mind; but the author can give the stage no better than what was given him by nature; and the actors must represent such things as they are capable to perform, and by which both they and the scribbler may get their living. After all, it is a good thing to laugh at any rate; and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness. Beasts can weep when they suffer, but they cannot laugh."

His remarks on Invention are more to the purpose :

"The principal parts of painting and poetry next follow. Invention is the first part, and absolutely necessary to them both; yet no rule ever was or ever can be given, how to compass it. A happy genius is the gift of nature it depends on the influence of the stars, say the astrologers; on the organs of the body, say the naturalists; it is the particular gift of heaven, say the divines, both Christians and heathens. How to improve it, many books can teach us; how to obtain it, none; that nothing can be done without it, all agree—

Tu nihil invita dices faciesve Minerva.

Without invention, a painter is but a copier, and a poet but a plagiary of others. Both are allowed sometimes to copy, and translate; but as our author tells you, that is not the best part of their reputation. 'Imitators are but a servile kind of cattle,' says the poet; or at best, the keepers of cattle for other men: they have nothing which is properly their own: that is a sufficient mortification for me, while I am translating Virgil. But to copy the best author, is a kind of praise, if I perform it as I ought; as a copy after Raffaelle is more to be commended than an original of any indifferent painter.”

And yet, on principle, he was opposed to unnecessary digressions on the larger scale :

"As in the composition of a picture the painter is to take care that nothing enter into it which is not proper or convenient to the subject, so likewise is the poet to reject all incidents which are foreign to his poem and are naturally no parts of it; they are wens and other excrescences, which belong not to the body, but deform it. No person, no incident in the piece or in the play, but must be of use to carry on the main design. All things else are like six fingers to the hand, when nature, which is superfluous in nothing, can do her work with five. A painter must reject all trifling ornaments, so must a poet refuse all tedious and unnecessary descriptions. role which is too heavy is less an ornament than a burthen."

A

We might expect to find the prose diction of a poet highly coloured, and profusely embellished with imagery. Dryden's is the reverse of this-familiar, clear, vigorous, and full of epigrammatic point. "I have endeavoured," he says, "to write English as near as I could distinguish it from the tongue of pedants and that of affected travellers." He expressly apologises for the "poetical expressions " in his translation of Du Fresnoy; he "dares not promise that some of them are not fustian, or at least highly metaphorical," but the fault lay with the original.

There is little geniality in his style; he knew as well as anybody where his power lay, and he said of himself that "he could

write severely with more ease than he could write gently." When he girds on his sword for a sarcastic onslaught, he goes to work with all his heart. In the controversy with Stillingfleet, his intense feeling sometimes betrays him into bare unadorned abuse; he calls his adversary, by comparison with "the meekness, devotion, and sincerity" of the pious lady's declaration, " disingenuous, foul-mouthed, and shuffling." But this is a passage of exceptional heat; most of the sarcasm is clothed in fresh and splendid language, and takes the form of rough but brilliant wit, throwing his tamer rival into the shade: indeed, had his cause not been so hopelessly unpopular, the attack would have been overwhelming.

OTHER WRITERS.

THEOLOGY.

The most eminent divine in the early part of this period was Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), a man of extremely fertile and versatile talents. He was the son of a linen-draper in London. In 1649 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and for some time thereafter studied medicine. In 1652 he was a candidate for the Greek Professorship, but was disappointed. He then spent some years in travelling along the shores of the Mediterranean. In 1660 he again tried for the same post, and was successful. He had been but two years Professor of Greek when he discovered his preference for mathematics by accepting the Professorship of Geometry in Gresham College. In 1663 he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in Cambridge. In 1669, having not yet found his life-work, he vacated his professorship in favour of his pupil Isaac Newton, and thereafter devoted himself exclusively to divinity. In 1670 he was made D.D. by royal mandate, receiving at the time a high compliment from the lips of the King. In 1672 he was nominated to the Mastership of Trinity. He published several mathematical works in Latin. His English writings are all theological, consisting of seventyseven Sermons; Expositions of the Apostles' Creed, The Lord's Prayer, The Decalogue, &c.; a Treatise on the Pope's Supremacy' and a 'Discourse concerning the Unity of the Church.' "He was in person of the lesser size, and lean; of extraordinary strength, of a fair and calm complexion, a thin skin, very sensible of the cold; his eyes grey, clear, and somewhat short-sighted; his hair of a light auburn, very fine and curling." He was abstracted in his manner, and of slovenly habits. Anecdotes are told of his personal courage and presence of mind. He was a great smoker, and an immoderate eater of fruit. He died of fever, to which he was subject. The most striking things in his sermons are the extraordinary copiousness and vigour of the language, and the ex

