resigned these preferments, he became curate of the Savoy and, in 1642, just at the outbreak of the Civil War, offended the Parliament by a sermon. The King had left his capital and was on the eve of declaring war against his subjects, and Fuller's advice of reconciliation with him was not palatable. After this he joined Charles at Oxford, and this time displeased the Court party by a degree of moderation which they called lukewarmness. Seeing that he thus managed to excite dissatisfaction on both sides, his unpopularity is fairly to be attributed to his reasonable and moderate views. During the war he was attached as chaplain to the army commanded by Sir Ralph Hopton in the West of England, and took part in the famous defence of Basing House, when Sir William Waller and the Parliamentary army were forced to abandon the siege. During his campaigning he industriously collected material for his most popular work, The Worthies of England and Wales (1662), which, however, was not published until after his death. During the Commonwealth he officiated at Waltham Abbey; at the Restoration he recovered his benefices, and was appointed chaplain extraordinary to the King. Posterity has associated Fuller's name with his Worthies rather than with his Church History (1655); but this and his sermons exhibit all those peculiarities of style which made him one of the most singular writers of the age. His History of Cambridge (1655) too must not be forgotten. His enthusiasm as an antiquarian led him to write the history of his own University, and his work has, ever since, remained a storehouse of phrase and anecdote upon whose treasures every succeeding writer has had to draw. His writings are eminently amusing, not only from the immense number of curious and anecdotic details which they contain, but also from the odd and frequently profound reflections suggested by these very details. The Worthies contains biographical notices of eminent Englishmen, in connection with the different counties, and furnishes an inexhaustible treasure of curious stories and observations. But whatever subject Fuller treats, he places it in so many new and unexpected lights, and introduces, Fuller's pic to illustrate it, so many fresh and ingenious remarks turesqueness. that the reader's attention is incessantly kept alive. He was a man of a pleasant and jovial as well as an ingenious turn of mind; there is no sourness or asceticism in his way of thinking; he lights up the gravest and most unattractive passages with flashes of fancy, and, as frequently happens in men of a lively disposition, the sparkle of his wit is warmed by a glow of sympathy and tenderness. His learning was very extensive and very minute, and he drew from out-of-the-way and neglected corners of reading illustrations which give the mind a pleasant shock of novelty. One great source of his picturesqueness is his frequent use of antithesis; in his style antithesis is not what it frequently becomes in other authors, Dr. Johnson for example, a bare opposition of words, but is the juxta position of apparently discordant ideas, from whose sudden contact flashes forth the spark of wit or the embodiment of some original conception. The shock of his antithetical oppositions is as creative as the action of a His use of galvanic battery. He has been accused of levity in and simile. intermingling ludicrous images with serious matter, antithesis but these images are the reflection of his own cheerful, ingenious, and amiable nature; and, though their oddity may sometimes excite a smile, it is a smile which is never incompatible with serious feeling. He is said to have possessed an almost supernatural quickness of memory, yet he has given many precepts guarding against the abuse of that faculty; in the same way, he has shown that wit and ingenuity may go very well hand in hand with lofty morality and deep feeling. In a word, Fuller was an essentially wise and learned humorist with no less singularity of genius than Sir Thomas Browne, and with less than Browne's abstract indifference to ordinary human interests. JEREMY § 4. But by far the greatest theological writer of the Anglican Church at this period was JEREMY TAYLOR. He was probably of a good but decayed family, but his father was a barber at Cambridge, where he was born. He TAYLOR received a sound education at the free grammar (1613-1667): his life. school which Dr. Perse had recently founded in Cambridge, and afterwards, as scholar and fellow of Caius College, became conspicuous for his talents and learning. He took Holy Orders, in 1633, at an unusually early age, and, at a sermon which he preached before Archbishop Laud, his youthful appearance and his "graceful and pleasant air " are said to have so attracted the Primate's notice that Taylor soon found himself one of his chaplains, and was presented with a fellowship at All Souls' College, Oxford. His career during the Civil War bears some resemblance to Fuller's, but he stood higher in the favour of the Cavalier party and the Court. He served as