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settled down to the composition of his Alciphron, which is reported to have been written in a cave on the shore of Rhode Island. It is said that Berkeley was one of the early benefactors of Yale College. This strange philosophic exile in America—a period of great calm and happiness in his life-closed, after three years, at the end of 1731. He settled, not at Derry, of which he still was dean, but in London.

As John Stuart Mill has remarked, the leading purpose of Berkeley as a philosopher was to vanquish the freethinkers. He pushed this polemical intention a little too far in his next work, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, 1732, in which his main attack is upon Shaftesbury and Mandeville. This is the longest of Berkeley's books, and perhaps the most easy for the outsider to understand; philosophers have condemned it as the least valuable. The scene of the book is laid in Rhode Island, and the form is that of the Platonic dialogue, in its most polished and graceful shape. The dialogues are seven, and there is a slight setting of landscape to each, with a hint of woods and gardens, and the distant hallo of the fox-hunter. Alciphron was abundantly attacked, and the doctrine of immaterialism proved doubly unwelcome when it was seen to be used as an argument against atheism, whose genteel professors the author sneered at as "minute philosophers."

"I can easily comprehend that no man upon earth ought to prize anodynes for the spleen more than a man of fashion and pleasure. An ancient sage, speaking of one of that character, saith, He is made wretched by disappointments and appetites. And if this was true of the Greeks, who lived in the sun, and had so much spirit, I am apt to think it still more so of our modern English. Something there is in our climate and complexion that makes idleness nowhere so much its own punishment as in England, where an uneducated fine gentleman pays for his momentary pleasures with long and cruel intervals of spleen. There is a cast of thought in the complexion of an Englishman, which renders him the most unsuccessful rake in the world. He is, as Aristotle expresseth it, at variance with himself. He is neither brute enough to enjoy his appetites, nor man enough to govern them. He knows and feels that what he pursues is not his true good, his reflection only serving to show him that misery which his habitual sloth and indolence will not suffer him to remedy. At length, being grown odious to himself, and

abhorring his own company, he runs into every idle assembly, not from the hopes of pleasure, but merely to respite the pain of his own mind. Listless and uneasy at the present, he hath no delight in reflecting on what is past, or in the prospect of anything to come. This man of pleasure, when after a wretched scene of vanity and woe his animal nature is worn to the stumps, wishes for and dreads Death by turns, and is sick of living, without having ever tried or known the true life of man.

For some time Berkeley was fully engaged in controversy, and then in the spring of 1734 he returned to Ireland, as Bishop of Cloyne-a little city which was to be his home for the next eighteen years. In the palace at Cloyne he presently set up a distillery of tar-water—a medicine which had long attracted him, from its supposed quality of being charged with "pure invisible fire, the most subtle and elastic of bodies." Finally, in 1744, he published his extraordinary book called Siris, a chain of philosophical reflections and inquiries concerning tar-water. In this treatise Berkeley originates a phrase often attributed to Cowper, and describes tar-water as a beverage which "cheers but not inebriates." A single passage can give but little impression of the strange crossed warp and woof of the book :

"The balsam or essential oil of vegetables contains a spirit, wherein consist the specific qualities, the smell and taste of the plant. Boerhave holds the native presiding spirit to be neither oil, salt, earth, nor water, but somewhat too fine and subtle to be caught alone and rendered visible to the eye. This, when suffered to fly off, for instance, from the oil of rosemary, leaves it destitute of all flavour. This spark of life, this spirit or soul, if we may so say, of the vegetable departs without any sensible diminution of the oil or water wherein it was lodged.

"It should seem that the forms, souls, or principles of vegetable life subsist in the light or solar emanation, which in respect to the macrocosm is what the animal spirit is to the microcosm, -the interior tegument, the subtle instrument and vehicle of power. No wonder, then, that the ens primum or scintilla spirituosa, as it is called, of plants should be a thing so fine and fugacious as to escape our nicest search. It is evident that nature at the sun's approach vegetates, and languishes at his recess; this terrestrial globe seeming only a matrix disposed and prepared to receive life from his light. . . . The luminous spark which is the form or life of a plant, from whence its differences and properties flow, is somewhat extremely volatile."

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Siris is a most curious amalgam of hints for the manufacture. and use of the author's panacea, and of magnificent flights into Platonic regions of pure intellect. Of late Berkeley had been studying the Greek metaphysicians with especial earnestness, and in Siris his thought is etherealised and his style kindled by contact with the light and fire of ancient thought. In no other part of his writings does Berkeley reach the brilliant and audacious subtlety of the best passages in Siris.

