Living and Dying, and which was published about the era of the Restoration, is remarkable; not only for brilliancy of imagery, but, considering the period in which he wrote, for purity and simplicity of diction. His sentences are usually clear and compact, and, where the occasion calls for it, are modulated with uncommon sweetness and harmony. The following are specimens which display both the richness of his imagination, and the beauty of his expression. "Some are called at age at fourteen, some at one and twenty, some never; but all men late enough, for the life of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibly. But as when the sun approaching towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to the cock, and calls up the lark to mattens, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those which deck'd the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil, because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shews a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly: so is a man's reason and his life." "It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to us who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, the fair cheeks and the full eyes of childhood, from the vigourousness and strong flexure of the joints of five and twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomness and horror of a three-days burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so I have seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece: but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin-modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retire ments, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness, and the symptoms of a sickly age: it bowed the head, and broke its stalk, and at night having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and worn-out faces. The same is the portion of every man and every woman; the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonour +." * Holy Dying, 8vo. 23d edition, page 17, 1719. Several years elapsed, however, before the ex amples of Cowley and Taylor had their due weight. In the mean time, namely in 1673, CLARENDON closed his elaborate History of the Rebellion. This celebrated work, estimable for its accuracy, impartiality, and variety of incident, is written in a style which was once highly admired, but is now justly condemned for its prolixity and involution. Clarendon has dropped the inversions of Hooker and Milton; but he has drawn out his periods to such a length, and embarrassed them with so many parentheses, and with such a number of slenderly connected particulars, that the reader, though occasionally gratified by sonorous and dignified phraseology, is soon bewildered amid the labyrinth of his sentences, and compelled in almost every page to retrace with care its various mazes, in order to ascertain a meaning. Of these periods of a mile the closing sentence of the annexed passage affords a curious instance. I shall mark its commencement and termination by capitals. "It was by many impatiently wondered at then, and, no doubt, will be more censured hereafter, that notwithstanding all these invasions, and breaches upon the regal power, and all these vast preparations to destroy him, the king, hitherto, put not himself into a posture of safety; or provided for the resistance of that power, which threaten'd him; and which, he could not but know, intended whatsoever it hath since done; and though they had not yet formed an army, and chosen a general, yet, he well knew, they had materials abundantly ready for the first, and particular, digested resolutions, in the second; which they could reduce to publick acts whensoever they pleased. It is very true, he did know all this, and the unspeakable hazards he run, in not preparing against it. BUT the hazards, which presented themselves unto him on the other side, were not less prodigious: he had a very great appearance of the nobility; not only of those, who had from the beginning walked, and governed themselves by the rules the law prescribed, and in that respect, were unblameable to king and people: but of others who had passionately and peevishly (to say no worse) concurred in all the most violent votes and actions, which had been done from the beginning for besides the Lord Spencer (who had been chosen their lieutenant of Northamptonshire, but was recovered to a right understanding, of which he was very capable, by his uncle the Earl of Southampton) the Lord Paget likewise, who had contributed all his faculties to their service, and to the prejudice of the king's from before the beginning of the parliament; had been one of their teizers to broach those bold high overtures, soberer men were not, at first, willing to be seen in; and had been, as a man most worthy to be confided in, chosen lord lieutenant of one of the most confiding counties, the county of Buckingham (where he had, with great solemnity and pomp, executed their ordinance, in defyance of the King's proclamation) and had subscribed a greater number of horses for their service, upon their propositions, than any other of the same quality; convinced in his conscience, fled from them, and besought the King's pardon and, for the better manifesting the tenderness of his compunction, and the horror he had of his former guilt, he frankly discovered whatsoever he had known of their counsels; and aggravated all the ill they had done, with declaring it to be done to worse and more horrid ends, than many good men believed to be possible for them to propose to THEMSELVES *." A work of many volumes, abounding in sentences as protracted and involved as the above, must necessarily excite fatigue, if not disgust, even in the most patient student. It is not always, however, that the style of Clarendon is * Clarendon's History, Part i. vol. ii, book v. p. 651, 652, 8vo. edit. of 1720. |