things unclean, the east miscarriage requires purification. Man is like a watch; if evening and morning he be not wound up with prayer and circumspection, he is unprofitable and false, or serves to mislead. If the instrument be not truly set, it will be harsh and out of tune; the diapason dies, when every string does not perform his part. Surely, without a union to God, we can not be secure or well. Can he be happy who from happiness is divided? To be united to God, we must be influenced by his goodness, and strive to imitate his perfections. Diligence alone is a good patrimony; but neglect will waste the fairest fortune. One perseveres and gathers; the other, like death, is the dissolution of all. The industrious bee, by her sedulity in summer, lives on honey all the winter. But the drone is not only cast out from the hive, but beaten and punished. MEDITATION. Meditation is the soul's perspective glass; whereby, in her long remove, she discerneth God, as if he were nearer hand. I persuade no man to make it his whole life's business. We have bodies as well as souls; and even this world, while we are in it, ought somewhat to be cared for. As those states are likely to flourish where execution follows sound advisements; so is man, when contemplation is seconded by action. Contemplation generates; action propagates. Without the first, the latter is defective; without the last the first is abortive, and embryous. Saint Bernard compares contemplation to Rachel, which was the more fair; but action to Leah, which was the more fruitful. I will neither always be busy, and doing; nor ever shut up in nothing but thought. Yet that which some would call idleness, I will call the sweetest part of my life, and that is, my thinking. Lecture the Twentieth. JOHN EARLE PETER HEYLIN WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH JOHN GAUDEN DAVID CALDERWOOD T HE present lecture will close our remarks upon the literature of the age of Queen Elizabeth and King James; and though we may be thought to have dwelt too long and too minutely upon this period, yet its varied intellectual richness would not permit us to make our investigations less thorough, or less extensive. There were giants in the land in those days,' and the impress of their mighty minds upon their still living and breathing pages, throws round their productions a halo of splendor from which we instinctively draw back with awe. Their works are the offspring of that creative mental power which moulds every thing with which it comes in contact into its own likeness; and though occasional defects may be found in their writings, they are uniformly the defects incident to the highest order of genius. Of these writers we have still to notice Earle, Heylin, Chillingworth, Gaudon, Taylor, and Browne. JOHN EARLE was born at York, in 1601, and educated at Merton College, Oxford. He was a man of extensive learning and great eloquence, extremely agreeable and facetious in conversation, and of such excellent moral and religious qualities, that in the language of Walton, there had lived, since the death of Richard Hooker, no man 'whom God had blessed with more innocent wisdom, more sanctified learning, or a more pious, peaceable, primative temper.' He was at one period chaplain and tutor to Prince Charles, and went with him into exile during the civil wars, after having been deprived of his whole property for his adherence to the royal cause. At the Restoration his fidelity was amply rewarded, being first made dean of Windsor, then Bishop of Worcester, and, in 1663, Bishop of Salisbury, where he died two years after this last honor was conferred upon him. Bishop Earle was a very successful writer, and extremely happy in the drawing of characters. His principal literary performance is entitled Micro cosmography, or a Piece of the World Discovered, in Essays and Characters. This was published in 1628, and is a valuable storehouse of particulars illustrative of the manners of the times. Among the characters drawn are those of an Antiquary, a Carrier, a Player, a Pot-poet, a University Dun, and a Clown. The last of these we here present: THE CLOWN. The plain country fellow is one that manures his ground well, but lets himself lie fallow and untilled. He has reason enough to do his business, and not enough to be idle or melancholy. He seems to have the punishment of Nebuchadnezzar, for his conversation is among beasts, and his talons none of the shortest, only he eats not grass, because he loves not sallets. His hand guides the plough, and the plough his thoughts, and his ditch and land-mark is the very mound of his meditations. He expostulates with oxen very understandingly, and speaks gee, and ree, better than English. His mind is not much distracted with objects; but if a good fat cow come in his way, he stands dumb and astonished, though his haste be never so great, will fix here half an hour's contemplation. His habitation is some poor thatched roof, distinguished from his barn by the loop-holes that let out smoke, which the rain had long since washed through, but for the double ceiling of bacon on the inside, which has hung there from his grandsire's time, and is yet to make rashers for posterity. His dinner is his other work, for he sweats at it as much as at his labour; he is a terrible fastener on a piece of beef, and you may hope to stave the guard off sooner. His religion is a part of his copyhold, which