of this. It was reserved for the highest to throw it off, "like dewdrops from the lion's mane." After a very full consideration of Shakspere's dramatic works, we are come to the conclusion that he possessed, above all other men, so complete a mastery over the tendency to colour general representations of life and character with personal views and circumstances, that he invariably went out of himself-that he saw nothing through his own individual feelings-and that thus none of his portraits are alike, because none are personifications of his own nature-his own life-his own self-consciousness. If there are some portions of his Sonnets which are conceived in an entirely different spirit, we think they are not very numerous, and must be received as evidences of personal character, habits, and feelings, with great scrupulousness.

Shakspere during the last year or two of the 16th century, and the opening years of the 17th. was for the most part in London. In 1598 we find his townsman, Richard Quiney, writing him a letter, requesting the loan of thirty pounds. Mr. Alderman Sturley, with reference to some public business of the period, not only says in a letter that our countryman, Mr. William Shakspere, would procure us money," but speak of the friends he can make." Such notices are decisive as to the position Shakspere then held in the estimation of the world. In 1601 his father died; and his burial is registered at Stratford. He appears then to have had three brothers living,-Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund. Gilbert, the next to himself, resided at Stratford, and probably managed William's affairs there while he was in London; for in 1602, when the prosperous poet bought a considerable quantity of land near Stratford, of William and John Combe (107 acres), the counterpart of the conveyance (which we have seen) contains an acknowledgment of possession being given to Gilbert Shakspere, to the use of William. It is probable that Gilbert died before William; for no mention is made of him in the poet's will. The younger son of the family, Edmund, born in 1580, followed the fortunes of his illustrious brother. It was probably intended that he should succeed him in his proprietorship of the theatres; but the register of the burials of St. Mary Overies, in Southwark, closes his history in 1607: "Edmund Shakspere, player, in the church." Richard Shakspere died in 1613.

In 1603 James I. ascended the throne of England. Lord Southampton, who had so imprudently participated in the conspiracy of Essex, was a favourite of the new king; and one almost of the first acts of the reign was a grant of a patent to the proprietors of the Blackfriars and Globe theatres. In this patent the name of Shakspere stands the second; the names mentioned being "Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakspere, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Hemmings, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armyn, Richard Cowley."

It would appear that at this period Shakspere was desirous of retiring from the more laborious duties of his profession as an actor. He desired to be appointed, there is little doubt, to the office of Master of the Queen's Revels. Daniel, a brother poet, was appointed; and in a letter to the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, he thus speaks of one of the competitors for the office:-"It seemeth to my humble judgment that one who is the author of plays now daily presented on the public stages of London, and the possessor of no small gains, and moreover himself an actor in the King's company of comedians, could not with reason pretend to be master of the Queen's Majesty's revels, forasmuch as he would sometimes be asked to approve and allow of his own writings."

But Shakspere continued to hold his property in the theatre. In 1608 the Corporation of London again attempted to interfere with the actors of the Blackfriars; and there being little chance of ejecting them despotically, a negociation was set on foot for the purchase of their property. A document found by Mr. Collier amongst the Egerton papers at once determines Shakspere's position in regard to his theatrical proprietorship. It is a valuation, containing the following item:"Item. W. Shakespeare asketh for the wardrobe and properties of the same playhouse 500., and for his four shares, the same as his fellows Burbidge and Fletcher, viz. 9331. 68. 8d. 1433 6 8" With this document was found another-unquestionably the most interesting paper ever published relating to Shakspere: it is a letter from Lord Southampton to Lord Ellesmere, the lord chancellor; and it contains the following passage:—

"These bearers are two of the chief of the company; one of them by name Richard Burbidge, who humbly sueth for your Lordship's kind help, for that he is a man famous as our English Roscius, one who fitteth the action to the word and the word to the action most admirably. By the exercise of his quality, industry, and good behaviour, he hath become possessed of the Black Friars playhouse, which hath been employed for plays since it was built by his father, now near fifty years ago. The other is a man no whit less deserving favour, and my especial friend, till of late an actor of good account in the company, now a sharer in the same, and writer of some of our best English plays, which, as your Lordship knoweth, were most singularly liked of Queen Elizabeth, when the company was called upon to perform before her Majesty at court, at Christmas and Shrovetide. His most gracious Majesty King James also, since his coming to the crown, hath extended his royal favour to the company in divers ways and at sundry times.

This other hath to name William Shakespeare, and they are both of one county, and indeed almost of one town: both are right famous in their qualities, though it longeth not to your Lordship's gravity and wisdom to resort unto the places where they are wont to delight the public ear. Their trust and suit now is, not to be molested in their way of life whereby they maintain themselves and their wives and families (being both married and of good reputation), as well as the widows and orphans of some of their dead fellows."

