fore they that came to succour them no better than rogues and runnagates, specially coming with no licence nor commission from their own king: so as it should be dishonourable for him in the name of his Queen to condition or make any terms with such rascals, but left them to their choice, to yield and submit themselves or no. Whereupon the said coronel did absolutely yield himself and the fort, with all therein, and craved only mercy, which it being not thought good to show them, both for danger of themselves, if being saved, they should afterwards join with the Irish, and also for terror to the Irish, who were much emboldened by those foreign succours, and also put in hope of more ere long; there was no other way but to make that short end of them which was made. Therefore most untruly and maliciously do these evil tongues backbite and slander the sacred ashes of that most just and honourable personage, whose least virtue, of many most excellent which abounded in his heroical spirit, they were never able to aspire unto.

(From the Same.)

RICHARD HOOKER

[Richard Hooker, as we learn from Izaak Walton in his famous Life, was born near Exeter about the year 1553. About the year 1567 he went to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where in 1573 he was admitted as one of the twenty scholars of the foundation, and where, in 1577, he was elected fellow. About 1582 he was ordained and was presently appointed to preach at St. Paul's Cross. A little later he married a lady who seems to have proved to him a singularly unpleasant wife. In 1585 he was made Master of the Temple. In 1595 he was appointed to the parsonage of Bishopsbourne in Kent. In the year previous his first four Books and large Epistle' were published; and the fifth Book (On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity) was published in 1597. He died at the early age of forty-six in the autumn of 1600. His literary works other than the above were published posthumously.]

IT may at once be said of Hooker's work that his quality, his accomplishment (though of a high order in rhetoric, in composition governed by certain stately and scholastic laws) cannot rank him among the great creative writers of the world. As a man of thought, and as a man who set serious value by his thought: as a man who perpended every paragraph, and who carefully elaborated every parenthesis: as a man whose conscientious labour must ever be among the influences that drive the frivolous to despair, his superior or even his rival would not be easy to find. His workmanship, too, is very cunningly equipoised. He had an ear for the balance of parts, and for sonorousness of diction. He is never irresponsible, never gay, never passionate, never free from his own personal control. But for the artificial quality of his art he takes an exceptional eminence. There is something peculiarly satisfactory about all his writing; it is thorough. The extreme labour which he devoted to it sometimes indeed gives to it an excessive cast; he thinks his thoughts out to so wire-drawn a completeness that he not infrequently irritates by his persistent digressions and his unashamed length of sentence. "It may be," he once wrote, in perhaps the most heated docu

ment he ever composed-singularly temperate though it be-" I have talked or walked or eaten or interchangeably used the duties of common humanity with some such as he is hardly persuaded of. For I know no law of God or man, by force whereof they should be as heathens and publicans unto me that are not gracious in the eyes of another man." An ordinary thinker accustomed to pursue his thoughts with average fury would there have ceased; but Hooker is content to mar the whole passage by the clumsy addition of a fresh clause, which is the merest elucidation, unessential to his contention, yet irresistible to his refining mind. After the interval of a comma he continues, "perhaps without cause, or, if with cause, yet with such cause as he is privy unto and not I." These are the natural faults of excessive laboriousness. One who presses his eyes too closely to a picture loses its perspective unity; the writer who can never leave his thought alone inclines to the same bemusement; he sometimes— as in this instance-surrenders the very achievement upon which his heart is customarily set; he loses his balance, and gains nothing for his pains.

Let this suffice for a brief general review of Hooker's literary style. To come to detail, the first thing to note is the academical quality of every sentence he ever wrote-a quality so academical, so purely the outcome of studiousness that you begin presently to wonder whether the man had a pair of eyes at all. It would perhaps be rash to say that there is not a single passage in all his works dealing with the commonest matters of natural observation; but such passages are certainly of extreme infrequency. To compare him to Taylor in this respect is to step from the close atmosphere of a sealed library into the flowers of the springtime. Recall, for example, two passages, one from each writer, in which each deals with his subject through the medium of some objective phenomena. "So have I seen a rose," says Jeremy, "newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head and broke its stalk, and, at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces." The passage, full of exquisitely personal observation, may be left to sing its

own song.

Take in comparison to it this fine passage from a sermon by Hooker. "The judgments of God do not always follow crimes as thunder doth lightning, but sometimes the space of many ages coming between. When the sun hath shined fair the space of six days upon the tabernacle, we know not what clouds the seventh may bring. . . . If they chance to escape clearly in this world, which they seldom do; in the day when the heavens shall shrivel as a scroll and the mountains move as frighted men out of their places, what cave shall receive them? What mountain or rock shall they get by entreaty to fall upon them? what covert to hide them from that wrath, which they shall be neither able to abide nor to avoid?" Every allusion in this second passage is perfectly academical. The sentences roll majestically, they prove a nice sense of words, a rhythmical command of speech. But when this writer speaks of the shining of the sun upon the tabernacle he has no visual sense, it is clear, of his metaphor; the shrivelling of the heavens and the moving of the mountains in their second-hand application, are the purest figures of rhetoric; there is an intellectual impressiveness in that comparison of the moving mountains to "frighted men"; but the conception has no real analogies to anything in nature: indeed, any attempt to make such an analogy would involve the whole image in grotesqueness. The academic mind is incapable of literal imagery, if such imagery is to be evolved from the sights and sounds and scents of the objective world. Hooker's fancy is a quality entirely dormant ; he has a certain intellectual imagination, but this is mostly derivative. The Old Testament supplied him with what splendour of illustration he chanced to need.

To bring the matter down to narrower issues: it is to be noted how deeply Hooker was affected by Latin writers and Latin construction in his literary style, although it cannot truthfully be said that this was to the disadvantage of his literature. He discovers the strength of such an influence, partly in his deliberate massiveness of construction, partly in the obvious impatience he displays towards the Teutonic prepositional substitutes for inflected speech, and partly in his repetition of an idea in words of slightly different shades of meaning" without any qualifications, cautions, ifs and ands," he writes in one place, obvious y induced thereto by some Ciceronian reminiscence. Sometimes, too, he will omit an auxiliary verb, will give to his principal words a Latinised importance of position, yet-with some fine insight into the