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THE

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

BRITISH WORTHIES

VOLUME X

LONDON:
CHARLES KNIGHT & CO., LUDGARE STREET.

1846.

London: Printed by W. Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street.

CONTENTS.

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

BRITISH WORTHIES.

Sir William Temple has left a name of some distinction in our literature; it is, however, as a diplomatist and statesman that he is most entitled to remembrance. Strictly speaking, his public career extends only over about half the space that intervened between the Restoration and the Revolution; but during that memorable period he was, although not perhaps so conspicuous a figure as some others, yet one of the most active and influential personages of our political drama. He was certainly also one of the most honest. His[Pg 6] straightforwardness, indeed, upon all occasions, even although it may not have been of a very adventurous character, and although it may have been accompanied by, and may indeed have sprung in part from, a certain vanity or over-consciousness of his own merits and cleverness, was such as would have done honour to a time very different from that age of general duplicity and want of principle among public men, and would have made him remarkable among the diplomatists of any age or country.

The Temples, according to the common genealogies, derived their descent from the Saxon Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his wife the famous Godiva. They were certainly one of the oldest families among our gentry, having been established at their manor of Temple, or Temple Hall, near Wellesborough, in Leicestershire, since the twelfth or thirteenth century. One of them, Peter Temple, a second son, removed, in the reign of Elizabeth, to Stow, in Buckinghamshire; and while from his eldest son, John, whose son Thomas was made a baronet in 1611, have sprung the Barons and Viscounts Cobham, the Earls Temple, the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos, the Lords Nugent, the Lords Lyttelton, &c., his youngest, Anthony, became the progenitor of Sir William Temple, as well as of the Viscounts Palmerston. Anthony's son William, after having been secretary first to Sir Philip Sidney, and after his death to the unfortunate Earl of Essex, retired to Ireland, was knighted, and became a master in the Irish Court of Chancery, provost of Trinity College, Dublin, and a representative, some accounts say of the university, some of the city, in parliament. His son John, also knighted, became Master of the Rolls and a privy councillor in Ireland, and wrote a History of the Rebellion in 1641. He married Mary, daughter of John Hammond, of Chertsey, in Surrey, and sister of Dr. Henry Hammond, the eminent divine; and by her he had three sons and a daughter, of whom William, the eldest son, whose life we are about to relate, was born at Blackfriars, in London, in the year 1628. John, the second son, who became,[Pg 7] after the Restoration, solicitor and attorney general for Ireland, and also speaker of the Irish House of Commons, was the father of the first and the great-great-grandfather of the present Viscount Palmerston.

Sir John Temple, when the contest first broke out between the king and the parliament, had sided with the latter, and was dismissed from his office of Master of the Rolls, and imprisoned, in 1643, for opposing certain proceedings of the Duke of Ormond, then the Irish lord-lieutenant. The following year he obtained his liberty by an exchange of prisoners, and, having been returned to the English parliament as member for Chichester, he sat till he was turned out by Colonel Pride, with the rest of his party, in 1648. If not a professor of the religious opinions of the Presbyterians, he had generally voted with that section of the House, which comprised most of the original opponents of the king, to the exclusion of those whose object was not to bring Charles to terms, but to destroy the monarchy. After living, however, in retirement in London for about five years, he gave in his adhesion to the government of the Protector, and in 1653 he was permitted to resume his office in Ireland, in which he was continued after the Restoration, and in the possession of which he died at the age of seventy-seven, in 1677.

The Life of Sir William Temple has lately been written in ample detail, and with a careful examination of all the known sources of information, both printed and manuscript, which has brought to light many new facts, by the Right Hon. Thomas Peregrine Courtenay. In what follows we shall avail ourselves freely of the materials collected in Mr. Courtenay's work, which appeared in 2 vols. 8vo. in 1836.

Temple's early education is said to have been superintended by his learned uncle, Dr. Hammond, who was rector of Penshurst in Kent. Temple therefore must be supposed to have spent his first years there, in the neighbourhood of the seat of the Sidneys, the old patrons of his family. The common accounts make him to have gone to school at Penshurst. When[Pg 8] Hammond, who was a royalist of a much deeper dye than his brother-in-law, was driven out of his living by the parliament, in the summer of 1643, young Temple, who, it would appear, had been left with his uncle when his father and mother removed to Ireland, was sent to a grammar-school at Bishop's Stortford, in Hertfordshire. "Here," says Mr. Courtenay, "he learned all the Latin and Greek he ever knew." But surely it cannot be supposed that his uncle would allow him to grow up to the age of fifteen without knowing his rudiments. "His Latin," Mr. Courtenay adds, "he retained; but he often regretted the loss of his Greek." We do not understand what Mr. Courtenay means by telling us that an interval of two years which he now spent before going to college was "occasioned by the unsettled state of affairs." If he knew nothing of either Greek or Latin, when he went to Stortford, the two years that he spent there are sufficiently explained. Such an interval for preparation would have been quite necessary even in the most tranquil times. At the age of seventeen, however, which would be in the year 1645, he was placed at Emanuel College, Cambridge, where his tutor was Dr. Ralph Cudworth, the celebrated author of the 'Intellectual System of the Universe.' "At this time," continues Mr. Courtenay, on the authority of a manuscript Life of Temple by his sister Lady Giffard, "the fortunes of Sir John Temple were very low; but he chose to spare in any thing rather than what might tend to the advantage of his children in their breeding and education. But Temple's education in its scholastic sense did not proceed successfully. His learned tutor endeavoured in vain to initiate him in the study of logic and philosophy; he gave himself up to tennis, and entertainments which agreed better with his age and lively humour, and quitted Cambridge after two years, without any degree or academic honours; and had it been possible, he was accustomed to say, he should have lost all that he had previously learned." He left the university probably in the latter end of the year 1647.

He was then sent by his father to spend some time in[Pg 9] France. This proved a momentous journey for him. Passing through the Isle of Wight, where the king now lay a prisoner in Carisbrook Castle, he there met the son and daughter of Sir Peter Osborne, the royalist governor of Jersey, who were, like himself, on their way to St. Maloes, in Normandy, there to join their father. The party had all left the inn to proceed to their place of embarcation, when young Osborne, in the excitement of the moment, stepped back and wrote with a diamond on one of the windows the following verse from the book of Esther:—And Haman was hanged upon the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. We suppose the sting of the allusion was considered to lie in the resemblance of the name Haman to that of Colonel Hammond, in whose hands Charles was. The words at all events were no sooner read than pursuit was made after the writer; and it might have fared ill with the imprudent youth if his sister, with the quickness of woman's wit, had not taken the offence upon herself. Of course, she had also the skill to beg herself off in a way there was no resisting and the party were allowed to proceed on their journey. But Dorothy Osborne had in those few moments done more than deliver her brother and herself; she had wound a chain around another heart with that fatal cast which was to make it her captive for life, and also (what perhaps she less thought of) in due time to terminate for ever the freedom of her own. She was at this time twenty-one, about a year older than Temple, and very beautiful. They are supposed to have remained together for some time at St. Maloes; and it is probable that before they parted, Temple had obtained a confession that his affection was returned. As soon, however, as his father heard of what was going on, he ordered him to proceed to Paris.

Mr. Courtenay makes him to have resided two years in France, then to have visited Holland, Flanders, and Germany, and to have returned home when he was yet only twenty-two or twenty-three—that is to say, in 1650 or 1651. It is strange that Mr. Courtenay should have overlooked the following endorsement on some of[Pg 10] Temple's manuscripts still preserved, which he has himself given in his Supplement;—"Essays by Sir W. T., written in his youth at Brussels in 1652, when he was about 24." It is not probable that his return took place, at the earliest, before the end of that year. And from one of Miss Osborne's letters, of which Mr. Courtenay gives a short abstract in his Supplement, he appears to have paid a second visit to Holland in 1653.

When he came back, he is stated to have fixed his residence in London, with his father it may be supposed, at least till Sir John returned to Ireland in 1653. It is admitted that he entered to a certain extent into the dissipations of the town; but he spent the greater part of his time in study, reading much, and also continuing the habit of composition both in prose and verse, which he had begun while abroad. Some specimens which Mr. Courtenay has printed from his early writings, still preserved in manuscript, evince a rather remarkable degree both of reflection and observation, as well as considerable ingenuity and fancy, although we cannot subscribe to the judgment of an eloquent living critic, that they contain anything "which reminds us of the best things in Montaigne." Mr. Courtenay speaks also of a collection of romantic stories, still extant, which Temple says he had imitated, not translated, from the French, and which appear to be of this date. He had brought back with him from his travels a complete mastery of both French and Spanish.

But by far the most interesting passage of this period of his life is his wooing of Dorothy Osborne. "The accidents for seven years of that amour," says his sister, Lady Giffard, "might make a history, and the letters that passed between them a volume. Though I cannot venture on it myself, I have often wished that they might be printed; for, to say nothing of his writing, which all the world has since been made judge of, I never saw anything more extraordinary than hers." Fortunately, although Temple's own letters are lost, many of those of the lady are preserved; and Mr. Courtenay has printed large extracts from them, though[Pg 11] not more than every reader will thank him for having given. Besides the love-story the memorable course of which they record or enable us to trace, they are interesting both from the talent they display, and from the glimpses they afford us into English life, both public and private, two hundred years ago. They make decidedly the portion of the biography of Temple that retains the most of life in it and will retain that life the longest. At first, and for some time, both families were opposed to the match, but the Osbornes most resolutely or violently. Sir John Temple himself, half a Commonwealth-man in principle, willing to be reconciled to the existing state of things, and already perhaps looking to the new government for the preferment or restoration to office which he eventually obtained, naturally saw no prudence in his son connecting himself with the side which had been thrown down, even although there was the chance of its rising again some time or other; but there was no passion in his objections. Latterly, in his attempts to wean his son from his unfortunate attachment, he appears to have relied chiefly on being able to persuade him that the lady did not care for him—that he was no more to her than another of her many suitors; and perhaps the old gentleman believed this, for indeed the number of admirers Mistress Dorothy managed to gather and keep about her may very well have perplexed and somewhat alarmed an old-gentlemanly understanding of such matters. But the aversion of the Osbornes to the Temples was a feeling of another description. In the estimation of the faithful adherents and martyrs of royalism, the conduct of the ex-Master of the Rolls and ex-member for Chichester, false, as they would say, to both parties, and discarded first by the one and then by the other, yet waiting to be reinstated he did not mind by which, and meanwhile safe and snug, and little harmed in his fortunes, while they were deprived nearly of their all, would be viewed with all the bitterness of mingled hatred and contempt. But love, true and enduring, conquers all things. Temple was not to be turned from his suit; and Dorothy Osborne[Pg 12] was a brave, resolute, noble-hearted maiden, to whom difficulties were nothing, and trials of all kinds only triumphs.

Mr. Courtenay believes that the letters of which he gives extracts were all written in the years 1653 and 1654. "During the period of the correspondence," he observes, "Mrs. Osborne was partly, perhaps for the greater part of it, at her father's house at Chicksands (in Bedfordshire), sometimes at other places in the country, sometimes for a short time in London. Temple was, apparently, at the commencement, for a short time in Holland, chiefly in London, and in Ireland; and paid her, it would appear, some clandestine and some acknowledged visits." In what has been printed, it is added, "mere expressions of affection have been generally omitted," which we think a pity and a mistake. In the complete collection, we are elsewhere informed, "they contain abundant evidence of a faithful and passionate attachment; much allusion to the persecution of friends, the difficulties of the correspondence, the impatience with which the letters were expected, and the blush with which they were received. There are thanks for long letters, reproaches for short; rings, pictures, and hair requested or bestowed; company despised, and the world abjured; tears amid parties of pleasure, and delight in the solitary ramble; rivals rejected, and cruel brothers defied. There is the usual variety of matter, and rapidity of transition; some fashionable gossip, and much serious reflection; now and then a very little scandal; often, the warm commendation of a friend. All these ordinary topics are handled by Dorothy Osborne with a confident frankness, and an ease that is delightful; in a style correct and graphical, evidently conceived in purity and truth. There is much to show the gentlewoman and the Christian, with an occasional appearance of the simple woman. She writes much of books; but generally of romances, chiefly of poetry; scarcely at all of works of a graver cast."

In the few passages for which we can make room we must confine ourselves chiefly to such as have something[Pg 13] of a narrative character—describing either the progress of the love-story or something else that had happened within the experience of the fair writer. Here is her account of her day at Chicksands:—"You ask me how I pass my time here. I can give you a perfect account, not only of what I do for the present, but what I am likely to do this seven years if I stay here so long. I rise in the morning reasonably early, and before I am ready I go round the house till I am weary of that, and then into the garden till it grows too hot for me. I then think of making me ready; and when that's done I go into my father's chamber; from thence to dinner, where my cousin, mother, and I sit in great state in a room and at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner we sit and talk till Mr. P. comes in question, and then I am gone. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working; and about six or seven o'clock I walk out into a common that is hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads; and go to them, and compare their voices and beauty to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there, but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly, while we are in the middle of our discourse, one looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings at their heels. I, that am not so nimble, stay behind, and when I see them driving home their cattle think it is time for me to return too. When I have supped I go into the garden, and so to the side of a small river that runs by it, where I sit down and wish you with me (you had best say this is not kind, neither). In earnest, it is a pleasant place, and would be more so to me if I had your company, as I sit there sometimes till I am lost with thinking; and, were it not for some cruel thoughts of the crossness of my fortune, that will not let me sleep there, I should forget there were such a thing to be done as going to[Pg 14] bed.... My father is reasonably well, but keeps his chamber still; but will hardly, I am afraid, ever be so perfectly recovered as to come abroad again." There is no mention of her mother in the extracts Mr. Courtenay has printed; but he tells us that she died while the correspondence was going on.

In two subsequent letters she urges with great seeming earnestness the expediency of giving up their engagement and changing their affection into mere friendship—a demonstration that must have alarmed poor Temple more than any thing else that could have happened, if, amid all her vehemence, it had not been evident enough from many of her expressions that she only deceived herself in supposing she had obtained such a victory over her passion. "I think I need not tell you," she says, "how dear you have been to me, nor that in your kindness I placed all the satisfaction of my life; 'twas the only happiness I proposed to myself, and had set my heart so much upon it, that it was therefore made my punishment, to let me see that, how innocent soever I thought my affection, it was guilty in being greater than is allowable for things of this world.... We have lived hitherto upon hopes so airy, that I have often wondered how they could support the weight of our misfortunes; but passion gives a strength above nature; we see it in mad people, and, not to flatter ourselves, ours is but a refined degree of madness; what can it be else, to be lost to all things in the world but that singular object that takes up one's fancy, to lose all the quiet and repose of one's life in panting after it, when there is so little likelihood of ever gaining it, and so many more probable accidents that will infallibly make us miss of it; and, what is more than all, it is being mastered by that which reason and religion teach us to govern, and in that only gives us a pre-eminence above beasts? This soberly considered is enough to let us see our error; and consequently to persuade us to redeem it.... If, as we have not differed in any thing else, we could agree in this too, and resolve upon a friendship that will be much the perfecter for having nothing of passion in it, how[Pg 15] happy might we be, without so much as a fear of the change that any accident could bring; we might defy all that fortune could do, and, putting off all disguise and constraint with that which only made it necessary, make our lives as easy to us as the condition of this world will permit. I may own you as a person that I extremely value and esteem, and for whom I have a particular friendship, and you may consider me as one that will always be your faithful ——." Again;—"If I loved you less I would allow you to be the same person to me, and I would be the same to you, as heretofore: but, to deal freely with you, that were to betray myself, and I find that my passion would quickly be my master again if I gave it any liberty; I am not secure that it would not make me do the most extravagant things in the world, and I shall be forced to keep a continual war alive with it as long as there are any remainders of it left; I think I might as well have said, as long as I lived."

This strain, however, is not long persevered in. Many subsequent letters breathe the most unreserved and longing affection. One, written when Temple was on the point of going out of England for a short time, concludes;—"For God's sake send me word how your journey goes forward, when you think you shall begin it, and how long it may last; when I may expect your coming this way; and, of all things, remember to provide a safe address for your letters when you are abroad." In another she says, "I shall not blush to tell you that you have made the whole world besides so indifferent to me, that, if I cannot be yours, they may dispose of me how they please. H. C. will be as acceptable to me as any body else." H. C. was no less a personage than Henry Cromwell, Oliver's second son. It appears from these letters that he was really one of Miss Osborne's suitors, or servants as she calls them, strange as it may be thought that he should have addressed himself to such a quarter. She seems to have regarded such an alliance as preposterous and out of the question in any circumstances. Yet some one, as she tells us in another letter, had described her in the following couplet:—

"Of stately and majestic brow,
Of force to make Protectors bow."

Here is a true touch of nature from another of these frank, warm-hearted communications:—"For God's sake, when we meet, let us design [appoint] one day to remember old stories in, to ask one another by what degrees our friendship grew to this height 'tis at. In earnest, I am lost sometimes in thinking of it, and, though I can never repent of the share you have in my heart, I know not whether I gave it you willingly or not at first. No; to speak ingenuously, I think you got an interest there a good while before I thought you had any, and it grew so insensibly, and yet so fast, that all the traverses it has met with since have served rather to discover it to me than at all to hinder it."

Sir Peter Osborne at last died, in March, 1654, and this probably removed the chief obstacle to the marriage. But Temple's father, it would appear, still had his doubts and objections. In reference to these Miss Osborne writes, with becoming spirit:—"I would fain tell you that your father is mistaken; and that you are not, if you believe that I have all the kindness and tenderness for you my heart is capable of. Let me assure you, whatever your father thinks, that, had you 20,000l. a year, I could love you no more than I do, and should be far from showing it so much, lest it should look like a desire of your fortune, which as to myself I value as little as anybody breathing. I have not lived thus long in the world, and in this age of changes, but certainly I know what an estate is; I have seen my father's reduced [from] better than 4000l. to not 400l. a year, and I thank God I never felt the change in anything that I thought necessary. I never wanted, and am confident I never shall; yet I would not be thought so inconsistent a person as not to remember that it is expected from all people that have sense that they should act with reason; that to all persons some proportion of fortune is necessary, according to their several qualities.... If any accident out of my power should bring me to adversity, though[Pg 17] never so great, I should not doubt, with God's assistance, but to bear it as well as anybody, and I should never be ashamed on 't if He pleased to send it me; but if by my own folly I had put it upon myself, the case would be extremely altered. If ever this comes to a treaty, I shall declare that in my own choice I prefer you much before any other person in the world, and all that this inclination, in the judgments of any persons of honour and discretion, will bear, I shall desire may be laid upon it, to the utmost of what they can allow; and if your father please to make up the rest, I know nothing that is like to hinder me from being yours. But if your father, out of humour, shall refuse to treat with such friends as I have, let them be what they will, it must end here; for, though I was content for your sake to lose them and all the respect they had for me, yet, now I have done that, I'll never let them see that I have so little interest in you and yours as not to permit that my brother may be admitted to treat for me.... I doubt much whether all this be sense or not, I find my head so heavy; but that which I would say is in short this:—if I did say once that my brother should have nothing to do in it, 'twas when his carriage towards me gave me such an occasion as I could justify the keeping that distance with him; but, now it would look extremely unhandsome in me, sure I hope your father would not require it of me.... If your father would but in some measure satisfy my friends that I might but do it in any justifiable manner, you should dispose of me as you pleased. Carry me whither you would, all places of the world would be alike to me where you were."

At length, however, all difficulties were surmounted, and about October, 1654, as it would appear, the day that was to unite the two lovers was fixed. But before it arrived the lady was taken suddenly and dangerously ill; so serious and alarming was the attack that the physicians, we are told, rejoiced when it appeared to be the small-pox, fatal as that disease then so often was. Dorothy Osborne recovered, but the lustre of her beauty was gone. It was something of a trial, no doubt, for[Pg 18] both, but far the hardest for the lady; however, she did not fear still to trust herself to an affection the strength of which had been so well proved, and they were married and made happy at last. The event probably took place about the end of the year 1654 or early in 1655.

The few remaining notices that we have of Dorothy Temple may be added here. Temple seems to have visited his father in Ireland more than once before his marriage; the first year they were together was passed by him and his wife in England, at the country-house of a friend, and here their eldest son was born. They then went over to reside in Ireland with Sir John Temple, with whom they spent five years, partly in Dublin, partly in the county of Carlow. During this time they lost five children in succession. Other children were afterwards born to them in England, nearly all of whom also died young. After this the two were sometimes together, sometimes separated for considerable intervals, the one in England, the other on the Continent. One letter more of hers has come down to us, written to Temple, who had been called away to England, and had left her at the Hague, in the end of October, 1670. It is interesting as showing the unabated affection that still subsisted between them, and also how completely this admirable woman made all her husband's concerns her own. "My dearest heart," she begins; concluding "I am my best dear's most affectionate D. T." They did not rejoin one another till the summer of the following year, when Temple was suddenly dismissed from his post of ambassador in Holland, whereupon a king's yacht was sent to bring home his wife. The ungrateful and unprincipled government by whom his services were thus requited, bribed and bought by France, was now determined to throw off the alliance with the Dutch; and with that view the captain of the yacht had orders, as he sailed through the Dutch fleet, either in going over or in returning, to fire into the ships nearest to him until they should either, in obedience to a pretension which had never before been admitted, strike their topsails by way of salute to the English flag,[Pg 19] or return his shot. What followed is thus abridged by Mr. Courtenay from Temple's own account:—"He saw nothing of the Dutch fleet in going over; but on his return he fell in with it, and fired, without warning or ceremony, into the ships that were near to him. The Dutch admiral, Van Ghent, was puzzled; he seemed not to know, and probably did not know, what the English captain meant. He therefore sent a boat, thinking it possible that the yacht might be in distress; when the captain told his orders, mentioning also that he had the ambassadress on board. Van Ghent himself then came on board, with a handsome compliment to Lady Temple; and, making his personal inquiries of the captain, received the same answer as before. The Dutchman said he had no orders upon the point, which he rightly believed to be still unsettled, and could not believe that the fleet, commanded by an admiral, was to strike to the king's pleasure-boat. When the admiral returned to his ship, the captain, also perplexed enough, applied to Lady Temple, who soon saw that he desired to get out of his difficulty by her help; but the wife of Sir William Temple called forth the spirit which we have seen in Dorothy Osborne. He knew, she told the captain, his orders best, and what he was to do upon them, which she left him to follow as he thought fit, without any regard to her or her children." The Dutch admiral, however, did not imitate or retaliate the barbarous conduct of the English government; the yacht was allowed to proceed on its course, and the lady was safely landed in England, where she was much applauded for the part she had acted, and was called upon to give an account of it to Sir Leoline Jenkins, the judge of the Court of Admiralty. When Temple went to the next levee, the king, he tells us, began to speak of his wife's carriage at sea, saying she had shown more courage than the captain. When his majesty then fell upon the insolence of the Dutch, Temple adroitly escaped from the ungrateful theme by remarking that, however matters should go, it must be confessed there was some merit in his family, since he had made the alliance with Holland (the famous[Pg 20] Triple Alliance of 1668), and his wife was like to have the honour of making the war. The king smiled, and so the conversation ended.

Temple, at the age of sixty-seven, lost his wife in the beginning of 1695, after a union of forty years. "She was," writes her sister-in-law, Lady Giffard, "a very extraordinary woman, as well as a good wife, of whom nothing more need be said to her advantage, than that she was not only much esteemed by her friends and acquaintance, some of whom were persons of the greatest figure, but valued and distinguished by such good judges of true merit as King William and Queen Mary, with whom (the Queen) she had the honour to keep a constant correspondence, being justly admired for her fine style and delicate turn of wit and good sense in writing letters; and whom she outlived about a month, the deep affliction for her majesty's deplorable death having hastened her own." But a few years before, in 1689, she had sustained what must have been a far severer blow—the loss of her son, the last of her children, who committed self-destruction.

Lady Temple is thus described by Swift in a poem on a dangerous illness from which Sir William recovered in December, 1693:—

"Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great,
Trembling beheld the doubtful hand of fate;
Mild Dorothea, whom we both have long
Not dared to injure with our lowly song,
Sprung from a better world, and chosen then
The best companion for the best of men:
As some fair pile, yet spared by zeal and rage,
Lives pious witness of a better age;
So men may see what once was womankind
In the fair shrine of Dorothea's mind."

We must now return to follow Temple's public career. The Restoration drew him from his retirement; but only for a time. When, a few weeks before the king's arrival, a council of military officers in Dublin called an Irish Convention, he was chosen without his knowledge[Pg 21] member for the county of Carlow. This distinction he probably owed to the position and local influence of his father, who had some time previous, it would appear, gone over to resume his seat in the Long Parliament, restored by Monk, and had "by the friendship and favour of the General" got himself nominated one of the council of state. The younger Temple is said to have given proof in the Convention of great aptitude for business; he was sent over to England by that assembly with an address to Monk; and when a regular Irish parliament was summoned after the arrival of the king, he was again returned with his father for the county of Carlow, his younger brother, Sir John Temple, who was made solicitor-general, being elected for the borough of the same name. Both his talents for business and his powers as a persuasive speaker were now shown to greater advantage; and he appears to have acquired not only influence in the House, but popularity out of doors, by the fairness and patriotic firmness as well as the ability which he was thought to display. "Whilst every body," his sister relates in her biographical sketch, "was vying who should pay most court to the king, a Poll Bill was read. Though he and many others thought it the height of what the nation could bear, the Lords Justices, whilst it was debating, sent a message to the House to desire it might be doubled, which, amongst a great many that disliked it, Temple only opposed, though the rest afterwards joined with him. The Lords Justices, that heard whence the difficulty came, sent some to reason it with him; his answer was, that he had nothing to say to it out of the House, where they chose a time to pass it in his absence. This made a great deal of talk, and brought him into more conversation and business than he had been used to in that country." "He often," she tells us, "turned the House in their warmest debates by never entering into any of the parties or factions;" and she adds, "A considerable person, Sir John Perceval, illustrated his influence by observing that he was glad he was not a woman, as he was sure that Temple might have persuaded him to anything."[Pg 22] In July, 1661, he was sent over to England as one of a commission appointed to lay certain important matters relating to Ireland before his majesty; and it is stated that upon his return the Irish parliament voted him an extra reward for his services, besides what he had in common with his colleagues. This was the first time that Temple saw King Charles.

He was fortunate enough, at the same time, so to trim his course as not only not to offend the government, but to overcome whatever prejudice had been conceived against him from the conduct of his father at the commencement of the civil war. The Duke of Ormond, who had in those days (with the title of Marquess) held the post of Lord Lieutenant, and who was reappointed to his old office in 1661, received Temple coldly when they first met in London in July of that year; but they afterwards became very good friends in Dublin. Ormond declared that Temple was the only man in Ireland who never asked him for anything. And when the Irish parliament was prorogued in May, 1663, and Temple removed with his family to England, the Lord Lieutenant gave him letters of recommendation to Lord Clarendon and Lord Arlington, then the two principal ministers of the crown.

Temple quickly perceived that Clarendon's was the declining, Arlington's the ascending star; and from the first he attached himself to the latter. It was some time, however, before anything was found for him to do. At last in June, 1665, while he was residing in a small house he had purchased at Richmond (then more commonly called Sheen) he was roused one morning at four o'clock by a messenger from Arlington, who desired to see him in London immediately. We were then at war with the Dutch; and a German ecclesiastical potentate, the Bishop of Munster, had sent over a proposal, which had been accepted by the English ministry, that he would, upon the payment of a certain sum of money, invade Holland, to which his principality lay contiguous, with an army of 20,000 men. The treaty, by which it was agreed that the Bishop should have half a million of[Pg 23] rix-dollars, to be paid in three instalments, had already been signed; and Temple was to be dispatched forthwith as envoy or commissioner to keep the warlike ecclesiastic to his engagements, and also if possible to obtain the co-operation of others of the German princes. In this his first public employment, however, Temple's success was not at all in proportion to his zealous exertions. The Bishop had already received part of the money, when in January, 1666, war was openly declared against this country by France; upon which his views underwent a complete change, and within three months he had signed a secret treaty with the Dutch. Temple's conduct, nevertheless, was approved of at home; "His Majesty," Arlington wrote to him, "is entirely satisfied in your proceedings; and therefore, whatever your success has been in your journey, or whatever mortification your disappointment may give you, do not believe any of it is imputed to you, or to your want of good conduct and zealous affection to his majesty's service." The journey to which Arlington here alludes was a rapid transference of himself which he had accomplished from Munster to Brussels, with the object, in which he was successful, of intercepting a second instalment of the subsidy before the Bishop's agent should get hold of it. He had some time previously (in October, 1665) been appointed to proceed to and remain at Brussels as English resident at the vice-regal court there. He had also in January, 1666, been made a baronet.