We may now suppose that the great poet, honoured and esteemed, had retired to Stratford, retaining a property in the theatre-regularly writing for it. There is an opinion that he ceased to act after 1603. In that year his name is found amongst the performers of one of Ben Jonson's plays. But the years from 1604 to his death, in the April of 1616 were not idly spent. He was a practical farmer, we have little doubt. In 1605 he bought a moiety of the tithes of Stratford, which he would then probably collect in kind. He occupied the best house of the place; he had there his curious knotted garden' to amuse him; and his orchard had many a pippin of his own graffing.' James I. recommended the cultivation of mulberry-trees in England; and who has not heard of Shakspere's mulberry-tree? Vulgar tradi tion at this time represents him as writing a bitter epitaph upon his friend and neighbour John Combe, as he had satirised Sir Thomas Lucy. He was doing something better. To the first half of the period between 1604 and his death may be assigned-' Lear,' Macbeth,' 'Cymbeline,' 'The Winter's Tale,' and 'The Tempest. The very recital of the names of these glorious works, associated as they are with that quiet country town, its beautiful Avon, its meadows, and its woodlands, is enough to make Stratford a name dear and venerable in every age. But there are others to be added to the wondrous list; and these probably belong to the latter half of the period :-Troilus and Cressida,' 'Henry VIII.,'' Coriolanus,' 'Julius Cæsar,' 'Antony and Cleopatra.' The direction of Shakspere's mind to Roman subjects, in his closing period, and the marvellous accuracy, the real substantial learning, with which he has treated them, would lead us to believe that he had renewed the studies of his boyhood in the last years of his retirement. Alfieri learned Greek after he was fifty. It is our opinion that Shakspere continued to write till he was removed by death; and that the Roman plays were the beginning of a series. Who will finish that series?

In 1607 Susanna, the eldest daughter of Shakspere, married a physician resident at Stratford-a man of high professional eminence Dr. Hall. In 1608 his grand-daughter Elizabeth was born. To this child he bequeathed a sum of money, and all his plate, "except my broad silver and gilt bowl." Shakspere was a grandfather at fortythree. In 1608 his mother died-the mother, doubtless, of his ardent love. There is a curious record of Shakspere's later years, which was recently discovered in the library of the Medical Society of London, contained in the Diary of the Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratfordupon-Avon.' The diary extends from 1648 to 1679; and it contains the following very characteristic entry :—

"I have heard that Mr. Shakspeare was a natural wit, without any art at all; he frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year: and for it had an allowance so large, that he spent at the rate of 1000l. a year, as I have heard.

"Shakspeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting; and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakspeare died of a fever there

contracted."

Shakspere's annual expenditure, and the merry meeting, and the hard drinking, are probably exaggerations. They however show that our opinion that Shakspere continued to write for the stage after he had ceased to be an actor has some foundation; and that his residence in comfort and affluence at Stratford did not necessarily imply an abandonment of all his former pursuits. 'Henry VIII.,' upon every rational construction of evidence, was produced at the Globe theatre in 1613, and was then a new play.

We approach the end. Shakspere, according to the register of Stratford, was buried on the 25th of April 1616.

He survived the marriage of his daughter Judith to Thomas Quiney only two months, and he made his will probably upon the occasion of that marriage. It is dated the 25th of March, but in the document February was first written, and afterwards struck out. By this will which is long, he gives his real estate to his eldest daughter. According to the received interpretation of his will, Shakspere treats his wife with neglect and "bitter sarcasm," for which estranged affections would have been no warranty; and consigns her, with a solemn avowal of contempt and hatred, to a miserable dependence, not even recommended or implied, upon the bounty of their common children. According to the dictum of Malone, who first dragged this part of his will into notice sixty years ago, "His wife had not wholly escaped his memory-he had forgot her, he had recollected her, but so recollected her as more strongly to mark how little he esteemed her; he had already (as it is vulgarly expressed) cut her off, not indeed with a shilling, but with an old bed." It was the object of Shakspere by this will to perpetuate a family estate. In doing so did he neglect the duty and affection which he owed to his wife? He did not. His estates, with the exception of a copyhold tenement, expressly mentioned in his will, were freehold. His wife was entitled to dower. She

