Andrew Marvell.

When upon the subject of Milton, I made mention of a certain poet who used to go and see him in his country retirement, and who was also assistant to him in his duties as Latin Secretary to the Council. This was Andrew Marvell,[74] a poet of so true a stamp, and so true a man, that it is needful to know something more of him.

He was son of a preacher at Kingston-upon-Hull (or, by metonomy, Hull) in the north of England. In a very singular way, the occasion of his father’s sudden death by drowning (if current tradition may be trusted) was also the occasion of the young poet’s entrance upon greatly improved worldly fortune.

The story of it is this, which I tell to fix his memory better in mind. Opposite his father’s home, on the other bank of the Humber, lived a lady with an only daughter, the idol of her mother. This daughter chanced to visit Hull, that she might be present at the baptism of one of Mr. Marvell’s children. A tempest came up before night, and the boatmen declared the crossing of the river to be dangerous; but the young lady, with girlish wilfulness insisted, notwithstanding the urgence of Mr. Marvell; who, finding her resolved, went with her; and the sea breaking over the boat both were lost. The despairing mother found what consolation she could in virtually adopting the young Andrew Marvell, and eventually bestowing upon him her whole fortune.

This opened a career to him which he was not slow to follow upon with diligence and steadiness. Well-taught, well-travelled, well-mannered, he went up to London, and was there befriended by those whose friendship insured success. He was liberal in his politics, beautifully tolerant in religious matters, kept a level head through the years of Parliamentary rule, and was esteemed and admired by both Puritans and Royalists. He used a sharp pen in controversy and wrote many pamphlets, some of which even now might serve as models for incisive speech; he was witty with the wittiest; was caustic, humorous; his pages adrip with classicisms; and he had a delicacy of raillery that amused, and a power of logic that smote heavily, where blows were in order. He was for a long time member of Parliament for Hull, and by his honesties of speech and pen, made himself so obnoxious to the political jackals about Charles’s court—that he was said to be in danger again and again of assassination; he finally died under strong (but unfounded) suspicion of poisoning.

Those who knew him described him as “of middling stature, strong set, roundish face, cherry-cheeked, hazel-eyed, brown-haired.”[75]

There are dainty poems of his, which should be read, and which are worth remembering. Take this, for instance, from his Garden, which was written by him first in Latin, and then rendered thus:

And this other bit, from his “Appleton House” (Nuneaton), still more full of rural spirit:

This is better than Rochester’s “Nothing,” and has no smack of Nell Gwynne or of Charles’s court.

Author of Hudibras.

It is altogether a different, and a far less worthy character that I now bring to the notice of the reader. The man is Samuel Butler,[76] and the book Hudibras—a jingling, doggerel poem, which at the time of its publication had very great vogue in London, and was the literary sensation of the hour in a court which in those same years[77] had received the great epic of Milton without any noticeable ripple of applause.

For myself, I have no great admiration for Hudibras, or for Mr. Samuel Butler. He was witty, and wise in a way, and coarse, and had humor; but he was of a bar-room stamp, and although he could make a great gathering of the court people stretch their sides with laughter, it does not appear that he had any high sense of honor, or much dignity of character.

Mr. Pepys (whose memoirs you have heard of, and of whom we shall have more to tell) says that he bought the book one day in the Strand because everybody was talking of it—which is the only reason a good many people have for buying books; and, he continues—that having dipped into it, without finding much benefit, he sold it next day in the Strand for half-price. But poor Mr. Pepys, in another and later entry, says, “I have bought Hudibras again; everybody does talk so much of it;” which is very like Mr. Pepys, and very like a good many other buyers of books.

Hudibras is, in fact, a great, coarse, rattling, witty lunge at the stiff-neckedness and the cropped heads of the Puritans, which the roistering fellows about the palace naturally enjoyed immensely. He calls the Presbyterians,

It is not worth while to tell the story of the poem—which, indeed, its author did not live to complete. Its fable was undoubtedly suggested by the far larger and worthier work of Cervantes; Hudibras and Ralpho standing in the place of the doughty Knight of La Mancha, and Sancho Panza; but there is a world between the two.