haustiveness and subtlety of the thought. He is a perfect mine of varied and vigorous expression. His sentences are thrown up with a rough careless vigour; an extreme antithesis to the polished flow of language and ideas in Addison. In his love of scrupulous definitions and qualifications we discover the mathematician; he divides and subdivides with Baconian minuteness, and in drawing parallels adjusts the compared particulars with acute exactness.

The simple and felicitous diction of John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury (1630-1694), was praised by Dryden and by Addison, and long held up as a model.i Born in Yorkshire, of Puritan parents, he was educated at Cambridge, submitted to the Act of Uniformity in 1662, and entered the Church. Going to London in 1663, his preaching soon drew attention, and he was rapidly promoted. At the Revolution he was made Dean of St Paul's, and in 1691 was raised to the supreme height of ecclesiastical dignity. He was a man of great moderation and good sense, without excitability or enthusiasm, "loving neither the ceremony nor the trouble of a great place." Though he received preferment in the reign of Charles, he was not an extravagant royalist his wife was the niece of Oliver Cromwell, and daughter-in-law of Bishop Wilkins. Ready to serve his friends, he was literary executor to Wilkins and to Barrow, gave an opinion on Burnet's History of the Reformation' before it was published, and edited the 'Discourses' of Dr Hezekiah Burton. A good, easy, clear-headed man, with not a little of the character of Paley. The merits of his style are simplicity, and a happy fluency in the choice and combination of words. He probably had no small influence in forming the style of Addison. The defects are considerable. In his easy way he lingers upon an idea, and gives two or three expressions where one would serve the purpose; passing on, he rambles back again, and presents the idea in several other different aspects. The result is an enfeebling tautology and want of method. Taken individually, the expressions are admirably easy and felicitous; but there are too many of them, and they are ill arranged.

Edward Stillingfleet (1635-1699), made Bishop of Worcester in 1689, was much before the public as a controversialist during this period. He fought against Atheists, Unitarians, Papists, and Dissenters, and rendered distinguished service to his cause. His bestknown engagements were with Dryden and Locke. Against Dryden, though far inferior in style, he had the best of the argument;

1 Dryden is said to have "owned with pleasure that if he had any talent for English prose it was owing to his having often read the writings of Archbishop Tillotson." This is but a random compliment; Dryden showed his talent for English prose before Tillotson had published a line, and long before he became famous.

but in the encounter with Locke he sustained a defeat so signal and humiliating that it was said to have hastened his death. He wrote with great vigour, but his expressions are neither original nor felicitous. To a modern reader his manner seems too arrogant and personal to be persuasive. Although Clarendon professes himself "exceedingly delighted with the softness, gentleness, and civility of his language," this word-praise is not borne out by facts; there is no evidence that he had Tillotson's power of bringing over opponents.

William Sherlock (1641-1707), who succeeded Tillotson as Dean of St Paul's, was another champion of the Church against dissent and infidelity, and wrote a 'Vindication of the Trinity' in 1691; but he is now known only by his devotional works. His 'Discourse concerning Death' is a standing article in second-hand book-stalls. This continued popularity is due more to the matter than to the manner. His son Thomas was more distinguished than

himself.

