the translators, and was not needlessly deviated from, they have evidently modernized its style, not perhaps quite up to that of their own day, but so far, we apprehend, as to exclude nearly all words and phrases that had then passed out even of common and familiar use. In that theological age, indeed, few forms of expression found in the Bible could well have fallen altogether into desuetude, although some may have come to be less apt and significant than they once were, or than others that might now be substituted for them. But we believe the new translators, in any changes they made, were very careful to avoid the employment of any mere words of yesterday, the glare of whose recent coinage would have contrasted offensively with the general antique colour of diction which they desired to retain. If ever their version were to be revised, whether to improve the rendering of some passages by the lights of modern criticism, or to mend some hardness and intricacy of construction in others, it ought to be retouched in the same spirit of affectionate veneration for the genius and essential characteristics of its beautiful diction; and a good rule to be laid down might be, that no word should be admitted in the improved renderings which was not in use in the age when the translation was originally made. The language was then abundantly rich enough to furnish all the words that could be wanted for the purpose.

THEOLOGICAL WRITERS:-JAMES I.; BISHOP ANDREWS; DONNE ; HALL; HOOKER.

Besides the translation of the Bible, the portion of the English literature of the present period that is theological is very great in point of quantity, and a part of it also possesses distinguished claims to notice in a literary point of view. Religion was the great subject of speculation and controversy in this country throughout the entire space of a century and a half between the Reformation and the Revolution; and nothing can more strikingly illustrate the universality of the interest that was now taken in theological controversy, than the fact that both the kings whose reigns fill the first half of the seventeenth century have left us a considerable quantity of literary manufacture of their own, and that it is almost all theological. The writings

of Charles I. will be noticed afterwards. King James, whose works were collected and published in a folio volume in 1616, under the care of Dr. Mountague, bishop of Winchester, had given to the world what he called a Fruitful Meditation upon part of the Apocalypse, “"in form of ane sermon," so early as the year 1588, when he was only a youth of two-and-twenty. Indeed, according to Bishop Mountague's account, this performance was "written by his majesty before he was twenty years of age." Soon after, on the destruction of the Spanish Armada, he produced another Meditation on certain verses of one of the chapters of the First Book of Chronicles. Among his subsequent publications are Meditations on the Lord's Prayer and on some verses of the 27th chapter of St. Matthew. And nearly all his other works,—his Dæmonologie, first published in 1597; his True Law of Free Monarchies, 1598; his Basilicon Doron, or advice to his son Prince Henry, 1599; his Apology for the Oath of Allegiance, 1605,-are, in the main, theological treatises. It is scarcely necessary to add that they are of little or no value, either theological or literary; though they are curious as illustrating the intellectual and moral character of James, who was certainly a person of no depth either of learning or of judgment, though of some reading in the single province of theology, and also of considerable shrewdness and readiness, and an inexhaustible flow of words, which he mistook for eloquence and genius.

One of the most eminent preachers, perhaps the most eminent, of the age of Elizabeth and James, was Dr. Lancelot Andrews, who, after having held the sees of Chichester and Ely, died bishop of Winchester in 1626. Bishop Andrews was one of the translators of the Bible, and is the author, among other works, of a folio volume of Sermons published, by direction of Charles I., soon after his death; of another folio volume of Tracts and Speeches, which appeared in 1629; of a third volume of Lectures on the Ten Commandments, published in 1642; and of a fourth, containing Lectures delivered at St. Paul's and at St. Giles's, Cripplegate, published in 1657. He was, perhaps, the most learned of the English theologians of that learned time, and was besides a person of great vigour and acuteness of understanding; so that his death was regarded by scholars both at home and abroad as the extinction of the chief light of the English church. Milton, then a youth of seventeen, bewailed the event in a Latin

elegy, full of feeling and fancy; and even in a tract written many years afterwards, when his opinions had undergone a complete change, he admits that "Bishop Andrews of late years, and in these times the Primate of Armagh (Usher), for their learning are reputed the best able to say what may be said" in defence of episcopacy.* Both the learning and ability of Andrews, indeed, are conspicuous in everything he has written; but his eloquence, nevertheless, is to a modern taste grotesque enough. In his more ambitious passages he is the very prince of verbal posture-masters,-if not the first in date, the first in extravagance, of the artificial, quibbling, syllable-tormenting school of our English pulpit rhetoricians; and he undoubtedly contributed more to spread the disease of that manner of writing than any other individual. Not only did his eminence in this line endear him to the royal tastes of Elizabeth and James; all men admired and strove to copy after him. Fuller declares that he was 66 an inimitable preacher in his way;" and then he tell us that "pious and pleasant Bishop Felton, his contemporary and colleague, endeavoured in vain in his sermons to assimilate his style, and therefore said merrily of himself, I had almost marred my own natural trot by endeavouring to imitate his artificial amble." Many a "natural trot" Andrews no doubt was the cause of spoiling in his day, and long after it. This bishop is further very notable, in the history of the English church, as the first great asserter of those semi-popish notions touching doctrines, rites, and ecclesiastical government with which Laud afterwards blew up the establishment. Andrews, however, was a very different sort of person from Laud,—as superior to him in sense and policy as in learning and general strength and comprehensiveness of understanding. A wellknown story that is told of him proves his moderation as much as his wit and readiness: when he and Dr. Neal, bishop of Durham, were one day standing behind the king's chair as he sat at dinner (it was the day on which James dissolved his third parliament, and the anecdote is related on the authority of Waller, the poet, who was present), his majesty, turning round, addressed the two prelates-My lords, cannot I take my subjects' money when I want it, without all this formality in parliament? "The bishop of Durham readily answered, God forbid, sir, but

