tinguishes contemporary writings: his profound learning was, if we may use the expression, chemically and not mechanically united with his mind; it was incorporated not by contact, but by solution. Though the general tone of the work is of course abstract and even dry, the sweet and simple character of the man sometimes makes itself perceptible through the elaborate and brilliant panoply of the orator; or, to use the beautiful words of D'Israeli, "Hooker is the first vernacular writer whose classical pen harmonised a numerous prose. While his earnest eloquence, freed from all scholastic pedantry, assumes a style stately in its structure, his gentle spirit sometimes flows into natural humour, lovely in the freshness of its simplicity." In purity and meekness of personal character, in immensity of erudition, and in power of eloquence, there is a strong resemblance between the great writer of whom we have just feebly attempted to give a sketch and the sweet orator to whom we are about to turn our attentionJeremy Taylor. They were both stamped with the majestic impress of that noble age of our literature, when the minds of men seemed to possess something of the simplicity, grandeur, and freshness which we fondly believe characterized (at least physically) the primeval races of mankind. Taylor's learning, indeed, was hardly less vast and multifarious than that of Hooker; but, whether from the poetical and imaginative turn of his mind, or from the greater temptations offered by the more declamatory nature of the subjects of his writings, his erudition appears less under his command than Hooker's. The latter may be compared to the Roman warrior, whose arms indeed were weighty, but not so much so as to impair his strength and agility in the combat; while Taylor reminds us rather of the knight of the Middle Ages, sheathed from plume to spur in shining and ponderous panoply, but his armour is too complicated in its parts to admit of free motion, and the very plumes, and scarfs, and penoncelles which adorn it, are an impediment, no less than a decoration. We find, in short, in the writings of Taylor something of that diffuse, sensuous, and effeminate overrichness which distinguishes the style of many of the Greek and Roman fathers-Tertullian, for instance, or Chrysostom. But in spite of these defects, we cannot conceal our conviction that the works of Jeremy Taylor are, upon the whole, the finest production of English ecclesiastical literature; or, to use the strong but hardly exaggerated language of Parr, "they are fraught with guileless ardour, with peerless eloquence, and with the richest stores of knowledge, historical, classical, scholastic, and theological."

He was born in the humblest rank of life (his father was a barber at Cambridge), in the year 1613, and entered Caius College, in that university, in his thirteenth year. On taking his bachelor's degree in 1631 he entered into holy orders, and made his first step in the career of ecclesiastical advancement, by preaching, for a friend, in

St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Here his eloquence, his learning, and what a contemporary calls "his florid and youthful beauty and pleasant air," procured him immediate reputation, and the notice of Archbishop Laud, who made him his chaplain, gave him preferment in the Church, and presented him to a fellowship in All Souls' College, Oxford. He married, in 1639, Phoebe Langdale, by whom he had three sons, all of whom he had the misfortune to survive. But this prosperous and peaceful existence was now overshadowed by the clouds of that tremendous storm which was soon to burst upon England, and in its fury not only to sweep away the altar and the throne, but almost to efface the very foundations of society. At the breaking out of the civil war Taylor sided warmly with the royalist party, and even wrote a defence of episcopacy. In the troubles which followed he was taken prisoner by the parliamentary army in the battle fought under the walls of Cardigan Castle. The royalist cause now met with a long succession of reverses; and Taylor, who had been released by the victorious party, determined to retire altogether from what he probably foresaw was a hopeless struggle, and one in which an ecclesiastic could hardly hope to mingle with much utility to his party or much honour to his professional character. He retired to Wales, and established a school at Newton Hall, in Carmarthenshire, where he remained in tranquillity, without incurring any very violent or persevering persecution at the hands of the dominant party. His own account of this portion of his life is interesting and beautiful. "In the great storm which dashed the vessel of the Church all in pieces I had been cast on the coast of Wales; and, in a little boat, thought to have enjoyed that rest and quietness which in England, in a far greater, I could not hope for. Here I cast anchor, and, thinking to ride safely, the storm followed me with so impetuous violence, that it broke a cable, and I lost my anchor. And here again I was exposed to the mercy of the sea, and the gentleness of an element that could neither distinguish things nor persons; and, but that he He that stilleth the raging of the sea, and the noise of the waves, and the madness of his people, had provided a plank for me, I had been lost to all opportunities of content and study; but I know not whether I have been more preserved by the courtesies of my friends or the gentleness and mercies of a noble enemy."