Sherlock's Vindication' was attacked with great wit and fury by a man far his superior in literary genius, Robert South (16331716). South, a brilliant Oxonian scholar, the son of a London merchant, was an ultra-royalist, appointed at the Restoration Public Orator of his University, and chaplain to the Earl of Clarendon. He accompanied Lawrence Hyde to Poland in 1676. On his return he was presented to the rectory of Islip, and, having some private fortune, steadily declined farther preferment. He has been called the last of the great English divines of the century. A quick and powerful intellect, solid erudition, a superlative command of homely racy English, and wit of unsurpassed brilliancy, make a combination that, in a literary point of view, places the possessor at least on a level with Taylor and Barrow. Doubtless his fame would have been equal to his powers had he not mistaken his vocation. He shows little religious earnestness, and without that, devotional, and even controversial, religious works can hardly pretend to the first rank. He was an earnest Churchman, but not an earnest Christian. Against sectaries his abuse was hearty and hot-"villanous arts,' venomous gibberish," "treacherous cant," "a pack of designing hypocrites," are samples of his phrases. Satirical wit is his distinguishing quality. Even his sermons are brilliantly lighted up with flashes of ingenious mockery; he was always glad to have a victim.

Thomas Sprat, D.D. (1636-1713), Fellow of Wadham, Bishop of Rochester, friend and biographer of Cowley. Besides his 'Life of Cowley,' he wrote a 'History of the Royal Society,' of which he was a member, as well as sermons and political tracts. He is praised by Macaulay as "a great master of our language, and possessed at once of the eloquence of the orator, of the controversialist,

and of the historian." He also receives a high tribute from Johnson. There is indeed a certain flow and rotund finish about his diction. Some of his sentences would pass for Johnson's. Had the matter been more substantial, he might have taken a higher place in our literature; but he was a good genial fellow, rather fond of the bottle, and his lubricated eloquence perished with him.

Thomas Burnet (1635-1715), Master of the Charter-house, is known in literature by his 'Sacred Theory of the Earth' (pub. in Latin 1680, in English 1691). It is the outcome of a poetic mind excited by the gathering interest in physical science. The theory is merely a framework for extravagant sublimities of description. He represents the antediluvian globe as disposed in regular concentric belts, the heavy solid parts in the centre, then the liquid, then on the top of the liquid a floating crust of solidified oily matter, even and uniform all over," without rocks or mountains, "wrinkle, scar, or fracture." On this smooth surface, fresh, fruitful, overhung by a calm and serene atmosphere, men lived till the Flood; that calamity was caused by the generation of steam in the subterraneous water and the rupture of the crust, when "the whole fabric broke," and tumbled in fragments into the abyss. The accounts of the Flood and of the final conflagration of the existing earth are given in language worthy of such bold and spacious conceptions.

Of little importance in literature, but of considerable importance in the history of opinion, are the two chief literary defenders of the Quaker faith, William Penn (1644-1718) and Robert Barclay (1648-1690), both men of good position by birth. Penn, the son of an admiral, imbibed the proscribed views at Oxford, and was expelled the University. A course of travel on the Continent made him a fine gentleman again; the Plague reconverted him; a trip to Ireland restored him to fashionable circles; a sermon from an old master converted him a third time. This last conversion was in 1668 from that date he remained Quaker for life. In 1669 he was imprisoned for eight months. For some years thereafter his life was prosperous. He was reconciled to his father, who left him a good estate, and some claims on the Government, in liquidation of which he received a grant of Pennsylvania in America. In the later years of Charles and under James he was a great favourite at Court: his conduct there is assailed by Macaulay and warmly defended by Paget and others. The remaining thirty years of his life were spent in private, not a little imbittered by personal griefs and losses.-Barclay was a Scotsman, of the family of Barclay of Ury. He several times suffered imprisonment. His works are, 'Truth Cleared of Calumnies,' 1670; and 'An Apology for the People called in scorn Quakers.' Neither Penn nor Barclay has