Seventeenth-Century Prose: III. The Baroque Glory

The Jacobean tendency to simplicity and sententiousness in prose, eminently illustrated in Bacon and the character writers, was a revulsion from Elizabethan Gothicism and a long step toward the taste of the age of Queen Anne. But the revulsion was never complete, and before James I died (1625) the temporarily arrested Gothic taste had come surging back to create a mingled style which can best be called “baroque” 1 and which, in the dizzy intensities it attained, has never been equaled. Donne’s prose is the best illustration of this ferment.