Page 47 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes has an element of wit, even the wit of the metaphysical kind. At any rate, he is delightful, even
though in patches. He wittily describes a negro as “an image of God cut in ebony.” “The soldier”,
Fuller writes at a place, “at the same time shoots out his prayers to God and his pistol at his
enemy.”
Izaac Walton (1593-1683) falls in a class by himself. He is known for his biographies of Donne,
Henry Wotton, Hooker, George Herbert, and Bishop Sanderson written between 1640 and 1678.
They are, says Hardin Craig in A History of English Literature, ed. Hardin Craig, “masterpieces,
not of biography, but of style and temper, hearty sincerity, cheerfulness and good nature, and
personal interest in the men treated. His mistakes as a biographer, for example in the case of ‘
Hooker, have to be guarded against, but his pictures are essentially true.”
Walton’s more important work, however, is The Compleai Angler (1653) which is essentially a
treatise on fishing, but has alongside many incidental attractions for the student of literature.
Walton was an ironmonger by profession and he spent all of his leisure on fishing, of which sport
he acquired an almost uncanny knowledge. He sets forth this knowledge in this book. “Its charm,”
says Hardin Craig, “rests also on its background which is made up of natural scenery, life at inns,
fishermen’s tales and casual conversations with fishermen, and of casually interspersed songs and
lyrics”.
“He”, says Legouis in his A Short History of English Literature “serves as a link between Marlowe
and Dryden.” We can easily perceive in his prose, even though it is the prose of an ironmonger, a
marked Elizabethan quality. “He describes”, says Legouis, “these healthful pleasures in a prose,
limpid, if a little slow; still redolent of the artificial pastoral here and there but wherein lies the
witchery of the English countryside.”

6.7 Summary
The age of Milton (that is, 1625-1660, comprising the Caroline age and the Common-
wealth) was an age of singular activity in the field of English prose.
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.
Among the Anglicans the important prose writers were George Herbert, Thomas Traherne,
John Hales, William Chiliingworth, John Gauden, and Jeremy Taylor (1613-67).

6.8 Keywords

Autobiography of the Soul : 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”.
Sir Thomas Browne : He was a quaint Figure, though a very typical prose writer of his age.

6.9 Review Questions

1. What was the Baroque style?
2. Who was Sir Thomas Browne? Explain.
3. What is the eccentrics?

Answers : Self Assessment
1. Sir Thomas Browne 2. Age of Milton 3. Puritan camp
4. Hobbes 5. Leviathan
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