they remain as free from 'Donnishness' as they are from rambling sentences. While Earle's little book has twice been republished of late, the work of an incomparably greater mind, that of Samuel Butler, who brought the art of character-writing in England to its highest point, still awaits an editor. A great part of it lies in manuscript at the British Museum, written in a style as strong, clear, and incisive as that of Swift, whom Butler strangely resembles in his genius, temperament, and pessimism, and even in his life. They also had in common the talent for writing a clever mechanical kind of verse, which is inferior to their prose. If beside these character-writings there are placed Baxter's 'Autobiography' and 'Saint's Rest,' Howell's Familiar Letters,' Walton's Angler' and 'Lives,' L'Estrange's Esop,' Urquhart's 'Rabelais,' and the tales translated from the French, Spanish, and Italian, it will be seen that easy and vigorous diction, wit and vivacity, plain, clear, and moderate prose, did not perish in England even under the régime of the Puritans.

One of the most pleasant studies, to our mind, in Professor Dowden's essays on 'Anglican and Puritan'literature, is that of Richard Baxter. It shows how the sympathetic interest in the position of this admirable and clear-minded man, re-awakened by Jowett's sermon on him, has since increased. From a literary point of view, Baxter never fully manifested his undoubted gifts, for he was too hurried and voluminous a writer to leave any deep mark in literature. He might truly have said of all, as he said of one of his works: 'I scarce ever wrote one sheet twice over, nor stayed to make any blots or interlinings, but was fain to let it go as it was first conceived.' Yet on the whole, he wrote with remarkable terseness, vigour, and lucidity, resembling Defoe in many of the qualities of his style; and in the range of our literature it is impossible to find a better type of prose as the instrument of the average expression. And Baxter was not, like Defoe, almost alone in his generation. He represents many writers of his time, such as the unknown author of the Whole Duty of Man,' who directly addressed his contemporaries in the sincere, plain, and manly language which they themselves spoke. Their works, however, by virtue of their time, are chiefly of a religious nature, and not therefore very attractive to the profane modern

reader; and, save in the case of Baxter's 'Saint's Everlasting Rest,' and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress,' they are not literature. Bunyan, especially, put the vernacular into print with the same assurance as other men had done before him, but with far more lasting success.

There are also more entertaining examples of the secondary prose of the seventeenth century. In the 'Familiar Letters,' the subjects of social discourse are touched upon with such lightness and grace that Addison, apart from what he had of incommunicable genius, could have taught but little to James Howell in 1645. As for Izaak Walton, besides that series of portraits wherein, while tracing the features of other men, he discovers to us with winning simplicity all the qualities of his own soul, who in after-times has described the countryside with equal charm and delicacy of phrase? White of Selborne had keener powers of observation, and was, through living in the country and living at a later date, a more competent naturalist. But his book, delightful and instructive as it is, must rank as literature after that of Walton. If Mr Marston will permit us to say so, the 'Complete Angler' is now, from a fisherman's point of view, sadly incomplete and erroneous, and it is the style alone that ensures it immortality. And this, we submit, is true of most of the early seventeenth-century writers. Bacon, so far as his scientific experiments went, did not add a single fact to effective science; and, as Huxley pointed out, his method of induction has been followed in none of the tremendous discoveries of the modern era. As for Burton, the oddest thing about that quaintest of books, the 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' is that it was intended for a sober pathological study. And was there ever a philosopher so subtle and exquisite in his credulity, and so ignorant of the real issues, as Sir Thomas Browne? Yet how delectable he is! The work of the scientific pioneers of his time is now melted almost beyond recognition into the sum of human knowledge, and their writings are unread, save by the few conscientious historians of science, while Sir Thomas Browne grows the more attractive the more he ages. To what is this due if not to the resplendence of his diction? a thing of art as full of studied effect as Milton's verse, although perhaps it is wanting in that maintaining power which is the per

fection of Milton's style. The author of Religio Medici' and Urn Burial' occupies, it seems to us, a place in the prose of the seventeenth century somewhat analogous to that of Marlowe in Elizabethan poetry: he is the master of resonance and mighty cadences. And the great divines of the pre-Restoration traditions-Taylor, Barrow, South, and Fuller-are they not in breadth and energy more akin to the great dramatists than any of our prose writers, even the Elizabethans, with the exception of the few men of commanding eloquence, Bacon, Hooker, and Raleigh, whose art they continued and developed?

