or that the kingdom could be tolerably happy in the intermission of them.'

In the next Parliament this faith in Parliaments was destined to be roughly shaken. The Long Parliament met at the end of 1640. Falkland had a warm admiration for Hampden, and a strong disapprobation of the violent proceedings of the court. He acted with the popu lar party. He made a powerful speech against ship-money. He was convinced of Strafford's guilt, and joined in his prosecution. He spoke vigorously for the bill to remove the bishops from the House of Lords. But the reason and moderation of the man showed itself from the first. Alone among his party he raised his voice against pressing forward Strafford's impeachment with unfair and vindictive haste. He refused to consider, like the Puritans, the order of bishops as a thing by God's law either appointed or forbidden. He treated it as a thing expedient or inexpedient. And so foolish had been the conduct of the High Church bishops and clergy, so much and so mischievously had they departed from their true province, that it was expedient at that moment, Falkland thought, to remove the bishops from the House of Lords. We shall find them,' he said of the High Church clergy, to have tithed mint and anise, and have left undone the weightier works of the law. The most frequent subjects, even in the most sacred auditories, have been the jus divinum of bishops and tithes, the sacredness of the clergy, the sacrilege of impropriations, the demolishing of Puritanism.' But he was careful to add: We shall make no little compliment to those to whom this charge belongs, if we shall lay the faults of these men upon the order of the bishops.' And even against these misdoing men he would join in no injustice. To his clear reason sacerdotalism was repulsive. He disliked Laud, moreover; he had a natural antipathy to his heat, fussiness, and arbitrary temper. But he refused to concur in Laud's impeach

ment.

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The Lords threw out the bill for the expulsion of the bishops. In the same session, a few months later, the bill was reintroduced in the House of Commons. But during this time the attitude of the popular party had been more and more declaring itself. The party had professed at first that the removal of bishops from Parliament was all that they wanted; that they had no designs against episcopacy and the Church of England. The strife deepened, and new and revolutionary designs emerged. When, therefore, the bill against the bishops was reintroduced, Falkland voted against it. Hampden reproached him with inconsistency. Hampden said, that 'he was sorry to find a noble lord had changed his opinion since the time the last bill to this purpose had passed the House; for he then thought it a good bill, but now he thought this an ill one' But Falkland answered, that he had been persuaded at that time by that worthy gentleman to believe many things which he had since VOL. I.-No. 1.

L

found to be untrue, and therefore he had changed his opinion in many particulars as well as to things as persons.'

The king's party availed themselves eagerly of this changed disposition in a man so much admired and respected. They pressed Falkland to come to the aid of the Crown, and to take office. He was extremely loth to comply. He disapproved of the policy of the court party. He was for great reforms. He disliked Charles's obstinacy and insincerity. So distasteful, indeed, were they to him, that even after he had taken office it was difficult to him-to him, the sweetest-mannered of men-to maintain towards Charles the same amenity which he showed towards everybody else. Compliant as he was to others, yet towards the king, says Clarendon, he did not practise that condescension, but contradicted him with more bluntness and by sharp sentences; and in some particulars (as of the Church) to which the king was in conscience most devoted; and of this his majesty often complained.' Falkland feared that, if he took office, the king would require a submission which he could not give. He feared, too, and to a man of his high spirit this thought was most galling, that his previous opposition to the court might be supposed to have had for its aim to heighten his value and to insure his promotion. He had no fancy, moreover, for official business, and believed himself unfit for it. Hyde at last, by earnestly pleading the considerations which, he thought, made his friend's acceptance of office a duty, overcame his reluctance. At the beginning of 1642 Falkland became a member of the King's Council, and Secretary of State.

We approach the end. Falkland filled his place,' says Clarendon, 'with great sufficiency, being well versed in languages, to understand any that are used in business and to make himself understood.' But in August, 1642, the Civil War broke out. With that departure of the public peace fled for ever Falkland's own. He exposed himself at Edge-hill with even more than his ordinary carelessness of danger. As the war continued, his unhappiness grew upon him more and But let us quote Clarendon, who is here admirable:

more.

