from the very homes and strongholds of learning, had been wrought a work which not only turned scholarship to incomparably finer account, but set the English language on a four-square monument for all time. This was the Authorized Version of the Bible, translated, between 1607 and 1611, by three committees at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster. The names of the translators, though preserved to us, are with hardly an exception obscure and unfamiliar: in an age of great divines they made little or no personal mark; their one supreme achievement finished, they laid their pens aside and returned to the customary routine of study or administration. But the effect of their work was in less than a generation clearly apparent; it influenced the style of Walton and formed that of Bunyan, it reappeared in varying degree through the writings of Fuller and Jeremy Taylor, of Bacon and Traherne; it exercised almost every province of thought, a sway nearly as potent as that of Luther's Bible over the language and literature of Germany. Beside these, and affected in due measure by both, there was steadily growing and developing the prose of common speech-that clear lucid expression, in everyday language, of the plain fact at issue,which forms the texture of Tillotson and Dryden, of Clarendon's History, and of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. It has some of the qualities of the best French prose-of Voltaire for instanceit is almost wholly free from ornament, it follows rather than leads the accepted language of the time, it never distracts the reader from its point or leaves him in doubt as to its meaning. If the aim of style be 'to say what you have to say as simply as possible', that is an aim which generation by generation it has successively achieved: in Swift, in Defoe, in Goldsmith, in Hazlitt we may trace the line of inheritance which lives on its own means and neither envies nor seeks to rival the gold and jewellery of its more sumptuous neighbours. Two more general points may briefly be noted. First, the width of range covered by the topics of seventeenth-century prose. Browne, like Pepys, is interested in everything under the sun; Burton reads every book in the library and stores his mind with a miscellaneous treasury of anecdotes and illustrations; Walton's Complete Angler includes acoustical experiments from Bacon and verses from Waller in praise of music, and a hymn of George Herbert, which is most in place of them all. Secondly, the age contributed in more than one way to the later development of the English novel. It had a keen eye for picturesque detail: witness the descriptions in Fuller's Holy War, and in both the principal allegories of Bunyan; it was found of analysing character from the fictions of Earle to the biographies of Walton and the historical portraits of Clarendon; the diarists, and not these alone, are occupied in a spirited and vivacious reflection of ordinary life. The time has not yet come for Captain Singleton and Tom Jones, but there is already a premonition of their appearance. SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682), educated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, was a noted physician of Norwich. His best known work, the Religio Medici, was written probably in 1635, though it was not published until 1642. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Browne's sympathies were wholly with the Royalists, but he took no active part in the struggle. In 1646 appeared 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths which examined prove but Vulgar and Common Errors'. In 1658 came Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk'; and The Garden of Cyrus, an account of horticulture from the earliest times, with a disquisition on the mystic properties of the number five. Browne was knighted by Charles II when the king visited Norwich in 1671. Various miscellaneous tracts and letters were published after his death, of which the most important is the collection of maxims known as Christian Morals. RELIGIO MEDICI PART II, SECT. I Now for that other virtue of Charity, without which faith is a mere notion and of no existence, I have ever endeavoured to nourish the merciful disposition and humane inclination I borrowed from my parents, and regulate it to the written and prescribed laws of Charity. And, if I hold the true anatomy of myself1, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of virtue, for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things. I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humour, air, anything. I wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools, nor at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them make them my common viands, and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs. I could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander; at the sight of a toad or viper I find in me no desire to take up a stone to destroy them. I feel not in myself those common antipathies that I can discover in others; those national repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch; but, where I find their actions in balance with my countrymen's, I honour, love, and embrace them in the same degree. I was born in the eighth climate2, but seem for to be framed and constellated unto all. I am 1i. e. if I can truly analyse my own feelings. 2 The earth was divided into seven zones or 'climates', each of which was under one of the 'seven planets'. Browne means that he does not belong to any one climate in particular. no plant that will not prosper out of a garden. All places, all airs, make unto me one country: I am in England everywhere, and under any meridian. I have been shipwrecked, yet am not enemy with the sea or winds; I can study, play, or sleep in a tempest. In brief, I am averse from nothing: my conscience would give me the lie if I should say I absolutely detest or hate any essence but the devil, or so at least abhor anything but that we might come to composition'. If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion, the multitude-that numerous piece of monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men and the reasonable creatures of God, but, confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than hydra. It is no breach of Charity to call these fools; it is the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonical Scripture, and a point of our faith to believe so. Neither in the name of Multitude do I only include the base and minor sort of people; there is a rabble even amongst the gentry, a sort of Plebeian heads whose fancy moves with the same wheel as these, men in the same level with mechanics, though their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and their purses compound for their follies. But as in casting account three or four men together come short in account of one man placed by himself below them, so neither are a troop of these ignorant doradoes2 of that true esteem and value as many a forlorn person whose condition doth place him below their feet. Let us speak like politicians; there is a nobility without heraldry, a natural dignity whereby one man is ranked with another, another filed before him, according to the 1 'Agreement'. 2 Gilded ones'. quality of his desert, and pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the corruption of these times and the bias of present practice wheel another way, thus it was in the first and primitive commonwealths, and is yet in the integrity and cradle of well-ordered polities, till corruption getteth ground, ruder desires labouring after that which wiser considerations contemn-every one having a liberty to amass and heap up riches, and they a licence or faculty to do or purchase anything. THOMAS FULLER (1608-1661) was perpetual curate of St. Benet's, Cambridge. His first poem, David's Hainous Sinne, Heartie Repentance, Heavie Punishment, was published in 1631. The influence of his uncle, Bishop Davenant, obtained him speedy promotion, and he became prebend of Salisbury and rector of Broadwindsor in Dorsetshire. In 1639 appeared The History of the Holy Warre, an account of the Crusades. This was followed in 1641 by The Holy and Profane State, which was at one time attributed to Nicholas Ferrar. He was deprived of his living under the Commonwealth, but in 1644 was appointed chaplain to the baby Princess, Henrietta. In 1646 he published his Good Thoughts in Bad Times. For some time he had been working at his Worthies, and also at a Church History, which appeared in 1655. The Worthies appeared posthumously. Fuller also produced a certain amount of inferior verse, a large number of sermons, and a few political works, including Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician, which ran through three editions. THE HOLY WAR BOOK I, CHAPTER XVII ANTIOCHIA, thus taken, was offered to Alexius the Emperor; but he refused it, suspecting some deceit in the tender; as bad men measure other men's minds by the crooked rule of their own. Hereupon it was bestowed on Boemund; though this place, dearly purchased, was |