book X
. of Paradise Lost.
Footnote 38:
Sir Thomas Brown has it, ‘The huntsmen are up in America,’ but Mr. Coleridge prefers reading Arabia. I do not think his account of the Urn-Burial very happy. Sir Thomas can be said to be ‘wholly in his subject,’ only because he is _wholly out of it_. There is not a word in the Hydriotaphia about ‘a thigh-bone, or a skull, or a bit of mouldered coffin, or a tomb-stone, or a ghost, or a winding-sheet, or an echo,’ nor is ‘a silver nail or a gilt _anno domini_ the gayest thing you shall meet with.’ You do not meet with them at all in the text; nor is it possible, either from the nature of the subject, or of Sir T. Brown’s mind, that you should! He chose the subject of Urn-Burial, because it was ‘one of no mark or likelihood,’ totally free from the romantic prettinesses and pleasing poetical common-places with which Mr. Coleridge has adorned it, and because, being ‘without form and void,’ it gave unlimited scope to his high-raised and shadowy imagination. The motto of this author’s compositions might be—‘_De apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio._’ He created his own materials: or to speak of him in his own language, ‘he saw nature in the elements of its chaos, and discerned his favourite notions in the great obscurity of nothing!‘
Footnote 39:
The above passage is an inimitably fine paraphrase of some lines on the tombs in Westminster Abbey by F. Beaumont. It shows how near Jeremy Taylor’s style was to poetry, and how well it weaves in with it.
‘Mortality, behold, and fear, What a charge of flesh is here! Think how many royal bones Sleep within this heap of stones: Here they lie, had realms and lands, Who now want strength to stir their hands. Where from their pulpits seal’d in dust, They preach “In greatness is no trust.” Here’s an acre sown indeed With the richest, royal’st seed That the earth did e’er suck in, Since the first man died for sin. Here the bones of birth have cried, Though Gods they were, as men they died. Here are sands, ignoble things, Dropp’d from the ruin’d sides of kings. Here’s a world of pomp and state Buried in dust, once dead by fate.’
Footnote 40:
He and his wife both died from fright, occasioned by the great fire of London in 1665, and lie buried in St. Giles’s church-yard.
Footnote 41:
The difference in the tone of moral sentiment is the greatest of all others.
Edinburgh: Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. P. 20, changed “was an effeminate as” to “was as effeminate as”. 2. P. 89, changed “that that of the torrid zone” to “than that of the torrid zone”. 3. P. 150, changed “Procustes” to “Procrustes”. 4. Other spelling errors were left uncorrected. 5. Footnotes were re-indexed using numbers and collected together at the end of the last chapter. 6. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. 7. Enclosed bold font in =equals=. 8. Superscripts are denoted by a caret before a single superscript character or a series of superscripted characters enclosed in curly braces, e.g. M^r. or M^{ister}. 9. Subscripts are denoted by an underscore before a series of subscripted characters enclosed in curly braces, e.g. H_{2}O.