Undoubtedly the three books in this blogs are in some form are represented in most libraries. Of course EEBO or microform and certainly in later reprints or variorum editions. I need not here discuss the importance of original editions, yet I might do that anyway. BUT what I would like to do in this blog is to take a fresh look at these three titles. Here I hope to re)discovered or uncovered and exposed some wonderful facets of these influential and foundational works we have inherited from early modern England.

George Herbert’s The Temple, Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum and Thomas Brown’s Works

689G  George Herbert (1593-1633) & Christopher Harvey;

The Temple. Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. By Mr. George Herbert, Late Oratour of the University of Cambridge. Together with his Life. with several Additions. Psal. 29. In his Temple doth every man speak of his honour. The Tenth Edition, with an Alphabetical Table for ready finding out the chief places. [bound with] The Synagogue: Or The Shadow Of The Temple. Sacred Poems, And Private Ejaculations. In Imitation of Mr. George Herbert. The Sixth Edition, Corrected and Enlarged.

London: Printed by W. Godbid, for R.S. and are to be Sold by John Williams Junior, in Cross-Key Court in Little-Britain, 1674. . price $ 4,500

Duodecimo , Signatures: π⁶ [*⁶](-[*1]) ,A- I¹² K⁶; ²A-C¹², A-B¹²,C⁶ {tricky but complete] Nineth edition of the first book, the second title is a Fifth edition. There were no editions published between 1709 -1799. This copy is bound in 20th century vellum over boards a nice copy.

From The Church Militant

Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
Ready to pass to the American strand.
When height of malice and prodigious lusts, Impudent sinning, witchcrafts, and distrusts
The marks of future bane—shall fill our cup
Unto the brim, and make our measure up ;
When Seine shall swallow Tiber, and the Thames, By letting in them both, pollutes her streams When Italy of us shall have her will,
And all her calendar of sins fulfil.
Whereby one may foretell what sins next year Shall both in France and England domineer Then shall Religion to America flee ;
They have their times of Gospel even as we. My God, Thou dost prepare for them a way, By carrying first their gold from them away ; For gold and grace did never yet agree ; Religion always sides with poverty.

The text of the Temple includes the pattern poems, “The Altar,” and “Easter Wings” Herbert’s reputation rests on this remarkable collection of poems which mark perfectly the metaphysical tone of his spiritual unrest, which is resolved in final peace, “the Herbert we know through ‘Aaron,’ ‘Discipline,’ ‘The Collar,’ ‘The Pulley,’ and many other poems in which he strives to subdue the willful or kindle the apathetic self His principal themes are those ‘two vast, spacious things Sinne and Love’ There is nothing soft in the poet who seeks to engrave divine love in steel; and a catalogue of gratuitous, untempered, and short-lived sweets leads up to the magnificent contrast of the disciplined soul that ‘never gives’

¶” As the Anglican merges with the greater poet, so the ‘quaint’ writer merges with the metaphysical Herbert had his share of the age’s passion for anagrams and the like, which Addison was to condemn as ‘false wit’ But the poet who could shape a poem in the physical likeness of ‘The Altar’ or ‘Easter Wings’ had, even more than most of his fellows, a functional sense of meter and rhythm. The technical experimentalist and master was, we remember, a skilled and devoted musician. The movement of his verse, taut or relaxed, can suggest all his fluctuating moods, from self-will or weakness to joyful surrender and assured strength. He moves from this world to the world of the spirit ‘As from one room t’another,’ or dwells simultaneously in both, and it is in keeping with that habit of mind, and with metaphysical origins in general, that many of his poems should be allegorical anecdotes, transfigured emblems. Apart from some of his fine dramatic openings, Herbert does not attempt the high pitch of Donne’s ‘Divine Poems’ . His great effects are all the greater for rising out of a homely, colloquial quietness of tone; and peace brings quiet endings- ‘So I did sit and eat;’ ‘And I reply’d, My Lord’ Though the friend and admirer of Donne (and of Bacon), Herbert did not cultivate scholastic or scientific imagery; mature and everyday life, the Bible and the liturgy were his chief sources The highest truth, as he said more than once, must be plainly dressed In spite of his classical learning and his Latin and Greek verse, he avoided the common surface classicism of the time Of the elements of a deeper classicism, if we care to use that name, he had muscular density, precision, deceptive simplicity, and a dynamic sense of form At times his structure may be a winding stair, but it is all built of seasoned timber” (D Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, pages 137-138).