*The Reason of Church Government argued against Prelacy (published in 1641), Book i. chap. 3.

you should; you are the breath of our nostrils. Whereupon the king turned, and said to the bishop of Winchester, Well, my lord, what say you? Sir, replied the bishop, I have no skill to judge of parliamentary cases. The king answered, No put-offs, my lord, answer me presently. Then, sir, said he, I think it is lawful for you to take my brother Neal's money, for he offers it."* Clarendon has expressed his belief that if Archbishop Bancroft had been succeeded in the see of Canterbury by Andrews, instead of Abbot, the infection of the Geneva fire would have been kept out, which could not afterwards be so easily expelled.†

Donne, the poet, was also a voluminous writer in prose; having left a folio volume of Sermons, besides a treatise against Popery entitled The Pseudo-Martyr, another singular performance, entitled Biathanatos, in confutation of the common notion about the necessary sinfulness of suicide, and some other professional disquisitions. His biographer, Izaak Walton, says that he preached "as an angel, from a cloud, but not in a cloud;" but most modern readers will probably be of opinion that he has not quite made his escape from it. His manner is fully as quaint in his prose as in his verse, and his way of thinking as subtle and peculiar. His sermons are also, as well as those of Andrews, overlaid with learning, much of which seems to be only a useless and cumbersome show. Doubtless, however, there are deep and beautiful things in Donne, for those that will seek for them; as has, indeed, been testified by some who in modern times have made themselves the best acquainted with these longneglected theological works of his.‡

Another of the most learned theologians and eloquent preachers of those times was as well as Donne an eminent poet, Bishop Joseph Hall. Hall's English prose works, which are very voluminous, consist of sermons, polemical tracts, paraphrases of Scripture, casuistical divinity, and some pieces on practical religion, of which his Contemplations, his Art of Divine Meditation, and his Enochismus, or Treatise on the Mode of Walking with God, are the most remarkable. The poetic temperament of Hall reveals itself in his prose as well as in his verse, by the fervour of his * Life of Waller, prefixed to his Poems, 1712. † Hist. i. 88 (edit. of 1717).

The first edition of the collected Works of Dr. Donne was published by the Rev. Henry Alford, M.A., in 6 vols. 8vo. in 1839. Three folio volumes of his Sermons, however, had been successively published in 1640, 1649, and

piety, and the forcible and often picturesque character of his style, in which it has been thought he made Seneca his model. "The writer of the Satires," observes Warton, "is perceptible in some of his gravest polemical or Scriptural treatises; which are perpetually interspersed with excursive illustrations, familiar allusions, and observations on life."* It will be perceived, from all this, that both in style and in mind IIall and Donne were altogether opposed; neither in his prose nor in his verse has the former the originality of the latter, or the fineness of thought that will often break out in a sudden streak of light from the midst of his dark sayings; but, on the other hand, he is perfectly free from the dominant vices of Donne's manner, his conceits, his quaintness, his remote and fantastic analogies, his obscurity, his harshness, his parade of a useless and encumbering erudition.

Last of all may be mentioned, among the great theological writers of this great theological time, one who stands alone, Richard Hooker, the illustrious author of the Eight Books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; of which the first four were published in 1594, the fifth in 1597, the three last not till 1632, many years after the author's death. Hooker's style is almost without a rival for its sustained dignity of march; but that which makes it most remarkable is its union of all this learned gravity and correctness with a flow of genuine, racy English, almost as little tinctured with pedantry as the most familiar popular writing. The effect also of its evenness of movement is the very reverse of tameness or languor; the full river of the argument dashes over no precipices, but yet rolls along without pause, and with great force and buoyancy.

BACON.

Undoubtedly the principal figure in English prose literature, as well as in philosophy, during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, is Francis Bacon. Bacon, born in 1561, published the first edition of his Essays in 1597; his Two Books of the Advancement of Learning in 1605; his Wisdom of the

* Hist. Eng. Poet. iv. 336. A complete collection of the works of Bishop Hall, edited by the Rev. Peter Hall, was brought out at Oxford, in 12 vols. Svo. in 1837-39.