which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his
writings in a fondness for puns, droll turns of expression and bits of
eccentric suggestion. His prose, unlike Browne's, Milton's, and Jeremy
Taylor's, is brief, simple, and pithy. His dry vein of humor was
imitated by the American Cotton Mather, in his _Magnolia_, and by many
of the English and New England divines of the 17th century.

Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king's army, was several times
imprisoned for his opinions, and was afterward made, by Charles II.,
bishop of Down and Connor. He is a devotional rather than a theological
writer, and his _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_ are religious classics.
Taylor, like Sidney was a "warbler of poetic prose." He has been called
the prose Spenser, and his English has the opulence, the gentle
elaboration, the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of the poet of the
_Faerie Queene_. In fullness and resonance Taylor's diction resembles
that of the great orators, though it lacks their nervous energy. His
pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous similes have Spenser's
pictorial amplitude. Some of them have become commonplaces for
admiration, notably his description of the flight of the skylark, and
the sentence in which he compares the gradual awakening of the human
faculties to the sunrise, which "first opens a little eye of heaven, and
sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls
up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and
peeps over the eastern hills." Perhaps the most impressive single
passage of Taylor's is the opening chapter in _Holy Dying_. From the
midst of the sickening paraphernalia of death which he there accumulates
rises that delicate image of the fading rose, one of the most perfect
things in its wording in all our prose literature. "But so have I seen a
rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was as
fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece;
but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and
dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on
darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it
bowed the head and broke its stock; and at night, having lost some of
its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and
outworn faces."

With the progress of knowledge and discussion many kinds of prose
literature, which were