Wing (2nd ed.), H1521, &, Wing H-1049; Palmer IV, 12.

‡

Francis Bacon, in a rather round about way, can be seen as forming the world we now know. His influence is not as popularized as Newton, but maybe he was the giant whose shoulders Newton could stand on? There has been a lot of interesting work coming to fruition on Bacon this Century, and without a doubt the OXFORD BACON PROJECT “It aims therefore to replace the great but now outdated Victorian edition produced by Spedding, Ellis and Heath, and for the first time to publish a number of manuscript works unknown to them. In the process we hope to improve and advance critical-editorial techniques at the very highest level; provide brand-new facing-page translations for the edited texts of the Latin works; and reintegrate Bacon’s work into the study of early modern philosophy, science, historiography, legal thought, and literature.”   Is the most useful. Here is a link: http://www.oxfordfrancisbacon.com/about-2/editorial-board/

“As co-founder of the Virginia Company which financed expeditions in 1607 and 1620, as well as a member of the Company of Adventurers that established a settlement in Newfoundland, Francis Bacon has been commemorated as “The Guiding Spirit in [the] Colonization Scheme.” As Solicitor General to James I, Bacon oversaw the progress of the American colonies and drafted the second and third Royal Charters of the Virginia Company in 1609 and 1612. These documents, which outlined the rights of investors and settlers, as well as the governing structure of the colony, are among the founding documents of American constitutionalism.” ( The Father of the American EnlightenmentFrancis Bacon authored the vision of the American Commonwealth. It combined scientific progress, spiritual enlightenment, and the union of polarities. Joseph F. McCormick)

Bacon was elevated to the House of Lords (as Baron Verulam), and became Lord Chancellor in 1618. Created Viscount St. Albans in 1621,

464F  Bacon, Francis.   1561-1626

  Sylva Sylvarum, Or, A Naturall History, In Ten Centuries. Written by the Right Honorable Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount of St. Alban. Published after the Authors Death, By William Rawley, Doctor in Divinitie, One of His Majesties Chaplaines. Hereunto is now added an Alphabeticall Table ofthe Principall Things contained in the Ten Centuries.

London: Printed by John Haviland for William Lee, and are to be Sold by Iohn Williams, 1635     $2,800     

Folio, 7 x 10.4 in.  Fourth edition. Signatures π^2, A-Z⁶, Aa-Bb⁶, Cc⁴, a-g⁴ (g⁴ is blank and lacking). The engraved title page and portrait of Bacon dated to 1631 and 1631 respectively are both present in this volume.  This copy is bound in its early quarter calf calf over marble paper boards. Binding tight and firm.  A good clean copy of an early edition.

“The new method [Bacon’s big plan, the Instauratio Magna] is valueless, because inapplicable, unless it be supplied with materials duly collected and presented—in fact, unless there be formed a competent natural history of the Phenomena Universi. A short introductory sketch of the requisites of such a natural history, which, according to Bacon, is essential, necessary, the basis totius negotii, is given in the tract Parasceve, appended to the Novum Organum. The principal works intended to form portions of the history, and either published by himself or left in manuscript, are historia Ventorum, Historia Vitae et Mortis, Historia Densi et Rari, and the extensive collection of facts and observations entitled Sylva Sylvarum […] “Nature thus presented itself to Bacon’s mind as a huge congeries of phenomena, the manifestations of some simple and primitive qualities, which were hid from us by the complexity of the things themselves. The world was a vast labyrinth, amid the windings of which we require some clue or thread whereby we may track our way to knowledge and thence to power. This thread, the filum labyrinthi, is the new method of induction. But, as has been frequently pointed out, the new method could not be applied until facts had been observed and collected. This is an indispensable preliminary. ‘Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much, and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.’ The proposition that our knowledge of nature necessarily begins with observation and experience, is common to Bacon and many contemporary reformers of science, but he laid peculiar stress upon it, and gave it a new meaning. What he really meant by observation was a competent natural history or collection of facts. ‘The firm foundation of a purer natural philosophy are laid in natural history.’ ‘First of all we must prepare a  natural and experimental history, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all.” (EB)

The New Atlantis. STC 1172; Gibson #174.