The passage just quoted is taken from Taylor's dedication to the Liberty of Prophesying,' his first work of a universal and permanent importance. The object of this admirable production is "to show the Unreasonableness of Prescribing to other Men's Faith, and the Iniquity of Persecuting Differing Opinions." It is, in fact, the first complete and powerful vindication that the world had ever seen of the great principle of religious toleration. Proud, indeed, may England justly be in the reflection that it was she who first gave to

the world the noble birth of Religious and Civil Liberty-those twin-sisters, eternal and inseparable, the fairest and strongest children of Heaven. With the line of argument taken by Taylor in this production we have nothing to do at present: viewed as a mere work of literature, it is distinguished by all the excellences which mark his style, though at the same time it is more argumentative and less declamatory than his other writings.

His wife having died three years after her marriage, in 1642, Taylor contracted a second alliance during his residence in Wales. His second wife was Mrs. Joanna Bridges, said to have been a natural daughter of Charles I., a lady possessed of a considerable estate in Carmarthenshire. Though thus relieved from the necessity of continuing to be a schoolmaster, he appears at different times to have suffered serious losses from fines and sequestrations, and even to have been imprisoned on one occasion, if not more, for having too fréely expressed his sentiments on public and church affairs. His literary activity, however, did not for a moment relax, and will be best proved by the enumeration of some of his principal works:'An Apology for authorised and set Forms of Liturgy;' 'The Life of Christ, the Great Exemplar,' published in 1648; The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living,' and 'The Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying,' two admirable treatises of Christian conduct, which, like the last-named work, have taken a permanent place in the religious literature of the English Church. Besides these, and a great number of sermons, he wrote 'Golden Grove,' a small but admirable manual of devotion, so named after the seat of his friend and neighbour the Earl of Carbery; and a treatise on the subject of Original Sin, which involved him in a controversy with the Calvinists on the one hand, and the High Church party on the other. This is the only occasion on which Taylor's courtesy and gentleness of character appear to have at all deserted him. The Restoration was now at hand, when the long-oppressed Church might look forward to tranquillity and peace, and when the devoted adherents of the monarchy and the constitution might reasonably expect some reward for their sacrifices and their fidelity.

Their hopes, however, were cruelly disappointed: the profligate monarch forgot, in his moment of prosperity, all the lessons which exile and distress might have taught even the most insensible; and it is satisfactory to think that one exception was made to the melancholy uniformity of ingratitude, and that one pious and apostolic clergyman was rewarded for his sufferings and for his virtues. Taylor was made Bishop of Down and Conner, to which see was afte: wards annexed that of Dromore, also in Ireland. These well-won and nobly-worn dignities Taylor did not long enjoy, for he died of a fever at Lisburn, in Ireland, on the 13th of August, 1667, in the fifty-fifth year of his age.

His character was truly apostolic, and his was one of those rare and excellent natures which appear equally venerable in prosperity and in adversity; the one not able to swell him with pride, nor the other to humiliate the simple grandeur of his soul.

