how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed." Even the assertion that "the vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people" is inconsiderate and erroneous. The language is homely, indeed, but it is not the everyday speech of hinds and tinkers; it is the language of the Church, of the Bible, of Fox's 'Book of Martyrs,' and whatever other literature Bunyan was in the habit of perusing. As for the "old unpolluted English language," it needs no microscopical eye to detect in the 'Pilgrim's Progress' a considerable sprinkling of vulgar provincialisms, and even of such Latin idioms as are to be found in his favourite old martyrologist Fox.

Two other devotional writers of this period retain their hold on pious readers, especially among the lower orders: - Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), a Scotch minister (author of the 'Trial and Triumph of Faith'); and Sir Matthew Hale (1609-1676), an English judge (author of Contemplations, Moral and Divine').

HISTORY.

The great historian of the peried was Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon (1609-1674), who had some share in making material for the history that he wrote. The son of a country gentleman, he was bred to the law, and in 1640 began his public career in Parliament. He supported the moderate opposition to the arbitrary measures of the King; but when Parliament raised its tone and demanded the abolition of Episcopacy, he went over to the King's party. He accompanied the Prince and the Queen-mother to France. After the Restoration, which was brought about chiefly by his skilful management, he was appointed Chancellor; but in the course of a few years he became unpopular both with the King and with the people, and in 1667 he was impeached of high treason by the Commons, ordered by the King to quit the kingdom, and, pursued by the Lords with a bill of banishment. He was never permitted to return; he spent four years of his exile at Montpellier, and the remaining three years at Rouen. It was during his two periods of exile that he composed his various works. His 'History of the Grand Rebellion' was begun at Jersey-his first place of refuge on the failure of the King's cause-and completed during his final banishment. His 'Life and Continuation of the History' was published from his manuscripts in 1759. He wrote, besides, several brief works now fallen into neglect. He seems to have been a man of great practical sagacity and singular tenacity of purpose a hard, austere, and, on the whole, upright man; too unyielding and too little disposed to regard the feelings of others. His manner was reserved and dictatorial. He comments upon the transactions of the time from his own point of view, animadvert

ing severely upon the enemies of the King; but it is universally allowed that he wrote with a high-principled regard for truth: he was probably too magnanimous, too loftily convinced of the right of his own cause, to seek to pervert the facts. His style is dry and rather prolix. In the history our interest is drawn chiefly to the judgments of men and measures; the veteran politician was a penetrating observer, and his estimates of character and motive will always attract readers to his work.

Two minor historians deserve a passing mention. Thomas May (1595-1650)—commended by Dr Johnson as one of the earliest English writers of Latin verse able "to contest the palm with any other of the lettered nations -was secretary to the Parliament, and published in 1647 The History of the Parliament of England which began November 3, 1640.' Arthur Wilson (1596-1652), secretary to the Parliamentary General Essex, left a work on 'The Life and Reign of James I.'

The two chief antiquaries were Sir William Dugdale (1605-1686), and his son-in-law Elias Ashmole (1617-1692).

MISCELLANEOUS.

James Howell (1596-1666), a versatile writer of dictionaries, grammars, histories, biographies, poems, and political pamphlets, is now known chiefly as the author of the first volume of 'Familiar Letters' in our language. Howell had something of the versatile activity of Defoe: like Defoe he travelled on the Continent for commercial purposes, and like Defoe he was often employed on political missions. Only, Howell had less power than the later adventurer, and was less intensely political, observing men goodhumouredly, and recording his observations with sparkling liveliness. As an example of the purposely-familiar strain of his letters, take his account of the rise of the Presbyterians, in a letter written from the Fleet prison to a grave inquirer:

