Robert South, born at Hackney in 1633, from Westminster passed as a student to Christ Church in 1651. In 1658 he received orders from a deprived bishop, and in 1660 was appointed public orator. His vigorous sermons, full of mockery of the Puritans, delighted the restored royalists. He became domestic chaplain to Clarendon, prebendary of Westminster in 1663, canon of Christ Church in 1670, rector of Islip in Oxfordshire in 1678, and chaplain to Clarendon’s son on his embassy to the Polish court of John Sobieski (1676). He suppressed his disapproval of James II.’s Declaration of Indulgence, “acquiesced in” the Revolution, but blazed out with anger against the proposed scheme of Comprehension. In 1693 began his great controversy with Sherlock, Dean of St. Paul’s, who had defended the Trinity against the Socinians. South flung his “Animadversions” anonymously into the fray, but the bitter irony and fierce sarcasms quickly betrayed his hand. Sherlock published a “Defence,” to which South rejoined in his “Tritheism charged upon Dr. Sherlock.” The controversy became the talk of the town, and the king himself interposed. South made interest for Sacheverell, and is said to have refused the see of Rochester and deanery of Westminster (1713). He died 8th July 1716…. His sermons fill 11 vols. (1692–1744); in 1717 appeared his “Posthumous Works,” with Memoir; also his “Opera Posthuma Latina” (all republished by the Clarendon Press in 1823). See his “Sermons on Several Occasions” (new ed. 1878), Quarterly Review (1868), and Dean Lake in “Classic Preachers” (1877).

Personal

  Odd’s fish, Lory, your chaplain must be a bishop; therefore put me in mind of him at the next death.

  Pray, my lord, desire Dr. South to die about the fall of the leaf; for he has a prebend of Westminster … and a sinecure in the country … which my friends have often told me would fit me extremely.

  Dr. South holds out still; but he cannot be immortal.

  Robert South stands hardly in the first rank, but he has never been surpassed, and not often imitated, in his own style as a preacher. He was a stout defender of orthodoxy, and a very hard hitter of his opponents. Men admired him, as they have admired some modern preachers, for the sharp things he said; but they admired him more for his irrepressible and inimitable humour. A sermon of South’s is a perpetual succession of jocularities; and the churches in which he preached resounded with the laughter of the congregations. But his ridicule was always directed against pretence, or falseness, or self-assertion, or pride—never against anything high or noble. He was an earnest, self-denying ecclesiastic, and entirely without aims for his own advancement. He remained content with preferment which was considered slight in comparison to his genius, and died a poor man, having spent his income on good works.

  On the whole perhaps the greatest preacher of his age.

  South, a man of strong prejudices and warm attachments, was never a self-seeker, and, when he changed his attitude, followed what appeared to be the dictates of common sense. His use of humour in the pulpit suggested to Tillotson a want of seriousness in his character. Yet no preacher was more direct in his dealing with the vices of the age, no court preacher more homely in his appeals. His humour has a native breadth and freshness. Like Fuller’s pleasant turns, it always illuminates his subject; but, unlike Fuller’s conceits, it does not cloy. Baxter says that South was “a fluent, extemporate speaker,” yet tells a story of his breaking down, which shows that in early life his sermons were learnt by heart. Kennett tells of his attention to delivery, and how he “worked up his body” as he approached his points. Wood’s harsh judgment on South is said to have been inspired by a jest with which South received Wood’s mention of a bodily ailment from which he suffered.

Sermons

  South had great qualifications for that popularity which attends the pulpit; and his manner was at that time original. Not diffuse, not learned, not formal in argument like Barrow, with a more natural structure of sentences; a more pointed, though by no means a more fair and satisfactory, turn of reasoning; with a style clear and English, free from all pedantry, but abounding with those colloquial novelties of idiom, which, though now become vulgar and offensive, the age of Charles II. affected; sparing no personal or temporary sarcasm, but, if he seems for a moment to tread on the verge of buffoonery, recovering himself by some stroke of vigorous sense and language,—such was the witty Dr. South, whom the courtiers delighted to hear. His sermons want all that is called unction, and sometimes even earnestness, which is owing, in a great measure, to a perpetual tone of gibing at rebels and fanatics; but there is a masculine spirit about them, which combined with their peculiar characteristics, would naturally fill the churches where he might be heard.

  Of all the English preachers, South seems to us to furnish, in point of style, the truest specimens of the most effective species of pulpit eloquence. We are speaking, it must be remembered, simply of his style: we offer no opinion on the degree of truth or error in the system of doctrines he embraced; and for his unchristian bitterness and often unseemly wit, would be the last to offer any apology. But his robust intellect—his shrewd common sense—his vehement feelings—and a fancy ever more distinguished by force than by elegance, admirably qualified him for a powerful public speaker. His style is accordingly marked by all the characteristics which might naturally be expected from the possession of such qualities. It is everywhere direct, condensed, pungent. His sermons are well worthy of frequent and diligent perusal by every young preacher.

  No explorer of the thorny tracts of theology can ever forget his exhilaration of spirit on first reading the sermons of Dr. South, the shrewdest, sharpest, bitterest, and wittiest of English divines. His character, formed by a curious interpenetration of strong prejudices and great powers, and colored by the circumstances of his age and position, is one of the most peculiar in English literature, and, as displayed in his works, repays the most assiduous study. In some points he reminds us of Sydney Smith, though distinguished from him by many striking individualities, and utterly opposed to him in political sentiment and principle. He is a grand specimen of the old Tory; and he enforced his Toryism with a courage, heartiness, and wealth of intellectual resources, to which the warmest radical could hardly refuse admiration and respect.

