CHAPTER I

THE DECLINE

1630-1660

THE decline of letters in England began almost as soon as Shakespeare was in his grave, and by the death of James I. had become obvious. The period which we have now to consider was illuminated by several names of very high genius both in prose and verse, and by isolated works of extraordinary value and beauty. In spite, however, of the lustre which these give to it, no progress was made for thirty years in the general structure of literature; at best, things remained where they were, and, in literary history, to stop still is to go back. It is possible that we should have a different tale to tell if the most brilliant Englishman who survived Shakespeare had realised what it was possible to do with the tongue of his country. At the close of James's reign Francis Bacon stood, as Ben Jonson put it, "the mark and acme of our language," but he gave its proficients little encouragement. He failed, for all his intuition, to recognise the turn of the tide; he thought that books written in English would never be citizens of the world. Anxious to address Europe, the universe, he felt no interest in his English contemporaries, and passed through the sublime age of Elizabethan poetry without conceding the fact of its existence.

When Bacon died, in 1626, he left English literature painfully im- Burton poverished. For the next fifteen years it may be said that prose of the higher kind scarcely existed, and that there threatened to be something like a return to barbarism. But a work which belongs to a slightly earlier period must first of all be discussed. No book is more characteristic of the coming age, of its merits alike and of its faults, than that extraordinary emporium, the Anatomy of Melancholy, first issued in 1621. ROBERT BURTON, a clergyman, mainly resident at Christchurch, Oxford, was the author of this vast monograph on what we should now call neurasthenia. The text of Burton. has been unkindly styled a collection of clause-heaps, and he is a typical example of that extreme sinuosity, one of the detestable tricks of the schools, to which the study of the ancients betrayed our early seventeenthcentury prose-writers. Of the width of reading of such men as Bacon and Burton and Hales there have been no later specimens, and these writers, but Burton above all others, burden their folio pages with a

VOL. III.

A

gorgeous spoil of "proofs" and "illustrations" from the Greek and Latin authors. The Anatomy of Melancholy, though started as a plain medical dissertation, grew to be, practically, a huge cento of excerpts from all the known (and unknown) authors of Athens and Rome. All Burton's treasure was in Minerva's Tower, and the chamber that he fitted up there has been the favourite haunt of scholars in every generation. In his own his one book enjoyed a prodigious success, for it exactly suited and richly indulged the temper of the time. But Burton, delightful as he is, added nothing to the evolution of English prose in this its dangerous hour of crisis. The vogue of his entertaining neurotic compendium really tended to retard the purification of the language.

Robert Burton (15771640) was born at Lindley, in Leicestershire, on the 8th of February 1577. His father was a country gentleman, Ralph Burton. He was educated at Nuneaton and at Sutton Coldfield schools, and in 1593 he was entered as a commoner of Brasenose College, Oxford, whence, in 1599, he passed to Christ Church as a student. He took orders in 1614, scarcely any record of his earlier career at the University having been preserved, but in 1616 we find him presented to the vicarage of St. Thomas's, Oxford. This, and the rectory of Segrave which Lord Berkeley gave him in 1630, he kept "with much ado to his dying day." The famous Anatomy of Melancholy first appeared in 1621, and was written by Burton in his rooms in college. Burton suffered from the hypochondria he described; we are told that "he would fall into such a state of despondency that he could only get relief by going to the bridge-foot at Oxford, and hearing the bargemen swear at one another." He was evidently looked upon as a very original character at Oxford, and his "merry, facete, and juvenile" conversation was much sought after. Burton died in his college rooms, not without suspicion of suicide, on the 25th of January 1640, and was buried in Christ Church Cathedral. A Latin comedy of Philosophaster, written by Burton in 1606, remained in MS. until 1862.