Master, and I wish ye would let him read my letter, and the joy I have, if he will appear for, and side with my Lord Jesus. Grace, grace be with you.-Yours, in his sweet Lord Jesus.

ABERDEEN, 13th March 1637.

S. R.

(From the Letters.)

VIOLENT AND NATURAL DEATH

VIOLENCE more or less is an accident of death, as it is the same hand folded in, or the fingers stretched out; violent death is but death on horseback, and with wings, or a stroke with the fist, as the other death is a blow with the palms of the hand. Natural death is death going on foot, and creeping with a slower pace; violent death unites all its forces at once, and takes the city by storm, and comes with sourer and blacker visage. Death natural divides itself in many several bits of deaths; old age being a long spun out death, and nature seems to render the city more willingly, and death comes with a whiter and a milder visage; the one has a salter bite, and teeth of steel and iron; the other has softer fingers, and takes asunder the boards of the claytabernacle more leisurely, softly, tenderly, and with less din, as not willing that death should appear death, but a sleep; the violent death is as when apples green and raw are plucked off the tree, or when flowers in the bud, and young, are plucked up by the roots; the other way of dying is, as when apples are ripened and are filled with well-boiled summer sap, and fall off the tree of their own accord in the eater's mouth; or when flowers wither on the stalk. Some dying full of days have like banqueters, a surfeit of time, others are suddenly plucked away when they are green; but which of the ways you die, not to die in the Lord is terrible; ye may know ye shall die by the fields ye grow on, while ye live; a believer on Christ, breathes in Christ, speaks, walks, prays, believes, eateth, drinketh, sickens, dies in Christ; Christ is the soil he is planted in, he groweth on the banks of the paradise of God; when he falleth, he cannot fall wrong; some are trees growing on the banks of the river of fire and brimstone; when God hews down the tree, and death fells them, the tree can fall no otherwise than in hell; O how sweet to be

in Christ, and to grow as a tree planted on the banks of the river of life, when such die they fall in Christ's lap and in His bosom; be the death violent or natural! it is all one whether a strong gale and a rough storm shore the child of God on the new Jerusalem's dry land, or if a small calm blast, even with rowing of oars, bring the passenger to heaven, if once he be in that goodly land.

(From Christ Dying.)

JOHN EARLE

[Born at York about 1601. According to Wood, graduated B.A. and was elected to a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, in 1619. He was a resident in the University in 1628, the date of the publication, by Edward Blount, of his Microcosmography, or A Piece of the World discovered in Essays and Characters. King Charles II., whose tutor he had been, and whose fortunes he had followed in exile, conferred upon him in 1662 the Bishopric of Worcester, whence in 1663 he was promoted to Salisbury. He died at Oxford in 1665.]

EARLE'S epitaph in Merton College Chapel, conformably with the fact that he lived in an age of academical studies from which we are but just emerging, based his literary reputation upon his presumably excellent Latin versions of two standard English books. But although no reference was allowed on his tomb to the one work in the vulgar tongue which has secured to him a place among our men of letters, the inscription suggests precisely enough the antithetical mixture which distinguished him "as an author," while it commended him "as a man." "Potuit in aulâ vivere, et mundum spernere: he contrived to live at court, while contemning the world.” No sentence could better summarise that which attracts and that which edifies in the character-sketches of this quick-witted observer and high-minded censor of his times.

It would be rather absurd to treat a slender collection of "detached leaves" like the Microcosmography (to which in later editions new detachments were from time to time added) as a classic of our prose-literature; but there is no difficulty in accounting for its prolonged popularity, and good reason for approving the soundness of the judgment with which it found favour. It fell in, as is the case with all but possibly a very few successful books (and I think I might omit the qualification), with a current of public predilection; yet its author knew how to preserve, or preserved unconsciously, the individual note.

These books of Characters-short essays delineating in brief and quasi-aphoristic form particular types of men or women— were an appropriate product of what may (roughly) be called the Jacobean age. On the one hand, the creativeness of dramatic characterisation had exhausted, or was exhausting itself; on the other, the introspection which Puritanism had begun to enforce called for the comparisons without which no examination of self seems to be altogether complete. The literary form suited to this still real, however extenuated, demand was ready to hand. Its inventor Theophrastus had, like Earle, lived in an age marked, to borrow the words of Professor Jebb, by a reaction from creating to analysing; and the century in which the Microcosmography was written gave birth to scores of imitations of so congenial a model. Earle, who unlike some of these had most certainly read Theophrastus, is differentiated from them all-including the Master— by characteristics of his own. Inasmuch as while the Greek `original at once inspired and controlled his method, the Characters which Earle had immediately before him were undoubtedly those of Overbury, it may suffice to compare these two series. The wider variety of observation on the part of the courtier is more than compensated by the greater depth and refinement in the university scholar; but while Overbury displays on occasion a graphic skill of which Earle's sketches, as it were, offer hardly more than a promise, he cannot be said to be Earle's superior either in pure wit, or I think in the conception of those grave counterfoils so effectively introduced by both authors. What, in the former way, could be better than the turn in Earle's very first Character, A Child: "The older he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches ? " Or the touches in the Character of A Plain Country Fellow, who "never praises God but on good ground"; and who thinks "Noah's flood the greatest plague that ever was, not because it drowned the world, but spoiled the grass?" Or, as a mere matter of quaint novelty of style, the final reference of A Young Raw Preacher to a chambermaid, with whom we will leave him now in the bonds of wedlock. Next Sunday you shall have him again?"

The seventy-eight types which in the most enlarged edition of the book make up the World in Small, display less diversity than might perhaps have been expected from so numerous a selection. But the writer, it must be remembered, had, unlike Overbury, not yet begun his travels, and was a resident college fellow