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Unit 6: The Puritan Age or Age of Milton: Milton as a Poet and His Contribution

6.1 The Baroque Style Notes

As regards prose style, the writers of the age of Milton exhibit a curious retrogressive tendency.
Every past age in England had in some measure advanced literature from antiquity to modernity.
But the age of Milton does not seem to have advanced English prose from the extra vagance and
antiquity of the prose of the Elizabethan period towards the ideal of simplicity, comprehensibility,
and lucidity associated with the prose of the writers of the age of Queen Anne (1702-14). Right in
the Jacobean age (1603-25) we come across some important writers like Bacon and the character
writers who look to the future and dissociate themselves from the ornateness, prolixity,
involvedness, arid diffuseness of the prose of their contemporaries. The Gothic” style of most
Elizabethans influenced a sizable proportion of the prose writer of the age of Milton. The lesson of
simplicity and sententiousness set forth by Bacon and the character writers was forgotten, with the
result that a kind of “baroque” style was cultivated during the age of Milton. It was at the end of the
age that the Restoration writers like Dryden stemmed the retrogressive tide and furthered the
advance towards simplicity and lucidity which came fully and effectively to be realised by such
writers as Addison and Swift after the close of the seventeenth century. However, it may be
admitted with H.C.J. Grierson that the progress towards simplicity and modernity cost the English
prose some “freshness, harmony, dignity, and poetic richness of phraseology.” When prose becomes
strictly functional in nature these qualities have to be done without. With these preliminary
remarks let us proceed to examine the work of the major prose writers of the age.

6.2 Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682)

Sir Thomas Browne was a quaint figure, though a very typical prose writer of his age. He may be
compared with Burton before him. But whereas Burton was by profession a clergyman with a deep
interest in medicine, Browne was by profession a physician, with a very deep interest in religion.
As a thinker and writer he was a surprising blend of the medieval and modern characteristics. He
had a scientific love of investigating the physical truths, the qualities of both a mystic and a sceptic,
was a crusader for a rationalistic appraisal of both the work and the word of God, a great supporter
of religious tolerance, a zealous campaigner for the removal of errors in all fields of learning and
divinity, but himself tenaciously wedded to such errors as belief in witchcraft and the mystic
supremacy of the number five. His works reveal his attractively quaint personality in its fullness,
and therein lies the reason of his perpetual appeal to the readers of all ages.

Notes The modern reader may justly scoff at the pomposity and the occasional absurdity of
the learned doctor, but he has to admit with the Earl of Dorset that “assuredly, he is
the owner of a strong generous heart.”
Browne’s Religio Medici (The Religion of a Doctor) which was published in 1642 immediately
achieved Continental fame, and was translated into several languages. The work may be called”
an autobiography of the soul”. But apart from its importance in revealing the personality of the
writer, the work intended a curative effect on the “sick” society of the age. “It is likely,” says
Tucker Brooke in A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh, “that Dr. Browne, in
all his estimable career, never prescribed a better medicine than when he wrote Religio Medici.
The world was sick of horrors, on the brink of civil war, and in the throes of a harsh theology. The
book is a prophylactic against totalitarian damnation, and the world took it to its heart.”
Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Vulgar Errors), which comprised seven books, attempted to
correct the common errors in the fields of mineral and vegetable bodies, animals, men,
misrepresentations in pictures etc. geography, and history, However, the author himself is not
altogether free from errors. In his Hydriotaphia or Urn-Burial and The Garden vf Gyrjus (both
published 1658), the emphasis is clearly on style. The former was opcasioned by the recovery of a
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