some good expressions; but the conclusion, as a piece of art, very lame and ineffectual—indeed, an anti-climax:

is

"Now if nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether, though it were but for a while, the observation of her own laws; if those principal and mother elements of the world, whereof all things in this lower world are made, should lose the qualities which now they have; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should, as it were, through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and to rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture, the winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the earth be defeated of heavenly influence, the fruits of the earth pine away as children at the withered breasts of their mother no longer able to yield them relief;-what would become of man himself, whom these things now do all serve? See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world?"1

Pathos. In nearly every exhibition of feeling in Hooker's works there is a tinge of pathos. His craving for rest, quiet, and order is perpetually appearing. When, in his office at the Temple, he conceived the design of writing a final defence of Episcopacy, and had read many books, he made the following pathetic appeal to Whitgift:

"But, my lord, I shall never be able to finish what I have begun, unless I be removed into some quiet country parsonage, where I may see God's blessings spring out of my mother earth, and eat mine own bread in peace and privacy."

Throughout his Polity we trace the working of the same spirit. There is a large mixture of pathos in the examples that we have quoted of his loftier flights. The rhapsody on law, which was so distasteful scientifically to John Austin, we regard with a kindlier feeling when we keep in mind the character of the man. We see

a feeble, dependent soul clinging with ecstasy to an idea that gives him comfort and strength :

"Of law, there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage; the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power. Both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform cousent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy."

1 This passage is an instance of Hooker's want of originality and native power. The imagined confusion of the world is translated particular for particular fron Arnobius, an unacknowledged plagiarism pointed out by Keble. Besides the noble rhythm, no part of the vigorous conception is Hooker's except the concluding particular. Arnobius supposes the earth to be too dry for seeds to germinate; Hooker too dry to "yield relief to her fruits."

Another favourite subject in a similar vein is the desirability of peace and unity between Puritan and Prelatist :

"Far more comfort it were for us (so small is the joy we take in these strifes) to be joined with you in bonds of indissoluble love and amity, to live as if our persons being many our souls were but one, rather than in such dismembered sort to spend our few and wretched days in a tedious prosecuting of wearisome contentions."

The Ludicrous.-Such a genuine lover of peace as Hooker was not likely to exasperate by keen sarcasm. And, on the other hand, a man of his feeble constitution was not likely to have a genial flow of humour, or a broad, hearty sense of the ludicrous. Such humour as he has is very faint, and takes a sarcastic, ironical turn. In answering the Puritans he states their doctrines gravely, very seldom allowing any trace of ridicule to cross his statement, and even then making the ridicule apparent, not by epithets, but by bringing ludicrous incongruities to the surface in his exposition. His manner was very different from the boisterous wit of Tom Nash, a champion on the same side. We have seen one example of his irony (p. 216). Here is another :

"Where they found men in diet, attire, furniture of house, or any other way, observers of civility and decent order, such they reproved as being carnally-minded. Every word otherwise than severely and sadly uttered seemed to pierce like a sword through them. If any man were pleasant, their manner was presently with deep sighs to repeat those words of our Saviour Christ, Woe be to you which now laugh, for ye shall lament.' So great was their delight to be always in trouble, that such as did quietly lead their lives, they judged of all other men to be in most dangerous case.

To quote one or two passages like this without any of the context would give an exaggerated idea of the power of Hooker's irony. Read with the grave body of context, they strike us as but a very slight departure from the general gravity. In the above, which is a favourable example, the point is not brought out with equal force in all the sentences.

Melody. The general movement of Hooker's language is stiff cumbrous, but richly musical. Here and there, as we have seen, his stiffness relaxes, and he warms into flowing strains of solemn melody. The majority of our quotations are favourable examples of his rhythm. The opening sentence of the Polity (p. 216)"Though for no other cause, yet for this," &c.-is a fine example of a crescendo effect. The first sentence of his paragraph on the angels-"But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were) from the footstool to the throne of God," &c.-has something of the movement of the sentence in Sir Thomas Browne's 'Hydriotaphia' that drew such exclamations of delight from De Quincey.

The great cause of clumsiness in his general rhythm is an excessive use of heavy relative constructions:

"That which hitherto we have set down is (I hope) sufficient to show their brutishness which imagine that religion and virtue are only as men will account of them."

"Of what account the Master of Sentences was in the Church of Rome, the same and more amongst the preachers of Reformed Churches Calvin had purchased; so that the perfectest divines were judged they which were skilfullest in Calvin's writings. Till at length the discipline, which was at the first so weak, that without the staff of their approbation, who were not subject unto it themselves, it had not brought others under subjection, began now to challenge universal obedience, and to enter into open conflict with those very churches, which in desperate extremity had been relievers of it."

Even these passages are not without a certain musical charm, especially if we disregard the meaning and attend only to the succession of the syllables.

KINDS OF COMPOSITION.

Exposition.-Hooker's powers of exposition are tested by the book on Law, his most abstruse subject. Viewed simply as a piece of exposition, this book contains little to profit the student. In this particular respect, it is bad even by the standard of the time. Its main faults have been specified under the Paragraph and the quality of Clearness. The paragraph on the discovery of rules of action, quoted to illustrate his worst, is a piece of very confused writing. On a subject requiring closeness of thought, he has not the qualities that made up for bad method in some of his contemporaries; he has neither felicity nor variety of expression, nor fulness of example and illustration. These remarks apply chiefly to the First Book: his imperfect expression is most apparent there. In his arguments on ritual and doctrine he is more on beaten ground, and proceeds with less confusion.