In 1752 Berkeley determined to resign Cloyne and to settle in Oxford; but George II., while desiring him to live where he pleased, vowed that he should die a bishop. He published one or two tracts while he was at Oxford, but his stay there was brief; without positive illness, he grew weaker and weaker. On the 14th of January 1753 he died peacefully, while sleeping on a sofa, and was buried in Christ Church Cathedral. He lived just long enough to be praised by Hume, though it does not appear that Berkeley became aware of the existence of the young man who was destined to be our next great philosopher. In this place no attempt can be made to sketch Berkeley's contributions to thought. We have only to deal with him as a writer. In this capacity we may note that the abstruse nature of his contributions to literature has unduly concealed the fact that Berkeley is one of the most exquisite of all writers of English prose. Among the authors who will find a place in the present volume, it may perhaps be said that there is not one who is quite his equal in style; his prose is distinguished as well for dignity and fulness of phrase, without pomposity, as for splendour and delicacy of diction, without effeminacy.

William Law (1686-1761) was a Christian mystic whose name was first rescued from obscurity by the pious care of Gibbon, whose father he had taught in early youth; Law had afterwards resided in the historian's family. Law spent the rest of his life in a sort of cloister in his native village of King's Cliff, where certain pious ladies clustered round him and formed a little spiritual community. For their use, in the first instance, he wrote his remarkable Evan

gelical treatise, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, 1729, -a volume that is composed in an enthusiastic and exalted spirit which is almost an anomaly in the prosaic eighteenth century. Law was a High Churchman, and he enjoined upon his readers an unflinching asceticism, denouncing every species of carnal pleasure with the fervour of a Tertullian. Although the Wesleyans in the succeeding generation owed a good deal to his teaching, neither they nor any section of the Church of England could be said to be his disciples. He is, in fact, a solitary philosophic mystic, of very unusual literary gift. Certain of his treatises contain sketches somewhat in the manner of La Bruyère, of typical men and women of the world, drawn with a great deal of wit and fancy. Wesley was at first an admirer of Law, but he broke with him in 1738, and in 1756 Wesley severely and publicly attacked his old friend's mysticism. Yet late on in life Wesley found himself obliged to speak of the Serious Call as a treatise which will hardly be excelled in the English tongue either for beauty of expression or for justice and depth of thought."

The two women who wrote most cleverly during the reign of Anne were unlucky enough to secure a pre-eminence in coarseness of language, a quality which would have enabled them to graduate with success in the school of Charles II. It has never been suggested to question the ability of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), the eldest daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston, though she is now perhaps best remembered by her unseemly squabbles with Pope. Lady Mary was educated under Bishop Burnet, who early instilled into her a passionate love of literature. For him, at the age of twenty, she translated the Enchiridion of Epictetus. At eight years old she was the toast of the Kit-Cat Club, her face already giving promise of the splendid beauty of her maturity. When she was six-and-twenty, her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, was appointed ambassador to the Porte, and Lady Mary had the advantage, for two or three years, of studying Eastern manners under unusually favourable circumstances. From 1739 to 1761 she resided principally in

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Italy. It was her habit, during her long periods of exile from England, to write copiously to friends at home, and when a selection from these letters was published in 1763 Lady Mary was recognised at once as having been one of the wittiest of English letter-writers. She took pains to introduce into this country in 1717 the Turkish practice of inoculation for the smallpox, and it is in a letter to Miss Sarah Chiswell, from Adrianople, on 1st April of that year, that she first mentions this subject, in the following terms:

"I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell; and in this manner opens four or five veins. The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the middle of the forehead, in each arm, and on the breast, to mark the sign of the cross; but this has a very ill effect, all these wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those who are not superstitious, who choose to have them in the legs, or that part of the arm that is concealed. . . . Every year thousands undergo this operation, and the French ambassador says, pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries."

In many respects, though hard and mannish in temper, Lady Mary was eminent for width of view and for a mind open to the whole intellectual horizon. Her Town Eclogues, printed in 1716 in heroic verse, are so rich and sparkling that they almost place Lady Mary among the poets, but they are of astounding freedom of thought and language.

A muse more draggle-tailed than Lady Mary's now claims our attention for a moment. Delarivière Manley (1672-1724) was born