Hooker

THE life of the “learned and judicious” Mr. Richard Hooker, by Izaak Walton, is one of the most perfect biographies of its kind in literature. But it is biography on its knees ; and though it contains some exquisite touches of characterization, it does not, perhaps, convey an adequate impression of the energy and enlargement of the soul whose meekness it so tenderly and reverentially portrays. The individuality of the writer is blended with that of his subject, and much of his representation of Hooker is an unconscious idealization of himself. The intellectual limitations of Walton are felt even while we are most charmed by the sweetness of his spirit, and the greatest thinker the Church of England has produced is not reflected on the page which celebrates his virtues.

Hooker’s life is the record of the upward growth of a human nature into that region of sentiments and ideas where sagacity and sanctity, intelligence and goodness, are but different names for one vital fact. His soul, and the character his soul had organized, — the invisible but intensely and immortally alive part of him,— was domesticated away up in the heavens, even while the weak visible frame, which seemed to contain it, walked the earth ; and though in this world thrown controversially, at least, into the Church Militant, the Church Militant caught, through him, a gleam of the consecrating radiance, and a glimpse of the heaven-wide ideas, of the Church Triumphant. There is much careless talk in our day of “ spiritual ” communication ; but it must never be forgotten that the condition of real spiritual communication is height of soul; and that the true “ mediums ” are those rare persons through whom, as through Hooker, spiritual communications stream in the conceptions of purified, spiritualized, celestialized reason.

Hooker was born in 1553, and was the son of poor parents, better qualified to rejoice in his early piety than to appreciate his early intelligence. The schoolmaster to whom the boy was sent, happy in a pupil whose inquisitive and acquisitive intellect was accompanied with docility of temper, believed him, in the words of Walton, “ to be blessed with an inward divine light”; thought him a little wonder: and when his parents expressed their intention to bind him apprentice to some trade, the good man spared no efforts until he succeeded in interesting Bishop Jewell in the stripling genius. Hooker, at the age of fourteen, was sent by Jewell to the University of Oxford ; and after Jewell’s death Dr. Sandys, the Bishop of London, became his patron. He partly supported himself at the university by taking pupils ; and though these pupils were of his own age, they seem to have regarded their young instructor with as much reverence, and a great deal more love, than they gave to the venerable professors. Two of these pupils, Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, rose to distinction. As a teacher, Hooker not merely communicated the results of study, but the spirit of study ; some radiations from his own soul fell upon the minds he informed : and the youth fortunate enough to be his pupil might have echoed the grateful eulogy of the poet: —

No one, perhaps, rvas better prepared to enter holy orders than Hooker, when, after fourteen years of the profoundest meditation and the most exhaustive study, he, in his twentyeighth year, was made deacon and priest. And now came the most unfortunate event of his life ; and it came in the shape of an honor. He was appointed to preach at St. Paul’s Cross, a pulpit cross erected in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and from which a sermon was preached every Sunday by some eminent divine, before an assemblage composed of the Court, the city magistracy, and a great crowd of people. When Hooker arrived in London on Thursday, he was afflicted with so severe a cold that he despaired of being able to use his voice on Sunday. His host was a linen-draper by the name of Churchman; and the wife of this man took such care of her clerical guest, that his cold was sufficiently cured for him to preach his sermon. Before he could sufficiently express his gratitude, she proposed further to increase her claim upon it. Mrs. Churchman — unlike the rest of her sex — was a matchmaker ; and she represented to him that he, being of a weak constitution, ought to have a wife who would prove a nurse to him, and thus, by affectionate care, prolong his existence, and make it comfortable. Her benevolence not stopping here, she offered to provide such a one for him herself, if he thought fit to marry. The good man, who had, in his sermon, deemed himself capable of arguing' the question of two wills in God, “ an antecedent and a consequent will, — his first will that all men should be saved ; his second, that those only should be saved who had lived answerable to the degree of grace afforded them,” — a subject large enough to convulse the theological world, — the good man listened to Mrs. Churchman with a more serene trustfulness than he would have done to an Archbishop, and gave her power to select such a nurse-wife for him ; he, the thinker and the scholar, who, in the sweep of his mind over human learning, had probably never encountered an intelligence capable of deceiving his own, falling blandly into the toils of an ignorant, cunning, and low-minded matchmaker ! This benevolent lady had a daughter, whose manners were vulgar, whose face was unprepossessing, whose temper was irritable and exacting, but who had youth and romance enough to discriminate between being married and going out to service ; and this was the wife Mrs. Churchman selected, and this was the wife gratefully and guilelessly received from her hands by the “judicious Mr. Hooker.” Izaak Walton moralizes sweetly and sedately over this transaction, taking the ground that it was providential, and that affliction is a divine diet imposed by God on souls that he loves. Is this the right way to look at it ? Everything is providential after it has happened; but retribution is in the events of providence as well as chastening. Hooker, in truth, had unconsciously slipped into a sin ; for he had intended a marriage of convenience, and that of the worst sort. He had violated all the providential conditions implied in the sacred relation of marriage. It was a marriage in which there was no mutual affection, no assurance of mutual help, no union of souls ; and taking his wife, as he did, to be his nurse, what wonder that she preferred the more natural office of vixen ? And though every man and woman who reads the ac count of the manner in which she tormented him thinks she deserved to have had some mechanical contrivance attached to her shoulders, which should box her ears at every scolding word she uttered, it seems to be overlooked that great original injustice was done to her. We take great delight in being the first who has ever said a humane word for the injudicious Mrs. Hooker. Mated, but not united, to that angelic intellect and that meek spirit, — taken as a servant rather than as a wife, — she felt the degradation of her position keenly ; and, there being no possibility of equality between them, she, in spiritual self-defence, established in the household the despotism of caprice and the tyranny of the tongue.

