tiently. It had suffered persecution, and it had learned forgive

ness.

The three great men whose works we propose to examine occupy a period extending between the years 1553 and 1677, or rather more than a century—a century filled with vicissitudes of the gravest import to the fortunes of the English Church. We should not have ventured to take a view of this part of our subject embracing so long a period of time, and necessitating the consideration of so many, so various, and so important works, but from the reflection that these men and their productions bear one stamp and possess a singular resemblance in mode of thought and tone of language; they all belong, intellectually if not chronologically, to the Elizabethan era.

The first of them in point of time is Richard Hooker, born near Exeter in 1553, and enabled, by the wise benevolence of the venerable Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, to study at the University of Oxford, where he speedily distinguished himself for his vast learning and industry, no less than by a simplicity and purity of character almost angelic.

Having attracted the notice of Bishop Sandys, he was made tutor to that prelate's son, who, together with Cranmer, a descendant of the archbishop, enjoyed the benefit of Hooker's superintendence, and who ever afterwards retained for his wise and simple preceptor the warmest veneration and respect. After occupying for a short time the chair of Deputy Professor of Hebrew, he entered into holy orders, and married. This last important act of life was productive of so much affliction, even to his pious and gentle spirit, and was entered upon with a guileless simplicity so characteristic of Hooker's unworldly temper, that we cannot refrain from giving the anecdote as related by his friend and biographer Walton. Arriving wet and weary in London, he put up there at a house set apart for the accommodation of the preachers who had to deliver the sermon at Paul's Cross. His hostess treated him with so much kindness that Hooker's gratitude induced him to accept a proposition made by her of procuring him a wife. This she accordingly did in the person of her own daughter, “a silly clownish woman, and withal a mere Xantippe," whom he accordingly married, and who appears to have inflicted upon her simple and patient husband an uninterrupted succession of such penance as ascetics usually exercise upon themselves in the hope of recompense in a future existence. visited, at a rectory in Buckinghamshire to which he was afterwards presented, by his old pupils Sandys and Cranmer, Hooker was found in the fields tending sheep and reading Horace, possibly contrasting the sweet pictures of rural life painted by the Venusian bard with the vulgar realities which surrounded him. On returning to the house the guests "received little entertainment except from the conversation of Hooker," who was disturbed by his wife's calling

When

him away to rock the cradle. On their departure the next morning Cranmer could not refrain from expressing his sympathy with Hooker's domestic miseries, with his poverty and the obscurity of his condition. "My dear George," replied this Christian philosopher, "if saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my wise Creator hath appointed for me, but labour (as indeed I do daily) to submit mine to his will, and possess my soul in patience and peace." Shortly after the event related in this touching anecdote, Hooker received the dignified appointment of Master of the Temple in London, a post in which his learning, genius, and piety were exhibited in all their brightness, but in which his resignation and love of peace were put to a trial not less severe, though certainly less humiliating, than those to which this heavenly-minded man was exposed in his Buckinghamshire rectory. He soon found himself engaged in a controversy with Walter Travers, his colleague in the ministry of the Temple, an eloquent and able man, but professing certain opinions respecting church government with which Hooker could not coincide. In this interminable sea of discussion was now conscientiously embarked the mild and modest Hooker; and though the argument was conducted on both sides with good temper and courtesy, it embittered the existence of our peace-loving divine, and ended in his antagonist being. suspended from his ministerial functions by the authority of Archbishop Whitgift. Hooker on this occasion wrote to the prelate a letter imploring deliverance from "that troubled sea of noises and harsh discontents," an element so unfitted to the peculiar character of his mind and temper, and a position which prevented him from proceeding with the great work he was now meditating, his "Treatise on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.' The letter breathes so noble a spirit of Christian purity, and is withal so characteristic of the man, that we shall, we trust, be pardoned for inserting some passages of it; the rather as it contains the outline and general aim of the work itself.