The capital of the Netherlands accordingly now became his head-quarters. Soon after his arrival there he was joined by his wife and family, including his sister Martha Temple, who having been married, in April, 1662, to Sir Thomas Giffard, and left by him a widow in the following month, resided so long as he lived with her brother, whom, however, she survived many years. Meanwhile, the war went on; in the beginning of June, 1666, was fought the protracted but indecisive engagement between the English and Dutch fleets under the Duke of Albemarle and De Ruyter; and early in the following year Louis XIV. openly prepared to invade[Pg 24] Flanders. This latter movement, however, alarmed De Witt and the Dutch, the allies of the French king, almost as much as it did Spain, to which the menaced country belonged; Louis was a convenient ally for the present, but they had no desire that he should become a permanent neighbour. It was out of this state of things that the negotiations arose which issued in the conclusion of the famous Triple Alliance, the greatest of Temple's diplomatic achievements.

In July, 1667, treaties of peace were concluded at Breda, both between England and Holland, and between the English and the two allies of the Dutch, the French and the Danes. France and Spain, however, still remained at war; the French king did not delay making his advance upon Flanders; Charleroi, Douay, Oudenarde, Lille, and other towns fell one after the other into his hands in the summer of 1667; Brussels itself was threatened; and Temple thought it prudent to send his wife and children home to England. His sister, however, remained with him. He had hitherto, or nearly up to this time, entertained the common notions respecting the Dutch and De Witt which prevailed at the English court, and in the party to which he had attached himself, regarding the republic as the rival and national enemy of his country, and its Grand Pensionary, who had acquired the almost entire direction of its affairs, as little better than an agent of France. Recent events, however, and especially the manifest anxiety that De Witt had shown to avert the conquest of Flanders by the French king, had begun to change his opinions. We are told that it was his sister, Lady Giffard, who, from a strong wish that she had conceived to see Holland, induced him, in the latter end of August, 1667, to solicit permission to visit Amsterdam and the Hague. His request was granted; at the Hague he introduced himself to De Witt; and a confidential friendship commenced between the two, which lasted so long as both lived. In giving an account of their first interview in a dispatch from Dort, dated the 5th of October, published for the first time from the original in the State Paper[Pg 25] Office by Mr. Courtenay (who has neglected, however, to tell us to whom it is addressed), Temple says, "After above two hours discourse in private.... I left him, and judge him either to be a plain steady man, or very artificial in seeming so, more properly homme de bon sens than homme d'esprit, pointing still to that which is solid in business, and not to be imposed upon easily. These I take to be his talents; so that whoever deals with him must go the same plain way that he pretends to in his negotiations, without refining or colouring, or offering shadow for substance." He is confident, he adds, that De Witt is hearty in the point of defending Flanders, which he called in his discourse le bon parti.

Temple now strongly recommended to the English government the formation of such an alliance with Holland as should compel France and Spain to make peace. The course that affairs had recently taken at home gave this proposition a much better chance of being listened to than it would have had a short time before. Clarendon, looked upon as the chief supporter in the cabinet of the French interest, had been first dismissed from office and soon after sent into banishment; and even Arlington, whom this change left in the possession of almost undivided power, although he had been hitherto less unpopular than his late colleague, had reason to feel uneasy at the strong tone taken by the House of Commons on the subject of the late Dutch war. The consequence was that about the end of November instructions were received by Temple directing him to ascertain by conference with De Witt whether the States would really and effectively enter into a league offensive and defensive with England for the protection of the Spanish Netherlands, "and if the interests of both nations should require it, even against France itself." He was at the same time ordered to communicate with the Marquis of Castel Rodrigo, the Spanish governor of the Netherlands, apprising him in general terms of his intention to converse with De Witt, and pressing him for an unreserved disclosure of the prospects and expectations of Spain. Temple now lost not a moment. First, he hastened to Antwerp, where[Pg 26] he saw the Marquis; then to the Hague, where he had a conference with De Witt; then, accompanied by his sister, to London with a report of his proceedings. On the 1st of January, 1668, the English government came to a resolution to the effect that an offensive league, which De Witt had objected to, should not be insisted upon, but that Temple should be commanded to propose to the States a defensive alliance, and a treaty by which France should be obliged to make peace upon certain terms, which Spain should be persuaded to accept. This was distinctly taking part with Spain and against France. Moreover, Spain was allowed her choice of two alternatives; namely, either that France should be left in possession of her conquests of the last campaign, or that she should give them up and receive instead certain other towns together with either Luxembourg or the county of Burgundy.

Temple now, accompanied as before by his sister, re-embarked for the Hague; the royal yacht in which he sailed was overtaken by a violent storm, and for thirty hours all on board had given themselves up for lost; but they at last got safe to port. He immediately had another long conference with De Witt, who advised him to see Count Dhona, the Swedish ambassador, and try whether Sweden could not be engaged to join the alliance. He went to the Count the same evening—dispensing with all ceremony, as he tells us, "by going straight into his chamber, and taking a chair before the Swede could rise out of his." Dhona had no doubt that his government would be very ready to join. On this De Witt agreed to conclude a treaty, trusting to the future accession of Sweden. But a great difficulty was still to be surmounted; according to the forms of the Dutch constitution, the treaty could not be signed till it had first been sent round to all the States; and this would take up six weeks, before the expiration of which time the French, either by the further success of their military operations, or by dexterous diplomacy, and even bribery if need were, might ruin everything. He told De Witt therefore, that "unless the States-General would conclude[Pg 27] and sign the treaty immediately, and trust to the approbation of their several provinces and towns after it was done," he should "give it up for gone, and think no more of it." De Witt conceived that what was proposed was impossible; "no such thing had ever been done since the first institution of their commonwealth." Temple, after a formal audience of the States-General, was granted a conference with the eight commissioners of secret affairs; but it ended unsuccessfully. But on the next night, which was Saturday, De Witt and Isbrant, to whom the further conduct of the negotiation had been intrusted, agreed to every thing; and at eleven o'clock on Monday morning, the 23rd of January, 1668, the treaty was signed. "After sealing," says Temple, "we all embraced with much kindness, and applause of my saying, upon that occasion, A Breda comme amis, ici comme frères (At Breda as friends, here as brothers); and Monsieur De Witt made me a most obliging compliment of having the honour, which never any other minister had before me, of drawing the States to a resolution and conclusion in five days, upon a matter of the greatest importance, and a secours of the greatest expense they had ever engaged in; and all directly against the nature of their constitutions, which enjoined them recourse to their provinces upon all such occasions, and used to draw out all common deliberations to a month's delay; and added upon it, that, now it was done, it looked like a miracle. I must add these words, to do him right, in return of his compliment, that I found him as plain, as direct and square, in the course of this business, as any man could be, though often stiff in points where he thought any advantage could accrue to his country; and have all the reason in the world to be satisfied with him. And, for his industry, no man had ever more, I am sure; for these five days, at least, neither of us spent any idle hours, neither day nor night."

Such was the Triple Alliance of the Hague—"the master-piece of Charles's life," as Bishop Burnet, no admirer of Temple, styles it—"the only good public thing," says Pepys, writing at the time, "that hath been[Pg 28] done since the king came into England." It was followed by the effect intended: the French king desisted from the prosecution of the war; and within a few months a peace was concluded between France and Spain. The real importance of the Triple Alliance, which some recent writers, in opposition to what appears to have been the unanimous judgment of contemporary politicians, have been inclined to question, has been amply vindicated by Mr. Macaulay in a brilliant paper on Sir William Temple, which originally appeared in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1838, and is reprinted in the third volume of his 'Historical and Critical Essays.'

Temple was now empowered to proceed as ambassador to the Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, where the peace between France and Spain was to be finally arranged. He preferred, however, appearing only as envoy extraordinary. The treaty was at last signed on the 2nd of May.

In the latter part of the year 1666, it may be here mentioned, Temple had, while resident at Brussels, perpetrated, as far as is known, his first act of authorship by the publication of a pamphlet in French, under the title of 'The London Merchant's Letter to him of Amsterdam.' It was written at the instigation of Arlington, with the object of exciting among the Dutch a jealousy of France and a feeling favourable to a peace with England. He states in one of his letters that it ran with some vogue at Antwerp, where it accorded with the predominant sentiment; and he was assured by Arlington that "it was allowed by his majesty to be very well written;" but no copy of it is now known to exist.

Immediately after Temple's return to Brussels from Aix-la-Chapelle, he was appointed to the post of Ambassador from the King of England to the States-General of Holland. Having first paid a short visit to London, he returned to the Continent in the end of August, and took up his residence at Ryswick, in the neighbourhood of the Hague. Here he remained till after what is called the Secret Money Treaty, by which Charles II. became a dependant and pensioner of France, had been signed at[Pg 29] Dover, in May, 1670, and other preparations had been made by the English government for a complete change of policy, when he was commanded to withdraw himself privately and come home, leaving his house standing as it was, and acquainting De Witt that it was his majesty's purpose to send him speedily back again. He arrived in London in October, when the reception he met with from his old friend Arlington, now confederated with Buckingham, Clifford, Ashley, and Lauderdale, at once confirmed his suspicions, and convinced him that he was not to return. It was not till June following, however, that he was formally displaced. Upon this he sent for his wife and family; and Lady Temple in coming over met with the adventure which has been already related.

The next three years were spent by the ex-ambassador in retirement. He was for some months of the year 1673 in Ireland with his father; his ordinary residence was at Sheen, where he had enlarged his grounds and improved his house, and where he amused his leisure with his garden and orchard, and employed his more serious hours in preparing some of the treatises on which his literary reputation rests. In 1668, before going to the Hague, he had written his 'Essay upon the present State and Settlement of Ireland,' which, however, was not published till 1701 (after his death): other tracts which he now drew up were, 'A Survey of the Constitutions and Interests of the Principal Powers of Europe, with their relation to England in the Year 1671,' first published in 1679; his 'Observations upon the United Provinces,' 1672, perhaps the most valuable of all his works; 'An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government;' 'An Essay upon the Advancement of Trade in Ireland, written to the Earl of Essex, Lord-Lieutenant of that Kingdom,' 1673; a Letter entitled 'To the Duke of Ormond, written in October, 1673, upon his Grace's desiring me to give him my opinion what was to be done in that conjuncture' (after the commencement of the second Dutch war); and a 'Letter to the Countess of Essex,' written with the object of rousing her from the grief to which she had given way on[Pg 30] the death of her only daughter—a composition often referred to as displaying the highest qualities of Temple's flowing, animated, and sometimes stately style.

When in the beginning of 1674 the course of events had brought both Holland and England to a condition in which it became desirable or necessary that an end should be put to the war which they had been carrying on with one another for nearly two years, Temple's services were again called into requisition for the negotiation of a peace. But while he was preparing to proceed to the Hague, as envoy and plenipotentiary, the Marquis del Fresno, the Spanish ambassador at the English court, received full powers from the Dutch; and what is known as the Treaty of Westminster was arranged here between him and Temple in three days. It was signed on the 19th of February, 1624.

Temple was now offered the embassy to Spain, which, however, he declined, at the instance, it is said, of his father, who, for some unknown reason, was violently opposed to his accepting it. Arlington then persuaded him to buy from him (as was then the practice) his office of Secretary of State, which he wanted to exchange for that of Chamberlain; but, although Temple could probably have obtained the royal nomination to the office through the interest of the new Lord High Treasurer, Danby, who was a relation of his wife, and had also been an old acquaintance of his own, and although his friends offered to lend him the 6000l. required to be paid to his predecessor, he would not accede to the proposal. "I have seen such changes at court," he wrote to his father, "that I know not what to make of this last, and still remember poor De Witt's words of fluctuation perpétuelle dans les conseils d'Angleterre, which of all things in the world I am not made for, and would rather break my head with going on than be wrenching myself continually with sudden turns." At last in May, 1674, he was again appointed to his old post of ambassador at the Hague; and thither he repaired in the succeeding July.

He remained in Holland for the next two years. That republic, where M. Fagel had succeeded to De Witt as[Pg 31] Grand Pensionary, but where the chief direction of affairs was now in the hands of the young William, Prince of Orange, restored to the stadtholdership on the repeal of the Perpetual Edict, which had abolished that dignity, and the massacre of De Witt and his brother, in 1672, was still, in conjunction with Spain and the Empire, at war with France. Temple was instructed to offer the mediation of the King of England in the arrangement of a general peace. It was not, however, till August, 1678, that this was accomplished by the treaty concluded between France and Holland at Nimeguen, to which Spain and the Emperor afterwards acceded. Temple had been appointed representative for England to the congress at Nimeguen, in March, 1675; and he had proceeded thither in July of the following year. The Hague, however, continued to be his principal residence. It was now that his intimacy commenced with the Prince of Orange. "William," Lady Giffard relates, "who was fond of speaking English, and of their plain manner of eating, which Temple always continued abroad as well as at home, grew into so easy and familiar conversation in his family, that he constantly dined there, and commonly supped twice a week in his house, while he remained at the Hague. The company was always chosen of those who were most agreeable to the prince; and with this conversation, and so much besides as passed in business and ceremony, Sir William grew very much into the Prince's esteem and confidence." The marriage which afterwards took place between William and the Princess Mary, the daughter of the Duke of York, was a favourite scheme of Temple's, and was strongly recommended by him to the prince early in 1676. The marriage was brought about in November of the following year.

In the spring of 1675 Temple was suddenly sent for to England by the king, who apparently wanted his assistance to reconcile his two ministers Arlington and Danby, now become open and violent enemies. But in this matter he was able to effect nothing; and he returned to the Hague after an absence of about six weeks. He soon after quarrelled himself, and broke finally, with his old[Pg 32] friend and first patron Arlington, who he conceived had used him ill in inducing the king to send over Sir Gabriel Silvius in the character of confidential agent to the Hague, with the object of learning through him more of the Prince's mind than had been ascertained from the regular ambassador. "This good usage," says Temple, "ended all correspondence between Lord Arlington and me, which had lasted by letters to this time, though coldly since my being last in England. But upon Sir Gabriel Silvius's coming to the Hague in January (1676), and my preparations to go to Nimeguen, I ended that scent, having not learned enough of the age, nor of the court I lived in, to act an insincere part, either in friendship or in love."

In June, 1677, another offer of the post of secretary of state was made to Temple at the instance of the king himself, who offered to advance one half of the sum—now ten thousand pounds—which was demanded by Henry Coventry, the present holder, as the price of his resignation. Temple came over to England and had an interview on the subject with his majesty, who would not at first listen to his objections. "Go, get you gone to Sheen," he said; "we shall have no good of you till you have been there; and when you have rested yourself come up again." Within two days, however, Coventry changed his mind; and Charles was then persuaded not to press the matter for the present. Temple remained about a year in England, during which he was consulted by the king upon all the highest affairs of state, both foreign and domestic.

He returned to the Hague in July, 1677; and on the 26th of that month concluded a new treaty with the States, "by which," to quote his own account, "France was obliged to declare, within 14 days after the date thereof, that they would evacuate the Spanish towns; or, in case of their refusal, Holland was engaged to go on with the war, and England immediately to declare it against France, in conjunction with Holland and the rest of the confederation." He then proceeded to Nimeguen, and was present at the treaty of peace executed there[Pg 33] between the Dutch and French on the 10th of August. The general peace was concluded at Nimeguen on the 5th of February, 1679; but, although Temple had made another journey thither on that occasion, the imperial ambassador refused to allow precedence to him and Sir Leoline Jenkins, the other English mediator, and their signatures were consequently not affixed to the treaty.

Meanwhile, a week or two before, Temple had again been offered the place of secretary of state, and had again declined it. "The sensible decays I feel of late in myself," he wrote to Danby on the 24th of January, "and which must increase every day with my age and ill health, make me absolutely despair of acquitting myself as I ought, and would be necessary for his majesty's service, in a post that requires not only great abilities, but good health and all the application that can be. Neither of which I can either ways promise either his majesty or myself." But this excuse would not serve. A letter of recall was sent to him on the 11th of February, and by the end of that month he was again in England. He appears now to have hesitated for a moment; but he soon returned to his first resolution. The state of public affairs, with the popular mind inflamed by the Popish Plot, and a new parliament about to assemble, in addition to the chronic disorganization of the court and the government, was too formidable. So he managed to escape by first representing very strongly how necessary it was that the new secretary should be in parliament, and then taking care that his pretended attempts to obtain a seat should fail. "I concluded it," he says, "a scene unfit for such actors as I knew myself to be, and resolved to avoid the secretary's place, or any other public employment at home, my character abroad still continuing." It was not only, in truth, that he was constitutionally cautious and wary, and averse to every kind of danger and contest; the field of diplomacy had now become his world, and no other theatre of ambition had the same attraction for him.

Although, however, he would take no office of responsibility[Pg 34] in the government, he was induced in the course of his private conferences with the king to submit a project which makes almost as memorable a passage in his political career as the Triple Alliance. This was his new scheme of a privy council, to supersede at once the actually existing body so called, which, as in our own day, had become too numerous for its nominal purpose, and also the closet or cabinet council, to which the entire actual exercise of the government had come to be intrusted, but which Temple considered to consist of too few persons to wield that power with proper influence and effect. He proposed that the new council should be composed of thirty persons, fifteen of them the great officers of state and of the household, the other fifteen the most distinguished and especially the most opulent individuals that could be found in the two houses of parliament without regard to party. The idea was adopted by Charles, and the new system of government was set up towards the end of April, 1679.

Mr. Macaulay, in the paper to which we have already referred, has given a new view of this plan of Temple's, which is at least in the highest degree ingenious and plausible. He argues that Temple's design must have been that his new council should serve as a substitute for the parliament rather than merely for the old cabinet, or at least that it should form a barrier or breakwater between the parliament and the crown. It proved, however, a complete failure, and, although it was formally kept up for nearly two years, it was substantially abandoned almost as soon as it had been tried.

Here Temple's public life may be said to close. He was himself one of the members of the council of thirty: but he very soon found himself a cipher among bolder and more unscrupulous men. Before it came to this, however, he had again declined the office of secretary of state. He got himself returned to the new parliament, which met in October, 1679, for the university of Cambridge; but he took very little part in the debates. "I went not often," he says, "to the house or council; but when I did, and thought it to any purpose, I endeavoured[Pg 35] to allay the heats on either side, and told the king I expected to be turned out of the house in the morning, and out of the council in the afternoon. Mr. Hyde (Lawrence Hyde, Clarendon's youngest son, afterwards Viscount Hyde and Earl of Rochester) asked me one day in the council chamber, why I came so seldom to the house or council. I told him it was upon Solomon's advice, neither to oppose the mighty, nor to go about to stop the current of a river; upon which he said I was a wise and quiet man, and, if it were not for some circumstances he could not help, he would do so too." When this parliament was dissolved in January, 1681, and a new one summoned to meet at Oxford, he consulted the king as to whether he should stand again. Charles told him, "in a manner kind and familiar," as he says, but significantly enough too, we may suspect, that, considering how matters stood, he doubted whether he would be of much use in the house. In a week after his name was struck out of the list of privy councillors.

In 1679, Temple collected several of his tracts that have already been mentioned, and published them, together with 'An Essay upon the Cure of the Gout by Moxa,' which he had addressed in June, 1677, to M. de Zulichem, under the title of 'Miscellanea; the First Part.' The same year he printed privately a little volume of his poetical compositions. In April, 1683, he commenced the writing of his 'Memoirs;' the First Part of which, however, extending from 1665 to 1671, he afterwards destroyed. The Second Part extending from 1672 to 1679, and the Third, extending from 1679 to February, 1681, were published after his death; the former in 1691, the latter in 1709.

He continued to reside for some years at Sheen, "without," we are told, "ever seeing the town or court." He still, however, presented himself occasionally in the royal circle when the king came to Richmond, both in the time of Charles and in that of his successor. In November, 1686, he removed to Moor Park, near Farnham, a small retired place which he had recently purchased. He had no part in the consultations and[Pg 36] arrangements which brought about the Revolution, nor had he even been made aware of the design; but after the Prince of Orange came over, he visited his old friend two or three times, and even pressed him, though unsuccessfully, to take office as secretary of state. Though Temple was at this time only sixty years of age, his constitution was much shattered by gout and other ailments, and some severe domestic sorrows increased his inclination for retirement and repose. Of nine children that he and his wife had had, only one, a son, now remained to them. They had lost the last, a girl of fourteen, by small-pox, in 1680: Lady Giffard says she was a child her father was infinitely fond of, and one than whom none ever more deserved a father's love. This was followed in 1689 by the death of his son, John Temple, already alluded to. He had been married in 1684 to the daughter and heiress of M. Duplessis Rambouillet, a French Protestant gentleman of distinguished family and great wealth; upon the Revolution he was appointed secretary-at-war; and within a week afterwards he threw himself into the Thames.

It was about this time that Jonathan Swift, who is supposed to have been distantly related to Lady Temple through his mother, came to reside with Sir William Temple as his amanuensis. With the exception of a visit which he paid to Ireland, about three years after he first entered the family, he continued to fill this office so long as Temple lived, and ultimately acquired a large share of his confidence.

In 1691 Temple published a Second Part of his 'Miscellanea,' containing, among other tracts, his essays 'Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, or Of Gardening' (written in 1685), 'On Heroic Virtue,' 'On Poetry,' and 'Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning.' The last, which was a defence of the ancients against Perrault's 'Parallel between the Ancients and Moderns,' and some other recent French publications in which it had been attempted to show that the genius of the moderns excelled that of the ancients, is memorable in the history of literature from the controversy of learning[Pg 37] and wit by which it was followed—producing Bentley's 'Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris,' on the one side, and Swift's 'Battle of the Books,' and 'Tale of a Tub,' on the other—but in which Temple himself took no part except by preparing part of a reply to his original assailant, William Wotton, under the title of 'Some Thoughts upon reviewing the Essay of Ancient and Modern Learning,' which was not published till after his death. In 1693, we may also mention, a passage in his recently printed 'Memoirs' drew down upon him a scurrilous attack from a M. De Cros, who had been an agent from the court of Sweden at the Congress of Nimeguen. De Cros's pamphlet drew forth two anonymous answers, one of which at least has been generally believed to have been written by Temple himself. Swift has been thought to have had a hand in the other.

The last of Temple's pieces published in his lifetime was his short 'Introduction to the History of England,' a performance of very little value, which appeared in 1695. Early in this year, as already mentioned, Temple lost his admirable wife. He himself died at Moor Park, on the 27th of January, 1699, in his seventy-first year. His son John left two daughters, Dorothy and Elizabeth, both of whom were married; the former to Nicholas Bacon, Esq., of Shrubland Hall in Suffolk; the latter to her cousin, John Temple, son of Sir John Temple, her father's younger brother. Mrs. Temple left no surviving issue; and Mrs. Bacon had only a son, the Rev. Nicholas Bacon, vicar of Coddenham in Suffolk, who was also the last of his race.

A collection of Temple's Letters written while he was ambassador at the Hague had been published in 1699, immediately after his death, by a Mr. David Jones. Soon after Swift published his first Collection, in two volumes, embracing the period from 1665 to 1672; and in 1703 his second, in a third volume, bringing down the series to 1679. In 1701, also, Swift sent to the press a Third Part of the 'Miscellanea,' containing an 'Essay on Popular Discontents,' another 'On Health and Long Life,' the unfinished 'Thoughts upon reviewing the[Pg 38] Essay of Ancient and Modern Learning,' already mentioned, 'Heads designed for an Essay upon the different Conditions of Life and Fortune,' 'Heads designed for an Essay on Conversation,' and a few short poetical compositions. It was likewise under Swift's care that the Third Part of the 'Memoirs' was given to the world in 1709.

The class of our English poets to which Dryden belongs is not the highest; it must be placed below the class comprising Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton; but he is the founder of his own school, and, on the whole, perhaps he may be allowed to stand at its head in the order of excellence as well as in the order of time. At the least, he stands there with only Pope by his side.

John Dryden was born in 1631, it is conjectured on or about the 9th of August, at the parsonage house of Oldwinkle (or Aldwinkle) All-Saints, a village a few miles to the north-west of the town of Oundle, in Northamptonshire. The family of Dryden, or Driden, as the name used more commonly to be spelt, is traced to the county of Cumberland. John Dryden, the great-grandfather of the poet, was the first of them who settled in Northamptonshire, where he acquired the estate of Canons Ashby by marriage with Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Sir John Cope. It is said that this John[Pg 40] Dryden enjoyed the friendship of Erasmus, and that the illustrious scholar stood godfather to one of his sons. If so, it was probably to the eldest, who received the name of Erasmus, and who was made a baronet by James I. His third son also bore the name of Erasmus. This was the father of the poet, of another Erasmus, who eventually inherited the baronetcy and family estate, and of two more sons and ten daughters. Their mother was Mary, daughter of the Reverend Henry Pickering, who is stated to have been minister of Aldwinkle, from 1647 to 1657, when he died at the age of seventy-three. But the circumstance of Dryden having been born in the parsonage-house would seem to indicate that his maternal grandfather's incumbency had begun many years earlier than this account would make it to have done. The Reverend Henry Pickering was the younger son of a Sir Gilbert Pickering, who is said to have been in considerable favour with James I. Yet the Pickerings were furious puritans, and the Drydens also held the same principles. The families were connected otherwise as well as through the poet's mother; a sister of his father had married Sir John Pickering, the eldest brother of the minister of Aldwinkle. Sir Gilbert Pickering, son of Sir John, was one of the judges of Charles I., and was afterwards made by Cromwell Lord Chamberlain of the Household and a member of his House of Peers.

Dryden is believed to have been first sent to school at Tichmarsh, or Tickmarsh, in his native county. He was afterwards admitted a king's scholar at Westminster, under Dr. Busby; and he was still there when in 1649 he produced his first performance in verse, his poem on the Death of Henry, Lord Hastings. It was one of ninety-eight elegies on the same subject, which were all published together the following year, under the title of 'Lachrymae Musarum.'

Dryden's verses are highly curious. At his age he inevitably imitated the reigning style, which was what he himself afterwards baptized the metaphysical style of poetry—originally, perhaps, a derivation from the subtleties and refinements of the scholastic philosophy, through[Pg 41] the medium of the punning and quibbling divines, casuists, and other prose writers of the time of Elizabeth and James—and first brought into vogue by Donne in the last age, from whom it was now perpetuated by Cleveland, Cowley, and their imitators. It caught and enveloped almost everybody as well as Dryden—writers and readers, young and old alike. Milton alone entirely escaped; by nothing else is it shown more strikingly that "his soul was like a star, and moved apart." Perhaps what put it down at last was its lucky adoption by Butler in his Hudibras, for the subject and sort of writing to which it is really appropriate. After such an example, it could not long continue to be employed in serious composition.

The truest description that can be given of Dryden's poem is to say, that it is a serious poem in the style of Hudibras. The principal difference is that the lines are of ten syllables instead of eight. The thoughts are quite as far-fetched, the images as multifarious and grotesque, as those which Butler accumulates for the purposes of satire and drollery.

Lord Hastings was cut off by small-pox, on the eve of his intended nuptials; and the verses are in part addressed to his betrothed bride. Here are some of them:

Was there no milder way but the small-pox,
The very filthiness of Pandora's box?
So many spots, like naeves on Venus' soil,
One jewel set off with so many a foil;
Blisters with pride swelled, which through's flesh did sprout,
Like rose-buds stuck i' the lily skin about.
Each little pimple had a tear in it,
To wail the fault its rising did commit;
Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife,
Thus made an insurrection 'gainst his life.
Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin,
The cabinet of a richer soul within?
No comet need foretell his change drew on,
Whose corpse might seem a constellation.

Yet, with all its extravagance and absurdity, the poem[Pg 42] could not be read without its being felt to betoken no common power, especially in so young a writer. The absurdity, in such a case, must be laid to the charge of the time, not of the poet. And the very height to which Dryden here carried his imitation of his bad models gave proof of the fervour and boldness of his genius.

Ere long, too, he broke away from the enticements of this fantastic, unnatural, and false style. After his first perpetration he sinned no more in the same way, or at least to the same excess. In May, 1650, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, on a Westminster scholarship; and he remained at the University till the summer of 1657. Meanwhile the death of his father, in June, 1654, had put him in possession of a small landed property near Blakesley, in Northamptonshire, which yielded him about sixty pounds a year for the present, besides about half as much more which he would inherit on the death of his mother. The only degree he took at Cambridge, notwithstanding the length of his residence, is stated to have been that of Bachelor of Arts, in January, 1654. Yet in the patent appointing him Poet Laureat (1670) he is styled "John Dryden, Master of Arts."

