perished at the stake in the third year of Queen Mary. He was well grounded at the free school, and entered Caius College as a poor scholar in August, 1626. He was thus a contemporary of Milton at Cambridge, where Taylor, who was already a Fellow of his college, proceeded M. A. in 1634. He was now ordained, and, having preached for a friend at St. Paul's, the rumour of his eloquence reached Lambeth, whither he was summoned to preach before the Primate. Laud greatly admired his style, and deplored nothing but the preacher's youth; whereupon Taylor humbly begged his Grace to pardon that fault, and promised, if he lived, he would mend it. By Laud's advice Taylor now pursued his studies at All Souls', in Oxford, until in March, 1637, he was presented to the rectory of Uppingham, and soon afterwards made a chaplain to the King. In the struggles that were impending Taylor had committed himself on the losing side by his treatise on episcopacy asserted. In 1642, or thereabouts, he was ejected from his living at Uppingham, and followed the royal army in the capacity of chaplain. Of the other divines of this period it is interesting to remember that Fuller was at this very time picking up stories of English worthies in the rear of a marching column. Pearson was chaplain to the King's troops at Exeter, while Chillingworth acted as engineer at the siege of Gloucester in 1643. It was perhaps during his connection with the army that Taylor wrote the prayer which is now appended to the third chapter of his Holy Living commencing, "Place a guard of Angels about the person of the King." In 1644 Taylor seems to have been taken prisoner by the Parliamentary forces. He was soon released, however, and, under the patronage of Sir John Vaughan, decided to remain on in Wales and to set up a school, where he had as an assistant the learned William Nicholson, who afterwards became Bishop of Gloucester.

While in this seclusion he wrote his celebrated Liberty of Prophesying, showing the unreasonableness of prescribing other men's faith, and the iniquity of persecuting opinions. In this Taylor suggests the Apostles' Creed or summary of fundamental truths as a broad basis of union. In 1648 Taylor was in London, and was permitted to pay a last visit to the King. Charles, in token of his regard, is said to have given him his watch and a few pearls and rubies which had adorned the ebony case in which he kept his Bible. Long after that farewell, in a letter to John Evelyn, Taylor spoke with affectionate reverence of the departed saint. He returned to his seclusion at Golden Grove, in Carmarthen, in the neighbourhood of Grongar Hill, afterwards celebrated by Dyer, where he was continually cheered by the friendship of the Earl of Carbery, in whose family he spent many happy hours, and after whose seat of Golden Grove he called the Manual of Devotion, at one time almost without a rival in popularity, which goes by that name.

The year 1650 saw Taylor's famous Holy Living, completed in 1651 by Holy Dying, the Allegro and Penseroso of Christian ethics and Anglican devotion. Their apposite titles and the euphony of their author's name have served to embalm these little works in the popular mind. Far inferior in originality as they doubtless are to the works of Burton, Fuller, or Browne, they have exercised a continuous influence on such devout persons as Wesley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and have found a champion in the anything but sentimental mind of the author of Hora Sabbatice. To prose anthologists the musings and reveries of this prose poet, with his Virgilian ornaments, composite similes, and other flowers of speech, will always remain dear, while Taylor himself will survive as the most flowery and "honey-flowing" of divines and pietists-theologian we can scarcely call him. Standing between two tides, the

tide of words and the tide of Puritanism, both of which came near to overwhelm him, Taylor (with his old patron Sanderson) was almost alone among the mighty men of old who survived the flood. His heart was gladdened by the Restoration, and the dedication of his great work of casuistry, Ductor Dubitantium, to Charles II. secured a mitre for him in the Irish Establishment. No better man, unless it were Ken, was so elevated by the later Stuarts. Bishop Jeremy Taylor died at Lisburn, and was buried under the communion-table at Dromore in August, 1667. It must be admitted that Jeremy makes monotonous reading. He writes with a peacock's feather, and every movement, however slight, not only of his pen, but also of his mind, is attended by flourishes.1

