these solemn hours of prayer and meditation. A considerable portion of his time was devoted by Mr. Ferrar to the composition of the essays, short biographies of the saints, historical sketches, and moral and devotional works, which were sometimes read aloud during meals, or used as textbooks for the younger members of the family. Ties of the closest friendship existed between Nicholas Ferrar and George Herbert: they always spoke of each other as brothers, and though personal meetings were rare, correspondence was frequent up to the time of George Herbert's death.

It was perhaps only to be expected that the exemplification of piety and strictness of life manifested at Little Gidding should provoke not only wonder and curiosity, but obloquy and malig nant abuse. The Ferrars suffered alike from the misrepresentation of Puritans and of Roman Catholics; and although all their rules were cordially approved by Bishop Williams, who paid several visits to Little Gidding from his palace. at Buckden, they were denounced on the one hand as Papists and on the other as Protestants, being in fact neither, but living in strict and loyal accordance with the doctrine and discipline of the Anglican Church.

Mrs. Ferrar died in 1635, and her son Nicholas survived her but two years. He passed away on the morning of December 4th, 1637, precisely as the clock struck one, his regular hour of rising for prayer and meditation.

The character of Nicholas Ferrar was a unique and many-sided one. In his earlier life he was at once Mathematician, Linguist, Physician, Barrister and Musician. He had been a Courtier, a Traveller, a Colonial Deputy-Governor and a Member of Parliament; and underneath all this versatility of intellect was a mind gifted with a spiritual faculty of the deepest earnestness. And at length when the imperious call, which most surely and certainly does come some men, came to him and summoned

to

him to a life apart from the worldto the deepening of his own spiritu ality and to the direction of the spiritual life of others he was not behind-hand in embracing the higher walk which leads to the " heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Brilliant as was the career of Nicholas Ferrar in the world, who shall say that his life did not shine with a brighter lustre in the self-renunciation of the Spiritual Director at Little Gidding?

After Mr. Ferrar's death the direction of the community was undertaken by his nephew Nicholas, the son of his elder brother John; but the excep tionally gifted genius of this young man (he was only twenty) was lost to the Church by his early death in May, 1640. The interesting connection between the King and Little Gidding, however, was not suffered to lapse. In the year 1646 Charles in his flight from Oxford came to Gidding a little after midnight in the early hours of May 2nd, and craved protection and concealment. For better security he was conducted to a house at Coppingford, whence he passed the next day on his way northwards. A window on the south side of the chapel commemorates this visit with the following inscription under the royal coat of arms, Insignia Caroli Regis qui latitavit apud Ferrarios: 2 Maii., A.S. 1646. In the troublous times that followed, times fraught with danger alike to the church and the nation, Little Gidding was not spared. family, forewarned of a meditated attack upon their retreat, managed by a timely flight to save their persons from violence; but the little church was rudely desecrated and robbed, the mansion plundered, and most of the literary works of the Ferrars ruthlessly destroyed. The members of this unique family-whose home was at once a Retreat, a College, a Sisterhood, and a Hospital, whose life was a Psalm and a Benevolence, whose

The

1 There is another interesting window, on the north side, bearing the arms of Nicholas Ferrar with his motto Ferre va Ferme."

energies for more than twenty years had been directed with noble-hearted self-abnegation to the advancement of. God's glory by the example of a life of devout worship and of neverflagging sympathy with and care for their poorer brethren-were obliged to separate for safety. Ties of kindred, and those deeper ties which union in spiritual and eternal things alone can weld, were wrenched asunder never here to be re-united. As one stands on the green slope which marks the site of Gidding Hall, and recalls scene after scene of those days of bitter intolerance, only one feeling is possible-the feeling of pity: of pity alike for the persecuted and the persecutors.

It was on a beautiful day in summer that a friend and myself arranged to make our pilgrimage to Little Gidding. The sky was dappled with soft flakes of white cloud, and the midday stillness just ruffled by the few homely sounds of village life which the faint breeze wafted along as we rode out of the courtyard of a decayed but still imposing posting-inn, a relic of coaching days, and turned along the once frequented high road between London and York. The full light of the June sun was falling clear on the golden flats of Huntingdonshire; and that inner sympathy of the quietude and solemnity of Nature, always ready to respond to our highest moods or aspirations, seemed wonderfully near and real. Neither of us cared for conversation, and we rode on mile after mile in silence. Turning out of the high road at Alconbury we lost sight of the numerous church spires which just before were to be seen dotting the landscape around us. Next we caught a glimpse of Coppingford, where the home of the loyal Roman Catholic afforded shelter and hiding to the royal fugitive stumbling through the fields with a lantern and a single guide on that dark May night which preceded his surrender to the Scottish Army. A turn in the lane No. 334.-VOL. LVI.