to the impressment of seamen, and a citizen of London having been seized and carried to the Nore, Sharp had him brought back by a writ of habeas corpus from the Court of King's Bench, and he was set at liberty. He sent out a number of negroes whom he found in the streets of London to Sierra Leone at his own expense, and also drew up a 'Sketch of Temporary Resolutions for the intended Settlement on the Grain Coast of Africa, near Sierra Leone,' and thus may be said to have been the founder of the settlement there. He was an advocate of parliamentary reform, having as early as 1778 published A Declaration of the People's Natural Rights to a share in the Legislature, which is the Fundamental Principle of the British Constitution of State; also a Declaration of Defence of the same Doctrine when applied particularly to the People of Ireland,' 8vo, London. Granville Sharp continued to pass his time in these and similar benevolent labours till his death, July 6, 1813, at the age of seventy-nine. Sharp's writings were numerous, and had many readers at the time when they appeared; but as most of them are pamphlets, and were written for temporary purposes, they are not much referred to now. Among them however are some laborious and useful investigations into the great principles of the English constitution, particularly his 'Account of the Ancient Divisions of the English Nation into Hundreds and Tithings,' 8vo, London, 1784; and his 'Account of the English Polity of Congregational Courts, more particularly of the great Annual Court of the People, called Frank Pledge,' 8vo, London, 1786. He was a zealous member of the Established Church, and had a great dislike to the Roman Catholic religion, but was liberal to Protestant dissenters of all classes.

(Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Esq., composed from his own Manuscripts and other authentic Documents, 4to, 1820.)

SHARP, JAMES, archbishop of St. Andrews, was born in May, 1618, in the castle of Banff, where his father, Mr. William Sharp, resided in his quality of sheriff clerk of the county. Sharp's paternal grandfather had been a merchant of considerable eminence in the town of Aberdeen, and was the younger son of a gentleman of landed property in Perthshire. Sharp was educated at the University of Aberdeen, where he is said to have distinguished himself in the studies then in vogue. On leaving college he paid a visit to England, but soon after returned to his native country on being chosen one of the regents, or professors of philosophy, in St. Leonard's College, St. Andrews, an appointment for which he is said to have been indebted to the interest of his relation the Earl of Rothes, to whom he had got himself introduced while in the South. His whole history evinces the great talent he had in insinuating himself into the favour of the great. After a short time he exchanged his professorship for the office of minister of the parish of Crail, no doubt a better living, to which he was appointed by his friend John, earl of Crawford and Lindesay. These facts are given on the authority of a tract entitled 'A true and Impartial Account of the Life of the most Reverend Father in God, Dr. James Sharp, Archbishop of St. Andrews,' which is usually quoted as printed in 1723, although, according to Watt's 'Bibliotheca,' it was first published in 1719. The object of the writer is to make it appear that Sharp was disinclined to Presbytery, or at least opposed to the Solemn League and Covenant, from the beginning; but he must at any rate have complied with both when he accepted his professorship and his living in the church. Indeed it is evident that he assumed the appearance of great zeal for the ecclesiastical system now, after the commencement of the civil war, established in Scotland, and with such success as to take in its firmest and ablest friends, so that he enjoyed the full confidence and took part in all the councils of the leaders of the church. His affability and pleasing manners also, we are told, made him a favourite among his parishioners.

In August 1651, according to Sir James Balfour's 'Annals,' Sharp was one of a number of ministers who were seized and put on board ship at Broughty, on the Tay, and carried off prisoners to England, by order of General Monk, who was then overrunning the country. This remarkable passage in his history is not noticed in the common accounts of Sharp; but frequent allusions occur in the Presbyterian invectives to certain base compliances, by which he is asserted to have purchased the favour of Cromwell on some occasion, and to have obtained his liberty, while his companions were left in bondage. He appears, at all events, to have, after some time, found his way back to his charge at Crail.

Some years after this we hear of him being sent up to London with a commission from the party in the church called the Resolutioners, to plead their cause before the Protector against Mr. James Guthrie, minister of Stirling, the deputy of the opposing faction, called the Protestors or Remonstrators; on which occasion he is said to have so distinguished himself by his management and address that Cromwell remarked to the byestanders, " That gentleman, after the Scotch way, ought to be styled Sharp of that ilk." He was no doubt selected for this mission partly on account of the connections he had formed in England. According to Burnet, Sharp at this time "seemed more than ordinary zealous for Presbytery."