From his entrance into this unnatural war, his natural cheerfulness and vivacity grew clouded, and a kind of sadness and dejection of spirit stole upon him which he had never been used to. Yet being one of those who believed that one battle would end all differences, and that there would be so great a victory on one side that the other would be compelled to submit to any conditions from the victor (which supposition and conclusion generally sank into the minds of most men, and prevented the looking after many advantages that might then have been laid hold of), he resisted those indispositions, et in luctu, bellum inter remedia erat. But after the king's return from Brentford, and the furious resolution of the two Houses not to admit any treaty for peace, those indispositions, which had before touched him, grew into a perfect habit of uncheerfulness. And he who had been so exactly easy and affable to all men that his face and countenance was always present and vacant to his company, and held any cloudiness and less pleasantness of the visage

a kind of rudeness or incivility, became on a sudden less communicable, and thence very sad, pale, and exceedingly affected with the spleen. In his clothes and habits, which he had minded before always with more industry and neatness and expense than is usual to so great a soul, he was now not only incurious, but too negligent.

In this mood he came to Newbury. Before the battle he told one of his friends that he was weary of the times and foresaw much misery to his country, and did believe he should be out of it ere night.' But now, as always, the close contact with danger reanimated him :

In the morning, before the battle, as always upon action, he was very cheerful, and put himself into the first rank of the Lord Byron's regiment, then advancing upon the enemy, who had lined the hedges on both sides with musketeers; from whence he was shot with a musket in the lower part of the belly, and in the instant falling from his horse, his body was not found till the next morning; till when there was some hope he might have been a prisoner, though his nearest friends, who knew his temper, received small comfort from that imagination. Thus fell that incomparable young man in the four-and-thirtieth year of his age, having so much despatched the true business of life that the eldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the youngest enter not into the world with more innocency. Whosoever leads such a life, needs be the less anxious upon how short warning it is taken from him.

He fell on the 20th of September, 1643. His body was carried to Great Tew and buried in the churchyard there. But his grave is unmarked and unknown.. The house, too, in which he lived, is gone and replaced by a new one. The stables and dovecote, it is thought, existed in his time; and in the park are oaks and limes on which his eyes may have rested. Falkland left his estates, and the control of his three children, all of them sons, to his wife, with whom he had lived happily and in great affection. But the lands of Tew and Burford have long passed away from his family.

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And now, after this review of Falkland's life, let us ask whence arose that exalted esteem of him whereof Lord Carnarvon speaks, and whether it was deserved. In the first place, then, he had certainly, except personal beauty, everything to qualify him for a hero to the imagination of mankind in general. He had rank, accomplishment, sweet temper, exquisite courtesy, liberality, magnanimity, superb courage, melancholy, misfortune, early death. Of his accomplishment we have spoken. And he was accomplished, nay learned, with the most dexterity and address,' says Clarendon, and the least pedantry and affectation, that ever man who knew so much was possessed with, of what quality soever.' Of his amenity we have spoken also; of his disposition so gentle and obliging, so much delighting in courtesy, that all mankind could not but admire and love him ;' of 'his gentleness and affability so transcendent and obliging, that it drew reverence, and some kind of compliance, from the roughest and most unpolished and stubborn constitutions, and made them of another temper of

debate, in his presence, than they were in other places.' Equally charming was his generosity and delicacy to all who stood in need of help, but especially to those whose fortunes required, and whose spirits made them superior to, ordinary obligations.' Such is Clarendon's euphemistical phrase for poor and proud men of letters. His high-mindedness is well shown in his offer, which we have already mentioned, to resign his fortune to his father. Let me quote another fine instance of it. He never would consent, while he was Secretary of State, to two practices which he found established in his office: the employment of spies and the opening of letters.

For the first, he would say, such instruments must be void of all ingenuousness and common honesty before they could be of use, and afterwards they could never be fit to be credited; and no single preservation could be worth so general a wound and corruption of human society, as the cherishing such persons would carry with it. The last he thought such a violation of the law of nature that no qualification by office could justify him in the trespass.