On leaving college Dryden seems to have come up to London, and to have taken up his residence for a time with his flourishing relative Sir Gilbert Pickering. It has been supposed that he was employed by Sir Gilbert in the capacity of amanuensis or secretary.

His next poem was produced in the latter end of the year 1658, his 'Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell.' Its style is wholly free from the peculiar vices of the elegy on Lord Hastings; but if it has none of the forced thought and expression of his earliest manner, it wants also the force of thought and expression of his latest. The form, too, is one to which his genius was ill-suited. The confinement of the heroic line in quatrains, each complete in itself, is almost as destructive of its animation and variety, its "full resounding march and energy divine," as would be the making every couplet a[Pg 43] distinct stanza. The quatrain may suit a trim, precise, step-picking, poetical genius, such as that of Sir John Davies; but is not nearly spacious enough for the impetuosity and splendid recklessness of Dryden. To afford full scope for a style of any breadth or abundance, it requires to be expanded into the interwoven double quatrain and annexed couplet of Spenser or Byron, where the regular flow of the melody is varied ever and anon, by the prolonged swell or the sudden break.

This poem upon the death of Cromwell, however, may be regarded as exemplifying Dryden's second manner. It is substantially the same with that of his 'Astraea Redux; or the Happy Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty, Charles II.;' 1660; his 'Panegyric of the Coronation' of Charles the same year; and his 'Annus Mirabilis; the Year of Wonders,' 1666; although only the last is written in quatrains or the elegiac stanza. It is a careful and occasionally stately manner, but without much life or fire at the best, and becoming not unfrequently ponderous, languid, and drawling. The 'Annus Mirabilis,' however, contains a good deal of elaborate and ambitious writing, and was by much the highest effort its author had yet made. It appears to have been the first of his poems that brought him into general notice.

It will be perceived from the titles of some of the pieces we have just named that Dryden had now left his original political party. The Restoration had of course terminated his secretaryship with Sir Gilbert Pickering; and he probably worked for a time for the booksellers; but he was soon fortunate enough to find a new patron in Sir Robert Howard, a younger son of the Earl of Berkshire, who, besides the influence that his services and connections gave him under the new state of things, was himself a person of literary and poetical tastes, and as such capable of appreciating the merits of the young poet. The 'Annus Mirabilis' was prefaced by a long letter to Howard, giving an account of the poem, in which Dryden says: "You have not only been careful of my fortune, which was the effect of your nobleness,[Pg 44] but you have been solicitous of my reputation, which is that of your kindness." "It is not long," he adds, "since I gave you the trouble of perusing a play for me; and now, instead of an acknowledgment, I have given you a greater, in the correction of a poem."

It was some years before this that Dryden had commenced dramatic writing. His first piece, the 'Wild Gallant,' was produced in the beginning of the year 1663, and met with so mortifying a reception that he resolved never more to write for the stage. The hasty resolutions of anger are seldom kept, and are seldom worth keeping; but in the present instance it would have been well had he adhered to the first dictates of his resentment. We should not then have had to regret that so large a portion of a great writer's life and labour should have been wasted on twenty-eight dramas: the comedies exhibiting much ribaldry and but little wit; with neither ingenuity nor interest in the fable; with no originality in the characters: the tragedies for the most part filled with the exaggerations of romance, and the hyperboles of an extravagant imagination, in the place of nature and pathos. His tragedy seldom touches the passions: his staple commodities are pompous language, poetical flights, and picturesque description. His characters all speak in one language—that of the author. Addison says, "It is peculiar to Dryden to make all his personages as wise, witty, elegant, and polite as himself." But however uncongenial with his natural talent dramatic composition might be, his temporary disgust soon passed away. In his 'Essay of Dramatic Poesy,' he tells his patron, Dorset, that the writing of that treatise served as an amusement to him in the country, when he was driven from London by the plague; that he diverted himself with thinking on the theatres, as lovers do by ruminating on their absent mistresses. But whatever opinion he might entertain of his own tragic style, he was himself sensible that his talents did not lie in the line of comedy. "Those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit: reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend." He retaliated[Pg 45] on the criticisms levelled against his extravagances in tragedy, by an ostentatious display of defiance. We find in his Dedication of the 'Spanish Friar,' "All that I can say for certain passages of my own 'Maximin' and 'Almanzor' is, that I knew they were bad enough to please when I wrote them."

In 1671 he was publicly ridiculed on the stage in the Duke of Buckingham's comedy of the 'Rehearsal.' The character of Bayes was at first named Bilboa, and meant for Sir Robert Howard; but the representation of the piece in its original form was stopped by the plague in 1665: it was not reproduced till six years afterwards, when it appeared with alterations in ridicule of the pieces brought out in the interval, and with a correspondent change of the hero. Dryden affected to despise the satire. In the Dedication to his Translation of Juvenal, he says, "I answered not to the 'Rehearsal,' because I knew the author sat to himself when he drew the picture, and was the very Bayes of his own farce."

Even in his rhymed plays, however, the fluent and vigorous harmony of Dryden's verse is sometimes displayed with great effect, and, in the absence of all true dramatic spirit, the declamation is eloquent and imposing. The comedy of 'The Wild Gallant' was followed by the tragi-comedy of 'The Rival Ladies,' in 1663; the tragedy of 'The Indian Emperor,' in 1665; the comedy of 'Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen,' in 1667; the comedy of 'Sir Martin Mar-all' (improved from a translation of Molière's L'Etourdi, executed by the Duke of Newcastle), the tragedy of 'The Royal Martyr, or Tyrannic Love,' and the comedy of 'An Evening's Love, or the Mock Astrologer,' in 1668; the two parts of the tragedy of 'The Conquest of Granada' (the second otherwise entitled 'Almanzor and Almahide'), both in 1671; the comedies of 'Marriage Alamode' and 'The Assignation,' and also the tragedy of 'Amboyna,' in 1673; the opera of 'The State of Innocence and Fall of Man' (founded on Milton's Paradise Lost), in 1674 (never acted); the tragedy of 'Aurengzebe,' in 1675; that of 'All for Love,[Pg 46] or the World Well Lost' (founded on Shakspeare's Antony and Cleopatra), and the comedy of 'The Kind Keeper, or Mr. Limberham,' in 1678; the tragedies of 'Œdipus, King of Thebes' and of 'Troilus and Cressida' (altered from Shakspeare), in 1679; the tragi-comedy of 'The Spanish Friar,' in 1681; the tragedy of 'The Duke of Guise' (in conjunction with Lee), in 1683; the opera of 'Albion and Albanius,' in 1685; the tragedy of 'Don Sebastian,' in 1690; the comedy of 'Amphitryon, or the Two Sosias' (founded on Plautus and Molière), and the dramatic opera of 'King Arthur, or the British Worthy' (a sequel to Albion and Albanius), in 1691; the tragedy of 'Cleomenes, or the Spartan Hero,' in 1692; and, lastly, the tragi-comedy of 'Love Triumphant,' in 1694. It thus appears that he continued to write for the stage with little intermission till nearly the close of his life.

In 1665 Dryden had married the Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire and sister of his friend Sir Robert Howard. This was an inauspicious connection from the beginning. It is said that the lady's noble relations were at first opposed to the match, as was natural enough; but any resentment her father and brother at least may have felt does not appear to have lasted very long; the Dedication of the 'Annus Mirabilis,' written in November, 1666, is not only, as we have seen, evidence of the friendly feeling subsisting between the poet and Sir Robert, but is dated from Charlton, in Wiltshire, the earl's seat. He seems, however, to have derived little of either worldly advantage or much satisfaction in any other way from his high alliance. He got only a small property in Wiltshire, yielding him not more than fifty or sixty pounds a year, with Lady Elizabeth; and in herself she turned out but an indifferent bargain. "It is difficult," observes Sir Walter Scott, in a remarkable passage, "for a woman of a violent temper and weak intellects, and such the lady seems to have been, to endure the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incident to one doomed to labour incessantly in the feverish exercise of the imagination.[Pg 47] Unintentional neglect, and the inevitable relaxation or rather sinking of spirit, which follows violent mental exertion, are easily misconstrued into capricious rudeness or intentional offence; and life is embittered by mutual accusation, not the less intolerable because reciprocally just. The wife of one who is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be) equally exhausting, must either have taste enough to relish her husband's performances or good nature sufficient to pardon his infirmities. It was Dryden's misfortune that Lady Elizabeth had neither the one nor the other; and I dismiss the disagreeable subject by observing, that on no one occasion when a sarcasm against matrimony could be introduced, has our author failed to season it with such bitterness as spoke an inward consciousness of domestic misery."

The 'Essay of Dramatic Poesy' mentioned above, was published by Dryden in 1667 or 1668. It is in the form of a dialogue, in which the speakers are Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Robert Howard, and the author, under feigned names; and its principal object is the defence of tragedies in rhyme. The same question had been more slightly discussed before by our author in the Dedication of his play of the 'Rival Ladies,' in which the tragic scenes were in rhyme and the comic in blank verse; that Dedication had been replied to by Sir Robert Howard; and now in the 'Essay of Dramatic Poesy' Sir Robert was made the champion not only of the side he had then taken up, but of every other opinion which the Essay was designed to confute and demolish. Not at all flattered by such treatment, Sir Robert, in the preface to his play of 'The Duke of Lerma,' published soon after, attacked the Essay with some asperity, and in a tone of rather offensive hauteur. Scott thinks it not improbable that some dislike to the alliance of Dryden as a brother-in-law may have mingled with his jealousy as a poet and critic. At all events, the controversy certainly engendered some bitterness or soreness of feeling between them, and occasioned at least a temporary alienation, which perhaps never entirely gave[Pg 48] way to a return of their old cordiality. Dryden answered Sir Robert's preface in a 'Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy,' which he prefixed to a second edition of his 'Indian Emperor,' published in 1668, and in which he kept no reserve, but assailed his luckless opponent with all his powers both of argument and ridicule. He declared, indeed, in the conclusion that he honoured his parts and person as much as any man living, and had so many particular obligations to him that he should be very ungrateful not to acknowledge them to the world; "yet the personal and contemptuous severity of the whole piece," says Scott, "must have cut to the heart so proud a man as Sir Robert Howard. This quarrel between the baronet and the poet, who was suspected of having crutched up many of his lame performances, furnished food for lampoon and amusement to the indolent wits of the day. But the breach between the brothers-in-law, though wide, proved fortunately not irreconcilable; and towards the end of Dryden's literary career we find him again upon terms of friendship with the person by whom he had been befriended at its commencement." It appears that in a letter to Tonson the bookseller, written in 1696, Dryden reckons upon Sir Robert Howard's assistance in regard to some pecuniary arrangement. But this might be without there being much intimacy between them. The manner in which Sir Robert's brother Edward Howard, who was also a writer of plays, and who had entered as warmly as Sir Robert into the controversy about rhyming tragedies, expresses, about the same date, his high and indeed extravagant admiration of Dryden's genius, would rather imply that there was but little intercourse between the families. In his 'Proem to an Essay on Pastoral,' published in 1695, this Honourable Edward Howard writes, absurdly enough:—"I am informed Mr. Dryden is now translating of Virgil; and, although I must own it is a fault to forestall or anticipate the praise of a man in his labours, yet, by the greatness of the work, and the vast capacity of the author, I cannot here forbear saying, that Mr. Dryden, in the translating of Virgil, will of a certain[Pg 49] make Maro speak better than ever Maro thought." This very wise gentleman goes on to say, as if to prove his competency to speak with authority on such subjects:—"The two elaborate poems of Blackmore and Milton, the which, for the dignity of them, may very well be looked upon as the two grand exemplars of poetry, do either of them exceed and are more to be valued than all the poets both of the Romans and Greeks put together." However, it seems that, in testimony of total amnesty between Dryden and the Howards, the 'Defence of the Essay' was cancelled; so that copies of the original edition are now of the extremest rarity.

It was upon his connexion with the theatre that Dryden principally depended for the means of existence during a great part of his life. Soon after the performance of his 'Indian Emperor,' in 1665, he entered into a contract with the King's Company, then playing in Drury Lane, by which he engaged to furnish them with three plays a year, in consideration of which he was admitted to hold a share and a quarter in the profits of the theatre; this, the company afterwards affirmed, commonly produced him three or four hundred pounds a year; and the money was regularly paid to him, although, with all his industry and fertility, he did not supply half, or more than a third of the number of plays he had undertaken to write. "Though he received the money," they say in a memorial addressed to the Lord Chamberlain, "we received not the plays—not one in a year." In August, 1670, Dryden's income was further increased by his being appointed to the two offices of Royal Historiographer and Poet Laureate, which had become vacant, the former by the death of James Howell in 1666, the latter by that of Sir William Davenant in 1668. The two offices brought him a salary of 200l. a-year, besides his butt of Canary; and the grant was made to take effect from the date of Davenant's demise. It is probable, however, that, like the other court salaries and pensions of that period, Dryden's was not very regularly paid; and his contract with the players seems not to have yielded him latterly nearly so much as at[Pg 50] first, so that about 1678 he declined going on with it any longer. From this date he wrote for the Duke's company, acting in Dorset Gardens, Salisbury Court, till the union of the two companies, and their joint occupation of the new theatre in Drury Lane in 1682.

His controversy about rhyming tragedies with Sir Robert Howard, and his exhibition on the stage in the Duke of Buckingham's farce of the 'Rehearsal,' make only a small part of the history of Dryden's quarrels with his brother authors. One of the persons by whom Buckingham had been assisted in the 'Rehearsal,' was a Martin Clifford, who afterwards became Master of the Charter-house; this man, who is said to have been a scholar, but evidently had not the mind of one, published a violent and scurrilous attack upon Dryden's poetry, in four letters, the last of which is dated from the Charter-House, in 1672, and which appear to have been originally published at different times, but the only edition of which now known is of the year 1687. Dryden did not deign to take any notice of Clifford, although the letters, and some other pieces in a similar strain, which appeared about the same time, provoked replies from several of the poet's friends and admirers. "I have neither concernment enough upon me to write anything in my own defence;" said Dryden, alluding to these attacks, in the Dedication, in 1673, of his play of the 'Assignation,' to Sir Charles Sedley, "neither will I gratify the ambition of two wretched scribblers, who desire nothing more than to be answered. I have not wanted friends, even amongst strangers, who have defended me more strongly than my contemptible pedant could attack me; for the other, he is only like Fungoso in the play, who follows the fashion at a distance, and adores the Fastidious Brisk of Oxford." The "contemptible pedant," and "Fastidious Brisk," is supposed to be a Richard Leigh, who had been educated at Oxford, but afterwards became a player in the Duke's company, and wrote an anonymous pamphlet, printed at Oxford in 1673, entitled 'The Censure of the Rota on Mr. Dryden's Conquest of Granada;' the other, his[Pg 51] imitator, is conjectured to be the writer of another of these attacks, which appeared soon after at Cambridge with the title of 'A Friendly Vindication of Mr. Dryden from the Author of the Censure of the Rota.' Another of his assailants, whom he did condescend to notice, was a play-writer named Edward Ravenscroft, notorious as the author of what has been distinguished as the grossest play that ever succeeded on the stage in England, (one, nevertheless, which continued to be acted till some years after the commencement of the last century). This person had sneered at the 'Conquest of Granada' in a prologue to a play acted at the Duke's house in 1672; Dryden retaliated in the prologue to his 'Assignation;' and Ravenscroft rejoined in the prologue to his 'Careless Lovers,' which was produced immediately after. But the most memorable of these feuds was that in which he became involved with Elkanah Settle, who in his old age was reduced to write the dialogue for the puppet-shows then exhibited on Lord Mayor's Day, and even to act in his own drolls at St. Bartholomew's Fair, but who at one time actually divided the applause of the town with Dryden. The story is thus told by John Dennis, writing in 1717:—"Nothing is more certain than that Mr. Settle, who is now the City poet, was formerly a poet of the court. And at what time was he so? Why, in the reign of King Charles II., when that court was more gallant and more polite than ever the English court perhaps had been before; when there was at court the present and the late Duke of Buckingham, the late Earl of Dorset, Wilmot earl of Rochester, famous for his wit and poetry, Sir Charles Sedley, Mr. Saville, Mr. Buckley, and several others. Mr. Settle's first tragedy, 'Cambyses, King of Persia,' was acted for three weeks together. The second, which was 'The Empress of Morocco,' was acted for a month together; and was in such high esteem, both with the court and town, that it was acted at Whitehall before the king by the gentlemen and ladies of the court; and the Prologue, which was spoken by the Lady Betty Howard, was writ by the famous Lord Rochester. The[Pg 52] bookseller who printed it, depending upon the prepossession of the town, ventured to distinguish it from all the plays that had been ever published before; for it was the first play that ever was sold in England for two shillings, and the first that ever was printed with cuts.... Well, but what was the event of this great success? Mr. Settle began to grow insolent, as any one may see who reads the epistle dedicatory to 'The Empress of Morocco.' Mr. Dryden, Mr. Shadwell, and Mr. Crowne, began to grow jealous; and they three in confederacy wrote 'Remarks on the Empress of Morocco.' Mr. Settle answered them; and, according to the opinion which the town then had of the matter (for I have utterly forgot the controversy), had by much the better of them all. In short, Mr. Settle was then a formidable rival to Mr. Dryden; and I remember very well that not only the town, but the University of Cambridge, was very much divided in their opinions about the preference that ought to be given to them; and in both places the younger fry inclined to Elkanah."

Connected in some degree with this unworthy altercation with Settle was an extraordinary event which happened a few years afterwards. Settle is believed to have been merely an instrument in the hands of Rochester, who, for some reason or other, had taken umbrage at Dryden, with whom he had been at one time on very good terms. It is supposed that the poet had incurred his hatred by an intimacy he was understood to have formed with Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards Duke of Buckingham, between whom and Rochester there was a mortal enmity, the history of which as commonly told is not creditable to the latter in any view. Rochester, whose genius was almost equal to his profligacy, had easily managed by his influence at court to procure that temporary exaltation of Settle and his vulgar bombast which succeeded in so mortifying and irritating Dryden. But this was only the beginning of a long and vindictive persecution. Having made the most of Settle, Rochester next took under his all-potential patronage another dramatist of the day, Crowne,[Pg 53] who, although a writer of altogether a different stamp from Settle, was yet far from enjoying a reputation equal to that of Dryden, and got him to be appointed to write a masque, which was acted by the court lords and ladies in 1675. The effect was the same as in the case of Settle's 'Empress of Morocco;' Crowne's masque, 'Calisto,' as it was called, had a run of ninety nights when it was afterwards brought out at the public theatre. Next Rochester took up Otway, whose 'Don Carlos' appeared in 1676, and who, in the Preface to the play when it was published, not only proclaimed his obligations to Rochester, who he said had recommended him to the King and the Duke, but took an opportunity of speaking of Dryden with defiance and contempt. It appears that Dryden had expressed himself somewhat slightingly of Otway's play; but, however little he may have admired the structure of that writer's verse, he has recorded his sense of Otway's pathetic power. Rochester, however, probably succeeded in inspiring the two poets with such a mutual dislike as kept them apart while they lived. Some time after this his lordship attacked Dryden with his own pen in an imitation of Horace, entitled 'An Allusion to the Tenth Satire,' which he published without his name in 1678, and in which he ridiculed his victim under the designation of Poet Squob. This drew forth some severe remarks from Dryden in the Preface to his 'All for Love,' published the same year. Towards the close of the next year, 1679, copies were handed about in manuscript of an anonymous poem by Mulgrave, entitled 'An Essay upon Satire,' in which Rochester was treated with great severity, as well as the King himself, the Duchesses of Portsmouth and Cleveland, and various other persons. Although the mere versification of the poem, which was the meanest doggerel, ought to have made it evident that Dryden could have had no share in its composition, it appears to have been at first received as his. "The author is apparently Mr. Dr., his patron, Lord M., having a panegyric in the midst," Rochester wrote on the 21st of November in a letter to a friend, inclosing a copy of the libel. A[Pg 54] month after, on the night of Monday, the 18th of December, as Dryden was returning from Wills's coffee-house in Russell Street to his own house in Gerard Street, Soho, through Rose Street, Covent Garden, he was waylaid, and, in the words of an advertisement which appeared in the next Gazette offering a reward of 50l. for the discovery of the authors of the outrage, "barbarously assaulted and wounded by divers men unknown." No discovery was ever made; but the universal opinion was that the ruffians had been hired by Rochester, in concert perhaps with the Duchess of Portsmouth.

At length, however, Dryden, after having written no verse except for the theatres during about fourteen years, resumed the species of poetical composition in which he had first distinguished himself. But his style and manner were no longer now the same as when he produced the 'Astraea Redux' and the 'Annus Mirabilis.' All his poems after this date belong to what may be called his third and latest manner, from which all heaviness and languor have disappeared, and given place to an animation and fervour, a force, freedom, and fearlessness of execution, in which he is not surpassed by any other English poet.

In 1680 a translation of Ovid's Epistles into English came out: two of which, together with the Preface, were by Dryden. In the following year he published 'Absalom and Achitophel;' a work of first-rate excellence as a political and controversial poem. Dr. Johnson ascribes to it "acrimony of censure, elegance of praise, artful delineation of character, variety and vigour of sentiments, happy turns of language, and pleasing harmony of numbers; and all these raised to such a height as can scarcely be found in any other English composition." In the same year 'The Medal,' a satire, was given to the public. This piece was occasioned by the striking of a medal, on account of the indictment against Lord Shaftesbury being thrown out, and is a severe invective against that celebrated statesman.

In 1682 Dryden published 'Religio Laici,' in defence of revealed religion against Deists, Papists, and Presbyterians.[Pg 55] Yet soon after the accession of James the II., he became a Roman Catholic; and in the hope of promoting Popery, was employed on a translation of Maimbourg's History of the League, on account of the parallel between the troubles of France and those of Great Britain. This extraordinary conversion exposed him to much ridicule from the wits.

In the same year appeared the first edition of his tremendous crucifixion of Shadwell—his 'Mac-Flecnoe, or a Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T. S., by the author of Absalom and Achitophel.' Richard Flecnoe was an Irish priest, well known about the court, whose name had become proverbial for his wretched verses; and Shadwell is represented as his adopted son, who is to succeed him as monarch of the realm of Dulness and Nonsense.

Pope's Dunciad, though more extended in its plan, and more diversified in its incidents, was professedly written in imitation of this poem. The leisure and pains bestowed on its performance give the imitator the superiority in point of elaborate execution; but there are bursts of pleasantry in Mac Flecnoe, and sallies of wit and humour, equal if not superior to any thing in Pope or Boileau, or perhaps in any poet excepting Horace. Dr. Joseph Warton says of it, that "in point of satire, both oblique and direct contempt and indignation, clear diction, and melodious versification, this poem is perhaps the best of its kind in any language."

Mac Flecnoe was followed by a second part of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' which for the greater part was written by Nahum Tate, and only revised by Dryden; but the latter inserted about two hundred lines of his own, in which, joining Shadwell and Settle, under the names of Og and Doeg, he has laid his scourge on both without mercy.

The 'Hind and Panther,' a controversial poem in defence of the Romish church, appeared in 1687. The Hind represents the Church of Rome, the Panther the Church of England. The first part of the poem consists mostly of general characters and narration; which, says the author, "I have endeavoured to raise, and give it the[Pg 56] majestic turn of heroic poetry. The second, being matter of dispute and chiefly concerning church authority, I was obliged to make as plain and perspicuous as possibly I could, yet not wholly neglecting the numbers, thought I had not frequent occasion for the magnificence of verse. The third, which has more of the nature of domestic conversation, is, or ought to be, more free and familiar than the two former. There are in it two episodes, or fables, which are interwoven with the main design; so that they are properly parts of it, though they are also distinct stories of themselves. In both of these I have made use of the commonplaces of satire, whether true or false, which are urged by the members of one church against another." The absurdity of a fable exhibiting two beasts discoursing on theology was ridiculed in the 'City Mouse and Country Mouse,' a prose dialogue after the manner of the 'Rehearsal,' the joint production of Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax, and Prior, who then put forth the first sample of his talents. Dryden is supposed to have been engaged for the translation of Varillas's History of Heresies, but to have dropped the design, from a feeling of his own incompetency to theological controversy. Bishop Burnet, in his 'Reflections on the Ninth Book of the first Volume of M. Varillas's History,' classes together that work and the Hind and Panther, as "such extraordinary things of their kind, that it will be but suitable to see the author of the worst poem become likewise the translator of the worst history that the age has produced." Dr. Johnson supports the Bishop's hostile criticism so far as to pronounce the scheme of the work injudicious and incommodious, and to censure the absurdity of making one beast advise another to rest her faith on a pope and council: but he allows it to be written "with great smoothness of metre, a wide extent of knowledge, and an abundant multiplicity of images: the controversy to be embellished with pointed sentences, diversified by illustrations, and enlivened by sallies of invective;" and a poem inlaid with such ornaments, however little worth the solid material might be, was but peevishly represented as "the worst that the age[Pg 57] had produced." Pope, a higher authority than the Bishop in such matters, considered it as the most correct specimen of Dryden's versification. Malone has shown that Burnet was mistaken in attributing to our author the answer to Burnet's 'Remarks on the History.'

In 1688 Dryden published 'Britannia Rediviva,' a congratulatory poem, in a high style of adulation, on the birth of the Prince afterwards known by the title of the Pretender. But even had he not so identified himself with the ejected dynasty, his conversion to Popery disqualified him for holding his place after the Revolution. He was accordingly dispossessed of it; and the mortification of its being conferred on an object of his confirmed dislike aggravated the pecuniary loss, which he could ill afford. His successor was his old enemy Shadwell.

Dr. Johnson doubts whether Dryden was the translator of the 'Life of Francis Xavier,' by Father Bouhours, to which his name is affixed. The borrowing of popular names for title-pages was very prevalent in those days, and the loan probably not without profit to the lenders.

In 1693 a translation of Juvenal and Persius appeared. The first, third, sixth, tenth, and sixteenth satires of Juvenal, and the whole of Persius, are Dryden's: also the Dedication to Lord Dorset, a long and ingenious discourse, in which the writer gives an account of a design, which he never carried into effect, of writing an epic poem either on Arthur or the Black Prince. Lord Dorset well deserved the compliment of so masterly a dedication; for he continued to patronise the poet in the reverse of his fortunes, and allowed him an annuity equal to the salary which he had lost.

In 1694 Dryden published a prose translation of Du Fresnoy's 'Art of Painting,' with a Preface, exhibiting a parallel between painting and poetry. Pope addressed a copy of verses to Jervas, the painter, in praise of this work.

The most laborious of Dryden's works, the translation of Virgil, was given to the world in 1697. The 'Pastorals' were dedicated to Lord Clifford, the 'Georgics' to Lord Chesterfield, and the 'Æneid' to Lord[Pg 58] Mulgrave: an economical and lucrative combination of flattery, which the wits suffered not to pass unnoticed. The translation had an extensive sale, and has since passed through many editions. Like most of Dryden's longer productions, it has many careless passages, which do not well accord with an original so remarkable for finish and correctness; but it still stands its ground, and is a stock-book, in the face of the more careful and perhaps more scholarlike performances of Warton, Sotheby, and Pitt.

Besides the original pieces and translations already mentioned, Dryden wrote many others, the most important of which were published in six volumes of Miscellanies, to which he was the principal contributor. They consist of translations from the Greek and Latin poets; epistles, prologues, and epilogues; odes, elegies, epitaphs, and songs. 'Alexander's Feast, an ode for Saint Cecilia's Day,' displays one of the highest flights within the compass of lyric poetry. Dryden, although no lover of labour, is said to have devoted a fortnight to this masterpiece. Yet the poetic fervour is so supported throughout, that it reads as if struck off at a heat; so much so, that the few negligences which escaped the enthusiasm of the writer are scarcely ever noticed. Dr. Johnson, seldom carried beyond the wariness of criticism by the inspiration of his author, did not discover that some of the lines are without correspondent rhymes, till after an acquaintance with it of many years. The splendour of this poem eclipsed that of his first ode for St. Cecilia's Day, which would have fixed the fame of any other poet. In 'Alexander's Feast' the versification is brilliantly worked up, and abruptly varied, according to the rapid transitions of the subject; the language is natural though elevated, and the sentiments are suited to the age and occasion. Had Dryden never written another line, his name would yet be as undying as the tongue in which he wrote. His Fables in English verse from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, were his last work; they were published in 1698. The preface gives a critical account of the authors from whom the Fables are translated. In this work he furnished us[Pg 59] with the first example of the revival of antient English writers by modernising their language. Yet those readers who can master Chaucer's phraseology, and have an ear so practised as to catch the tune of his verse, will like him better in the simplicity of his native garb than in the elaborate splendour of his borrowed costume.