It is characteristic of Sharp that, although thus the agent of the Resolutioners, he always, according to his friendly biographer, kept a good understanding with the chiefs of their opponents, the Protestors. While ingratiating himslf with Cromwell also, it seems, he maintained a correspondence with Charles II. during all the time of

his exile. General Monk was exactly the character for such a man to get into his hands at the critical moment of the Restoration. It is certain that, whatever may have afterwards been thought or said of the acts by which he had obtained his release from Cromwell when his companions were left in confinement, he had either never lost or had completely regained the confidence of his brethren in the church, five of whom, ministers of Edinburgh, and the leading men of their party, when Monk began his march from the North of England upon London, in January 1660, applied to him to receive Sharp as their representative, and as a person fully instructed in their views. The seven months that followed form the portion of Sharp's history which is of the most importance to the appreciation of his character. He proceeded to London, where he arrived 13th February, set out for Breda 4th May, returned to London 26th May, and appears to have remained there till about the middle of August. During all this time he was in close communication with all the leading persons and parties of the day; with Monk and the chief of the English and Scottish nobility then in London; with both the Presbyterian and the Episcopalian ministers there; with Charles himself and the members of his court; and he also kept up an active correspondence with Douglas and the other ministers in Scotland by whom he had been deputed. The numerous letters which passed between him and Douglas have been preserved; they are now deposited in the library of the University of Glasgow, and a very full abstract of them has been given by Wodrow in the Introduction to his 'History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution.' Mr. C. Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in a note to Kirkton's Secret and true History of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the year 1678,' observes that "Wodrow is accused of gross injustice in garbling Sharp's letters to Douglas;" but that writer, whose partisanship is very decided, neither ventures to warrant the truth of this accusation, nor professes to have examined the original letters. On the other hand, the Rev. Dr. Burns, late of Paisley, now of Toronto in Canada, the modern editor of Wodrow's History, having compared, as he tells us, the letters with the abstract, asserts, "without hesitation, as a general result of the inquiry, that, while the historian does by no means conceal his design of exposing Sharp's treachery, he had it in his power from these documents to have held him up to detestation in still blacker colours, had he quoted all the expressions of affected devotion-all the solemn protestation of attachment to Presbytery-all the specimens of mean adulation, and all the bitter vituperations against his opponents, which these letters contain." Dr. Burns probably would not wish to be considered a less zealous partisan than Mr. Sharp; but, besides the authority his statement derives from his having actually seen and read the original letters, it appears to us to be probable in itself. Wodrow, though not a critically exact historian, had a most minute as well as extensive acquaintance with the times of which he writes, and is a very careful compiler from the vast store of original documents on which his work is almost exclusively founded; and, although not a person of much enlargement of mind, he cannot with justice be called either a violent or an unfair writer. His abstract certainly leaves a strong impression of Sharp's thorough dissimulation and treachery. The opinion which Douglas afterwards formed was, it seems, that he had been corrupted and gained over to the Episcopalian side during his visit to Breda, where he was probably much with Hyde, and where Charles himself treated him with the most flattering favour and familiarity; and in this view of the matter Wodrow also appears to coincide. To us his conduct has the air of intrigue and dishonesty from the commencement of his mission; he may not have made up his mind when he left home to support the restoration of Episcopacy in Scotland, but we believe he set out fully determined to take the course as to that matter which promised most for his own advancement, and that what he saw of the current in which things were running after he got to London very soon determined him as to the part he should act.

Some of Sharp's defenders however take up other ground, and, without disputing the correctness of Wodrow's abstract of the letters, deny that they afford any evidence of his insincerity, or that we have any other reason for believing that he was unfaithful to the cause of Presbytery so long as he was employed on this mission. When he returned to Scotland, he brought with him a letter from the King, directed, "to Mr. Robert Douglas, to be communicated to the Presbytery of Edinburgh," in which his Majesty declared his resolution "to protect and preserve the government of the church of Scotland, as it is settled by law, without violation." This letter Sharp's enemies will have to have been of his composition; its mode of expression was at least ingenious. The Scottish parliament, which met 1st January 1661, passed an act-suggested, according to Burnet, at the council table in a drunken bout-rescinding or repealing all acts passed since the year 1633; and this at once abolished any legal establishment that Presbytery had ever received, and made "the church as it is settled by law" to mean the old Episcopal church which had been overthrown in 1638. During his late absence from Scotland, Sharp had been elected professor of divinity in St. Mary's college, St. Andrews; he was also appointed his Majesty's chaplain for Scotland, with an annual salary of 2001. sterling; and now, having gone up again to London, on the rising of parliament, along with Glencairn,

the chancellor, and Rothes, the president of the council, he was, in a council held at Whitehall, nominated Archbishop of St. Andrews. He returned to Scotland with the same two noblemen on August 31st, and left again for England on October 18th; and about the middle of December he and three of his brethren were consecrated with great pomp at Westminister by the bishops of London and Worcester. The history of Sharp's government of the Scottish Church cannot be here detailed. He certainly did not allow any recollections of his own very recent renouncement of Presbyterianism, or of the extreme zeal he had been wont to profess for that system of ecclesiastical government, to check his activity and ardour in the maintenance of the opposite order of things that had been now set up. The party he had deserted charge him with an unrelenting persecution of his old associates, of all who would not apostatise like himself, as well as with the most overbearing deportment even to those of his own communion who were his inferiors in station, and with an insatiable ambition; and it cannot be denied that many well-authenticated facts lend strong countenance to these imputations. He may have conscientiously believed such a policy to be necessary, or to be the wisest and best; but whatever were his views or motives, it is certain that we find him on all occasions the advocate for measures of rigour and severity, and constantly clamouring for the more strict execution of the laws against nonconformists.