His marriage compelled Hooker to resign his fellowship at Oxford ; and he accepted a small parish in the diocese of Lincoln. Here, about a year afterwards, he was visited by his two former pupils, Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer. It was sufficient for Mrs. Hooker to know that they were scholars, and that they revered her husband. She accordingly at once set in motion certain petty feminine modes of annoyance. to indicate that her husband was her servant, and that his friends were unwelcome guests. As soon as they were fairly engaged in a conversation, recalling and living over the quiet joys of their college life, the amiable lady that Mr. Hooker had married to be his nurse called him sharply to come and rock the cradle. His friends were all but turned out of the house. Cranmer. in parting with him, said: “ Good tutor, I am sorry that your lot is falleh in no better ground as to your parsonage ; and more sorry that your wife proves not a more comfortable companion, after you have wearied yourself in your restless studies.” “ My dear George,” was Hooker’s answer, “if saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my wise Creator hath appointed for me, but labor — as indeed I do daily—to submit mine to his will, and possess my soul in patience and peace.” Is it not to be supposed that John Calvin, if placed in similar circumstances, would have shown a little more of the ancient Adam ? Would it not have been somewhat dangerous for Catherine, wife of Martin Luther, to have screamed to her husband to come and rock the cradle while he was discoursing with Melancthon on the insufficiency of works ?

One result of this visit of his pupils was that Sandys, whose father was Archbishop of York, warmly represented to that dignitary of the Church the scandal of allowing such a combination of the saint and sage as Richard Hooker to be buried in a small country parsonage ; and the mastership of the Temple falling vacant at this time, the Archbishop used his influence with the judges and benchers, and in March, 1585, obtained the place for Hooker. But this promotion was destined to give him new disquiets rather than diminish old ones. The lecturer who preached the evening sermons at the Temple was Walter Travers, — an able, learned, and resolute theologian, who preferred the Presbyterian form of church government to the Episcopal, and who, in his theological belief, agreed with the Puritans. It soon came to be noted that the sermon by Hooker in the morning disagreed, both as to doctrine and discipline, with the sermon delivered by his subaltern in the evening ; and it was wittily said that the “ forenoon sermon spake Canterbury and the afternoon Geneva.” This difference soon engaged public attention. Canterbury stepped in, and prohibited Geneva from preaching. Travers appealed unsuccessfully to the Privy Council, and then his friends privately printed his petition. Hooker felt himself compelled to answer it. As the controversy refers to deep mysteries of religion, still vehemently debated, it would be impertinent to venture a judgment on the relative merits of the disputants ; but it may be said that the reasoning of Hooker, when the discussion does not turn on the meaning of authoritative Scripture texts, insinuates itself with more subtile cogency into the natural heart and brain, and is incomparably more human and humane than the reasoning of his antagonist. A fine intellectual contempt steals out in Hooker’s rejoinder to the charges of Travers in regard to some minor ceremonies, for which the Puritans, in their natural jealousy of everything that seemed popish, had, perhaps, an irrational horror, and to which the Churchmen were apt to give an equally irrational importance. Hooker quietly refers “to other exceptions, so like these, as but to name I should have thought a greater fault than to commit them.” One retort has acquired deserved celebrity : “ Your next argument consists of railing and reasons. To your railing I say nothing ; to your reasons I say what follows.”

