poet of the secondary order, when regarded in connection with Cow ley, one work of his, Cooper's Hill, will always occupy an important place in any account of the English Literature of the seventeenth century. This place it owes not only to its specific merits, but also in no mean degree to the circumstance that this poem was the first work in a peculiar department which English writers afterwards cultivated with great success, and which is, I believe, almost exclusively confined to our lit erature. This department is what may be called local or topographic poetry, and in it the writer chooses some individual scene as the object round which he is to accumulate his descriptive or contemplative passages. Denham selected for this purpose a beautiful spot near Richmond on the Thames, and in the description of the scene itself, as well as in the reflections it suggests, he has risen to a noble elevation. Four lines, indeed, in which he expresses the hope that his own verse may possess the qualities which he attributes to the Thames, will be quoted again and again as one of the finest and most felicitous passages of verse in any language.

§ 8. One of the most accomplished and influential writers of the period was ABRAHAM COWLEY (1618-1667). He exhibits one of the most perfect types of the ideal man of letters. He was a remarkable instance of intellectual precocity, for he is said to have published his first poems, filled with enthusiasm by the Fairy Queen of Spenser, when only thirteen years of age. He received a very complete and learned education, partly at Oxford, and afterwards, when obliged by religious and political troubles to leave that academy, in the sister University of Cambridge; and he early acquired and long retained among his contemporaries the reputation of being one of the best scholars and most distinguished poets of his age. During the earlier part of his life he had been confidentially employed, both in England and in France, in the service of Charles I. and his queen, and on attaining middle age he determined to put in execution the philosophical project he had long fondly cherished, of living in rural and lettered retirement. He was disappointed in obtaining such a provision as he thought his services had deserved; but receiving a grant of some crown leases producing a moderate income, he quitted London and went to reside near Chertsey. But his dreams of ease and tranquillity were not fulfilled; he was involved in continual squabbles with the tenants, from whom he could extort no rents; and he speaks with constant querulousness of the hostility and vexations to which he was subjected. He died of a fever caused by imprudence and excess, but not before he had learned the melancholy truth that annoyances and vexations pursue us even into the recesses of rural obscurity.

Cowley is highly regarded among the writers of his time both as a poet and an essayist. Immense and multifarious learning, well digested by reflection and polished into brilliancy by taste and sensibility, renders his prose works, in which he frequently intermingles passages of verse, reading little less delightful than the fascinating pages of Montaigne. Cowley, like Montaigne, possesses the charm arising from the

intimate union between reading and reflection, between curious erudition and original speculation, the quaintness of the scholar and the practical knowledge of the man of the world. There are few writers so substantial as Cowley; few whose productions possess that peculiar attraction which grows upon the reader as he becomes older and more contemplative. As a poet, the reputation of Cowley, immense in his ɔwn day, has much diminished, which is to be attributed to that abuse. of intellectual ingenuity, that passion for learned, far-fetched, and recondite illustrations which was to a certain extent the vice of his age. Hel as very little passion or depth of sentiment; and in his love-verses a kind of composition then thought obligatory on all who were ambitious of the name of poet- he substitutes the play of the intellect for the unaffected outpouring of the feelings. He was deeply versed both in Greek and Latin literature, and his imitations, paraphrases, and translations show perfect knowledge of his originals and great mastery over the resources of the English language. He translated the Odes of Anacreon, and attempted to revive the boldness, the picturesqueness, and the fire of the Pindaric poetry; but his odes have only an external resemblance with those of the "Theban Eagle." They have the irregularity of form-only an apparent irregularity in the case of the Greek originals, which, it must be remembered, were written to be accompanied by that Greek music of whose structure nothing is now known; but they have not that intense and concentrated fire which burns with an inextinguishable ardor, like the product of some chemical combustion, in the great Baotian lyrist. Cowley seems always on the watch to seize some ingenious and unexpected parallelism of ideas or images; and when the illustration is so found, the shock of surprise which the reader feels is rather akin to a flash of wit than to an electric stroke of genius. Cowley lived at the moment when the revolution inaugurated by Bacon was beginning to produce its first fruits. The Royal Society, then recently founded, was astonishing the world, and astonishing its own members, by the immense horizon opening before the bold pioneers of the Inductive Philosophy. In this mighty movement Cowley deeply sympathized; and perhaps the finest of his lyric compositions are those in which, with a grave and welladorned eloquence, he proclaims the genius and predicts the triumphs of Bacon and his disciples in physical science.

One long epic poem of great pretension Cowley meditated but left unfinished. This is the Davideis, the subject of which is the sufferings and glories of the King of Israel. But this work is now completely neglected. Biblical personages and events have rarely, with the solitary and sublime exception of Milton, been transported with success out of the majestic language of the Scripture; and it may be maintained, without much fear of contradiction, that the rhymed heroic couplet the measure employed by Cowley - is not a form of versification capable of supporting the attention of the reader through a lofty epic narrative. The genius of Cowley was far more lyric than epic;

and in his shorter compositions he exerted that influence upon the style of English poetry which tended very much, during nearly two centu ries, to modify it very perceptibly, and which is especially traceable in the writings of Dryden, Pope, and generally in the next succeeding generations.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

DR. HENRY KING (1591-1669), chaplain to James I., and afterwards Bishop of Chichester, wrote | chiefly religious poetry. His thoughts are elevated, and his language is choice. His style is not free from the conceits so fashionable in the writers of MRS. KATHERINE PHILIPS (1631-1664), a Cardithis age, but the little fancies he indulges are chaste ganshire lady, known by the name of Orinda, exand full of beauty. ceedingly popular as a writer with her contempo JOHN CLEVELAND (1613-1658), son of a Leices-raries. Her style is more free than that of most of terchire clergyman, distinguished himself as a col- the poets of the age from quaintness and conceit.