revealed the grey tower of Hammerton church, as yet half hidden by the tall sprays of blowing dog-roses which tinted the dark hedge-rows with a livelier green and blushing white. But we left Hammerton buried amongst the beeches and willows for another day's exploration, and turned to the right along a gently rising road flanked by low hedges bounding yellow fields, in one of which some half-dozen busy mowers lent a charm of human life to the otherwise unbroken stillness of the landscape. A little further, and an old white gate creaked on its hinges as we turned into the ancient manorial estate of the Ferrars, and received the keys of the little church readily offered to us by the clerk. We passed down the hedge-side through a couple of gates, and then on our left, standing in the shade of a cluster of beeches, was the small but beautifully proportioned chapel. Within a stone's throw formerly stood the old mansion fronting south-east; but no remains of it are to be seen, though the raised pathway which led from its entrance to the church-door is still traceable. We left our horses to wander in the meadow, and as we stood gazing, the sweet glory of the June sun was falling aslant on the old red brick and grey lichened stone of the south wall; and the tall grass in the graveyard, swayed by the breeze, was full of colour and beauty. In the calm and peace of the scene one's soul seemed to be hallowed by the realisation of perfect solitude and repose, while the picture of the pure and holy life of the "Nuns of Little Gidding" rose before one's imagination, compelling sympathy and homage.

up

We opened the wooden wicket, and, treading softly over the stones in the centre of the path which tell of the last resting-place of John Collet and of his daughter Susanna, we paused before the closed door to read the legend above-"This is none other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven." Surely here, if anywhere,

T

the Presence of God could be revealed! We entered, and the closed door seemed to shut us in to a holier sanctuary and to a nearer realisation of the unseen.

The sunlight faintly streamed in through the coloured glass of the illuminated arms of the royal coat of Charles; and the half-tints glimmered on the brass of the font and the eagle and the mural tablets of John Ferrar and Susanna Collet. Sinking into one of the oak stalls, which range along the walls as in a college chapel, one's thoughts wandered backwards over the many changes witnessed by that small shrine. Its restoration by Nicholas Ferrar, with the night - vigils, the psalmody, the meditations, the celebrations at the raised and beautiful altar decked with lights and flowers, the lowly reverence, the mysterious Presence, the hush of adoration, and the light of God in the soul. Then, its desecration by the heavy - handed Puritan rabble: the breaking up of the little community, and the silenced Prayer-book unheard for fifteen years. Again, a gleam of joyous brightness at the Restoration; and again, a period of lax services and gloom.

Ah (so ran one's thoughts), surely one might live unspotted from the world amid these hallowed

scenes, toiling for others, for the poor, the sick, the needy, and the sinful: growing more and more into the heavenly life, following the Divine Type in the true union of the active with the contemplative: aiming at the perfection of life in the combination of work and worship-of worship which is work, and of work which is worship progressing very slowly perhaps over the thorny and stony path, but still and ever advancing to a clearer entrance into that life eternal which is the knowledge of our fellowship with the True God in His revelation of Himself through Jesus Christ.

My friend had wandered out into the graveyard, and as I roused myself from my musings to join him, the sun was half overshadowed by a dark cloud. ""Tis a two-fold omen," I said, as we rode slowly away through the long grass, past the orchards and beeches to the old gate and the road, "'tis a two-fold omen: the future of the Anglican Church will be none the less bright for its late period of gloom; and not dimmer but the more transcending will be the Eternal Glory that shall be revealed in us that we dwell for a moment in the half-lights of Time."

T. HERBERT BINDLEY.

THERE is a certain interesting point of critical analysis which may be stated thus: what is the work of invention, and what the work of imagination, in the arts of poetry and romance? And in what writers does the one faculty predominate over the other; and with what result?

The first part of the question is not very obscure. Whether in poem or novel, invention, broadly speaking, makes the plot. It makes the outline of the story it thinks out the course of the events: it sets the scenes. It resolves, in short, on what shall happen. It decrees that Achilles shall drag Hector round the walls of Troy, that Don Quixote shall tilt against the windmill, that Ferdinand shall play at chess with Miranda in the cave, that Ravenswood shall be swallowed up in the quicksand. Invention determines that such events shall happen; but in the case of the finest work it attempts to go no further. has proposed the scene: the power which sets the scene like life before the inward eye, the graphic touch which makes it unforgetable, belong, of right, to the imagination alone.

