author of the Leviathan. The style in which the Latin books of the Instauratio were given to the world, though certainly not a model of classical purity, is weighty, vigorous, and picturesque.

§ 13. Bacon's English writings are very numerous; among them unquestionably the most important is the little volume entitled Essays, the first edition of which he published in 1597, and which was several times reprinted, with additions, the last in 1625. These are short papers on an immense variety of subjects, from grave questions of morals and policy down to the arts of amusement and the most trifling accomplishments; and in them appears, in a manner more appreciable to ordinary intellects than in his elaborate philosophical works, the wonderful union of depth and variety which characterises Bacon. The intellectual activity they display is literally portentous, the immense multiplicity and aptness of unexpected illustration is only equalled by the originality with which Bacon manages to treat the most worn-out and commonplace subject, such, for instance, as friendship or gardening. No author was ever so concise as Bacon; and in his mode of writing there is that remarkable quality which gives to the style of Shakspeare such a strongly-marked individuality : that is, a combination of the intellectual and imaginative, the closest reasoning in the boldest metaphor, the condensed brilliancy of an illustration identified with the development of thought. It is this that renders both the dramatist and the philosopher at once the richest and the most concise of writers. Many of Bacon's essays, as that inimitable one on Studies, are absolutely oppressive from the power of thought compressed into the smallest possible compass. Bacon wrote also an Essay on the Wisdom of the Ancients, in which he endeavoured to explain the political and moral truths concealed in the mythology of the classical ages; and in this work he exhibits an ingenuity which Macaulay justly describes as almost morbid: an unfinished romance, The New Atlantis, which was intended to embody the fulfilment of his own dreams of a philosophical millennium; a History of Henry VII., and a vast number of state-papers, judicial decisions, and other professional writings. All these are marked by the same vigorous, weighty, and somewhat ornamented style which is to be found in the Instauratio, and are among the finest specimens of the English language at its period of highest majesty and perfection.

§ 14. In every nation there may be found a small number of writers who, in their life, in the objects of their studies, and in the form and manner of their productions, bear a peculiar stamp of eccentricity. No country has been more prolific in such exceptional individualities than England, and no age than the sixteenth century. There cannot be a more striking example of this small but curious class than old ROBERT BURTON (1576-1640), whose life and writings

are equally odd. His principal work, the Anatomy of Melancholy, which purported to be written by "Democritus, junior,” is a strange combination of the most extensive and out-of-the-way reading with just observation and a peculiar kind of grave saturnine humour. The object of the writer was to give a complete monography of Melancholy, and to point out its causes, its symptoms, its treatment, and its cure: but the descriptions given of the various phases of the disease are written in so curious and pedantic a style, accompanied with such an infinity of quaint observation, and illustrated by such a mass of quotations from a crowd of authors, principally the medical writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of whom not one reader in a thousand in the present day has ever heard, that the Anatomy possesses a charm which no one can resist who has once fallen under its fascination. The enormous amount of curious quotation with which Burton has incrusted every paragraph and almost every line of his work has rendered him the favourite study of those who wish to appear learned at a small expense; and his pages have served as a quarry from which a multitude of authors have borrowed, and often without acknowledgment, much of their materials, as the great Roman feudal families plundered the Coliseum to construct their frowning fortress-palaces. The greater part of Burton's laborious life was passed in the University of Oxford, where he died, not without suspicion of having hastened his own end, in order that it might exactly correspond with the astrological predictions which he is said, being a firm believer in that science, to have drawn from his own horoscope. He is related to have been himself a victim to that melancholy which he has so minutely described, and his tomb bears the astrological scheme of his own nativity, and an inscription eminently characteristic of the man: "Hic jacet Democritus, junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia."

Our notice of the prose-writers of this remarkable period would be incomplete without some mention of LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY (1581-1648), who was remarkable as a theologian and also as an historian. He was a man of great learning and rare dignity of per sonal character, and was employed in an embassy to Paris in 1616. There he first published his principal work, the treatise De Veritate, an elaborate pleading in favour of deism, of which Herbert was one of the earliest partisans in England. He also left a History of Henry VIII., not published until after his death, and which is certainly a valuable monument of grave and vigorous prose, though the historical merit of the work is diminished by the author's strong partiality in favour of the character of the king. Though maintaining the doctrines of a freethinker, Herbert gives indications of an intensely enthusiastic religious mysticism, and there is proof

of his having imagined himself on more than one occasion the object of miraculous communications by which the Deity confirmed the doctrines maintained in his books.