Hudibras had also the like honor of suggesting its scheme and measure and jingle to an early American poem—that of McFingal, by John Trumbull—in which our compatriot with less of wit and ribaldry, but equal smoothness, and rhythmic zest, did so catch the humor of the Butler work in many of his couplets that even now they pass muster as veritable parts of Hudibras.[78]

Samuel Butler was the son of a farmer, over in the pretty Worcestershire region of England; but there was in him little sense of charming ruralities; they never put their treasures into his verse. For sometime he was in the household of one of Cromwell’s generals,[79] who lived in a stately country-hall a little way out of Bedford; again, he filled some dependency at that stately Ludlow Castle on the borders of Wales—forever associated with the music of Milton’s “Comus.” It was after the Restoration that he budded out in his anti-Puritan lampoon; but though he pandered to the ruling prejudices of the time, he was not successful in his search for place and emoluments; he quarrelled with those who laughed loudest at his buffoonery and died neglected. His name is to be remembered as that of one of the noticeable men of this epoch, who wrote a poem bristling all through with coarse wit, and whose memory is kept alive more by the stinging couplets which have passed from his pen into common speech than by any high literary merit or true poetic savor. His chief work in verse must be regarded as a happy, witty extravaganza, which caused so riotous a mirth as to be mistaken for valid fame. The poem is a curio of letters—a specimen of literary bric-à-brac—an old, ingeniously enamelled snuff-box, with dirty pictures within the lid.

Samuel Pepys.

I had occasion just now to speak of the Pepys Diary, and promised later and further talk about its author, whom we now put in focus, and shall pour what light we can upon him.[80]

He was a man of fair personal appearance and great self-approval, the son of a well-to-do London tailor, and fairly educated; but the most piquant memorial of his life at Cambridge University is the “admonition”—which is of record—of his having been on one occasion “scandalously over-served with drink.” In his after life in London he escaped the admonitions; but not wholly the “over-service” in ways of eating and drinking.

Pepys was a not far-off kinsman of Lord Sandwich (whom he strongly resembled), and it was through that dignitary’s influence that he ultimately came into a very good position in connection with the Admiralty, where he was most intrepid in his examination of tar and cordage, and brought such close scrutiny to his duties as to make him an admirable official in the Naval Department under Charles II. For this service, however, he would never have been heard of, any more than another straightforward, plodding clerk; nor would he have been heard of for his book about naval matters, which you will hardly find in any library in the country. But he did write a Diary, which you will find everywhere.

It is a Diary which, beginning in 1660, the first of Charles’ reign, covers the ten important succeeding years; within which he saw regicides hung and quartered, and heard the guns of terrific naval battles with the Dutch, and braved all the horrors of the Great Plague from the day when he first saw house-doors with a red cross marked on them, and the words “Lord, have mercy on us!” to the time when ten thousand died in a week, and “little noise was heard, day or night, but tolling of bells.” Page after page of his Diary is also given to the great fire of the following year—from the Sunday night when he was waked by his maid to see a big light on the back side of Mark Lane, to the following Thursday when two-thirds of the houses and of the churches of London were in ashes.

But Pepys’ Diary is not so valued for its story of great events as for its daily setting down of little unimportant things—of the plays which he saw acted—of the dust that fell on the theatre-goers from the galleries—of what he bought, and what he conjectured, and what his wife said to him, and what new dresses she had, and how he slept comfortably through the sermon of Dr. So-and-So—just as you and I might have done—never having a thought either that his Diary would ever be printed. He wrote it, in fact, in a blind short-hand, which made it lie unnoticed and undetected for a great many years, until at last some prying Cambridge man unriddled his cipher and wrote out and published Pepys’ Diary to the world. And it is delightful; it is so true and honest, and straightforward, and gossipy; and it throws more light upon the every-day life in London in those days of the Restoration than all the other books ever written.