  The English language affords no higher specimen of its richness and strength than is to be found in this beautiful discourse…. Every student for the Pulpit or the Bar should read this eloquent Sermon.

  I have been re-reading South’s sermons, and like the handsome way he has of taking everything for granted while he seems to be arguing its probability. But you can hear as good at St. Paul’s—I was going to say.

  Robert South stands midway between the older and the newer generation. He preached good sense and good morals with masculine force, but he was not a reconciler, rather he was an unflinching combatant, and a too truculent victor; among his gifts the grace of charity can hardly be reckoned; he sets forth his gospel of good morals with great intellectual clearness and energy, but rarely with what we understand by unction…. South’s preaching was not dry or cold; through the vigour and perspicacity of his intellect, aided by the power of a strong rhetoric, he rises at times to a kind of rational enthusiasm.

General

  South’s sentences are gems, hard and shining: Voltaire’s look like them, but are only French paste.

  As a writer, Dr. South is conspicuous for good practical sense, for a deep insight into human character, for liveliness of imagination, and exuberant invention, and for a wit that knew not always the limit of propriety. In perspicuity, copiousness, and force of expression, he has few superiors among English writers.

  Nor can the ingenuity, the subtlety, the brilliancy of South, though too exuberant in point, and drawing away the attention from the subject to the epigrammatic diction, be regarded otherwise than as proofs of the highest order of intellect.

  South astonishes us by his wit, while he instructs us with his wisdom.

  He who was called the wittiest of ecclesiastics, Robert South, as different from Barrow in his character and life as in his works and his mind; armed for war, an impassioned royalist, a partisan of divine right and passive obedience, an acrimonious controversialist, a defamer of the dissenters, a foe to the Act of Toleration, who never refused to use in his enmities the licence of an insult or a foul word…. His style is anecdotic, striking, abrupt, with change of tone, forcible and clownish gestures, with every species of originality, vehemence, and boldness. He sneers in the pulpit, he rails, he plays the mimic and comedian. He paints his characters as if he had them before his eyes. The audience will recognise the originals again in the streets; they could put the names to the portraits.

  A quick and powerful intellect, solid erudition, a superlative command of homely racy English, and wit of unsurpassed brilliancy, make a combination that, in a literary point of view, places the possessor at least on a level with Taylor and Barrow. Doubtless his fame would have been equal to his powers had he not mistaken his vocation. He shows little religious earnestness, and without that, devotional, and even controversial, religious works can hardly pretend to the first rank. He was an earnest Churchman, but not an earnest Christian.

  No person who is wont to slake his intellectual thirst at “the wells of English undefiled,” will soon forget the tingling delight, the exhilaration of mind and spirit, with which he first read the sermons of Robert South, the shrewdest, most caustic, most fiery, and, with the exception of Thomas Fuller, the wittiest of the old English divines. Among the giants of English theology he stands alone…. He was a kind of Tory Sydney Smith, yet lacking the genial, sunny disposition, and the humor, of that divine wit and witty divine; and in reading his works, it is difficult to say which is most to be admired, the thorough grasp and exhaustive treatment of the subject, the masterly arrangement of the thoughts, or the vitality, energy and freshness of expression, which have given his sermons a higher place in the library of the scholar than even in that of the theologian or the pulpit orator…. South’s writings are a storehouse of vehement expression, such as can be found in no other English writer. He had at his command the whole vocabulary of abuse, satire, and scorn, and, when his ire was aroused, he was never niggard of the treasures of his indignant rhetoric. Against everything, especially, which militated with the doctrines or ceremonies of the English church, he hurled his anathemas and shot his sarcasms. Radical editors should study his writings day and night; nowhere else (except in Milton) will they find such biting words and stinging phrases with which to denounce wicked men, wicked institutions, and wicked practices. The intensity of thought and feeling which burns through his writings has hardly any parallel in English literature. It has been compared to the unwearied fire of the epic poet. There are times when he seems to wrestle with his subject, as if he would grind it into powder; and when he seems to say all that he does say to us, only that we may conjecture how much more he could say if he were able to wreak his thoughts upon expression. It has been truly said that many sentences in his works appear torn from his brain by main strength, expressing not only the thought he intended to convey, but a kind of impatient rage that it did not come with less labor. With all his command of language, he seems often to struggle with it in order to wrestle from it words enough for his wealth of thought.

  His style is voluble and nervous; he runs while he talks, and without pausing he snatches, now from one side and now from the other, missiles, ornaments, objects of every description, all of which find their proper places in his motley discourse. He never hesitates to invite virulence, buffoonery, or even downright hateful falsehood to adorn his attacks upon a brother divine, and, as Stillingfleet said, waits in figurative lanes and argumentative narrow passages ready to bespatter his opponents with dirt amid fits of roguish laughter. There is something impish about Dr. South.

  “The Scourge of Fanaticism.” An epithet conferred on Robert South, a noted English preacher. He had sharp wit, keen satire, and was a man to be admired and not imitated. He was embittered against Dissenters. He was not diffuse, not learned, but he had ingenuity, subtlety, and brilliancy, and in his sermons often approached buffoonery, which made him popular with the courtiers.

  Was as witty in rhetoric as he was fierce in controversy.

  The most masculine of English seventeenth-century writers except Hobbes, and indeed a sort of orthodox pair to that writer…. His literary reputation rests upon his numerous and very remarkable sermons…. South has still something of Elizabethan conceit and word-play, and a great deal of Jacobean scholasticism…. While he never has the beauty of Taylor, while he lacks the easy lambent light of Fuller’s wit, he is in better fighting trim, better balanced, less unequal and disquieting than either, and provides in almost all his work quite admirable examples of the more scholastic prose.