His courage, again, had just the characters which charm the imagination :

Upon any occasion of action, he always engaged his person in those troops which he thought, by the forwardness of the commanders, to be most like to be farthest engaged. And in all such encounters he had about him an extraordinary cheerfulness, without at all affecting the execution that usually attended them, in which he took no delight, but took pains to prevent it where it was not by resistance 'made necessary. Insomuch that at Edge-hill, when the enemy was routed, he was like to have incurred great peril by interposing to save those who had thrown away their arms, and against whom, it may be, others were more fierce for their having thrown them away. So that a man might think, he came into the field chiefly out of curiosity to see the face of danger, and charity to prevent the shedding of blood.

At the siege of Gloucester, when Hyde

passionately reprehended him for exposing his person unnecessarily to danger, as being so much beside the duty of his place (of Secretary of State) that it might be understood rather to be against it, he would say merely that his office could not take away the privilege of his age, and that a secretary in war might be present at the greatest secret of danger; but withal alleged seriously, that it concerned him to be more active in enterprises of hazard than other men, that all might see that his impatiency for peace proceeded not from pusillanimity or fear to adventure his own person.

To crown all, Falkland has for the imagination the indefinable, the irresistible charm of one who is and must be, in spite of the choicest gifts and graces, unfortunate of a man in the grasp of fatality. Like the Master of Ravenswood, that most interesting by far of all Scott's heroes, he is surely and visibly touched by the finger of doom. And he knows it himself; yet he knits his forehead, and holds on his way. His course must be what it must, and he cannot flinch from it; yet he loves it not, hopes nothing from it, foresees how it will end :

He had not the court in great reverence, and had a presaging spirit that the king would fall into great misfortune; and often said to his friend that he chose to

serve the king because honesty obliged him to it, but that he foresaw his own ruin by doing it.

Yes, for the imagination Falkland cannot but be a figure of ideal, pathetic beauty. But for the judgment, for sober reason? Lord Carnarvon insisted on the salutary example of Falkland's 'moderation.' The Dean of Westminster, who could not go to the Newbury meeting, wrote to say that in his opinion Falkland is one of the few examples of political eminence unconnected with party, or rather equally connected with both parties; and he is the founder, or nearly the founder, of the best and most enlightening tendencies of the Church of England.' And Principal Tulloch, whose chapter on Falkland is perhaps the most delightful chapter of his delightful book,' calls him 'the inspiring chief of a circle of rational and moderate thinkers amidst the excesses of a violent and dogmatic age.'

On the other hand, the Spectator pronounces Falkland to have been capricious and unstable, rather than truly moderate. It thinks that 'he was vacillating, and did not count the cost of what he undertook.' It judges his life to have been wasted. It says that the heart of moderation is strength,' and that it seems to us easier to maintain that either Cromwell, or Pym, or Hampden, or Fairfax, presented the truer type of moderation than Falkland.' Falkland recoiled, and changed sides; the others recognised the duty for a man 'to take strong measures, if none less strong will secure an end which he deems of supreme importance.'

Severe, too, upon Falkland, as might be expected, is the Nonconformist. It talks of his amiable and hesitating inconsistency.' It says that he was moved by intellectual perception and spiritual sentiment' rather than by 'moral impulse,' while the Puritan leaders were 'moved mainly by moral impulse.' It adds that the greatest reformers have always been those who have been swayed by moral feeling rather than by intellectual conceptions, and the greatest reforming movements have been those accomplished not by the enlightened knowledge of a few, but by the moral enthusiasm of the many.' The Puritan leaders had faith. They drew no complete picture of the ideal to be arrived at. But they were firmly and fixedly resolved, that, come what might, the wrongs of which they were conscious should not be endured.' They followed, then, the voice of conscience and of duty; and, broadly speaking, the voice of conscience is the voice of God.' And therefore, while Falkland's death has a special sadness as the end of an inconsistent, and in a certain sense of a wasted life, on the other hand the death of Hampden was a martyr's seal to truths assured of ultimate triumph.'

Truths assured of ultimate triumph! Let us pause upon those words. The Puritans were victors in the Civil War, and fashioned

'Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century.