THOMAS SPRAT [Thomas Sprat was born at Tallaton, Devon, in 1636; he became a commoner of Wadham College, Oxford, under the famous Dr John Wilkins, in 1651, and a Fellow in 1657. On the death of Cromwell he wrote an Ode in the manner of Cowley, and, as he supposed, of Pindar, which was published along with two poems on the same theme by Waller and Dryden. After the Restoration he took orders, and became successively chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, whom he is said to have assisted in the Rehearsal, and to the king. He published in 1667 the History of the Royal Society, of which he was one of the early Fellows, and in 1668 the Latin Life of Cowley, afterwards translated into English and enlarged, besides the Observations on M. de Sorbière's Voyage into England. He became Canon of Windsor in 1680, and Bishop of Rochester in 1684. His later works, besides Sermons, are a History of the Rye House Plot (1685), and a Relation of his own Examination on a charge of treason trumped up against him by two professional impostors. He died in his Bishopric, May 1713.] AN early biographer of Sprat remarks that his name deserves the first rank in history for "his raising the English tongue to that purity and beauty which former writers were wholly strangers to, and those who come after him can but imitate." Dr Johnson, who caught the echoes of Sprat's short-lived fame, adds that each of his books has its own distinct and characteristical excellence. Sprat is undoubtedly a versatile writer, his "relations" of matters of fact are written in a succinct and lucid style, his wit, exercised in defence of his countrymen against the strictures of the French traveller Sorbière, is easy and telling, his Life of Cowley is a model of dignified panegyric. Yet his chief claim to remembrance lies in his efforts both by precept and example to purge English prose of its rhetorical and decorative encumbrances, and to show that there is as much art "to have only plain conceptions on some arguments as there is in others to have extraordinary flights." It may well be urged that Sprat deserves a share in the credit, so commonly yielded to Dryden alone, of having inaugurated modern 66 English prose. Not only does he show himself, in the History of the Royal Society (published before Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy), in full possession of a close, naked, natural way of speaking," but he clearly indicates the necessity of a reform in prose writing, and his consciousness of his own mission as a reformer. And yet the change which came over the spirit and methods of English prose in the seventeenth century must not be assigned by any easy and fallacious formula to the influence of one or two men, it was due rather to a number of complex causes of the most general nature. And among these, the cause set down by Sprat in the first extract was no doubt quite as powerful as the influence of the French. The rise of positive knowledge made the conceits of the wits, wherein "falsehoods are continued by tradition because they supply commodious allusions," distasteful, and the enthusiasm of the little group of scientific inquirers that gathered together at Oxford and London for purposes of experiment and research during the civil troubles, gave to England in the Royal Society, of which Dryden himself was an early Fellow, her only Academy of repute. The preference of the members of the Royal Society for "the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits and scholars was not, like Wordsworth's later innovation, a preference exercised in the interests of the effective expression of emotion; it was determined rather by the instinct of science, and in the interests of the clear statement of fact. "Prose and sense," the ideals of the authors of the Rehearsal, gained the day, but the victory was not without its price. It was a victory of logic over rhetoric, in some sort even of Science and Criticism over Literature and Art, for the cadences of Sir Thomas Browne and the accumulated epithets of Robert Burton were never revived. In his clearness of manner and coolness of judgment, whether he is defending the Royal Society from the hostile armies of the wits and Aristotelians, or criticising the preaching of the Puritan divines, Sprat is an admirable representative alike of the new positive spirit which founded the Royal Society, and of the spirit of moderation, reason, and compromise which has given its chief strength to the Church of which he was a bishop. W. A. RALEIGH. A SIMPLE AND AN ORNATE STYLE ८ THERE is one thing more about which the Society has been most solicitous; and that is, the manner of their discourse: which unless they had been very watchful to keep in due temper, the whole spirit and vigour of their design had been soon eaten out by the luxury and redundance of speech. The ill effects of this superfluity of talking have already overwhelmed most other arts and professions; inasmuch, that when I consider the means of happy living, and the causes of their corruption, I can hardly forbear recanting what I said before, and concluding that eloquence ought to be banished out of all civil societies, as a thing fatal to peace and good manners. To this opinion