Centuries of Meditations

In the autumn of 1673 he came to London to publish Roman Forgeries, an anonymous attack on the forged records by which, he argued, the Church of Rome had propped up its claims. He dedicated it to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, who until the year before had been Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, the chief law officer of the Crown. By February 1674 he had left Herefordshire to be Bridgeman’s domestic chaplain at Teddington, on the Thames above London, and when Bridgeman died that June he stayed on in the widow’s household, preparing a second book, Christian Ethicks, for the press. Late in September he fell ill there and made a spoken will, saying that he had not enough to need a written one. His books and his best hat went to his brother. He was dead by 3 October, at about thirty-seven, and on 10 October he was buried under the reading desk of Teddington church, without a stone.

Christian Ethicks appeared in 1675 with his name on the title page, and a book of thanksgivings in a loose, psalm-like verse followed without his name in 1699. Everything else lay in manuscript. The poems and the Centuries surfaced in the 1890s, a second collection of poems, copied and much altered by Philip, was printed in 1910, and most of the rest came to light in the twentieth century. The Select Meditations were offered for sale as an anonymous manuscript in 1964, the unfinished encyclopedia Commentaries of Heaven came to light in Lancashire around 1967, and a volume of treatises was recognised at Lambeth Palace in 1997. Few English writers have had so much of their work given back to them so late.

The records show a parish priest of small means and wide learning, loyal to the Church restored in 1660 and drawn late in life into a great man’s household. They show almost nothing of the inner life that fills the Centuries. The book tells its own story of a childhood in the Third Century, and that story is best met there, in Traherne’s words, and not summarised in advance.

The Book and Its Making

The Centuries are short prose paragraphs numbered in hundreds, a form the monks of the Greek East had used to set down spiritual teaching in short chapters, each to be pondered alone. The seventh-century monk Maximus the Confessor wrote the best known, the Four Centuries on Love. By Traherne’s day the word had become a common way of packaging short pieces of every kind, and Joseph Hall, later a bishop, published his Meditations and Vowes in centuries from 1605. The philosopher Francis Bacon even called his natural history Sylva Sylvarum a work in ten centuries (1627).

Traherne uses the form loosely, for his meditations run from a single sentence to several pages, the Third Century carries poems, and the Fifth stops at its tenth number. What the numbering gives him is a pace. Each unit can be read, turned over and set down before the next, and the book can be taken up and left at any point, as a book of devotion should be.

The book cannot be dated exactly. The evidence points to the early 1670s, the last years of Traherne’s life. One of its poems appears in another version in Christian Ethicks, which he was finishing in 1674, while the Select Meditations, which go over some of the same ground more plainly, belong to the first years after the Restoration. Where he wrote it, at Credenhill or elsewhere, is not known.

The notebook was a present, and the verse on its flyleaf sends it to “the friend of my best friend”, a woman whose best friend is most naturally Christ, which makes her a fellow believer and the book a gift between friends in him. Her name is never given. The traditional candidate is Susanna Hopton (1627-1709) of Kington in Herefordshire, a devotional writer who had gone over to Rome in the 1650s and come back to the Church of England, and whose niece and god-daughter married Traherne’s brother Philip in 1670. The family link is certain. That she was the friend is a reasonable guess and no more. Dobell thought the book was written at first for this one reader and later shaped for anyone who might read it.

The manuscript is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is a small notebook, and all of it is in Traherne’s own hand, a fair copy written in very small characters and revised as he went, with words struck through and others written above the line. It holds about a dozen poems among the prose. It has no title in Traherne’s hand, only the words Centuries of Meditation on a flyleaf, apparently added by someone else, and Dobell made the last word plural.

How the book passed from Philip, who inherited his brother’s books in 1674, to a London street is not known, and Dobell’s guess at a Herefordshire family is contradicted by the saleroom records. The folio of poems that turned up with it had been sold in London in 1844 and again in 1854, and the Scottish clergyman Alexander Grosart, a tireless editor of rare Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, seems to have owned both manuscripts around 1870. No one knows how they left his hands. Someone had lettered the spine of the Centuries as the work of “Henry Vaughan Silurist”, the name the poet used for himself as a son of the Silures, the ancient people of south Wales. The guess was not foolish, for Vaughan too had written of the vision of childhood and the glory of the creatures.