It was unfortunate for Hooker’s logic that it was supported by the arm of power. Travers had the great advantage of being persecuted ; and his numerous friends in the Temple found ways to make Hooker so uncomfortable that he wished himself back in his secluded parish, with nobody to torment him but his wife. Pie was a great controversialist, as far as reason enters into controversies ; but the passions which turn controversies into contentions, and edge arguments with invectives, were foreign to his serenely capacious intellect and peaceable disposition. As he brooded over the condition of the Church, and the disputes raging within it, he more and more felt the necessity of surveying the whole controversy from a higher ground, in larger relations, and in a more Christian spirit. At present the dispute raged within, and had not rent the Church. The Puritans were not dissenters, attacking the Church from without, but reformers, attempting to alter its constitution from within. The idea occurred to Hooker, that a treatise might be written, demonstrating “ the power of the Church to make canons for the use of ceremonies, and by law to impose obedience to them, as upon her children,” and written with sufficient comprehensiveness of thought and learning to convince the reason of his opponents, and with sufficient comprehensiveness of love to engage their affections. This idea ripened into the “ Ecclesiastical Polity,” which he began at the Temple ; but he found that the theological atmosphere of the place, though it stimulated the mental, was ungenial to the loving qualities he intended to embody in his treatise; and he accordingly begged the Archbishop to transfer him to some quiet parsonage, where lie might think in peace. Accordingly, in 1591, he received the Rectory of Boscum ; and afterwards, in 1595, the Queen, who seems to have held him in great respect, presented him with the living of Bourne, where he remained until his death, which occurred in the year 1600, in his forty-sixth year. In 1594 four books of the ‘‘Ecclesiastical Polity” were published, and a fifth in 1597 ; the others not till after his death. Walton gives a most beautiful picture of him in his parsonage, illustrating Hooker’s own maxim, “ that the life of a pious clergyman was visible rhetoric.” His humility, benevolence, self-denial, devotion to his duties, the innocent wisdom which marked his whole intercourse with his parishioners, and his fasting and mortifications, are all set forth in Walton’s blandest diction. The most surprising item in this list of perfections is the last; for how, with “the clownish and silly” Mrs. Hooker always snarling and snapping below, while he was looking into the empyrean of ideas from the summits of his intellect, he needed any more of the discipline of mortification, it would puzzle the most resolute ascetic to tell. That amiable lady, as soon as she understood that her husband was opposed to the Puritans, seems to have joined them ; spite, and the desire to plague him, appearing to inspire her with an unwonted interest in theology, though we have no record of her theological genius, except the apparently erroneous report that, after Hooker’s death, she destroyed or mutilated some of his manuscripts. In Keble’s Preface to his edition of Hooker’s Works will be found an elaborate account of the publication of the last three books of the “ Ecclesiastical Polity,” and an examination and approximate settlement of the question regarding their authenticity and completeness.

Hooker’s nature was essentially an intellectual nature ; and the wonder of his mental biography is the celerity and certainty with which he transmuted knowledge and experience into intelligence. It may be a fancy, but we think it can -be detected, in an occasional uncharacteristic tartness of expression, that he had carried up even Mrs. Hooker into the region of his intellect, and dissolved her termagant tongue into a fine spiritual essence of gentle sarcasm. Not only did his vast learning pass, as successively acquired, from memory into faculty, but the daily beauty of his life left its finest and last result in his brain. His patience, humility, disinterestedness, self-denial, his pious and humane sentiments, every resistance to temptation, every benevolent act, every holy prayer, were by some subtile chemistry turned into thought, and gave his Intellect an upward lift, increasing the range of its vision, and bringing it into closer proximity with great ideas. We cannot read a page of his writings, without feeling the presence of this spiritual power in conception, statement, and argument. And this moral excellence which has thus become moral intelligence, this holiness which is in perfect union with reason, this spirit of love which can not only feel but see, gives a softness, richness, sweetness, and warmth to his thinking, quite as peculiar to it as its dignity, amplitude, and elevation.