“MY LORD,—When I lost the freedom of my cell, which was my college, yet I found some degree of it in my quiet country parsonage. But I am weary of the noise and oppositions of this place; and, indeed, God and nature did not intend me for contentions, but for study and quietness. And, my Lord, my particular contests here with Mr. Travers have proved the more unpleasant to me because I believe him to be a good man; and upon that belief hath occasioned me to examine my conscience touching his opinions. And to satisfy that, I have consulted the Holy Scriptures and other laws both human and divine. And in this examination I have not only satisfied myself, but have begun a treatise, in which I intend the satisfaction of others, by a demonstration of the reasonableness af our laws of ecclesiastical polity. But, my Lord, I shall never be

able to finish what I have begun, unless I be removed into some quiet parsonage, where I may see God's blessings spring out of my mother earth, and eat my bread in peace and privacy; a place where I may, without disturbance, meditate my approaching mortality, and that great account which all flesh must give at the last day to the God of all spirits."

His wise and moderate desire was granted; he was transferred, in 1591, to the rectory of Boscomb, in Wiltshire, where he finished the first four books of his treatise, which were printed in 1594. He was in the following year presented, by Queen Elizabeth, to the rectory of Bishop's Bourne, in Kent, whither he removed, and where he spent, in learned retirement and in the faithful discharge of his pastoral duties, the short remainder of his life. Here he completed the fifth book of his great work, published in 1597, and also prepared three others, which did not appear till after his death. This event took place in November, 1600; and it is difficult to conceive any human soul, purified by suffering, elevated by the most vigorous yet meekest intellect, adorned by learning, and inspired by piety, passing through our mortal life with less of stain, and rising into a more glorious existence with less need of change and purifying, than the angelic spirit of the mild and venerable Hooker.

"Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity,'" says the excellent and acute historian of the literature of Europe, "might seem to fall under the head of theology; but, the first book of this work being by much the best, Hooker ought rather to be reckoned among those who have weighed the principles, and delineated the boundaries, of moral and political science." No quality is more surely a concomitant of the highest order of genius than its suggestiveness, and what we may call its expansive character. Though originally written to determine a particular and limited controversy on certain matters of church discipline, Hooker's immortal treatise is a vast arsenal or storehouse of all those proofs and arguments upon which rests the whole structure of the moral and political edifice. "The first lays open," says D'Israeli, "the foundations of law and order, to escape from the mother of confusion, which breedeth destruction."" Unhappily, however, this great work is incomplete; or at least so much mystery rests upon its publication, that it is impossible to divest the mind of the most fatal of all suspicions which can affect a book-suspicions as to its genuineness. At the death of Hooker his manuscripts fell into the hands of his despicable wife, who, marrying indecently soon after the loss of the good man whose constant penance she had been, at first refused to give any account of the precious literary remains of her deceased husband. It afterwards appeared that she had allowed various Puritan ministers (men professing the very opinions which Hooker had written to refute) to have free access to these papers; and it is to their sacrilegious tampering that we ought doubtless to