Yet in spite of the panegyrics of Emerson, Taine, and other critics of insight and authority, it cannot be allowed that Jeremy Taylor or any one of the great seventeenthcentury writers was the Shakespeare of English prose. The instrument which they used was thrown aside at the crisis of its development, before it had in ease and expressiveness equalled the perfection of our blank-verse. As it stood, it was, with some admirable exceptions, like the style of the earlier Elizabethan plays, full of strength, beauty, and melodiousness, but lacking, in many cases, in suppleness. There were, as we have pointed out, in the writings of Chillingworth, Howell, Baxter, Butler, and other men, indications that this greater ease of movement was in course of being obtained. Taylor himself, especially in his controversial works, is another instance; and Dean South also learnt to use the older style with equal power and vehemence and yet with more sprightliness and point. Barrow ranks with Hobbes for the manner in which he combines vigorous and unembellished diction with biting vernacular. In his most striking passages the language is just lofty enough to bring home to the mind of the reader the greatness of his conceptions. They glow with an inward light, as in the magnificent irony of his sermon on Contentment. Descartes, Pascal, and Bossuet are mighty names; but among the writers that stretch between Hooker, Browne, and Bunyan, is Hobbes inferior at all points to Descartes, or Bacon to Pascal? Are there no qualities of imagination, vehemence, and majestic strength in Taylor, South, and Barrow, which would survive a comparison with Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Massillon?

If the prose of the pre-Restoration traditions was not

the classic prose of our literature, it is the nearest approach we have had to a style that exhibited the highest qualities of the English mind. With all its defects, our language had then freed itself from Elizabethan affectation, and had united in a living whole the diction of a mighty line of poets and the blunt vivid speech of the people. In freeing itself from Elizabethan affectation it had, in the case of some writers, become too latinistic, though more in vocabulary than in structure; yet this fault was disappearing, and the language was developing into an instrument as expressive and beautiful as any in Europe, while in power and richness it was without a rival. The very words in which Dr Johnson depreciates this age as the time when our language was considered by every writer as a subject on which he might try his plastic skill by moulding it according to his fancy,' might have been used by Coleridge in an entirely opposite sense.

The prose of the early seventeenth century was like an organ of many stops and vast compass, upon which all who had the skill might play according to their bent of mind. In Hooker's hands, it filled the cathedrals and churches of England with solemn and victorious strains. For Bishop Taylor it rang with the fulness and the sweetness of all its tones. With it Bacon heralded the advance of science in a triumphant prelude, that was afterwards changed for the clear bugle-note and the sound of the march, as the giant of modern thought, Thomas Hobbes, set out to raze the crumbling towers of scholasticism. With it again, Browne, half-wondering and half-amused, awoke enchanted echoes amidst the ruins of the mediæval world; and Izaak Walton, touching it so lightly and yet with such exquisite art, converted the most ordinary exercise into a pastorale, a thing of country-songs and dances. Even Milton, who reserved his incomparable harmonies for his verse, content too often to deafen his opponents with noisy abuse-what interludes he has, almost despite himself, of divine beauty! But music, the art of expression the most plastic and inexhaustible, is without terms of general significance to apply as critical similitudes to the varying and abundant excellences of those writers of English prose who may be said to begin with Hooker and Bacon and end with Barrow and South.

Art. VI. THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA

1. Aus den Tiefen des Weltmeeres. By C. Chun. Jena; Gustav Fischer, 1900.

2. Tierleben der Tiefsee. By O. Seeliger. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1901.

3. Report of the Scientific Results of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger. Edited by the late Sir C. Wyville Thomson and John Murray. A Summary of the Scientific Results. Published by Order of Her Majesty's Government, 1885. 4. La Vie au Fond des Mers. By H. Filhol. Paris: G. Masson, 1885.

5. The Fauna of the Deep Sea. By Sydney J. Hickson. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1894.

THE first recorded attempt to sound the depths of the ocean was made early in the year 1521, in the South Pacific, by Ferdinand Magellan. He had traversed the dangerous Straits destined to bear his name during the previous November, and emerged on the 28th of that month into the open ocean. For three months he sailed across the Pacific, and in the middle of March, 1521, came to anchor off the islands now known as the Philippines. Here Magellan was killed in a conflict with the natives. The records of his wonderful feat were brought to Spain during the following year by one of his ships, the Victoria; and amidst the profound sensation caused by the news of this voyage, which has been called 'the greatest event in the most remarkable period of the world's history,' it is probable that his modest attempt to sound the ocean failed to attract the attention it deserved. Magellan's sounding-lines were at most some two hundred fathoms in length, and he failed to touch bottom; from which he 'somewhat naïvely concluded that he had reached the deepest part of the ocean.'

It was more than two hundred years later that the first serious study of the bed of the sea was undertaken by the French geographer, Philippe Buache, who first introduced the use of isobathic curves in a map which he published in 1737. His view, that the depths of the ocean are simply prolongations of the conditions existing in the neighbouring sea-coasts, though too wide in its generalisation, has been shown to be true as regards the sea