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Every reader must notice how readily he adapts his rhythm to pointed wit or flowing declamation. Few of our writers surpass him in soaring and bringing out a full melodious cadence. last-quoted sentence is as measured and stately in its movement as could well be found. In some of the tender passages, the music of the language is such as can hardly be imitated under present laws of taste as regards epithets. The following is an instance-"the nightingales one with the other striving which could in most dainty variety recount their wrong-caused sorrow."

It is needless to review Sidney's style at length under the kinds of composition. We have seen that he has no descriptive method -that the only merit of his description lies in the graces of his style. As a Narrator, he relates events with clearness; but the different lines of events are so numerous and interwoven that it is difficult to avoid getting confused among them. To those that do not enjoy the beauties of his language, the numerous speeches and meditations must appear a tedious impediment to the action. As regards Exposition, all has been said under the intellectual qualities. In the way of Persuasion, his Apology would tell partly by its clear and ingenious arguments, partly by its winning playfulness of manner and impetuous exuberance of spirits.

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RICHARD HOOKER, 1553-1600.

The following estimate of Hooker by the author of the 'Introduction to the Literature of Europe,' is often quoted : "So stately "and graceful is the march of his periods, so various the fall of his "musical cadences upon the ear, so rich in images, so condensed in sentences, so grave and noble his diction, so little is there of vul"garity in his racy idiom, of pedantry in his learned phrase, that "I know not whether any later writer has more admirably dis"played the capacities of our language, or produced passages more "worthy of comparison with the splendid monuments of antiquity." Though this eloquent panegyric is an extreme exaggeration, and could never have been written by any person keeping his eye on the facts, the Ecclesiastical Polity' does undoubtedly, as is often said, "mark an era in English prose." In some respects superior, in some inferior to Sidney's, Hooker's style is the first specimen of good prose applied to the weightier purposes of literature.

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According to Izaak Walton, in one of his well-known "Lives," Hooker was born at Heavitree, in or near Exeter. His parents were poor, but of respectable family; his uncle John was Chamberlain of Exeter. His father designed to apprentice him to a trade; but his schoolmaster, seeing the boy's abilities, was solicitous that he should get learning, and spoke to the chamberlain uncle. The uncle spoke to Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, who examined the young

prodigy, found him all that the good schoolmaster represented, gave him a pension, and in 1567 got him admitted as a Clerk (sizar, servitor, or bursar) to Corpus Christi, Oxford. In 1571 his patron died, and Hooker was greatly dejected, and even in tears, about his future subsistence. From this he was relieved by the President of the College, who promised to be his friend; and some nine months after, through the recommendation of his late patron, he got as a pupil Edwin, son of Bishop Sandys, whose influence was afterwards of great service to him. For some ten years after this, he remained at Oxford, being admitted Fellow of his College in 1577, appointed to read Hebrew lectures in 1579, and in the same year temporarily expelled along with Reynolds for some reason now unknown. During this time he was an industrious reader, "enriching," says Walton, "his quiet and capacious soul with the precious learning of the philosophers, casuists, and schoolmen; and with them the foundation and reason of all laws, both sacred and civil; and indeed with such other learning as lay most remote from the track of common studies." In 1581, going to preach in London, he was led to make an unhappy marriage; and about the same time settled with his wife in the living of Drayton Beauchamp, in Buckinghamshire. In 1584-85, at the recommendation of Sandys, whose son had seen and pitied the unhappiness of his old tutor's married life, Hooker was taken in hand by Archbishop Whitgift, and through his influence appointed Master of the Temple, in the Episcopal interest, and against a Presbyterian champion of the name of Travers. Here began Hooker's labours in defence of Episcopacy. Travers, a bold preacher, with a popular manner, was Afternoon Lecturer in the Temple, and maintained in the pulpit Presbyterian views of Church government. Hooker preaching in the forenoon, "the pulpit," as Fuller said, "spake pure Canterbury in the morning, and Geneva in the afternoon.' Travers, silenced by Whitgift on the ground of insufficient ordination, continued the war in print; Hooker replied-but, unfit for the worry of controversy, begged from his patron some quiet post in the country, and in 1591 removed to the living of Boscombe, near Salisbury. Here in peace and privacy he meditated his Ecclesiastical Polity,' and published the first four Books in 1594. Translated in 1595 to the better living of Bishopsborne, near Canterbury, he sent a fifth Book to the press in 1597. He died in 1600, leaving three more Books of the Polity. The genuineness of these later books is doubted by Walton. On his and other evidence it is contended that the Sixth Book was mutilated by the Presbyterian friends of Hooker's wife, and interpolated with other matter taken from Hooker's papers; also that the Seventh and the Eighth received a bias from Presbyterian hands. The evidence of fraud, though not improbable, is scarcely conclusive. The good faith of Hooker's Episcopal friends is shown by their pub