}

attribute not only the destruction of many of these papers, but also alterations which have apparently been made in the text. The wretched woman, who had thus betrayed the glory of her departed husband, was found dead in her bed the day after she had been forced to make this humiliating confession. The precious manu. scripts now passed through several hands, and an edition of the five books of the Ecclesiastical Polity' was published in 1617. "Again, in 1632," continues D'Israeli, who has given us the secret history of Hooker's great work, "the five undoubted genuine books were reprinted. But their fate and their perils had not yet terminated." At the troubled period of the Long Parliament, Hooker's manuscripts were again examined by order of the House of Commons, and the sixth and eighth books were given to the world. It is singular that in this, as well as in subsequent editions, the seventh book is not included; and doubts were even raised as to the genuineness of that book when restored by Dr. Gauden in his edition of the work. It is, however, now generally admitted that the seventh book, though hastily composed, is really genuine; but we must, on the other hand, content ourselves with the mortifying conclusion that the so-called sixth book is irrecoverably lost; that which occupies its place being a separate treatise, never intended to form part of the Ecclesiastical Polity.' In spite, however, of the loss of an important portion of its argument, in spite of the numerous and often contradictory passages which have been interpolated by unfaithful copyists and disingenuous commentators, the 'Ecclesiastical Polity' will ever remain one of the noblest ornaments of English literature, and one of the mightiest triumphs of human genius and industry. "He had drunk," says Hallam, "at the streams of ancient philosophy, and acquired from Plato and Tully somewhat of their redundancy and want of precision, with their comprehensiveness of observation and their dignity of soul." When a portion of Hooker's preface was translated by an English Romanist to the Pope, his Holiness expressed the greatest surprise at the erudition and acuteness of the book. “There is no learning that this man has not searched into," said the Pontiff; "nothing too hard for his understanding, and his books will get reverence by age." James I. of England, a prince to whom we cannot deny the possession of most extensive learning, inquiring after Hooker, and hearing that his recent death had been deeply lamented by the Queen, paid the following tribute to his genius "And I receive it with no less sorrow; for I have received more satisfaction (that is, conviction) in reading a leaf of Mr. Hooker than I had in large treatises by many of the learned: many others write well, but yet in the next age they will be forgotten." Hooker's style, though full of vigorous and idiomatic expressions, is much more Latin and artificial than was usual at that time: he does not disfigure his sentences with that vain parade of quotation which di3

tinguishes contemporary writings: his profound learning was, if we may use the expression, chemically and not mechanically united with his mind; it was incorporated not by contact, but by solution. Though the general tone of the work is of course abstract and even dry, the sweet and simple character of the man sometimes makes itself perceptible through the elaborate and brilliant panoply of the orator; or, to use the beautiful words of D'Israeli, "Hooker is the first vernacular writer whose classical pen harmonised a numerous prose. While his earnest eloquence, freed from all scholastic pedantry, assumes a style stately in its structure, his gentle spirit sometimes flows into natural humour, lovely in the freshness of its simplicity."

In purity and meekness of personal character, in immensity of erudition, and in power of eloquence, there is a strong resemblance between the great writer of whom we have just feebly attempted to give a sketch and the sweet orator to whom we are about to turn our attentionJeremy Taylor. They were both stamped with the majestic impress of that noble age of our literature, when the minds of men seemed to possess something of the simplicity, grandeur, and freshness which we fondly believe characterized (at least physically) the primeval races of mankind. Taylor's learning, indeed, was hardly less vast and multifarious than that of Hooker; but, whether from the poetical and imaginative turn of his mind, or from the greater temptations offered by the more declamatory nature of the subjects of his writings, his erudition appears less under his command than Hooker's. The latter may be compared to the Roman warrior, whose arms indeed were weighty, but not so much so as to impair his strength and agility in the combat; while Taylor reminds us rather of the knight of the Middle Ages, sheathed from plume to spur in shining and ponderous panoply, but his armour is too complicated in its parts to admit of free motion, and the very plumes, and scarfs, and penoncelles which adorn it, are an impediment, no less than a decoration. We find, in short, in the writings of Taylor something of that diffuse, sensuous, and effeminate overrichness which distinguishes the style of many of the Greek and Roman fathers-Tertullian, for instance, or Chrysostom. But in spite of these defects, we cannot conceal our conviction that the works of Jeremy Taylor are, upon the whole, the finest production of English ecclesiastical literature; or, to use the strong but hardly exaggerated language of Parr, "they are fraught with guileless ardour, with peerless eloquence, and with the richest stores of knowledge, historical, classical, scholastic, and theological."

He was born in the humblest rank of life (his father was a barber at Cambridge), in the year 1613, and entered Caius College, in that university, in his thirteenth year. On taking his bachelor's degree in 1631 he entered into holy orders, and made his first step in the career of ecclesiastical advancement, by preaching, for a friend, in