chaplain in the Royalist army, and was taken prisoner in 1644 at an action fought under the walls of Cardigan Castle; but he confesses that on this occasion, and on others which brought him into the hands of the Parliament, he was treated with generosity and indulgence. When the King's cause grew desperate, Taylor was in London, and Charles, on taking leave of him, made him a present of his watch. Taylor then placed himself under the protection of his friend the Earl of Carbery, and resided for some time at his seat of Golden Grove in Carmarthenshire. Taylor was married twice; first (1639) to a certain Phoebe Langsdale, who died in 1651, and afterwards, about 1655, to Joanna Bridges, who was reputed, without much foundation, to have been a natural daughter of Charles I. His second wife brought him a small fortune, but he was very unhappy in his children. During his sojourn at Golden Grove, Taylor kept a school, and continued to take an active part in the religious controversies of the day. The opinions which he expressed were naturally distasteful to the dominant party, and, on at least three occasions, subjected him to imprisonment and sequestrations at the hands of the Government. In 1654 and 1655, for example, he was incarcerated twice for a short time in Chepstow Castle. In 1658 he migrated, with some hesitation and reluctance, to Ireland, where he was given a weekly lectureship at Lisburn, and lived at Portmore, near the banks of Lough Neagh and the seat of Lord Conway, his patron. At the Restoration his services were rewarded, not with the English bishopric which they deserved, but with the see of Down and Connor, to which Dromore was subsequently added. During the short time in which he held this preferment he was an example of the brightest qualities that can adorn the office of a bishop. He died at Lisburn in 1667; his last illness was a fever. He was buried in Dromore Cathedral, which he had rebuilt, and left behind him a reputation, not merely for eloquence, but for courtesy, charity, and zeal in the discharge of his episcopal duties. Taylor's controversial § 5. Taylor's works are very numerous and their subjects are very different; we will therefore content ourselves with mentioning the principal of them, and will then endeavour to give a general appreciation of his genius. As a controversialist, his best known work is the Discourse works. of the Liberty of Prophesying (1646), which must be understood to refer to the general profession of religious principles and the right of all Christians to toleration in the exercise of their worship. This book is the first complete and systematic defence of the great principle of religious toleration. Taylor's aim is to show how contrary it is, not only to the spirit of Christianity, but even to the true interests of government, to interfere with the profession and practice of religious bodies. Of course the argument, although its application is universal, was intended by Taylor to secure indulgence for the Church of England, once dominant, but then proscribed and persecuted by the violence of sectarians. His Apology for Fixed and Set Forms of Worship (1649) was an elaborate defence of the stately ritual and liturgy of the same Church. Among his disciplinary and practical works the longest is the very elaborate and quaint life of Christ, published under the title of The Great "The Great Exemplar (1649), in which the details scattered Exemplar" (1649). through the four Gospels and the Fathers are coordinated into one continuous narrative. Each chapter is followed by one or two dissertations upon points of practical religion arising out of it; and these, although long and often rambling, are always eminently picturesque. Their subjects cover very much the same ground as Living Taylor's most popular work, the two wonderful treatises on The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and on The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), which mutually correspond to and "Holy and "Holy complete each other, forming an institute of Christian life and conduct adapted to every conceivable circumstance and relation of human existence. This devotional work has enjoyed, among the more intellectual type of English Churchmen, a popularity superior to that of any other religious manual; its use in every condition of life is so apparent, and the practical piety which it recommends receives so much ornament from the fine, solid style of the treatise, that one cannot wonder at its immortality. The least admirable of Taylor's numerous writings, and the only instance in which he went astray from his usual tone of courtesy and fairness, is his Ductor Dubitantium (1660), a manual dealing with Taylor's casuistry questions of casuistry. His sermons are very numer and sermons. ous, and are among the most eloquent, learned, and powerful in the whole range of Christian religious literature. As in his character, so in his writings, Taylor is the ideal Anglican priest, learned, well skilled in theology and the writings of the