condoling, howling, and distraction enough to the end of the tragedy. One may imagine how a Grecian audience, that loved their country, and gloried in the virtue of their ancestors, would be affected with this representation. Never appeared on the stage a ghost of greater consequence. The grand monarch Darius, who had been so shamefully beaten by those petty provinces of the united Grecians, could not now lie quiet in his grave for them, but must be raised from the dead again to be witness of his son's disgrace, and of their triumph. Were a tragedy after this model to be drawn for our stage Greece and Persia are too far from us. The scene must be laid nearer home, as at the Louvre; and instead of Xerxes we might take John, king of France, and the battle of Poictiers. So if the Germans or Spaniards were to compose a play on the battle of Pavia, and King Francis there taken prisoner, the scene should not be laid at Vienna, or at Madrid, but at the Louvre. For there the tragedy would principally operate, and there all the lines most naturally centre. But perhaps the memorable adventure of the Spaniards in '88 against England, may better resemble that of Xerxes. Suppose then a tragedy called "The Invincible Armado." The place, then, for the action may be at Madrid, by some tomb or solemn place of resort; or if we prefer a turn in it from good to bad fortune, then some drawing-room in the palace near the king's bed-chamber. The time to begin, twelve at night. The scene opening presents fifteen grandees of Spain, with their most solemn beards and accoutrements, met there (suppose) after some ball or other public occasion. They talk of the state of affairs, the greatness of their power, the vastness of their dominions, and prospect to be infallibly, ere long, lords of all. With this prosperity and goodly thoughts transported, they at last form themselves into the chorus, and walk such measures, with music as may become the gravity of such a chorus. Then enter two or three of the cabinet council, who now have leave to tell the secret, that the preparations and the Invincible Armado was to conquer England. These, with part of the chorus, may communicate all the particulars, the provisions, and the strength by sea and land, the certainty of success, the advantages by that accession, and the many tun of tar-barrels for the heretics. These topics may afford matter enough, with the chorus, for the second act. In the third act these gentlemen of the cabinet cannot agree about sharing the preferments of England, and a mighty brawl there is amongst them. One will not be content unless he is king of Man; another will be duke of Lancaster. One, that had seen a coronation in England, will by all means be duke of Aquitayn, or else duke of Normandy. And on this occasion two competitors have a juster occasion to work up, and show the muscles of their passion, than Shakespeare's Cassius and Brutus. After, the chorus. The fourth act may, instead of Atossa, present some old dames of the court, used to dream dreams, and to see sprites, in their night-rails and forehead-clothes, to alarm our gentlemen with new apprehensions, which make distraction and disorders sufficient to furnish out this act. In the last act the king enters, and wisely discourses against dreams and hobgoblins to quiet their minds; and the more to satisfy them, and take off their fright, he lets them to know that St. Loyola had appeared to him, and assured him that all is well. This said, comes a messenger of the ill news; his account is lame —suspected, he is sent to prison. A second messenger, that came away long after, but had a speedier passage; his account is distinct, and all their loss credited. So, in fine, one of the chorus concludes with that of Euripides, "Thus you see the gods bring things to pass often, otherwise than was by man proposed." In this draught we see the fable, and the characters or manners of Spaniards, and room for fine thoughts and noble expressions, as much as the poet can afford. The first act gives a review or ostentation of their strength in battle array. In the second, they are in motion for the attack, and we see where the action falls. In the third, they quarrel about dividing the spoil. In the fourth, they meet with a repulse; are beaten off by a vanguard of dreams, goblins, and terrors of the night. In the fifth, they rally under their king in person, and make good their ground, till overpowered by fresh troops of conviction, and mighty truth prevails. For the first act, a painter would draw Spain hovering, and ready to strike at the universe. In the second, just taking England in her pounces. But it must not be forgotten in the second act that there be some Spanish fryar or Jesuit, as St. Xaviere (for he may drop in by miracle anywhere) to ring in their ears "The northern heresie"; like Iago in Shakespeare, "Put money in thy purse, I say, put money in thy purse." So often may he repeat, "The northern heresie. Away with your secular advantages; say, the northern heresie; there is roast meat for the church, voto a Christo, the northern heresie." If Mr. Dryden might try his pen on this subject, doubtless, to an audience that heartily love their country and glory in the virtue of their ancestors, his imitation of Eschylus would have better success, and would "pit, box, and gallery," 1 far beyond any thing now in possession of the stage, however wrought up by the unimitable Shakespeare. (From A Short View of Tragedy, 1693.) 1 "In fine, it shall read, and write, and act, and plot, and shew, ay, and pit, box, and gallery, I gad, with any play in Europe."-BAYES in the Rehearsal.