and when the bishop of London was brought before them, gave his voice in his favour1. Thus far he suffered interest or obedience to carry him; but 11 further he refused to go. When he found that the powers of the ecclesiastical commission were to be exercised against those who had refused the Declaration, he wrote to the lords and other commissioners a formal profession of his unwillingness to exercise that authority any longer, and withdrew himself from them. After they had read his letter they adjourned for six months, and scarcely ever met afterwards 2. When king James was frighted away and a new government 12 was to be settled, Sprat was one of those who considered in a conference the great question whether the crown was vacant, and manfully spoke in favour of his old master 3. He complied, however, with the new establishment, and was 13 left unmolested; but in 1692 a strange attack was made upon him by one Robert Young and Stephen Blackhead, both men convicted of infamous crimes, and both, when the scheme was laid, prisoners in Newgate. These men drew up an Association, in which they whose names were subscribed declared their resolution to restore king James; to seize the princess of Orange, dead or alive; and to be ready with thirty thousand men to meet king James when he should land. To this they put the names of Sancroft, Sprat, Marlborough, Salisbury, and others 5. The copy of Dr. Sprat's name was obtained by a fictitious request, to which an answer 'in Two Letters, &c., p. 5. The Bishop was brought before them in the summer of 1686, for refusing to suspend a clergyman on the order of the Secretary of State. Macaulay's Hist.ii. 347, 352. He thus ends his letter, dated Aug. 15, 1688:-'I earnestly request your Lordships to . . . assure his Majesty that I am still ready to sacrifice whatever I have to his service but my conscience and religion.' Two Letters, &c., p. 17. 'Immediately upon the receipt of my letter wherein I renounced them they adjourned in confusion for six months, and scarce ever met afterwards.' lb. p. 8. 'A government must be indeed in danger when men like Sprat addressed it in the language of Hampden.' 14 15 his own hand' was desired'. His hand was copied so well, that he confessed it might have deceived himself2. Blackhead, who had carried the letter, being sent again with a plausible message, was very curious to see the house, and particularly importunate to be let into the study, where, as is supposed, he designed to leave the Association. This however was denied him, and he dropt it in a flower-pot in the parlour 3. Young now laid an information before the Privy Council; and May 7, 1692, the bishop was arrested, and kept at a messenger's under a strict guard eleven days. His house was searched, and directions were given that the flower-pots should be inspected. The messengers, however, missed the room in which the paper was left. Blackhead went therefore a third time; and finding his paper where he had left it, brought it away 5. The bishop, having been enlarged, was, on June the 10th and 13th, examined again before the Privy Council, and confronted with his accusers'. Young persisted with the most obdurate impudence against the strongest evidence; but the resolution of Blackhead by degrees gave way. There remained at last no doubt of the bishop's innocence, who, with great prudence and diligence, traced the progress and detected the characters of the two informers, and published an account of his own examination and deliverance 10; which made such an impression upon him that he commemorated it through life by an yearly day of thanksgiving ". ' Sprat's Relation, p. 56. a Ib. p. 67. 3 Ib. pp. 47, 61, 65, 69, 160. Horace Walpole wrote on Aug. 5, 1752 (Letters, ii. 296) :—' While they were changing our horses at Bromley we went to see the Bishop of Rochester's palace; not for the sake of anything there was to be seen, but because there was a chimney, in which had stood a flower-pot, in which was put the counterfeit plot against Bishop Sprat.' It was on Saturday, the seventh of May of this present year 1692, in the evening, as I was walking in the orchard at Bromley, meditating on something I designed to preach the next day, that I saw a coach and four horses stop at the outer gate, out of which two persons alighted.' With what hope or what interest the villains had contrived an 16 accusation which they must know themselves utterly unable to prove, was never discovered 1. After this he passed his days in the quiet exercise of his 17 function. When the cause of Sacheverell put the publick in commotion he honestly appeared among the friends of the church. He lived to his seventy-ninth year, and died May 20, 1713. Burnet is not very favourable to his memory 3; but he and 18 Burnet were old rivals. On some publick occasion they both preached before the house of commons. There prevailed in those days an indecent custom: when the preacher touched any favourite topick in a manner that delighted his audience their approbation was expressed by a loud hum, continued in proportion to their zeal or pleasure. When Burnet preached, part of his congregation hummed so loudly and so long that he sat down to enjoy it, and rubbed his face with his handkerchief. When Sprat preached, he likewise was honoured with the like animating hum; but he stretched out his hand to the congregation, and cried 'Peace, peace, I pray you, peace.' This I was told in my youth by my father, an old man, who 19 had been no careless observer of the passages of those times 5. Burnet's sermon, says Salmon, was remarkable for sedition, 20 and Sprat's for loyalty". Burnet had the thanks of the house; Sprat had no thanks, but a good living from the king; which, he said, was of as much value as the thanks of the Commons. 'Sprat thus describes the consternation both in town and country' when the plot was sprung:-'The English fleet was scarce yet out of the river; the Dutch for the most part at home; the French in the mouth of the Channel, and only kept back by contrary winds; a terrible invasion hourly expected from France; the army beyond sea that should have defended us; a real plot and confederacy by many whispered about, by the common people believed; many persons of great quality imprisoned upon that suspicion; all men's minds prepared to hear of some sudden rising or See discovery.' Relation, p. 162. also Macaulay's Hist. vi. 252-63. 