tan rancour condemned to a miserable death at the age of forty. We remember Lovelace best for his lines: Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind, Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field; And with a stronger faith embrace Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more. In 1642 Lovelace was imprisoned at Westminster for demanding that the King should be restored to his rights, and while there he wrote "To Althea from Prison," which contains the well-known stanza: Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage. Other Contemporary Writers Like Herrick and Lovelace, Edmund Waller was a Royalist, but he was a worldling and a time-server. Not even his song, "Go, lovely rose," has served to keep alive his once great reputation. He is thought of now chiefly as a skilful craftsman in verse, to whom Dryden was indebted for some of his art. Nothing demonstrates the deep piety of the first half of the seventeenth century more clearly than the fact that the partisans of Charles I, denounced by the Puritans as the children of wrath and the enemies of God, included such distinguished writers of religious verse as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw and Cowley, and such divines as Fuller and Jeremy Taylor. It is a curious fact that most of the literature of piety produced during the years of struggle between King and Parliament came from the pens of Royalist Churchmen, and not from the pens of Puritan Dissenters. § 8 ROBERT BURTON Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" One of the most remarkable books published in England in the years before the Civil War was Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton was another literary clergyman, and his book, which is unique in English prose, contains a definition of melancholy, a discussion of its causes, and suggested cures. Love melancholy is given a section of its own, in which Burton's quaint humour finds full play, and the book finishes in serious vein with an examination of religious melancholy and suggestions for the cure of despair. As he proceeds, melancholy comes to mean to Burton every imaginable ill, and the most modern scientific men admire the sanity and the subtlety of his diagnoses. He illustrates his points with quotations from scores of ancient and modern authors, and it has often been suggested that a large number of the quotations were invented by Burton himself. Dr. Johnson and Laurence Sterne were fervent admirers of the Anatomy, and it was one of Charles Lamb's enthusiasms. To him Robert Burton was a "fantastic great old man," and in a letter written in 1821 Lamb says: "I am hanging over for the thousandth time some passage in old Burton." Burton's humour and wisdom may be appreciated from the following passages. Many of them have become the counters of everyday modern speech: Naught so sweet as melancholy. A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see further than a giant himself. Him that makes shoes go barefoot himself. Rob Peter, and pay Paul. Penny wise, pound foolish. Women wear the breeches. Can build castles in the air. All our geese are swans. Set a beggar on horseback and he will ride a gallop. Birds of a feather will gather together. No cord nor cable can so forcibly draw, or hold so fast, as love can do with a twined thread. Marriage and hanging go by destiny; matches are made in heaven. Where God hath a temple, the Devil will have a chapel. Sir Thomas Browne, the author of the famous Religio Medici, was the son of a mercer, and was born in Cheapside in 1605. He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, studied medicine for some years on the Continent, and practised at Norwich, where he lived for over forty years. The Religio Medici was translated into French, Dutch, German, and Italian during its author's lifetime. Thomas Browne also wrote Christian Morals, Letter to a Friend, and Urn Burial. Browne was a deliberate stylist, that is to say, like Henry James, he cared more for manner than for matter. He loved to embroider, and he |