Page images
PDF
EPUB

'

see that a family can 'stand' without a form of government of divine order'? For both parents may die and the family still stand,' because the brothers and sisters are members one of another. A nation, state, or commonwealth may also so 'stand.' Did England cease to be England when her king's head was cut off? Or does a State cease to be a State in the interval between two parliaments? No Papist has yet imagined that the Catholic Church goes out of existence at the death of a Pope. So 'a Church' may of course 'stand,' though it has neither bishop nor priest. For as the standing of a nation subsists in the entirety of the born (nati), so the standing of a national or parochial Church subsists in the entirety of the re-born, the christened. And it is the liberal doctrine of the Catholic Church, which Hooker and others vindicated against the illiberal and inveterate 'clericalism' of the Nonconformists, that a lay man or woman, by virtue of the universal priesthood of the baptized, may be a minister of baptism. It was in this sense that Andrewes and Bramhall could say that they saw national and parochial Churches on the Continent 'standing,' though they had no bishops or priests. But if these bishops had seen Independent, Baptist, or Wesleyan preachers urging the baptized in Holland, or the Palatinate, to separate from such standing Churches, and form themselves into Congregationalist, Anabaptist, or Methodist segregations from such national and parochial Christian fellowships, they certainly would not have called these companies Churches,' as the dean does. They would have called them, as the Lutheran and Reformed. pastors called and call them, 'sects.'

[ocr errors]

(4) The loose Puritan legend of a number of unnamed men who were beneficed in the English Church, on the ground of their presbyterian ordination, certainly needs to be sifted by historical criticism. The gentle 'rational divine,' Bishop Patrick, had some healthy scepticism about this legend. He took pains to verify the only concrete instance in which the name of the presumed 'un-episcopal' beneficed minister could be cited. He was no other than the famous and learned Nonconformist, Thomas Gataker, who was nearly seventy years old when he took his seat in that curious parliamentary synod, the Westminster Assembly of Divines. Gataker had been appointed rector of Rotherhithe. The Nonconformists used to boast that Gataker had never had any episcopal ordination,' and yet had been instituted by the bishop to the pastoral charge of Rotherhithe. He had been ordained, they said, by a suffragan, whom they described as 'a chor-episcopus,

or presbyter only, one and the same as a rural dean.' They did not know,' said Patrick,' what a suffragan was.' Patrick found, upon examination of the case, that Gataker had been ordained by Dr. Stern, the suffragan Bishop of Colchester. The one Presbyterian parson whose name could be cited was thus proved, upon honest research, to have been a priest, and to have received as episcopal an ordination 'as if he had been ordained by the greatest bishop in the world.'1 If the names of the other beneficed men in Presbyterian orders could have been discovered, and their record examined, it is probable that plain documentary research would have yielded a like result. There was doubtless a legend, credited by a few Conformists and by many Nonconformists, of such violations of canon and law by some English bishop or bishops, but there was no extant proof. If proof could be found, it would prove merely that such bishops had set up themselves, Popelike, above the Church and the law.

(5) What Dr. Perowne really needed to show, in order to establish his point as to the opinions of Bishops Andrewes and Cosin, is that each of them invited Brownist and Anabaptist preachers, as such, to celebrate the Eucharist in his cathedral, or that each of them instituted a Presbyterian or Independent minister, as such, to a parochial cure, and to give the names of the men. As for Bishop Hall, evidence has already been produced of two cases, separated by an interval of twenty years, in which he deliberately re-ordained men who had already received Presbyterian ordination-John Dury in 1634, and Simon Patrick in 1654. Any momentary opportunism of his, written under the brutal pressure of the mad year of 'Episcopophobia,' though we may deplore it as a weak attempt to arrest the parliamentary persecution, must be interpreted by his acts as a free bishop before and after that fearful trial. 'Laud's chosen champion of episcopacy,' as the dean calls him, showed that he had not the courage or the breadth of the great primate. Bishop Jeremy Taylor, who was a profounder theologian and a more liberal thinker than Bishop Hall, had the courage to say that many Anglican divines had made a bitter mistake, and, as it proved in the end, an impolitic one also, in setting up their private opinions against the written law and custom of the Church, by endeavouring to justify their [the foreign Presbyterian, not the English Separatist] ordinations, not thinking,' as he added, 'what would follow upon ourselves.'2 Dr. Perowne actually

1 Bishop Patrick's collected Works, vi. 286, 287.

26 'Episcopacy Asserted.' Works, Heber's ed. vii. 138-42.

says, 'The Elizabethan and Caroline divines were under no temptation to lower the claims of episcopacy,' whereas Jeremy Taylor says this was precisely their temptation. At the Westminster disputation between the representatives of the Papist and Anglican parties in the Church of England, five months after the accession of Elizabeth, Horne, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, laid down the following as the Anglican position, which had already been twice affirmed by the Preface to the Ordinal: The Apostles' authority is derived upon after ages, and conveyed to the bishops, their successors.' The Preface to The Form and Manner of Making and Consecrating Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, published in the same year (1559), was a reproduction of the Preface of the two earlier books of Edward VI. It is true that the Preface of 1662 contains the clause, 'Or hath formerly had episcopal consecration or ordination,' and that this does not occur in the Edwardian or Elizabethan Prefaces. But it is simply a substitute for a passage, with exactly the same meaning, which does occur in the older Prefaces, but was omitted from the 1662 Preface-' Not being, at this present, bishop, priest, or deacon.' Thus the same position as to episcopal ordination which the English Church had maintained against the Papists in the sixteenth century, she maintained in the next century against the Nonconformists and Separatists.