§ 15. But in force of demonstration, and clearness and precision of language, none of the English metaphysicians have surpassed THOMAS HOBBES (1588-1679), who, however, more properly belongs to a later period. Hobbes was a man of extraordinary mental activity, equally remarkable, during the whole of a long literary career, for the power as for the variety of his philosophical speculations. The theories of Hobbes exerted an incalculable influence on the opinions, not only of English, but also of Continental thinkers, for nearly a century, and though that influence has since been much weakened by the errors and sophistries mingled in many of this great writer's works, in some important and arduous branches of abstract speculation, as for example in the great question respecting Free Will and Necessity, it is doubtful whether any later investigations have thrown any new light upon the principles established by him. He was born at Malmesbury in Wiltshire in 1588, was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and subsequently travelled abroad as private tutor to the Earl of Devonshire. On his return he became intimate with the most distinguished men of his day, through the influence of his patron the Earl of Devonshire. His first literary work, the translation of Thucydides, was published in the third year of the reign of Charles I., in 1628. He subsequently passed several years in Paris and Italy, and he was in constant communication with the most illustrious minds among his contemporaries, as with Descartes for example, with Galileo, and with Harvey. Though of extreme boldness in speculation, Hobbes was an advocate for high monarchical or rather despotic principles in government: his theory being that human nature was essentially ferocious and corrupt, he concluded that the iron restraint of arbitrary power could alone suffice to bridle its passions. This theory necessarily flowed from the fundamental proposition of Hobbes's moral system, viz. that the primum mobile of all human actions is selfish interest. Attributing all our actions to intellectual calculation, and thus either entirely ignoring or not allowing sufficient influence to the moral elements and the affections, which play at least an equal part in the drama of life, Hobbes fell into a narrow and one-sided view of our motives which makes his theory only half true. He was a man whose reading, though not extensive, was singularly profound: and in the various branches of science and literature which he cultivated we see that clearness of view and vigour of comprehension which is found in men of few books. The most celebrated work of this great thinker was the Leviathan (published in 1651), an argument in favour of monarchical government: the reasonings, however, will

apply with equal force to the justification of despotism. But though the Leviathan is the best known of his works, the Treatise on Human Nature, and the Letter on Liberty and Necessity, are incontestibly those in which the closeness of his logic and the purity and clearness of his style are most visible, and the correctness of his deductions least mingled with error. Two purely political treatises, the Elementa Philosophica de Cive, and De Corpore Politico,* are remarkable for the cogency of the arguments, though many of the results at which the author struggles to arrive are now no longer considered deducible from the premises. In the latter portion of his life Hobbes entered with great ardour upon the study of pure mathematics, and engaged in very vehement controversies with Wallis and others respecting the quadrature of the circle and other questions in which novices in those sciences are apt to be led away by the enthusiasm of imaginary discoveries. Hobbes has often been erroneously confounded with the enemies of religion. This has arisen from a misconception of the nature of his doctrines, which are indeed materialistic, but neither atheistic nor professedly in antagonism to the Christian theology. And, although the ethical principles of Hobbes are in his case partly the offspring of a cold and timorous moral disposition, the selfish theory of human actions, when divested of those limitations which confine the motive of self to those low and shortsighted views of interest with which it is generally associated, no more necessitates an immoral line of argument than any other system for clearing up the mysteries of our moral nature.†

*These two treatises were published before the Leviathan, and were incorporated in the latter work.

It may also be mentioned that Hobbes wrote, in 1672, at the age of 84, a curious Latin poem on his own life; and he also published in 1675, at the age of 87, a translation in verse of the Iliad and Odyssey. His Behemoth, or a History of the Civil Wars from 1640 to 1660, appeared in 1680, a few months after his death.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

MINOR PROSE WRITERS IN THE

REIGNS OF ELIZABETH AND
JAMES 1.

WEBSTER PUTTENHAM, published in 1586 the Art of English Poesie; a writer whom Mr. Hallam considers the first who wrote a well measured prose.

RICHARD GRAFTON, a printer in the reigns of Henry VIII. and the three following sovereigns, is one of the early chroniclers. He wrote in prison, into which be was thrown for printing the

proclamation of the succession of Lady Jane Grey to the throne, An Abridgement of the Chronicles of England, published in 1562.

