May. Sometimes style seems to be everything, and a writer never loses sight of the formal dignity of address befitting his calling, as in Sir Thomas Browne or Sir Kenelm Digby, or Drummond. Sometimes, again, style seems to be altogether neglected, and the writer is absorbed only in his subject, as with Selden, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Ussher. Sometimes the most fantastic, either in style or subject, seems to be the only object of pursuit-as with the extravagances of Urquhart, the odd eccentricities of Fuller, or the whimsical theories of Harrington. No literature ever passed through the throes of a severer struggle ; none was ever more near to losing all balance in the wilderness of variety, the only saving quality of which was its thorough

earnestness.

But with all this, there was a steady development. English prose had perhaps lost its best chance of rising to the highest level when the Elizabethan age passed without leaving a standard warranted by its authority. The floods of controversy, of misdirected effort, of exaggerated individualism, passed over it. But in time it attained to a more serene atmosphere. In Jeremy Taylor, and we might add, in a lesser degree, in Leighton, we see the evolution of order from disorder. Taylor inherited something from the Euphuists: he caught his note of earnestness from such a man as Donne; but in his prose we have a sense of greater security and restfulness than in any that had gone before. The fretfulness of controversy, the restlessness of individualism, the perpetual pursuit of intricacy, and the ceaseless desire to startle the reader, all the seare calming down. The note of his books is earnestness; but it is earnestness which flows calmly. Contrast his prose with that of Milton, powerful as that is with the very heat of the fight, and sounding as it were with the echo of the war-trumpet. We cannot deny its power, we cannot resist its excitement. But yet we are compelled to hear in it rather the echoes of what had gone before than to recognise it as the harbinger of a new and more self-contained prose. To Milton prose

was an unnatural medium, which he never subdued to his purposes. As a prose writer he commands admiration only where he enlists sympathy. He used the weapon provided for him by his age with consummate power: but it was a weapon which he seized as he found it, which owed its force to the arm that wielded it, and which he left with no sharpness added to its temper, no new polish to its surface, no new facility in its contrivance.

On the whole the elements of greatest hopefulness for English prose-its earnestness, its dignity, its conscious grace-were perhaps best summed up, in that age, in Jeremy Taylor: and to him more than to any other may be ascribed the handing on of the torch from the preceding to the next generation, and the preserving of its flame clear and undimmed amidst the heated struggles and cloudy controversies of the time. But others played no small part in the development of English prose. The glory

of Taylor is shared by Clarendon, whose work, with all the occasional involution and irregularity of his style, stands unrivalled for its vivid picture of the Epic struggle in which he had played so conspicuous a part: for its careful adjustment of the parts, and above all for the surpassing skill of its character drawing. The chief impression of his prose is its studied restraint, and the instinct which makes him feel the exact point at which description should cease, and which compels his readers to accept each sentence, not as a mere literary ornament, but as contributing something essential to the description in hand. A history written under such conditions as that of Clarendon can never, in the nature of things, become a type which any successors could follow; but none the less, in spite of all its irregularities, his prose has left as distinct an impression on our literature as his personal action has upon our constitution.

Another strain of English prose has to be taken into account in estimating the inheritance which this age bequeathed. From Hales and Chillingworth to Cudworth and Henry More there is a distinct genealogical connexion. Prose style was in no wise the aim, nor did it engage much of the attention of the English Rationalists or Platonists. But undoubtedly their work, in its care, its balanced thought, its elaborate arrangement of argument, above all in its air of philosophic calmness, did impart something of its character to later English prose. Doubtless the range of such writings must be small, and their influence cannot tell powerfully on the form of a general literary movement. Fancy, imagination, humour—these stand outside their sphere, and yet by these literary form must be largely shaped. But the language of the schools must still play its part; and it was something that alongside of the strained but powerful phrases of a philosopher like Hobbes, and the amorphous diction of such a writer on religion as Lord Herbert of Cherbury, there should be carried on the sane, albeit somewhat tame, moderation of

the school of Hales and Chillingworth, of Henry More and Cudworth.

