AP Success - AP English Language: English and Its Usage

His exuberance of knowledge, and plenitude of ideas,

sometimes obstruct the tendency of his reasoning and the

clearness of his decisions: on whatever subject he employed

his mind, there started up immediately so many images before

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him, that he lost one by grasping another. His memory

supplied him with so many illustrations, parallel or

dependent notions, that he was always starting into

collateral considerations; but the spirit and vigour of his

pursuit always gives delight; and the reader follows him,

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without reluctance, through his mazes, in themselves flowery

and pleasing, and ends again at the point originally in

view.

“To have great excellencies and great faults, magna virtutes

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nec minora vitia; is the poesy,” says our author, “of the

best natures.” This poesy may be properly applied to the

style of Browne; it is vigorous, but rugged; it is learned,

but pedantic; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes, but does

not please; it commands, but does not allure; his tropes are

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harsh, and his combinations uncouth.

He fell into an age in which our language began to lose the

stability which it had obtained in the time of Elizabeth;

and was considered by every writer as a subject on which he

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might try his plastick skill, by moulding it according to

his own fancy. Milton, in consequence of this encroaching

license, began to introduce the Latin idiom: and Browne,

though he gave less disturbance to our structures in

phraseology, yet poured in a multitude of exotick words;

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many, indeed, useful and significant, which, if rejected,

must be supplied by circumlocution, such as ‘commensality,’

for the state of many living at the same table; but many

superfluous, as a paralogical, for an unreasonable doubt;

and some so obscure, that they conceal his meaning rather

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than explain it, as arthritical analogies, for parts that

serve some animals in the place of joints.

His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture

of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant

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regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and

drawn by violence into the service of another. He must,

however, be confessed to have augmented our philosophical

diction; and, in defence of his uncommon words and

expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon

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sentiments, and was not content to express, in many words,

that idea for which any language could supply a single term.

But his innovations are sometimes pleasing, and his

fertilities happy; he has many “verba ardentia” to express

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expressions, which he would never have found, but by

venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and flights

which would never have been reached, but on the void very

little fear of the shame of failing.

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(1756)