That Elusive Quotation

In his thesis Vincent Cabell Flanagan says

In the nineteenth century ... Adams had several advocates. The most notable of them was Robert Southey. Just about two hundred years after Adams began to publish, Southey, apparently while gathering material for his voluminous works on church history and the lives of churchmen, was caught by the quality of Adams' expression. The earliest of Adams' works were copied into Southey's explanatory notes and commonplace books. 

It must be noted, however, that from a relative standpoint the record of Southey's interest in Adams is not particularly impressive; Adams is but one of several seventeenth century divines in whom Southey indicated interest. Alexander B. Grosart, the ubiquitous nineteenth-century editor, is apparently responsible for giving currency to a dictum on Adams attributed by him to Southey which for almost a century has been cited by one critic after another, but without authentication. As this dictum appears in Grosart's article on Adams in the DNB it reads, 

[Thomas Adams] ... a divine who was pronounced by Robert Southey to be ‘the prose Shakespeare of puritan theologians ... scarcely inferior to Fuller in wit or to Taylor in fancy,’ ... 

Grosart cites no specific work of Southey's as a source, and those who have continued the use of the quotation have cited none. This group includes John Brown (who, like Southey, wrote a biography of John Bunyan), whose edition of a selection of Adams' sermons, published in 1909 and reprinted in 1927 by the Cambridge Press, carries a binder's stamping in gold leaf on the front cover which reads, "The prose Shakespeare of Puritan Theologians". 

A general survey of Southey's letters and his prose which has been judged to be pertinent has failed to disclose the sources of the specific quotation Grosart offers. Even so, it is of course unwise to challenge the authenticity of the quotation without making an exhaustive search through all of Southey's prose works, notes, and letters. As mentioned above, there are indications in Southey's works of a limited interest in Adams, but if the words which Grosart attributed to Southey are actually contained in a work by that poet, the quotation pulled out of context suggests that Southey's appreciation of, and interest in, Adams was greater than the bulk of Southey's prose would indicate. For example, in Southey's chapters "James I," and "Charles I. Triumph of the Puritans," in his Book of the Church (1824), Southey makes no reference to Adams. Nevertheless, the attention which several nineteenth-century editors and commentators devoted to Adams and perhaps even that of twentieth-century critics may well reflect the result of the currency given to the comment

In his footnotes Flanagan reveals that he had examined The Life and Correspondence of the late Robert Southey ed C C Southey Selections from the letters of Robert Southey ed J. W. Warter (4 vold, 1856) The Correpsondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles ed Edward Dowden (1881); Omniana (ed Robert Southey) (2 vols 1812); The Life of Wesley (2 vols 1820); The Book of the Church (2nd ed 2 vols 1824); Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826); Thomas More or Colloquies on the progress and prospects of society (2 vol 1822); The Life of John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress (1830); etc and found nothing.

In another interesting footnote he says that a similar complimentary phrase was applied by nineteenth century critics to John Donne and Jeremy Taylor. Mrs Simpson notes that "Coleridge loved Donne's prose. His highest praise is given to a sentence which he describes as "Worthy almost of Shakespeare" (op cit, p 290) and Edmund Gosse in his biography of Jeremy Taylor writes "It is in this extraordinary vitality and organic growth of his metaphors that Taylor is really what he is so often called, “the Shakespeare of English prose ..." In a footnote Gosse identifies his source: "This epithet was first applied to Jeremy Taylor ... by William Mason, the biographer of Gray" (Jeremy Taylor (1904), p. 219).

He also notes that Thomas Smith notes in his introduction to the Adams volumes in Nichol's Series of Standard Divines, the first volume of which is dated l861, that Adams "has been styled the Shakespeare of the Puritans" (I, xi). He does not identify the source of the phrase. 

Angus in his memoir of Adams in the third volume of this series, which appeared in 1862, in commenting on the style of Adams, writes: "For fancy we may, after Southey, compare him with Taylor, for wit with Fuller". (III, xxii). In concluding his memoir Angus acknowledges both his debt and the publisher's debt to Grosart (see below, p 135).