"The first broacher of the presbyterian religion, and who made it differ from that of Rome and Luther, was Calvin; who being once banished Geneva was revoked, at which time, he no less petulantly than profanely applied to himself that text of the holy prophet which was meaned of Christ, The stone which the builders refused, is made the headstone of the corner, &c. Thus Geneva lake swallowed up the episcopal sea, and church lands were made secular; which was the white they levelled at. This Geneva bird flew thence to France, and hatched the Hugonots, which make about the tenth part of that people. It took wing also to Bohemia and Germany high and low, as the Palatinate, the land of Hesse, and the confederate provinces of the States of Holland, whence it took flight to Scotland and England. It took first footing in Scotland, when King James was a child in his cradle; but when he came to understand himself, and was manumitted from Buchanan, he grew cold in it; and being come to England, he utterly disclaimed it, terming it in a public speech of his to the parliament a sect, rather than a religion. To this sect may be imputed all the scissures that

have happened in Christianity, with most of the wars that have lacerated poor Europe ever since; and it may be called the source of the civil distractions that now afflict this poor island."

Howell, as is evident from the above, was a royalist: and when he wrote it, he lay in prison by order of the Parliament.

When Fuller's Church History' was published, it was attacked by a somewhat flippant and self-confident controversialist, Peter Heylin (1600-1662), author of a History of the Reformation in England.' Heylin began to write at an early age, publishing 'Microcosmus; or, a Description of the World,' a popular geographical work, in 1621; and to the end of his life he continued a prolific and varied writer. In 1625 he published an account of a six weeks' tour in France-a very flippant and superficial affair, with occasional dashes of clever expression. In his history he is a bitter partisan on the royalist side. He was in holy orders, and is said to have died partly of chagrin at not being recognised after the Restoration.

John Earle (1601-1665), chaplain and tutor to Prince Charles II., appointed at the Restoration Bishop of Worcester, and subsequently promoted to Salisbury, followed in the wake of Overbury, Dekker, and others, as a writer of essays and characters. His Microcosmography; or, a Piece of the World discovered in Essays and Characters,' was published about 1628, and became popular. An eleventh edition was printed in 1811. The characters are such as an Antiquary, a Carrier, a Country Fellow, a University Dun. He writes in the same punning antithetical strain as Overbury, but caricatures more, and has a much less delicate fancy.

Long after the death of Samuel Butler, author of 'Hudibras (1612-1680), in 1759, appeared his 'Genuine Remains in Prose.' The principal of them are Characters" in the style of Overbury and Earle. Butler belongs to this generation through his satires on the Puritans. His prose has something of the coarse satiric vigour of his poetry; the wit has a much stronger flavour than either Overbury's or Earle's.

Owen Felltham (1608-1677?) put forth in 1628 a second edition of a work called-Resolves' (that is, "Solutions "); 'Divine, Moral, and Political,' — consisting of essays on the model of Bacon's. The work made little noise at the time, but being reprinted in 1707, it went through twelve editions in less than two ⚫ years. The thoughts are commonplace, the method bad, being the disjointed method of Bacon's essays without the natural clearness; and there is a constant straining after imagery. Their popularity in Queen Anne's reign is accounted for by their high moral tone, and their occasionally felicitous application of Baconian imagery to common themes, such as moderation in grief, evil-speaking, industry, and meditation.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682).—Were this book intended as a guide to the intellectual epicure, it should give a large space to the works of Sir Thomas Browne, the curiously-learned, meditative, and humorous physician of Norwich. Born in London the son of a rich merchant, he lost his father early, and was defrauded by one of his guardians, but was taken up by his step-father and sent to Winchester school, and thence to Oxford. He studied medicine, practised for some time near Oxford, travelled on the Continent, received M.D. at Leyden in 1633, returned to England, practised for a short time near Halifax, settled in Norwich, and there spent the remainder of his life. His first work, 'Religio Medici,'—The Religion of a Physician-published in 1643,2 made an immediate sensation, was translated into Latin, and " very eagerly read in England, France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany." It is remarkable for its equanimity and tranquil warmth of sentiment; he avows himself an orthodox believer in the English Church, yet he loves the symbols of Catholic worship; he is elevated in spirit at hearing "the Ave-Mary bell," and is moved to tears at sight of a solemn procession; when others, "blind with opposition and prejudice, fall into an excess of scorn and laughter," he "cannot laugh at but rather pities" the asceticism of pilgrims and friars, because there is in it "something of devotion." He did not like to hear that the Anglican religion began with Henry VIII.—he desired for it a longer antiquity; and he disapproved of the "popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffs at the Bishop of Rome"-"though he call me heretic, I will not return to him the name of antichrist, man of sin, or whore of Babylon." For all his moderation the book was placed on the Index Expurgatorius.' 3 His other works made less immediate noise, though they contain equally fine passages; their themes are less exciting, run counter to no vested interests. The 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica,' or Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors,' 1646, deals with physical, not moral, errors:-false beliefs concerning the properties of gems, of plants, of animals, of men; mistakes in popular pictures (the conventional dolphin, pelican, &c., the conventional temptation of Eve, sacrifice of Isaac, &c.); cosmographical and geographical errors (concerning the seasons, the river Nilus, the blackness of Negroes, &c.); historical errors, chiefly touching Scripture (that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that John the Evangelist should not die, &c.) The Garden of Cyrus, or

