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In a discourse upon comedy which he printed in his miscellany called Love and Business (1702), Farquhar hit off a happy definition. Comedy," he said, “is no more at present than a wellframed tale handsomely told as an agreeable vehicle for counsel or reproof." He meant, no doubt, that of his own drama the motto should be castigat ridendo mores, but his natural cheerfulness would break out. His flighty beaux and swaggering cavalry officers too frequently forget to counsel or reprove, but Farquhar succeeds in being always wholesome, even when he cannot persuade himself to be decent. His scenes breathe of the open air, while Congreve's have a heated atmosphere of musk. There is something hopeful and encouraging in finding the crowded and unsatisfactory drama of the Restoration closing, not in inanity and corruption, but in this gay world of Farquhar's, this market-place of life, bright with scarlet tunics and white aprons, loud with drum and bugle, and ringing with peals of laughter and impudent snatches of ballad-music. It is Sergeant Kite, one of Farquhar's heroes, to whom we owe the song of "Over the hills and far away." Farquhar was the last writer who dared to bring the animal riot of the senses face to face with a decent audience, and the best we can say of his morals is that it is more wholesome to laugh with Ariosto in the sunshine than to snigger with Aretine in the shadow. Better than either is to walk in the light of Molière or of Goldsmith.

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PROSE AFTER THE RESTORATION

THE prose of the last forty years of the seventeenth century is not one of the most attractive sections of literature to the common reader. It is eminently pedestrian in character, unimaginative, level, neutral. It has neither the disordered beauties of the age that preceded it, nor the limpid graces of that which followed it. It is tentative and transitional; and its experiments, like its changes, are in the direction of common sense and conventionality. There is, moreover, a peculiarity about its history which has, doubtless, served to consign it to comparative neglect. Neither of its two greatest names, neither Dryden nor Temple, though both of them men of genius and influence, and one of them a master of English, has left a single volume in prose which is in household use; while its best-known book, if we set aside The Pilgrim's Progress, is Locke's Human Understanding—a work particularly unengaging in its mere style and delivery. English prose between 1660 and 1700 is exhibited in a great variety of examples, many of them-nay, the majority of them—unimportant to any but an antiquarian reader, and displaying a talent so uniform, that it is not very easy to define the orders of merit. We meet nothing here like the genius with which Hooker or Swift, Bacon or Fielding, towers above all minor contemporaries.

The period, however, is misjudged if we regard its merits as negative merely. It had extraordinary positive qualities. It is

notable as the age in which educated Englishmen in the mass began to use their native tongue more or less as we use it now. The interminable sentences which had preserved the awkward forms of the sixteenth century, the affected and excessive use of imagery, the abuse of parenthesis; all these vices of style, which are as marked in Milton as in Ascham and Elyot, fell off from English prose-writing about 1660, and left it a little cold and bare, but terse, sensible, and modern. The change is as distinct as the change from romantic to classical in verse, but the causes of the former are not so easy to explain as those of the latter. Contact with France did much-the neglect of Latin perhaps did more- -to strip our prose of needless ornament, while simplifying and defining our grammar. The reform here indicated set in somewhat rapidly, and then, a generation of writers having accepted it to a certain extent, it proceeded very little further for another half century. This arrested modernity will be presently exemplified in the very typical case of Dryden.

It would be to force criticism to pretend to be able to trace a distinct line between the old and new prose, such as may be pretty accurately drawn between the old and new poetry. The two schools blend into one another, and the writers are not, at first, even consistent in their practice. It is convenient to take the date of the Restoration as that at which the prose of our period opens. That date excludes the last of the old prose school, such as Hobbes, Fuller, Harrington, Henry More, and Sir Matthew Hale, who lived beyond it, but who are properly found to be mainly in sympathy with the past. It excludes writers whose production goes on long after that date, such as Izaak Walton and Sir T. Browne, and even writers whose production mainly belongs to a later period, such as Dr. Walter Charleton, the scholastic essayist (1619-1707), when their style shows no influence of a later taste. Arbitrary as this division appears to be, it is found to inconvenience us but little. There is only one great author whom it is difficult to relegate decisively to the one class or to the other, namely, Clarendon; and his historical posi

III

WILKINS

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tion has seemed to demand that he should be considered as a

product of the earlier age.