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lishing what they believed to be mutilated copies. The Sixth and Eighth Books were first published in 1651, the Seventh in 1662.

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From Walton we have a circumstantial description of Hooker as a man in poor clothes, his loins usually girt in a coarse gown or canonical coat; of a mean stature, and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thought of his soul; his body worn out, not with age, but study and holy mortifications; his face full of heat-pimples, begot by his inactivity and sedentary life." This account of his poor physique is borne out by other authorities. Dr Spenser says that his body was spent with study, and Fuller that his voice was low and his stature little. To complete his bodily infirmities, "though not purblind, he was short or weak sighted."

Impartial critics will not join the devoted admirers of Hooker in placing him among the greatest intellects of the nation. All his life through he was a most industrious student, and his acquisitions as a scholar were undeniably profound. But his original force, whether as a thinker or as an expositor, was not great. As a champion of Episcopacy, he added little or nothing to the arguments of Jewel and Whitgift. Even his high flights of eloquence are not always original; in many cases the ideas and the images are borrowed, the diction only being his own. In the application of his scholarship he is often very ingenious. His great fault, and it is fatal to the high pretensions set up for him, is a want of coherence. He seems incapable of the effort of closely concatenating his thoughts. As he writes, a quotation occurs to him having some dim application to his present subject; he puts down the quotation, but leaves its bearing vague and indistinct. Something like this is admitted, as it must be admitted, by his warmest eulogists. The explanation probably lies in his constitutional languor. What his intellect might have done in a more vigorous constitution of body, can be only a matter of speculation.-One thing may be noted by way of parenthesis. If in controversy his constitutional feebleness interfered with the clear and telling application of his scholarship, in another respect it gave him a great advantage over his opponents. It left him free from the impulses of vehement attachment; no impetuosity of conviction hurried him into unreason; he could always approach his subject with judicial calmness, and take a circumspect survey of his ground. This dispassionate habit strikes us in every sentence; it is Hooker's chief distinction amidst the fiery partisanship of the time. Whether his judgment was sound or unsound, he was eminently free from vehement prejudice, or mist of passionate affection.'

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Perhaps the chief cause of the over-estimation of Hooker's intel- . lectual force is the extraordinary musical richness of his language. Most of us are more influenced by mere pomp of sound than we

might be willing to allow; and the melody of Hooker's periods is of the richest order. Like De Quincey, he was extremely susceptible to the "luxuries of the ear." This we can see from his own account of how music affected him: "We are at the hearing of some more inclined unto sorrow and heaviness, of some more mollified and softened in mind; one kind apter to stay and settle us, another to move and stir our affections; there is that draweth to a marvellous grave and sober mediocrity; there is also that carrieth, as it were, into ecstasies, filling the mind with a heavenly joy, and for the time in a manner severing it from the body."