There have been other diaries which have historic value; there was Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,[81] with some humor and a lordly grace, who wrote a History of the Rebellion—more than half diary—with sentences as long as his pages; but it does not compare with Pepys’ for flashes of light upon the accidents of life. There was good, earnest, well-meaning John Evelyn,[82] who had a pretty place called Says-Court (inherited through his wife) down at Deptford—which Scott introduces as the residence of Essex in his story of Kenilworth—who had beautiful trees and flowers there which he greatly loved. Well, John Evelyn wrote a diary, and a very good one; with perhaps a better description of the great London fire of 1666 in it than you will find anywhere else; he gives us, too, a delightful memorial of his young daughter Mary—who read the Ancients, who spoke French and Italian, who sang like an angel, who was as gentle and loving as she was wise and beautiful—whose death “left him desolate;” but John Evelyn is silent upon a thousand points in respect to which Pepys bristles all over like a gooseberry bush. Dr. Burnet, too, wrote a History of his Own Times, bringing great scholarly attainments to its execution, and a tremendous dignity of authorship; and he would certainly have turned up his bishop’s nose at mention of Samuel Pepys; yet Pepys is worth a dozen of him for showing the life of that day. He is so simple; he is so true; he is so unthinking; he is the veriest photographer. Hear him for a little—and I take the passages almost at random:

And again:

Again:

Another day, having been to court, he says:

One more little extract and I have done:

Was there ever anything more ingenuous than that? How delightfully sure we are that such writing was never intended for publication!

The great charm of Mr. Pepys and all such diary writing is, that it gives us, by a hundred little gossipy touches, the actual complexion of the times. We have no conventional speech to wrestle with, in order to get at its meaning. The plain white lights of honesty and common-sense—so much better than all the rhetorical prismatic hues—put the actual situation before us; and we have an approach to that realism which the highest art is always struggling to reach. The courtiers in their great, fresh-curled wigs, strut and ogle and prattle before us. We scent the perfumed locks of Peter Lely’s ladies, and the eels frying in the kitchen. We see Mr. Samuel Pepys bowing to the Princess Henrietta, and know we shall hear of it if he makes a misstep in backing out of her august presence. How he gloats over that new plush, or moire-antique, that has just come home for his wife—cost four guineas—which price shocks him a little, and sends him to bed vexed, and makes him think he had better have kept by the old woollen stuff; but, next Lord’s day being bright, and she wearing it to St. Margaret’s or St. Giles’, where he watches her as she sits under the dull fire of the sermon—her face beaming with gratitude, and radiant with red ribbons—he relents, and softens, and is proud and glad, and goes to sleep! This Pepys stands a good chance to outlive Butler, and to outlive Burnet, and to outlive Clarendon, and to outlive John Evelyn.

I may add further to this mention of the old diarist, that at a certain period of his life he became suspected—and without reason—of complicity with the Popish plots (of whose intricacies you will get curious and graphic illustration in Peveril of the Peak); and poor Pepys had his period of prisonship like so many others in that day. He also became, at a later time, singularly enough, the President of the Royal Society of England—a Society formed in the course of Charles II.s’ reign, and which enrolled such men as Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton in its early days; and which now enrols the best and worthiest of England’s scientists.

I do not think they would elect such a man as Samuel Pepys for President now; yet it would appear that the old gentleman in his long wig and his new coat made a good figure in the chair, and looked wise, and used to have the members down informally at his rooms in York Building, where he made good cheer for them, and broached his best bin of claret. Nor should it be forgotten that Pepys had an appreciative ear for the melodies of Chaucer (like very few in his day), and spurred Dryden to the making of some of his best imitations.

