comparison between him and Buchanan his Latin version of the Psalms. Of Johnston's fellow Latinists of the "Delitia," there were others besides himself who were Aberdonians. The northern city, indeed, had a peculiar celebrity at that time as a seat of letters. Even Clarendon had heard of this; for, when speaking of the Universities of Scotland as being the only spots north of the Tweed on which, in the early part of Charles's reign, an Episcopalian or English eye could rest with any composure, he names that of Aberdeen as worthy of particular recognition. His Lordship ought to have known, however, that that city had two Universities. The Universities of Scotland were and still are five in number. St. Andrew's has one, Glasgow has another, Edinburgh has a third; but it is the boast of the single city of Aberdeen to have two to itself, within a mile of each other - King's College and University as the Aberdonian Oxford, and Marischal College and University as the Aberdonian Cambridge.

After so extensive a survey of British poetry in or about the year 1632, there are several reasons why, without the risk of leading to a false estimate of the relative intellectual importance of the prose and the poetry of that age, our account of the contemporary prosewriters may be much more summary.

In the first place, far more of the prose of any period than of its poetry consists of the expenditure of intellect on those immediate social topics, the consideration of which, and consequently of all the activity connected with them, is undertaken by the general historian. It may be incumbent on the historian of literature to mention in due place some versifier whose intrinsic faculty may have been of the smallest; whereas, the bishops, the statesmen, the men of weight and metal who made society quiet or tumultuous round about that versifier, who did more and perhaps wrote more in a month than he did in a year, may have no recognition whatever in literary history. Laud, largely as he figures in the social history of his period, is a less figure in our ordinary literary histories than Herrick, who would have licked his shoe; and Williams, almost every recorded saying of whom is worth a sonnet or an epigram, is hardly named among our national writers. It is very necessary that this should be borne in mind. With Mr. Hallam we think that many of those poets whom it has been our duty to mention, fare all the better now because they lived long ago, and are presented to us, not in the entire impression of their writings, but

1 History of Rebellion, edit. 1707, p. 63.

solely through extracts, in which what is tolerable alone remains, while the trash is left out of account. As regards these writers, envy has lost its function. No one is interested now in keeping them down. Moreover, an antiquarian interest attaches to them; and hence a thought, a phrase, a fancy which we should pass with little notice in a modern writer, surprises us in them into something like glee. We believe that, if it were possible to disinter some of those minor poets of the year 1632, so as to see them as they actually were, weak, vain creatures, it would be felt that it was only conventional deference to the metrical form of writing that had given them a title to be enumerated in the same chronological list with the Shakspeares, the Jonsons, and the Donnes, while other far superior men who also labored with the pen, but labored only in business-like prose, are excluded from the dignity of such a fellowship. Not but that this difference of treatment is founded on reason. It is not merely valuable intellectual matter, but intellectual matter of a certain range of kinds, elaborated into one or other of a certain range of forms, that constitutes literature in the sense in which it can be made the subject of specific continuous history; and thus there may, in any period, be hundreds of men of profound scholarship, of quick wit, and of energetic elocution, who, though they leave writings behind them, are passed over afterwards in literary history, simply because their writings lack the prescribed characteristics. In compensation for this omission, they have their due amount of recognition from the general historian as social functionaries; or, if the particular departments of activity with which they were connected-education, philology, antiquarian research, theological doctrine, ecclesiastical polity and the like are ever separately studied, they are then named individually and more exactly appreciated.

In addition to this consideration, however, which would apply to any period, there is a circumstance peculiar to the period under notice, contributing to the same result. English prose then had by no means taken a development that could entitle it to coördinate rank with English poetry in the aggregate of English literature. This may have been partly owing to that general law according to which, in all nations, metrical literature has preceded oratio soluta; in virtue of which it was that Greece had a Homer long before she could have a Herodotus or a Thucydides; and in virtue of which, could we penetrate far enough back into the infancy of our species, we should probably find that men sang and recited before they could talk, and danced and leaped rhythmically before they could walk with composure. It was owing in a greater degree, however,

to the fact that prose, much later than poetry, emancipated itself among us from the trammels of a dead tongue. Almost from the first hour that Englishmen expressed their feelings in song, or sought play for their imagination in tales, they chose their vernacular for the purpose; whereas in those departments of literary exercise which the world had long recognized as the proper dominion. of prose the great business of record or of history in all its varieties, the noble work of speculation or philosophical thought on all subjects interesting to humanity, and, to some extent also, the work of social controversy and moral exhortation - Latin had all along been preferred to English. An English prose was, indeed, nobly disentangling itself. As was natural, it had disentangled itself first in the form and for, the purposes of popular eloquence. Allowing for the precedents of a Wycliffe, a Chaucer in some of his works, a Sir Thomas More and the like, the first English prosestyle was that of the pulpit after the Reformation. Then, in the Elizabethan age, towering above a host of chroniclers, pamphleteers, and polemical theologians, there had appeared a Sydney, a Hooker, a Raleigh, and a Bacon. After such men had appeared, and there had been exhibited in their writings the union of wealth and depth of matter with beauty and even gorgeousness of form, there could no longer be a definition of literature in which English prose should not be coördinate with English poetry. And yet, so much had still to be done before genius of all kinds could sufficiently master the new element, and make it plastic for all purposes (some of those included which Poetry had hitherto believed to be her own), that, in the schemes of our ablest literary historians, it is common to count but one period of English prose prior to the age of Dryden and the Restoration.

