dulness in a Master of a College makes him a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope for fitter to manage secular affairs."

The Good Yeoman.-"Is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see refined." Good Parent.-"For his love, therein like a well-drawn picture, he eyes all his children alike."

Deformity in Children.-" This partiality is tyranny, when parents despise those that are deformed; enough to break those whom God had bowed before."

Good Master." In correcting his servant he becomes not a slave to his own passion. Not cruelly making new indentures of the flesh of his apprentice. He is tender of his servant in sickness and age. If crippled in his service, his house is his hospital. Yet how many throw away those dry bones, out of the which themselves have sucked the marrow!"

revenge."*

Bishop Brownrig.-"He carried learning enough in numerato about him in his pockets for any discourse, and had much more at home in his chests for any serious dispute."

Modest Want.-"Those that with diligence fight against poverty, though neither conquer till death makes it a drawn battle, expect not but prevent their craving of thee: for God forbid the heavens should never rain, till the earth first opens her mouth; seeing some grounds will sooner burn than chap."

Death-bed Temptations." The devil is most busy on the last day of his term; and a tenant to be outed cares not what mischief he doth."

Conversation.-"Seeing we are civilised Englishmen, let us not be naked savages in

our talk."

Wounded Soldier.-"Halting is the stateliest march of a soldier; and 'tis a brave sight to see the flesh of an ancient as torn as his colours."

Wat Tyler.-" A misogrammatist; if a good Greek word may be given to so barbarous a rebel."

Good Widow." If she can speak but little good of him [her dead husband] she speaks but little of him. So handsomely folding up her discourse, that his virtues are shown outwards, and his vices wrapt up in silence; as counting it barbarism to throw dirt on his memory, who hath mould cast on his body." Horses." These are men's wings, where-names- taking from them, adding to them, with they make such speed. A generous creature a horse is, sensible in some sort of honour; and made most handsome by that which deforms men most — pride."

Martyrdom." Heart of oak hath sometimes warped a little in the scorching heat of persecution. Their want of true courage herein cannot be excused. Yet many censure them for surrendering up their forts after a long siege, who would have yielded up their own at the first summons.-Oh! there is more required to make one valiant, than to call Cranmer or Jewel coward; as if the fire in Smithfield had been no hotter than what is painted in the Book of Martyrs." Text of St. Paul.-"St. Paul saith, Let not the sun go down on your wrath, to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's meaning rather than his words, with all possible speed to depose our passion; not understanding him so literally, that we may take leave to be angry till sunset: then might our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in Greenland, where the day lasts above

Heralds. "Heralds

new mould men's

melting out all the liquid letters, torturing mutes to make them speak, and making vowels dumb,-to bring it to a fallacious homonomy at the last, that their names may be the same with those noble houses they pretend to."

Antiquarian Diligence." It is most worthy observation, with what diligence he [Camden] inquired after ancient places, making hue and cry after many a city which was run away, and by certain marks and tokens pursuing to find it; as by the situation on the Roman highways, by just distance from other ancient cities, by some affinity of name, by tradition of the inhabitants, by Roman coins digged up, and by some appearance of ruins. A broken urn is a whole evidence; or an

This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one would have thought of deducing,-setting up an absurdum on purpose to hunt it down,- placing guards as it were at the very outposts of possibility,- gravely

giving out laws to insanity and prescribing moral fences to distempered intellects, could never have entered into

a head less entertainingly constructed than that of Fuller,

or Sir Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of this passage most aptly imitates.

old gate still surviving, out of which the city | the condition of Sir Edward. This accident,
is run out. Besides, commonly some new that he had killed one in a private quarrel,
spruce town not far off is grown out of the
ashes thereof, which yet hath so much natural
affection as dutifully to own those reverend
ruins for her mother."

put a period to his carnal mirth, and was a covering to his eyes all the days of his life. No possible provocations could afterwards tempt him to a duel; and no wonder that, Henry de Essex.-"He is too well known one's conscience loathed that whereof he had in our English Chronicles, being Baron of surfeited. He refused all challenges with Raleigh, in Essex, and Hereditary Standard more honour than others accepted them; it Bearer of England. It happened in the reign | being well known, that he would set his foot of this king [Henry II.] there was a fierce as far in the face of his enemy as any man battle fought in Flintshire, at Coleshall, be- alive."- Worthies, article Lincolnshire. tween the English and Welsh, wherein this Decayed Gentry. "It happened in the Henry de Essex animum et signum simul reign of King James, when Henry Earl of abjecit, betwixt traitor and coward, cast away | Huntingdon was Lieutenant of Leicestershire, both his courage and banner together, occa-that a labourer's son in that country was sioning a great overthrow of English. But pressed into the wars; as I take it, to go he that had the baseness to do, had the bold-over with Count Mansfield. The old man at ness to deny the doing, of so foul a fact; Leicester requested his son might be disuntil he was challenged in combat by Robert de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was confiscated to the king, and he himself, partly thrust, partly going, into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, under which, betwixt shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder of his life."*."*Worthies, article Bedfordshire.