1 See p. 94.

2 A surreptitious copy, published in 1642, he disowned as imperfect.

3 The fate of his refined moderation is a warning. Hating nobody, he was hated and attacked by the extreme adherents of all parties; denounced as an atheist, as a Papist, and as a Presbyterian. On the other hand, a certain Quaker was hopeful of bringing him over to the Society of Friends, because he disliked strife, and with all his love of symbolic acts, would not lift his hat to a crucifix.

the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered,' 1658, is a fanciful search through nature for his favourite figure the Quincunx: he finds, says Coleridge, "quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything." 'Hydriotaphia,' Urn-burial, published along with the 'Garden of Cyrus,' is a discourse upon the ancient practice of incremation, occasioned by the discovery of certain urns in Norfolk; in the concluding chapter, the solemn impassioned rhetoric on the shortness of life, and of posthumous memory, is considered his finest effort.

He

Browne's character is drawn by De Quincey in its points of contrast with the character of Jeremy Taylor. He is "deep, tranquil, and majestic as Milton, silently premeditating and disclosing his golden couplets,' as under some genial instinct of incubation." The reference to Milton is not so happy: Browne had not the passionate fervour of Milton; grave, solemn, meditative, without fire or freshness of sentiment, he would have shrunk from Milton's vituperative scorn, and could never have conceived the tender and graceful fancies of Milton's smaller poems. The prevailing characteristic of his style is tranquil elaboration. abounds in carefully-constructed periods, intermixed with short pointed sentences that have a singularly Johnsonian sound, from the fulness of the rhythm. His sentence-structure is more "formed" than in any previous writer, perhaps more so than in any writer anterior to Johnson. His figures are original, ingenious, and peculiarly apt; he does not err in excess of similitudes. Felicitous and complete expression, comparatively free from tautology, inspires a general feeling of vigour; and here and there we are carried away by flights of high and solemn elevation. The great drawback for the modern reader is his excessive use of words coined from the Latin. Even Johnson condemns him on this score. His Latinised diction is all the more remarkable because he expressly condemns Latin quotations, saying that "if elegancy still proceedeth, and English pens maintain that stream we have observed to flow from many, we shall within few years be fain to learn Latin to understand English, and a work will prove of equal facility in either." His offences have probably been exaggerated, extreme passages being tendered as fair examples; still in every page there are at least two words that have not been naturalisedimproperations, amit, depilous, manuduction, and suchlike.

Another recluse, more sensitive and egotistic, and less full of power than the tranquil sage of Norwich, was Dr Henry More (1614-1687), Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. He was obstinately attached to the cloister: he might have had a bishop

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