as to stand forward in after-times among the most conspicuous of his generation. Nor is there perhaps now the same delight in the pursuit of physical science as there was, when its wide regions lay, like a vast continent newly discovered, to invite and to reward re search. 6 His diary, or Kalendarium, as he himself entitled it, begins in the year 1641, but he has prefixed to it some notices of his family and earlier life. Richard Evelyn, his father, of Wotton, in the county of Surrey, possessed an estate estimated at about 4000l. a year,* 'well wooded and full of timber.' He was a man of singularly even mind, in whom his son could never call to mind the least passion or inadvertence; in his habits of life ascetic and sparing, and one that was never known to have been surprised by excess.' It is possible, though Evelyn himself intimates no such suspicion, that his ascetic habits were carried to excess, and injured his health, for his hair, which was 'inclining to light,' and therefore the less likely early to have become gray, grew hoary by the time he was thirty years of age, and he died at middle age of dropsy, an indisposition (says his son) the most unsuspected, being a person so exemplarily temperate,' but which, perhaps, his manner of life may have induced. John, the second of three sons, was born at Wotton, October 31, 1620. At four years old he was taught to read by the parish schoolmaster, whose school was over the church porch, and at six his picture was drawn in oil by one Chanterell, no ill painter.' If this portrait, as is not unlikely, be preserved in the family, it should have been engraved for the present work; itwould have been very interesting to compare the countenance of such a person in childhood, in the flower of years, when his head was engraved by Nanteuil, and in ripe old age, when he sat to Sir Godfrey Kneller. When he was eight years old, at which time he resided with his maternal grandmother, he began to learn Latin at Lewes, and was afterwards sent to the free-school at Southover, near that town. His father, who would willingly have weaned him from the fondness of his grandmother, intended to place him at Eton, but the boy had been so terrified by the report of the severe discipline there, that he was sent back to Lewes. Poor Tusser's account of Eton, which he undoubtedly had in his mind, was quite sufficient to justify him. To give an instance of what store of woods and timber of prodigious size, there were growing in our little county of Surrey, (the nearest of any to London,) and plentifully furnished both for profit and pleasure,-(with sufficient grief and reluctancy I speak it) my own grandfather had standing at Wotton, and about that estate, timber that now were worth 100,000l. since, of what was left my father (who was a great preserver of wood) there has been 30,000l. worth of timber fallen by the axe, and the fury of the late hurricane and storm; now no more Wotton, stript and naked, and ashamed almost to own its name.'-Sylva, book iii, ch. 7. From Paul's I went, to Eton sent, For fault but small, or none at all. No such inhumanity, we may be assured, would be perpetrated at Eton while Sir Henry Wotton was provost, and Evelyn, who says that he afterwards a thousand times regretted his perverseness, lost much in not being placed under this admirable man, by whom his disposition and talents would have been justly appreciated and cherished. Evelyn lost his mother when he was fifteen. He describes her as of proper personage; of a brown complexion, her eyes and hair of a lovely black, of constitution inclined to a religious melancholy, or pious sadness; of a rare memory and most exemplary life; for economy and prudence esteemed one of the most conspicuous in her country. Her death was occasioned by excessive grief for the loss of a daughter, and perhaps for the previous unhappiness of that daughter, who was married to one of the worst of men. In the following year he was entered at the Middle Temple, though he continued at school, and in 1637 was placed as a fellow commoner at Baliol College, Oxford. At school he had been very remiss in his studies till the last year, so that I went to the university,' he says, 'rather out of shame of abiding longer at school, than from any fitness, as by sad experience I found, which put me to relearn all that I had neglected, or but perfunctorily gained.' Here he was placed under no less notorious a person than Bradshaw, nomen invisum,' says Evelyn, yet the son of an excellent father, beneficed in Surrey. I ever thought my tutor had parts enough, but as his ambition made him much suspected of the college, so his grudge to Dr. Lawrence, the governor of it, whom he afterwards supplanted, took up so much of his time, that he seldom or never had the opportunity to discharge his duty to his scholars. The pupil however found a fellow collegian named James Thicknesse, who was disposed to study with him, from whose learned and friendly conversation he received great advantage,' and with whom in consequence he formed a lasting intimacy. The university was then exceedingly regular under the discipline which Laud had established as chancellor. Had Laud been born a generation earlier, or a generation later, how high and undisputed a reputation would he have raised by his munificent love of letters, and his conscientious discharge of the duties of his office! bat unlike Evelyn, he had fallen upon the most unhappy age in which his mortal lot could possibly have been cast. While at Oxford Evelyn was admitted into the dancing and vaulting school,' and began also to look on the rudiments of mu sic,' in which, he says, he afterwards arrived to some formal knowledge, though to small perfection of hand, because he was so frequently diverted by inclinations to newer trifles.' During the last year of his residence his younger brother came to be his chamberfellow. They soon removed to the Middle Temple, and before they had been there three months their father died, retaining,' says Evelyn, his senses and piety to the last, which he most tenderly expressed in blessing us, whom he now left to the world and the worst of times, whilst he was taken from the evil to come. Thus we were bereft of both our parents in a period when we most of all stood in need of their counsel and assistance, especially myself, of a raw, vain, uncertain, and very unwary inclination; but so it pleased God to make trial of my conduct in a conjuncture of the greatest and most prodigious hazard that ever the youth of England saw. If I did not, amidst all this, peach my liberty, nor my virtue, with the rest who made shipwreck of both, it was more the infinite goodness and mercy of God than the least discretion of mine own, who now thought of nothing but the pursuit of vanity, and the confused imaginations of young men.' The signs of the times were then too evident to be mistaken; the palace at Lambeth had been assaulted by a rabble; and libels and invectives scattered about the streets 'to the reproach of government and