Sir Edward Harwood, Knt.-"I have read of a bird, which hath a face like, and yet will prey upon, a man: who coming to the water to drink, and finding there by reflection, that he had killed one like himself, pineth away by degrees, and never afterwards enjoyeth itself. Such is in some sort *The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have been pronounced impossible: it has given an interest and a holy character to coward infamy. Nothing can be more beautiful than the concluding account of the last days, and expiatory retirement, of poor Henry de

Essex. The address with which the whole of this little story is told is most consummate: the charm of it seems to consist in a perpetual balance of antitheses not too violently opposed, and the consequent activity of mind in which the reader is kept: "Betwixt traitor and coward"-" baseness to do, boldness to deny"-" partly

thrust, partly going, into a convent"-"betwixt shame and sanctity." The reader by this artifice is taken into a kind of partnership with the writer,- his judgment is exercised in settling the preponderance,--he feels as if he were consulted as to the issue. But the modern historian flings at once the dead weight of his own judg. ment into the scale, and settles the matter.

charged, as being the only staff of his age,
who by his industry maintained him and his
mother. The Earl demanded his name,
which the man for a long time was loath to
tell (as suspecting it a fault for so poor a
man to confess the truth), at last he told his
name was Hastings. 'Cousin Hastings,' said
the Earl, we cannot all be top branches of
the tree, though we all spring from the same
root; your son, my kinsman, shall not be
pressed.' So good was the meeting of
modesty in a poor, with courtesy in an hon-
ourable person, and gentry I believe in both.
And I have reason to believe, that some who
justly own the surnames and blood of Bohuns,
Mortimers, and Plantagenets (though igno-
rant of their own extractions,) are hid in the
heap of common people, where they find that
under a thatched cottage which some of their
ancestors could not enjoy in a leaded castle,
-contentment, with quiet and security."-
Worthies, article Of Shire-Reeves or Shiriffes.

Tenderness of Conscience in a Tradesman.—
"Thomas Curson, born in Allhallows, Lom-
bard-street, armourer, dwelt without Bishops-

Errors; but the delight which he would have taken in the discussing of its probabilities, would have shown that the truth of the fact, though the avowed object of his search was not so much the motive which put him upon the investigation, as those hidden affinities and I do not know where Fuller read of this bird; but a poetical analogies.- those essential verities in the applimore awful and affecting story, and moralising of a story, cation of strange fable, which made him linger with such in Natural History, or rather in that Fabulous Natural reluctant delay among the last fading lights of popular History where poets and mythologists found the Phoenix tradition; and not seldom to conjure up a superstition, and the Unicorn, and "other strange fowl," is nowhere that had been long extinct, from its dusty grave, to inter extant. It is a fable which Sir Thomas Browne, if heit himself with greater ceremonies and solemnities of had heard of it, would have exploded among his Vulgar burial.

In obedience hereunto, Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, Diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight, scent, at a dead carcass) to ungrave him. Accordingly to Lutterworth they come, Sumner, Commissary, Official, Chancellor, Proctors, Doctors, and their servants, (so that the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone amongst so many hands,) take what was

gate. It happened that a stage-player bor- thrown far off from any Christian burial. rowed a rusty musquet, which had lain long leger in his shop: now though his part were comical, he therewith acted an unexpected tragedy, killing one of the standers by, the gun casually going off on the stage, which he suspected not to be charged. Oh the difference of divers men in the tenderness of their consciences! some are scarce touched with a wound, whilst others are wounded with a touch therein. This poor armourer left out of the grave, and burnt them to was highly afflicted therewith, though done against his will, yea, without his knowledge, in his absence, by another, out of mere chance. Hereupon he resolved to give all his estate to pious usęs: no sooner had he gotten a round sum, but presently he posted with it in his apron to the Court of Aldermen, and was in pain till by their direction he had settled it for the relief of poor in his own and other parishes, and disposed of some hundreds of pounds accordingly, as I am credibly informed by the then churchwardens of the said parish. Thus as he conceived himself casually (though at a great distance) to have occasioned the death of one, he was the immediate and direct cause of giving a comfortable living to many."

