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![]() Excerpted from: English Literature: An Illustrated Record. Vol II. Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse, Eds. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1904. 370-373.
The Sermons of the angelical Lancelot Andrewes, the star of preachers, display to us the qualities which were most enthusiastically welcomed from the pulpit in the days of James I. The oddity of phraseoly, the affectations, quips, and pranks of style, are so extraordinary in the surviving English writings of Andrewes that it is difficult to realise that they were once considered exemplary and found impressive. In his own age, the strange gymnastics of the bishop's language were not unobserved, but were the objects of adoring emulation. His fellow-translator on the Authorised Version, Nicholas Felton, Bishop of Ely (1556-1626), admits that he tried hard to write like Andrewes, and had almost marred my own natural trot by endeavouring to imitate his artificial amble. It was said, in a less eulogistic spirit, that Andrewes had reduced preaching to punning. There must have been something radically wrong in the taste of an age which persuaded the most saintly of its prelates, a man of the purest and noblest character, to indulge in such linguistical buffooneries as deface the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes. But it must not be forgotten that he looked upon Latin as the vehicle of his serious and important declaration, and that his sermons, in which in lighter mood he sported indulgently with his courtly audiences, were not prepared by himself for publication. In that vast labour for the Church of England, in which Andrewes stood forth as incomparabile propugnaculuman incomparable bulwarkhis English writings took a negligible place. Andrewes | Works | Links | Essays | Books | Religious Writers | 17th C. English Literature
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