Wit, seeing truth, from cause to cause ascends,
And never rests, till it the first attain;

Will, seeking good, finds many middle ends,
But never stays, till it the last do gain.
Now God the truth, and first of causes is;
God is the last good end, which lasteth still;
Being Alpha and Omega named for this;
Alpha to wit, Omega to the will.

Sith then her heavenly kind she doth display
In that to God she doth directly move,
And on no mortal thing can make her stay,

She cannot be from hence, but from above."
"Hence springs that universal strong desire,
Which all men have of immortality.
Not some few spirits unto this thought aspire
But all men's minds in this united be.

Then this desire of nature is not vain,
She covets not impossibilities;

Fond thoughts may fall into some idle brain,
But one assent of all is ever wise.

From hence that general care and study springs,
That launching and progression of the mind,
Which all men have so much of future things,
As they no joy do in the present find.
From this desire that main desire proceeds,
Which all men have surviving fame to gain,
By tombs, by books, by memorable deeds;

For she that this desires, doth still remai 1.

Other specimens of the beautiful poetry in which this period abounded we must reserve for a future opportunity.

BISHOP HALL: THE ENGLISH SENECA.

DROPPING down a river-the Rhine or other—as crag follows crag, and castle succeeds to castle, the eye at last grows weary, and beauty itself becomes monotonous. You are glad of a halting-place-a Coblenz or St Goar-where you may disembark and rest a while. Our stream runs fast, and in the rapid succession of names and objects which we have already opened, it is hardly to be wondered at if the eye is bewildered and the memory confused. We shall therefore indulge ourselves in an occasional excursion on shore. In other words, instead of skimming onwards at an equal rate, and quitting every author after a momentary glimpse, we shall occasionally devote an entire section to some name outstanding and pre-eminent.

Of these little monographs the first is claimed by Dr Joseph Hall, successively Bishop of Exeter and Norwich in the reign of Charles I. Of our Christian classics, he is the earliest who still retains extensive popularity. Hooker's "Polity" is no doubt as valuable to Churchmen in the reign of Victoria as it was in the days of Elizabeth, and individual treatises of Sibbs, and a few others, will long continue to be reprinted; but the author of the "Contemplations" is as dear and delightful a companion to his modern admirers as he was to his ruffed and bearded contemporaries. In many other respects a remarkable man, for our immediate purpose he possesses a special value, as a link between two periods widely sundered. Commencing the career of authorship under the "good Queen Bess," had he lived four years longer he would have seen the restoration of Charles II. ; and during all that interval his pen was seldom idle. Nor are there many writers who can be perused with equal profit. With his cheerful tone, his playful touches, his

T

"Old

keen insight, and his well-tempered wisdom, the Humphrey" of the seventeenth century, he often exhibits an ethical profundity and a sententious eloquence well entitling him to the name which Sir Henry Wotton gave him, and with which he himself, judging from his admiration of his Roman paragon, would no doubt be greatly pleased-" the English Seneca."

JOSEPH HALL was born in the parish of Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire, July 1, 1574. He was one of the twelve children of a worthy yeoman who acted as borough-reeve of Ashby, under the Earl of Huntingdon. His mother, a feeble, sickly woman, and long exercised with the sorer affliction of a wounded spirit, lived mainly for a better world, and, as her son records, "it was hard for any friend to come from her discourse no whit holier. How often have I blessed the memory of those divine passages of experimental divinity which I have heard from her mouth! What day did she pass without a large task of private devotion? whence she would still come forth with a countenance of undissembled mortification. Never any lips have read to me such feeling lectures of piety, neither have I known any soul that more accurately practised them than her own. Temptations, desertions, and spiritual comforts, were her usual theme. Shortly-for I can hardly take off my pen from so exemplary a subject-her life and death were saint-like."

At a very early age he was sent to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he pursued his studies with great ardour, and was successively elected scholar, fellow, and professor of rhetoric. His pious mother's instructions were not lost; for not only was the ministry the destination to which he all along aspired, but he seems to have passed through the perils of a university career unspotted from the world. With characteristic modesty he states "I was called to public disputations

COLLEGE CAREER.

often, with no ill success; for never durst I appear in

219

any of

those exercises of scholarship till I had from my knees looked up to Heaven for a blessing, and renewed my actual dependence upon that Divine Hand.” Of these disputations one "Mundus senescit;" but,

was very famous. The theme was,

as Fuller cannot help remarking, his argument confuted his position, "the wit and quickness whereof did argue an increase rather than a decay of parts in this latter age."

But although himself so correct and inoffensive, he must have been a shrewd observer of other people's foibles; for at the age of twenty-three he published a volume of satires so wonderful that their appearance forms a marked incident in the history of English literature. In reading them we have always felt it difficult to comprehend how a youth, transferred from a provincial grammar-school to the cloisters of Cambridge, could have seen the world as he describes it; and it moves no less amazement that, without any other models than Juvenal, Persius, and Ariosto, he should have started into instantaneous existence, not only the founder of a new school of vernacular poetry, but such a master in that style, that followers like Dryden and Pope have hardly excelled him in the harmony of their numbers, and have frequently been constrained to use the poison of envenomed personalities in order to produce the effect for which Hall trusted to the sharpness of his arrows, the precision of his aim, and the strength of his arm.

Of "the volubility and vigour," "the harmony and picturesqueness," of Hall's couplets, so justly extolled in the "Specimens of the British Poets," Mr Campbell has given as an example the following description of a magnificent mansion deserted by its inhospitable owner :—

"Beat the broad gates; a goodly hollow sound,
With double echoes, doth again rebound!
But not a dog doth bark to welcome thee,
Nor churlish porter canst thou chafing see.

All dumb and silent, like the dead of night,
Or dwelling of some sleeping Sybarite;
The marble pavement hid with desert weed,
With house-leek, thistle, dock, and hemlock seed.

Look to the tow'red chimneys, which should be
The wind-pipes of good hospitality,
Through which it breatheth to the open air,
Betokening life and liberal welfare;

Lo, there th' unthankful swallow takes her rest,

And fills the tunnel with her circled nest."

Not less vivid and musical is his description of the Golden Age:

"Time was, and that was term'd the time of gold,

When world and time were young that now are old,
(When quiet Saturn sway'd the mace of lead,
And pride was yet unborn and yet unbred.)
Time was, that while the autumn fall did last,
Our hungry sires gaped for the falling mast:
Could no unhusked acorn leave the tree,

But there was challenge made whose it might be.
But if some nice and licorous appetite
Desired more dainty dish of rare delight,
They scaled the stored crab with bended knee,
Till they had sated their delicious eye:
Or search'd the hopeful thicks of hedgy rows,
For briery berries, or haws, or sourer sloes:
Or when they meant to fare the finest of all,
They lick'd oak leaves besprent with honey fall.
As for the thrice three-angled beech nut-shell,
Or chestnut's armed husk and hid kernel,
No squire durst touch, the law would not afford,
Kept for the court, and for the king's own board.
Their royal plate was clay, or wood, or stone,
The vulgar, save his hand, else he had none.
Their only cellar was the neighbouring brook :
None did for better care, for better look."

Nor could Miss Edgeworth herself have sketched an Irish cabin better than Hall hits off the cottage, with an old barrel for