t earlier prose literature is
eminently occasional, closely determined by the eager practical aims of
contemporary politics and theology, or else due to a man's own native
instinct to speak because he cannot help speaking. Hardly aware of the
habit, he likes talking to himself; and when he writes (still in
undress) he does but take the "friendly reader" into his confidence.
The type of this literature, obviously, is not Locke or Gibbon, but,
above all others, Sir Thomas [125] Browne; as Jean Paul is a good
instance of it in German literature, always in its developments so much
later than the English; and as the best instance of it in French
literature, in the century preceding Browne, is Montaigne, from whom
indeed, in a great measure, all those tentative writers, or essayists,
derive.

It was a result, perhaps, of the individualism and liberty of personal
development, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of the
Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective,"
as people say, of the singularities of personal character. Browne,
too, bookish as he really is claims to give his readers a matter, "not
picked from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and
tares" of his own brain. The faults of such literature are what we all
recognise in it: unevenness, alike in thought and style; lack of
design; and caprice--the lack of authority; after the full play of
which, there is so much to refresh one in the reasonable transparency
of Hooker, representing thus early the tradition of a classical
clearness in English literature, anticipated by Latimer and More, and
to be fulfilled afterwards in Butler and Hume. But then, in recompense
for that looseness and whim, in Sir Thomas Browne for instance, we have
in those "quaint" writers, as they themselves understood the term
(coint, adorned, but adorned with all the curious ornaments of their
own predilection, provincial [126] or archaic, certainly unfamiliar,
and selected without reference to the taste or usages of other people)
the charm of an absolute sincerity, with all the ingenuous and racy
effect of what is circumstantial and peculiar in their growth.

The whole creation is a mystery and particularly that of man. At the
blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare
word they started out of nothing. But in the frame of man He played
the sensible operator, and seemed not so much to create as to make him.
When