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English prose. Not only does he show himself, in the History of the Royal Society (published before Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy), in full possession of a "close, naked, natural way of speaking,” but he clearly indicates the necessity of a reform in prose writing, and his consciousness of his own mission as a reformer. And yet the change which came over the spirit and methods of English prose in the seventeenth century must not be assigned by any easy and fallacious formula to the influence of one or two men, it was due rather to a number of complex causes of the most general nature. And among these, the cause set down by Sprat in the first extract was no doubt quite as powerful as the influence of the French. The rise of positive knowledge made the conceits of the wits, wherein "falsehoods are continued by tradition because they supply commodious allusions," distasteful, and the enthusiasm of the little group of scientific inquirers that gathered together at Oxford and London for purposes of experiment and research during the civil troubles, gave to England in the Royal Society, of which Dryden himself was an early Fellow, her only Academy of repute. The preference of the members of the Royal Society for "the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits and scholars" was not, like Wordsworth's later innovation, a preference exercised in the interests of the effective expression of emotion; it was determined rather by the instinct of science, and in the interests of the clear statement of fact. "Prose and sense," the ideals of the authors of the Rehearsal, gained the day, but the victory was not without its price. It was a victory of logic over rhetoric, in some sort even of Science and Criticism over Literature and Art, for the cadences of Sir Thomas Browne and the accumulated epithets of Robert Burton were never revived. In his clearness of manner and coolness of judgment, whether he is defending the Royal Society from the hostile armies of the wits and Aristotelians, or criticising the preaching of the Puritan divines, Sprat is an admirable representative alike of the new positive spirit which founded the Royal Society, and of the spirit of moderation, reason, and compromise which has given its chief strength to the Church of which he was a bishop.

W. A. RALEIGH.

A SIMPLE AND AN ORNATE STYLE

THERE is one thing more about which the Society has been most solicitous; and that is, the manner of their discourse: which unless they had been very watchful to keep in due temper, the whole spirit and vigour of their design had been soon eaten out by the luxury and redundance of speech. The ill effects of this superfluity of talking have already overwhelmed most other arts and professions; inasmuch, that when I consider the means of happy living, and the causes of their corruption, I can hardly forbear recanting what I said before, and concluding that eloquence ought to be banished out of all civil societies, as a thing fatal to peace and good manners. To this opinion I should wholly incline; if I did not find that it is a weapon which may be as easily procured by bad men as good : and that, if these should only cast it away, and those retain it; the naked innocence of virtue would be upon all occasions exposed to the armed malice of the wicked. This is the chief reason that should now keep up the ornaments of speaking in any request; since they are so much degenerated from their original usefulness. They were at first, no doubt, an admirable instrument in the hands of wise men; when they were only employed to describe goodness, honesty, obedience, in larger, fairer, and more moving images: to represent truth, clothed with bodies; and to bring knowledge back again to our very senses, from whence it was at first derived to our understandings. But now they are generally changed to worse uses: they make the fancy disgust the best things, if they come sound and unadorned; they are in open defiance against reason, professing not to hold much correspondence with that; but with its slaves, the passions : they give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching to consist with right practice. Who can behold without indignation how many mists and uncertainties these specious tropes and

figures have brought on our knowledge? How many rewards, which are due to more profitable and difficult arts, have been still snatched away by the easy vanity of fine speaking? For, now I am warmed with this just anger, I cannot withhold myself from betraying the shallowness of all these seeming mysteries, upon which we writers, and speakers, look so big. And, in few words, I dare say that of all the studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtained than this vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue, which makes so great a noise in the world. But I spend words in vain; for the evil is now so inveterate, that it is hard to know whom to blame, or where to begin to reform. We all value one another so much upon this beautiful deceit, and labour so long after it in the years of our education, that we cannot but ever after think kinder of it than it deserves. And indeed, in most other parts of learning, I look upon it as a thing almost utterly desperate in its cure and I think it may be placed among those general mischiefs, such as the dissension of Christian princes, the want of practice in religion, and the like, which have been so long spoken against that men are become insensible about them; every one shifting off the fault from himself to others; and so they are only made bare common-places of complaint. It will suffice my present purpose to point out what has been done by the Royal Society towards the correcting of its excesses in natural philosophy; to which it is, of all others, a most professed enemy.

