple English.

18. John Locke ( 1632-1704 ), a great English philosopher, was born at Wrington, near Bristol, in the year 1632. He was educated at Oxford; but he took little interest in the Greek and Latin classics, his chief studies lying in medicine and the physical sciences. He became attached to the famous Lord Shaftesbury, under whom he filled several public offices—among others, that of Commissioner of Trade. When Shaftesbury was obliged to flee to Holland, Locke followed him, and spent several years in exile in that country. All his life a very delicate man, he yet, by dint of great care and thoughtfulness, contrived to live to the age of seventy-two. His two most famous works are Some Thoughts concerning Education , and the celebrated Essay on the Human Understanding . The latter, which is his great work, occupied his time and thoughts for eighteen years. In both these books, Locke exhibits the very genius of common-sense. The purpose of education is, in his opinion, not to make learned men, but to maintain “a sound mind in a sound body;” and he begins the education of the future man even from his cradle. In his philosophical writings, he is always simple; but, as he is loose and vacillating in his use of terms, this simplicity is often purchased at the expense of exactness and self-consistency. 4IzHggKnXK4U/t2YNFSZB6YrtVmDzTwjboc/cAE349Lx/b+0/v7RSffQtLmkjxq2