ART. VII.-THE EARLY DIARY OF FRANCES

BURNEY.

The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768-1778, with a Selection from her Correspondence and from the Journals of her Sisters, Susan and Charlotte Burney. Edited by ANNIE RAINE ELLIS, Author of Sylvestra and Editor of Evelina and Camilla. 2 vols. (London, 1889.)

IT is not a little strange that we should now first become acquainted with the Early Diary of Frances Burney. It is more than a century since the world was carried by storm through the appearance of Evelina. It is nearly half a century since Macaulay wrote his well-known essay on Madame d'Arblay, in which the praise awarded to her earlier works gave deeper emphasis to his assertion that her later style was the worst the world had ever seen. Amid the real or affected revival of interest in earlier English fiction which

has blossomed in éditions de luxe of Richardson and Fielding and Smollett, we might have expected that a place would sooner have been found for the early diary of one who can claim to be the mother of that purer romance which forms so large a part of contemporary literature. Possibly the memory of Dr. Burney's Memoirs and Madame d'Arblay's later diaries cast a shadow over the prospects of any further production from the pen of Frances Burney which was dark enough to deter the most enterprising publisher. Whatever the cause which withheld the Early Diary, we are unfeignedly rejoiced that it has been overcome, and we beg to offer our hearty welcome to so substantial an addition to the knowledge of English life in the eighteenth century as these volumes convey.

Before proceeding to speak about the Diary itself, a word of acknowledgment is due to the editor for the careful pains with which she has accomplished a most laborious task. Amidst the multitude of names that occur in these pages there is hardly one which Mrs. Ellis has not elucidated, and almost every unusual word or phrase meets with ample explanation in her copious notes. After such an admissionwhich we make most unreservedly, and with a lively memory of the obscurity in which some recent biographies are left through lack of similar annotation-it seems ungracious to add that Mrs. Ellis's forte is also her foible, and that the conscientious critic is compelled to wade through much matter which could have been spared without injury to these portly volumes. In days when the mass of current literature swells to vast proportions, it is a serious burden to have such a work as this extended over 750 pages by voluminous notes upon every variety of person and subject, however slight their connexion with the text; by a preface of ninety pages, distended by useless anecdotes of the wrong Sam. Crisp, as well as by a detailed account of the fortunes and failures of the ancestry of the veritable' daddy'; and by an appendix of Mrs. Pappendiek's Reminiscences, which are apparently inserted only to show that they are utterly untrustworthy. Mrs. Ellis should ponder the maxim Ne quid nimis.

The domestic interior painted in such vivid colours by Frances Burney's pen presents a variety of elements rarely seen in combination in the same class of life. Her father came of an old, but reduced, family, and was dependent upon the care of an elder brother, who first trained him in music under his own eye, and then bound him as apprentice to the famous Dr. Arne. A youth of drudgery and hardship

neither extinguished Charles Burney's love for the home of his boyhood, nor rendered him an unfit associate in the eyes of Fulk Greville, a dandy of the first water, who wanted an agreeable travelling companion. Intense capacity for enjoyment and for work, a singular power of attraction which secured the friendship of such judges of character as Garrick and Dr. Johnson, a charm of manner acquired through travel and association with men of high breeding, and a professional position which enabled him to gather the leaders of society and the first artists of the day beneath the roof of Newton House, all helped to give Dr. Burney a standing in the metropolis that was almost unique. His house, to the outer world, might have seemed the beau-ideal of simple living and high thinking By his own children, for whom he fulfilled most scantily the simplest duties of a father, and especially by Frances, he was absolutely adored. Frances lost her mother when she was only nine years old, and five years later Dr. Burney married the widow of the Rev. Stephen Allen to take charge of his six motherless children. The second Mrs. Burney had already three children, and two more were the issue of the second marriage. Mrs. Burney generally went to Lynn for a sojourn of some months' duration in each year. The doctor was engaged in giving music lessons from eight A.M. to ten P.M. so unremittingly that he took his meals in the coach which conveyed him from the house of one pupil to that of another, and on his return retreated, after a hasty supper, to spend half the night at work in his study. Life under such conditions was favourable to the free development of those personal characteristics which gave a distinct individuality to each member of the family, and the whole group was charmingly united by strong mutual affection. Almost all of them had a passion for writing, and the tone and sparkle which glitter in the Diary and its appendices explain and justify the warm regard of Garrick for all the Burneys. Besides the education inseparable from constant intercourse with clever men and women, through a Huguenot grandmother French was as familiar as English to them, and most of the daughters spent a couple of years at a Parisian boarding-school. Yet it is curious that the one member of the family who did not enjoy such exceptional advantages became pre-eminent as the authoress of Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla.

It could hardly have been other than a perilous training for young motherless girls which fell to the lot of Frances Burney and her sisters. Her stepmother was absent for

VOL. XXXI.-NO. LXII.

EE

« PreviousContinue »