Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/253

Rh saved, and at times just saved, from being merely these by being also a humane and Christian moralist. Sense and absurdity, fancy and wisdom, are inextricably blended in all he wrote. The wisdom does not venture outside the beaten track: the fancy is ready at any moment for the most unexpected flights. Browne's eloquence is not, like Pascal's, a wisdom which is eloquence, an eloquence which is wisdom. It is only at times that the thought of one of Browne's paragraphs is as suggestive and illuminating as the phrasing is imaginative, and the cadence musical. Often the thought is purely fanciful, almost freakish, for one must not overlook the vein of humour in Browne. In general, when he is most serious, his subjects are the familiar topics of Christian morality arrayed in new and splendid, if occasionally quaint and overwrought, garb. Browne's prose and Milton's verse are the finest fruits of seventeenth century Latinism. It is difficult to conceive of a purely Teutonic language achieving such at once sonorous and melodious effects as Browne and Milton produced, in different ways, by the admixture of racy English with Latin polysyllables rich in labials and open vowels. In impassioned and sustained eloquence Browne is not the compeer of Hooker, or Donne, or Milton, or Taylor. He is too prone in the midst of a noble flight to check at some passing sparrow of antiquarian fancy. But of prose as an artistic medium no writer of the century had so easy and conscious a mastery, could produce at will such varied and wonderful effects.