proved the more unpleasant to me, because I believe him to be a good man; and that belief hath occasioned me to examine mine own conscience concerning his opinions. And to satisfy that I have consulted the holy Scripture, and other laws, both human and divine, whether the conscience of him and others of his judgment ought to be so far complied with by us as to alter our frame of church-government, our manner of God's worship, our praising and praying to Him, and our established ceremonies, as often as their tender consciences shall require us. And in this examination I have not only satisfied myself, but have begun a treatise in which I intend the satisfaction of others, by a demonstration of the reasonableness of our laws of ecclesiastical polity. But, my lord, I shall never be able to finish what I have begun, unless I be removed into some quiet parsonage, where I may see God's blessings spring out of my mother-earth, and eat my own bread in peace and privacy; a place where I may, without disturbance, meditate my approaching mortality, and that great account which all flesh must give at the last day to the God of all spirits.'

First appointed to a parish in Wiltshire, he was in the following year presented to a rectory in Kent, where the remainder of his life was spent in meditation and the faithful discharge of his duties. Never strong, he died in November, 1600, of pulmonic disease induced by a heavy cold.

Writings.-Against the non-conforming Puritans, Hooker, in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, undertook to investigate and define the right of the Church to claim obedience from its members, and the duty of the members to render obedience to the Church. His opponents insisted that a definite scheme of church polity was revealed in the Bible, thus reducing the controversy to a mere anarchy of opinions about the meaning of certain texts. With that aching for order and that demand for fundamental ideas which characterize a tranquil spirit and a great mind, he founded his argument on general conceptions, and urged that the laws of nature, reason, and society, equally with those of Scripture, are of divine institution. Both are equally worthy of respect. It is the province of the 'natural light' to distinguish between what is variable and what is invariable in these laws, between what is eternal and what is temporary in Revelation itself. Hence the divinely constituted reason of man does not exceed its rights in establishing certain uniformities and ceremonials on which Scripture may be doubtful or silent. The English Church system may be conformable to the will of God, though not enjoined by any clear text of his revealed Word.

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What was transitory or what was partial in the book may subtracted without injury to its immortal excellence; for its foundations are laid deep in the eternal verities which are the basis of all duties and all rights, political as well as religious.

Its central idea is law, as apprehended by reason, which in its essential nature is one with the self-conscious infinite reason at the heart of things. May we,' he indignantly asks, 'cause our faith without Reason to appear reasonable in the eyes of men?' And of this uncreated Law which sustains the fabric of the universe, and weds obligation to ecstasy, he says in language touched by a consecrating radiance:

'Wherefore, that here we may briefly end: of law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and their joy.'

Style.-Methodical, correct, ample, massive, and grand; idiomatic without vulgarity, and learned without pedantry. The Latin order of arrangement was with Hooker, as with all the translators of the period, a favorite construction. For example: 'Brought already we are even to that estate'; 'able we are not to deny, but that we have deserved the hatred of the heathen.' Often it is used with powerful effect, giving to the capital images the emphatic positions; as, 'Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the doings of the Most High.' Some of his periods are cumbrous and intricate, but in general they roll melodiously on, with the serene might of the soul that inspires and moves them, rich in imagery and noble in diction.

Rank. By universal consent, one of the great in English letters. A learned divine without fanaticism. A persuasive logician, from the chain of whose reasoning it is hard to detach a link, without a fracture. A philosopher whose breadth and power of mind are shown not only in the conception and application of one majestic principle, but in the exhibition of many principles harmoniously related. None before him had his grasp and largeness; few after him have been so comprehensive. As he was one of the loftiest of thinkers, so he was one of the most practical. The idea that shone in the heaven of contemplation, radiated in a thousand directions on the earth. Worthy to be regarded not only as one of the fathers of the English Church, but as one of the chief founders of English prose. It was said by a contemporary Romanist that he had never read an English

book whose writer deserved the name of author till he read the first four books of 'a poor obscure English priest' on Laws and Church Polity; a judgment which points at least to the fact that the 'obscure priest' is the original of what deserves to be called English literature, in its theological and philosophical domain.

