occasion to consider his books separately. Whatever the subject, they one and all bear the impress of the same inventive, confident, good-humoured, and pre-eminently witty mind. We read a page of his on a topic on which we look for serious treatment, and nothing but serious treatment. Suddenly we find in the middle of it some quaint conceit, some ingenious pun, which at once raises a smile if not a laugh. His wit is a perennial fountain, bubbling up continually in the most unexpected places. A few examples may be cited: "Anger kept till the next morning, with manna, doth putrify and corrupt; save that manna, corrupted not at all (and anger most of all), kept the next Sabbath. St. Paul saith, 'Let not the sun go down on your wrath,' to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let us take the apostle's meaning rather than his words, with all possible speed to depose our passion; not understanding him so literally that we may take leave to be angry till sunset; then might our wrath lengthen with the days, and men in Greenland, where day lasts above a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope of revenge." Speaking of the charity of the Jesuits, he says, "Such is the charity of the Jesuits, that they never owe any man any ill-will, making present payment thereof." "Aphek, whose walls falling down, gave both death and gravestones to 27,000 of Benhadad's soldiers." Of the celebrated Selden he remarks, "Mr. Selden had some coins of the Roman emperors, and a good many more of our English kings." Hundreds of such instances might be given. But his effervescent wit, as is perhaps generally the case, was accompanied with shrewd practical wisdom and great fertility of intellectual resource. Coleridge, with characteristic exaggeration, said, "Next to Shakespeare, I am not certain whether Thomas Fuller, beyond all other writers, does not excite in me the sense and emotion of the marvellous; the degree in which any given faculty, or combination of faculties, is possessed and manifested, so far surpassing what one would have thought possible in a single mind, as to give one's admiration the flavour or quality of wonder." Coleridge's judgments upon

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favourite authors must, like Charles Lamb's, be accepted with great reservations; but to the literary epicure, who loves to read books that have infused into every page of them the genius of a singular and original mind, few volumes are likely to be more attractive than the works of Thomas Fuller.

With all his many excellences, Fuller, it must be owned, never touches, even in his finest passages, the highest chords of our nature. Witty, ingenious, inventive, he was not imbued with a poetic spirit, and those who desire rich strains of devotional feelings must seek for them elsewhere. They will find them in abundance in the works of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, whose writings, though marred by very complicated sentencearrangement and unpruned luxuriance of imagination, still rank among the best religious classics in our language. On the whole, he was the greatest prose writer of his time, and, as was said above, the period was rich in prose writers of great excellence. Taylor was born in 1613 at Cambridge, at which University he received his education. Taken under the patronage of Archbishop Laud, who had been greatly impressed by his eloquence, he was, at the age of twenty, placed at All Souls' College, Oxford, where he obtained a fellowship, and was appointed one of the Archbishop's chaplains. A year or two later, Juxon, Bishop of London, presented him to the rectory of Uppingham, in Rutlandshire. On the outbreak of the Civil War, he embarked his fortunes with the Royalists, and composed a work in favour of Episcopacy, which obtained for him the degree of D.D. from the King-an honour more than compensated for by the sequestration of his rectory of Uppingham by the Presbyterians, who were now rapidly gaining strength. Of Taylor's history during the Civil War not much is certainly known. In 1643 we find him residing with his mother-in-law in Wales; and in the following year, his fortunes having again. brought him into connection with the royal army, he was taken prisoner in the battle fought near Cardigan Castle. He was soon released, but preferred remaining in the comparatively safe solitudes of Wales to again risking the loss of his liberty.