When he died—it was in the early years of the eighteenth century—he left his books, manuscripts, and engravings, which were valuable, to Magdalen College, Cambridge; and there, as I said when we first came upon his name, his famous Diary, in short-hand, lay unheard of and unriddled for more than a hundred years.

A Scientist.

Science was making a push for itself in these times. Newton had discovered the law of gravitation before Charles II. died; the King himself was no bad dabbler in chemistry.

Robert Boyle, the son of an Earl, and with all moneyed appliances to help him, was one of the early promoters and founders of the Royal Society I spoke of; a noticeable man every way in that epoch of the Ethereges and the Buckinghams and the Gwynnes—devoting his fortune to worthy works; estimable in private life; dignified and serene; tall in person and spare—wearing, like every other well-born Londoner, the curled, long-bottomed wig of France, and making sentences in exposition of his thought which were longer and stiffer than his wigs. I give you a sample. He is discussing the eye, and wants to say that it is wonderfully constructed; and this is the way he says it:

What do you think of that for a sentence? If the Fellows of the Royal Society wrote much in that way (and the Honorable Boyle did a good deal), is it any wonder that they should have an exaggerated respect for a man who could express himself in the short, straight fashion in which Samuel Pepys wrote his Diary?

John Bunyan.

I have a new personage to bring before you out of this hurly-burly of the Restoration days, and what I have to say of him will close up our talk for this morning.

I think he did never wear a wig. Buckingham, who courted almost all orders of men, would not have honored him with a nod of recognition; nor would Bishop Burnet. I think even the amiable Dr. Tillotson, or the very liberal Dr. South, would have jostled away from him in a crowd, rather than toward him. Yet he was more pious than they; had more humor than Buckingham; and for imaginative power would outrank every man living in that day, unless we except the blind old poet Milton. You will guess easily the name I have in mind: it is John Bunyan.[83] Not a great name then; so vulgar a one indeed that—a good many years later—the amiable poet Cowper spoke of it charily. But it is known now and honored wherever English is spoken.

He was born at Elstow, a mile away from Bedford, amid fat green meadows, beside which in early May long lines of hawthorn hedges are all abloom. You will go straight through that pleasant country in passing from Liverpool to London, if you take, as I counsel you to do, the Midland Railway; and you will see the lovely rural pictures which fell under Bunyan’s eye as he strolled along beside the hedge-rows, from Elstow—a mile-long road—to the grammar-school at Bedford.

The trees are beautiful thereabout; the grass is as green as emerald; old cottages are mossy and picturesque; gray towers of churches hang out a great wealth of ivy boughs; sleek Durham cattle and trim sheep feed contentedly on the Bedford meadows, and rooks, cawing, gather into flocks and disperse, and glide down singly, or by pairs, into the tops of trees that shade country houses.

The aspects have not changed much in all these years; even the cottage of Bunyan’s tinker father is still there, with only a new front upon it. The boy received but little schooling, and that at hap-hazard; but he got much religious teaching from the elders of the Baptist chapel, or from this or that old Puritan villager. A stern doctrinal theology overshadowed all his boyish years, full of threatening, fiery darts, and full of golden streaks of promise.

He was a badish boy—as most boys are; a goodly quantum of original sin in him; he says, with his tender conscience, that he was “very bad;” a child of the devil; swearing, sometimes; playing “three old cat” very often; picking flowers, I dare say, or idly looking at the rooks of a Sunday. Yet I would engage that the Newhaven High School would furnish thirty or forty as bad ones as John Bunyan any day in the year. But he makes good resolves; breaks them again; finally is convicted, but falters; marries young (and, as would seem, foolishly, neither bride nor groom being turned of twenty), and she bringing for sole dower not so much as one dish or spoon, but only two good books—The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety.

Even before this he had been drafted for service in the battles which were aflame in England—doubtless fighting for the Commonwealth, as most of his biographers[84] allege. Very probably, too, he was under orders of that Sir Samuel Luke, who lived near by, and who—as I have mentioned—was the butt of much of Samuel Butler’s Hudibrastic satire.