Related articles

• Francis Bacon on the Dark Side of Curiosity and the Vanity of Knowledge (brainpickings.org)
• Francis Bacon on the Making of Gold. And Beauty. (longstreet.typepad.com)
• Coquillette on Edward H. Cooper (lsolum.typepad.com)

‡‡

883G Sir Thomas Browne 1605-1682

The Works of the learned Sr Thomas Brown, Kt. Doctor of Physick, late of Norwich.containing I. Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors. II Religio Medici: With Annotations and Observations upon it. III. Hydriotaphia; or, Urn-Burial: Together with The Garden of Cyrus. IV. Certain Miscellany Tracts.

London: Printed for Tho. Baffet, Ric. Chiswell, Tho. Sawbridge, Charles Mearn, and Charles Brome, 1686                                  $1,650

Large Folio 31 x 18.5 cm. Folio 33 x 19 cm. Signatures: A⁶, (a)⁴, B-Z⁴, Aa-Zz⁴, Aaa-Iii⁴, Kkk⁶, Lll-Qqq⁴, Rrr⁶, Sss-Zzz⁴, Aaaa-Dddd⁴, Eeee². This is a First edition printed under the supervision of Archbishop Tenison, and the last collected edition in English until Pickering’s in 1835.  This copy has the rare portrait of Browne by R. White; the engraving of the urns is bound before the Hydriotaphia, and the engraving of the quinqunx is bound opposite the title for the Garden of Cyrus. This copy is in good condition. It is bound in early calf which has been rebacked.         This copy has a signature of “Thomas Powell, march 16th 1839 .” 

 The EB writes:

“Thomas Powell (1809–1887) was an English writer and fraudster. He was noted early for his prolific output and social charm, and he entertained a circle of notable authors at his home, often showing-off his skill at mimicking authors’ handwriting. But it became clear that he was putting this gift to criminal use, forging cheques and signatures, and he was repudiated by Charles Dickens (who likely based the character Uriah Heep on Powell, Robert Browning, and others. In 1849 he moved to New York to avoid prosecution, and many American publications printed an accusation by Dickens, which he was unable to substantiate and had to withdraw, settling with Powell out of court.

First Edition. This copy is nicely bound in older calf and rebaked about 100 years ago.

“Browne was born in London and educated at Winchester and Oxford. After a brief period of professional work he continued his medical studies at Montpellier, Padua, and Leyden. For a time he lived in Yorkshire, where he wrote Religio Medici. In 1637 he settled at Norwich to practice his profession. In spite of his wish that mankind might procreate like trees- a wish not endorsed by Sir Kenelm Digby and James Howell- Browne married and had a dozen children. He followed with paternal and scientific interest the travels and medical researches of his son Edward, an upon ‘honest Tom,’ who sojourned in France and then entered the navy, he lavished advice ranging from underwear to the heroic examples ‘in your beloved Plutark.’ Browne was the physician and friend of Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich in 1641-1647.

Browne corresponded with Henry Power, Evelyn, Ashmole, Lilly, Dugdale, Oldenburg, Aubrey, and others. Why he did not become a member of the Royal Society we do not know. Although a royalist in sympathy, Browne never let public disturbances interrupt his varied studies and experiments, the collecting of books and rarities, and meditations on all things below and above the moon. […] Browne was knighted in 1671, on the occasion of a royal visit to Norwich, the uniquely generous mayor effacing himself in favor of the town’s most illustrious citizen.” (quoted from D. Bush, page 272, English Lit. in the Earlier 17th C.)“[Thomas Browne’s] affluence and established residence (the transport of a collection containing many folio volumes is not lightly to be undertaken) enabled him to build up in ten years or so the substantial scholarly library which provided the materials for his longest work,
Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths. First published in 1646, it was revised and expanded in successive editions up to the sixth in 1672. In it Browne took up a suggestion by Bacon in his Advancement of Learning that there should be compiled a list of erroneous beliefs held at that time in the fields of the natural sciences and general knowledge. Browne went further, and, by combining in his disquisition on each topic the testimonies of authority, reason, and experiment, endeavored to dispose once for all of some hundreds of fallacies. The work, executed with wide learning, wit, and characteristic style, immediately established his reputation as a savant, remaining popular at home and abroad for at least a century.” (quoted from page xv of the preface of Robin Robbins’ edition of Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus) “Browne is more scientific than Bacon when he discusses some notions already touched in Sylva Sylvarum: for instance, that coral is soft under water and hardens in the air; that a salamander can live in and extinguish fire (if ancient tradition is true, says Bacon, the creature has a very close skin and some very cold ‘virtue’); that the chameleon lives on air (Bacon makes air its ‘principall Sustenance’ but admits flies as well). In the examination of these and other arresting items in his encyclopedia, Browne appeals to critical authority, reason, and experience; of these criteria only the last is strictly Baconian.   But Browne was in fact a tireless observer and experimenter. And when a whale was thrown upon the coast of Norfolk he verified his notion of spermaceti; in later years he was able, through his son, to test the belief that ‘the Ostridge digesteth Iron’ -after swallowing a nugget the bird died ‘of a soden.’ But in the settling of a more commonplace problem, the reputed inequality of the badger’s legs, the mere report of the senses appears, happily for readers, to count less than abstract and almost metaphysical logic. Many exotic and ‘occult’ traditions were less readily verifiable by experience, and in this un-Baconian realm Browne of necessity relied upon reason and the weighing of authorities. Over many years he had gathered bits of strange learning from countless books, both the standard ones and, preferably, the remote and unfamiliar, and his antiquarian instinct could enjoy what his scientific reason denied.” (Bush page 273)