Though the Polity is professedly an argumentative work, and does contain some very solid dispassionate argument, his mind was perhaps more poetical than scientific. Special emotions do not assert themselves in marked individual luxuriance. The poverty of his nature in vital power was not favourable to the growth of emotion. We meet in the Polity neither rancorous invective nor passionate sentimental philanthropy, neither hero-worship nor exuberant self-confident vivacity. The work is as utterly deficient in these more obtrusive forms of emotion as could well be conceived. The basis of the peculiar poetic vein of the work is his intense fear of every mode of confusion, strife, agitation; his passionate longing for quiet and tranquillity. He dilates with an approach to rapture on "the glorious inhabitants of those sacred palaces, where nothing but light and blessed immortality, no shadow of matter for tears, discontentments, griefs, and uncomfortable passions to work upon, but all joy, tranquillity, and peace, even for ever and ever doth dwell." In the spirit of this craving for peace, and weary impatience of conflict and excitement, he dwells upon the prevalence of order throughout nature, upon the blessings of regularity and authority wherever they exist; and passionately deprecates every appearance of insubordination. He is earnest with all dissenters from the established faith, worship, or government, to give up "private discretion," "private fancies," which can lead only to anarchy, disturbance, tumult. He would have them mature their views, submit these to constituted authority, and abide by the decision. Meantime let them obey in silence.

What we know of his demeanour and active habits confirms the view of his character that one naturally forms from reading his works. "God and nature," says Izaak Walton, "blest him with so blessed a bashfulness, that as in his younger days his pupils might easily look him out of countenance; so neither then, nor in his age, did he ever look any man in the face; and was of so mild and humble a nature, that his poor parish clerk and he did never talk but with both their hats on, or both off, at the same time." All circumstances show Hooker to have been an unusually shy, sensitive, feeble little man, with very little activity, and very low

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constitutional power. He entered the controversies of his time unwittingly; and, after a short experience, begged for "peace and privacy.' When forced to vindicate what he had said in his sermons, he did so, not with the heat of a strongly persuaded man of energy, but with the meekness and charity of a retiring nature. How much he leant upon others appears in the narrative of his college life so different from the sturdy self-reliance of Johnson. Still more does this come out in Walton's well-known account of his visit to the "Shunemite's House" in London, when he went up from Oxford to preach. Reaching London on the back of a horse that would not or could not run, wet, weary, weather-beaten, numb with wind and rain, he bitterly refused to be persuaded that he could preach within two days; but the Shunemite, Mrs Churchman, by cosy nursing, "enabled him to perform the office of the day," and having given him such a taste of the comfort of womanly ministration, persuaded him that he needed a wife, drew from the unresisting man in his gratitude a commission to procure one, and provided him with her own daughter.-There is hardly to be found in history a more extreme instance of a man wanting in self-will, and submitting himself passively to the disposal of others.1

Even this

Opinions. One of the many eulogistic sayings concerning Hooker is that, "should the English Constitution in Church and State be unhappily ruined, the book" (Ecclesiastical Polity') "probably contains materials sufficient for repairing and rebuilding the shattered fabric." A less glowing admirer represents him as "the one adequate exponent of the religious ideas and policy of the age and reign of Elizabeth." needs an explanation. Hooker was not, as this would imply, an impartial chronicler of all existing views of Church doctrine, ritual, and government. He was the champion of a religious party of the adherents to Episcopacy. He expounded their views, and with such acceptance, that for more than 250 years he has been honoured as a main bulwark of the Church of England. Certainly he has a good claim to his title " the judicious Hooker!" The profound scholarship of the work, its "earnest

1 The story is doubted by Mr Keble, who also, by way of exalting Hooker's virtue, maintains that his nieekness and patience under his wife was not constitutional, but a painfully acquired self-command. Had old Izaak Walton's ideal of virtue been the same as Mr Keble's, we should probably never have heard of Hooker's passive obedience in domestic life; but if we doubt this fact, we must doubt many others that confirm it. In Walton's Biography---and it is our only external authority-Hooker appears as an inactive man of feeble constitution, yielding willingly to the guidance of others. That he should show signs of an irritable temper in his writings is hardly to the purpose, if it could be established. Self-assertion upon paper and self-assertion in an actual presence are two very different things.

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