As a result of this deep, silent, and rapid growth of nature, this holding in his intelligence all the results of his emotional and moral life, he attaches our sympathies as we follow the stream of his arguments ; for we feel that he has communed with all the principles he communicates- and knows by direct perception the spiritual realities he announces. His intellect, accordingly, does not act by flashes of insight; “ but his soul has sight ” of eternal verities, and directs at them a clear, steady, divining gaze. He has no lucky thoughts ; everything is earned ; he knows what he knows in all its multitudinous relations, and cannot be surprised by sudden objections, convicting him of oversight of even the minutest applications of any principle he holds in his calm, strong grasp. And as a controversialist he has the immense advantage of descending into the field of controversy from a height above it, and commanding it, while his opponents are wrangling with minds on a level with it The great difficulty in the man of thought is to connect his thought with life"; and half the literature of theology and morals is therefore mere satire, simply exhibiting the immense, unbridged, ironic gulf that yawns, wide as that between Lazarus and Dives, between truth and duty, on the one hand, and the actual affairs and conduct of the world on the other. But Hooker, one of the loftiest of thinkers, was also one of the most practical. His shining idea, away up in the heaven of Contemplation, sends its rays oi light and warmth in a thousand directions upon the earth, illuminating palace and cottage, piercing into the crevices and corners of concrete existence, relating the high with the low, austere obligation with feeble performance, and showing the obscure tendencies of imperfect institutions to realize divine laws.

This capacious soul was lodged in one of the feeblest of bodies. Physiologists are never weary of telling us that masculine health is necessary to the vigor of the mind ; but the vast mental strength of Hooker was independent of his physical constitution. His appearance in the pulpit conveyed no idea of a great man. Small in stature, with a low voice, using no gesture, never moving his person or hiring his eyes from his sermon, he seemed the verv impersonation of clerical incapacity and dulness ; but soon the thoughtful listener found his mind fascinated bv the automaton speaker ; a still, devout ecstasy breathed from the pallid lips ; the profoundest thought and the most extensive learning found calm expression in the low accents; and, more surprising still, the somewhat rude mother - tongue of Englishmen was heard for the first time from the lips of a master of prose composition, demonstrating its capacity for all the purposes of the most refined and most enlarged philosophic thought. Indeed, the serene might of Hooker’s soul is perhaps most obviously perceived in his style, in the easy power with which he wields and bends to his purpose a language not yet trained into a ready vehicle of philosophical expression. It is doubtful if any English writer since his time has shown equal power in the construction of long sentences. — those sentences in which the thought, and the atmosphere of the thought, and tiie modifications of the thought, are all included in one sweeping period, which gathers clause after clause as it rolls melodiously on to its foreseen conclusion, and having the general gravity and grandeur of its modulated movement pervaded by an inexpressibly sweet undertone of individual sentiment And the strength is free from every fretful and morbid quality which commonly taints the performances of a strong mind lodged in a sickly body. It is as serene, wholesome, and comprehensive as it is powerful.

The Ecclesiastical Polity is the great theological work of the Elizabethan Age. Pope Clement, having said to Cardinal Allen and Dr. Stapleton, English Roman Catholics at Rome, that he had never met with an English book whose writer deserved the name of author, they replied that a poor, obscure English priest had written a work on Church Polity, which, if he should read, would change his opinion. At the conclusion of the first book, the Pope is said to have delivered this judgment: "There is no learning that this man hath not searched into, nothing too hard for his understanding. This man indeed deserves the name of an author ; his books will get reverence from age ; for there is in them such seeds of eternity, that, if the rest be like this, they shall last until the last fire consume all learning.”

But it must be admitted that the rest, however great their merits, are not “like this.” The first book of the Ecclesiastical Polity is not only the best, but it is that in which Hooker’s mind is most effectually brought into relations with all thinking minds, and that in virtue of which he takes his high place in the history of literature and philosophy. The theologians he opposed insisted that a definite scheme of Church polity was revealed in the Scriptures, and was obligatory on Christians. This, of course, reduced the controversy into a mere wrangle about the meaning of certain texts ; and as this mode of disputation does not make any call upon the higher mental and spiritual powers, it has always been popular among theologians, giving everybody a chance in the textual and logical skirmish, and conducing to that anarchy of opinions which is not without its charm to the stoutest champion of authority, if he has in him the belligerent instinct. But Hooker, constitutionally averse to controversy, and looking at it, not as an end, but a means, had that aching for order which characterizes a peaceable spirit, and that demand for fundamental ideas which characterizes a great mind. Accordingly, in the first book, he mounts above the controversy before entering into it, and surveys the whole question of law, from the one eternal, divine law to the laws which are in force among men. He makes the laws which God has written in the reason of man divine laws, as well as those he has supernaturally revealed in the Scriptures ; and especially he enforces the somewhat startling principle, that law is variable or invariable, not according to the source from which it emanates, but according’to the matter to which it refers. If the matter be changeable, be mutable, the law must participate in the mutability of that which it was designed to regulate; and this principle, he insists, is independent of the fact whether the law originated in God or in the divinely constituted reason of man. There are some laws which God has written in the reason of man which are immutable ; there are some laws supernaturally revealed in Scripture which are mutable. In the first case, no circumstances can justify their violation ; in the other, circumstances necessitate a change. The bearing of this principle on the right of the Church of England to command rules and ceremonies which might not have been commanded by Scripture is plain. Even if the principle were denied by his opponents, it could be properly denied only by being confuted ; and to confute it exacted the lifting up of the controversy into the region of ideas.