Next we hear of him as preacher—not properly sanctioned even by the non-conforming authorities—but opening that intense religious talk of his upon whatever and whomsoever would come to hear. Even his friendly Baptist brothers look doubtfully upon his irregularities; but he sees only the great golden cross before him in the skies, and hears only the crackle of the flames in the nethermost depths below. He is bound to save, in what way he can, those who will be saved, and to warn, in fearfullest way, those who will be damned.

Hundreds came to hear this working-man who was so dreadfully in earnest, and who had no more respect for pulpits or liturgies than for preaching-places in the woods. It was not strange that he offended against non-conformist acts, nor strange that, after accession of Charles II. he came to imprisonment for his illegal pieties. This prison-life lasted for some twelve years, in the which he still preached to those who would listen within prison walls, and read his Bible, and wrought at tagged laces (still a great industry of that district) for the support of his family, a separation from whom—most of all from his poor blind daughter Mary—was, he says, like “pulling the flesh from his bones.” Over and over in that reach of prison-life he might have been free if he would have promised to abstain from his irregular preachments, or if he would go over seas to America. But he would not; he could not forbear to warn whomsoever might hear, of the fiery pit, and of the days when the heavens should be opened. He loved not the thought of over-ocean crossing; his duties lay near; and with all his radicalism he never outlived a gracious liking for British kingly traditions, and for such ranking of men and powers as belonged to Levitical story.

Finally, under Charles’ Declaration of Indulgence (1672), which was intended more for the benefit of ill-used Romanists than for Non-conformists, Bunyan’s prison-doors were laid open, and he went to his old work of preaching in public places. There may have been, as his more recent biographers intimate, a later (1675) short imprisonment;[85] and this, or some portion of the previous prison-life, was certainly passed in that ancient Bedford jail, which, only a few years since, was standing on Bedford bridge, hanging over the waters of the river Ouse—whose slow current we shall find flowing again in our story of William Cowper.

And if the whole weight of tradition is not to be distrusted, it was in this little prison over the river, where passers-by might shout a greeting to him—that John Bunyan fell into the dreamy fashioning of that book which has made his name known everywhere, and which has as fixed a place in the great body of English literature as Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” or Spenser’s Faery Queen—I mean the Pilgrim’s Progress.

But how is it, the reader may ask, that this tinker’s son, who had so far forgotten his school learning that his wife had to teach him over again to read and write—how is it that he makes a book which takes hold on the sympathies of all Christendom, and has a literary quality that ranks it with the first of allegories?[86]

Mr. Pepys told plainly what we wanted him to tell; but he had nothing but those trifles which give a color to every-day life to tell of. If he had undertaken to make a story of a page long, involving imaginative powers, he would have made a failure of it; and if he had tried to be eloquent he would have given himself away deplorably. But this poor brazier (as he calls himself in his last will), with not one-fourth of his knowledge of the world, with not one-twentieth of his learning (bald as the old diarist was in this line), with not one-hundredth part of his self-confidence, makes this wonderful and charming book of which we are talking. How was it?

Well, there was, first, the great compelling and informing Christian purpose in him: he was of the Bible all compact; every utterance of it was a vital truth to him; the fire and the brimstone were real; the Almighty fatherhood was real; the cross and the passion were real; the teeming thousands were real, who hustled him on either side and who were pressing on, rank by rank, in the broad road that leads to the City of Destruction. The man who believes such things in the way in which John Bunyan believed them has a tremendous motive power, which will make itself felt in some shape.

Then that limited schooling of his had kept him to a short vocabulary of the sharpest and keenest and most telling words. Rhetoric did not lead him astray after flowers; learning did not tempt him into far-fetched allusions; literary habit had not spoiled his simplicities. And again, and chiefest of all, there was a great imaginative power, coming—not from schools, nor from grammar teachings—but coming as June days come, and which, breathing over his pages with an almost divine afflatus, lifted their sayings into the regions of Poetry.