the fermentation of our since distractions.' Evelyn had been present at Strafford's trial, where 'the lords and commons, together with the king, queen, prince, and flower of the noblesse, were spectators and auditors of the greatest malice and the greatest innocency that ever met before so illustrious an assembly,' and he had seen the fatal stroke which severed from its shoulders the wisest head in England-to such exorbitancy were things arrived:" he now therefore determined to absent himself from a state of things which 'gave umbrage' (fearful suspicion) to wiser than himself that the calamities of England were but yet in their infancy.' His intention was to overtake the leagure then before Gennep,' on the Waal, a place which having been greatly strengthened by the Cardinal Infante D. Fernando, in 1635, was at this time besieged by the French and Dutch. He landed at Flushing, proceeded to Dort, and taking waggon from thence to Rotterdam, was *There is a full account of the siege in the great work of Aitzema, a man who, with extraordinary patience, compiled materials for the History of the United Provinces during the greater part of the seventeenth century. One of his brothers was mortally wounded at this siege. hurried there in less than an hour, though it be ten miles distant, so furiously did these foremen drive.' The Dutch are not so celebrated for the celerity of their motions in these days. On the way to the Hague he observed divers leprous poor creatures dwelling in solitary huts on the brink of the water, and permitted to ask the charity of passengers, which is conveyed to them in a floating box that they cast out.' Perhaps this is the latest notice of lepers in Europe being thus thrust apart from the rest of mankind, and Holland is likely to be the country in which the disease would continue longest. At the Hague he visited the Queen of Bohemia, a woman who, more than any other princess of her age, seems to have won and deserved the admiration of all who knew her. Her presence chamber was then hung with black, and she was keeping a fast-day for her husband's death with as little to console her in any earthly prospect of the future as in looking back upon the past. Evelyn did not reach Gennep till four or five days after it had capitulated; he was, however, complimented by being received a volunteer in Captain Apsley's corps, and took his turn in watching on a horn work, and trailing a pike,' till the fortifications were repaired. He found himself on hot service for a young drinker,' and after a week's stay he took his leave, being pretty well satisfied with the confusion of battles and sieges, if such,' he says, 'that of the United Provinces may be called, where their quarters and encampments are so admirably regular, and orders so exactly observed, as few cities exceed it for all convenience.' He remained about three months in the Netherlands and then returned to England. Among the remarkable things which he had noticed in his journal during this journey, is the case of a woman who had been married five and twenty times, and was then prohibited from marrying again, yet it could not be proved that she had ever made any of her husbands away, though the suspicion had brought her divers times to trouble.' He was particularly pleased with Antwerp, and with nothing more than those delicious shades and walls of stately trees which render the fortified works of the town one of the sweetest places in Europe.' Long will it be before any traveller can again speak of the delicious shades and stately trees of Antwerp! Carnot, in preparing to defend the place, laid what were then its beautiful environs as bare as a desert. The remark which he makes upon the view from the tower of the cathedral is curious. 'The sun,' he says, shone exceeding hot, and darted its rays without any intermission, affording so bright a reflection to us who were above, and had a full prospect of both land and water about it, that I was much confirmed in my opinion of the moon's being of some such substance as the earthly globe consists of; perceiving all the adjacent country, at so small a horizontal distance, to represent such a light as I could hardly look against, save when the river and other large waters within our view appeared of a more dark and uniform colour, resembling those spots in the moon supposed to be seas there, according to our new philosophy, and viewed by optical glasses." On his return to England he studied a little, but ' danced and fooled more." But this was no age for vanities. The civil war broke out, and Evelyn went with his horse and arms to join the king at Brentford, but he was not permitted to remain there, (this is the phrase he uses,) because the retreat of the royal army, which immediately took place, would have left him and his brothers exposed to ruin without any advantage to his Majesty. He retired to his brother's house at Wotton, and began to improve the gardens; when the Covenant was pressed he absented himself, but finding it 'impossible to evade the doing very unhandsome things,' he obtained the king's license to travel, and set out for a longer journey, accompanied by his old fellow collegian Thicknesse. Twice at the very outset had this journey well nigh proved fatal: mistaking the tide as they came before Calais, in weather which was snowy and untoward enough,' they struck on the sands with no little danger: and crossing an overflown stream on the way to Boulogne, in darkness, and in a storm of rain, hail, and snow, his horse slipt and had almost been the occasion of his perishing. ، The 'churches upon the continent hold the first place among those rareeshows by which the curiosity of a young English traveller is invited. Evelyn was much amused with the treasures at St. Denis, which contained at that time some of the most remarkable relics, true and false, any where in existence: among the latter were a likeness of the Queen of Sheba, Solomon's drinking cup, Judas's brass lanthorn, and Virgil's stone mirror; among the former Charlemagne's set of chessmen, full of Arabic characters.' There were also 'the effigies of the late French kings in wax, like ours in Westminster, covered with their robes, with a world of other rarities.' Paris appeared to him, for the materials the houses are built with, and its many noble and magnificent piles, one of the most gallant cities in the world: he describes it large in circuit, of a round form, very populous, but situated in a bottom environed with gentle declivities, rendering some places very dirty, and making it smell as if sulphur were mingled with the mud.' This odour, for which certainly the nature of the ground was not in fault, provoked the spleen of Peter Heylyn, who had visited France some years before Evelyn, at a time of life when both his wits and fancies (if ever he was master of any) were in their predominancy.' 'This I am confident of,' he says, 'that the nastiest lane in London is frankincense and juniper to the sweetest street in this city. The ancient by-word C |