and his Mundus Alter et Idem' (Another World yet the Same) is said (though that is disputed) to have furnished Swift with the idea of Gulliver's Travels.' 1

The character and opinions of the "immortal Chillingworth," 1602-1644, attract interest; his style is as finished, clear, and vigorous as any that was written in his day; and he argues with great force. He was a distinguished student at Oxford, a versatile scholar, eminent both in mathematics and in poetry, and noted for the confident independence of his views, and fearlessness in asserting and acting up to them. His patron was Laud, and it needed no little policy to keep so erratic and independent a genius in the orthodox track. He was first gained over by the Roman Catholics; and when regained, he refused to sign the Church formulas, consenting only when it was urged that they were merely bonds of peace and union, and that subscription did not imply belief of the whole. At the siege of Gloucester, he showed his versatility by proposing certain siege engines on a Roman model. Before the King at Oxford, he boldly attacked the vices of the Cavaliers. His chief wok is 'The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation.' &c., 1637. It is a remarkably bold and liberal book. He is not tied down to his own Church; by the "religion of Protestants" he understands neither "the doctrine of Luther, or Calvin, or Melanchthon; nor the Confession of Augusta, or Geneva; nor the Catechism of Heidelberg, nor the Artic.es of the Church of England-no, nor the harmony of Protestant Confessions," but “the Bible, and THE BIBLE ONLY." His work is undoubtedly the germ of Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying,' published ten years later; and it breathes a still bolder and wider spirit of tolerance :—

'I see plainly, and with mine own eyes, that there are Popes against Popes, councils against councils, some fathers against others, the same fathers against themselves, a consent of fathers of one age against a consent of fathers of another age, the Church of one age against the Church of another age. In a word, there is no sufficient certainty but of Scripture only for any considering man to build upon. Propose me anything out of this Book, and require whether I believe or no, and seem it never so incomprehensible to human reason, I will subscribe it with hand and heart, as knowing no demonstration can be stronger than this. God hath said so, therefore it is true. In other things I will take no man's liberty of judgment from him; neither shall any man take mine from me. I will think no man the worse man nor the worse Christian: I will love no man the less for differing in opinion from me. I am fully assured that God does not, and therefore that men ought not to require any more of any man than this, to believe the Scripture to be

1 Like other writers of the time, he has his pedantic nickname. Sir Henry Wotton called him the English Seneca, probably because he wrote Satires, Epistles, and Moral Essays. Fuller says "He was commonly called our English Seneca, for the pureness, plainness, and fulness of his style; not ill at controversies, more happy at comments, very good in characters, best of all in meditations."

God's Word, to endeavour to find the true sense of it, and to live according to it."

The "ever-memorable John Hales," 1584-1656, was before even Chillingworth in advocating tolerance. In his tract on "Schism and Schismatics," published in 1628, he boldly asserted that "Church authority is none." The chief public incident in his life was his at endance at the Synod of Dort, 1618-19; his letters written at the time contain perhaps the best account of its proceedings. He wrote little: some of his sermons and tracts were collected into a volume in 1659, after his death. He was a little man with " a most ingenuous countenance, sanguine, cheerful, and full of air." He had a high reputation for learning, wit, and courteous manner. His style is simple and felicitous.

HISTORY.

This period very nearly saw the end of the last of the Chron iclers, Sir Richard Baker, 1568-1645, whose work, 'A Chronicle of the Kings of England, from the Time of the Romans' Government unto the Death of King James,' was published in 1641. Baker's name, though not his fame, has been kept alive by his connection with Sir Roger de Coverley in the 'Spectator': Addison, ridiculing the simple ignorance of the Tory squires in the person of Sir Roger, makes him quote Sir Richard Baker as a great authority. Poor Sir Richard is visited quite as bitterly as his rustic admirer:

"The glorious names of Henry the Fifth and Queen Elizabeth gave the Knight great opportunities of shining, and of doing justice to Sir Richard Baker, who, as our Knight observed with some surprise, had a great many kings in him whose monuments he had not seen in the Abbey.”

Baker's popularity with country gentlemen was probably due to his style, which is praised by such an authority as Sir Henry Wotton-"full of sweet raptures and researching conceits, nothing borrowed, nothing vulgar, and yet all glowing with a certain equal facility."

Two antiquaries survived from the illustrious knot of King James's reign through the whole of this generation and far into the next. James Usher or Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, 1581-1656, and John Selden, lawyer and politician, Keeper of the Records in the Tower, 1584-1654, were intimate with Camden, Spelman, and Cotton. Both were men of some fortune: Usher inherited a good estate, but retained only a competency, resigning the rest to his brother; and Selden, having a lucrative practice as a consulting lawyer and a conveyancer, possessed, as Fuller said, "a number of coins of the Roman Emperors, and a good many more of the later English Kings." Their principal antiquarian

works are in Latin.