Dryden was a voluminous writer in prose as well as in verse, and quite as great a master of the English language in the former as in the latter. His performances in prose consist of Dedications, Prefaces, and controversial pieces; the Lives of Plutarch and Lucian, prefixed to the translations of those authors by several hands; the Life of Polybius, prefixed to the translation of that historian by Sir Henry Shears; and the Preface to Walsh's Dialogue concerning Women.

Dryden died at his house in Gerard Street, at three o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, the 1st of May, 1700. There is a confused story respecting some vexatious and tumultuary incidents occurring at his funeral, which rests on no satisfactory authority; and, even if true, would occupy more room in the detail than would square either with our limits or its own importance.

His wife, Lady Elizabeth Dryden, survived till the summer of 1714, when she died at the age of seventy-nine, having been for the last four years insane. He had three sons by this lady; Charles, John, and Erasmus-Henry. Charles, his father's favourite, was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and he is the author of the Seventh Satire of Juvenal, published in his father's version, and of several original pieces of verse both in English and Latin; he went to Rome, in 1692, and was appointed Chamberlain of the Household to Pope Innocent XII.; but he returned home in 1698, in ill health, and was drowned in an attempt to swim across the Thames, at Datchet, near Windsor, on the 28th of August, 1704. John, the second son, studied at University College, Oxford, and is the author of a comedy, and of the Fourteenth Satire in his father's translation of Juvenal; he followed his brother Charles[Pg 60] to Rome, where he officiated as his deputy in the Pope's household, and died at Rome before Charles. The poet's third son, Erasmus-Henry, after having been educated at the Charter-House, also went to Rome, where he became a captain in the Pope's guards; but after the death of his brother John he returned to England, and in 1708 succeeded to the title of Baronet, as representative of his great-grandfather, but without the estate of Canons Ashby, which had been devised to his cousin, who also succeeded him in the baronetcy upon his death in 1710.

Dryden was the father of English criticism; and his Essay of Dramatic Poetry is the first regular and judicious treatise in our language on the art of writing. Although, after so many valuable discourses have been delivered to the public on the same subjects during the century and a half which has elapsed since his original attempts, his prose works may now be read more for the charm of their pure idiomatic English, than for their novelty or instructive matter, yet the merits of a discoverer must not be underrated because his discoveries have been extended, or his inventions improved upon. Before his time, those who wished to arrive at just principles of taste, or a rational code of criticism, if they were unacquainted with the works of the ancients and the modern languages of Italy and France, had no guides to lead them on their way. Dryden communicated to his own learning, which, though not deep nor accurate, was various and extensive, the magic of his style and the popular attraction of his mother-tongue: the Spectator followed his lead, in essays less diffusive, and therefore more within the reach of the million: in our day such is the accumulation of material, and so cheap and copious the power of circulating knowledge, that the poorest man who can read may inform his mind on subjects of general literature, to the enlargement of his understanding, and the improvement of his morals. But we must not forget our obligations to those who began that hoard, whence we have the privilege of drawing at will.

With respect to those prose works of our author which[Pg 61] are devoted to controversy, their interest has quite passed away, farther than as they may evince his powers in argument, or command of language. Dr. Johnson gives a just estimate of his general character. "He appears to have a mind very comprehensive by nature, and much enriched with acquired knowledge. His compositions are the effects of a vigorous genius, operating upon large materials."

Dryden's works have been constantly before the public in various shapes and successive editions. Those best deserving a place in the library are, his Prose Works in four volumes, edited by Mr. Malone; his Poetical Works, in four volumes, with notes, by Dr. Joseph Warton, and his son, the Rev. John Warton; and the whole of his Works in eighteen volumes octavo, by Sir Walter Scott. The earlier authorities for his Life are Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses; the Biographia Britannica; and a Life by Derrick, poorly executed, prefixed to Tonson's edition, in 1760. Johnson's admirable Essay on this subject is in the hands of every reader, and is one of the most masterly among his 'Lives of the Poets.' He was peculiarly well qualified to appreciate a writer in whom, to use his own words, "strong reason rather predominated than quick sensibility." Scott also has written a copious Life, occupying the first volume of his edition of Dryden's Works.

This Prince descended from an ancient and illustrious German house, which, very early, distinguished itself throughout Europe in the cause of Protestantism and Civil Liberty. The Counts of Nassau, then settled on the Rhine, acquired great power during the middle ages: at one period they disputed the pre-eminence with the House of Austria; in 1292 Adolphus of Nassau was elected Emperor of Germany, or—as it was styled—of the Holy Roman Empire; and five ecclesiastical electors of the family of Nassau figured then among the princes of the Empire.

"From Didier and imperial Adolph trace
The glorious offspring of the Nassau race,
Devoted lives to public liberty;
The chief still dying, or the country free."[1]

[1] Matthew Prior. Carmen Seculare, addressed to King William III., A.D. 1700.

These magnates were famed as a valorous, taciturn, cautious race: and in few historical families have the original characteristics been so long and so perfectly preserved.

Early in the sixteenth century the Nassaus obtained, through marriage and bequest, the French principality of Orange in Provence, from which their most celebrated title has been derived: but the possession of several large domains and hereditary dignities in the Netherlands had meanwhile numbered the Counts of Nassau among the great and almost royal vassals whom the House of Austria gained by the marriage of Maximilian with Mary of Burgundy: and William I. of Nassau, Prince of Orange, the true founder of the political importance and glories of his race, was the subject of the Emperor Charles V. This William I. of Orange, great-grandfather to our William III., was born at Dillenburg in Nassau, in 1533, during the latter part of the reign of our Henry VIII. His father having embraced the Lutheran doctrines, he was, at first, educated as a Protestant; but the Emperor Charles V. removed the promising boy to his court, and caused him to be brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. In the words of Cardinal Bentivoglio, the ultra-Catholic historian of the Wars of Flanders,—"He was born a heretic in Germany, but being called into Flanders, when a child, to immense property, paternal and maternal, he became a Catholic; and was ever held in great favour by the emperor." Charles, who is said to have foreseen the great statesman in the boy, kept him very constantly about his person, gave him practical lessons in the business of government, allowed him to be present when he gave audience to foreign ambassadors, and honoured him with a confidence far above his years. William merited this extraordinary favour by a discretion and a taciturnity which had already obtained for him his famous surname of "The Silent;" and the great Emperor did not blush to avow publicly that to so young a man he had often been indebted for suggestions, in matters of state, which had escaped his own sagacity and long experience. In the last solemn[Pg 64] act of his public life, when he abdicated his throne to his son Philip II., Charles leaned on the shoulder of this William of Orange; and to him also the retiring monarch committed the honourable mission of delivering over the imperial crown to his brother Ferdinand. The Prince, even then, was only in his twenty-third year.

That intolerant bigot and umbrageous tyrant Philip II. had scarcely ascended the throne ere he conceived a distrust and jealousy of the young Prince, whose popularity and influence in the Low Countries were immense. At the same time William embraced Calvinism. This change of religion was unknown when he was sent to reside at the court of France as a hostage from Philip II. for the peace of Cateau Cambresis; and the French King, Henry II., believing him to be still a Catholic, and as much in the confidence of Philip as he had been in that of Charles V., incautiously spoke to him of the secret treaty which the crowns of France and Spain had recently concluded for the extirpation of the Protestants in the dominions of both. William hastened to communicate this disclosure to the leaders of the Protestant party in Brussels; and Philip II. soon discovered that he had done so. Yet, for several years, and so long as Philip left the Netherlands under the feeble administration of Margaret of Parma, the Prince of Orange was left undisturbed; and, all that time, as a member of the Flemish council of state, and as Stadtholder of Holland, Zealand, and Utrecht, he covertly but indefatigably employed himself in undermining the tyrannical designs of Philip, who, on his side, was masking his designs with the most consummate dissimulation. But, at last, when the bigot and tyrant, conceiving that the time for action was come, sent the able, energetic, and sanguinary Duke of Alva to supersede Margaret of Parma, William threw off the mask. His friends, the Counts Egmont and Horn, perished on a scaffold, but he saved his life by retiring in good time to his paternal domains of Nassau. There he matured his scheme for entirely overthrowing the mighty power of Spain in the Netherlands. In the field, with raw heterogeneous levies, he had to contend[Pg 65] against the veteran Spanish and Italian troops which Alva had led into the Low Countries, and which were successively headed by the greatest Captains of Europe, as Alva himself, Don John of Austria, and Alexander Farnese of Parma. He was frequently defeated—for a long time war was to him nothing but a series of reverses—but he never desponded or faltered in his purpose, and every disadvantage in the field was counterbalanced by his consummate abilities as a statesman, which ultimately enabled him to triumph not only over his Spanish enemies, but also over every rival in the councils of the revolted provinces. It was by his suggestion and under his auspices that the seven Protestant states of Holland, Zealand, Utrecht, Friesland, Groningen, Overyssel, and Guelderland, concluded, in 1576, the famous Union of Utrecht, which formed the lasting basis of the Dutch Republic. Philip now invited assassins by setting a high price upon his head. One murderer failed, but a second, in the year 1584, shot him. The villain was a Burgundian, by name Balthazar Gerard, who is said to have been encouraged by Roman Catholic priests.

The contest with Rome and Spain and the whole House of Austria was continued by William's son, Maurice of Nassau, who was as secret and adroit as his father in the cabinet, and far more successful in the field. He gained victory after victory, captured fortress after fortress, and in about twelve years he entirely cleared the Seven United Provinces of the Spaniards and of all their Catholic foes. In many respects his policy was Machiavellian, and his character as a statesman open to severe reprobation; but as a scientific soldier he stood unrivalled. Maurice of Nassau, in fact, is regarded as the founder of the military science of modern Europe. He was, at least, the earliest restorer of the true principles of warfare, which he had deeply studied in the enduring lessons of classical antiquity, and as carefully applied to the altered circumstances and the exigencies of his own time. He was the first to methodize the practice of sieges, encampments, and marches; and he introduced numberless reforms in the armament, training,[Pg 66] and formation of troops. To him must be referred that uniformity of exercise and regularity of movement which have become the simplest elements of martial discipline. Maurice died on the 23rd of April, 1625. He left no legitimate offspring; and was succeeded, both in the principality of Orange and the Stadtholdership of the United Provinces, by his half-brother, Frederic Henry. These two great ancestors were more especially the models of the illustrious subject of the present memoir.

William III. of Nassau, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of the United Provinces, and ultimately King of England,—the great champion of the civil and religious liberties of Protestant Europe—was born in the year 1650, and was the posthumous son of William II. of Orange, by Mary, daughter of Charles I. of England. As William II. was the eldest son of the Stadtholder Frederic Henry, who was the youngest son of William the Silent, by Louisa, daughter of the famous Admiral Coligni, one of the most illustrious of the Protestant victims sacrificed at Paris in the St. Bartholomew massacre, young William III. was great-grandson of the founder of the Dutch Republic, and was also lineally descended, in the female line, from the renowned leader of the Huguenots or French Protestants. The morning of life was sadly overcast; not only had a father's care been denied to the birth and infancy of William III., but his youth was destined to suffer for the errors and misfortunes of his parent. The Republic of the United Provinces was, in many respects, a disjointed, anomalous, uncertain form of government (the defects and vices of the system eventually led to the easy subjugation of the whole country by the French Revolutionists of 1792); the Stadtholdership, which had been meant to be elective (like the Presidency in the United States of America), had been allowed to become hereditary in the house of Nassau; at times there was attached to the office as ample a prerogative as that which has since been enjoyed by the truly constitutional monarchs of Great Britain; but, at other times, the Stadtholder could scarcely exercise any authority without exciting jealousy, fear, and hatred;[Pg 67] and at all times, from the moment that William the Silent had achieved the liberation of his country, there was an aristocratic or republican party that constantly and vehemently opposed the Prince and the Orangeists. The crooked policy, the subterfuges of state were not all on one side: the Barneveldts, the De Witts, and the other leaders could be quite as Machiavellian, pitiless, and remorseless as Maurice of Nassau, and as rash and violent as William II. Moreover, while struggling for a theoretical freedom, by always leaning to France they jeopardized the liberties of their country, which had been purchased by so much blood, and by forty years of war. There was also inherent in the government the incurable evils of Federalism. The seven provinces were politically united, without being amalgamated: each had an internal government of its own, and its own views, interests, and predilections. In some, the Orangeists predominated; in others the ultra-republicans. The quarrels between them were occasionally so violent as to threaten the dissolution of the union, and the ruin of the edifice which had been raised by the prudence, wisdom, and valour of the house of Nassau.

Great faults were, however, imputed to the father of William III. The Stadtholder Frederic Henry, unlike his half-brother and predecessor, the warlike Maurice, had administered his office without giving much umbrage to the States; but his son and successor William II. even in his brief career, which was cut short by death in his twenty-fourth year, was accused of violently infringing the fundamental laws of the republic, and of aspiring to the establishment of a monarchy; and after his death, the party opposed to the Orange interest took advantage of the helplessness of his posthumous infant son to prevent his succeeding to the dignity of Stadtholder. The alliance of the family of Nassau with the house of Stuart (the young William being son of the daughter of the late Charles I.) had also excited the jealousy of Oliver Cromwell, whose power was now in the ascendant; and when—in the year 1654—peace was concluded between the Commonwealth of England[Pg 68] and the republic of the United Provinces, the imperious demand of the English Protector, that all the states should solemnly engage to exclude the infant Prince of Orange and his descendants prospectively from the Stadtholdership, was only satisfied by a secret engagement to the same effect, to which Holland, as the leading province of the Union, disgracefully acceded.

The States, in lieu of a Stadtholder, created a sort of a President in the person of the Pensionary John de Witt, who not only administered the affairs of government, but also took charge of the education of the young prince.

The restoration of the Stuarts to the British throne in 1660, tended at once to raise the hopes of the Orangeists and to increase the disquietude of their opponents, whose government had been neither fortunate abroad nor popular at home. Yet, in 1667, when William was in his seventeenth year, the republican party, headed by the two brothers, John and Cornelius de Witt, succeeded in inducing the States to pass the "Perpetual Edict," for ever abolishing the office of Stadtholder. But perpetuity is not a mortal quality; and this arrogant Edict, instead of living for ever, died in five years, and had but few tears shed at its obsequies. Its death-blow was given by the iniquitous aggression of Louis XIV. upon the republic, in 1672. Threatening to drown those shopkeepers in their own ditches, the French King, with 100,000 men, commanded by those great and experienced generals, Turenne, Condé, and Luxembourg, crossed the Rhine almost without a show of opposition, overran three of the seven United Provinces, and spread such consternation in the great trading city of Amsterdam, that the municipal authorities proposed sending their keys to the conqueror. Even the Pensionary de Witt despaired, and suggested the inevitable necessity of submission; and he had brought the country to that state that resistance did, in very deed, appear hopeless. Blindly confiding in the friendship of France, and distrusting and hating the best officers of the army, as men devoted to the house of Orange, and disgusted with[Pg 69] the oligarchy, they had, by dismissals, reductions, and neglect, so weakened the land-forces that the republic was in a manner defenceless. At the present terrible crisis, the Dutch remembered that it was the house of Orange that had first made them an independent people, and they turned their eyes to the young prince who was behind the river Maas and the broad dikes of South Holland, and who, though never inflated by hope or by realized success, was never, in his whole life, cast down by despair; and as, besides the prestige of his name, and the traditions of his grandfather and great-grandfather, young William had already acquired a reputation for unusual forethought, prudence, conduct, and fortitude, it was soon resolved to intrust him with the supreme command of all the forces. De Witt, who could not prevent this sudden appointment, succeeded, nevertheless, in inducing the republican party to bind the prince by an oath to observe the "Perpetual Edict," and never seek to advance himself to the office of Stadtholder. But the days of the republican Pensionary were numbered. The people murmured at the defenceless state of the provinces, at the easy capture the French had been allowed to make of fortresses, towns, cities, provinces; they suspected De Witt, who had been so long and so closely linked with the French, of traitorous connivance with Louis XIV.; and by proposing abjectly to treat with that haughty invader, he sealed his doom. The hatred of the two parties against each other had long been inveterate; and now the Orangeists—the quasi-royalists—who, ever since the death of William II. had been deprived of the honours and emoluments of office, intrigued and harangued, and, without doubt, fanned the popular fury into a blaze. At Dort, at Middleburg, at Rotterdam, at Amsterdam, the people, who had always been favourable to the family of Nassau, rose and called for a Stadtholder, to beat back the French and restore the independence and honour of the country. Their first fury was directed against the two De Witts, whom they murdered and mutilated in the streets of the Hague with horrible barbarity. The[Pg 70] young Prince of Orange was then tumultuously raised to the prescribed dignity of Stadtholder; and, being absolved from his recent oath, both civilly and canonically, he took the reins of government into his own hands.

William was only in the twenty-second year of his age when he was thus suddenly called to the government of a factious, distracted, and half-conquered state, a lawless populace, and a dispirited and disorganized army. He was of a sickly habit of body—he was all his life through a valetudinarian—but this physical weakness did not affect the iron strength of his mind, or check for a moment his energetic activity. Having given rewards and employments to some of the men who had headed the recent revolution, and having called around him the veteran officers who had so long served his family, he, with an undivided, unlimited command, and with all the resources of the country at his disposal, made head against the victorious and confident French. For a long time he had no ally of any importance. His loving uncle, Charles II., had become the pensioner of Louis XIV., and had basely rendered England subservient to France. Charles even sent over 6000 British troops under the command of his natural son, the Duke of Monmouth, to aid the French in their iniquitous invasion. But, happily for his country and the world, young William at once displayed the same characteristics of firmness, sagacity, valour, and perseverance, which had rendered his great-grandfather so illustrious. His taciturnity was as invincible as that of old "Silent." Knowing that Louis was moving with money-chests filled with gold to bribe and to buy, and that every camp contains men capable of selling themselves for gold, William kept his plans to himself until they were put into execution. One of his colonels, after a very successful affair of arms, asked him what was his next great design. "Can you keep a secret?" said the prince. "I can," said the colonel. "And so can I," said William. His firmness was sublime; and it was beautiful and touching in being coupled with his youth and inexperience, and his love of his country. He indignantly rejected all the efforts and tempting[Pg 71] offers of the combined kings of France and England to seduce him from the cause of the Dutch republic; and when Buckingham, the favourite of Charles II., asked him whether he did not see that Louis must prevail, and that the destruction of the Commonwealth was inevitable, he replied, "There is one means by which I at least shall be sure not to witness the ruin of my country: I will die in the last ditch." This magnanimous spirit found its way into the hearts of his despairing countrymen, who cut the dikes of their lands, and resigned the fertile fields, which their ancestors had rescued from the sea, to the ravages of that element, rather than yield them to their invaders. An impassable inundation was placed between Amsterdam and the French; and the vain-glorious Louis, finding that the war was no longer a pleasant promenade, returned to his own capital. The great Turenne, who remained behind, was foiled and beaten; and in two short campaigns the French armies were entirely driven out of the territories of the republic. This has been classed among the miracles of military history.

In 1674, the young Prince of Orange even dared every measure to bring the veteran Condé to a pitched battle; and though he suffered for his temerity at Senef, near Mons, he so nobly conducted himself in that defeat or check, as to extort from his illustrious opponent the generous avowal that "he had acted in everything like an old captain, except in exposing his life too much like a young soldier." It was also in adversity, and in the midst of the perplexities of state and the pangs of disappointed hope, that William's character, like a rocket against a dark sky, shone forth with all its brilliancy. No failure could extract from him any dishonourable concession, or any expression of despondency. His principle, as his word, was "Steady, Steady!"

During the remainder of the war, which, after a separate peace between England and the States in 1674, was protracted with France for four years, and only concluded by the peace of Nimeguen in 1678, William continued to give abundant proofs both of his political[Pg 72] and military genius; and shortly before the treaty of Nimeguen, he had effected a personal alliance, which largely influenced the fortunes of his subsequent life. In the month of September, 1677, after having been obliged to raise the siege of Charleroi, the prince came over to England, and, very soon, was allowed to marry his cousin Mary, eldest daughter of James, duke of York, by Anne Hyde (daughter of Chancellor Clarendon), and, at that date, heiress presumptive to the British crown. It is said that Charles II. was much amused at the prince's nicety in having refused to enter upon any treaty of marriage until he had first seen his intended wife, and had ascertained her inclinations. On a personal acquaintance, and a familiar though short intercourse, the prince and princess were mutually pleased with each other; the match was then concluded, and William's disinterestedness and delicacy were rewarded by the harmony which attended his domestic life with his consort. It is not easy to comprehend how Charles II. so readily consented to a measure so contrary to his usual policy and inclinations; for William, though his nephew, had thwarted his designs, had exposed his political baseness, and had given still greater offence by his maintenance of the republican cause. But Charles was never steady to any course—there was no more calculating upon his impulses and movements than there was upon the flight of the butterfly or moth which he and his women and courtiers were chasing, while De Ruyter and the Dutch were burning his fleet in the Medway, and threatening to bombard him in his capital. Yet it is generally believed that one or two very weighty considerations may have influenced him at this juncture. The Prince of Orange was already very popular among the great body of the two nations of England and Scotland, who regarded him as the champion of the Protestant faith, and as the only warrior and statesman of the day capable of preserving Europe from the tyranny and intolerance of Louis XIV. Charles's government was becoming excessively unpopular; his brother, the Duke of York, was hated and feared as a bigoted papist,[Pg 73] and a prince of a tyrannical disposition; and the whole country was on the eve of being convulsed and maddened by Shaftesbury, Titus Oates, and their so-called Popish plots. It was therefore very expedient for the king to give some sign of Protestanism; and he may have hoped, by this marriage, to dispel the suspicions excited by his brother's religion. There is no doubt but that the Duke of York was opposed to the match. But the king, who had made up his own mind, exclaimed, "God's fish! he must consent;" and this, in the end, though with evident reluctance, the duke did. The marriage, which, according to Burnet, gave a general satisfaction to the whole nation, was celebrated on the 4th of November, 1677. Encouraged by the popularity he had thus acquired, Charles ventured, very soon after, to meet his parliament, and to demand from it a very great supply of money.

It is more than probable that neither the Prince of Orange nor Charles II. and his dark brother the duke foresaw all the consequences of this well-sorted and auspicious union to the polities of Europe. But no event of William's fortune contributed so essentially to the furtherance of that great design which had become the master-passion of his soul—the reduction of the disproportionate and tyrannical power of Louis XIV., and the security of the liberties of the Protestant world. The last was a mission he may be said to have inherited through three generations; and nearly all the fame and traditions of his ancestors, whether on the side of the house of Nassau, or on that of the scarcely less illustrious house of Coligni, were inseparably linked with the Protestant cause. While the French troops were devastating his country, the French Huguenots were putting up secret prayers for his success, and for the overthrow of Louis. To his two grand objects, from the first hour in which he had been called to the defence of his country, his whole life was consistent; and in whatever degree motives of personal ambition, whether unconsciously to himself or otherwise, were mingled in his plans, he appears never to have suffered any consideration for an[Pg 74] instant to interfere with the pursuit of the great cause to which he had devoted himself. Besides his genius, his valour, his consummate prudence, and the accidents of his birth which pointed him out as the Protestant chief, many circumstances contributed to place him at the head of the general league, provoked by the monstrous aggressions and intolerable insolences of the French king. The formal revocation (in 1684) of the tolerant Edict of Nantes, which had never been properly observed by Louis XIV., and the barbarous persecution of the Huguenots which immediately followed that revocation, justly alarmed and outraged all the Protestants of Europe; the arrogant, illimitable pretensions of Louis gave mortal offence to the Emperor and King of Spain; the apprehensions which a sad experience had taught the United Provinces to entertain of the projects of the French king naturally rendered the court of their Stadtholder the centre of negotiations against him; and various causes of hatred, suspicion, and fear enabled William to combine the States themselves and the Protestant princes of Germany, with the two Roman Catholic monarchs of the house of Austria (the Emperor and the King of Spain), and other minor powers, in the celebrated League which was concluded against Louis XIV. at Augsburg in 1687. To the completeness of that great European confederacy nothing was wanting but the accession of England; and this was soon (and at the very moment it was most needed) obtained, in the only manner which the alliance of her new King, James II., with France rendered practicable, by his insane attempt to overthrow the liberties and established faith of these realms. But for William there would have been no League of Augsburg; and but for that league France would long have domineered over Europe.

Ever since his marriage with the Princess Mary, William had studiously abstained from taking part in the struggle of parties in England; and though, through his activity in thwarting the schemes of the French king, he had not been able to escape the displeasure of his uncle, Charles II., he had lived on decent terms with[Pg 75] his uncle and father-in-law, the Duke of York; and since that prince's accession to the throne as James II., he had proffered him aid in suppressing the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth, which, though ended by the one single battle or skirmish of Sedge Moor, did at one time seem to menace the unstable throne of James, and the prospective rights of his eldest daughter Mary, Princess of Orange, who still, by birth and by Protestantism, stood indisputably next in order of succession; for James's son (afterwards the unhappy Pretender) by his second wife, Maria Beatrice of Modena, was not born when Monmouth made his rash attempt to win the crown. James, with thanks, declined the proffered assistance of the Stadtholder. But when William publicly refused to support the repeal of the Test Act, which was intended solely to place the government, church, colleges, and corporations of England in the hands of the papists, James began both to treat him as an enemy and to adopt injurious measures against the United Provinces. This obstinate, doomed Stuart, as a means of working out his plans at home, meanly took money from France, concluded a treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, tied himself to the triumphal car of Louis XIV., and, by so doing, rendered his political existence absolutely incompatible with that of his son-in-law, the Prince of Orange. This anti-national and odious league, and all the measures which James was systematically and doggedly pursuing, struck at the very existence of the Protestant faith; and their success might have been fatal also to the cause of civil freedom in Europe, to which William was equally attached. And if the Stadtholder had not become King of England, French armies might have penetrated again to the gates of Amsterdam, and French dragoons might have been employed as Catholic missionaries in the streets of London, even as Louis was employing them at Nismes, and the other Huguenot cities in the south of France. It was at this crisis that all the English and Scotch Protestants turned their eyes to William for the protection of their liberties and faith. His court at the Hague was thronged by exiles who had fled from the[Pg 76] tyranny of James; and some of these men, as Dalrymple, Lords Stair, Fletcher of Saltoun, and others, were eminent by birth, acquirements, or genius, and were possessed of great and deserved influence in the country from which they had been compelled to flee, and to which they were impatient to return in safety and honour. When the entire Whig and Tory parties—when all the conspicuous statesmen, churchmen, and most of the general officers of the army and admirals of the fleets of England—implored him to come to their succour, William was at length induced to undertake his ever-memorable expedition into England for the restoration of the national rights; and, having arranged his preparations with his usual skill and secrecy, he sailed from Helvoet-Sluys on the 1st of November, 1688, with an army of about 14,000 men, composed partly of Dutch troops and partly of English and Scotch regiments in the service of the States. He was accompanied by many British noblemen and gentlemen. His ship bore the flag of England and his own arms, with this motto: "I will Maintain the Protestant Religion and the Liberties of England." He landed at Torbay on the 5th of November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot; and from that day our church and our liberties were safe.

This interference of William in the domestic politics of England has been variously viewed, by opposite parties, as the most glorious, or the most questionable act of his life. But it cannot be denied that it was in perfect consonance with the whole tenor of his principles and his policy. The unexpected birth of a male heir to the crown of England may have quickened the zeal of William; and the double injury to his wife's title, consequent upon a prior right and a Roman Catholic succession, doubtless had its influence upon his mind. Yet there is no reason whatever to discredit his sincere anxiety for the Protestant cause, which without these interested motives might assuredly have prompted his great, and, to England, most happy enterprise. Add to these religious feelings the consideration[Pg 77] he owed to the safety, strength, and alliances of his own native country, and the destined mission of his life to resist the encroachments of Louis XIV., and it will be confessed by every dispassionate mind, that it was almost impossible for him to have turned a deaf ear to the invitations of England, or to have acted otherwise than he did. The dethronement of a father-in-law has sometimes been imputed to him as a deed of ingratitude, and of unnatural guilt; and, if the affections of private life were usually permitted to have sway in the breasts of princes, it would not be easy to justify William in having made his wife an accomplice in the expulsion of her father. But, in sober truth, there was no debt of gratitude owing by William to James; nor had there at any time been circumstances of private regard between them to outweigh considerations of public duty or personal interest. As Duke of York James had opposed the Prince' marriage with his daughter to the utmost, and as King he had never cordially courted his friendship. On the contrary, he had injured and insulted him, and had formed political connexions with the most dangerous, deadliest enemies of his country. Even the affections of James's two daughters, the Princesses Mary and Anne, had been alienated; for they had been well trained in the Protestant faith, and their unhappy father, after vainly attempting to convert them to his own creed, regarded them as irreclaimable heretics. At no time had his parental affection to them been very warm; and now all his hopes, all his pride and fondness, were absorbed by his infant son, the child of his old age, who, in his vain conceit, was to prolong a line of Catholic and absolute kings in England.