-[ED.] WILLIAM AND THOMAS SHERLOCK [The almost obligatory rule of treating but one author in one article may be broken with some reason in the case of the Sherlocks, who occupy a position almost unmatched in English literary history. The lives of the father and the son covered nearly a century and a quarter, during by far the greater part of which time both occupied very high places in exactly the same branch of literature, that of oratorical and controversial divinity,—their careers overlapping considerably. They were both Eton and Cambridge men; both held the important office of Master of the Temple, which gave them probably the most intellectual congregation out of the two universities; both were representatives of an extreme and yet by no means uncompromising political and theological orthodoxy; both were for the time the central figures of furious and celebrated polemical struggles; and both had very high reputations in their day as writers and preachers. The continuity of their careers is curious; perhaps not less curious is the contrast of their style, which marks progress more strikingly than any unrelated and casual examples taken at the same distance of time could possibly do. William Sherlock, the father, was born at Southwark in 1641, went from Eton to Peterhouse, and became a beneficed London clergyman in 1669. He soon took a prominent part among the High Church section of the London clergy, and became even more famous as a controversialist and pamphleteer than as a preacher. He opposed Puritans and Romanists, but especially the enemies of the Duke of York's succession, for which latter service he received the Mastership of the Temple and other preferments from Charles II. But he would not lend himself to James's toleration of Papists, and fell under the royal displeasure even before the Revolution. His singular and, to say the least, unfortunate conduct at that crisis has been told by Macaulay in one of his liveliest and (for the importance of the matter) most detailed passages. Here it must be sufficient to say that Sherlock at first refused the oaths, and was suspended from his Mastership; but after some months announced his conversion, by dint of a treatise of Bishop Overall's, enjoining submission to the government de facto, and took the oaths-together with the Deanery of St. Paul's. He at once became the mark for the most violent abuse, not merely from Non-jurors, but from those who, by this means or that, had reconciled themselves to the oaths at once. By extraordinary ill-luck or maladroitness, the almost simultaneous publication of a well-intentioned but clumsy Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity," in which he was said to have fallen into Tritheism in attacking the Socinians, gave his enemies (among whom was the redoubtable South) a handle. Sherlock, how ever, kept his places, lived the storm down, and after loyal dedications and the like to Queen Anne, died in 1707. His most famous work, A Practical Discourse concerning Death (1689), was written during retirement between his refusing and his taking the oaths, and became extraordinarily popular, twentyseven editions having been called for by the middle of the eighteenth century. He also published other Discourses of the same kind on Judgment, Providence, and Future Punishment, together with sermons and a great number of controversial works. But these do not appear to have ever been collected. Thomas Sherlock, his second son (by a wealthy and masterful lady, who was said by scandal to have had not a little to do with her husband's tergiversation), was born in London in 1678. He too went to Eton, where he made many useful friends, including Walpole, and acquired much reputation as a scholar and a swimmer. He then went to Catherine Hall, Cambridge, of which he became successively Fellow and (in 1714) Master, and where he came into early contact with his future antagonist, Hoadly. In 1704, when he was only twenty-six, his father found means to resign the Mastership of the Temple in his favour. Sherlock was a strong Tory and High Churchman ; but with a luckier application of the family tendency to face both ways, he contrived to be a strong Hanoverian also, and after the accession of the Georges he was successively Dean of Chichester (1715), and Bishop of Bangor (1728), Salisbury (1734), and London (1748). He had also inherited another family talent, that for controversy, and after taking no small share, as ViceChancellor, in the Bentleian broils at Cambridge, he became a protagonist in the great Bangorian controversy with Hoadly, his early rival and immediate predecessor at Bangor itself. He was a frequent and effective speaker in Parliament, is said to have declined Canterbury before he accepted London, and (a rather unusual thing in that age of pluralities), resigned his Mastership of the Temple, after a tenure of all but half a century, in 1753. He died on 11th July 1761, leaving no children, but a considerable fortune to his wife, who had been a Miss Judith Fountaine. Sherlock's long life, prominent position, active temper, and not small abilities, brought him under the favourable or unfavourable notice of many men of letters among both the wits and the divines of his time. Besides his controversial works and his sermons, he is best remembered by his very clever Trial of the Witnesses against the Deists, and by an excellent little Letter to the Clergy and Laity of his diocese on the earthquakes of 1750. A collected edition of his works appeared in 1830, in 5 vols. 8vo, edited by the Rev. T. C. Hughes.] WILLIAM SHERLOCK'S Discourse on Death must certainly be pronounced a book of no ordinary good fortune. As has been said above, the public bought it without stint; and the critics praised as freely as the public bought. Addison, in prose, set it in the first rank as a persuasive to a religious life: Prior, in verse, devoted to it a long string of very bad and very un-Prior-like lines, in which Sherlock is apostrophised as "wondrous good man," is compared to St. John the Baptist, is told that "his words are easy and his sense sublime," receives the doubtfully orthodox assurance that at the Last Judgment he will "glad all |