In 1663 he left the declining interest of the Earl of Middleton, to whose support he had been mainly indebted for his nomination to the primacy, and attached himself to his old adversary the Earl of Lauderdale; but their association scarcely lasted two years. In 1664, on the death of the Earl of Glencairn, he made strong application for the office of Lord Chancellor, but without success. In the beginning of the year 1667 he was commanded come no more to the council-table, but to remain within his diocese; but this restraint was taken off before the end of the year. On Saturday, the 9th of July 1668, he was shot at as he was entering his coach in the streets of Edinburgh, by one James Mitchell, a conventicle preacher; but the ball was intercepted by the arm of the Bishop of Orkney, who was following him into the coach. The bishop's arm was shattered, but nobody attempted to apprehend the assassin, who was discovered, however, five years afterwards, and executed in January 1678, after a series of proceedings which, at least according to one version of the story, are little creditable to Sharp's magnanimity. At last, on Saturday, the 3rd of May 1679, the archbishop, while travelling with his eldest daughter from Kennoway, where he had passed the night, to St. Andrews, was attacked by a band of nine enthusiasts on Magus Muir, within three miles of that city, dragged from his coach, and slaughtered on the spot with circumstances of the most ferocious and pitiless barbarity. Various narratives of this murder have been collected by Wodrow, and one has been added by Dr Burns, in his late edition of that historian's work (4 vols. 8vo, Glasgow, 1829); but the most detailed and in all respects remarkable account of the affair is that drawn up by James Russell, one of the actors in it, which was for the first time printed by Mr. Sharpe at the end of his edition of Kirkton's History. The same volume also contains a letter from Sir William Sharp, the archbishop's son, giving an account of his father's murder, dated St. Andrews, the 10th of May. By his wife Helen Moncrief, daughter of the laird of Randerston, Archbishop Sharp left a son, Sir William Sharp, and two daughters, both of whom were married, the youngest, Margaret, to William, eleventh Lord Saltoun, the ancestor of the present lord. His portrait, from a painting by Lely, is engraved in Sharpe's Kirkton, and also in the last edition of Wodrow. The spot where he was murdered on Magus Muir is still marked by a stone erected to the memory of Andrew Guillan, one of the only two of the party who were brought to justice, whose body was there hung in chains. A magnificent marble monument was erected to the archbishop by his son over the place where his remains were interred in the parish-church of St. Andrews, exhibiting, besides a representation of the murder, a long and highly laudatory inscription, a copy of which, with a short account of the archbishop, may be found in the 'Reliquiæ Divi Andrea' of Mr. George Martine, who is supposed to have been his secretary (4to., St. Andrews, 1797).

SHARP, JOHN, Archbishop of York, was born at Bradford, 16th February 1644; his father, Mr. Thomas Sharp, was engaged in trade there, but is said to have been descended from the Sharps of Little Norton, a family of great antiquity in Bradford Dale. In 1660 he was admitted of Christ's College, Cambridge; in July 1667, he was ordained deacon and priest; and in October of the same year he became domestic chaplain to Sir Heneage Finch (then attorney-general, afterwards chancellor), and tutor to his sons. Having taken his master's degree at Oxford in 1669, he was in 1672, on the recommendation of Finch, nominated by the crown to the archdeaconry of Berkshire. When Finch was appointed the same year lord-keeper, he devolved the exercise of his church patronage upon Sharp, "whose conscience," says Nelson, in his 'Life of Dr. Bull,' "he charged with an impartial scrutiny in this matter; adding withal, that he would prefer none but those who came recommended from him; and that if he led him wrong, the blame should fall upon his own soul." In 1676 Sharp was installed a prebendary of Norwich; and in 1677 he was instituted to the rectory of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, London, on which he

ceased to reside with his patron the chancellor, and took a house for himself. In 1679 he commenced D.D. at Cambridge, and that year also he accepted the lectureship at St. Lawrence, Jewry, which he held till 1683. In 1681 he was made dean of Norwich, an appointment for which he was again indebted to the interest of his steady friend the chancellor.

Having been chaplain to Charles II., he was re-appointed to the same office on the accession of James II., but gave great offence and involved himself in some trouble by a sermon which he soon after preached in his own church against popery. Sharp seems to have had no intention of provoking the royal displeasure; his sermon was preached in reply to a written argument in support of the right of the Church of Rome to the style and title of the only visible catholic church, which had been put into his hands as he was descending from the pulpit on the preceding Sunday; and he showed every disposition to make up for any offence he might have given. On the 14th of June 1686, James addressed a letter to Compton, bishop of London, in which he observed, that notwithstanding the late royal letter to the two archbishops, and the directions concerning preachers issued on the 15th of March 1685, yet Sharp had in some of the sermons he had since preached, "presumed to make unbecoming reflections, and to utter such expressions as were not fit or proper for him; endeavouring thereby," continued his majesty, "to beget in the minds of his hearers an evil opinion of us and our government, by insinuating fears and jealousies, to dispose them to discoutent, and to lead them into disobedience and rebellion." And the bishop was commanded immediately to suspend Sharp from further preaching within the diocese of London, until he should have given satisfaction to his majesty, and his majesty's further pleasure should be known. Compton replied, that he should always count it his duty to obey the king in whatever he could perform with a safe conscience; but that in this case he humbly conceived he was obliged to proceed according to law, and therefore it was impossible for him to comply. His lordship however advised Sharp to abstain in the meantime from preaching; and on the 20th of June Sharp himself proceeded to Windsor with a petition to the king, in which he assured his majesty, that so far had he always been from venting in the pulpit anything tending to schism or faction, or anyway to the disturbance of his majesty's government, that he had upon all occasions in his sermons, to the utmost of his power, set himself against all sorts of doctrines and principles that looked that way. "But," the petition went on, "if in any sermon of his any words or expressions have unwarily slipped from him, that have been capable of such constructions as to give your majesty cause of offence, as he solemnly professes he had no ill intention in those words or expressions, so he is very sorry for them, and resolves for the future to be so careful in the discharge of his duty, that your majesty shall have reason to believe him to be your most faithful subject. And therefore he earnestly prayeth that your majesty, out of your royal grace and clemency, would be pleased to lay aside the displeasure you have conceived against your humble petitioner, and restore him to that favour which the rest of the clergy enjoy under your majesty's gracious government." James would not even hear this petition read; upon which Sharp left town and went down to Norwich, where he amused his leisure in collecting old British, Saxon, and English coins, till at length, in the beginning of January 1687, a letter from Sunderland informed him that he might return to his function. Kennet, in his 'Complete History,' says that he was indebted for his recal to the intercession of Pepys (the author of the 'Diary'), who was applied to "as a good-natured man, with wife and children," and who" went freely to the king, and prevailed with his majesty" to remit his displeasure.

In August 1688, Sharp drew up the reasons on which the other archdeacons and himself declined to appear before the ecclesiastical commissioners to answer for not obeying the king's orders in regard to the reading of the declaration for liberty of conscience. On the 27th of January 1689, he preached before the Prince of Orange, and on the 30th before the Convention; on both occasions praying for King James, although on the 28th the Commons had voted that the king had abdicated and that the throne was vacant. It was not till after a long debate that the House agreed to thank him for his sermon, and to request that he would print it; and he thought it best to decline complying with that request. After the settlement of the new government, Sharp was, in September 1689, promoted to the deanery of Canterbury, on the removal of Tillotson to that of St. Paul's. He was pressed to accept the place of one of the deprived bishops; but this his feelings would not allow him to do, and he ran some risk of losing the favour of King William, till his friend Tillotson put it into his head to offer to accept the archbishopric of York, on the pretext that such an arrangement would place him in his native district, as soon as it should become vacant by the death of Lamplugh, who was then very ill. He died, in fact, within a fortnight after, and Sharp was consecrated archbishop on the 5th of July 1691. Sharp acquired a very high character in this eminent office, which he retained till his death, at Bath, on the 2nd of February, 1714. He enjoyed considerable influence at court during the reign of Anne, and, among other things, is said to have had a share in preventing the elevation of Swift to the Episcopal bench. As a preacher, he had a clear, easy, correct style; and his sermons, which make seven octavo

volumes, only one of which however appeared during his lifetime, have been repeatedly printed. The last edition was published at Oxford in 1840. Mr. Speaker Onslow, in a note to Burnet's 'History of his Own Times,' says of Sharp, "He was a great reader of Shakspeare. Doctor Mangey, who had married his daughter, told me that he used to recommend to young divines the reading of the Scriptures and Shakspeare. And Doctor Lisle, bishop of Norwich, who had been chaplain at Lambeth to Archbishop Wade, told me that it was often related there, that Sharp should say that the Bible and Shakspeare made him archbishop of York." The Life of Archbishop Sharp,' by bis son, Dr. Thomas Sharp, archdeacon of Northumberland, which had been in the hands of the compilers of the 'Biographia Britannica,' was published at London in 2 vols. 8vo, in 1829. SHARP, WILLIAM, an eminent engraver in the line manner, was born on the 29th of January 1749, in Haydon-yard, in the Minories, where his father carried on the business of a gun-maker. He was early apprenticed to an engraver of door-plates, and other such articles, being what is termed a bright engraver. At the expiration of his indentures, Sharp married a French woman, and commenced business in the same line in Bartholomew-lane; but he soon exercised his talent in the higher branches of the art. His earliest effort was an engraving of the old lion Hector in the Tower of London, from an original drawing by himself. In 1782 he sold his shop, and removed to a private house in Vauxhall, where he began to engrave from pictures by the old masters; and soon after he was engaged, in conjunction with Angus, Heath, and Collyer, in decorating the Novelist's Magazine,' with plates after the designs of Stothard. Here he also completed the Landing of Charles II. after West, a work which Woollett had left unfinished; and he engraved some plates for Cook's 'Voyages;' and a beautiful oval work, after Bennall, of the Children in the Wood. The profits of his professional employment and a legacy enabled Sharp to take a larger house, and he accordingly removed to Charles-street, Middlesex Hospital. In 1814, when enjoying his highest reputation, he was elected a member of the Imperial Academy of Vienna, and of the Royal Academy of Munich. Sir Joshua Reynolds offered to propose him as an associate of the Royal Academy of London; but Sharp, coinciding in opinion with Woollett, Hall, and other engravers, that the art was slighted by the rule which precludes the election of its professors to the rank of academician, declined the proferred compliment. From London he went to reside at Acton, and finally at Chiswick, where he died of dropsy in the chest, on the 25th July 1824. Amongst the many works of this eminent engraver may be enumerated the Doctors Disputing on the Immaculateness of the Virgin, and the Ecce Homo, after Guido; St. Cecilia, after Domenichino; the Virgin and Child, after Carlo Dolci; Diogenes, after Salvator Rosa; the Sortie from Gibraltar, after Trumbull; the Destruction of the Floating Battery at Gibraltar, after Copley; and the portrait of John Hunter, after Sir Joshua Reynolds. The last engraving is considered to be one of the finest specimens of the art. He also engraved, in some instances, figures in the landscape plates of other persons. As an instance of this may be mentioned the group of Niobe in the print by Samuel Smith, after the original picture by Wilson, now in the National Gallery.

Mr. Sharp, though in the ordinary transactions of life a man of shrewdness, was, in matters of science and religion, a visionary and an enthusiast. No imposture was too gross for his belief, and no evidence sufficiently strong to disabuse his mind. The doctrines of Mesmer, the rhapsodies of the notorious Richard Brothers, and the still more disgusting exhibitions of Johanna Southcott, in turn found in him a warm disciple; and, in the last case, an easy and liberal dupe. By Johanna and her confederates, Mr. Sharp was induced to part with the bulk of his savings, under the delusion that he was purchasing estates in the New Jerusalem. So confident was he in her divine mission, that although she died several years before him, he believed, up to the hour of his own dissolution, that she was only in a trance. In the case of Brothers, he had so strong an opinion of his prophetic powers, that he engraved two plates of his portrait, lest one should not be sufficient to produce the requisite number of impressions which would be called for on the arrival of the predicted Millenium. Upon these plates he inscribed, "Fully believing this to be the man appointed by God, I engrave his likeness. W. Sharp." [BROTHERS, RICHARD.]

The general style of Sharp's engraving, though undoubtedly original, was formed from a careful selection of the merits of his eminent predecessors and contemporaries. The half-tints and shadows of his best engravings are peculiarly rich; and his lines combine, with great freedom, a regularity and accuracy of position rarely attained without mechanical aid. In no quality of his art was he more distinguished than in the power which he possessed of imitating the various textures of the different parts of his subject, a circumstance which is most obvious in a fine impression of the portrait of John Hunter before alluded to.

