ABSTRACT
Robert Burton shared the hopes, doubts, and disenchantments of this first great intellectual class that created the Western words and mental patterns which we, four and five centuries later, still sense as the obsessive impulses in our public discourse. More than others who might take refuge in a revised philosophy, or at worst in a new ideology, Burton’s magniloquence tinged itself with a shade of cynicism about the capacities of human effort, which ignobly falls short when the noble creature most extended himself. It was a memorable “If” even if it put the reader into a kind of euphuistic* euphoria:
if princes would do justice, judges be upright, clergymen truly devout, and so live as they teach, if great men would not be so insolent, if soldiers would quietly defend us, the poor would be patient, rich men would be liberal and humble, citizens honest, magistrates meek, superiors would give good example, subjects peaceable, young men would stand in awe: if parents would be kind to their children, and they again obedient to their parents, brethren agree among themselves, enemies be reconciled, 20servants trusty to their masters, virgins chaste, wives modest, husbands would be loving and less jealous: if we could imitate Christ and His apostles, live after God’s laws, these mischiefs would not so frequently happen amongst us.