In conjunction with two friends he opened a school,

and also busied himself in the composition of his first great work, "The Liberty of Prophesying," a plea for tolerance, which would not now be considered very liberal, but which was far in advance of the opinions then entertained by most on that subject. In the dedication to that work he says, alluding to his imprisonment, "In the great storm which dashed the vessel of the Church all in pieces, I had been cast on the coast of Wales, and in a little boat thought to have enjoyed that rest and quietness which in England, in a far greater, I could not hope for. Here I cast anchor, and thinking to ride safely, the storm followed me with so impetuous violence, that it broke a cable, and I lost my anchor. And here again I was exposed to the mercy of the sea, and the gentleness of an element that could distinguish neither things nor persons; and but that He that stilleth the raging of the sea, and the noise of the waves, and the madness of His people, had provided a plank for me, I had been lost to all opportunities of content or study; but I know not whether I have been more preserved by the courtesies of my friends or the gentleness and mercies of a noble enemy." He soon found a patron in the Earl of Carbery, at whose seat, Golden Grove, he wrote his "Life of Christ" and his “Golden Grove," and his most popular work, "Holy Living and Dying," besides several minor performances. Some expressions in the "Golden Grove" gave offence to Cromwell, and in the years between 1654 and 1658 Taylor more than once suffered imprisonment. In 1658 his friends obtained for him an alternate lecturership at Lisburne, in the north-east of Ireland, where he lived in tranquillity and happiness till the Restoration. About this time he composed his most elaborate work, the "Ductor Dubitantium" (Guide to the Scrupulous). His most important works, besides those already mentioned, are his treatise on "Repentance" and his sermons. After the Restoration the sunshine of Court favour shone upon him. He was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor, and afterwards Bishop of Dromore, and had besides several minor dignities bestowed upon him. He died in 1667.

This

Taylor has been called the Shakespeare of English prose: and although his position as a prose writer is not at all comparable to that occupied by Shakespeare as a poet, there is a good deal of truth in the designation. Like Shakespeare, his superabundant fancy occasionally gets the better of his good taste, and he pours forth the riches of his imagination with a profusion which is more to be wondered at than admired. Like Shakespeare, too, he seems to have "written right on," careless of minute accuracy in the grammatical construction of his sentences. He possessed the typical poetic temperament: tender, full of love for all that is beautiful, impassioned, and impetuous. Another characteristic of Taylor is his width of learning, which is distributed over his works with the same careless abundance as the flowers of his fancy. Thus in writings intended for popular perusal, he speaks of hard students "being as mute as the Seriphian frogs;" of "garments made of the Calabrian fleece, and stained with the blood of the murɛx;" of "the tender lard of the Apulian swine;" and so on. pedantry (for it can be called by no better name) is no doubt to be in part attributed to the fashion of the time; but Taylor carries the practice further than any of his contemporaries. His quotations from classical authors, which are frequent, are, as has been several times shown, often inaccurate to an astonishing degree. He was also a great coiner of new words, using "respersed" for "scattered;""deordination" for “confusion;" "clancularly" for "secretly;" "immorigerous" for "disobedient ;" "ferity" for "fierceness;" "intenerate" for "render soft," and many others of the same kind. With all his faults (many of which, after all, are faults that a man of less copious genius could not have committed), Taylor was a writer of astonishing power, who can in no wise be passed over by any one aspiring to even a fair knowledge of English literature. "He was," said Coleridge, "a man constitutionally overflowing with pleasurable kindliness, who scarcely even in a casual illustration introduces the image of a woman, child, or bird, but he embalms the thought with so rich a tenderness as makes the very words seem beauties and fragments

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of poetry from a Euripides or a Simonides." In occasional passages he reaches surpassing heights of eloquence. Take the following description of the "Day of Judgment" :

"Then all the beasts and creeping things, the monsters, and the usual inhabitants of the sea shall be gathered together, and make fearful noises to distract mankind: the birds shall mourn and change their song into threnes and sad accents; rivers of fire shall rise from east to west, and the stars shall be rent into threads of light, and scatter like the beards of comets; then shall be fearful earthquakes, and the rocks shall rend in pieces, the trees shall distil blood, and the mountains and fairest structures shall return into their primitive dust; the wild beasts shall leave their dens, and shall come into the companies of men, so that you shall hardly tell how to call them, herds of men or congregations of beasts; then shall the graves open and give up their dead, and those which are alive in nature and dead in fear shall be forced from the rocks whither they went to hide them, and from the caverns of the earth where they would fain have been concealed; because their retirements are dismantled and their rocks broken into wild ruptures, and admit a strange light into their secret bowels; and the men being forced abroad into the theatre of mighty horrors, shall run up and down distracted and at their wits' end; and then some shall die, and some shall be changed; and by this time the elect shall be gathered together from the four quarters of the world, and Christ shall come along with them to judgment."

But it is not alone in sublime description that Taylor excels. In pathos he has few equals; and had we space, many passages from his writings might be quoted full of the most touching grace and tenderness.

Two other theological writers of the period may be briefly mentioned. One of these was Richard Baxter (1615-91), who, originally ordained in the Church of England, afterwards joined the Parliamentary party. Of his many works-he is said to have written one hundred and sixty-eight in all—two still remain popular, the "Saint's Rest" and the "Call to the