Therefore and thereby it is that he has fused his thought into such shape as takes hold on human sympathies everywhere, and his characters are all live creatures. All these two hundred and twenty years last past the noble Great-heart has been thwacking away at Giant Grim and thundering on the walls of Doubting Castle with blows we hear; and poor, timid Christian has been just as many years, in the sight of all of us, making his way through pitfalls and quagmires and Vanity Fairs—hard pressed by Apollyon, and belabored by Giant Despair—on his steady march toward the Delectable Mountains and the river of Death, and the shining shores which lie Beyond.

CHAPTER VI.

There were some unsavory names which crept into the opening of our last chapter; but they were sweet in the nostrils of Charles II. Of such were Buckingham, Rochester, Etherege, Dorset, and the Castelmaine. And we made a little moral counterpoise by the naming of Baxter’s Saints’ Rest, and of Tillotson, and of the healthful, noble verse of Andrew Marvell, by which we wished to impress upon our readers the fact that the whole world of England in that day was not given over to French court-dances and to foul-mouthed poets; but that the Puritan leaven was still working, even in literary ways, and that there were men of dignity, knowledge, culture, and rank, who never bowed down to such as the pretty Duchess of Portsmouth.

We had our glimpse of that witty buffoon Samuel Butler, who made clever antics in rhyme; and I think, we listened with a curious eagerness to what Samuel Pepys had to say of his play-going, and of the black patches with which his pretty wife set forth her beauty. Then came Bunyan, with his great sermonizing in barns and woods, and that far finer sermonizing which in the days of his jailhood took shape in the immortal story of Christian and Great-heart. He died over a grocer’s shop, in Snow Hill, London (its site now all effaced by the great Holborn Viaduct), whither he had gone on a preaching bout in the year 1688, only a few months before James II. was driven from his throne. It is worth going out by the City Road—only a short walk from Finsbury Square—to the cemetery of Bunhill Fields, where Bunyan was buried—to see the marble figure of the tinker preacher stretched upon the monument modern admirers have built, and to see Christian toiling below, with his burden strapped to his back.

Three Good Prosers.

In the course of that old Pepys’ Diary—out of which we had our regalement—there is several times mention of Thomas Fuller;[87] among others this:

Honest Pepys! Shrewd Dr. Fuller, and a man not to be forgotten! He was a “Cavalier parson” through the Civil-War days; was born down in Northamptonshire in the same town where John Dryden, twenty-three years later, first saw the light. He was full of wit, and full of knowledges; people called him—as so many have been and are called—“a walking library;” and his stout figure was to be seen many a time, in the Commonwealth days, striding through Fleet Street, and by Paul’s Walk, to Cheapside. There is quaint humor in his books, and quaintness and aptness of language. Coleridge says he was “the most sensible and least prejudiced great man of his time.”

Sir Thomas Browne,[88] a doctor, and the author of the Religio Medici and Urn-Burial, was another delightful author of the Civil-War times, whose life reached almost through the reign of Charles II.; yet he was not a war man—in matter of kings or of churches. Serenities hung over him in all those times wherein cannon thundered, and traitors (so called) were quartered, and cathedrals despoiled. He loved not great cities. London never magnetized him; but after his thorough continental travel and his doctorate at Leyden, he planted himself in that old, crooked-streeted city of Norwich, in Norfolk; and there, under the shadow of the stupendous mound and Keep (which date from the early Henrys) he built up a home, of which he made a museum—served the sick—reared a family of ten children, and followed those meditative ways of thought which led him through sepulchral urns, and the miracles of growth, and the Holy Scriptures, away from all the “decrees of councils and the niceties of the schools” to the altitudes he reaches in the Religio Medici.

