ng on, till He and we be through the briars and bushes on the ry ground. Our soft nature would be borne through the roubles of this miserable life in Christ's arms. And it is His visdom, who knoweth our mould, that His bairns go wet-shod and cold-footed to heaven. Oh how sweet a thing were it for us

o learn to make our burdens light by framing our hearts to the burden, and making our Lord's will a law! I find Christ and His cross not so ill to please, nor yet such troublesome guests as nen call them. Nay, I think patience should make Christ's vater good wine, and this dross good metal; and we have cause to wait on, for ere it be long our Master will be at us, and bring this whole world out before the sun and the daylight in their blacks and whites. Happy are they who are found watching. Our sand-glass is not so long as we need to weary time will eat away, and root out our woes and sorrow: our heaven is in the oud, and growing up to an harvest, why then should we not follow on, seeing our span-length of time will come to an inch? Therefore, I commend Christ to you, as your last living and longest living Husband, and the staff of your old age: let Him have now the rest of your days; and think not much of a storm upon the ship that Christ saileth in; there shall no passenger fall overboard; but the crazed ship and the sea-sick passenger shall come to land safe. I am in as sweet communion with Christ as a poor sinner can be; and am only pained that He hath much beauty and fairness, and I little love; He great power and mercy, and I little faith; He much light, and I bleared eyes. O, that I saw him in the sweetness of His love, and in His marriage clothes, and were over head and ears in love with that Princely One, Christ Jesus my Lord! Alas, my riven dish and running-out vessel can hold little of Christ Jesus! I have joy in this, that I would not refuse death before I put Christ's lawful heritage in men's trysting; and what know I, if they would have pleased both Christ and me? Alas! that this land hath put Christ to open rouping, and to an "Any man more bids?" Blessed are they who would hold the crown on His head, and buy Christ's honour with their own losses. I rejoice to hear your son John is coming to visit Christ and taste of His love. I hope he shall not lose his pains, or rue of that choice. I had always (as I said often to you) a great love to dear Mr. John Brown, because I thought I saw Christ in him more than in his brethren; fain would I write to him, to stand by my sweet

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Master, and I wish ye would let him read my letter, and the joy I have, if he will appear for, and side with my Lord Jesus. Grace, grace be with you.-Yours, in his sweet Lord Jesus.

ABERDEEN, 13th March 1637.

S. R.

(From the Letters.)

VIOLENT AND NATURAL DEATH

VIOLENCE more or less is an accident of death, as it is the same hand folded in, or the fingers stretched out; violent death is but death on horseback, and with wings, or a stroke with the fist, as the other death is a blow with the palms of the hand. Natural death is death going on foot, and creeping with a slower pace ; violent death unites all its forces at once, and takes the city by storm, and comes with sourer and blacker visage. Death natural divides itself in many several bits of deaths; old age being a long spun out death, and nature seems to render the city more willingly, and death comes with a whiter and a milder visage; the one has a salter bite, and teeth of steel and iron; the other has softer fingers, and takes asunder the boards of the claytabernacle more leisurely, softly, tenderly, and with less din, as not willing that death should appear death, but a sleep; the violent death is as when apples green and raw are plucked off the tree, or when flowers in the bud, and young, are plucked up by the roots; the other way of dying is, as when apples are ripened and are filled with well-boiled summer sap, and fall off the tree of their own accord in the eater's mouth; or when flowers wither on the stalk. Some dying full of days have like banqueters, a surfeit of time, others are suddenly plucked away when they are green; but which of the ways you die, not to die in the Lord is terrible; ye may know ye shall die by the fields ye grow on, while ye live; a believer on Christ, breathes in Christ, speaks, walks, prays, believes, eateth, drinketh, sickens, dies in Christ; Christ is the soil he is planted in, he groweth on the banks of the paradise of God; when he falleth, he cannot fall wrong; some are trees growing on the banks of the river of fire and brimstone; when God hews down the tree, and death fells them, the tree can fall no otherwise than in hell; O how sweet to be

Christ, and to grow as a tree planted on the banks of the ver of life, when such die they fall in Christ's lap and in His osom; be the death violent or natural! it is all one whether a trong gale and a rough storm shore the child of God on the new erusalem's dry land, or if a small calm blast, even with rowing f oars, bring the passenger to heaven, if once he be in that oodly land.

(From Christ Dying.)

JOHN EARLE

[Born at York about 1601. According to Wood, graduated B.A. and vas elected to a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, in 1619. He was a esident in the University in 1628, the date of the publication, by Edward Blount, of his Microcosmography, or A Piece of the World discovered in Essays ind Characters. King Charles II., whose tutor he had been, and whose ortunes he had followed in exile, conferred upon him in 1662 the Bishopric of Worcester, whence in 1663 he was promoted to Salisbury. He died at Oxford in 1665.]

EARLE'S epitaph in Merton College Chapel, conformably with the fact that he lived in an age of academical studies from which we are but just emerging, based his literary reputation upon his presumably excellent Latin versions of two standard English books. But although no reference was allowed on his tomb to the one work in the vulgar tongue which has secured to him a place among our men of letters, the inscription suggests precisely enough the antithetical mixture which distinguished him "as an author," while it commended him "as a man." "Potuit in aulâ vivere, et mundum spernere: he contrived to live at court, while contemning the world." No sentence could better summarise that which attracts and that which edifies in the character-sketches of this quick-witted observer and high-minded censor of his times.

It would be rather absurd to treat a slender collection of "detached leaves" like the Microcosmography (to which in later editions new detachments were from time to time added) as a classic of our prose-literature; but there is no difficulty in accounting for its prolonged popularity, and good reason for approving the soundness of the judgment with which it found favour. fell in, as is the case with all but possibly a very few successful books (and I think I might omit the qualification), with a current of public predilection yet its author knew how to preserve, or preserved unconsciously, the individual note.

It