For these reasons, and also because some who were prose-writers of the period were also poets, and have been named as such, it will be enough if, by way of appended survey of the prose literature of the period, we name only those who, from some peculiarity in the form of their writings, rose out of the crowd of the scholars and academic men, or who, without this distinction, were men of extraordinary intellectual mark. We may still allow Ben Jonson to occupy the chair; for Ben was a good prose-writer himself, and it was not the poets alone, but all the wits and intellectual men of his day, that he regarded as his subjects.

A very large proportion of the prose literature of the period consisted of sermons, devotional treatises, and other works of popular or practical as distinct from learned theology. There were few Church dignitaries or clergymen of note, whether on the Laud

ian or on the Calvinistic side, who had not published sermons funeral sermons, discourses before the King, and the like in which the aim was rather the exposition of the general principles of Christianity, than the inculcation of their peculiar views as Laudians or as Calvinists. Among the devotional writings most in request were those of the late Bishop Andrews. The "most eminent divine" in the English Church while he lived, and undoubtedly one of the first to introduce that Patristic theology, with its accompanying tendency to strong hierarchical notions in Church government and to ceremoniousness of worship, which Laud afterwards sought to enforce as the only Anglican orthodoxy, Andrews had been particularly distinguished as a pulpit orator. "He was an unimitable preacher in his way," says Fuller, "and such plagiaries who have stolen his sermons could never steal his preaching, and could make nothing of that whereof he made all things as he desired." Besides what Andrews had published in his life, a folio volume of his sermons had been published after his death by the command of the King; and these were still serving as theological reading for persons of superior culture. "Both the learning and the ability of Andrews," says Mr. Craik, “are conspicuous in everything he has written; but his eloquence, nevertheless, is to a modern taste grotesque enough. In his more ambitious passages, he is the very prince of verbal posture-masters-if not the first in date, the first in extravagance, of the artificial, quibbling, syllable-tormenting school of our English pulpit rhetoricians; and he undoubtedly contributed more to spread the disease of that manner of writing than any other individual." Something of the same manner, with the variations to be expected from a man of so subtle and abstruse a talent, is to be found in the sermons of Donne. Some of these, preached at Whitehall or before public bodies, had been accessible in print long before Donne's death, though it was not till a later period that the whole were edited.

The Calvinists were not without authors more exactly agreeable to their tastes than either Andrews or Donne. Among the eminent Puritan preachers who had outlived Preston, there was none more celebrated than the "humble and heavenly-minded" Dr. Richard Sibbes. Between 1618 and 1625, he had been preacher to the Society of Gray's Inn; and after his appointment to the mastership of Catharine Hall, Cambridge, he had continued to preach, with Laud's eyes upon him, at Cambridge and elsewhere. A set of sermons which he had put forth separately, and then collected in 1629 into a folio, volume under the title of "The 1 Worthies; London. 2 Sketches of Literature and Learning in England, III. 212.

Saint's Cordial," were eagerly bought and read by the Puritan part of the community. To these were added, in 1632, his "Soul's Conflict with itself," being the substance of several sermons — a treatise which, with "The Bruised Reed" similarly composed, and other sermons published before his death in 1635, or shortly afterwards, has not yet ceased to be in demand. From the year 1630, onwards for twenty years or so, no writings in practical theology seem to have been so much read among the pious English middle classes as those of Sibbes. Quarles, who had been one of his hearers in London, testified his admiration in a copy of verses, in which he styles him

"This known author, — this rare man of men."1

Of far higher literary pretensions than the works of Sibbes, and also soundly Calvinistic, if not obtrusively so, were the prose writ ings of Bishop Hall. It has already been mentioned that, since the publication of his "Satires" in 1597, Hall had confined himself almost exclusively to prose authorship. Among his publications in the earlier part of his clerical life, while he was yet but a parish clergyman in Suffolk, or Archdeacon of Nottingham, had been his "Meditations" (1605), his "Epistles" (1608-11), and various controversial tracts, under such titles as "No Peace with Rome," "The Apology of the Church of England against the Brownists," etc. While Dean of Worcester, he had published (1617), in a large folio, a "Recollection" of such treatises, dedicated to King James. Since then he had put forth a good many additional tracts and sermons, of which he was just about to make another folio. The writings of his first folio seem, however, to have been still in most general request, particularly his "Meditations," his “Characters of Virtues and Vices," and his "Contemplations upon the Principal Passages of the Holy Story." In addition to their other merits, these, and indeed most of Hall's prose writings, had a merit which might have been expected from the author of the "Satires," and which distinguished them from the mass of the theological writings of their day-the merit of careful literary execution. "He was commonly called our English Seneca," says Fuller, "for the pureness, plainness, and fulness of his style." Hall, accordingly, has still a place in the history of English theological prose between Hooker and Jeremy Taylor; and there are modern critics

1 Poem prefixed to a collected edition of Sibbes's works, published at Aberdeen in 1809- the only recent collected edition I have seen, though editions of his "Soul's Conflict,"

his "Bruised Reed," and his "Meditations," are numerous. Baxter traced his conversion to the "Bruised Reed."