stored with great, heroical, and supernatural actions (since verse will needs find or make such) as the wars of Joshua, of the Judges, of David, and divers others? Can all the transformations of the gods give such copious hints to flourish and expatiate on, as the true miracles of Christ, or of His prophets and apostles? Why do I instance in these few particulars? All the books of the Bible are either already most admirable and exalted pieces of pesy, or are the best materials in the world for it."

Perhaps the most effective piece of rhetoric in all his composition is the passage beginning with the simile of "Jack in the clockhouse.' The melodious solemnity of the rhythm, the vigour and propriety of the language, the fine similes, and the imposing examples, exhibit probably the utmost stretch of the author's power:

"I have often observed (with all submission and resignation of spirit to the inscrutable mysteries of Eternal Providence) that, when the fulness and maturity of time is come, that produces the great confusions and changes in the world, it usually pleases God to make it appear, by the manner of them, that they are not the effects of human force or policy, but of the divine justice and predestination; and, though we see a man, like that which we call Jack of the clock-house, striking, as it were, the hour of that fulness of time, yet our reason must needs be convinced that his hand is moved by some secret, and, to us who stand without, invisible direction. And the stream of the current is then so violent, that the strongest men in the world cannot draw up against it; and none are so weak but they may sail down with it. These are the spring tides of public affairs, which we see often happen, but seek in vain to discover any certain causes. And one man then, by maliciously opening all the sluices that he can come at, can never be the sole author of all this (though he may be as guilty as if really he were by intending and imagining to be so); but it is God that breaks up the flood-gates of so general a deluge, and all the art then, and industry of mankind, is not sufficient to raise up dikes and ramparts against it. In such a time, it was, as this, that not all the wisdom and power of the Roman senate, nor the wit and eloquence of Cicero, nor the courage and virtue of Brutus, was able to defend their country, or themselves, against the unexperienced rashness of a beardless boy, and the loose rage of a voluptuous madman. The valour, and prudent counsels, on the one side, are made fruitless, and the errors, and cowardice, on the other, harmless, by unexpected accidents. The one general saves his life and gains the whole world, by a very dream; and the other loses both at once, by a little mistake of the shortness of his sight. And though this be not always so, for we see that, in the translation of the great monarchies from one to another, it pleased God to make choice of the most eminent men in nature, as Cyrus, Alexander, Scipio, and his contemporaries, for his chief instruments, and actors, in so admirable a work (the end of this being, not only to destroy or punish one nation, which may be done by the worst of mankind, but to exalt and bless another, which is only to be effected by great and virtuous persons); yet, when God only intends the temporary chastisement of a people, he does not raise up his servant Cyrus (as he himself is pleased to call him), or an Alexander (who had as many virtues to do good, as vices to do harm); but he makes the Massaniellos, and the Johns of Leyden, the instruments of his vengeance, that the power of the Almighty might be more evident by the weakness of the means which he chooses to demonstrate it. He did not assemble the serpents, and the monsters of Afric, to correct

the pride of the Egyptians; but called for his armies of locusts out of Æthiopia, and formed new ones of vermin out of the very dust; and, because you see a whole country destroyed by these, will you argue from thence they must needs have had both the craft of foxes, and the courage of lions! }"

Wit and Humour.—Wit and humour are undoubtedly the ruling features of Cowley's prose. His ridicule is for the most part gay and genial. Here and there we meet with passages of keen satire; but there is nothing approaching to personal spleen in his sarcasms. In his bitterest shots at Cromwell, he keeps in view rather what he supposed to be Cromwell's vices-tyrannous ambition and hypocrisy. The man himself he admits to be an extraordinary person, and professes to look upon him with no greater animosity than upon Marius or Sylla. Besides, the invective is supposed to be delivered in a dream, and to the face of a terrible angel professing to be an admirer of the late Lord Protector. The circumstances are managed with a kind of comic effect; and, keeping in mind the situation, we see the most bitter invective through a humorous medium.