SHARPE, DANIEL, F.R.S., at the time of his decease president of the Geological Society of London, was born in London in 1806. His mother, who died a few weeks after his birth, was sister to Samuel Rogers the poet. He was educated at Walthamstow, and as a boy early showed a taste for the study of natural history, but he did not commence seriously to work at geology till after he had been admitted a Fellow of the Geological Society in June

1829. In that year he gave his first memoir to the society, on a new species of Ichthyosaurus, I. grandipes, which however it afterwards appeared had been previously described by Conybeare, under the name of I. tenuirostris. Throughout the greater part of his life, Mr. Sharpe was actively engaged as a merchant, and his business connection with the winegrowing districts of Portugal occasionally leading him there, in 1832, 1839, 1848, and 1849, he gave to the Geological Society a series of memoirs on the rocks of the neighbourhood of Lisbon and Oporto. The first is a mere sketch of the general arrangement of the tertiary and secondary rocks by a young and intelligent geologist; the second, on the same subject, is fuller and more definite, but not sufficiently complete in the determination of fossils to fix the precise age of the strata described. It contains however in an appendix some observations of great value on the comparative effects of the great earthquake of 1755 on the strata on which Lisbon stands. The destructive effects of this shock were chiefly confined to the area occupied by the soft tertiary beds, while the buildings erected on the more solid Hippurite limestone and chalk escaped entirely. The line of division between the shattered and entire buildings Mr. Sharpe found to correspond precisely with the boundaries of the strata. In his third memoir Mr. Sharpe describes the granitic, gneissic, clay-slate, and coal-bearing rocks of Vallongo near Oporto. The clay-slate he proved by its fossils to be of Lower Silurian age, and his sections show that the strata bearing anthracitic coal underlie the slate, and rest on gneiss pierced by granite. He thence concluded that the coal is of Lower Silurian age. In the obituary notice of Mr. Sharpe given in the Anniversary Proceedings' of the Royal Society for 1856, on which the present article is founded, but with omissions, alterations, and additions, the following just remarks occur on this subject:-"In the present state of knowledge regarding that country, it is impossible to deny that this may be the case, but it must be remembered that the few remains of plants discovered in these strata are considered by paleontologists to present characters indicative of 'carboniferous' age; and even those geologists who most strenously support the so-called uniformitarian doctrines, incline to attribute the peculiar position of the coal to one of those great inversions of the strata so frequent in highly disturbed districts of all ages, from palæozic up to tertiary times." The fourth paper commences with a succinct sketch of the general geology of Portugal, and goes on to define the limits of the secondary rocks north of the Tagus, both by stratigraphical and paleontological evidence. Long before this paper was read, Mr. Sharpe had acquired much critical skill and knowledge as a paleontologist, and on palæ. ontological principles he now established the existence of cretaceous and Jurassic rocks in the country described. The whole formed an excellent sketch of a hitherto undescribed country, and up to this date British geologists are chiefly indebted to these memoirs for the knowledge they possess of a land where the science is almost uncultivated.

Between 1842 and 1844 Mr. Sharpe gave four memoirs to the Geological Society, on the Silurian and Old Red--audstone rocks of Wales and the north of England, territories previously chiefly illustrated by the labours of Professor Sedgwick. [SEDGWICK, THE REV. ADAM.] The first of these is 'On the Geology of the South of Westmoreland.' Part of this paper describes the range of the Coniston limestone. Mr. Sharpe identified it by its fossils as forming part of the Lower Silurian series, but did not determine its actual horizon. In 1839 Mr. James Garth Marshall, F.G.S., in a paper communicated to the British Association, placed it on the parallel of the Caradoc sandstone, which determination the researches of later geologists have sustained. Mr. Sharpe also pointed out the unconformity of the Upper on the Lower Silurian rocks of the area; and in describing the passage of the Ludlow rocks into the Old Red-sandstone, he correctly infers that the tilestones of South Wales should be withdrawn from the base of the Old Red-sandstone and classified with the Ludlow rocks, to which their fossils unite them. At a later period of the same year he produced a memoir 'On the Bala Limestone, and other portions of the older Paleozoic Rocks of North Wales.' Up to this date it was believed that at Bala and elsewhere there was a great thickness of fossiliferous Upper Cambrian rocks' of Sedgwick below the Lower Silurian strata. Mr. Sharpe maintained that this was an error, and that both stratigraphically and by their fossils, the Bala rocks were the equivalents of the Llandeilo flags and Caradoc sandstone. This sagacious determination has since been confirmed by Mr. J. W. Salter, F.G.S., as regards the Caradoc sandstone, the fossils of Bala and the typical Caradoc sandstone of Sir Roderick Murchison in Shropshire being the same.

The more elaborate paper of 1844 is accompanied by a geological map of North Wales, and has been considered less happy. Mr. Sharpe's genius chiefly lay in the paleontological determination of the age of rocks, and, in this case at least, the time he allowed him. self to map North Wales was too short for the satisfactory elucidation of the problems he proposed to solve.

Pursuing at intervals these subjects, Mr. Sharpe produced in 1847 an elaborate analysis and comparison of the Silurian fossils of North America, collected by Sir Charles Lyell, [LYELL, SIR CHARLES], with those of Great Britain, and confirmed the views entertained by the American geologist, Mr. Hall, that the American Silurian