CHAPTER V.
ENGLISH PROSE.
"an immoderate hydroptic thirst of learning"—bacon—jonson. divines—anglo-catholic: andrewes—donne—jeremy taylor; puritan: adams; latitudinarian: hales—chillingworth. controversialists: hall—taylor—milton. "characters": hall—overbury—earle. burton—drummond—browne—urquhart—fuller. philosophy: hobbes. history: clarendon. biography: walton.
The review of English prose[1] in the preceding volume of this series closed with the great name of Hooker. In the Ecclesiastical Polity, English prose, though not yet without faults of cumbrousness and diffuseness, for the first time grappled successfully with the task of setting forth in lucid, weighty, and harmonious periods a sustained philosophic argument, and, so doing, established its right to take the place of Latin even for learned purposes,
- ↑ Minto, A Manual of English Prose Literature, 3rd ed., Edinburgh, 1886; Saintsbury, Elizabethan Literature, 1903, Short History, 1898; Craik, English Prose Selections, vol. ii., London, 1893; Chambers, Cyclopædia of English Literature, ed. David Patrick, Edin., 1901-3.