It

But

If invention sets itself to attempt what only imagination can perform, it will produce a piece of stage-property, or a puppet, dead and cold. And the reason for this is obvious. For invention, at the best, can only think out, with painful intellectual workings, what details seem most likely to suit the circumstances. imagination is the faculty which "bodies forth the forms of things." It sees the scene before it, with all its details visibly presented, and has nothing more to do than to set down such of these as strike it most-which are precisely those which invention never would have thought of, though it had vexed its brain till doomsday.

As we turn over the leaves of the great poets, examples crowd upon us. We may take one out of "The Inferno"

-one out of hundreds. It is that of the sinner pulled writhing out of the boiling pitch by the hook of Graffiacane, naked, black, and glistening. "He looked to me," says Dante, briefly, "like an otter."

We open Milton. There are the hosts of the fallen angels, a thousand demi-gods on golden seats, rising together in applause as Satan ends his speech; and forthwith there comes the revealing touch of the imagination:

"Their rising all at once was as the sound
Of thunder heard remote."
We turn to Marlowe :

"Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian's shape, With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Shall bathe him in a spring;"

-a piece of imagery which invention could never have devised, most delicately painted, and as true as it is beautiful. In truth the "realms of gold" are full of such examples. But we have another reason for thus beginning with the poets. There is no difficulty here in identifying the work of the imagination for what it is. But when we turn from these to works which seek to paint the scenes of daily life, a certain difficulty appears. We can no longer always be sure that we have caught the imagination working. In the instances above given the imageries described were such as the eye of the body never saw, but only the eye of the mind; so that the result must be the work of imagination only, and not of actually observed and recollected fact. We know that it was in the mind's eye only that Dante ever saw a sinner pulled out of a dyke of pitch by the prong of a winged demon; that

Marlowe saw Diana's golden hair float over its own golden shadow; or that Milton beheld the hosts of applauding angels rise up together from their golden thrones. But we do not know that Dickens had not actually seen, and recollected, Mrs. Gamp rubbing her nose backwards and forwards along the warm bar of the fender, or Mr. Montague Tigg diving for his shirt-collar and bringing up a string.

The difficulty, however, is only on the surface. We cannot, it is true, be sure that these particular incidents were not observed; but it is enough for us to know that they were not invented. They are either the lifelike work of the imagination, or they are life itself. Nor is there any reason why, in the nature of things, they should not have been the work of the imagination only; for though, if they were so, they are wonderful examples, yet they are not at all more wonderful than those from Dante and Marlowe above cited. The sinner dangling on the prong of Graffiacane, is just as vivid a picture as Mr. Tigg bringing up his string.

The fact is, however, that though any single graphic touch may be the result of observation, neither Dickens, nor any other writer of imagination, ever takes a whole character direct from life. And this is one sure mark of the imaginative mind: it may copy life in places; but it can do without copying when it will, and yet be graphic and alive.

The

We may observe, in passing, one result of this which is not immediately connected with our purpose. writer of imagination, not being bound within the limits of his own circle of acquaintance, but being free to wander whithersoever he will, seems to have lived in a world in which the people are all worth describing. What this means we shall perhaps be better able to realise if we turn to the work of novelists who confessedly despise imagination, and who set themselves to copy ordinary life without it. Mr. Howells is the type of these.

We

open one of his books, and immediately find ourselves in the presence of people who are, it is true, exactly like life, but trivial and insipid to a dire degree: people who have as little in common with Becky Sharp, or Dalgetty, or Paul Emanuel, as tepid water with champagne: poor creatures, fit for nothing but to be read about languidly, and then swept into some dust-hole of the mind, and forgotten. And, observe, this must be so. For a novelist who can do nothing but describe from life, cannot, even if he has been exceptionally fortunate, have known very many people worth describing. And it is not enough that a character shall be life-like it must possess some spark of interest also, or be doomed "to lie in cold obstruction and to rot."

How, then, does imagination act, not in the vivid presentment of a scene, but in the drawing of character? We shall find, on reflection, that it acts by identifying itself so intensely with the persons it depicts, that it knows instinctively exactly what, under the given conditions, each must say and do; which, as before, are just those things which invention could not have discovered-being such as come by intuition, not by thought.

Perhaps we cannot do better, by way of illustration, than take Dante's description of the Centaur Chiron, whom he met on the brink of the river of blood, galloping at the head of his troop, and shooting his arrows at the tyrants and assassins, whenever they ventured to emerge from the red waves. On catching sight of Dante and Virgil coming across the coast from the ruined cliffs, what are the first words that Chiron utters? Let us try to realise, for a moment, what words he was likely to utter. What were the cir cumstances of the scene?

The troop of Centaurs, perceiving the two figures approaching down the shore, and supposing them to be two sinners condemned to be plunged into the river of blood, stand still, while one of their number hails them in a loud voice, and demands to know in