WILLIAM CECIL, LORD BURLEIGH (d. 1598), the celebrated statesman in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, wrote Precepts, or, Directions for the well Ordering and Carriage of a Man's Life, addressed to his son Robert Cecil.

JOHN LYLY, the author of the prose romance of Euphues, and GREENE and NASH, the authors of several pamphlets in prose,

are mentioned under the dramatists (p. 129, 130).

GEORGE BUCHANAN (1506-1582), celebrated as an elegant Latin writer, was born at Killearn, in the county of Stirling, and was educated at the Universities of St. Andrews and Paris. He was appointed by the Earl of Murray tutor to the young King James VI. His chief work is a History of Scotland, which was published in 1582, under the title of Rerum Scoticarum Historia. His Latin version of the Psalms has been already mentioned (p. 88). He wrote in the Scottish dialect a work called Chamaleon, to satirize Secretary Maitland of Lethington.

GEORGE SANDYS (1577-1643), known as a traveller and as a poet, was the youngest son of the Archbishop of York. His Travels in the East were very popular, and were repeatedly republished in the seventeenth century. His chief poetical production was a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. WILLIAM LITHGOW (d. 1640), a native of Scotland, also celebrated as a traveller. He travelled nineteen years on foot in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The first edition of his Travels was published in 1614.

SIR JOHN HAYWARD (d. 1627), an his torian, published in 1599 The First Part of the Life and Reign of Henry IV., dedicated to the Earl of Essex; a work which gave such offence to the queen that the author was thrown into prison. Hayward was subsequently patronised and knighted by James I. In 1613 he published The Lives of the three Norman Kings of England, William I., William II., and Henry I., dedicated to Charles, Prince of Wales. He likewise wrote The Life and Reign of King Edward VI., with the beginning of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, which was published in 1630, after his death.

RICHARD KNOLLES (d. 1610), master of the free-school at Sandwich, in Kent, published in 1610 a History of the Turks. Johnson, in a paper in the Rambler, gives Knolles the superiority over all English historians. "He has displayed all the excellencies that narrative can admit. His style, though somewhat obscured by time and vitiated by false wit, is pure, nervous, elevated, and clear. Nothing could have sunk this author into obscurity but the remoteness and barbarity of the people he relates." Mr. Hallam thinks that Johnson has not too highly extolled Knolles's style Rnd power of narration.

SAMUEL DANIEL, the poet, of whom we have already spoken (p. 79), published in 1618 a History of England, from the Con quest to the Reign of Edward III. Mr. Hallam remarks that, "this work is de serving of some attention on account of its language. It is written with a freedom from all stiffness, and a purity of style, which hardly any other work of so early a date exhibits. These qualities are indeed so remarkable that it would require a good deal of critical observation to distinguish it even from writings of the reign of Anne; and where it differs from them (I speak only of the secondary class of works, which have not much individuality of manner), it is by a more select idiom, and by an absence of the Gallicism or vulgarity which are often found in that age. It is true that the merits of Daniel are chiefly negative; he is never pedantic, or antithetical, or low, as his contemporaries were apt to be; but his periods are ill constructed; he has little vigour or elegance; and it is only by observing how much pains he must have taken to reject phrases which were growing obsolete that we give him credit for having done more than follow the common stream of easy writing. A slight tinge of archaism, and a certain majesty of expres sion, relatively to colloquial usage, were thought by Bacon and Raleigh congenial to an elevated style, but Daniel, a gentleman of the king's household, wrote as the court spoke, and his facility would be pleasing if his sentences had a less negligent structure. As an historian he has recourse only to common authorities; but his narration is fluent and perspicuous, with a regular vein of good sense, more the characteristic of his mind, both in verse and prose, than very commanding vigour."

WILLIAM CAMDEN (1551-1623) the antiquary and historian, was head-master of Westminster School, and endowed at Oxford the chair of history, which bears his name. His most celebrated work is in Latin, entitled Britannia, first published in 1586, giving a topographical description of Great Britain from the earliest times. He also wrote in Latin an account of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

SIR HENRY SPELMAN (1562-1641), alsc an eminent antiquary, published in Latin various works upon legal and ecclesiastical antiquities, of which one of the principal is a History of the English Councils.