he takes from his landlord, and refers it wholly to his discretion: yet if he give him leave he is a good Christian, to his power (that is), comes to church in his best clothes, and sits there with his neighbours, where he is capable only of two prayers, for rain and fair weather. He apprehends God's blessings only in a good year, or a fat pasture, and never praises him but on good ground. Sunday he esteems a day to make merry in, and thinks a bagpipe as essential to it as evening prayer, where he walks very solemnly after service with his hands coupled behind him, and censures the dancing of his parish. His compliment with his neighbour is a good thump on the back, and his salutation commonly some blunt curse. He thinks nothing to be vices but pride and ill husbandry, from which he will gravely dissuade the youth, and has some thrifty hob. nail proverbs to clout his discourse. He is a niggard all the week, except only market-day, where, if his corn sell well, he thinks he may be drunk with a good conscience. He is sensible of no calamity but the burning a stack of corn, or the overflowing of a meadow, and thinks Noah's flood the greatest plague that ever was, not because it drowned the world, but spoiled the grass. For death he is never troubled, and if he get in but his harvest before, let it come when it will, he cares not. PETER HEYLIN was another of those clerical adherents of the king, who, like Bishop Earle, were despoiled of their goods by the Parliament. Descended from an ancient family, and born at Burford, in Oxfordshire, on the twenty-ninth of November, 1600, he, in the fourteenth year of his age, entered Hart-Hall College, Oxford, and two years after passed to Magdalen College, in the same university. While at school Heylin had given a specimen of his genius for dramatic poetry, in the production of a tragedy on the war of Troy; and during his third collegiate year he wrote a drama entitled Spurious, with which the president of the college was so much pleased that he ordered it to be performed in his presence. Heylin, however early abandoned poetry, and turned his attention to more solid pursuits. In 1619, he became lecturer to his college on cosmography, and two years after published his Microcosmus, or Description of the Great World. This publication acquired, for its author, so great celebrity, as to attract royal attention, and, accordingly, in 1629, he was made chaplain to his majesty, and in the course of the two following years, received the rectory of Hemmingford, the prebendary of Westminster, and the living of Houghton, in Durham. In 1633, the degree of doctor of divinity was conferred upon him, and in 1637, he was made rector of Islip, in Oxfordshire; but while he was expecting higher preferments, he found his hopes at once shattered by the violence of civil war, and he was, therefore, not only stripped of his benefices and property, but declared, by parliament, a delinquent. He fled from the fury of his persecutors, and concealed himself, for some time, first at Winchester, then at Minster Lovel, in Oxfordshire, and afterward at Abingdon, where he remained, for a number of years, in comparative repose, and devoted himself exclusively to literature. At the Restoration he was reinstated in all his ecclesiastical honors, but while he expected, in higher dignities, the reward of his faithful services in favor of royalty, he sunk under a disease brought on, or at least aggravated by disappointment, and died on the eighth of May, 1662. The king, who had refused Heylin's ecclesiastical promotion, ordered him, at his death, a burial in Westminster Abbey. This able and indefatigable writer, whom Wood declares to have been endowed with 'singular gifts, and a sharp and pregnant wit,' was the author of no less than thirty-seven different publications, of which the 'Microcosmus,' already mentioned, is the most celebrated. As an historian, he displays too much of the spirit of a partisan and bigot, and must be ranged among the defenders of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny. His works, though now almost forgotten, were much read in the seventeenth century, and portions of them may still be perused with pleasure. In a narrative of a six weeks' tour in France, which he published in 1620, he gives the following humorous description of that people: THE FRENCH. The present French is nothing but an old Gaul, moulded into a new name: as rash he is, as headstrong, and as hair-brained. A nation whom you shall win with a feather, and lose with a straw; upon the first sight of him, you shall have him as familiar as your sleep, or the necessity of breathing. In one hour's conference you may endear him to you, in the second unbutton him, the third pumps him dry of all his secrets, and he gives them you as faithfully as if you were his ghostly father, and bound to conceal them 'sub sigillo confessionis,' (' under the seal of confession;') when you have learned this, you may lay him aside, for he is no longer serviceable. If you have any humour in holding him in further acquaintance (a favour which he confesseth, and I believe him, he is worthy of), himself will make the first separation: he hath said over his lesson now unto you, and now must find somebody else to whom to repeat it. Fare him well; he is a garment whom I should be loath to wear above two days together, for in that time he will be threadbare. 'Familiare |