Persuasion. The Ecclesiastical Polity' is said to have had great influence. It is a good example to show how much in persuasion depends upon the manner. Hooker added little or nothing to what Whitgift had urged against the Presbyterian champion, Cartwright; and in clearness, terseness of expression, and logical force, is far inferior to his patron. His main contribution is his elaborate and (in a logical point of view) clumsy attempt to prove what Whitgift had simply asserted or taken for granted, that not everything required for the conduct of human affairs is to be found in Scripture. His arguments in the first two Books had little weight with the Puritans. Once they saw his drift, they admitted the general propositions, but questioned his implied conclusions. Law was a good thing, and should be obeyed, but not bad law; not everything was found in Scripture-but the Presbyterian government, and their views about liturgies, vestments, and sacra

ments, were found in Scripture. While Hooker's arguments were neither new nor convincing, his moderation, singular in that age, gained him a hearing, and his earnest advocacy of the blessings of union and order was like oil on the troubled waters. Whitgift's strenuous hostility and unsparing rigour of argument set his opponents on edge, and steeled them against conviction; Hooker's mild and occasionally hazy statement of the same arguments won the doubtful at once, and by degrees made friends out of decided enemies.

JOHN LYLY or LILLIE, 1554-1606.

This ingenious writer deserves a place of minor prominence in a history of prose-partly from the intrinsic merits of his style, and partly from the voluminous controversy that has been raised upon it. He is generally known as "The Euphuist," and his style is called Euphuism. We shall analyse this Euphuism, and try to make out what it is, where its elements came from, and what influence it had upon its age as a model of composition.

Few particulars of Lyly's life are on record. We know only that he was born in Kent, that he was a student at Magdalen, Oxford, that he was patronised by Lord Burghley, and that from 1577 to 1593 he was a hanger-on at Court and wrote plays. His plays had no small reputation, coming immediately before Shakspeare. Ben Jonson gives him honourable mention; and, in a bookseller's puff of the next generation, he is described as "the only rare poet of that time, the witty, comical, facetiously quick and unparalleled John Lilly, Master of Arts." His chief work in prose, apart from prose dramas and some assistance to Tom Nash in the Marprelate controversy, is a moral romance known as Euphues' (whence his name Euphuist). It is in two parts, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit' (1579), and Euphues and his England' (1580). Euphues, a gay young Athenian of good family, travels in the first part to Naples, in the second part to England; the plot is subservient to the development of the young man's moral nature, and gives occasion for discourses on religion, education, friendship, and other virtues, with a great many love-passages. The book suited the taste of the time, and was popular: according to Blount the bookseller, "all our Ladies were then his Scholars; and that Beauty in Court which could not parley Euphuism was as little regarded as she which now" (1632) "speaks not French." With all his popularity the ingenious, gentle, humorous little man received no solid patronage. There are extant two petitions of his to the Queen complaining of his deferred hopes of favour. He had hung on for thirteen years in hopes of getting the Mastership of the Revels; and in his second petition (1593), despairing of this, he begs

"Some land, some good fines, or forfeitures that should fall by the just fall of these most false traitors, that seeing nothing will come by the Revels, I may prey upon the Rebels. Thirteen years your Highness' servant, but yet nothing. Twenty friends that though they say they will be sure I find them sure to be slow. A thousand hopes but all nothing; a hundred promises but yet nothing. Thus casting up the inventory of my friends, hopes, promises, and times, the summa totalis amounteth to just nothing. My last will is shorter than mine invention: but three legacies, patience to my creditors, melancholy without measure to my friends, and beggary without shame to my family.'

What were his fortunes after this, whether Elizabeth heard his petition, is not known. Probably the frugal Queen gave him some relief. His admiring bookseller says, though without express reference to the petition, that he was "heard, graced, and rewarded." He died at the comparatively early age of fifty-two.

The interest in Lyly was revived in this century by Sir Walter Scott's attempt to reproduce a Euphuist in the person of Sir Piercie Shafton. In the heat of attacking and defending Lyly and his style, of arguing as to whether he invented Euphuism or only fell in with a ruling taste, whether he vitiated our language or caught a taint, the disputants have not always kept in view what peculiarly belongs to Lyly's mannerism and what does not. His style has good points and bad points, peculiar affectations and affectations common to the age. A discussion on Euphuism becomes hopelessly tangled and complicated unless the leading elements of his manner are kept distinct. Here it may be well, without pretending to give an exhaustive analysis, to distinguish some particulars that should not be confused. Three or four may be specified.

(1.) Neatness and finish of sentence.-Lyly's sentences are remarkably free from intricacy and inversion, much shorter, more pithy and direct than was usual. We must come down at least a century before we find a structure so lucid. To be sure, his matter was not heavy, and did not tempt him to use either weighty sentences or learned terms: still, credit to whom credit is due; his sentences, as sentences, though not in perfect modern form, are the most smooth and finished of that time. His chief fault is the want of variety, "an eternal affectation of sententiousness," says an old critic, "keeps to such a formal measure of his periods as soon grows tiresome, and so by confining himself to shape his sense so frequently into one artificial cadence, however ingenious or harmonious, abridges that variety which the style should be admired for."

In

(2.) Fanciful antithesis and word-play. — The passage above quoted from his petition to Elizabeth is an extreme example. the Euphues' there are few passages so fantastically antithetical; the antithesis of the 'Euphues' is more a kind of balance in the

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