The landing of William in Torbay was followed, after a few days of hesitation, by an almost total defection of James's English subjects and troops from their allegiance; and with unparalleled ease and rapidity was that memorable Revolution effected which changed the royal line, and—for the first time—firmly established the constitution of these realms. Not one drop of blood was shed. For once all parties and orders of men in the[Pg 78] nation, except a scarcely visible minority of Roman Catholics, peaceably concurred in the necessity for an immediate change of sovereign and government; and when the betrayed and misguided King fled to France, the most opposite principles of passive obedience and popular rights were strained to the same practical conclusion, that James II. had either deserted or forfeited the throne. The vital question in what manner the vacant throne should be occupied, terminated the short-lived concord of factions. But William, whether moved in part by a mere selfish ambition, or wholly by a better and well-founded conviction of the public exigencies of the crisis, presently cut short all schemes of the high monarchical party for restricting his functions to a regency, either on behalf of his wife or her infant half-brother, by declaring that, except as King, he would not remain in the country. He scorned to wear a matrimonial crown, or to be merely a queen's husband; he would go back to Holland and leave the English to settle their difficulties by themselves, if any such proposition were insisted on. This decisive language hastened the proceedings of the Convention parliament, which had been composed of the peers, the surviving members of the three last Houses of Commons, and the Corporation of London; and in the famous Act of Settlement passed by that body on the 12th of February, 1701 the crown, with proper and nicely defined limitations to its power, was conferred jointly upon the Prince and Princess of Orange, with remainder successively to the issue of the latter, to the princess Anne and her children, and to the heirs of William by any other wife.

The Jacobites of Scotland, and the Roman Catholics of Ireland, resolutely opposed this salutary settlement, and endeavoured to reinstate King James. The death of the gallant, but selfish, unscrupulous, and sanguinary Viscount Dundee, in the battle of Killicrankie, soon put an end to the civil war in Scotland; but in Ireland the struggle was protracted, costly, and bloody. Seeing that his lieutenants were not sufficiently active, William went over to Ireland and told them he had not come to let the[Pg 79] grass grow under his horse's feet: he took, in person, the command of the army, gave a signal defeat to the enemy at the passage of the Boyne, and, before the close of the year 1691, all Ireland was reduced to a peaceful submission.

The day before forcing the passage of the Boyne, while reconnoitring on the bank, he was slightly wounded on the right shoulder. Lord Coningsby rode up to his majesty and clapped his handkerchief on the wound; but the King said coolly that it needed not—that the ball should have come nearer to do him harm.

Meanwhile William had the satisfaction—the greatest, probably, which his new dignity gave him—of engaging England in the League of Augsburg. The war of that confederacy against Louis XIV., of which the principal conduct was intrusted to William, though it effectually checked for the time the aggrandizement of France, was not so successful as might have been anticipated: neither the English parliament nor the States-General were sufficiently liberal in granting supplies; some of the allied powers were either lukewarm in the great European cause, or were incapable of making the adequate exertions; there was—as in all coalitions—a frequent divergency of interests, opinions, and plans; and in the field, William, though a hero, and a skilful general, wanted that lucky star, or good fortune, which the ancients numbered among the indispensable attributes of a great general; and he sustained in the course of this war two severe defeats,—at Steinkirk and Neerwinden,—from the French under the Duke of Luxembourg. But, in no way disheartened, the Stadtholder-King, after this, outmanœuvred Marshal Villeroy, and successfully undertook and finished the siege of Namur. During this siege, which is one of the most memorable of modern times—William, though a valetudinarian, shared in the fatigues as well as the dangers of the common soldiery. By the treaty of Ryswick, which was concluded on the 20th of September, 1697, the much weakened French monarch restored to the Empire, to Spain, to Holland, to the Duke of Lorraine, and to minor potentates, nearly every thing[Pg 80] that he had taken from them; he recognised William as King of England, and solemnly engaged to abandon the cause of the exiled family.

Except as increasing his means of defeating the ambitious projects of Louis XIV., the possession of the English throne had given William little happiness. Though almost the entire nation had at first so heartily concurred in the Revolution of 1688, the Tory and high church party were, in general, indisposed to the pretensions and person of the new King; and the Whigs and the low church party considered that the services they had rendered could be adequately compensated only by a complete monopoly of power and place. The Tories would have sent him back to Holland; the Whigs would have made him the king of a party—a Whig King, without consideration or bowels of compassion for any but Whigs. There were exceptions, but, generally, these Whigs—more especially when out of place, or when threatened with the loss of office—were full of jealousy of the royal power. At the same time the King's cold reserved temper, and not very gracious manner, tended to alienate the mind of his subjects in general. But this reserve was increased by manifold proofs that many of those who surrounded him, and who had invited him to the throne, were secretly corresponding with the deposed and unaltered James. His most favourite schemes were constantly thwarted in parliament; his whole reign was harassed with intrigues of faction and plans of insurrection at home; and his life and throne were assailed from abroad with base plots of assassination by the adherents of James, and with projects of invasion undertaken by Louis for the restoration of the dethroned King. For a long time the queen, his wife, never saw him leave the palace without a sad foreboding that she would not see him return alive. To add to his distresses, Mary, to whom he was deeply attached, died of the small-pox, as early as the 28th of December, 1694, in the thirty-third year of her age. During her illness he called Bishop Burnet into his closet, and gave free vent to a most tender passion. "He burst into tears," says the[Pg 81] Bishop, "and cried out that there was no hope, and that, from the happiest, he was now going to be the most miserable creature upon earth. He said, during the whole course of their marriage, he had never known one single fault in her; there was a worth in her which nobody knew besides himself.... The King's affliction for her death was as great as it was just; it was greater than those who knew him best thought his temper capable of: he went beyond all bounds in it: during her sickness he was in an agony that amazed us all, fainting often, and breaking out into most violent lamentations: when she died, his spirits sunk so low, that there was great reason to apprehend that he was following her; for some weeks after he was so little master of himself that he was not capable of minding business or of seeing company." But faction would not respect this deep-seated grief. The decease of Mary, as she left no issue, terminated all claim of her husband to the crown in the eyes of that part of the nation who had been reconciled to his government by the semblance of hereditary right in her participation of the throne. To stir directly for the restoration of James was too daring and hopeless a measure even for the most determined of the Jacobites; but that party pretended that, by the Act of Settlement, the Protestant Princess Anne ought to be called to the throne; and by degrees the great body of the Tories took up this notion. By means of the lord keeper—the great and wise Somers,—Anne was detached from the machinations of this faction, and reconciled with William, who gave her the whole or greater part of her deceased sister's jewels. But, from this moment, the King's measures experienced a systematic opposition from all parties. The very first use which was made in parliament of the peace of Ryswick was to compel him to reduce the army to an insignificant remnant of guards and garrisons, and to send out of the kingdom the regiments of French Protestant refugees as well as his own Dutch guards; and these, and other thickly-gathering, and factiously and maliciously intended mortifications and insults, had such an effect upon his mind as to extort from him a passionate[Pg 82] expression of his regret at ever having interfered in the affairs of a nation at once so ungrateful and so suspicious. The reduction was enforced only a few months after the discovery of the most desperate of all the conspiracies that had been entered into against his life—the plot of Barclay, Charnock, Perkins, Fenwick, Porter, &c.—and at a moment when William might fairly consider that his life was not safe in England without his Dutch guards. That veteran band and most of those regimented Huguenots had faithfully followed him in all his fortunes, had bravely fought by his side in Holland, in Ireland, in Flanders, and on the French frontiers; and, in England, their united numbers were far too inconsiderable to give any rational cause of alarm. Yet the leaders of faction, pretending to be patriots—self-seeking, unprincipled men, who would have thrown their country prostrate at the feet of the shallowest and most vindictive of despots, who would have brought back James II. by means of a French invasion, clamoured and raved against the expenses and perils of any standing army, and called for the instant dismissal of this small force, as its stay in England must endanger the country's liberties and constitution. To increase the King's vexation and real cause of alarm, every day was bringing him intelligence that Louis XIV., who, spite of the treaty of Ryswick, still kept the exiled Stuarts at St. Germain, and who had in no sense given up the cause of that family, or renounced his clandestine correspondence with their partizans in England, was preparing for a renewal of the war. William is said, in one moment of violently excited feeling, to have threatened to follow his Dutch guards to the Continent, and to return no more to this island.

From the annoyances of his position in England, he sought relief by renewing with more ardour than ever his attention to the affairs of Europe, and by pursuing his darling project of humbling the power of the French king, and keeping that monarch within such limits as would be consistent with the independence and tranquillity of the other continental nations. His innermost[Pg 83] conviction was, that the balance of power would be destroyed, and Europe exposed to frequent wars and invasions, if the French were allowed to incorporate Lorraine and Alsace, to make encroachments on the sides of the Alps and Pyrenees, and to extend their dominion along the left bank of the Rhine. And now there was a prospect of a far wider extension than this—of French dominion or dictation, by family connexion, in the great peninsula beyond the Pyrenees. Charles II., the childish and childless monarch of Spain, was in a most precarious state of health, and the pretensions of the House of Bourbon to the inheritance of his dominions were notorious. To arrest these impending evils William successively negociated two treaties of partition for the Spanish monarchy, to both of which Louis XIV. was an artful and faithless subscriber; for, when the Spanish King, controlled by the French party that surrounded him during his sickness, and worked into indignation by the notion that other powers should dismember and distribute his dominions, bequeathed them all at his death, in 1700, to Philip duke of Anjou, second son of the Dauphin, Louis XIV., in spite of every obligation of treaties, accepted the testament for his grandson, and put his armies in motion for the Pyrenees.

William, now declining in health, was sensibly affected by this defeat of all his diplomatic labours; but he applied himself with his usual energy to form a new league against France; and the insulting conduct of Louis, at this crisis, in giving the son of James II., on the death of that prince, the title of King of England, so exasperated the mass of the British nation (who had far higher and nobler feelings than most of their legislators), that they eagerly seconded William's wish for a declaration of war. But in the midst of eager preparations for the commencement of hostilities, William's life was suddenly brought to a close. He had suffered much during the winter, and in his more familiar conversations with his trusty friend Lord Albemarle, he had intimated serious apprehensions; but his unshaken mind maintained a most manful struggle with the weakness of his body;[Pg 84] he continued to toil in his cabinet, and, at his moments of relaxation, to take that hard exercise to which he had accustomed himself. As spring approached, hopes were entertained of his recovery. On Saturday the 21st of February, though his legs were swollen, he set out from Kensington, on horseback, to hunt at Hampton Court. As he was galloping along the road near Hampton the horse stumbled, and fell violently; and the King fractured his right collar-bone. His majesty was carried to Hampton Court, where the bone was set. That same evening, contrary to medical advice, he returned to Kensington. The setting was deranged by the motion of the carriage; but the fracture was soon reduced again. For several days no bad symptoms appeared, or, if they appeared, they were kept secret. On the 28th of February he sent a message to both Houses of parliament, earnestly recommending them to set on foot immediately a proper treaty for the union of England and Scotland. This was William's last public act; and no scheme or intention could well be wiser or greater; though, even here, a certain class of writers, who pursue the greatest man of the age to the very tomb with animosity and rancour, can find matter at which to cavil. The very day after sending the two messages, the King was alarmingly ill. On the 3rd of March he was seized with fever and ague. On the 7th Lord Albemarle arrived from Holland to comfort him with some very good news; but he said to his lordship—"Je tire vers ma fin."—(I am drawing near my end.) He expired at Kensington Palace, in the evening of Sunday the 8th of March, 1702, in the 52nd year of his age. When he was dead a bracelet made of his wife's hair was found upon his arm.

There were blemishes in his reign, although in no one instance can the culpability, or a tithe of it, be laid to his single share; and there were defects in his personal character, or, perhaps, rather, in his bearing and manners, which seem generally to have been considered as unattractive if not repulsive; but let every deduction be made, and even every censure of his enemies and detractors be admitted, still William III. must remain on[Pg 85] his lofty pedestal, as one of the greatest, wisest, and best kings that have ever worn the English crown. So long as the revolution of 1688 is called the "Glorious Revolution," and the Constitution which flowed from it is held in esteem, even so long must England owe a debt of gratitude to his memory. But for his rare combination of personal qualities this experiment would have failed. We had not, among our public men, sufficient steadiness and honesty of purpose, or valour and genius enough to face the crisis. As well in relation to the distracted, demoralized state of England, as with regard to the cause of religious liberty on the Continent, William might indeed be called "The man of God's right hand, whom he made strong for himself."

Burnet, who was much about his person, having "observed him very carefully in a course of sixteen years;" and who, on the whole, speaks impartially of him, not attempting to conceal his defects, says, among other particulars,—"William had a thin and weak body, was brown haired, and of a clear and delicate complexion; he had a Roman eagle nose, bright and sparkling eyes, a large front [forehead], and a countenance composed to gravity and authority: all his senses were critical and exquisite. He was always asthmatical, and the dregs of the small-pox falling on his lungs, he had a constant deep cough. His behaviour was solemnly serious, seldom cheerful, and then but with a few: he spoke little and very slowly, and most commonly with a disgusting dryness, which was his character at all times, except in a day of battle; for then he was all fire, though without passion: he was then everywhere and looked to everything.... He spoke Dutch, French, English, and German, equally well; and he understood Latin, Spanish, and Italian, so that he was well fitted to command armies composed of several nations. He had a memory that amazed all about him, for it never failed him; he was an exact observer of men and things; his strength lay rather in a true discerning and a sound judgment, than in imagination or invention: his designs were always great and good; but it was thought he trusted[Pg 86] too much to that, and that he did not descend enough to the humours of his people to make himself and his notions more acceptable to them.... His reservedness grew on him, so that it disgusted most of those who served him; but he had observed the error of too much talking, more than those of too cold a silence.... He knew all foreign affairs well, and understood the state of every court in Europe very particularly...." He was a devout Calvinist, and yet a warm friend to toleration—at least among all Protestant churches and sects. To the mere forms of church government he was very indifferent. His belief in predestination, or in absolute decrees, was as fixed as that of Napoleon Buonaparte in destiny or in his star. He had a horror of atheism and blasphemy,—"and though," says Burnet, "there was much of both in his court, yet it was always denied to him, and kept out of sight." He was scrupulously true to his word, when once pledged, and constant and warm in his attachment to his friends. By his wife, and by all those who best knew him, he was tenderly beloved. His character appears very advantageously in his private and confidential correspondence. The English nation, or rather the low-minded legislature of the day, were ungrateful to him through life, and disrespectful to him after death. They gave the great prince a private and meanly parsimonious funeral; and for many years no monument, statue, or tablet was erected to his memory.

With the death of William III. the male line of William the Silent became extinct; but William had named for his personal heir his cousin John William Friso, Prince of Nassau Dietz (grandson of his aunt Albertina Agnes by William Frederic of Nassau Dietz) from whom the present regal line of Orange is descended.

John Locke was born at Wrington near Bristol, on the 29th August, 1632. By the advice of Colonel Popham, under whom Locke's father had served in the parliamentary wars, Locke was placed at Westminster School, from which he was elected in 1651 to Christ Church, Oxford. He applied himself at that university with great diligence to the study of classical literature; and by the private reading of the works of Bacon and Descartes, he sought to acquire that aliment for his philosophical spirit which he did not find in the Aristotelian scholastic philosophy, as taught in the schools of Oxford. Though the writings of Descartes may have contributed, by their precision and scientific method, to the formation of his philosophical style, yet, if we may judge from the simply controversial notices of them in the 'Essay concerning Human Understanding,' they appear to have exercised a negative influence on the mind of Locke; while the principle of the Baconian method of observation gave[Pg 88] to it that taste for experimental studies which forms the basis of his own system, and probably determined his choice of a profession. He adopted that of medicine, which, however, the weakness of his constitution prevented him from practising.

In 1664 Locke visited Berlin as Secretary to Sir W. Swan, envoy to the Elector of Brandenburg; but after a year he returned to Oxford, where he accidentally formed the acquaintance of Lord Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke accepted the invitation of this nobleman to reside in his house; and from this time he attached himself to his fortunes during life, and after death vindicated his memory and honour. (Mémoires pour servir à la Vie d'Antoine Ashley, Comte de Shaftesbury, tirées des Papiers de feu M. Locke, et rédigées par Le Clerc, Biblioth. Choisie, t. vii. p. 146.) In the house of Shaftesbury Locke became acquainted with some of the most eminent men of the day, and was introduced to the Earl of Northumberland, whom, in 1668, he accompanied on a tour into France. Upon the death of the Earl, he returned to England, where he again found a home in the house of Lord Ashley, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Locke was employed to draw up a constitution for the government of Carolina, which province had been granted by Charles II. to Lord Ashley with seven others.

In 1670 Locke commenced his investigations into the nature and extent of the human understanding, but his numerous avocations long protracted the completion of his work. In 1672, when Ashley was created Earl of Shaftesbury and made Lord Chancellor, Locke was appointed Secretary of Presentations. This situation he held until Shaftesbury resigned the great seal, when he exchanged it for that of Secretary to the Board of Trade, of which the Earl still retained the post of President.

In 1675 Locke was admitted to the degree of Bachelor in Medicine, and in the summer of the same year visited France, being apprehensive of consumption. At Montpellier, where he ultimately took up his residence, he formed the acquaintance of the Earl of Pembroke, to[Pg 89] whom he afterwards dedicated his 'Essay concerning Human Understanding.' In 1679 Locke was recalled to England by the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had been restored to favour and appointed President of the Council. Six months afterwards however he was again disgraced, and, after a short imprisonment in the Tower, was ultimately compelled to leave England in 1682, to avoid a prosecution for high treason. Locke followed his patron to Holland, where, even after the death of Shaftesbury, he continued to reside; for the hostility of the court was transferred to Locke, and notwithstanding a weak opposition on the part of the Dean, his name was erased, by royal mandate of the 16th of November, 1684, from the number of the students of Christ Church. But the rancour of the court party extended its persecution of Locke even into Holland, and in the following year the English envoy demanded of the States-General the delivery of Mr. Locke, with eighty-three other persons, on the charge of participating in the expedition of the Duke of Monmouth. Fortunately Locke found friends to conceal him until either the court was satisfied of his innocence or the fury of persecution had passed away. During his residence in Holland he became acquainted with Limborch, Le Clerc, and other learned men attached to the cause of free inquiry, both in religion and politics. Having completed his 'Essay concerning Human Understanding' in 1687, he made an abridgment of it, which was translated into French by Le Clerc, who inserted it in one of his Bibliothèques. In that of 1686 he had already published his 'Adversariorum Methodus, or a New Method of a Common-place Book,' which was originally written in French, and was afterwards first published in English among his posthumous works. In the 'Bibliothèque' of 1688 appeared his Letter on Toleration, addressed to Limborch, which was soon translated into Latin, and published the next year at Gouda. On the Revolution of 1688, Locke returned to England in the fleet which conveyed the Princess of Orange. In reward for his sufferings in the cause of liberty, Locke now[Pg 90] obtained, through the interest of Lord Mordaunt, the situation of Commissioner of Appeals, with a salary of 200l. a-year. In 1690 his reputation as a philosophical writer was established by the publication of his 'Essay concerning Human Understanding,' which met with immense success. Independent of the merits of the work itself as an attempt to apply the Baconian method of observation and experience to establish a theory of human knowledge, many circumstances contributed to its success: among others, the personal celebrity of the author as a friend of civil and religious liberty, and the attempt made at Oxford to prevent its being read in the colleges, a measure which could not fail to have a contrary effect. Numerous editions passed rapidly through the press, and translations having been made of it into Latin and French, the fame of the author was quickly spread throughout Europe. In the same year Locke published a second letter on Toleration, in answer to an attack on his first letter by Jonas Proast, a clergyman of Queen's College, Oxford, as well as two treatises on Government. These essays were intended generally to answer the partisans of the exiled king, who called the existing Government a usurpation, but particularly to refute the principles advanced in the 'Patriarcha' of Sir Robert Filmer, who had maintained that men are not naturally free, and therefore could not be at liberty to choose either governors or forms of government, and that all legitimate government is an absolute monarchy. The first essay is devoted to the refutation of the arguments by which Sir Robert supports these principles, and which are ultimately reduced to this, that all government was originally invested by God in Adam as the father of all mankind, and that kings, as the representatives of Adam, are possessed of the same unlimited authority as parents exercise over their children. In the second essay Locke proceeds to establish, what had been the leading dogma of the Puritans and Independents, that the legitimacy of a government depends solely and ultimately on the popular sanction or the consent of men making use of their[Pg 91] reason to unite together into a society or societies. The philosophical basis of this treatise formed a model for the 'Contrat Social' of Rousseau.

The air of London disagreeing with Locke, who suffered from a constitutional complaint of asthma, he accepted the offer of apartments in the house of his friend Sir Francis Masham, at Oates in Essex, where he resided for the remainder of his life. In this retirement he wrote his third letter on Toleration, which called forth a reply from Locke's former antagonist on the subject; in answer to whom a fourth letter, in an unfinished state, was published after the death of Locke. In 1693 he first gave to the world his 'Thoughts upon Education,' to which likewise Rousseau is largely indebted for his 'Emile.' Though appointed one of the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations in 1695, Locke still found leisure for writing. The Treatise, which was published in this year, 'On the Reasonableness of Christianity,' was intended to facilitate the execution of a design which William III. had adopted to reconcile and unite all sects of professing Christians, and accordingly the object of the tract was to determine what, amid so many conflicting views of religion, were the points of belief common to all. This work being attacked by Dr. Edwards, in his 'Socinianism unmasked,' Locke published in defence of it a first and a second 'Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity,' &c. In 1697 Locke was again engaged in the controversy, in consequence of the publication of a 'Defence of the Doctrine of the Trinity,' by Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, in which the bishop had censured certain passages in the 'Essay concerning Human Understanding,' as tending to subvert the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Against this charge Locke ably vindicated his Essay; and the controversy, after having been maintained for some time, was at length terminated by the death of Stillingfleet.

Locke's health had now become so impaired, that he determined to resign his office of commissioner of trade and plantations. He refused to receive a pension which was offered him, and which his services in the public cause,[Pg 92] had amply merited. From the time of his retirement he resided always at Oates, and devoted the remainder of his life to the study of the Holy Scriptures. Among others of his religious labours at this period, a 'Discourse on Miracles,' and 'Paraphrases with notes, of the Epistles of St. Paul,' together with an 'Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul's Epistles by consulting St. Paul himself,' were published among his posthumous papers. These contained also the work, 'Of the Conduct of the Understanding,' and an 'Examination of Father Malebranche's opinion of seeing all things in God.' He died on the 28th October, 1704, in the seventy-third year of his age.

The personal character of Locke was in complete harmony with the opinions which he so zealously and so ably advocated. Truly attached to the cause of liberty, he was also willing to suffer for it. Perfectly disinterested, and without any personal objects at stake in the political views which he adopted, he never deviated from moderation, and the sincerity of his own profession rendered him tolerant of what he believed to be the conscientious sentiments of others.

As a writer Locke has a happy facility in expressing his meaning with perspicuity in the simplest and most familiar language. Clearness indeed is the leading character of his composition, which is a fair specimen of the best prose of the period. His style however is rather diffuse than precise, the same thought being presented under a great variety of aspects, while his reasonings are somewhat prolix, and his elucidations of a principle occasionally unnecessarily prolonged. These are faults however which, though they may materially detract from the merits of his composition as a model of critical correctness, have nevertheless greatly tended to make his 'Essay concerning Human Understanding' a popular work.

A rapid analysis of this Essay is necessary to enable us to form a right estimate of the philosophical merits of Locke.

As all human knowledge ultimately reposes, both in legitimacy and extent, on the range and correctness of[Pg 93] the cognitive faculty, which Locke designates by the term 'understanding,' Locke proposes to determine what objects our understanding is and is not fitted to deal with. With this view he proposes in the first place to inquire into the origin of ideas; and in the next place, to show the nature of that knowledge which is acquired by those ideas, and its certainty, evidence, and extent; and lastly, to determine the nature and grounds of assent or opinion.

Before entering upon this investigation Locke gets rid of a supposition which, if once admitted, would render all such inquiry useless. The refutation of the theory of innate ideas and principles of knowledge is the subject-matter of the first book of the Essay. Generally, he observes, the common assent of men to certain fundamental principles may be explained otherwise than by the supposition of their being innate; and consequently the hypothesis is unnecessary. But, in particular, he denies that there are any such universal and primary principles as are admitted by all men, and known as soon as developed, for to these two heads he reduces all the arguments usually advanced in support of this hypothesis. Thus of speculative principles he takes the principles of contradiction and identity, and shows, by an inductive appeal to savages, infants, and idiots, that they are not universally acknowledged; and as to their being primary, he appeals to observation of the infant mind, as proving that they are far from being the first ideas of which the human mind is conscious. The principles of morals are next submitted to a similar examination; and lastly, he shows that no ideas are innate: for this purpose he selects the ideas of God and substance, which, by a like appeal to savage nations and children, he proves to be neither universal nor primary, and arrives at the conclusion that neither particular ideas nor general principles of knowledge or morals are antecedent to experience.

The only source of human knowledge is experience, which is two-fold, either internal or external, according as it is employed about sensible objects or the operations[Pg 94] of our minds. Hence, there are two kinds of ideas, ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection. Reflection might properly be called an internal sense. The latter are subsequent to the former, and are inferior in distinctness to those furnished to the mind through the sensuous impressions of outward objects. Without conscientiousness it is, according to Locke, impossible to have an idea; for to have an idea and to be conscious of it is the same thing. He accordingly maintains, at great length, against Descartes, that the mind does not always think, and that its essence does not consist in thinking.

Now all ideas, whether of sensation or reflection, correspond to their objects, and there is no knowledge of things possible except as determined by our ideas. These ideas are either simple, and not admitting of further reduction, or complex. The simple rise from the inner or outer sense; and they are ultimately the sole materials of all knowledge, for all complex ideas may be resolved into them. The understanding cannot originate any simple ideas, or change them, but must passively receive them as they are presented to it. Locke here makes the first attempt to give an analysis of the sensuous faculty, to refer to each of the senses the ideas derived from them separately, or from the combined operation of several. Thus light and colour are derived from vision alone, but extension and figure from the joint action of sight and touch. While the outer sense gives the ideas of solidity, space, extension, figure, motion, and rest, and those of thought and will are furnished by the inner sense, or reflection, it is by the combined operation of both that we acquire the ideas of existence, unity, power, and the like. In reference to the agreement of ideas with their objects, Locke draws an important distinction between primary and secondary qualities: the former belong really to objects, and are inseparable from them, and are extension, solidity, figure, and motion; the latter, which are colour, smell, sounds, and tastes, cannot be considered as real qualities of objects, but still, as they are powers in objects themselves to produce various sensations in the mind, their reality must in so far be admitted. Of the[Pg 95] operations of the understanding upon its ideas, perception and retention are passive, but discerning is active. By perception Locke understands the consciousness or the faculty of perceiving whatever takes place within the mind; it is the inlet of knowledge, while retention is the general power by which ideas once received are preserved. This faculty acts either by keeping the ideas brought into it for some time actually in view, which is called contemplation or attention, the pleasure or pain by which certain ideas are impressed on the senses, contributing to fix them in the mind; or else by repetition, when the mind exerts a power to revive ideas which after being imprinted have disappeared. This is memory, which is, as it were, the storehouse of ideas. The ideas thus often refreshed, or repeated, fix themselves most clearly and lastingly in the mind. But in memory the mind is oftentimes more than barely passive, the re-appearance of obliterated pictures or ideas depending on the will. Discerning, by which term he designates the logical activity of the intellect, consists in comparing and compounding certain simple ideas, or in conceiving them apart from certain relations of time and place. This is called abstraction, by means of which particular ideas are advanced to generals. By composition the mind forms a multitude of complex ideas, which are either modes, substances, or relations.