They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been, a constant resolution to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of artizans, countrymen, and merchants, before that of wits or scholars.

(From the History of the Royal Society.)

THE ERROR OF EXTEMPORE PRAYER

AND PREACHING

WE have lived in an age, when the two gifts, as they were wont to be called, of extempore praying and extempore preaching, have been more pretended to and magnified than, I believe, they ever were before, or, I hope, ever will be again, in the Church and nation. Yet, for all I could ever learn or observe, the most sudden readiness and most profuse exuberancy in either of these ways has been only extempore in show and appearance, and very frequently but a cunningly dissembled change of the very same matter and words often repeated, though not in the same order.

As to that of extempore praying, which therefore too many mistake for praying by the spirit, it is manifest that the most exercised and most redundant faculty in that kind, is, in reality, only praying by the fancy or the memory, not the spirit. They do but vary and remove the Scripture style and language, or their own, into as many places and shapes and figures as they can. And though they have acquired never so plentiful a stock of them, yet still the same phrases and expressions do so often come about again, that the disguise may quickly be seen through by any attentive and intelligent hearer. So that, in plain terms, they who think themselves most skilful in that art do really, all the while, only pray in set forms disorderly set and never ranged into a certain method. For which cause, though they may not seem to be forms to their deluded auditors, yet they are so in themselves; and the very persons who use them most variously, and most artificially, cannot but know them to be so.

This, my brethren, seems to be all the great mystery of the so much boasted power of extempore praying. And why may not the like be affirmed, in great measure, of extempore preaching, which has so near an affinity with the other? Is not this also, at the bottom, only a more crafty management of the same phrases and observations, the same doctrines and applications, which they had ever before provided and composed, and reserved in their memories?

Do but hear the most voluble masters in this way once or twice, or perhaps oftener, as far as their changes shall reach,

VOL. III

T

and at first, no doubt, you will be inclined to wonder at the strange agility of their imaginations and compass of their inventions and nimbleness of their utterance. But if you shall attend them calmly and constantly the vizor will be quickly pulled off, though they manage it never so dexterously; you will at last find that they only walk forward and backward and round about one, it may be, in a larger labyrinth than another, but in a labyrinth still; through the same turnings and windings again and again, and, for the most part, guided by the same clue.

The explanations, perhaps, of their texts, the connections and transitions of the parts, and some sudden glosses and descants and flights of fancy may seem new to you. But the material points of doctrine and the commonplaces to which upon any loss or necessity they have recourse, these they frequently repeat, and apply to several subjects with very little alteration in the substance, oftentimes not in the words. These are the constant paths which they scruple not to walk over and over again, 'till, if you follow them very close, you may perceive, amidst all their extempore pretensions, they often tread in the same rounds, till they have trodden them bare enough.

But, God be thanked, the Church of England neither requires, nor stands in need of any such raptural (if I may so call it) or enthusiastic spirit of preaching. Here the more advised and modest, the more deliberate and prepared the preacher is, the better he is furnished, by God's grace, to deliver effectually our Church's solid sense, its fixed precepts, its unalterable doctrines. Our Church pretends not to enter into men's judgments merely by the affections; much less by the passions to overthrow their judgments. The door, which that strives first to open, is of the understanding and conscience: it is content, if by them a passage shall be made into the affections.

(From a Visitation Discourse.)

THE DEFENCE OF ENGLISH ELOQUENCE AND

LETTERS

CONCERNING the English eloquence, he bravely declares, that all their sermons in the pulpit, and pleadings at the bar, consist of nothing but mean pedantry. The censure is bold, especially

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