But it is not so much in the conception and application of one principle a$ in the exhibition of many principles harmoniously related, that Hooker’s largeness of comprehension is shown. No other great logician is so free from logical fanaticism. His mind gravitates to truth ; and therefore limits and guards the application of single truths, detecting that fine point where many principles unite in forming wisdom, and refusing to be pushed too far in any one direction. He has his hands on the reins of a hundred wild horses, unaccustomed to exercise their strength and fleetness in joint effort; but the moment they feel the might of his meekness, they all sedately obey the directing power which sends them in orderly motion to a common goal. The central idea of his book is law. Even God, he contends, “ works not only according to his own will, but the counsel of his own will,” — according “to the order which he before all ages hath set down for himself to do all things by.” A self-conscious, personal, working, divine reason is therefore at the heart of things, and infinite power and infinite love are identical with infinite intelligence. Hooker’s breadth of mind is evinced in his refusing, unlike most theologians, to emphasize and detach any one of these divine perfections, whether it be power, or love, or intelligence. Intelligence is in power and love; power and love are in intelligence.

It would be impossible, in our short space, to trace the descent of Hooker’s central idea of law to its applications to men and states. The law which the angels obey, the law of nature, the law which binds man as an individual, the law which binds him as member of a politic community, the law which binds him as a member of a religious community, the law which binds nations in their mutual relations, — all are exhibited with a force and clearness of vision, a mastery of ethical and political philosophy, a power of dealing with relative as well as absolute truth, and a sagacity of practical observation, which are remarkable both in their separate excellence and their exquisite combination. To this comprehensive treatise Agassiz the naturalist, Story the jurist, Webster the statesman, Garrison the reformer, could all go for principles, and for applications of principles. He appreciates, beyond any other thinker who has taken his stand on the Higher Law, but who still believes in the binding force of the laws of men, the difficulty of making an individual, to whom that law is revealed through reason, a member of a politic or religious community; and he admits that the best men, individually, are often those who are apt to be most unmanageable in their relations to state and church. The argument he addresses to such minds, though it may not be conclusive, is probably the best that has ever been framed, for it is presented in relations with all that he has previously said in regard to the binding force of the divine law.

Of this divine law, — the law which angels obey, the law of love ; the law which binds in virtue of its power to allure and attract, and which weds obligation to ecstasy,—of this law he thus speaks in language which seems touched with a consecrating radiance : —

“ But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were) from the footstool to the throne of God, and, ieaving these natural, consider a little the state of heavenly and divine creatures : touching angels, which are spirits immaterial and intellectual, the glorious inhabitants of those sacred palaces, where nothing but light and blessed immortality, no shadow of matter for tears, discontentments, griefs, and uncomfortable passions to work upon, but all joy, tranquillity, and peace, even for ever and ever doth dwell : as in number and order they are huge, mighty, and royal armies, so likewise in perfection of obedience unto that law, which the Highest, whom they adore, love, and imitate, hath imposed upon them, such observants they are thereof, that our Saviour himself, being to set down the perfect idea of that which we are to pray and wish for on earth, did not teach to pray and wish for more than only that here it might be with us as with them it is jn heaven. God, which moveth mere natural agents as an efficient only, doth otherwise move intellectual creatures, and especially his holy angels ; for, beholding the face of God, in admiration of so great excellency they all adore him ; and being rapt with the love of his beauty, they cleave inseparably forever unto him. Desire to resemble him in goodness maketh them umveariable, and even insatiable, in their longing to do by all means all manner of good unto all the creatures of God, but especially unto the children of men: in the countenance of whose nature, looking downward, they behold themselves beneath themselves ; even as upward, in God, beneath whom themselves are, they see that character which is nowhere but in themselves and us resembled.Angelical actions may, therefore, be reduced unto these three general kinds : first, most delectable love, arising from the visible apprehension of the purity, glory, and beauty of God, invisible saving only to spirits that are pure ; secondly, adoration grounded upon the evidence of the greatness of God, on whom they see how all things depend; thirdly, imitation, bred by the presence of his exemplary goodness, who ceaseth not before them daily to fill heaven and earth with the rich treasures of most free and undeserved grace.”

