diary, familiar letters, the essay, the ‘character’; romance and autobiography; history,
criticism, philosophy, political thought, religion and natural science.
The Royal Society of London was the nursery of English science, its members
including Wren, Boyle, Hooke, Locke and Newton. Its secretary Thomas Sprat, writ-
ing in History of the Royal Society, wished to make language fit for science:
Of all the Studies of Men, nothing may be sooner obtain’d than this vicious Abundance of
Phrase, this Trick of Metaphor, this Volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a Noise in
the World .... They [the Royal Society] have therefore been more rigorous in putting in
Execution the only Remedy, that can be found for this Extravagance; and that has been a
constant Resolution, to reject all the Amplifications, Digressions, and Swellings of Style;
to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when Men deliver’d so many Things,
almost in an equal number of Words. They have exacted from all their Members, a close,
naked, natural way of Speaking; positive expressions, clear Senses; a native Easiness;
bringing all things as near the mathematical Plainness as they can; and preferring the
Language of Artizans, Country-Men, and Merchants, before that of Wits, or Scholars.This is pro paganda: the Society’s royal patron much preferred the language of Wits.
Nor did Sprat cure all the members of metaphor, although such ideals may have
helped in the clarification of prose. His Puritan suspicion of figurative language was
taken to a logical extreme in John Wilkins’s Philosophical Language, satirized in
Jonathan Swift’s Academy of Projectors in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where the
projectors, instead of using words to represent things, carry the things themselves.
As the titles in the chronology indicate, the Restoration ushered in an age of
reasonableness. The Society was social as well as scientific, beginning in informal
meet ings of Oxford savants and writers, not all of whom had the scientific interests
ofAbraham Cowley. It was an early example of a club, meeting to discuss things of
interest. Talk, Sprat’s ‘natural way of speaking’, informs Restoration prose, allowing
fo r differ ence but inviting agreement. The presumption that language is for civil
exchange made for reasonableness. Civilization and urbanity spread from the city
and the Court to the professions and the gentry. Women begin to make a substan-
tial contribution to writing. But this civilization excluded middle-class dissenters,
and the Society had few ‘Artizan’ members.
There is much pleasurable minor prose: Izaak Walton’s Lives; the diaries of
Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn; the Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson by his wife Lucy;
the account of the assassination of Buckingham in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.
Dorothy Osborne began a letter to her future husband William Temple: ‘Sir, If to
know I wish you with me pleases you, ’tis a satisfaction you may always have, for I
do it perpetually.’
Another new form was the ‘character’, a brief biography. An example is Lord
Shaftesbury’s Character of Henry Hastings, ‘the copy of our nobility in ancient days
in hunting and not warlike times’:
he was low, very strong and very active, of a reddish flaxen hair, his clothes always green
cloth, and never all worth when new five pounds .... Not a woman in all his walks of the
degree of a yeoman’s wife or under, and under the age of forty, but it was extremely her
fault if he were not intimately acquainted with her .... The upper part of [the parlour]
had ... a desk, on the one side of which was a church Bible, on the other the Book of
Martyrs; on the tables were hawks’ hoods, bells, and such like, two or three old green
hats with their crowns thrust in so as to hold ten or a dozen eggs, which were of a
pheasant kind of poultry he took much care of and fed himself; tables, dice, cards and
boxes were not wanting. In the hole of the desk were store of tobacco-pipes that hadTHE RESTORATION 175