Before the period closes we have a foretaste in L'Estrange of the literary craftsman of another age and type. His task came perilously near to hackwork, but he discharged it with something of the rollicking boldness, if with all the slipshod carelessness, of a generation to which, although older in years, he essentially belongs.

FRANCIS BACON

[Francis Bacon, son of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and nephew of her Treasurer, Lord Burghley, was born on the 22d January 1561. In his twelfth year he was sent to Cambridge, in his sixteenth he was admitted to Gray's Inn, and went to complete his education by a three years' residence with Sir Amyas Paulet, the English Ambassador in France. He naturally looked to public life, having been saluted in his boyhood by the Queen as "her young Lord Keeper"; but his advancement, in spite of urgent solicitation on his part, was slow, probably owing to the jealousy or the distrust of his powerful relatives. His first employment of State was as Queen's Counsel in the trial of Essex in 1601, his conduct in which has been much discussed. It was an embarrassing position for him in consequence of his previous relations with that nobleman. Under James, at first, there was little improvement in his fortunes, but he became Solicitor-General in 1607, and his foot once on the ladder, he kept it there till he reached the top, being charged with the Great Seal in 1617. He was dismissed from this high office in 1621, upon impeachments which have since been the subject of prolonged and keen controversy, and spent the rest of his life in retirement. His literary and philosophic works were the occupation of his leisure, voluntary and enforced. The first edition of his Essays, numbering ten only, appeared in 1597; these were enlarged, and the number increased in successive editions (1612, 1625) to fifty-eight. The Advancement of Learning was issued in 1605; the Novum Organum in 1620. The History of Henry VII. was his first work after his fall; the New Atlantis was written about the same time; the Sylva Sylvarum was his last occupation. He died on the 9th April 1626.]

ANY attempt at analysing Bacon's style convinces us of the futility of trying to separate matter and manner, if by matter we understand more than the mere subject of discourse. The charm of Bacon's writings lies in his "wit," in the broad old sense of the word, in which it means intellect as well as expression. The sagacity of the underlying thought on which we rest when we apprehend the meaning of his words is as potent an element in our impression of delight as the aptness of the phrase and the ingenuity of the allusion. It is the style, as including both matter

and manner, that is the man. To read him, is to put ourselves in invigorating contact with an intellect of the utmost keenness and force, steadily centred but wide in its scope and alive at every point with a buoyant and intense vitality.

Taking style in the narrower sense of "expression," but still as including both diction and method, we find that Bacon had more than one style. Essentially a man of calculation and contrivance, he adapted his style to his purposes.

His Essays have

always been, as he himself says they were in his own time, the "most current" of his works. In substance the very quintessence of the worldly wisdom of his age, they have been most influential in the history of English prose. They have fixed the form of one of our chief kinds of prose writing-the essay. The Essays are sometimes spoken of as if they were models of good prose for all purposes; but this, as Bacon himself would have been the first to discern, is an indiscriminate praise that is virtually a detraction, inasmuch as it obscures the adaptation of the expression to the design. We miss in them the luminous sequence that we find in his exposition of more definite themes, the close coherence that made Ben Jonson say of his speeches that "his hearers could not cough or look aside without loss." The Essays are, as he said himself, "dispersed meditations," detached thoughts on such topics as Studies, Friendship, Ambition, Cunning, Praise, written down as they occurred, without any other connection than their general relevance to the topic. In the original edition of ten, this was indicated by prefixing to each separate "meditation the now obsolete mark ¶. Mr. Arber's careful "Harmony" of the various editions printed in parallel columns shows how he added to these reflections and illustrated them here and there by happy anecdotes and quotations at each revision. It was a natural incident of this "dispersed" way of writing that the expression of each thought should have a felicity of its own, independent of its relation to the others; and the author did not mar this by trying to force them into a sequence such as they might have had if one had risen out of another in a continuous stretch of thought. If we forget this, we are apt to do another injustice to Bacon, and to suspect him of a wilful and artful contravention of one of his own precepts. In a passage which we quote from the Advancement of Learning, he deprecates "hunting more after words than matter," and after "the choiceness of the phrase" and "the illustration of the work with tropes and figures," rather than