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Changing ideas of identity, both personal and political, were reflected in changes in the English language, which responded to popular as well as learned culture. An accomplished classicist, Ben Jonson closely modeled his verses on Latin poems and their syntax; at the same time the language of his poetry and plays often echoes the cadences of the English spoken by ordinary folk. Authors of popular comic pamphlets, such as Dekker and Robert Greene, conveyed the lively language of London rogues and vagabonds, combining local slang with parodic Latin. The writing of English prose was further changed by the study of Latin grammar and rhetoric in the humanist curriculum that was inspired by the pedagogical reforms of Erasmus and his English followers, John Colet, Roger Ascham (tutor to Elizabeth I), and Richard Mulcaster. Many words of Latin origin were introduced into English vocabulary; many writers experimented with analytic prose by adapting Latin syntax, which allowed them to show relations of cause and effect by resorting to clauses beginning with "if," "when," "because," and so forth. The first Latin-English dictionary on humanist principles was compiled by Sir Thomas Elyot; and one of the most important English grammars, Ascham's The Schoolmaster (1570), instructed readers in the merits of an eloquent style. This enrichment of language from various sources inevitably caused debate. Prose composition was especially affected. Proponents of the so-called Ciceronian style (after the Roman orator Cicero) liked long sentences of many clauses exhibiting variation and restatement. Practitioners of the Senecan style favored short, direct, and uncomplicated sentences. Francis Bacon in particular criticized Ciceronian rhetoric for its emphasis on decorative "tropes and figures" rather than descriptive substance or "weight of matter"; he argued for a language that would accurately denote what he considered "scientific" data: the measures of the physical world. Bacon's reforms influenced English pedagogy and were further realized in the enterprise of the Royal Academy of Science, founded in 1660 by Charles II, who was determined to give his monarchy a new look and a new purpose. The terse, clear, pointed language of Bacon's Essays (1597) resembles more what we might think of as modern than does, for example, the florid style that Robert Burton used a quarter of a century later for his mythological-historical, medical discourse The Anatomy of Melancholy. Language and style were changing notions of the world and God's design in creating it. Habits of thought that had prevailed during the medieval period now seemed to be incompatible with knowledge that derived from experience of nature. Europeans had inherited from classical philosophy an idea of creation as a vast aggregate of layered systems or spheres, supposedly centered on the densest matter at the earth's core, that emanated out and up to end, finally, in the sphere of pure spirit or the ethereal presence of divinity. The entities in these layered spheres had assigned places that determined their natures both within their particular sphere and in relation to other spheres. Thus gold, the most precious metal, was superior to silver, but it was at the same time analogous to a lion, a king, and the sun, each also representing the peak of perfection within its particular class of beings. Human nature was also systematized, the body and personality alike being regulated by a balanced set of "humors," each of which consisted of a primary element. The earth, water, air, and fire that made up the great world, or macrocosm, of nature also composed the small universe, or microcosm, of the individual man or woman, whose personality was ideally balanced between impulses that were melancholic (caused by a kind of bile), phlegmatic (brought on by a watery substance), sanguine or bloody, and choleric or hot-tempered. Excessive learning, the contemplation of death, the darkness of night, and isolation were all associated with melancholia, a diseased condition that in more or less severe form is represented in such disparate texts as Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, Milton's Il Penseroso, and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (literally, "the religion of a doctor"). This view of creation was important for artists and writers because it gave them a symbolic language of correspondences by which they could refer to creatures in widely differing settings and conditions. In a sense, it made nature hospitable to poetry by seeing creation as a divine work of art, designed to inspire awe but also a kind of familiarity. Things were the likenesses of other things. In the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Marvell, human emotional experience is compared to the realms of astronomy, geography, medicine, Neoplatonic philosophy, and Christian theology. These correspondences are created through strikingly unusual metaphors, which some have called metaphysical conceits, from the Italian concetto ("concept"). The result is a pervasive sense of a universal harmony in all human experience. Such analogies were not always respected, however; increasingly, they were questioned by proponents of a kind of vision that depended on a quantitative or denotative sense of identity or difference. Poetic metaphor might not be able to account for creation in all its complexity; instead, nature had to be understood through the abstractions of science. By the seventeenth century it was becoming difficult to regard creation as a single and comprehensive whole; natural philosophers and scientists in the making wanted to analyze it piece by individual piece. As John Donne wrote of the phenomenon of uniqueness in his elegy for Elizabeth Drury, The First Anniversary: The element of fire is quite put out; The earth had been decentered by the insights of the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, who in the 1520s deduced that the earth orbits the sun. This "Copernican revolution" was confirmed by the calculations of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, and our solar system itself was revealed as one among many. With traditional understandings of the natural order profoundly shaken, many thinkers feared for the survival of the human capacity to order and understand society as well. Ironically, Donne complains of radical individualism by invoking the emblem of the phoenix, the very sort of traditional metaphor that constituted the coherence that he claims has "gone." But whereas the symbol in a devotional book would carry with it the myth of the bird's Christlike death and rebirth, the image of the rare bird takes on a newly skeptical and even satirical meaning in The Anniversary: it becomes the sign of a dangerous fragmentation within nature's order. Donne's audience would have been familiar with such symbols from emblem books, which presented images along with poems and mottoes, as well as in interior decoration, clothing, coats of arms, and the printers' marks on title pages of books. They were also featured on the standards or flags carried in the Civil War—antique signs in a decidedly modern conflict.
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