As an example of his powers of sarcastic irony, take the following ludicrously unexpected banter by the terrible apparition, the "North-West Principality." Cowley had been proceeding in a full tide of denunciation, accusing Cromwell of tyranny, craft, and other crimes :

"Here I stopt; and my pretended protector, who, I expected, should have been very angry, fell a-laughing; it seems at the simplicity of my discourse, for thus he replied: You seem to pretend extremely to the old obsolete rules of virtue and conscience, which makes me doubt very much, whether, from this vast prospect of three kingdoms, you can show me any acres of your own. But these are so far from making you a prince, that I am afraid your friends will never have the contentment to see you so much as a justice of peace in your own country. For this, I perceive, which you call virtue, is nothing else but either the forwardness of a Cynic, or the laziness of an Epicurean. I am glad you allow me at least artful dissimulation, and unwearied diligence in my hero; and I assure you that he, whose life is constantly drawn by these two, shall never be misled out of the way of greatness. But I see you are a pedant, and Platonical statesman, a theoretical commonwealth's-man, an Utopian dreamer. Was ever riches gotten by your golden mediocrities? or the supreme place attained to by virtues that must not stir out of the middle? Do you study Aristotle's politics, and write, if you please, comments upon them; and let another but practise Machiavel: and let us see, then, which of you two will come to the greatest preferments. If the desire of rule and superiority,' &c.

,,,

The satire of the Essays is never long kept up; some goodbumoured familiarity of expression comes in after a short passage of keener language, and puts us into a humorous mood by revealing the easy unexcited temper of the satirist. Thus, in the Essay on Obscurity :

"If we engage into a large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time: we expose our life to a quotidian age of frigid impertinencies, which would make a wise man tremble to think of. Now, as for being known much by sight and pointed at, I cannot comprehend the honour that lies in that: whatsoever it be, every mountebank has it more than the best doctor, and the hangman more than the lord chief justice of a city. Every creature has it, both of nature and art, if it be any ways extraordinary. It was as often said, 'This is that Bucephalus,' or This is that Incitatus,' when they were led prancing through the streets, as "This is that Alexander,' or This is that Domitian;' and truly, for the latter, I take Incitatus to have been a much more honourable beast than his master, and more deserving the consulship, than he the empire.

He can be humorous at his own expense, as in the description of his country experiences :

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"One would think that all mankind had bound themselves by an oath to do all the wickedness they can; that they had all (as the Scripture speaks) sold themselves to sin: the difference only is, that some are a little more crafty (and but a little, God kuows) in making of the bargain. thought, when I went first to dwell in the country, that, without doubt, I should have met there with the simplicity of the old poetical golden age; I thought to have found no inhabitants there, but such as the shepherds of Sir Philip Sidney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d'Urfé, upon the banks of Lignon; and began to consider with myself, which way I might recommend no less to posterity the happiness and innocence of the men of Chertsea; but to confess the truth, I perceived quickly, by infallible demonstrations, that I was still in Old England, and not in Arcadia, or La Forrest; that, if I could not content myself with anything less than exact fidelity in human conversation, I had almost as good go back and seek for it in the Court, or the Exchange, or Westminster-hall. I ask again then, whither shall we fly, or what shall we do?"

The Essay on Agriculture is written in his happiest vein. He searches out the authorities for the dignity of agricultural life with great pleasantry :—

"From Homer, we must not expect much concerning our affairs. He was blind, and could neither work in the country, nor enjoy the pleasures of it; his helpless poverty was likeliest to be sustained in the richest places; he was to delight the Grecians with fine tales of the wars and adventures of their ancestors; his subject removed him from all commerce with us, and yet, methinks, he made a shift to show his goodwill a little. For though he could do us no honour in the person of his hero Ulysses (much less of Achilles), because his whole time was consumed in wars and voyages; yet he makes his father Laertes a gardener all that while, and seeking his consolation for the absence of his son in the pleasure of planting, and even dunging his own grounds. Ye see, he did not contemn us peasants; nay, so far was he from that insolence, that he always styles Eumæus, who kept the hogs, with wonderful respect, dîov popßov, the divine swine-herd: he could have done no more for Menelaus or Agamemnon."

OTHER WRITERS.

The justification of departing from the usual chronological arrangement, which dates a period from the Restoration, is that

by the present arrangement we get a more compact grouping of our authors relatively to the great Rebellion. By annexing to the period of the Commonwealth the first ten years of the reign of Charles II., we bind together those that wrote during the agitation of the political storm, and those whose literary activity was greatest, indeed, when that storm was laid, but whose thoughts and style were powerfully influenced by the experience of their early manhood, and who belong in every way to the generation of the Commonwealth.