2 Ante, DRYDEN, 109; KING, 13; post, HALIFAX, 9. 3His parts were very bright in his youth, and gave great hopes; but these were blasted by a lazy libertine course of life, to which his temper and good nature carried him, without considering the duties, or even the decencies of his profession: he was justly esteemed a great master of our language, and one of our correctest writers.' BURNET, History, iv. 333. In a notice of this passage in Gent. Mag. 1779, p. 453, it is said that the custom of humming applause is less indecent than that which prevails in one of our University Churches of scraping dislike.' Ante, DRYDEN, 109. 6 [An Impartial Exam. of Bishop Burnet's Hist., 1724, by Thos. Salmon, ii. 852. The sermons were preached on Dec. 22, 1680.] 21 22 The works of Sprat, besides his few poems, are The History of the Royal Society, The Life of Cowley, The Answer to Sorbière, The History of the Ryehouse Plot, The Relation of his own Examination, and a volume of Sermons. I have heard it observed with great justness that every book is of a different kind, and that each has its distinct and characteristical excellence 1. My business is only with his poems. He considered Cowley as a model, and supposed that as he was imitated perfection was approached. Nothing therefore but Pindarick liberty was to be expected. There is in his few productions no want of such conceits as he thought excellent; and of those our judgement may be settled by the first that appears in his praise of Cromwell, where he says that Cromwell's 'fame, like man, will grow white as it grows old 3.' APPENDIX B (PAGE 33) For the Royal Society see ante, COWLEY, 31; BUTLER, 20. 'It was some space after the end of the Civil Wars at Oxford, in Doctor Wilkins his lodgings, in Wadham College, that the first meetings were made which laid the foundation of all this that followed. Their first purpose was no more than only the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being engaged in the passions and madness of that dismal age. . . . The founders have attempted to free the knowledge of nature from the artifice and humours and passions of sects; to render it an instrument whereby mankind 6 This observation was made to Dr. Johnson by the Right Hon. Wm. Gerard Hamilton, as he told me at Tunbridge, August, 1792.' MALONE, Johnson's Works, vii. 392 n. Unhappily for his fame it has been usual to print his verses in collections of the British poets. ... Those who are acquainted with his prose writings will form a very different estimate of his powers. He was, indeed, a great master of our language.' MACAULAY, History, ii. 351. 2 He was 'known to some by the name of Pindaric Sprat. Ath. Òxon. iv. 727; ante, COWLEY, 143. Gray, in his sketch of the division of a proposed History of English Poetry, says that 'a third Italian school, full of conceit, began in Queen Elizabeth's reign, continued under James and Charles I by Donne, Crashaw, Cleveland; carried to its height by Cowley, and ending perhaps in Sprat.' Mitford, Gray's Works, Preface, p. 112. 3 'Tis true, great name, thou art secure From the forgetfulness and rage Of death, or envy, or devouring age; Thou canst the force and teeth of time endure: Thy fame, like men, the elder it Will of itself turn whiter too, He may obtain a dominion over things, and not only over one another's judgments.' SPRAT, History of the Royal Society, pp. 53, 62. adds that 'the substance and direction' of what he wrote came from either Wilkins or Oldenburgh. Ib. p. 94. Cowley complimented Sprat in his Ode to the Royal Society (Eng. Poets, vii. 269): 'And ne'er did fortune better yet Th' historian to the story fit. His candid style, like a clear stream, does slide, Does, like the sunshine, in it play.' Lord Keeper North, who died in 1685, refused to join the Society, because he esteemed it a species of vanity for one, as he was, of a grave profession to list himself of a Society which, at that time, was made very free with by the ridiculers of the town.' Lives of the Norths, 1826, ii. 179. The Fellows 'seem to be in a confederacy against men of polite genius, noble thought and diffusive learning, and choose into their assemblies such as have no pretence to wisdom but want of wit, or to natural knowledge but ignorance of everything else.' The Tatler, No. 236. See also No. 221. Addison, in The Spectator, No. 10, under the class of men 'who live in the world without having anything to do in it,' comprehends 'all contemplative tradesmen, titular physicians, Fellows of the Royal Society,' &c. Pope ridicules the Society in The Dunciad, iv. 441-58, 565-70. When, in 1747, Horace Walpole was elected a Fellow, Gray wrote to him :-'This is only a beginning; I reckon next week we shall hear you are a Free-Mason, or a Gormogon at least.' Gray's Letters, i. 157. Johnson improved the method of arranging the materials in the Transactions.' Boswell's Johnson, ii. 40. APPENDIX C (PAGE 33) Relation d'un Voyage en Angleterre, par Samuel Sorbière, 12mo, Paris, 1664. Sprat in his reply (p. 3) calls Sorbière 'a pragmatical reviler of England, and says that he was punished by Lewis XIV for the book. According to Biog. Brit. p. 3815, the French king suppressed it by an 'arrest of his Council.' Pepys records on Oct. 13, 1664:—" -'Sorbière says that it is reported that Cromwell did, in his life-time, transpose many of the bodies of the Kings of England from one grave to another, and that by that means it is not known certainly whether the head that is now set up upon a post be that of Cromwell, or of one of the Kings.' Diary, ii. 387. The book is insignificant. The most curious part is the spelling-Chipsey for Cheapside; Rue de Biscop-Getrstriidt for Bishopsgate Street, and Mylord Piter Borrogh for Lord Peterborough. To Pope Clement IX, who had conferred on Sorbière some dis |