I must excerpt something to show the humors of this Norwich doctor, and it shall be this:

If there were no other reason for our love of the best writings of Sir Thomas Browne, it would be for this—that in some scarce distinguishable way he has inoculated our “Elia” of a later day with something very like his own quaint egoisms and as quaint garniture of speech. How Charles Lamb must have enjoyed him, and joyed in the meditation—of a twilight—on the far-reaching, mystic skeins of thought which so keen a reader would ravel out from the stores of the Urn-Burial! And with what delighted sanction the later writer permits, here and there, the tender solemnities of the elder to shine through and qualify his own periods; not through imitativeness, conscious or unconscious, but because the juices from the mellow fruitage of the old physician have been quietly assimilated by the stuttering clerk of the India House, and so his thought burgeons—by very necessity—into that kindred leafage of phrase which lifts and sways in the gentle breezes of his always gentle purpose.

Another name, of a man far less lovable, but perhaps more widely known, is that of Sir William Temple.[89] He was of excellent family, born in London, highly cultivated, and lived all through the reign of Charles II., and much beyond. He represented England, in diplomatic ways, often upon the Continent, and with great success; he negotiated the so-called Triple Alliance; he also brought about that royal marriage of the daughter of the Duke of York (afterward James II.), with William of Orange, and so gave to England that royal couple, William and Mary. He had great dignity; he had wealth; a sort of earlier Edward Everett—as polished and cold and well-meaning and fastidious; looking rather more to the elegance of his speech than to the burden of it; always making show of Classicism—nothing if not correct; cautious; keeping well out of harm’s way, and all pugnacious expressions of opinion; courteous to strong Churchmen; courteous to Papists; bowing low to my Lady Castelmaine; very considerate of Cromwellians who had power; moulding his habit and speech so as to show no ugly angles of opinion anywhere, but only such convenient roundness as would roll along life’s level easily to the very end. You will not be in the way of encountering much that he wrote, though he had the reputation in those days, and long after, of writing excellently well. “He was the first writer,” said Johnson, “who gave cadence to English prose.”

Among his essays is one on “Ancient and Modern Learning,” showing the pretensions of a scholastic man, whose assumptions brought about a controversy into which Richard Bentley, a rare young critic, entered, and out of which grew eventually Swift’s famous Battle of the Books.

Temple also wrote on gardens, with a safer swing for his learning and his taste; traces of what his taste was in such matters are still discernible about his old home of Moor Park, in Surrey. It lies some forty miles from London, on the way to Southampton and the Isle of Wight, near the old town of Farnham, where there is a venerable bishop’s palace worth the seeing; a mile away one may find the terraces of Sir William’s old garden, and the mossy dial under which he ordered his heart to be buried. Another interest, moreover, attaches to these Moor Park gardens, which will make them doubly worth a visit. On their terraces and under their trees used to pace and meditate that strange creature Jonathan Swift, who was in his young days a protégé or secretary of Sir William Temple; and there, too, in the same shade, and along the same terraces, used to stroll and meditate in different mood, poor Mistress Hester Johnson, the “Stella” of Swift’s life-long love-dream.

We shall meet these people again. But I leave Sir William Temple, commending to your attention a delightful little essay of Charles Lamb, in his volume of Elia, upon “The Genteel Style in Writing.” It gives a fair though flattering notion of the ways of Sir William’s life, and of the way of his work.

John Dryden.

Of course we know John Dryden’s name a great deal better than we know Sir William Temple’s; better, perhaps, than we know any other name of that period. And yet do we know his poems well? Are there any that you specially cherish and doat upon? any that kindle your sympathies easily into blaze? any that give electric expression to your own poetic yearnings, and put you upon quick and enchanting drift into that empyrean of song whereto the great poets decoy us? I doubt if there is much of Dryden which has this subtle influence upon you; certainly it has not upon me.

There are the great Cecilia odes, which hold their places in the reading-books, with their