CHAPTER X.

THEOLOGICAL WRITERS OF THE CIVIL WAR AND THE COMMONWEALTH.

1. Theological Writers. JOHN HALES and WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. § 2 SIR THOMAS BROWNE. § 3. THOMAS FULLER. § 4. JEREMY TAYLOR. His Life. § 5. His Liberty of Prophesying and other works. 6. His style com pared with Spenser. §7. RICHARD BAXTER. The Quakers: Fox, PENN, and BARCLAY.

§ 1. THE Civil War, which led to the temporary overthrow of the ancient monarchy of England, was in many respects a religious as well as a political contest. It was a struggle for liberty of faith at least as much as for liberty of civil government. The prose literature of this time, therefore, as well as of a period extending considerably beyond it, exhibits a strong religious or theological character. The blood of martyrs, it has been said, is the seed of the Church; and the alternate triumphs and persecutions, through which passed both the Anglican Church and the multiplicity of rival sects which now arose, naturally developed to the highest degree both the intellectual powers and the Christian energies of their adherents. The most glorious outburst of theological eloquence which the Church of England has exhibited, in the writings of Jeremy Taylor, Barrow, and the other great Anglican Fathers, was responded to by the appearance, in the ranks of the sectaries, of many remarkable men, some hardly inferior in learning and genius to the leaders whose doctrines they opposed, while others, with a ruder yet more burning enthusiasm, were the founders of dissenting communions, as in the case of the Quakers.

JOHN HALES (1584-1656), surnamed "the ever-memorable John Hales," was a man who enjoyed among his contemporaries an immense reputation for the vastness of his learning and the acuteness of his wit. He was born in 1584, and in the earlier part of his life had acquired, by travel and diplomatic service in foreign countries, a vast amount not only of literary knowledge, but practical acquaintance with men and affairs: he afterwards retired to the learned obscurity of a fef.owship of Eton College, where he passed the sad and dangerous years filled with civil contention. During part of this time his writings and opinions rendered him so obnoxious to the dominant party that a price was set upon his head, and he was obliged to hide, being at the same time reduced to the extremest privations. He for some time subsisted by the sale of his books. He died in 1656, and left behind him the reputation of one of the most solid and yet acutest intellects that his country had produced. The greater part of his writings are controversial, treating on the politico-religious questions that then agitated

men's minds. He had been present at the Synod of Dort, and has given an interesting account of the questions debated in that assembly. While attending its sittings as an agent for the English Church he was converted from the Calvinistic opinions he had hitherto held to those of the Episcopalian divines. Both in his controversial writings and in his sermons he exhibits a fine example of that rich yet chastened eloquence which characterizes the great English divines of the seventeenth century, and which was carried to the highest pitch of gorgeous inagnificence by Taylor and of majestic grandeur by Barrow.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH (1602-1644), also an eminent defender of Protestantism against the Church of Rome, was converted to the Roman Catholic faith while studying at Oxford, and went to the Jesuits' College at Douay. But he subsequently returned to Oxford, renounced his new faith, and published in 1637 his celebrated work against Catholicism, entitled The Religion of the Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, in reply to a treatise by a Jesuit, named Knott, who had maintained that unrepenting Protestants could not be saved. "In the long parenthetical periods," observes Mr. Hallam, " as in those of other old English writers, in his copiousness, which is never empty or tautological, there is an inartificial eloquence springing from strength of intellect and sincerity of feeling that cannot fail to impress the reader. But his chief excellence is the close reasoning which avoids every dangerous admission, and yields to no ambiguousness of language. He perceived and maintained with great courage, considering the times in which he wrote and the temper of those whom he was not unwilling to keep as friends, his favorite tenet, that all things necessary to be believed are clearly laid down in Scripture. . . . In later times his book obtained a high reputation; he was called the immortal Chillingworth; he was the favorite of all the moderate and the latitudinarian writers, of Tillotson, Locke, and Warburton."

§ 2. The writings of SIR THOMAS Browne (1605-1682), though not exclusively theological, belong, chronologically as well as by their style and manner, to this department. Both as a man and a writer this is one of the most peculiar and eccentric of our great prose-authors; and the task of giving a clear appreciation of him is unusually difficult. He was an exceedingly learned man, and passed the greater part of his life in practising physic in the ancient city of Norwich. It should be remembered that the great provincial towns at that time had not been degraded to that insignificance to which the modern facility of intercourse has reduced them in relation to the Metropolis: they were then to many little capitals, possessing their society, their commercial activity, and their local physiognomy, and had not yet been swallowed up by the monster London. Browne was born in 1605, and his life was unusually prolonged, as he died in 1682. His writings are of a most miscellaneous character, ranging from observations on natural science to the most arduous subtleties of moral and metaphysical speculation. Among the most popular of his works are the treatise entitled Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial, and the Essays on Vulgar Errors, which bear