Usher is an authority in chronological matters his 'Annales' (1650-54) settles the Chronology of Ancient History from the Creation to the Dispersion of the Jews. He wrote also voluminously on Church Antiquities. Further, he was a royalist, and wrote a denunciation of armed resistance to the King; this was not published till after his death. Sermons and Letters were also published posthumously. -Selden was an antiquary of more varied accomplishments, writing on the administration of Britain, international law, the legal antiquities of the Jews, the gods of Syria, the Arundel Marbles, old English Ballads, &c. In politics, both of State and of Church, he was opposed to Usher; his legal learning and skill are said to have been of service in the protestation against James, and in the Petition of Right against Charles. A cautious man, he held back from public business when his party went to an extreme. Selden's learning, prudence, and polite affable manner, made him perhaps the most generally respected man of his time-respected alike by Royalist and by Puritan. As a writer of English, he is known by his History of Tithes' (1618), which offended the clergy by denying their divine right to such revenue; but chiefly by his 'Table-Talk,' published after his death. The style of his writings is harsh, obscure, and antiquated; in conversation he seems to have been more felicitous, dealing in pointed sententious aphorisms and witty turns. The Table-Talk' is full of worldly wisdom and❤ sarcasms against clerical bigotry.

Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 1581-1648, a high-minded diplomatist, known in philosophy as the author of a Latin deistical treatise, De Veritate,' wrote a history of the Life and Reign of King Henry VIII. Those that differ from Lord Herbert most widely, join in admiring the dignity and earnestness of his character. His history may be put side by side with Lord Bacon's 'History of Henry VII.,' as one of the best historical works published before 1660. His style is not so clear, flowing, and pointed as Bacon's, but the idiom is purer. His sagacity in the explanation of affairs is no less remarkable, and he is at greater pains to make sure of the facts.

MISCELLANEOUS.

"Rare" Ben Jonson (1574-1637), wrote a prose work entitled 'Timber; or, Discoveries made on Man and Matter'—a series of random jottings on various subjects, containing some very sensible literary criticism. He does not affect the abrupt discontinuous style of Bacon's Essays; he writes rather in a free and easy conversational style. The following are specimens of his literary notes:

"And as it is fit to read the best authors to youth first, so let them be of the openest and clearest. As Livy before Sallust, Sidney before Donne : and beware of letting them taste Gower or Chaucer at first, lest falling too much in love with antiquity, and not apprehending the weight, they grow rough and barren in language only."

"Periods are beautiful when they are not too long: for so they have their strength too, as in a pike or javelin."

The following is partly an anticipation of Carlyle's metaphor about a plethoric style :

"We say it is a fleshy style when there is much periphrasis and circuit of words: and when with more than enough, it grows fat and corpulent. It hath blood and juice when the words are proper and apt, their sound sweet, and the phrase neat and packed."

His criticism of Shakspeare is often quoted, almost always without the qualification, and too often as an evidence of Ben's jealousy :

"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakspeare, that, in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer has always been, Would he had blotted out a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour: for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any."

In the Reliquiæ Wottonianæ,' the remains of Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639),-a wit of more polish than Overbury, King James's favourite diplomatist, and author of the definition of an ambassador as an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country we find a weighty balance of sentence almost as finished as Johnson's. The following is a sample :

"Sometimes the possibility of preferment prevailing with the credulous, expectation of less expense with the covetous, opinion of ease with the fond, and assurance of remoteness with the unkind parents, have moved them, without discretion, to engage their children in adventures of learning, by whose return they have received but small contentment: but they who are deceived in their first designs deserve less to be condemned, as such who, after sufficient trial, persist in their wilfulness are noway to be pitied."

The use of the abstract noun makes the resemblance to the Johnsonian structure all the more complete. Here is another specimen :

"The fashion of commending our friends' abilities before they come to trial sometimes takes good effect with the common sort, who, building their belief on authority, strive to follow the conceit of their betters; but usually, amongst men of independent judgments, this bespeaking of opinion breeds a purpose of stricter examination, and if the report be answered, procures only a bare acknowledgment, whereas," &c.

Among the miscellaneous writers of the period may be mentioned two travellers: George Sandys (1577-1643), son of Archbishop Sandys, translator of Ovid, and author of a book of 'Travels in the East' (1615); and William Lithgow (d. 1640), a Scotsman, who, during the reign of James, spent nineteen years in walking through "the most famous kingdoms in Europe, Asia, and Africa." Sandys was an accomplished traveller, with a constant eye to literary effect; his 'Travels' went through many editions. Lithgow seems to have walked more for adventure, and for the pleasure of boasting how many places he had visited, and how many miles he had walked on foot.

We must also mention the author of the 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' the recluse student of Christ Church, Oxford, Robert Burton (1576-1640). A grave dyspeptic man, and a great reader"confusedly tumbling over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment "—he was eccentric and original, and picked out of various authors an enormous mass of quotations suiting his peculiar moods. With an immense parade of divisions and subdivisions, there is no method in his book; the heading of a section is little clue to its contents. His enumeration of the acts characteristic of different forms of melancholy is wide enough to include every son of Adam in the category of gloom. The leading features of his style, if style it may be called, are profuse quotation-several authorities being quoted for the most trivial remark-and long strings of particular words by way of exhausting a general subject, poured out in successive sentences without break. Part of his account of himself may be quoted as a sample:

"I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have nothing, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva's tower. Greater preferment as I could never get, so am I not in debt for it, I have a competence (laus Deo) from my noble and munificent patrons, though I live still a collegiate student, as Democritus in his garden, and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum, sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world, Et tanquam in specula positus (as he said) in some high place above you all, like Stoicus Sapiens, omnia sæcula, præterita præsentiaque videns, uno velut intuitu. A mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me as from a common theatre or scene. I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily mus ters and preparations and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks," &c.

The enumeration would stretch on through one of our pages. To the modern writer Burton is of use only as a quarry, and to this purpose he has been turned by many. Sterne is not the only