Purple Patches
The Golden Grove. Edited by L. Pearsall Smith. (Oxford :
Clarendon Press. 10s.) •
AMONG the great English masters of language who were not poets, but masters of " the other harmony of prose," no one, we suppose, has surpassed Jeremy Taylor. The exact place of the stylist in literature still remains to be settled. Mr. Pearsall Smith, in The Golden Grove, an anthology compiled from the books and sermons of the great seventeenth-century churchman, puts the stylist very high. On the other hand, he will not concede any great amount of original thought or knowledge of human character to the divine whom Coleridge classed with -Shake- speare, Milton and Bacon, and Lamb declared to have more knowledge of life and manners than any prose writer in the language.
Mr. Pearsall Smith has, however, done Jeremy Taylor a great service. In a very interesting introduction, he tells how his reputation rose • and waned, taking it for granted that neither this nor any succeeding generation will have patience to wade through and appraise so many volumes of old-fashioned stuff. However that may be—and we take it each generation has the same amount of patience and applies it differently— no one who cares for his own language and literature could be bored by the delightful selection of purple patches here pre- sented to him.
To take at random one of the least resonant but most human and incisive of the extracts, concerning the character of Lady Carberry, for whom Holy Living and Holy Dying were written, Jeremy Taylor writes :-
" She was even and constant, silent and devout, prudent and material, she loved what she now enjoyes, and she feared what she never felt, and God did for her what she never did expect.
" If we remember her as a Mother she was kind and severe, carefull and prudent, very tender and not at all fond, a greater lover of her children's souls than of their bodies, and one that would value then, more by the strict rules of honour and proper worth than by their relation to herself."
The portrait is as beautiful as it is unlovable.
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