Enchiridion

the Enchiridion of Erasmus

He [Francis Quarles] wrote long poems, almost epics for length, about Jonah, Esther, Job, Samson, and Solomon, interspersed with meditations after a quite original plan,—Shepherd's Oracles, Comedies, Romances, Fancies, and Meditations,—the quintessence of meditation, —and Enchiridions of Meditation all divine, —and what he calls his Morning Muse; besides prose works as curious as the rest.

Sartor Resartus was for many years his Enchiridion (he says), while the translations from the German, the references to German literature and philosophy, fired him to read the originals.

To counteract these degrading effects he advised that […] the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelves containing all the ripest products of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs of Solomon, Boethius’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’, the apophthegms of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the ‘Enchiridion’ of Erasmus, and all other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the human soul.

If they queried the predictabilities and completions of story, Swift and Sterne were yet more suspicious of the totalisations and regularities of imposed rules, institutes, universal systems, cyclopaedias and enchiridions.