And though the concluding passage of the first book of the Ecclesiastical Polity has been a thousand times quoted, it would be unjust to Hooker not to cite the sentence which most perfectly embodies his soul: —

“ Wherefore, that here we may briefly . end : of law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world : all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power ; both angels and men and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and their joy.”

In concluding these essays on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, which for many months have appeared with more or less regularity in this magazine, let us pass rapidly in review the writers to whom they have referred. And first for the dramatists, whose works —in our day on the dissectingtables of criticism, but in their own all alive with intellect and passion — made the theatres of Elizabeth and James rock and roar with the clamors or plaudits of a mob, too excited to be analytic. Of these professors of the science of human nature we have attempted to portray the fiery imagination that flames through the fustian and animal fierceness of Marlowe; the bluff, arrogant, and outspoken Jonson, with his solid understanding, caustic humor, delicate fancy, and undeviating belief in Ben ; the close observation and teeming mother-wit which found vent in the limpid verse of Heywood ; Middleton’s sardonic sagacity, and Marston’s envenomed satire ; the suffering and the soaring and singing cheer, the beggary and the benignity, so quaintly united in Dekkar’s vagrant life and sunny genius ; Webster’s bewildering terror, and Chapman’s haughty aspiration ; the subtile sentiment of Beaumont ; the fertile, flashing, and ebullient spirit of Fletcher; the easy dignity of Massinger’s thinking, and the sonorous majesty of his style ; the fastidious elegance and melting tenderness of Ford ; and the one-souled, “ myriad-minded ” Shakespeare, who is transcendently beyond them all.

Then, recurring to the undramatic poets, we have endeavored to catch a glimpse of the Fairy Land of Spenser’s celestialized imagination ; and to touch lightly on the characteristics of the poets who preceded and follow ed him ; on the sternly serious and ungenial creativeness of Sackvillc; the pensive thoughtfulness and tender fancy of “ W'ell-Ianguaged ” Daniel; the enthusiastic expansiveness of description and pure, bright, and vigorous diction of Drayton ; the sententious sharpness of Hall; the clear imaginative insight and dialectic felicity of Davies; the metaphysical voluptuousness and witty unreason of Donne ; the genial, thoughtful, well-proportioned soul of Wotton ; the fantastic devoulness of Herbert; and the coarsely frenzied commonplaces of Warner,

Again, in Sidney we have striven to exhibit genius and goodness as expressed in behavior ; in Raleigh, genius and audacity as expressed in insatiable, though somewhat equivocal, activity of arm and brain; in Bacon, the beneficence and the autocracy of an intellect whose comprehensiveness needed no celebration ; and in Hooker, the passage of holiness into intelligence, and the spirit of love into the power of reason.

And in attempting to delineate so many diverse individualities, we have been painfully conscious of another and more difficult audience than that of the readers of this magazine. The imperial intellects — the Bacons, Hookers, Shakespeares, and Spensers, the men who on earth are as much alive now as they were two hundred years ago—are, of course, in their assured intellectual dominion, blandly careless of the judgments of individuals ; but there is a large class of writers, whose genius we have considered, who have mostly passed away from the protecting admiration and affectionate memory of general readers. As we more or less roughly handled these, as we felt the pulse of life throbbing in every time - stained and dust-covered volume,— dust out of which Man was originally made, and to which Man, as author, is commonly so sure to return, — the books resumed their original form of men, became personal forces to resent impeachments of their honor, or misconceptions of their genius ; and a troop of spirits stalked from the neglected pages to confront their irreverent critic. There they were, — ominous or contemptuous judges of the person who assumed to be their judge ; on the faces of some, sarcastic denial ; on others, tender reproaches ; on others, benevolent pity; on others, serenely beautiful indifference or disdain. “Who taught you,” their looks seemed to say, "to deliver dogmatic judgments on us ? What know you of our birth, culture, passions, temptations, struggles, excuses, purposes, two hundred years ago ? What right have you to blame ? What qualifications have you to praise ? Let us abide in our earthly oblivion,— in our immortal life. It is .sufficient that our works demonstrated on earth the inextinguishable vitality of the souls that glowed within us; and, for the rest, we have long passed to the only infallible, the Almighty, critic and judge of works and of men ! ”