I should wholly incline; if I did not find that it is a weapon which may be as easily procured by bad men as good: and that, if these should only cast it away, and those retain it; the naked innocence of virtue would be upon all occasions exposed to the armed malice of the wicked. This is the chief reason that should now keep up the ornaments of speaking in any request; since they are so much degenerated from their original usefulness. They were at first, no doubt, an admirable instrument in the hands of wise men; when they were only employed to describe goodness, honesty, obedience, in larger, fairer, and more moving images: to represent truth, clothed with bodies; and to bring knowledge back again to our very senses, from whence it was at first derived to our understandings. But now they are generally changed to worse uses: they make the fancy disgust the best things, if they come sound and unadorned; they are in open defiance against reason, professing not to hold much correspondence with that; but with its slaves, the passions : they give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching to consist with right practice. Who can behold without indignation how many mists and uncertainties these specious tropes and figures have brought on our knowledge? How many rewards, which are due to more profitable and difficult arts, have been still snatched away by the easy vanity of fine speaking? For, now I am warmed with this just anger, I cannot withhold myself from betraying the shallowness of all these seeming mysteries, upon which we writers, and speakers, look so big. And, in few words, I dare say that of all the studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtained than this vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue, which makes so great a noise in the world. But I spend words in vain; for the evil is now so inveterate, that it is hard to know whom to blame, or where to begin to reform. We all value one another so much upon this beautiful deceit, and labour so long after it in the years of our education, that we cannot but ever after think kinder of it than it deserves. And indeed, in most other parts of learning, I look upon it as a thing almost utterly desperate in its cure: and I think it may be placed among those general mischiefs, such as the dissension of Christian princes, the want of practice in religion, and the like, which have been so long spoken against that men are become insensible about them; every one shifting off the fault from himself to others; and so they are only made bare common-places of complaint. It will suffice my present purpose to point out what has been done by the Royal Society towards the correcting of its excesses in natural philosophy; to which it is, of all others, a most professed enemy. They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been, a constant resolution to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of artizans, countrymen, and merchants, before that of wits or scholars. (From the History of the Royal Society.) THE ERROR OF EXTEMPORE PRAYER AND PREACHING WE have lived in an age, when the two gifts, as they were wont to be called, of extempore praying and extempore preaching, have been more pretended to and magnified than, I believe, they ever were before, or, I hope, ever will be again, in the Church and nation. Yet, for all I could ever learn or observe, the most sudden readiness and most profuse exuberancy in either of these ways has been only extempore in show and appearance, and very frequently but a cunningly dissembled change of the very same matter and words often repeated, though not in the same order. can. As to that of extempore praying, which therefore too many mistake for praying by the spirit, it is manifest that the most exercised and most redundant faculty in that kind, is, in reality, only praying by the fancy or the memory, not the spirit. They do but vary and remove the Scripture style and language, or their own, into as many places and shapes and figures as they And though they have acquired never so plentiful a stock of them, yet still the same phrases and expressions do so often come about again, that the disguise may quickly be seen through by any attentive and intelligent hearer. So that, in plain terms, they who think themselves most skilful in that art do really, all the while, only pray in set forms disorderly set and never ranged into a certain method. For which cause, though they may not seem to be forms to their deluded auditors, yet they are so in themselves; and the very persons who use them most variously, and most artificially, cannot but know them to be so. This, my brethren, seems to be all the great mystery of the so much boasted power of extempore praying. And why may not the like be affirmed, in great measure, of extempore preaching, which has so near an affinity with the other? Is not this also, at the bottom, only a more crafty management of the same phrases and observations, the same doctrines and applications, which they had ever before provided and composed, and reserved in their memories? Do but hear the most voluble masters in this way once or twice, or perhaps oftener, as far as their changes shall reach, VOL. III T |