Selden’s Table Talk
Tuesday, 24.
“Learned Selden,” learned in civil and political wisdom as were few of his great contemporaries. If his book of Table Talk has less repute than Bacon’s famous Essays, like that, opened anywhere, it displays the author’s eminent discretion, his comprehensive understanding, apposite illustration of his theme. His homely, familiar manner, has its attractions as well for the scholar as for the common reader; pregnant as are his sentences with his great good sense, rare learning, bringing abstruse subjects home to the affairs of life in a style at once perspicuous and agreeable. “He was a person,” says Lord Clarendon, “whom no character can flatter, or transmit in any expressions equal to his merit. He was of such stupendous learning in all kinds of languages that a man would have thought he had been entirely conversant among books, and had never spent an hour but in reading and writing. Yet his humanity, courtesy, and affability were such, that he would have been thought to have been bred in the best courts, but that his good-nature, charity, and delight in doing good, and in communicating all he knew, exceeded his breeding. His style in all his writings seems harsh, and sometimes obscure, which is not wholly to be imputed to the abstruse subjects of which he commonly treated, but to a little undervaluing of style, and too much propensity to the language of antiquity; but in his conversation he was the most clear discourser, and had the best faculty of making hard things easy, and of presenting them to the understanding, of any man that hath been known.”
Coleridge, who never let any person of eminence, in thought or erudition, escape his attention, says: “There is more weighty bullion sense in this book (The Table Talk) than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer.”
Ben Jonson addressed him thus:—
… “You that have been
Ever at home, yet have all countries seen,
And like a compass keeping one foot still
Upon your centre, do your circle fill
Of general knowledge.…
I wondered at the richness, but am lost
To see the workmanship so excel the cost!
To mark the excellent seasoning of your style,
And manly elocution! not one while
With horror rough, then rioting with wit,
But to the subject still the colors fit,
In sharpness of all search, wisdom choice,
Newness of sense, antiquity of voice!
I yield, I yield. The matter of your praise
Floods in upon me, and I cannot raise
A bank against it; nothing but the round
Large clasp of nature such a wit can bound.”
One’s pen cannot be better drawn across paper, than in transcribing some of his wise and pithy sayings:—
“Books. ’Tis good to have translators, because they serve as a comment, so far as the judgment of the man goes.”
“Quoting of authors is most for matter of fact; and then I cite them as I would produce a witness, sometimes for a free expression; and then I give the author his due, and gain myself praise for reading him.”
“Henry the Eighth made a law that all men might read the Scripture, except servants; but no woman except ladies and gentlewomen who had leisure and might ask somebody the meaning. The law was repealed in Edward Sixth’s days.”
“Laymen have best interpreted the hard places in the Bible, such as Scaliger, Grotius, Salmasius, etc. The text serves only to guess by; we must satisfy ourselves fully out of the authors that lived about those times.”
“Ceremony. Ceremony keeps up all things. ’Tis like a penny glass to a rich spirit, or some excellent water; without it the water were spilt, the spirit lost.”
“Damnation. To preach long, loud, and damnation, is the way to be cried up. We love a man that damns us, and we run after him to save us.”
“Friends. Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes, they were easiest to his feet.”
“Language. Words must be fitted to a man’s mouth. ’Twas well said of the fellow that was to make a speech for my Lord Mayor: he desired to take measure of his lordship’s mouth.”
“Learning. No man is wiser for his learning; it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon; but wit and wisdom are born with a man.”
“Power. Syllables govern the world.”
“Reason. The reason of a thing is not to be inquired after till you are sure the thing itself is so. We commonly are at ‘What’s the reason of it?’ before we are sure of the thing. ’Twas an excellent question of my Lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe which was Moses’ or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it,—‘But, Mr. Cotton,’ says she, ‘are you sure it is a shoe?’”
“Religion. Religion is like the fashion; one man wears his doublet slashed, another laced, another plain; but every man has a doublet. So every man has his religion. We differ about trimming.”
“We look after religion as the butcher did after his knife, when he had it in his mouth.”