Fathers, and combining with his consummate erudition an extremely practical simplicity and fervour. § 6. Taylor's style is undoubtedly overcharged with learning and marked by that abuse and inaccuracy of quotation which disfigures a great deal of the prose of the age, but its eloquence it is always uniformly magnificent. His materials His style: are drawn from the whole extent of profane as well and melody. as sacred literature, and are fused together into a rich and gorgeous whole by the fire of a matchless imagination. No prose is more melodious than that of this great divine; his periods, although often immeasurably long, and evolving, in a series of subordinate clauses and illustrations, a train of images and comparisons, one springing out of another, roll on with a soft and mighty swell which has something of the enchantment of verse. He has been called by the great critic Jeffrey "the most Shakespearean of our great divines," but it would be more appropriate to compare him with Spenser. He has the same pictorial fancy, the same voluptuous and languishing harmony of style. If he can in any respect be with Spenser Comparison likened to Shakespeare, it is, first, in the vividness and Shakeof intellect which leads him to follow digressively the speare. numerous ideas that spring up as he writes and often lead him apparently far away from his point of departure, and secondly, his constant preference for drawing his illustrations from the simplest and most familiar objects, from the opening rose, the infant streamlet, "the little rings and wanton tendrils of the vine," the morning song of the soaring lark, or the "fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood." Like Shakespeare, too, he was as fully in touch with the terrible and sublime as with the tender and affecting aspect of things; and, if he could give an exquisite picture of married love, he could also write the stern and awful sentences of the sermon on Christ's Advent to Judgment. Nevertheless, with Spenser's sweetness he has occasionally something of Spenser's luscious and enervated languor. The atmosphere of his work is close and easily satiates the reader. He had studied the Fathers so intensely that he had become infected with something of the lavish and Oriental imagery which abounds in many of those great writers-some of them, it must be remembered, Oriental not only in their style but also in their origin. Taking his personal character and his writings together, Jeremy Taylor may be called the English Fénelon; but, in venturing to make this parallel, we must not forget that each of these excellent writers and admirable men possessed the characteristic features of his respective country. Fénelon's writing, like Taylor's, is distinguished by a certain sweetness, which, nevertheless, is closely allied to the neat, clear, precise expression habitual to French authors and derived, not only from the Latin origin of the language, but from the continual preference in France for the imitation of antique models. Taylor, on the other hand, owes his share of the same quality to that rich and poetic susceptibility to natural beauty which gives so matchless a colour to the English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. § 7. There is a natural temptation to compare Taylor with Bunyan-the great Royalist divine, the master of idealistic prose and its celestial harmonies, the scholar and prelate, Puritan with the chief of the Puritan theologians, the unlearned writers. observer of mankind and writer for the people, the master of clear, practical, incisive sentences. The two, at all events in their thought and personal condition, are acutely opposed to each other, and yet meet on the common ground of their spirituality and their love of Christ. Milton and Bunyan, the chief Puritan writers, will be discussed in subsequent chapters, but a few words may now be added respecting some of the more remarkable divines of their party. Baxter demands a place in the history of the period, and, with him, George Fox, the fanatical founder of the sect of the Quakers, together with his more cultivated, yet not less earnest follower, William Penn, and Barclay, who defended with the arms of learning and argument a system originally founded by half frantic enthusiasm. RICHARD BAXTER, born at Rowton in Shropshire, took Holy Orders in the Church of England, and won a great RICHARD (1615-1691). reputation by his parochial work at Kidderminster ; but, after the Act of Uniformity was passed, he left the Church and became a Presbyterian. Few authors have been so prolific as he; the multitude of his tracts and religious works almost defies computation. He was remarkable for his consistency and uprightness. During the Civil War he preserved his loyalty to the King, while approving the claims of the Parliament; and, after the Restoration, he refused Clarendon's offer of the see of Hereford. From the time of his secession until the Revolution of 1688 he suffered unrelenting persecution, and was tried for libel before the brutal |