“Hydriotaphia is the leisurely excursion of a scholarly mind into the burial customs of past nations, and The Garden of Cyrus a pursuit of a number and form through art, nature, and philosophy. The two pieces are not devoid of deeper meaning, nor are they presented together by chance: the First is predominantly a meditation on death, the second life. As in The Winter’s Tale, there are things dying and things new-born, with the emphasis- by positioning -on the hope to be vested in the latter against the former’s heavy message.“Hydriotaphia has been considered by George Williamson as a dissertation on human identity and the quest for its immortal retention. Its sections develop from the initial ease of identifying the purpose of the relics discussed, through a consideration of their failure to achieve this purpose -in that it is difficult to date such relics, let alone put a name to them- to the orthodox Christian consolation of expected resurrection, and the vanity by contrast of all earthly monuments.“The movement of thought in The Garden of Cyrus is not so simply charted: the title-page promises a systematic treatise, that the quincunx is to be ‘artificially, naturally, mystically considered,’ but within the broad classes of artifacts, plants and animals, and philosophical ideas, Browne intertwines many heterogeneous observations. The general progression, however, as in Hydriotaphia, is from the concrete to the abstract, the last section, as it draws to a close, proliferating in abstruse queries which express the boundlessly questing life of Browne’ s mind, while acknowledging at the end the limiting humanity of his body, oppressed by the call of sleep.”“Likewise, The Garden of Cyrus is no horticultural handbook: rather, its pentatonic groves and thickets are a musical score transposed into verbal imagery, a reading of ‘that universal and public manuscript’ of the great Platonic Idea, of ‘that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.’” (Robbins xvi-xvii)

In Certain Miscellany Tracts it is easy to understand why” Thomas Browne is considered a fine stylist and master of English prose. Some of the bizarre images in the Miscellany tracts are reminiscent of some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story ideas in Hawthorne’s Notebooks, e.g. page 208 (of the Miscellany Tracts) – “An handsome Piece of Deformity expressed in a notable hard Face”; page 212 – “The Skin of a Snake bred out of the Spinal Marrow of a Man”. The assortment of tracts in this volume include “An Answer to certain Queries relating to Fishes, Birds, Insects”; “Of Hawks and Falconry, ancient and modern”; Of Artifical Hills, Mounts or Boroughs in many parts of England: what they are, and to what end raised, and by what Nations”; “A Prophecy concerning the future state of several Nations; in a Letter written upon occasion of an old Prophecy sent to the Author from a Friend, with a request that he would consider it.” The Miscellany Tracts were published fairly soon after the death of Browne in 1682. “The Papers from which these Tracts were printed, were, a while since, deliver’d to me by, those worthy persons, the Lady and Son of the excellent Authour. He himself gave no charge concerning his Manuscripts, either for the suppressing of the publishing of them. Yet, seeing he had procured Transcripts of them, and had kept those Copies by him, it seemeth profitable that He designed them for publick use.” – from “The Publisher to the Reader” (Thomas Tenison).

The Musæun Clausum is one of my favorite tracts’s it is a list of lost or never existing rarities!

Of Religio Medici Guy Patin wrote ” It is a strange and pleasant book, but very delicate and wholly mystical; the author is not lacking in wit and you will see in him quaint and delightful thoughts. There are hardly any books of this sort. If scholars were permitted to write freely we would learn many novel things, never has there been a newspaper to this; in this way the subtlety of the human spirit could be revealed”

Heirs of Hippocrates 490; Keynes (Browne) 201; Wing B-5150; ESTC R19807