"The sermons of Jeremy Taylor are far above any that had preceded them in the English Church. An imagination essentially poetical, and sparing none of the decorations which, by critical rules, are deemed almost peculiar to verse; a warm tone of piety, sweetness, and charity; an accumulation of circumstantial accessories whenever he reasons, or persuades, or describes; an erudition pouring itself forth in quotation, till his sermons become in some places almost a garland of flowers from all other writers, and especially those of classical antiquity, never before so redundantly scattered from the pulpit distinguish Taylor from his contemporaries by their degree, as they do from most of his successors by their kind. His sermons on the Marriage Ring, on the House of Feasting, on the Apples of Sodom, may be named, without disparagement to others which perhaps ought to stand in equal place. But they are not without considerable faults. The eloquence of Taylor is great, but it is not eloquence of the highest class; it is far too Asiatic, too much in the style of Chrysostom and other declaimers of the fourth century, by the study of whom he had probably vitiated his taste; his learning is ill placed, and his arguments often as much so not to mention that he has the common defect of alleging nugatory proofs; his vehemence loses its effect by the circuity of his pleonastic language; his sentences are of endless length, and hence not only altogether unmusical, but not always reducible to grammar. But he is still the greatest ornament of the English pulpit up to the middle of the seventeenth century; and we have no reason to believe, or rather much reason to disbelieve, that he had any competitor in other languages.

There can be very little doubt of the general justice of the above criticism; and as the passage is calculated to give, as far as it goes, a faithful idea of the peculiarities-and particularly of the faults-of Jeremy Taylor's prose style, we have not scrupled to quote it here; we cannot, however, do so without remarking on what, to us at least, appears to be a defect in the general judgments of the excellent author from whose work we have extracted it.

No one can deny Hallam the praise of perfect acquaintance with the vast subject he has so ably illustrated, of a store of learning equally accurate and profound, and of a singularly clear and lucid style; but at the same time he will be generally found, we think, to have been barely just to the English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whether from the peculiar bent of his personal tastes, from the particular direction of his reading, or from the habit of periodical criticism, the discriminating faculty in his

powerful mind appears to have been developed disproportionately with, nay, even perhaps at the expense of, the admiring or appreciating power in other words, he exhibits a strong and possibly involuntary tendency to prefer what is consonant with a pure and regular system of rules to that which bears the stamp of vigorous and possibly irregular originality. His mind delights rather in what is negatively than in what is positively beautiful. Without enthusiasm, criticism becomes rather a dogmatic art than an ennobling and productive science; and Hallam will appear, in doing ample justice to the more regular and colder schools of literature in Europe, to have hardly been sufficiently warm in his praise of the great writers of this, the boldest and most impassioned period of his country's intellectual history. In our opinion, the richness, the inexhaustible fertility, the exquisite and subtle harmony, and the fervent and yet gentle piety which distinguish every page of Jeremy Taylor's writings, nay, the mere abundance of new ideas, and particularly the multitude of images drawn by him from the common objects and phenomena of nature, would of themselves be more than sufficient to place this great poet - for a poet he was, in the highest sense of the term - at least on an equality with any orator of the so-called classical school of French pulpit eloquence.

In the peculiarity to which we have just alluded he is indeed Shaksperian; few prose authors in the English language, and certainly none in any other, having surpassed Taylor in the number, the beauty, or the novelty of images drawn from rural life, from the lovely or sublime objects of nature, from the graces of infancy and the tenderest endearments of affection-those images, in short, which we never meet without a gentle flush and thrill of the heart; for they are echoes and emanations from a purer, a more innocent, and a happier existence.

In one respect, indeed, there exists a resemblance between Taylor and Shakspeare so striking as hardly to have escaped any one who has studied the literary physiognomy of this wonderful epoch; we allude to that exulting and abounding richness of fancy which causes them to be lured away at every turn from the principal aim of their reasoning by the bright phantoms which perpetually arise during its pursuit. As, in a country richly stocked with game, the hounds are perpetually drawn off from their chase by the fresh quarry they have started as they run, the minds of these writers seem incapable of resisting the temptation of turning aside to hunt the fancies started by their restless imagination. This is, it is true, often a defect, and sometimes produces confusion, and injures the very effect of the author's reasoning; few readers are able to follow the irregular movements of the poet's inconstant and suggestive imagination; to do that would imply a vivacity of perception resembling the creative energy of the poet himself. This discursive character is indeed