Burning of Wickliffe's Body by Order of the Council of Constance.-"Hitherto [A. D. 1428] the corpse of John Wickliffe had quietly slept in his grave about forty-one years after his death, till his body was reduced to bones, and his bones almost to dust. For though the earth in the chancel of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, where he was interred, hath not so quick a digestion with the earth of Aceldama, to consume flesh in twenty-four hours, yet such the appetite thereof, and all other English graves, to leave small reversions of a body after so many years. But now such the spleen of the Council of Constance, as they not only cursed his memory as dying an obstinate heretic, but ordered that his bones (with this charitable caution.—if it may be

discerned from the bodies of other faithful people) be taken out of the ground, and

ashes, and cast them into Swift, a neighbouring brook, running hard by. Thus this brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over."*. Church History.

I

*The concluding period of this most lively narrative

will not call a conceit; it is one of the grandest conliffe gliding away out of the reach of the Sumners, Commissaries, Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and all the puddering Council; from Swift into Avon, from Avon into Severn, rout of executioners of the impotent rage of the baffled from Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine "dispersed all the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Cæsar to the clay that stops a beer barrel is a no less curious pursuit of “ruined mortality;" but it is in

ceptions I ever met with. One feels the ashes of Wick

an inverse ratio to this; it degrades and saddeus us, for one part of our nature at least; but this expands the whole of diffusion as far as the actions of its partner can have reach or influence.

our nature, and gives to the body a sort of ubiquity,- &

I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a

quaint conceit of old Fuller. But what is not a conceit to

those who read it in a temper different from that in which

the writer composed it? The most pathetic parts of poetry
to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as divinity
meditating on his own utter annihilation as to royalty,
was to the Greeks foolishness. When Richard II.,
cries out,

"O that I were a mockery king of snow,
To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke,"

if we had been going on pace for pace with the passion be-
fore, this sudden conversion of a strong-feit metaphor into
something to be actually realised in nature, like that of
Jeremiah, "Oh! that my head were waters, and mine eyes

a fountain of tears," is strictly and strikingly natural; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a conceit: and so is a "head" turned into "waters."

ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH;

WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN THE WRITINGS OF THE LATE MR. BARRY.

ONE of the earliest and noblest enjoy- and extravagance, ending in the one with ments I had when a boy, was in the contem- driving the Prodigal from the society of men plation of those capital prints by Hogarth, into the solitude of the deserts, and in the the Harlot's and Rake's Progresses, which, other with conducting the Rake through his along with some others, hung upon the walls several stages of dissipation into the still more of a great hall in an old-fashioned house in complete desolations of the mad-house, in the -shire, and seemed the solitary tenants play and in the picture, are described with (with myself) of that antiquated and life- almost equal force and nature. The levee of deserted apartment. the Rake, which forms the subject of the second plate in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon's levee in the opening scene of that play. We find a dedicating poet, and other similar characters, in both.

Recollection of the manner in which those prints used to affect me has often made me wonder, when I have heard Hogarth described as a mere comic painter, as one of those whose chief ambition was to raise a The concluding scene in the Rake's Progress laugh. To deny that there are throughout is perhaps superior to the last scenes of the prints which I have mentioned circum- Timon. If we seek for something of kindred stances introduced of a laughable tendency, excellence in poetry, it must be in the scenes would be to run counter to the common of Lear's beginning madness, where the King notions of mankind: but to suppose that in and the Fool, and the Tom-o'Bedlam conspire their ruling character they appeal chiefly to to produce such a medley of mirth checked the risible faculty, and not first and foremost by misery, and misery rebuked by mirth; to the very heart of man, its best and most where the society of those "strange bedserious feelings, would be to mistake no less fellows" which misfortunes have brought grossly their aim and purpose. A set of severer Lear acquainted with, so finely sets forth the Satires (for they are not so much Comedies, destitute state of the monarch; while the which they have been likened to, as they are lunatic bans of the one, and the disjointed strong and masculine Satires) less mingled sayings and wild but pregnant allusions of with anything of mere fun, were never the other, so wonderfully sympathise with written upon paper, or graven upon copper. that confusion, which they seem to assist in They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches the production of, in the senses of that in Timon of Athens. "child-changed father."

I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered, “Shakspeare;" being asked which he esteemed next best, replied, "Hogarth." His graphic representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at, his prints we read.

In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Ruke's Progress, we find the same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. Here is desperate madness, the overturning of originally strong thinking faculties, at which we shudder, as we contemplate the duration and pressure of affliction which it must have asked to destroy such a building;

and here is the gradual hurtless lapse into In pursuance of this parallel, I have some- idiocy, of faculties, which at their best of times entertained myself with comparing the times never having been strong, we look Timon of Athens of Shakspeare (which I have upon the consummation of their decay with just mentioned) and Hogarth's Rake's Pro- no more of pity than is consistent with a gress together. The story, the moral, in both smile. The mad tailor, the poor driveller is nearly the same. The wild course of riot, that has gone out of his wits (and truly he