Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose. The best sellers of the period were godly manuals that ran to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions followed), two copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and author John Bunyan’s first wife. Puritans preferred sermons in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas Adams, believed it their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other factor shaping prose was the desire among scientists for a utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely represent the relationship between words and things, without figurative luxuriance. This hope, repeatedly voiced in the 1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the Royal Society (founded 1660), which decisively affected prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier writing, though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately from Sir Francis Bacon, the towering intellect of the century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance of his generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In the Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge, rationally and comprehensively ordered so that each discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others. The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight that there could be progress in learning (i.e., that the limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed forward) and his inductive method, which aimed to establish scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at particulars and working toward generalities, instead of working backward from preconceived systems. Bacon democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of authority and lifting scientific inquiry free of religion and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating second causes (though he held that the perfection of the machine itself testified to God’s glory). The implications for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement that the preoccupation with words instead of matter was the first “distemper” of learning; his own prose, however, was far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the Advancement is underpinned by a tactful but firmly persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged 1612, 1625) are shifting and elusive, teasing the reader toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended complications.
The Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser collections were published by Sir William Cornwallis (1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and Ben Jonson (Timber; or, Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related genre was the “character,” a brief, witty description of a social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and practiced first by Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John Webster, and Thomas Dekker. The best characters are John Earle’s (Micro-cosmography, 1628). Character-writing led naturally into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of this genre were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Hooker. Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem lightweight when placed beside Fulke Greville’s tragic and valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (c. 1610; published 1652). The major historical work of the period was Sir Walter Raleigh’s unfinished History of the World (1614), with its rolling sentences and sombre skepticism, written from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s providential framework would recommend his History to Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too saucy in censuring princes.” Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622) belongs to a more secular, Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its lessons in pragmatism. Prose styles
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction against the orotund flow of serious Elizabethan prose that has been variously described as metaphysical, anti-Ciceronian, or Senecan, but these terms are used vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped, aphoristic prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-endedness. The age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the sermons of Donne and Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny, hopping fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An extreme example of the loose style is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an investigation into human psychopathology. Burton’s compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a style that was infinitely extensible; his successor was Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in invention. In the Religio Medici (1635) and in “The Garden of Cyrus” and “Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk” (both printed 1658) of Sir Thomas Browne, the loose style serves a mind delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation, content with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate assurance. Browne’s majestic prose invests his confession of his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike with an almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.