Milward, in his introductory letter, requests the reader to distinguish times, and in his fancy to carry along with him the when and the why many of these things were spoken. The alphabetical arrangement of the matter of the book gives us no help here. There is no attempt at a chronological order. Times are confused throughout, and we pass from subject to subject with no notice of either when or why except such as we can gather from the contents of each paragraph. I have done what I could, in an imperfect tentative way, to supply the want. Out of the great stream of events and writings and speeches which formed, so to say, the environment of Selden's life, I have picked out, here and there, what seemed likely to have suggested some of his remarks. In some instances the reference has been clear and certain; in some his published writings have given the clue, and have served to supplement the imperfect information in the Table Talk as well as to correct mistakes which must have been due to his reporter not to himself. Of his very numerous works, his History of Tithes is the only one to which he makes direct reference in the Table Talk. (See Tithes, sec. 6.)

Selden was born in 1584. In 1600 he entered at Hart Hall, Oxford. In 1602 he was a law-student at Clifford's Inn, and thence migrated to the Inner Temple in 1604. He soon became known as a man of vast and exact learning. So great was his fame as a constitutional lawyer, that before he became a member of Parliament he was often called in to advise the House on questions of prerogative, and he is credited with having had a principal part in framing the Protestation of 1621—a service for which he paid the penalty of five weeks' imprisonment by order of the Council. He was thus already a marked man when, in 1624, he was elected a member of the House, a position which he held in several Parliaments, viz. in 1626, 1628, and in the second Parliament of 1640. It was not

long before he again became a prominent champion of the Parliamentary cause and an opponent of the highhanded acts of injustice done by the King or in the King's name. His knowledge of past history and of precedents made him a valuable ally, and when the Petition of Right was drawn up, Selden was one of those who had been appointed to give help in preparing it. This, and his general outspokenness in his place in the House, marked him out, a second time, as a proper object for royal vengeance. In the spring of 1629 he was one of what he terms the 'Parliament men imprisoned tertio Caroli,' by a stretch of the prerogative, aided and rendered effective by the subservient temper of the judges before whom the prisoners were brought. Denzil Hollis, Eliot, and Valentine were among his fellow prisoners—an illustrious company, in which Selden may not have been unwilling to find himself included. The charge against them had to do with their conduct and language in Parliament-matters about which no challenge could legally be made by any outside authority. The judges would have bailed the prisoners if they would have given security for their future good behaviour, but this at Selden's instance they most properly refused to do. It would have been a surrender of their privilege for the past, and a check on their future liberty of deed or word. They were accordingly committed to the Tower, and though in Selden's case the confinement did not last long, and his treatment was not harsh, yet the restraint was an outrage which he did rightly to resent, and which in his case and in that of his fellow sufferers was of grave and lasting injury to the cause which it was intended to serve. In politics, as in religion, it is useless to play at persecution. Charles by his half measures succeeded only in making enemies of those whom he had hoped to terrify into submission. Selden was not the most

formidable or the most bitter, but neither then nor in the future was he an adversary whom it was at all safe to provoke.

But just as Selden started as a Parliamentary champion on strictly constitutional grounds, so it was not long before the proceedings of the second Parliament of 1640 forced him into more or less of an antagonism to his old allies. We have several traces in the Table Talk of his growing coolness towards the advanced section of the Parliamentary party. Not, indeed, that his breach with his old friends had gone so far as to drive him into the opposite camp, expectant as it was and ready to welcome him if he had come over to it. He still held that the original contract between king and people had been broken, and that the subjects had thus been released from their promise of obedience. The quarrel, he saw clearly, had gone so far that it must be settled by an appeal to arms. It was a contest now, in which the original issues had become obscured, 'a scuffle,' as he terms it, between two sets of opponents with neither of whom could he identify himself. They must fight it out between themselves, and leave decent quiet people to their own business or to their books.

The outbreak of the civil war accordingly found him lukewarm, if not indifferent. He could look with no satisfaction to the victory of either side, to the king's highhanded disregard of law, or to the puritans' zeal not according to knowledge, and for objects many of which he disapproved. With the authors of the revolution of 1689 he would have been more entirely in agreement. The declared policy of the new rule was just what he had himself stood up for in evil days when power was triumphant over right. The year for the publication of the Table Talk was thus well chosen. When the illegal rule of James II had been ended, and when the Bill of

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Rights had settled the government of England after the type which Selden approved, then and not till then was his Table Talk given to the world. The day had at length come in which Selden's own principles were in the ascendant, it was the triumph of the only cause for which he had ever cared personally to contend.

After the beginning of the civil war, there is not much in Selden's public career that calls for notice here. The references in the Table Talk to the public events of the time are few and indistinct. We have no word about Charles' trial and execution, or about Cromwell's rise and administration. It is hardly possible that these should not have been frequent matters of table talk, but we have no record of them in Milward's report. Has Milward avoided keeping a record of them, or has the Table Talk, prior to publication, been curtailed and bowdlerised in a political sense? Or has Selden kept carefully to his rule that wise men say nothing in dangerous times (Wisdom, 3), and that the wisest way for men in these times is to say nothing (Peace, 1)? If he did say anything, we have certainly no record of it. The chief subject to which he again and again refers is of a very different class. In 1643 he was appointed one of the learned pious members of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and the Table Talk abounds with proofs of the kind of interest which he long continued to feel in his new work. The Assembly was formed of all parties in the Church and out of it. The prelatical party were included in it, but they studiously did not attend. The rest were Presbyterians with a moderate infusion of Independents and Erastians. Selden, it is certain, had no great love for bishops and clergy, but he did not regard them with the contemptuous dislike which he felt for the main body of their non-conformist opponents. The lofty claims and the ignorance and

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intolerance of the Presbyterian section; the ranting of the more ignorant Roundhead under the influence of what he termed the Spirit, were even less to his mind than the prelatical party had been.

In the Westminster Assembly of Divines it was with the Presbyterians that he came chiefly into conflict. They formed a clear majority, and as far as votes went, contrived to carry things pretty well in their own way. This, however, was the limit of their success. The House of Commons refused to ratify their claims to a free spiritual jurisdiction, or to acknowledge the divine right by which they claimed to hold their ministry. In debate they were no less unfortunate. Selden, by the evidence of friends and of enemies, was one of the chief thorns in their side. It was his way to lead them on to argue, to amuse himself with their mistakes and contradictions, and to bring to bear his formidable battery of learning against their favourite doctrinal strongholds. His services in this sort were, as we might suppose, very variously regarded. His friend and fellow divine, Mr. Whitelock, a sound Erastian like himself, writes

'Divers members of both houses, whereof I was one, were members of the Assembly of Divines, and had the same liberty with the Divines to sit and debate and give their votes . . . . In which debates Mr. Selden spake admirably, and confuted divers of them in their own learning.

'And sometimes when they had cited a text of Scripture to prove their assertion, he would tell them, Perhaps in your little pocket Bibles with gilt leaves (which they would often pull out and read) the Translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew signifies thus and thus; and so would totally silence them.' (Memorials, p. 71.)

Anthony à Wood, in his Athenae, quotes Aubrey to the same effect: