Imitation is out of the question where there is identity. One pen composed these works, as they did thirty more.

The English writings of the Jesuit Parsons have attracted the notice of some of our philological critics. Parsons may be ranked among the earliest writers of our vernacular diction in its purity and pristine vigor, without ornament or polish. It is, we presume, Saxon, English, unblemished by an exotic phrase. It is remarkable that our author, who passed the best part of his days abroad, and who had perfectly acquired the Spanish and the Italian languages, and slightly the French, yet appears to have preserved our colloquial English from the vicissitudes of these fashionable novelties which deform the long unsettled Elizabethan prose. To the elevation of Hooker his imagination could never have ascended; but in clear conceptions and natural expressions no one was his superior. His English writings have not a sentence which to this day is either obsolete or obscure. Swift would not have disdained his idiomatic energy. Parsons was admirably adapted to be a libeller or a polemic.

888

HOOKER.

THE government of Elizabeth, in the settlement of an ecclesiastical establishment, had not only to pass through the convulsive transition of the "old" to the "new religion," as it was called at the time; but subsequently it was thrown into a peculiar position, equally hateful to the zealots of two antagonist parties or factions.

The Romanists, who would have disputed the queen's title to the crown, were securely circumscribed by their minority, or pressed down by the secular arm; they were silenced by penal statutes, or they vanished in a voluntary exile; and even their martyrs were only allowed to suffer as traitors. A more insidious adversary was lurking at home; itself the child of the Reformation, it had been nourished at the same breast, and had shared in the common adversity; and this youthful protestantism was lifting its arm against its elder sister.

A public event, when it becomes one of the great eras of a nation, has sometimes inspired one of those "monuments of the mind," which take a fixed station in its literature, addressed to its own, but written for all times. And thus it happened with the party of the MAR-PRELATES; for these mean and scandalous satirists, and their abler chiefs, were the true origin of Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity." The scandalous pamphlets of the MAR-PRELATES met their fate, crushed by the sharper levity of more refined wits; the more solemn volumes of their learned chiefs encountered a master genius, such as had not yet risen in the nation.

In the state of the language, and the polemical tem

per of these early opposite systems of church, and indeed of civil government, it was hardly to be expected. that the vindication of the ruling party should be the work of an elevated genius. The vernacular style was yet imperfectly moulded, the ear was not yet touched. by modulated periods, nor had the genius of our writers yet extended to the lucid arrangement of composition; moreover, none had attained to the philosophic disposition which penetrates into the foundations of the understanding, and appeals to the authority of our consciousness. On a sudden appeared this master-mind, opening the hidden springs of eloquence-the voice of one crying from the wilderness.

It had been more in the usual course of human affairs, that the whole controversy of ecclesiastical polity should have remained in the ordinary hands of the polemics; the cold mediocrity of the Puritan Cartwright might have been answered by the cold mediocrity of the Primate Whitgift. Their quarrel had then hardly passed their own times; and "the admonition," and "the apology," and all "the replies and rejoinders," might have been equally suffered to escape the record of an historian.

But such was not the issue of this awful contest; and the mortal combatants are not suffered to expire, for a master-genius has involved them in his own immortality.*

*When our literary history was only partially cultivated, the readers of Hooker were often disturbed midst the profound reasonings of "The Ecclesiastical Polity" by frequent references to volumes and pages of T. C. The editors of Hooker had thrown no light on these mysterious ini tials. Contemporaries are not apt to mortify themselves by recollecting that what is familiar to them may be forgotten by the succeeding age. Sir John Hawkins, a literary antiquary, drew up a memoir which explains these initials as those of Thomas Cartwright, and has correctly arranged the numerous tracts of the whole controversy. But Hawkins having consigned this accurate catalogue to "The Antiquarian Repertory," it could be little known; and Beloe, in his Anecdotes of Literature, vol. i., transcribing the entire memoir of Hawkins, verbatim, without the slightest

The purity and simplicity of Izaak Walton's own mind reflected the perfect image of Hooker; the individualizing touches and the careful statements in that vital biography seem as if Hooker himself had written his own life.

We first find our author in a small country parsonage, at Drayton-Beauchamp, near Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire; where a singular occurrence led to his elevation to the mastership of the Temple.

Two of his former pupils had returned from their travels-Sir Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, men worthy of the names they bore; for the one became his ardent patron, and the other the zealous assistant in his great work. Longing to revisit their muchloved tutor, who did not greatly exceed them in age, they came unexpectedly; and to their amazement, surprised their learned friend tending a flock of sheep, with a Horace in his hand. His wife had ordered him to supply the absence of the servant. When released, on returning to the house, the visiters found that they must wholly furnish their own entertainment the lady would afford no better welcome; but even the conversation was interrupted by Hooker being called away to rock the cradle. His young friends reluctantly quit his house to seek for quieter lodgings, lamenting that his lot had not fallen on a pleasanter parsonage, and a quieter wife to comfort him after his unwearied studies. "I submit to God's will while I daily labor to possess my soul in patience and peace,' was the reply of the philosophic man who could abstract his mind amid the sheep, the cradle, and the termagant.

The whole story of the marriage of this artless student would be ludicrous, but for the melancholy

acknowledgment, obtains a credit for original research. Beloe is referred to for this authentic information by Burnet in his "Specimens of English Prose-Writers."

reflection that it brought waste and disturbance into the abode of the author of the "Ecclesiastical Polity." According to the statutes of his college he had been appointed to preach a sermon at Paul's-cross: he arrived from Oxford weary and wet, with a heavy cold; faint and heartless, he was greatly agitated lest he should not be able to deliver his probationary sermon, but two days' nursing by the woman of the lodgings recovered our young preacher. She was an artful woman, who persuaded him that his constitutional delicacy required a perpetual nurse, and for this purpose offered, as he had no choice of his own, to elect for him a wife. On his next arrival she presented him with her daughter. There was a generosity in his gratitude for the nursing him for his probationary sermon, which only human beings wholly abstracted from the concerns of daily life could possibly display. He resigned the quiet of his college to be united to a female destitute alike of personal recommendations and of property. As an apology for her person he would plead his short-sightedness; and for the other, that he never would have married for any interested motive. Thus, the first step into life of a very wise man was a folly which was to endure with it. The wife of Hooker tyrannized over his days, and at last proved to be a traitress to his fame.

The mastership of the temple was procured for the humble rector of Drayton-Beauchamp by the recommendation of his affectionate Edwin Sandys. But not without regret did this gentle spirit abandon the lowly rectory-house for "the noise" of the Temple-hall. Hooker required for his happiness neither elevation nor dignities, but solely a spot wherein his feeble frame might repose, and his working mind meditate; solitude to him was a heaven, notwithstanding his eternal wife Joan !

Hooker might have looked on the Temple as a