INTRODUCTION. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY PROSE. ALTHOUGH it is usual for the sake of convenience to classify great writers according to the century in which they flourished, the division must always be an arbitrary one, since the beginning and ending of a century does not necessarily coincide with the beginning and ending of other things. It does, however, so happen that the authors selected for this volume, with one exception,1 all lived and worked and died within the seventeenth century. Before the seventeenth century English Literature has little to show of what is by common consent regarded as literary prose in the modern sense of the term, that is, prose which follows the approved rules, so far as there can be any, of style. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the translator of the Bible, Sir Philip Sidney, Richard Hooker, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, to mention only the chief names, wrote literary prose before that era, and their work forms important steps in the evolution of English prose. But the old superstition, if we may so call it, that prose could only be properly written in Latin still lingered. Sir Thomas More's chief book, The Utopia, was written in Latin, so 1 Izaak Walton, born 1593. were Bacon's most important philosophical works, and although he introduced a new prose form-the Essayinto English literature, and practised it in English, he had the final edition of his Essays 1 turned into Latin, "for," he said, "I do conceive that the Latin volume of them (being in the universal language) may last as long as books last." Indeed, we may fairly say that before the seventeenth century the only great prose, prose that was at once stately and graceful, and that displayed the capacities of the English language of its time, was that of Hooker. The seventeenth century is then the first great period of English prose. During the first half it was written under the influence of the classical authors, during the last half under that of French writers. The subjects treated of in prose increased; philosophy, religion, history, biography and autobiography, literary criticism, familiar letters, sport and country life, the commencements of journalism, all began then to assume literary importance and to aim at literary style. True, it has been said of these seventeenth century writers that their style is either too rough or too poetical, always either above or below the prose level. But they were men who had things to say, and they used prose because they knew that what they had to say could only be expressed in prose. It was their care to make the best possible use, so far as their individual capability allowed, of the instrument of expression they had chosen. As far as is possible in so small a compass all departments of prose are here represented. But it will be well to mention one or two branches of prose-writing 1 Published 1625. |