Locke then proceeds to show in detail how certain complex ideas are formed out of simple ones. The idea of space is got by the senses of sight and touch together; certain combinations of relations in space are measures, and the power of adding measure to measure without limits is that which gives the idea of immensity.

Figure is the relation which the parts of the termination of a circumscribed space have within themselves. He then proceeds to refute the Cartesian doctrine, that body and extension are the same; and maintains that while body is full, space is empty, and that all bodies may easily pass into it; and while the latter is not physically divisible, that is, has not moveable parts, the parts of the former are moveable, and itself is physically[Pg 96] divisible. What however space is actually, is left undetermined. He asserts the existence of a vacuum beyond the utmost bounds of body, and this is proved by the power of annihilation and the possibility of motion. The idea of succession arises from the perception of a continued series of sensations, and by observing the distance between two parts of the series we gain the idea of duration, which, when determined by a certain measure, suggests that of time; and as we arrive at the idea of immensity by the perception that we can enlarge any given extension without limit, so the unchecked repetition of succession originates that of eternity. That of power is formed partly by a perception that outward objects are produced and destroyed by others, partly by that of the action of objects on the senses, but chiefly from that of the mind's internal operations. The latter suggests the idea of active power, the former of passive. Now the will is the power of producing the presence or absence of a particular idea, or to produce motion or rest, and liberty is the power to think or not, to act or not to act, according as appears good to the mind. The will is determined by the understanding, which itself is influenced by a feeling of the unfitness of a present state, which is called desire.

As to the origin of the idea of substance:—we often find certain ideas connected together; and in consequence of this invariable association, we conceive of them as a single idea; and as the qualities which originate these ideas have no separate subsistence in themselves, we are driven to suppose the existence of a 'somewhat' as a support of these qualities. To this somewhat we give the name of substance, and relatively to it all qualities are called accidents.

Of the ideas of relation, those of cause and effect are got from the observation that several particulars, both qualities and substances, begin to exist, and receive their existence, from the due application and operation of some other being. In the same manner the ideas of identity and diversity are derived from experience. When we compare an object with itself at different times and[Pg 97] places, and find it to be the same, we arrive at the idea of identity. Whatever has the same beginning in reference to time and place is the same, and a material aggregate which neither decreases nor lessens is the same, but in organical and living creatures, identity is determined not merely by the duration of the material mass, but by that of the organical structure and the continuance of consciousness. Lastly, moral good and evil are relations. Good and evil are nothing but that which occasions pleasure and pain; and moral good and evil are the conformity of human actions to some law whereby physical good or evil is produced by the will and power of the law-maker. Law is of three kinds: divine law, which measures sin and duty; civil, which determines crime and innocence; and philosophical, or the law of opinion or reputation, which measures virtue and vice.

Having thus examined the origin and composition of ideas, Locke proceeds to determine their general characters. He divides them accordingly into clear and obscure, distinct and confused, into real and fantastical, adequate and inadequate, and lastly, into true and false. In treating of this last distinction, he observes that all ideas are in themselves true; and they are not capable of being false until some judgment is passed upon them, or, in other words, until something is asserted or denied of them. But there is also this property in ideas, that one suggests another, and this is the so-called association of ideas. There are associations of ideas which are natural and necessary, as well as arbitrary, false, and unnatural combinations. The danger of the last is vividly pointed out, which often arise from our having seen objects connected together by chance. Hence the association, which was originally purely accidental, is invariably connected in the imagination, which consequently biases the judgment. Hence, too, a number of errors, not only of opinion but of sentiment, giving rise to unnatural sympathies and antipathies which not unfrequently closely verge upon madness. This gives occasion to a variety of judicious observations on the right conduct of education, the means of guarding against the formation[Pg 98] of such unnatural combinations of ideas, and the method of correcting them when once formed, and of restoring the regular and due associations which have their ground in the very nature of the human mind and its ideas. What however are the leading laws of association Locke has not attempted to determine.

Before passing from this deduction of ideas to the examination of the nature and extent of the knowledge which is acquired by means of them, Locke devotes the third book of his Essay to the investigation of language and signs, which it is not important for our purpose to state.

Locke then proceeds to determine the nature, validity, and limits of the human understanding. All knowledge, strictly defined, is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas, and is consequently limited to them. It extends therefore only so far as we are able to perceive the validity of the combinations and relations of our ideas, that is, so far as we are enabled to discover them by intuition, demonstration, and sensation. Intuition, which Locke calls an immediate perception of relation, does not apply to all ideas; many must be proved by means of some intermediate ideas. This is the province of demonstration, every step of which however is an act of intuition. Demonstration again does not apply to the proof of all ideas, since in the case of many no middle ideas can be found by means of which the comparison may be made. Sensation is still more limited, being confined to what is actually passing in each sense. Generally, all knowledge directs itself to identity or diversity, co-existence, relation, and the real existence of things. Identity and diversity are perceived by intuition, and we cannot have an idea without perceiving at the same time that it is different from all others. With regard to co-existence our knowledge is unlimited; for our ideas of substances are mere collections or aggregates of certain single ideas in one subject; and from the nature of these single ideas, it is impossible to see how far they are or are not combinable with others. Hence we cannot determine what qualities any object may possess[Pg 99] in addition to those already known to us. As to the actual existence of things, we have no intuitive knowledge thereof, except in the case of our existence; that of God is demonstrative, but of all other objects we only sensuously know that they exist, that is, we perceive mediately by sensation their existence or presence.

Locke next passes to an examination of propositions, axioms, and definitions. The utility of axioms is denied on the ground that they are not the only self-evident propositions, and because equal if not greater certainty is contained in all particular identical propositions and limited cases. Moreover they do not serve to facilitate knowledge, for all particular propositions will find a more ready assent; as, for instance, the proposition, twice two are four, will be more easily admitted than that the whole is equal to its parts. Moreover axioms are not useful for the proof of all lower propositions involved in them; they cannot consequently form the basis of any science: for example, no science has ever been raised on the basis of the principle of contradiction. They do not even contribute to the enlargement of knowledge; the false as well as the true may be proved by them, and consequently they serve at best but for endless dispute. Among these barren and unprofitable propositions, Locke reckons not merely those that are identical, but analytical also, or those in which a property contained in a complex idea is predicated of it: e. g. Every man is an animal. By such judgments or propositions we learn in fact nothing, and our knowledge is not increased in the least degree. Knowledge can only be extended by such judgments as predicate of a subject some quality or property which is not already involved in the idea of it. Synthetical propositions therefore are alone of value. In the next place he examines certain metaphysical problems, and concludes of most of them that they do not admit of any precise solution, while others might easily be set at rest if men would only come to the investigation of them free from all prejudices. Some very valuable remarks are added upon the source of error, and on enthusiasm and faith, the due limits of[Pg 100] which are pointed out, and the important truth repeatedly insisted upon, that reason is the ultimate test of revelation. The work concludes with a division of the object-matter of science or knowledge, which he makes to be threefold. 1, Natural philosophy, or physica, which is the knowledge of things both corporeal and spiritual. The end of this is speculative truth. 2, Ethics, or practica, which is the skill of rightly applying our powers and actions for the attainment of things good and useful, the end of it being not bare speculation, but right, and a conduct suitable to it. 3, The doctrine of signs (σημειωτική), the business of which is to consider the nature of the signs which the mind makes use of for the understanding of things or the conveying of its ideas to others. This is the most general as well as most natural division of the objects of the understanding. For man can employ his thoughts about nothing but either the contemplation of things for the discovery of truth; or about the things in his own power, which are his own actions for the attainment of his ends; or the signs which the mind makes use of in both, and the right ordering of them for its information.

Such is the celebrated Essay which has formed the basis of more than one school of modern philosophy, whose very opposite views may indeed find some support in the occasional variations and self-contradictions of its author. For it must be admitted that it is deficient in that scientific rigour and unity of view which preclude all inconsistency of detail. Nevertheless, rightly to appreciate Locke's philosophical merits, all contradictory passages must be neglected, or interpreted by the general spirit of his system. Attaching our attention then to the common mould and whole bearing of the Essay, we must conclude that the authority of Locke is unduly claimed by the followers of Condillac and the ideologists of France, whose object it was to approximate as closely as possible the rational thought and sensuous perception, and to explain the former as simply a result of the latter. For although Locke took in hand the defence of the sensuous element of knowledge, and, in opposition to[Pg 101] Descartes and the idealists, endeavoured to show that in the attainment of science we set out from the sensible as the earlier and the better known, still he was far from denying that the rational thought, which is the perfection of human cognition, is really and truly distinct from the motions of the mind or soul occasioned by sensation. Setting out with the assumption of the permanence of ideas in the mind, Locke proceeds to illustrate the development of the particular into the general; and having then shown their difference from the unreal creations of the fancy, proceeds to determine their degree of verity. This description of the advance from the simple idea to universals and to knowledge, evidently implies an independent and spontaneous activity of the mind, which assents to the sensuous impressions, and confirms them by its conviction. Locke therefore is far from looking upon human science and knowledge as the simple results of the impressions produced by external objects on the senses. Nevertheless there is another aspect of his theory which in some degree justifies the use which has been made of his name, and under which he appears to be proceeding in the direction of thought, of which the ideologists have attained to the height. Knowledge as well as sensation is looked upon as the joint result of the reciprocal action of outward objects and the mental faculties, wherein as much depends on the qualities of the external as on those of the internal. While he admits that assent is entirely subjective, he nevertheless grants that outward objects constrain it; and as a consequence of such a view, he teaches that notwithstanding the idea produced in the mind by an outward object be a passive affection of the mind, it nevertheless reveals to the mind its efficient cause; and that to this manifestation of outward objects by the senses there is invariably attached, as by a necessary consequence, the judgment that those objects exist really. It is therefore clear that, according to Locke, we receive from the senses not merely the object-matter of knowledge, but that likewise the forms under which we conceive of objects are furnished to the mind from the same source.

The works of Locke have been collected and frequently published in 3 vols. fol., and a Life of him was written in 1772; but the most complete and best edition is that in 10 vols. 8vo., London, 1801 and 1812. A Life of Locke was published in 1829, by the late Lord King, a lineal descendant of his sister.

John Somers was born at Worcester, in an ancient house called the White Ladies, which, as its name seems to import, had formerly been part of a monastery or convent. The exact date of his birth cannot be ascertained, as the parish registers at Worcester, during the civil wars between Charles I. and his Parliament, were either wholly lost, or so inaccurately kept as not to furnish any authentic information. It appears probable, however, from several concurring accounts, that he was born about the year 1650. The family of Somers was respectable, though not wealthy, and had for several generations been possessed of an estate at Clifton, in the parish of Severnstoke, in Gloucestershire. Admiral Sir George Somers, who in the reign of James I. was shipwrecked on the Bermudas, and afterwards died there, leaving his name to that cluster of islands, is said by Horace Walpole, in his 'Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors,' to have been a member of the same family.[Pg 104] The father of Somers was an attorney, in respectable practice at Worcester; who, in the civil wars, became a zealous Parliamentarian, and commanded a troop in Cromwell's army. His mother was Catherine Ceaverne, of a good family in Shropshire.

Of the early education of Somers, we have only a meagre and unsatisfactory account. The house called the White Ladies, in which he was born, was occupied by a Mr. Blurton, an eminent clothier of Worcester, who had married his father's sister. This lady, having no son of her own, adopted Somers from his birth, and brought him up in her house, which he always considered as his home till he went to the university. He appears for some years to have been a day-scholar in the college school at Worcester, which before his time had attained a high character for classical education, under the superintendence of Dr. Bright, a clergyman of great learning and eminence. At a subsequent period, we find him at a private school at Walsall in Staffordshire: he is described by a school-fellow as being then "a weakly boy, wearing a black cap, and never so much as looking out when the other boys were at play." He seems indeed to have been a remarkably reserved and "sober-blooded" boy. At a somewhat later period Sir F. Winnington says of him, that "by the exactness of his knowledge and behaviour, he discouraged his father and all the young men that knew him. They were afraid to be in his company." In what manner his time was occupied from the period of his leaving school until he went to the university, is unknown. It has been suggested that he was employed for several years in his father's office, who designed him for his own department of the profession of the law. There is no positive evidence of this circumstance, though the conjecture is by no means improbable. It cannot, however, be doubted that, during this period, he devoted much of his time to the study of history and the civil law, and laid in a portion of that abundant store of constitutional learning which afterwards rendered him the ornament of his profession, and of the age in which he lived. About this time also he[Pg 105] formed several connexions, which had great influence upon his subsequent success in life. The estates of the Earl of Shrewsbury were managed by Somers's father; and as that young nobleman had no convenient residence of his own in Worcestershire, he spent much of his time at the White Ladies, and formed an intimate friendship and familiarity with young Somers. In 1672 he was also fortunate enough to be favourably noticed by Sir Francis Winnington, then a distinguished practitioner at the English bar, who was under obligations to his father for his active services in promoting his election as a Member of Parliament for the city of Worcester. Winnington is described by Burnet as a lawyer who had "risen from small beginnings, and from as small a proportion of learning in his profession, in which he was rather bold and ready, than able." It is natural to suppose that such a man, feeling his own deficiencies, would readily perceive with what advantage he might employ the talents and industry of Somers in assisting him both in Westminster Hall and in Parliament. It was probably with this intention that Winnington advised him to go to the university, and to prosecute his studies with a view to being called to the bar.

In 1674 Somers was entered as a Commoner of Trinity College, Oxford, being then about three-and-twenty years of age. The particulars of his progress through the university are not recorded; but here, as at school, his contemporaries could perceive few indications of those splendid talents which afterwards raised him to such extraordinary eminence. His college exercises, some of which are still extant, are said to have been in no respect remarkable; and he quitted the university without acquiring any academical honours beyond his Bachelor's degree. Mr. Somers was called to the bar in 1676, by the Society of the Middle Temple; but he continued his residence at the university for several years afterwards, and did not remove to London until the year after his father's death, in 1681, upon which event he succeeded to his paternal estate at Severnstoke. During his residence at Oxford he had the advantage of being introduced[Pg 106] by the Earl of Shrewsbury and Sir F. Winnington to many of the patriotic opponents of the arbitrary measures of the Court. At this time he published several tracts, which sufficiently displayed to the world his familiar and accurate knowledge of constitutional history. His first acknowledged work was the Report of an Election Case, and is entitled 'The Memorable Case of Denzil Onslow, Esq., tried at the Assizes in Surrey, July 20, 1681, touching his Election at Haslemere in Surrey.' His next performance was 'A brief History of the Succession, collected out of the Records and the most authentic Historians.' This work was written at the time when the proposal to bring in a bill to exclude the Duke of York from the succession occupied universal attention, and excited the most intense interest. The object of Mr. Somers's tract was to exhibit the principles upon which the Parliament of England has authority to alter, restrain, and qualify the right of succession to the crown: and he places the historical arguments in support of this proposition in a forcible and convincing light. Indeed, though it might be difficult to justify such a proposition by abstract arguments upon what is called the theory of the British constitution, it has been so repeatedly acted upon in several periods of our history, that even in the time of Charles II. the practice had, as Somers justly contended, to all intents and purposes, established and sanctioned the principle. An excellent tract upon the same subject, entitled 'A just and modest Vindication of the two last Parliaments,' which appeared shortly after the breaking up of the Oxford Parliament in March, 1681, has been partly ascribed to Somers. Burnet says that this tract, which he characterizes as "the best writ paper in all that time," was at first penned by Algernon Sidney, but that a new draught was made by Somers, which was corrected by Sir William Jones. Upon occasion of the attempt of the Court party in 1681, by the illegal examination of witnesses under the direction of the king's counsel in open court, to induce a grand jury at the Old Bailey to find a true bill for high treason against the Earl of Shaftesbury, Mr. Somers wrote his[Pg 107] celebrated tract entitled 'The Security of Englishmen's Lives, or the Trust, Power, and Duty of the Grand Juries of England explained.' Of this work Bishop Burnet says, "It passed as writ by Lord Essex, though I understood afterwards it was writ by Somers, who was much esteemed, and often visited by Lord Essex, and who trusted himself to him, and writ the best papers that came out at that time." In later times, this work has been universally ascribed to Somers. During his residence at Oxford, Somers was not inattentive to polite literature; he published a translation of some of Ovid's Epistles into English verse, which at the same time that it shows that he could never have borne so distinguished a rank as a poet, as he afterwards attained as a lawyer and statesman, is by no means a contemptible performance. His translations from Ovid, and a version of Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades, are the only published proofs of his classical studies at Oxford.

In the year 1682 he removed to London, and immediately commenced an assiduous attendance upon the courts of law, which at that time was considered as the highway of the legal profession. Under the powerful patronage of Sir Francis Winnington, who had been solicitor-general, and was then in the full stream of business, he rose with considerable rapidity into good practice at the bar. In 1683 he appeared as junior counsel to Winnington, in the defence to an important political prosecution instituted against Pilkington and Shute, with several other persons, for a riot at the election of sheriffs for the city of London. His employment in a case of so much public expectation may be taken as a proof that at that time his professional merits were in some degree appreciated; and in the reign of James II. his practice is said to have produced 700l. a-year, which at that time was a very large income for a common lawyer of five years' standing. But such was the character for research and industry which he had attained within a very few years from the commencement of his professional career, that on the trial of the Seven Bishops in 1688, he was introduced as counsel into that momentous cause at the[Pg 108] express and peremptory recommendation of Pollexfen, one of the greatest lawyers of that day. The rank of the defendants, the personal interest of the king in the question at issue, the general expectation excited by this conflict amongst all classes of the people, and above all, the event of the prosecution which drove James from his throne and kingdom, and immediately introduced the Revolution of 1688, render the trial of the Seven Bishops one of the most important judicial proceedings that ever occurred in Westminster Hall. It was no trifling testimony, therefore, to the high estimation in which Somers was held by experienced judges of professional merit, that he should be expressly selected by the counsel for the defendants to bear a part in the defence. We are told that upon the first suggestion of Somers's name, "objection was made amongst the Bishops to him, as too young and obscure a man; but old Pollexfen insisted upon him, and would not be himself retained without the other; representing him as the man who would take most pains and go deepest into all that depended on precedents and records."[2] How far the leading counsel for the Bishops were indebted to the industry and research of Somers, for the extent of learning displayed in their admirable arguments on that occasion, cannot now be ascertained; his own speech, as reported in the State Trials, contains a summary of the constitutional reasons against the existence of a dispensing power in the king, expressed in clear and unaffected language, and applied with peculiar skill and judgment to the defence of his clients.

The intimate connexion of Somers with the leaders of that political party by whom the Revolution was effected, and in particular with his early friend Lord Shrewsbury, leaves little room for doubt that he was actively employed in devising the means by which that important event was brought about. It is said by Tindal that he was admitted into the most secret councils of the Prince of Orange, and was one of those who planned the measure[Pg 109] of bringing him over to England. Immediately upon the flight of James II., the Prince of Orange, by the advice of the temporary assembly which he had convened as the most proper representative of the people in the emergency of the time, issued circular letters to the several counties, cities, and boroughs of England, directing them to summon a Parliamentary Convention. On this occasion Mr. Somers was returned as a representative by his native city of Worcester. We find him taking a conspicuous part in the long and laborious debates which took place in that assembly respecting the settlement of the government. Upon a conference with the Lords upon the resolution, "that James II. having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, had abdicated the government, and that the throne had thereby become vacant," Mr. Somers spoke at great length, and with much learning, in support of the original resolution against some amendments proposed by the Lords. This resolution having been ultimately adopted by both Houses of Parliament, and the Prince and Princess of Orange having been declared King and Queen of England, a committee was appointed, of which Somers was a member, to bring in heads of such things as were necessary for securing the Protestant religion, the laws of the land, and the liberties of the people. The Report of this Committee, which was a most elaborate performance, having been submitted to the examination of a second committee, of which Somers was chairman, formed the substance of the Declaration of Rights which was afterwards assented to by the King and Queen and both Houses of Parliament, and thus adopted as the basis of the Constitution. The Report was probably the production in great part of Somers himself, as is hinted by Burke, who, in his 'Reflections on the Revolution in France,' says, "I never desire to be thought a better Whig than Lord Somers, or to understand the principles of the Revolution better than those by whom it was brought about; or to read in the Declaration of Rights any mysteries unknown to those whose penetrating style has[Pg 110] engraved in our ordinances and in our hearts the words and spirit of that immortal law."

It is impossible to ascertain with precision the particular services rendered by Somers in the accomplishment of this great measure. There was perhaps no individual at that moment in existence who was so well qualified to lend important aid in conducting his country with safety through the difficulties and dangers of a change of government, and in placing the interests of the nation upon a secure and solid foundation. Fortunate was it for the people of England and their posterity that the services of a man of his industry and settled principles, of his sound constitutional information, and his rational and enlightened views of the relative rights and duties of kings and subjects, were at that critical juncture available to his country; and that, at the instant of the occurrence of this momentous revolution, his character was sufficiently known and appreciated to render those services fully effective.

Shortly after the accession of William and Mary, Somers was appointed Solicitor-General, and received the honour of knighthood. Bishop Burnet says, that in the warm debates which took place in Parliament on the bill respecting the recognition of the King and Queen, and the validity of the new settlement of the government, it was strongly objected by the Tories that the convention, not being summoned by the King's writ, had no legal sanction; and that Somers distinguished himself by the spirited and able manner in which he answered the objection. "He spoke," says Burnet, "with such zeal and such an ascendant of authority that none were prepared to answer it; so that the bill passed without more opposition. This was a great service done in a very critical time, and contributed not a little to raise Somers's character."

In April, 1692, Sir John Somers became Attorney-General, and in the month of March following was appointed Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. This last appointment, of course, though he was not yet raised to the peerage, removed him both from Westminster Hall[Pg 111] and from the House of Commons. "All the people," says Burnet, "were now grown weary of the great seal being in commission: it made the proceedings in Chancery to be both more dilatory and more expensive: and there were such exceptions made to the decrees of the commissioners, that appeals were brought against most of them, and generally they were reversed. Sir John Somers had now got great reputation, both in his post of attorney-general and in the House of Commons; so the King gave him the great seal. He was very learned in his own profession, with a great deal more learning in other professions—in divinity, philosophy, and history. He had a great capacity for business, with an extraordinary temper; for he was fair and gentle, perhaps to a fault, considering his post; so that he had all the patience and softness, as well as the justness and equity, becoming a great magistrate. He had always agreed in his notions with the Whigs, and had studied to bring them to better thoughts of the King, and to a greater confidence in him." The most remarkable occasion on which Somers distinguished himself while holding the office of lord keeper, was what is called the case of the Bankers in the Court of Exchequer, in 1696. He delivered a judgment against the bankers, and reversing the decision of the barons of the Exchequer, which has been characterised by Mr. Hargrave as "one of the most elaborate arguments ever delivered in Westminster Hall," and in collecting books and pamphlets for which he is said to have expended several hundred pounds. It is contained in the report of the case in Howell's 'State Trials,' vol. xiv., pp. 39-105. This judgment however, in which he was supported by Treby, chief justice of the court of Common Pleas, but opposed by Holt, chief justice of the King's Bench, was afterwards reversed by the Lords; and Lord Dartmouth, in a note to Burnet's 'History,' asserts that when the decree which he had made was, after a very warm debate, set aside, Somers fell ill, and never appeared upon the woolsack more. This was in 1700. In 1697, however, he had been appointed Lord Chancellor, and raised to the peerage, with the title of Baron Somers of Evesham.

In the year immediately succeeding his elevation to the peerage, it was the fate of Lord Somers to experience the virulence of party animosity, and the selfishness and instability of royal favour. His influence with the King, and the moderation and good sense with which he had restrained the impetuosity of his own party, had been long the means of preserving the Whig administration; and the Tories saw plainly that there were no hopes for the attainment of their objects so long as Lord Somers retained the confidence of the King. William had been, from the commencement of his reign, continually vacillating between the two parties according to the circumstances of his affairs; at this period he was so incensed and embarrassed by the conduct of the contending parties in the House of Commons, that he readily listened to the leaders of the Tories, who assured him that they would undertake to manage the Parliament as he pleased, if he would dismiss from his councils the Lord Chancellor Somers, whom they represented to be peculiarly odious to the Commons. In fact, the Tory party in the House of Commons had, in the course of the stormy session of Parliament which commenced in November, 1699, made several violent but ineffectual attacks upon the Lord Chancellor. The first charge brought against him was, that he had improperly dismissed many gentlemen from the commission of the peace: upon a full explanation of all the circumstances, this charge was proved to be so utterly groundless that it was abandoned by those who had introduced it. The second accusation had no better foundation than the first. Great complaints having been made of certain English pirates in the West Indies, who had plundered several merchant ships, it was determined to send out a ship of war for the purpose of destroying them. But as there was no fund to bear the charge of such an expedition, the King proposed to his ministers that it should be carried on as a private undertaking, and promised to subscribe 3000l. on his own account. In compliance with this recommendation, Lord Somers, the Duke of Shrewsbury, the Earls of Romney, Oxford, Bellamont, and several[Pg 113] others, contributed a sufficient sum to defray the whole expense of the armament. Unfortunately one Captain Kidd was appointed to command the expedition, who was unprincipled enough to turn pirate himself, and having committed various acts of robbery on the high seas, was eventually captured, brought to England, and some time afterwards tried and executed for his offences. It was then insinuated that the Lord Chancellor and the other individuals who had subscribed towards the expedition were engaged as partners in Kidd's piratical scheme; so that an undertaking, which was not only innocent, but meritorious and patriotic, was construed by the blindness of party prejudice into a design for robbery and piracy. A resolution in the House of Commons, founded upon this absurd imputation, was rejected by a great majority. Shortly afterwards, after ordering a list of the Privy Council to be laid before the House, a question was moved in the House of Commons, "that an address should be made to his Majesty to remove John Lord Somers, Chancellor of England, from his presence and councils for ever." This motion, however, was also negatived by a large majority. The prosecution of these frivolous charges against Lord Somers was a source of perpetual irritation to the King, in consequence of the vexatious delay it occasioned to the public service, and the virulent party spirit which it introduced into the House of Commons; and it was under the influence of this feeling, and in order to deliver himself from a temporary embarrassment, that he selfishly determined to adopt the interested advice of the Tory leaders, and to remove the Lord Chancellor from his office. He accordingly intimated to Lord Somers that it was necessary for his service that he should resign the seals, but wished him to make the resignation himself, in order that it might appear as if it was his own act. The Chancellor declined to make a voluntary surrender of the seals, as such a course might indicate a fear of his enemies, or a consciousness of misconduct in his office; upon which Lord Jersey was sent with an express warrant for the[Pg 114] seals, and Lord Somers delivered them to him without hesitation.

The malignity of party spirit was not satisfied by the dismissal of Lord Somers from his office, and from all participation in the government. Soon after his retirement, namely, in the year 1701, the celebrated Partition Treaties gave occasion to much angry debate in both Houses of Parliament. His conduct, with respect to these treaties, seems to have been entirely irreproachable; but it became the subject of much misrepresentation, and the most unreserved invective and abuse in the House of Commons. It appears that in 1698, when the King was in Holland, a proposal was made to him by the French government for arranging the partition of some of the territories belonging to the crown of Spain upon the expected death of Charles II. This partition was to be made in certain defined proportions between the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, the Dauphin of France, and the Archduke Charles, the second son of the Emperor. The King entertained these proposals favourably, and wrote to Lord Somers, who was at that time Lord Chancellor, desiring his opinion upon them, and commanding him to forward to him a commission in blank under the great seal, appointing persons to treat with the Commissioners of the French Government. Lord Somers, after communicating with Lord Orford, the Duke of Shrewsbury, and Mr. Montague, as he had been authorised to do, transmitted to the King their joint opinions, which suggested several objections to the proposed treaty, together with the required commission. This was the "head and front of his offending" in this respect; for the treaty was afterwards negotiated abroad, and finally signed without any further communication with Lord Somers.

Understanding that he was accused in the House of Commons of having advised and promoted the Partition Treaties, Lord Somers requested to be heard in that House in his defence. His request being granted, he stated to the House, in a calm and dignified manner, the[Pg 115] history of his conduct respecting the treaties, and contended, with much force and eloquence, that in the whole course of that transaction he had correctly and honestly discharged his duty both as Chancellor and as a Privy Councillor. After he had withdrawn, a warm debate ensued, which terminated in a resolution carried by a small majority, "that John, Lord Somers, by advising his Majesty to conclude the Treaty of Partition, was guilty of a high crime and misdemeanour." Similar resolutions were passed against the Earl of Orford and Lord Halifax, and all of them were impeached at the bar of the House of Lords. The articles of impeachment against Lord Somers principally charged him with having affixed the great seal to the blank commission sent to the King in Holland, and afterwards to the treaties; with having encouraged and promoted the piracies of Captain Kidd, and with having received grants from the Crown for his own personal emolument. To each of these articles Lord Somers answered promptly and fully; to the two first he replied the facts of each case as above related; and in answer to the third, he admitted that the king had been pleased to make certain grants to him, but denied that they had been made in consequence of any solicitation on his part. After many frivolous delays and repeated disputes between the two Houses, a day was fixed for the trial of the impeachment; on which day the Commons not appearing to prosecute their articles, the Lords, by a considerable majority, acquitted Lord Somers of the charges and dismissed the impeachment.