Character.- Grave, mild, modest, and devout; in youth ardently studious, and in manhood conspicuous equally for learning and for eloquence. As a schoolboy he was remarkable for his continual questioning, but his inquisitive intellect was accompanied with docility of disposition, and the happy teacher spared no efforts to advance the little wonder. His body was feeble, his soul capacious. He suffered much, yet was without fretful or morbid quality, resolved, like Socrates, to make a noble use of racking pains and sordid annoyances. It was in this enlightened and tolerant spirit that he bore the perpetual cross of union with a female of vulgar manners, of unprepossessing face, of snappish and tyrannizing temper. A London hostess, on the occasion of his appointment to preach a sermon at Paul's Cross, had opportunely cured him of a cold. He was easily persuaded that his constitutional delicacy required a perpetual nurse. Her benevolence not stopping here, she offered to provide such a one; and he, in an excess of gratitude, promised to marry her choice. On his next arrival, the artful woman presented her daughter, and the guileless Hooker, the thinker and scholar, the man of innocent wisdom, who would have a nurse-wife, got a shrew. She preferred the more natural office of vixen. When visited, about a year afterwards, by two of his former pupils, he was found tending a flock of sheep, with a copy of Horace in his hand. In the house, they received no entertainment but his conversation, which Mrs. Hooker interrupted by calling him sharply to come and rock the cradle; for she would have it understood that her husband was her servant, and that his friends were unwelcome guests. Cranmer, in taking leave, said:

Good tutor, I am sorry that your lot is fallen in no better ground as to your parsonage; and more sorry that your wife proves not a more comfortable companion after you have wearied yourself in your restless studies.'

To which Hooker made the characteristic answer:

My dear George, if saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my wise Creator hath appointed for me, but labor-as indeed I do daily — to submit mine to His will, and possess my soul in patience and peace.'

His intelligence was essentially moral; and, by the alchemy of his rare spirit, all knowledge and experience were transmuted into celestialized reason.

Influence.-To Hooker belongs the merit of first fully developing the English language as a vehicle of refined and philosophic thought. His work is monumental. It is still

referred to as a great authority upon the whole range of moral and political principles. The beauty of his daily life was an agency to create new beauty everywhere. We can believe that it left its impress even upon his wife. A man of noble piety is in a community like a flower that fills the whole house with its fragrance; and the children born there a hundred years later are better born than elsewhere, because that man spread the sweetness of his character there, and uplifted the vulgar when they knew it not.

Above all, Hooker introduced into polemics a new spirit and method-philosophical rather than theological. Against the dogmatism of creed he set the authority of reason, to which he gave so large a place that never, even to this day, has it made a similar advance. It is not difficult to see the immense importance of this change, a change of which, indeed, he is the representative and reactionary rather than the initial and efficient cause. As long as an opinion was defended by the dogmatic method, whoever assailed it incurred the imputation of heresy, and it was easy to justify his persecution; but when it was chiefly defended by human reason, which leads the ablest minds to the most opposite conclusions, the element of uncertainty entered, and punishment was felt to be wrong when it was seen that the persecuted might be right.

RALEIGH.

A great but ill-regulated mind.-Hume.

Biography.-Born in Devonshire, in 1552, the younger son of a family richer in ancient lineage than in patrimony; entered Oxford, but quit it shortly for active life, with no resource but

his enterprise and his sword; at seventeen a valorous leader in the Protestant cause of France, subsequently in the Netherlands, then in Ireland; from the art of war, turned to the art of navigation, which had led Columbus to discovery and Pizarro to conquest; planned an expedition to North America; planted colonies in the wilds to which the royal maiden had eagerly given the name of Virginia, but failed, the colonists returning with tobacco and potatoes instead of diamonds and gold; rose to a favorite of the Queen, was knighted, was her chief adviser in the Spanish invasion of the Armada, was active in its destruction and serviceable in Parliament; a courtier commanding the Queen's guard, riding abroad with her in his suit of solid silver, or attending the Court in dress gorgeous with jewels, from the huge diamond which buttoned his feather to his shoes powdered with pearls; intrigued with a maid of honor, and lost the favor which had been the pride of his ambition; married the maid, and was imprisoned with his wife in the Tower; counterfeited the most romantic despair at the Queen's displeasure, and obtained his freedom, but was banished the presence; thought to dazzle her imagination, and went in quest of the El Dorado, fabled to be in the interior of South America, where the sands glistened, the rocks shone, and the houses were roofed, with the precious metal; returned, and wrote:

Of the little remaining fortune I had, I have wasted in effect all herein. I have undergone many constructions, been accompanied with many sorrows, with labor, hunger, heat, sickness, and peril. From myself I have deserved no thanks; for I am returned a beggar, and withered.'

Restored to the favor of his mistress-sovereign by the brilliancy of his maritime enterprise, he was discountenanced by James I, whose mind had been poisoned by a malignant rival; was tried on a charge of treason, condemned, but reprieved, and instead of being executed was committed to the Tower, where he was confined for twelve years, during six of which his wife was permitted to bear him company; tempted the cupidity of the king by the vision of a gold-mine and a new empire in Guiana; offered to equip a fleet for the adventure, and was released but not pardoned; burned a Spanish town, got nothing of value, was forced to return a baffled dreamer, under the imputations of falsehood and treachery; and to satisfy the implacable Spaniards, was