The first man in England to write commonly in the new kind of prose was John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester (1614-1672). His great activity after the Restoration, when he became one of the founders of the Royal Society, the main protector of the Nonconformists in the Church of England, and a zealous bishop, may be taken to show that his mind naturally welcomed the new order of things. But his two most interesting books were published long before that date the That the Moon may be a World, in 1638, and That the Earth may be a Planet, in 1640. In the first of these curious astronomical treatises he undertakes to prove, in fourteen propositions, that the moon is a habitable world:

"'Twas the fancy of some of the Jews, and more especially of Rabbi Simeon, that the moon was nothing else but a contracted sun, and that both those planets at their first creation, were equal both in light and quantity. For, because God did then call them both great lights, therefore they inferred that they must be both equal in bigness. But a while after (as the tradition goes) the ambitious moon put up her complaint to God against the sun, showing that it was not fit there should be two such great lights in the heavens; a monarchy would best become the place of order and harmony. Upon this, God commanded her to contract herself into a narrower compass; but she being much discontented hereat, replies, What! because I have spoken that which is reason and equity, must I therefore be diminished? This sentence could not choose but much trouble her; and for this reason was she in great distress and grief for a long space. But that her sorrow might be some way pacified, God bid her be of good cheer, because her privileges and charter would be greater than the sun's. He should appear in the day time only, she both in the day and night. But her melancholy being not satisfied with this, she replied again, that that alas was no benefit; for in the day time, she should be either not seen, or not noted. Wherefore God, to comfort her up, promised, that His people the Israelites should celebrate all their feasts and holy days by a computation of her months; but this being not able to content her, she has looked very melancholy ever since; however, she hath still reserved much light of her own."

Wilkins was in strong sympathy with Galileo, who was at that time still alive. In 1641 he published his Mercury, a proposition for communicating at great distances by a sort of telegraphy.

Wilkins recurs again and again in his writings to the dream of mechanical flying, by which he is best remembered.

Mercury he says:

In his

"Amongst all possible conveyances through the air, imagination itself cannot conceive any one more useful than the invention of a flying chariot, which I have mentioned elsewhere. By this means a man may have as free a passage as a bird, which is not hindered either by the highest walls or the deepest rivers and trenches or the most watchful sentinels."

The mathematical, scientific, and theological writings of Wilkins were very numerous. But the three little books mentioned above are all that the reader is now likely to meet with. The subjects on which the bishop wrote do not attract us, and his knowledge is trebly superannuated. But his style deserves great praise. His sentences are short, pointed, and exact. He has little or nothing of the redundant languor of his contemporaries; and justice has never yet been done to him as a pioneer in English prose. The praise given to Tillotson belongs properly to Wilkins, for Tillotson lived a generation later, and learned to write English from his study of the Bishop of Chester, whom he enthusiastically admired. The curious reader will find much in the style of Wilkins to remind him of that of Bishop Berkeley.

John Pearson (1612-1686), who succeeded Wilkins as Bishop of Chester, wrote an Exposition of the Creed (1659), which has always been considered a sound English classic. It was a series of sermons which he had preached while he was incumbent of the London parish of St. Clement's, Eastcheap. Pearson's style is clear and uniform, rising on rare occasions to positive felicity The paucity of Pearson's work contrasts with the excessive fecundity of his most distinguished Nonconformist contemporary, Richard Baxter (1615-1691), who published no less than one hundred and sixty-eight treatises, some of them under facetious and even unseemly titles. Jeffries told him that he had written "books enough to load a cart, every one as full of sedition (I might say treason) as an egg is full of meat." Baxter's most popular books were the Saints' Everlasting Rest (1650), and A Call to the Unconverted