The violence and folly exhibited in the conduct of these proceedings opened the eyes of the King to his error in having changed his ministry at so critical a time. He found to his infinite disquietude that, instead of enabling him to manage the Commons as they had promised, the Tory leaders had rendered them more intractable and imperious than before; and that, instead of sincerely endeavouring to promote peace abroad and quiet government at home, they were actuated entirely by motives of private passion and revenge. In this state of affairs he again directed his attention to Lord Somers,[Pg 116] in consequence, probably, of the urgent advice of Lord Sunderland, and wrote him a note from Loo, dated the 10th of October, 1701, assuring him of the continuance of his friendship. By the united exertions of Somers and Sunderland a negotiation was entered into with a view to the formation of a Whig ministry; but after some little progress had been made, the death of the King, in March, 1702, put an end to the project, and the succession of Queen Anne confirmed the establishment of the Tory administration.

The state of parties for some years after the accession of Queen Anne excluded Somers from taking any active part in political affairs. It is probable that at this period of his life he devoted his attention to literature and science, as in 1702 he was elected President of the Royal Society. He afterwards applied himself with diligence to the removal of several gross defects in the practice of the Courts of Chancery and Common Law. In 1706 he introduced into the House of Lords an extensive and effectual bill for the correction of such abuses. In passing through the House of Commons "it was found," says Burnet, "that the interest of under-officers, clerks, and attorneys, whose gains were to be lessened by this bill, was more considered than the interest of the nation itself. Several clauses, how beneficial soever to the subject, which touched on their profit, were left out by the Commons." Still the "Act for the Amendment of the Law and the better advancement of Justice," as it now stands amongst the statutes of the realm, effected a very important improvement in the administration of justice.

Lord Somers is said to have had a chief hand in projecting the scheme of the Union with Scotland; and in discussing and arranging the details of this great measure in the House of Lords, he appears to have been one of the most frequent and distinguished speakers, though he was then labouring under great bodily infirmity.

In the year 1708, on occasion of the temporary return of the Whigs to power, Lord Somers again formed part of the administration and filled the office of President of the Council. But the powers of his mind were at this[Pg 117] time much enfeebled by continual ill-health; and it was probably with feelings of satisfaction that the change of parties in 1710, by causing his dismissal from office, enabled him finally to retire into private life.

Of the mode in which the remaining period of his life was spent after his removal from public business, little is known. There is, however, no doubt that the concluding years of his existence were darkened by much sickness and some degree of mental alienation. On the accession of George I. he formally took his seat at the Council-Board; but a paralytic affection, which had destroyed his bodily health, had so impaired the faculties of his mind as to incapacitate him entirely for business. At intervals, however, when the pressure of disease was suspended, he appears to have recurred with strong interest to passing events in which the welfare of his country was involved. When the Septennial Bill was in progress, Lord Townshend called upon him: Lord Somers embraced him, congratulated him on the progress of the bill, and declared that "he thought it would be the greatest support possible to the liberty of the country." On a subsequent occasion, when informed by the same nobleman of the determination of George I. to adopt the advice of his ministry, by executing the full rigour of the law against Lord Derwentwater, and the other unfortunate persons concerned in the rebellion of 1715, he is said to have asked with great emotion, and shedding many tears, "whether they meant to revive the proscriptions of Marius and Sylla?"

He soon afterwards sunk into a state of total imbecility, from which, on the 26th of April, 1716, he was happily released by death.

Lord Somers was never married, though it is stated by the author of the Memoirs of his Life, that when he was solicitor-general he paid his addresses to a daughter of Sir John Bawdon, a London alderman, and that he went so far in the matter as to deliver in a rental of his estate, after several meetings with the lady's friends; "but," concludes the story, "the treaty broke off on account of a difference about the marriage-portion and[Pg 118] settlement, to the great regret of the lady, when she found him made lord-keeper of the great seal in two years' time." His estates descended to the family of his sister, who was married to Charles Cocks, Esq., M.P., whose grandson, the ancestor of the present Earl Somers, was created Baron Somers in 1784.

The character of Lord Somers has been elaborately drawn by Addison in one of the numbers of the 'Freeholder' (published 14th May, 1714), but with considerable wordiness, and something perhaps of the air of insincerity which commonly attaches to a formal panegyric. He had been an early and zealous patron of Addison, who had obtained his notice by inscribing to him his early poem on the campaigns of King William, and who afterwards dedicated to him his 'Travels in Italy,' and the first volume of the 'Spectator.' There is much more force in the more shaded picture of him which Swift has given in his 'History of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne;' nor perhaps, taken with the proper allowance, does it convey a less correct notion of the man.

The collection commonly called the 'Somers Tracts,' which has been twice printed, first in 1748, in 16 volumes, 4to., secondly, in 1809-15, in 13 volumes, 4to., under the superintendence of the late Sir Walter Scott, consists of scarce pamphlets selected, as the title intimates, principally from the library of Lord Somers. A valuable collection of original letters and other papers left by his lordship was unfortunately consumed in a fire which happened in the chambers of the Honourable Charles Yorke, then solicitor-general, in Lincoln's Inn Square, on the morning of Saturday, the 29th of January, 1752. Mr. Yorke's father, the Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, married Lord Somers's niece, Miss Margaret Cocks.

That the son of a blacksmith in an obscure English village should almost by his single unassisted efforts have created for himself a name among the highest in the history of European philosophy; and that by the variety and excellence of his writings upon the fluctuating sciences of Natural History he should have acquired a reputation so fresh, after the lapse of a century and a half, that at this very day he should be designated as the man "who saw the finger of God in the whole framework of Animated Nature," are circumstances which it is a peculiarly instructive and pleasing task for the biographer to illustrate. It is not however of scenes of stirring interest, which arrest our attention by an irresistible appeal to our passions or our feelings, that the life of such a man consists; on the contrary, the very success that attended his pursuits implies a tranquil tenour of existence, of which little can be told beyond the effect produced by his powerful mind upon his[Pg 120] contemporaries and posterity: his writings, not his acts, are the really important events of his career, and almost everything which the historian finds to tell.

John Ray, or, as he originally wrote it, Wray, was born on the 29th of November, 1627 (O.S.), at the village of Black Notley in the county of Essex. His father followed the humble occupation of blacksmith, and it is said that his smithy is still remaining by the side of a lane leading to the village church. But as some acres of land have descended with it to the present proprietor, and as the circumstance of his having been able to afford his son a College education and subsequently to leave his widow in competency, seem to indicate the possession of means greater than a mere blacksmith can be supposed to have acquired, it is not improbable that Mr. Ray was a substantial yeoman who combined the occupation of a smith with that of a small farmer, as is sometimes done to this day in the midland counties of England.

Of Ray's early history nothing is recorded except that he was educated at the charity-school of Braintree, a town about two miles from his birthplace; that he had an indifferent preceptor, whom he soon outstripped in learning; and that he loved reading, and wandering in the fields, better than the youthful pastime of his school-fellows. He appears moreover to have possessed that greatest of all blessings to a child, a kind, sensible, and right-hearted mother, who took care to instil into his youthful mind those high principles of honour which proved a sure guide to him in after life, and in vindication of which he sacrificed his temporal interests, while he secured imperishable fame.

Unaided at school by judicious instruction, unsustained by the sympathy of congenial spirits, for we can scarcely suppose his parents to have been able to appreciate talents such as his, and struggling with all those disadvantages to which a lad without books and with an ignorant master is exposed in a country school, he nevertheless evinced such proficiency in his studies as to excite the attention of those who, seeing in him the germ of future[Pg 121] eminence, advised his father to yield to the manifest bias of his son's inclinations, and to enable him to win his way in the world by means more congenial to his disposition than the forge and anvil.

Accordingly we find him at the age of sixteen entered as a Sizar of Catherine Hall, Cambridge (June 28th, 1644). At this time useful and solid learning had only just begun to displace the idle disputations of the schools, which had hitherto formed the occupation of the Cambridge students. At the most, to use his own words, "they contented themselves with a knowledge of the Tongues, a little skill in Philology, or History perhaps, and Antiquity, to the neglect of that which seems more material, I mean Natural History and the works of the Creation;" making little account of "real Experimental Philosophy, and those ingenious sciences of the Mathematics." Ray, whose life had been passed among the wild scenes of nature, was soon dissatisfied with the endless arguments about nothing in which his fellow-collegians were employed, and in which truth was a secondary object only, the first consideration being scholastic triumph.

The noble discoveries of the weight and elastic force of air, and of the restless circulation of the blood, the invention of telescopes and microscopes, and several other things, which were at this time novelties in philosophy, seemed calculated to reveal the most hidden secrets of nature and to recast the whole framework of Natural History; and Ray burned to exchange the metaphysical subtleties of Catherine Hall, for a position in which such subjects formed a part of the College learning. After nearly two years' penance he found the means of accomplishing his desire by removing to Trinity College, where science had already fixed her throne, secure within those sacred walls from the assaults of the intellectual bigots of those days, who then, as now, viewed all advances in human knowledge with alarm; and who would fain have compelled posterity to feed upon the same intellectual trash with which they had themselves been nourished, "fearful lest the world[Pg 122] should discover they had passed their own lives in following the mere shadow of philosophy; and that in the place of Juno they had embraced a cloud."

Once established among young men of congenial pursuits, the talents of Ray unfolded themselves with a rapidity which even his college companions viewed with admiration. The mind, which had been cramped and stifled by the unnatural position in which it had been so long confined, at once expanded, like a beauteous flower which cold and nipping winds have long restrained within its calyx, till a few days' warmth and gentle moisture renovate its energies, and cause it to burst forth into all its natural perfection.

His tutor was Dr. Duport, a distinguished Greek scholar, afterwards Dean of Peterborough, and his most intimate friend was the good and simple minded Isaac Barrow, who had entered Trinity shortly before himself, and who was elected Junior Fellow along with Ray, on the 8th of September, 1649. With such a master for his learning, such a companion for his pleasures, and such talents for his resource, it is no wonder that Ray should have gained further steps in his college rank more quickly than happens to many men; nor that a Senior Fellowship, and the offices of Greek Lecturer, Mathematical Lecturer, Humanity Reader, and others, should have successively rewarded his industry in the course of the next ten years.

During this period he was mentally preparing the materials of those important works on which his reputation was to be based, and performing with assiduity the various duties to which his college life compelled him. As a tutor he gained the friendship of several young men of rank, especially of Mr. Francis Willughby, with whom his fame and fortune eventually became almost identified. As a preacher he acquired much reputation for the excellence of his discourses; in which he showed that the true way to enchain the attention and interest the feelings of men of sense, is by appealing to their reason rather than to their passions or their zeal. At this time the practices of the Puritans had entered[Pg 123] the Universities more than their doctrines; and accordingly the sermons of the day were too often unmeaning rhapsodies or enthusiastical harangues, rather than sincere discourses upon the evidences and doctrines of true religion. Never to fancies of this kind did Mr. Ray give way; if his good sense had not been sufficient to convince him of the errors of the popular style, his conscience, that constant monitor which never for one moment deserted him, would have told him that he but ill performs his duty to his fellow-man who allows his judgment of what is for their eternal welfare to be swayed by a consideration of what may be agreeable to their inclinations. His celebrated work, 'On the Wisdom of God displayed in the Works of the Creation,' which was not published till towards the close of his life, is said to have been founded upon the sermons which he was at this time in the habit of delivering; and, if so, we may well imagine the truth of Archbishop Tenison's account of Ray's reputation at Cambridge for preaching solid and useful divinity. That such sermons should have been little acceptable to those fanatics who considered all religion to consist in a firm adhesion to controversial points, mistaking the shadow of godliness for the substance, and making up for the weakness of their arguments by the vehemence of their gesticulation, may be easily believed. But it was impossible that the merits of Mr. Ray should be overlooked by the young and rising spirits in the University, who, finding more diversion than instruction in the declamations of the ordinary class of preachers, must have turned with delight to the discourses of Mr. Ray, in which the religion of nature and the universal evidence of the power and goodness of God were made the foundation of every theological discussion. The reasons he himself assigns for making choice of such a line of argument deserve to be quoted as a specimen not only of his style, but also of the plain good sense which formed the peculiar feature of all his writings:—

"The belief of a Deity being the foundation of all religion (religion being nothing but a devout worshipping of God, or an inclination of mind to serve and[Pg 124] worship Him), for he that cometh to God must believe that he is God, it is a matter of the highest concernment to be firmly settled and established in a full persuasion of this main point. Now this must be demonstrated by arguments drawn from the Light of Nature, the Works of the Creation: For as all other sciences, so divinity proves not, but supposes its subjects, taking it for granted, that by natural light men are sufficiently convinced of the being of a Deity. There are indeed supernatural demonstrations of this fundamental truth, but not common to all persons or times, and so liable to cavil and exception by atheistical persons, as inward illuminations of mind, a spirit of prophecy and foretelling future contingents, illustrious miracles, and the like. But these proofs, taken from effects and operations, exposed to every man's view, not to be denied or questioned by any, are most effectual to convince all that deny or doubt of it. Neither are they only convictive of the greatest and subtlest adversaries, but intelligible also to the meanest capacities. For you may hear illiteral persons of the lowest rank of the commonalty affirming, that they need no proof of the being of a God, for that every pile of grass, or ear of corn, sufficiently proves that; for, say they, all the men of the world cannot make such a thing as one of these; and if they cannot do it, who can, or did make it but God? To tell them that it made itself, or sprung up by chance, would be as ridiculous as to tell the greatest philosopher so."

The incessant application to which Mr. Ray had given himself in the fulfilment of his college duties, joined to a delicate constitution, had already so impaired his health, that we find him, at an early age, directed by his physician to take frequent exercise abroad. How this finally led to the direction which his pursuits afterwards irrecoverably assumed, we are told by himself in his beautiful Latin, to which we have in vain attempted to do justice in a translation. "When from my indifferent state of health it became necessary, for the sake of both my mind and body, that I should relax from severer studies, and take exercise in walking or riding, it was scarcely[Pg 125] possible for me not to cast an occasional regard upon the varieties and elegancies of the vegetable kingdom—those curious labyrinthian works of Nature which were continually before my eyes, and which I had so often trampled beneath my careless feet. These once attentively inspected, it was no longer in my power to pass them by with indifference and disregard. For first the sweet spectacle of the fields in spring invited and detained me by the charm of their splendid apparel; and afterwards I was delighted by the singular forms of their plants, whose colours and external appearance are all so gay and admirably comely. Thus frequently feasting my eyes and delighting my mind with such things, the study of botany gradually grew upon me; and I was seized with a vehement desire and ardour to acquire some proficiency therein; for I was persuaded it would afford me much solitary, tranquil, and harmless pleasure." Natural history at that time (1550-60) was, however, in a lamentable condition. Arranged without system, and often by men but imperfectly acquainted even with the knowledge of their day, botanical works were a mere farrago of bad descriptions, the plants belonging to which could scarcely be identified without the aid of the rude wood-blocks by which the descriptions were accompanied. For example, Gerarde's 'History of English Plants,' which at that time was a standard book, was, as Ray himself tells us, the production of a man almost entirely ignorant of the learned languages in which, nevertheless, all books on science were at that time written. The principal part of the work was pirated from the Pemptades of Dodoens, turned into English by one Priest; and in order to conceal the plunder, the arrangement of Dodoens was exchanged for that of Lohl; while the whole was made up with the wood-blocks of Tabernæmontanus's Kreuterbuch, often unskilfully transposed and confounded. In this state of things there was no hope of a student making any progress in botany by himself; a master who could instruct him in all the existing knowledge of the subject, and so enable him to interpret the meaning of such books, was quite indispensable. It was not,[Pg 126] however, to be expected that a science (?) like that we have described should find much favour in the eyes of Cambridge scholars. It was, therefore, in vain that Mr. Ray sought among his college friends for some one to guide him in his new pursuit. "Wonderful to tell!" he exclaims, "not a man could I find among so many magnates of the learned world, among so many luminaries of letters, who could open the way for me, or who could spare me one little ray from his lamp; not a soul who had ever studied botany profoundly, nor indeed above one or two who had ever raised the cup to their lips. What was I to do in such a conjuncture? Was I to allow this my ardour to burn out, or to be directed to something else? Surely not. I was only ashamed and vexed, when I reflected that this most important part of natural philosophy, so useful and indeed so necessary to every-day life, should alone lie wasted and neglected when all other branches of science and polite literature were so flourishing and cultivated."

At length, when, with infinite toil, he had surmounted the difficulties that beset him, and had learned to read the Botanical Cabala of the day, his kind and social disposition irresistibly impelled him to communicate the enjoyment his new pursuit afforded him to those intimate friends and companions whose happiness was to him as much a source of pleasure as his own. This produced our earliest English Flora, and his first botanical essay, in the form of an alphabetical catalogue of the plants growing wild about Cambridge; in which he appears to have had no other object than to furnish his friends with a sort of hand-book, by which they might remember the plants they had gathered and admired in his society, and which might answer some temporary purpose until he could, "by Divine permission," prepare a general systematic arrangement of all known plants.

Shortly after the appearance of his Catalogue, on the 23rd of December, 1660, he was ordained both deacon and priest on the same day, according to Sir James Smith; but as this would have been contrary to the 32nd canon, which requires "that none be made deacon and[Pg 127] minister on the same day," it is probable that the words Diaconi et Presbyteri ordinati, which commence the registry of that day's ordination, only mean that the deacons and priests ordained on that day are such as appear in the subjoined list, and not that all therein named were then ordained both deacons and priests.

After his ordination he continued his college duties as before, constantly adding to his knowledge of natural history, collecting during journeys through various parts of England the materials for his 'Systematical Synopsis of British Plants,' which afterwards appeared in 1690; and endeavouring to establish among his acquaintance an admiration of the works of the Creator, in preference to curious instruments of human invention which can have no comparison with the admirable mechanism and exquisite fashioning of the animal and vegetable world. "There are those," he says, "who, ignorant and uninformed in such matters, contemn and despise such pursuits as mine. When you show these men a rare plant, the first question they ask is, what is it good for? And if peradventure you inform them that you do not know, for that its use is still to be discovered, they straightway exclaim, what idle curiosity is this! How can it profit you to squander thus your irretrievable time about things which are of no utility in life, to the neglect of so many more necessary concerns? As if the all-wise Maker of all things could have created anything rashly or to no end, and as if it did not behove us the more diligently to investigate that of which we happen to be ignorant.—Or as if those things which he has thought worthy of being created, we should think unworthy of even a passing regard. For my part, I am persuaded that whatever the earth produces from his bountiful lap, is born, if not for the food or medicine of man, most certainly for those of brute animals. And do not the latter nourish us with their flesh and their milk? and keep us warm with their hides, hair, or wool, and assist us by their toil, and give us pleasure as objects of the chase, to say nothing of the innumerable medicaments that are supplied by the animal kingdom?" Thus in tranquillity, and amidst such[Pg 128] peaceful occupations, nearly two years of his life passed away.

We have now reached a period in the history of Mr. Ray at which those high principles of honour and integrity, of which indeed his whole life was but a continual illustration, were to be put to their severest trial. He had succeeded in justifying the good opinion of those friends who had saved him from the drudgery of his father's trade; by his talents and unwearied industry he had gained an independence which was the more sweet, and which should have been the more secure, as having been the result of neither patronage nor accident, but won from his competitors in a fair and open field; he had raised himself to a high and honourable station in his college; and he, the blacksmith's son, had become at once the director and the friend of several of the rising aristocracy of his country. But beyond his college preferment, and the income this apparently secured to him, he possessed nothing. At once, and without warning, by the blackest act of the most profligate court and king by which England has had the misfortune to be oppressed, Mr. Ray was called upon either to prostitute his fair fame at the mandate of the court, in return for which he was to have secure possession of that which he had gained, and fair prospects of advancement; or to relinquish the fruits of eighteen years of labour and exertion, to see his little competency torn from him by a government as devoid of mercy as of virtue, and to be thrown back into that station from which he had so honourably raised himself—now more unfitted than ever by constitution as well as education for pursuits, to return to which it was probable he might be driven by sheer necessity.

When the English people, goaded to desperation by the tyranny of a king whose reputed private virtues were but a wretched atonement for his political offences, and disgusted with a hierarchy which they found another name for bigotry, intolerance, and despotism, were forced to assert their rights by the sword, they swore to a solemn league and covenant for the reform of religion by the extirpation of prelacy and episcopacy. They[Pg 129] believed in their consciences, as many good men still believe, that such a measure was necessary to restore the purity of the church, and to render it, what it was intended for, a powerful moral instrument. To this, however, Mr. Ray had never been a party. At the Restoration King Charles, among other iniquitous proceedings, procured to be passed an act of parliament usually known by the name of the Bartholomew Act, by which all clergymen were enjoined, upon pain of deprivation of all offices and emoluments whatsoever, to declare, among other things, that the oath taken by those who had joined the league was not only unlawful, but not binding upon their consciences, and might be broken.

Mr. Ray was not the man to hesitate as to the course he should adopt; his was not the supple honesty that could shift, and turn, and bend, and accommodate itself to the wishes of a corrupt government and a reckless hierarchy. Neither would he lend his good name and honourable character to delude the ignorant and encourage the weak or unprincipled, by declaring upon the faith of an honest man and a Christian clergyman that there is no sanctity in an oath. Upon being called upon to acquiesce in this infamous doctrine, Mr. Ray was too high-minded to answer otherwise than honestly and truly "that he had never taken the league and covenant, and that he even disapproved of it as an unlawful act: but that he could not declare for those who had taken the oath that no obligation lay upon them; but feared there might." For this straightforward answer, in which nothing can be blamed except its mildness, Mr. Ray, to his glory, was deprived of his college preferment, stripped of the independence his industry had procured for him, and driven back into the world as poor as he had quitted it, with thirteen other honourable men; for only fourteen such honest men were to be found in Cambridge in those days. This remarkable event happened on the 18th September, 1662.

In this conjuncture, when he might well exclaim that all was lost except his honour, the world did not forsake him with the court. That he was ready to endure the[Pg 130] extremity of poverty for conscience sake no man can doubt; but he was not called upon to make the trial.

His rectitude and high-mindedness had secured him the esteem, as his learning had obtained him the respect, of those who had benefited by his instruction as college tutor; and Mr. Willughby, his true and steady friend, immediately offered him his house as a home. Under that hospitable roof he soon consoled himself for his blighted prospects by the uninterrupted leisure he enjoyed for following his favourite pursuits, to which, indeed, Mr. Willughby was attached with as much enthusiasm as Ray himself.

After publishing an appendix to his catalogue of Cambridge plants, with some corrections and additions, it was arranged that Mr. Willughby and Ray, accompanied by some other gentlemen, should visit the continent, chiefly for the purpose of examining the plants and animals which were unknown in England. Accordingly, seven months after his expulsion from Cambridge, Mr. Ray and his companions visited France, and after passing through Flanders, Germany, Switzerland, the states of Venice, Sicily, and Malta, they returned by way of Florence to Montpellier; when Mr. Willughby quitted them for Spain, while Mr. Ray, after passing a winter in the south of France, proceeded through Lyons to Paris, and finally reached England in March, 1666.

During this tour he profited abundantly by the opportunity it afforded him of increasing his acquaintance with natural history; and at the very door, as it were, of Gesner and the Bauhins, he discovered plants which had been overlooked by those veterans in botany. The numerous remains of molluscous animals in a fossil state, with which his Italian journey supplied him, led him to reflect upon their origin, and to decide against the silly notions of his day that such remains had been created by a plastic force of nature, impeded and counteracted by the unsuitable situations, in the midst of rocks, in which it was exerted. To suppose that an inanimate body like the earth has a power to create forms equal to others which we see in living beings, is to approach within one[Pg 131] single step of dispensing with the necessity of an intelligent Creator, and could not fail to shock the philosophical and pious feelings of a man like Ray.

Shortly after his return (November 7, 1667), he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, which at that time was a considerable distinction; the value of which had not been reduced to below zero by promiscuous elections. About the same time he suffered himself to be persuaded to arrange the vegetable kingdom according to the notions of his "ever honoured" friend the good and liberal-minded Bishop Wilkins, whose scheme of an universal character required that trees and herbs should be each divided into three principal groups or "companies," neither more nor less; "that each company should be divided into nine parts called subaltern genera, so that in each of these the subordinate plants should not exceed a certain number; and finally that the plants should be joined two and two, or arranged in pairs." With only three weeks in which to execute this fantastic task, and sensible as Mr. Ray was of the impracticability of this scheme, yet he says that he could not do otherwise than endeavour to oblige so true a friend and so good a man. A trichotomous system was therefore produced, which, if it was not remarkable for its excellence, was, fortunately for posterity and Ray's fame, the immediate cause of his concentrating all the powers of his vigorous and comprehensive mind on the discovery of the principles of the natural system, upon which his botanical reputation was eventually founded.

It appears that Morison, afterwards Professor of Botany at Oxford, a hot-headed Aberdeen cavalier, and a pompous waspish man, who was more greedy of his own reputation than solicitous for the advancement of science, took especial offence at Ray's unlucky contribution to Bishop Wilkins. Whether from dislike to Ray's honest uncompromising principles, which could not be otherwise than distasteful to the hangers-on of Charles II., or from a wish to ingratiate himself with the court, for he bore the sounding titles of King's Physician and Royal Professor of Botany, or from mere jealousy of a rival in his[Pg 132] own department, or from whatever other motive, Morison anonymously attacked Ray's tables with much acrimony and unfairness, boasting of his own superior attainments, and that nature, not books, had been his guide in the system of which he had already published some specimens. Piqued at this uncalled-for attack from a man in every way so much his inferior in mental endowments, Mr. Ray determined, as he tells us, to see what he could do if unfettered by a plan, and with nature only for his guide. The consequence was the publication of his first scheme of Natural Arrangement in 1682.

But before this could be accomplished, his patron, Mr. Willughby, was unfortunately carried off by death on the 3rd of July, 1672, in the thirty-seventh year of his age. This distressing event put a sudden stop to Mr. Ray's occupations. By the will of Mr. Willughby he was left one of his five executors, and tutor to his two infant children; he was moreover charged with the publication of the Zoological Papers, upon which the two friends had long been jointly occupied, and he also found himself in possession of 60l. a-year for life. Dismissing from his mind for a time all thoughts of the pursuits which had previously engaged him, Mr. Ray's earliest care was to execute conscientiously the duties which his deceased friend had confided to him. The children and their education was his first consideration; he wrote his Nomenclator Classicus expressly for their improvement, submitted patiently to the irksome task of teaching them the most elementary parts of knowledge, and gave up his whole mind to the faithful discharge of his trust. But in the same year Bishop Wilkins also died; and thus in the space of a few short months he found himself separated from his oldest and dearest friends, and literally alone in the world.

We now find him, for the next three or four years, during the first of which he married, diligently employed in the instruction of his little pupils, in the publication of his foreign travels, in experiments upon vegetable physiology, and especially in preparing for the press[Pg 133] Mr. Willughby's ornithological papers, which appeared in Latin in 1675, under the name of Ornithologiæ Libri III. In this work the beak and the foot of birds are for the first time employed as the basis of a systematic arrangement; the classification thus established, imperfect as it was, had the merit of combining habits and structure, and of showing that land and water birds, and herbivorous and predaceous species, might be distinguished from each other by the conformation of the organs which had been specially modified in connexion with their modes of life.

Upon the death of Mr. Willughby's mother her two grandsons were removed from his care, and he himself quitted Middleton Hall. For a while he continued in the neighbourhood for the sake of access to Mr. Willughby's papers, which remained in possession of his widow, but finally, in 1679, he removed to his native village, where he had caused a cottage to be built, in order that he might spend the latter days of his life in the contemplation of scenes that were endeared to him by the recollections of his childhood. Before this occurred he had completed a translation of the Ornithology into English, and had published an improved edition of his Catalogue, with many additions, especially in what relates to the useful properties of plants. In three years more, the first sketch of his Natural System of Botany made its appearance, and shortly after he sent to press the Ichthyology of Mr. Willughby, which however was not published till 1686.