1 The standard edition of Taylor is Bishop Heber's (15 vols., 1822, revised by Eden, 1854). See also Coleridge's Literary Remains, Dowden's Puritan and Anglican (1901), Willmott's Jeremy Taylor, his Predecessors, Contemporaries, and Successors (1846), and Edmund Gosse's monograph in English Men of Letters (1904). Fuller's chief works were reprinted between 1831 and 1841, and his Sermons in 1891. There are Memorial, of his life by Arthur T. Russell (Pickering, 1844), a fuller Life by John Eglinton Bailey in 1874, and a sketch of his Life and Genius, with "Fulleriana," by Henry Rogers (1856). See also Basil Montagu's Selections from the Works of Taylor, Latimer, Hall, Milton, Barrow, South, Browne, Fuller, and Bacon,* first published in 1805.

A much greater casuist than Jeremy Taylor was Robert Sanderson (1587-1663), a luminary of Lincoln College, and afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, who enjoys the greater honour of being enshrined with Donne and Herbert and Hooker in Walton's never-to-be-forgotten Lives. His Nine Cases of Conscience Resolved (1678) is a book of great intellectual vigour. His Sermons, too, are notable for their clear reasoning. Charles I. was wont to say that he might take his ears to other divines, but for his conscience he would always take that to Dr. Sanderson. Unfortunately, upon his premature death on January 30th, 1649, the King's consicence fell into very inferior

hands. The very day after his execution appeared a little book called Eikon Basilike: the Portraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings." It is a volume of reflections written in the first person, apparently by Charles himself, dealing with the vicissitudes of the reign from Strafford's death down to the threshold of his own, interspersed with prayers-just such a book as the King might have written at Carisbrooke and after. As a manifesto of monarchy in extremis it was a most successful venture, fifty editions being sold within fifteen months. As a genuine expression of the conscience of the King it appeals strongly to the historical sensibilities. If it is not by Charles, it is worse than nothing, for it is one of the cleverest, most audacious, and most cynical forgeries known. It was not seriously suspected at the time, even by Milton, who answered it. But after the Restoration the authorship was called in question and, before Junius, it was the reigning puzzle of literary history. The external testimony is so conflicting as to be almost worthless; but internal evidence up to the present runs rather strongly against the authorship (or, at any rate, the exclusive authorship) of Charles, so confirming the claim made by John Gauden (1605— 1662), a very willow-pattern divine and casuist, who certainly wrote nothing else so skilful, but who was very suspiciously raised to the see first of Exeter and then of Worcester by Charles II. and Clarendon, presumably for some secret service. The problem, however, is not yet by any means completely solved. Our own opinion is that it was written by Charles with the aid of certain divines, edited by Gauden, and named by Jeremy Taylor.

CHAPTER II

JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE POETS

1. DONNE AND DRUMMOND

"Donne, nature à la fois ailée et grossière, ange au pied fourchu, vers rocailleux, de l'immoralité simiesque de Sterne.

Mais il a le don, ce qu'aucun travail, aucune imitation des bons modèles ne saurait fournir; partout où il va, quoiqu'il écrive, quelque boue qu'il remue, et jusque dans son hideux, ironique et malpropre Progress of the Soul, il est poète." -JUSSEBAND.

THE actuality, the intensity, and the individuality of Donne represent a new note in English poetry. Elizabethan love poetry is rarely personal. Ideal and graceful though it commonly is, it is at the same time decidedly mannered, full of affectation and imitation, and, as a result, but too often either patently false, or conventional and cold. Donne may be brutal or ugly, but he is not cold, still less conventional. Fantastic to excess as he often is, he writes of his own experience. He takes us into his intimacy and runs through mood after mood. He probes unsparingly even into the arcana of passion.

The descendant on both sides of Catholics who had remained staunch through the religious troubles of Edward's reign, John Donne was born in the neighbourhood of Bread Street, London, in 1573. His father,

a

prosperous ironmonger, died two years after his birth. His maternal grandfather, no other than John Heywood, the famous writer of interludes in Henry VIII.'s reign, died in the Low Countries a few years later. In order to escape an embarrassing tender of the oath of