The writers of the Commonwealth-and they are remarkably numerous — may, indeed, be divided into three classes: recluse or easy-tempered students, like Thomas Browne and Fuller, who were hardly influenced at all by the surrounding excitement; men of bold speech, like Milton, who made their voices heard in the strife; and men, like Cowley, who composed their works when the agitation had subsided. The division is more a loose help to the understanding and the memory than one that can be marked out with sharp and clear lines: it makes an interesting distribution of a few great men, and it is so far a clue to their character; but it cannot be made a principle of classification for the mass of writers without leading to unprofitable refinements. We here follow the same plan as for the other periods.

THEOLOGY.

Hall, Hales, and Chillingworth, all survived into this period. The Church of England boasted also two of her most famous divines, Robert Sanderson (1587-1663), and John Pearson (16131686). At the outbreak of the Civil War, Sanderson was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Canon of Christ Church, and a royal chaplain. Upon the Restoration he was appointed Bishop of Lincoln, and he was one of the commissioners at the Savoy Conference in 1661. His principal work in English is 'Niue Cases of Conscience.' He is the chief of Protestant casuists. Pearson, who after the Restoration succeeded Dr Wilkins in the Mastership of Trinity and in the see of Chester, published in 1659 an Exposition of the Creed,' which still holds its ground as a standard production. The work is laborious, calm, and acute, written in simple and clear language; it follows the easy arrangement of taking each word in order. He was profoundly versed in patristic literature; and in that department criticised with such acuteness that Bentley said "his very dross was gold."

The most eminent of the Nonconforming divines of this generation was Richard Baxter (1615-1691). He was ordained in the Church of England, and at the beginning of the Civil War was pastor of Kidderminster. He sided with the Parliament, was

attached as chaplain to a regiment, and saw some active service; but his health failing, he returned to his pastoral charge, and buried himself in study. In this retirement he wrote the Saint's Everlasting Rest,' a volume of pious thoughts that have a peculiar interest when we view them as the aspirations of an infirm man turning wearily from the distractions of a time so utterly out of joint. The violent breaking to pieces of the old monarchy and the usurpation of Cromwell were painful things to a man thirsting for quiet and security; and in a celebrated interview with the Protector he had the courage to remonstrate. After the Restoration he was offered a bishopric, but declined the offer. Subsequently, when penal enactments were passed against Dissenters, his quiet ministrations in London were interfered with, and he was exposed to considerable hardships. At last, in 1685, he was thrown into prison, taken before the infamous Judge Jeffreys, and shamefully bullied: he was released by the special intervention of the King. All his life through he was an indefatigable writer of his multitudinous works, numbering in all 168, only the 'Saint's Rest' and the 'Call to the Unconverted' have had a durable popularity. His autobiography- Memorable Passages of my Life and Times'-affords an interesting picture of an ardent impulsive nature tamed down by rude experience and infirm health to greater sobriety of judgment and closeness of observation. In the following passage he frankly owns that had his works been less numerous, their fame might have been more durable :

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Concerning almost all my writings, I must confess that my judgment is, that fewer, well studied and polished, had been better; but the reader who can safely censure the books, is not fit to censure the author, unless he had been upon the place, and acquainted with all the occasions and circumstances. Indeed, for the 'Saint's Rest,' I had four months' vacancy to write it, but in the midst of continual languishing and medicine; but, for the rest, I wrote them in the crowd of all my other employments, which would allow me no great leisure for polishing and exactness, or any ornament; so that I scarce ever wrote one sheet twice over, nor stayed to make any blots or interlinings, but was fain to let it go as it was first conceived; and when my own desire was rather to stay upon one thing long than run over many, some sudden occasions or other extorted almost all my writings from me.

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Another eminent Dissenter was John Owen (1616-1683), first a Presbyterian, thereafter an Independent. He was a man of singular moderation and sweetness of temper. He was a special favourite with Cromwell, who took him to Ireland to organise the College of Dublin, and subsequently to Scotland. After the Restoration, Clarendon offered him preferment in the Church if he woull conform, and Charles himself desired his acquaintance. His voluminous writings are exclusively on religious subjects. The style is bad. "I can't think how you like Dr Owen," said Robert Hall.