This work, which was the most complete of Mr. Ray's zoological publications, and which seems to have been Mr. Willughby's favourite study, is acknowledged by Cuvier in the following terms of praise:—

"It is to Ray and Willughby that the honour was reserved of first producing an ichthyology in which the objects were described clearly and from nature herself; in which the species were distributed according to characters derived exclusively from structure; and, finally, in which their history was disembarrassed of all those passages from ancient naturalists which it had been the practice[Pg 134] of the authors of the sixteenth century to refer to different species in the most arbitrary manner, and of which, in point of fact, so many were either untrue or unintelligible.—This work forms an era, and a happy one, in the history of ichthyology. For ever after subjected to the forms of system, this science was enabled to make a steady advance; and new species were no longer confounded with old ones, but were referred with certainty to a definite place in the arrangement; above all things the work was a tolerably perfect model of descriptive Natural History."

In 1686 and 1687 appeared, in two volumes folio, Ray's great work, the Historia Plantarum, at which he had long been labouring, towards the completion of which his mind had been steadily directed ever since himself and his friends had experienced the want of such a guide, and to which he had been urged the more in consequence of its having become evident that the Historia Plantarum of Morison, of which one volume had been published at Oxford, was a work far beyond the strength of its author, who besides was so involved in his circumstances that it was unlikely it would ever be completed.

One of the reasons assigned by Ray himself for having ventured upon the publication is too characteristic of the man not to deserve being repeated. "I have been mainly led to it," he says, "for the illustration of the glory of God—since the inconceivable variety of plants, together with their surpassing beauty, their wonderful order, and their immense importance, are among the most striking of all evidences and arguments as to the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness of the Supreme Artificer."

This extraordinary production, by far the most important systematic work which had then appeared, at once became the text of botanists in England till the time of Linnæus, who, upon his visit to this country in 1736, found the English professors warmly attached to it. Well had it been for us had it never been abandoned, for now, after nearly another century has elapsed,[Pg 135] we have done little more than come back again to the principles which Ray first promulgated.

Two thousand years had elapsed since the time of Theophrastus, and nothing which deserved the name of a philosophical view of the vegetable kingdom had again been written. Great advances had been made in the knowledge of species, and the recent invention of the microscope had led to the discovery of the secret springs by which the life of plants is regulated; but there had been no mind sufficiently comprehensive, nor indeed sufficiently in advance of the age, to render the knowledge thus industriously collected available for the great purposes of science. For grand general views, there was little better than petty details, mixed up with an inconceivable mass of inaccuracies, puerilities, and fables. The laborious industry of the Bauhins had indeed collected into a narrow compass what they found dispersed through the Histories, Theatres, Pandects, Notes, Observations, Illustrations, and Commentaries, of their predecessors; but no higher station can be assigned them than that of patient and diligent compilers; not that we would undervalue the labours of the Bauhins; on the contrary, it is not improbable that if they had not collected the rough materials of arrangement, Ray would never have wrought them into the system he left behind; but it cannot be disputed that their systematic views were neither original, sound, nor philosophical.

The most remarkable features in the Historia Plantarum are the methodical and logical manner in which all parts of the matter are arranged—the accuracy of the author's knowledge of vegetable physiology, his own peculiar system, and above all his views of systems in general.

He was the first who applied to botany the plan of analyzing genera and species, or ideas of any kind, in a tabular form, by a continual dichotomous succession of abstractions. Having felt most severely in his early studies how serious an impediment to those who have to labour unassisted was the crude matter which the botanists of his time placed before their readers, and being[Pg 136] sensible that there can be no logical precision either in natural history or any other branch of science, unless it is capable of being reduced to such an analysis, he seems to have made it a point, on all occasions, to introduce his dichotomous tables, both to test the soundness of his own principles, and to instruct in the most familiar manner those who were to study him.

The importance of this will not fail to be appreciated by those who have had to labour through the elements of any branch of natural history with books alone for their instruction; and now that natural history is becoming a more common branch of a liberal education, we are actually, after neglecting it for a century and a-half, at this moment falling back upon his method; often, we suspect, without being aware that it is to Ray that we are indebted for the example.

If there is nothing very original in Ray's notions about the vital actions of plants, the admirable works of Grew and Malpighi having appeared at the very time when he himself was engaged in pursuits of the same nature, he at least knew how to avail himself most skilfully of the observations of those authors, and he appears to have in some cases repeated their experiments, or, in others, to have either preceded or surpassed them in the investigation of the subject. He states most truly that the sap rises through the whole body of such trees as birch, willow, and the like, contrary to the less accurate statement of more recent writers, who would confine its upward current to the alburnum alone. He notices the error of considering a bulb a root, and properly refers it to an underground bud. He asserted that light was the true cause of the green colour in plants, and not air alone. He rejected the popular opinions about the transmutation of species, such as of wheat into maize or even ray-grass, and of turnips into radishes; and yet he was puzzled at finding that one kind of cabbage would produce another, and that cauliflowers would turn to coleworts, for he did not know that all these were mere varieties of one original species. His statements regarding the operation of grafting are remarkably just;—he[Pg 137] properly points out the identity between a bud and a scion, the former "not differing from the latter otherwise than as a child from an adult;" and he expressly declares that the operation cannot be performed except between species nearly related to each other. Moreover, he showed the fallacy of those experiments upon growing plants in water, upon which was founded the theory that pure water only is their food; for he asserted that water in the state in which it had been used was unquestionably impregnated with numerous saline and heterogeneous particles, and by no means a simple element. Finally, he adopted Grew's opinion that the pollen contains the male fluid of plants; and he distinctly points out the unisexual nature of diœcious plants. Some of these points have been referred to the discoveries of more modern botanists, some have even been the subject of experiment in very recent days; but all of them are to be found in the Historia Plantarum of Ray.

As for his botanical system, let it but be compared with those of Cæsalpinus and Morison, which were the only attempts at systematic arrangement worth mentioning which preceded him. That of the former was ingenious, and as some think profound, and for the first outline of a systematic arrangement sufficiently praiseworthy, but it was never adopted. The method of the latter was shallow and empirical, and had not a single feature worth recording except what was copied from preceding botanists. Ray, on the contrary, discovered with surprising sagacity, considering the scantiness of his materials, the fundamental principles of a natural arrangement, and laid the foundation of a system, which, passing down to posterity through Jussieu and the French school, has, with the alterations and improvements suggested by modern discovery, finally triumphed, after various turns of fortune, over all that have been set up in opposition to it.

Ray was no martinet in science, who would throw Nature bound and gagged into the arena of philosophy, to be dissected beneath a microscope, and who would have her turned, and pinched, and thwarted at every step[Pg 138] for the sake of his own awkward contrivances. On the contrary, he knew her to be a goddess whose very essence is freedom, variety, and change, to be restrained within no limits but those which the Creator has assigned her, and ready to slip between our definitions with a facility which sets mathematical precision at defiance. He well knew that living matter was not to be dealt with like rocks and stones, and that it was hopeless to look for that exactness in an arrangement of things endowed with life, which might be expected in the inorganic world. That to the soundest philosophical views he joined an unusual portion of good sense, in treating of such matters, will be abundantly manifest from the following extract from the Preface to his Historia Plantarum.

"The system by which species are arranged according to their conformity in the structure of their most essential parts, such as the flower and its calyx, the seed and the seed-vessel, is surely the most natural and philosophical, as well as the most commodious for learning botany; it is therefore what I employ. For by the assistance of such a method any student, however destitute he may be of the aid of others, and however much he may be left to his own resources, will have no difficulty in acquiring a knowledge of plants. Suppose he has procured a species before unknown to him; by comparing it with the characters of the natural order (summa genera), with which he should make himself familiar, he will easily perceive to which it belongs; thence, by following the order of my tables, he will with equal ease, and as if by the thread of Ariadne, be conducted through the genera (genera subalterna) to the species; and then by comparing his plant with their descriptions, he will either discover it if described, or determine it to be a new one.

"But let me here repeat in still stronger terms what I have elsewhere insisted upon, that no one is to expect a method which shall be perfect and complete in all its parts, and which shall distribute plants into their natural order with such exactness that every species shall be comprehended in them without excluding a single anomalous or peculiar form; nor that every natural order[Pg 139] shall be so circumscribed by its own peculiar and characteristic marks that no species can remain without a settlement, if I may so say, and referable to more orders than one. From the very nature of things such perfection is unattainable. For since nature never makes a leap, nor passes from one extreme to another, otherwise than through some intermediate state, she always produces between things of the highest and the lowest degree certain others of an intermediate and ambiguous condition, participating in the characters of both, and so connecting those that it is uncertain whether they belong to the one or to the other. Moreover the same kind parent of all things will not submit to be confined within the narrow bounds of any system; but, as if to manifest her freedom and disregard of all human laws, creating in every order of things some singular and anomalous species as exceptions to general rules." How completely is all this confirmed by the experience, inquiry, and discussion which have employed the world since it was written!

The system which he framed upon these principles is a lasting monument of his wisdom, acuteness, and foresight. What if he included corals among plants? He esteemed them to be of the lowest degree, as the most inferior of his lowest grade of vegetation, which he called Imperfect. With these he joined fungi and mosses and consequently his imperfect plants are nearly the same as what Jussieu named Acotyledonous, what we call Cellular, and what the recent designations of Flowerless or Sexless, which are little more than compressions of Ray's technical definition of imperfect plants, correctly express. At first he separated ferns and their allies from his imperfect plants, but he afterwards united them.

Ail other plants he called Perfect or Flowering, and divided into Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons, which is the essential part of the Natural System of Jussieu. This distinction Ray learned from Grew and Malpighi, but that which in their hands was nothing more than a naked fact, became, under the operation of the powerful mind of Ray, a mighty truth, a spark which was in time[Pg 140] to illuminate the whole vegetable kingdom; in fact he himself blew it into a flame: such is the difference between an observer and a philosopher! What is extremely remarkable, he not only founded this great distinction among flowering plants, but he stated in express terms that Monocotyledons, with a few exceptions, "have grassy, simple leaves, which are no way cut, notched, or lacerated, and have straight, not branched, longitudinal veins (fibri), and altogether a different texture from other plants." Both these great classes he divided again into Apetalous or Stamineous, and Petaloid orders; so that he distinctly indicated the great modern groups of Apetalous or Monochlamydeous, and Dichlamydeous orders among Dicotyledons, and of Glumaceæ as distinguished from other Monocotyledons. From all these, in conformity to popular usage, he separated Trees and Shrubs, dividing them into Monocotyledons, or Palms, including Bamboos; and into Dicotyledons, among which Coniferæ, Betulineæ, Cupuliferæ, Pomaceæ, &c., were distinctly indicated.

In the admission into his system of a separation of Trees from Herbs, Ray has been severely censured; and he himself was as much aware of the fault as his critics; but he justifies himself upon the ground of expediency and convenience, and it must in fairness be conceded that if it were not for the Papilionaceous plants which were thus divided from other Leguminosæ, there was little contrary to nature in the groups to which his system led, however indefensible the principle may be upon which the error was defended; and it is by the state of botanical materials which Ray possessed that he is to be judged, not by the knowledge that has been accumulated since his death.

Some progress had already been made in distinguishing natural orders when Ray became an author; what he found had mostly been formed from groups the limits of which could not well be overlooked, such as Stellatæ, Umbelliferæ, Compositæ, Labiatæ, Boraginæ, and Cruciferæ. These he of course adopted from those who had gone before him; confirming their validity however,[Pg 141] adapting them skilfully to his system, and either expressly or substantially laying the foundation of many more, as of Coniferæ, Betulineæ, Cucurbitaceæ, Pomaceæ, Polygoniæ, and the three primary subdivisions of Compositæ.

In this sketch of Ray's system we have probably been guilty of some unimportant anachronisms, referring to the date of the Historia Plantarum a few opinions which did not in fact appear till fifteen or sixteen years afterwards; but this, we conceive, is of no practical importance. What it was material to show was how far Ray did really advance with his systematic ideas; in order that the true source of the philosophy of botany may be understood, and that the world may know that it is neither to France nor Sweden, but to England herself and the University of Cambridge, that the glory is to be ascribed of having produced the father of modern botany. We think it must be clear that it is upon the unacknowledged system of Ray that the more perfect arrangement of Jussieu was essentially founded, far more than upon that of Tournefort, which, like many that intervened between the time of Ray and Jussieu, neglected the fundamental distinctions of Imperfect from Perfect plants, and of Dicotyledons from Monocotyledons, and was in all respects immeasurably inferior both in talent and utility. The system of Tournefort was in fact blemished by the adoption of the worst parts of that of Ray, and the exclusion of his fundamental distinctions; and was nothing more than a bad modification of the system of Ray, with some improvements in secondary characters, which themselves are borrowed from Rivinus. It would be difficult to find a living botanist who, upon a comparison of Ray's Methodus with the systems of even Boerhaave, van Royen, Haller, or Bernard de Jussieu, all of whom succeeded him, would hesitate to admit that in philosophical views, a deep knowledge of his subject, a clear perception of natural affinity, and the rare power of distinguishing exceptions from general rules, Ray was far more conspicuous than even Haller himself. The fault of Ray was a dread of too much innovation, which made him[Pg 142] adhere against his better judgment to the distinction of Trees from Herbs; for whatever may be the merits of the juste milieu system in politics, it is certainly not calculated for the advancement of science. He was also unfortunate in the want of a clear and simple nomenclature; had he instead of Linnæus fortunately perceived the importance of the latter, the great Swedish naturalist could never have gained that hold on men's minds he so long possessed, and we should this day refer to the times of Ray as the commencement of the era of philosophical botany instead of to Linnæus and Jussieu. Ray has been censured for his terming his natural orders summa genera, and his subordinate groupes, or real genera, genera subalterna—but this is a childish criticism worthy only of the school by which it has been suggested.

Mr. Ray seems now to have devoted himself entirely to the profession of an author. His Catalogue was recast in 1690 in a methodical form and published under the name of Synopsis methodica Stirpium Britannicarum; then followed his Wisdom of God manifested in the works of the Creation, in 1691; three Physico-theological Discourses, in 1692; a systematical Synopsis of Quadrupeds and a translation of Rauwolf's Oriental Travels, in 1693; an alphabetical Catalogue of European plants not English, partly observed by himself in his travels, in 1694; and a second edition of his Synopsis, in 1696.

Of these works two in particular deserve to be noticed. His Synopsis, which was the first systematic English Flora, and which from its cheapness served better than his larger works to make his arrangement known among his countrymen, is considered by some writers, who do not seem to have been able to appreciate the high merits of his Historia, as the "great corner-stone of his reputation." Without assigning it by any means so high a station, it must be allowed that it added most justly to a reputation which already stood higher than the highest. It was the result of many years' consideration, of several journeys through England taken expressly for the collection of materials, and of a personal examination of every plant that it contained. "Of all the systematical[Pg 143] and practical Floras of any country," says Smith, who in a criticism of this sort may be admitted as a competent authority, "the second edition of Ray's Synopsis is the most perfect that has come under our observation. He examined every plant recorded in his work, and even gathered most of them himself. He investigated their synonyms with consummate accuracy, and if the clearness and precision of other authors had equalled his, he would scarcely have committed an error. It is difficult to find him in a mistake or misconception regarding Nature herself, though he sometimes misapprehends the bad figures or lame descriptions he was obliged to consult."

Of his Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation, which was his most popular work, it is difficult to speak in terms of adequate praise. It may be considered not only as an admirable explanation of the truths which bear upon its subject, put into a form "suitable to all men's apprehension, and facile to their understanding," but as a good summary of Mr. Ray's extensive knowledge of the general facts of natural history. In this, as in all things, his careful separation of what he considered certain truths from possible errors is especially conspicuous, as well as the anxiety with which he distinguishes things the exactness of which is known to himself, from what rests upon the authority of others; "being most careful to admit nothing for matter of fact or experiment but what is undoubtedly true, lest I should build upon a sandy and ruinous foundation, and by the admixture of what is false render what is true suspicious." One of the reasons he alleges for having written this work is that he "suspects himself obliged to write something on divinity, having written so much on other subjects; for not being permitted (1691) to serve the church with my tongue in preaching, I know not but it may be my duty to serve it by my hand in writing."

Of this work it is not too much to say that, however inferior it may be in some respects to Paley, it is, considering the time at which it was published, by far the most perfect and beautiful of all the demonstrations of natural theology.[Pg 144] Its style is clear, simple, and forcible; the illustrations are generally selected with consummate skill; and the argument is so happily divested of all metaphysical subtlety as to be intelligible to the most humble capacity. Not a word is introduced which can be construed by the most perverse imagination into an attack upon controversial points in religion, but it is equally calculated to secure the approbation of Jew and Christian, of the highest Churchman or the most determined Presbyterian; no trifling merit in a work that was composed at a time when fanaticism of one kind or other scourged the land.

It would be unjust to Ray's memory if we did not give some specimen of his English style. The following will give a good idea of his manner of summing up his subject:—

"Methinks by all this provision for the use and service of man, the Almighty interpretatively speaks to him in this manner: I have now placed thee in a spacious and well-furnished world; I have endued thee with an ability of understanding what is beautiful and proportionable, and have made that which is so agreeable and delightful to thee. I have provided thee with materials whereon to exercise and employ thy art and strength; I have given thee an excellent instrument, the hand, accommodated to make use of them all; I have distinguished the earth into hills, and valleys, and plains, and meadows, and woods; all these parts capable of culture and improvement by thy industry; I have committed to thee for thy assistance in thy labours in plowing, and carrying, and drawing, and travel, the laborious ox, the patient ass, and the strong and serviceable horse; I have created a multitude of seeds for thee to make choice out of them of what is most pleasant to thy taste, and of most wholesome and plentiful nourishment; I have also made great variety of trees bearing fruit both for food and physic, these, too, capable of being improved by transplantation, stercoration, incision, pruning, watering, and other arts and devices. Till and manure thy fields, sow them with thy seeds; extirpate noxious and[Pg 145] unprofitable herbs; guard them from the invasion and spoil of beasts; clear and fence in thy meadows and pastures; dress and prune thy vines, and so rank and dispose them as may be most suitable to the climate; plant the orchards with all sorts of fruit-trees, in such order as may be most beautiful to the eye and most comprehensive of plants; gardens for culinary herbs and all kinds of salletting; for delectable flowers to gratify the eye with their agreeable colours and figures, and thy scent with their fragrant odours; for odoriferous and evergreen shrubs and suffrutices; for exotic and medicinal plants of all sorts; and dispose them in that comely order as may be both pleasant to behold and commodious for thy access.... I persuade myself that the bountiful and gracious author of man's being and faculties and all things else delights in the beauty of his creation, and is well pleased with the industry of man in adorning the earth with beautiful cities and castles, with pleasant villages and country houses, with regular gardens and orchards and plantations of all sorts of shrubs and herbs and fruits, for meat, medicine, or moderate delight; with shady woods and groves and walks set with rows of elegant trees; with pastures clothed with flocks, and valleys covered over with corn, and meadows burthened with grass, and whatever else differenceth a civil and well cultivated region from a barren and desolate wilderness."

We have before observed that Mr. Ray was naturally of a delicate constitution; it had originally broken down under the fatigue of his college studies; it had been undermined by habits of unreasonable abstemiousness, and it may be supposed that the severe labour of preparing so many original works for publication would have still further increased his maladies. He had especially been long tormented with ulcers in his legs, attended with intolerable itching and agonizing pain, which it was impossible for human nature to endure with the composure requisite for continued study. This appears at last to have almost put a stop to his pursuits; for during seven years, from 1696 to 1703, he published nothing except his Persuasion to a holy Life, which is[Pg 146] characterized as being devoid of religious bigotry and party spirit, and employing the plain and solid arguments of reason for the best of purposes.

During this period, however, Ray, if silent, was not unemployed. He occupied himself with an improvement of his Methodus, which, though printed in Holland in 1703, bears upon its title London and the names of London booksellers, a proceeding which the Dutch publisher considered necessary for his profit, but at which Ray's honesty was greatly scandalized.

In 1704 he printed a third volume of his Historia Plantarum; but it was evident from this that his mind was at length giving way to the attacks of disease, and that the time was close at hand when he was to die: this, in fact, occurred shortly afterwards; he expired in his house at Black Notley on the 17th January, 1705, in the seventy-seventh year of his age. He is said to have been offered a place in the chancel of the village church for his interment; but, simple in his manners to the last, he preferred to be buried by the side of his forefathers in the churchyard, where a monument was afterwards erected to his memory, at the expense, it is said, in part at least, of Bishop Compton, with a long and elegant Latin epitaph by the Reverend William Coyte of Ipswich. When in 1737 the monument had been defaced, it was repaired at the charge of Dr. Legge and removed to the chancel; but his daughters, not forgetful of their kind parent's wishes, insisted upon its being restored to its original station. Forty-five years afterwards it was again repaired at the expense of the late Sir Thomas Cullum; and finally, on the 29th of November, 1828, a public commemoration of the second centenary of his birth was attended by all the friends and professors of science then present in London.

His posthumous works were an Historia Insectorum, published in 1710 at the expense of the Royal Society, and a Synopsis of Birds and Fishes, which, though written in 1694, was not printed till 1713, under the care of his biographer Dr. Derham. Besides these, and the works already adverted to in the course of the[Pg 147] present memoir, he was also the author of several papers in the Transactions of the Royal Society and of several minor works.

Such was the earthly course of the greatest of English Naturalists; whose attainments were so high and varied that he excelled his contemporaries in every branch of science to which he directed his attention: he found Natural History mere dross, and it turned beneath his touch to sterling metal.

Of his reputation in some particular departments mention has been already made; as a general zoologist his talents were of the highest order.

Upon his skill as a geologist the following eulogium, pronounced by Professor Buckland at the commemoration dinner in 1828, is the best commentary. "In the department of science to which my own attention is peculiarly directed, the genius of Ray had made advances that would do honour to the present day. In his Treatise on the Wisdom of God in the Creation, he points out examples of design and utility in the form and structure and composition of our planet, founded on extensive and accurate observation of facts, and illustrated with sound argument, mixed with much good feeling and good sense. And in his Discourses on Chaos, Creation, and Deluge, there is a knowledge of many phenomena of the earth's surface, the discovery of which the present generation are too apt to consider as exclusively their own: that important and leading doctrine of the Huttonian theory, which attributes the elevation of islands, mountains, and continents to the force of vapour acting from below, is set forth in words that form almost an exact parallel to the statements of the same theory in Playfair's Illustrations; the theory, in neither case, was new; it was indeed handed down from high antiquity; but it is illustrated by Ray with such abundant arguments and examples, derived from the effects of earthquakes and volcanoes which in his time raged so terribly in Jamaica,[Pg 148] and with such copious and judicious references to the authentic records of the elevation of Thera, Therasia, and other volcanic islands, that the essence and leading features of much that has been written since on the theory of elevation and disturbance of subterranean vapours, have been anticipated by Ray. His remarks on the structure of mountains, as containing and affording access to metallic veins; their influence on climate, and use in collecting clouds for the formation of rain and production of rivers; his observations also on the general diffusion of springs, and their never-failing supply of water as derived from rains and dews, show much accurate observation, and point out correct conclusions which have been often repeated but rarely surpassed by his followers on these subjects.

"In another curious and extensive branch of geological inquiry, which relates to the history of fossil shells, he contended (in opposition to the prevailing theories of his predecessors, and of many of his contemporaries), that they were not accidental results of the plastic power and the sport of Nature, but the real and true exuviæ of animals that formerly inhabited them. He contended further, that these shells, for the most part, belong to species unknown in our existing waters, but recommends caution in pronouncing them to be absolutely extinct until we know the contents of the bottoms of all our deepest seas. Can it be said that modern geology has advanced on this point much further than Ray?"

But it is more especially as a Botanist that his memory deserves to be cherished and revered. He first gave to England a rank in Botany of which other nations might be envious, and which it behoves her sons to be anxious to preserve. Not however by maintaining a slavish system of partizan disputes about the respective merits of a French or a Swedish master, but by a steady perseverance in that course of original observation and independent thought in which Ray so much excelled.

In the whole history of Botany there are but five great æras. Theophrastus first collected and digested the knowledge that was scattered among the schools of[Pg 149] Greece; Grew and Malpighi, by their microscopical observations, laid the foundation of vegetable physiology; Ray systematised botany upon sound philosophical principles and formed it into a science; Linnæus gave it a definite and logical language; and, finally, Göthe demonstrated the simplicity and harmony of the laws of vegetable organisation. Of these writers the two whom it is most interesting to compare with each other are Ray and Linnæus. If the latter gave natural history a prodigious impulse by the unsparing reform which he introduced into the technical and literary department, on the other hand the check produced by his artificial system acted with so nearly equal an antagonist force, that it is difficult now to show whether the boon or the injury conferred by Linnæus upon science were the greater. Ray, on the contrary, who, although an accomplished scholar, was evidently no verbal critic (for the great importance of verbal criticism in natural history had still to be discovered), taking Nature and philosophy for his guides, and steadily refusing to desert them either for temporary convenience or long-enduring popularity, leaving behind him no evil to counterbalance the good that he had done, became the founder of a system which is now recognised through the scientific world as the only one that is conformable to Nature and worthy of Science. Under the name of the Natural System of Jussieu, we have finally accepted the substance of the method and philosophy of Ray. It would be invidious to carry the comparison much further; but we must be permitted to add that if these two eminent men are to be characterized in one sentence, it may be said of them, that Linnæus wrote for collectors, Ray for philosophers. That the former was more indebted to the latter for his fame than is generally supposed is evident from this single fact, that in the fifteenth page of the Preface of Ray's Stirpium Europæarum extra Britannias nascentium Sylloge, the universality of sexes in plants, which is the corner-stone of Linnæus's fame as a botanist, is distinctly insisted upon.

With regard to Ray's worldly affairs it is pleasing to[Pg 150] be able to state, that notwithstanding the destruction of his hopes of temporal prosperity by the flagitious act of King Charles, we learn from his will that he died possessed of houses and lands, and a small store of ready money. His circumstances therefore, if not considerable, were by no means straitened, for independently of such means he had Mr. Willughby's annuity and what the booksellers paid him for his works. The latter, however, appears to have been very trifling, for he states in one of his letters that he obtained only 30l. a volume for his Historia Plantarum, and as each volume consists of nearly a thousand pages folio, his remuneration did not exceed 7d. a page, or 2s. 4d. a sheet. Among his legacies was 4l. to the poor of Black Notley, and 5l. to the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, for the purchase of books for their college library. Thus, in his old age, he remembered with affection the friends of his youth, and he continued to regard his alma mater with kindness and respect, although she had refused to protect him from the hand of the persecutor.

To sum up in a few words a character of which a volume might be written, it may be said of Mr. Ray, that he was a man of whom it is difficult to speak too highly, whether for his strong good sense and extensive learning, or for his kindness of heart, simplicity of life, and strict integrity of conduct. As a husband and a father he was tender and affectionate; as a neighbour charitable to the extent of his means; as a gentleman high-minded and of uncompromising honour; and as a clergyman meek beneath oppression, patient under long suffering, and inspired with the purest sentiments of religion. In troubled times, and under most difficult circumstances, with much to shake his principles on the one side, and more to tempt him on the other, he preserved so straight and honest a course that not even his enemies, if he really had any, have ventured to point out a single stain upon his escutcheon. He died at once a memorable and most instructive illustration of the impotence of earthly power, in the hands of bad men, either to destroy the temporal peace or to blast the future fame[Pg 151] of those who with industry and prudence for their companions and honour for their guide, keep clear of the thorny ways of politics, and steadily pursue the path of learning, peace, and virtue.

(The authorities from which the foregoing sketch has been drawn up are principally Ray's own letters and writings; his Life by Dr. Derham, and by Sir James Smith in Rees's 'Cyclopædia;' Sprengel's 'Historia Rei Herbariæ;' and a MS. Life in the possession of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.)

END OF VOL. X.

London: Printed by William Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street.

[The end of The Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies Vol 10 of 12 edited by Charles Knight]


	Page
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE	5

DRYDEN	39

WILLIAM III.	62

LOCKE	87

LORD SOMERS	103

RAY	119

THE

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

OF

BRITISH WORTHIES

VOLUME X

LONDON: CHARLES KNIGHT & CO., LUDGARE STREET.

1846.

London: Printed by W. Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street.

CONTENTS.

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

OF

BRITISH WORTHIES.

END OF VOL. X.

London: Printed by William Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street.

LONDON:
CHARLES KNIGHT & CO., LUDGARE STREET.