noble romance, written by a bishop, which the entreaty of all the Eastern churches could never prevail with him to disown; and I am confident, that where romances are written by excellent wits, and perused by intelligent readers, that the judgment may pick more sound information from them, than from history, for the one teacheth us only what was done, and the other what should be done; and whereas romances present to us virtue in its holiday robes, history presents her only to us in those ordinary, and spotted suits which she wears while she is busied in her servile and lucrative employments; and as many would be incited to virtue and generosity, by reading in romances, how much it hath been honoured, so contrarywise, many are deterred by historical experience from being virtuous, knowing that it hath been oftener punished than acknowledged. Romances are those vessels which strain the crystal streams of virtue from the puddle of interest; whereas history suffers the memory to quaff them off in their mixed impurity; by these likewise lazy ladies and luxurious gallants are allured to spend in their chambers some hours, which else the one would consecrate to the bed, and the other to the brothel and albeit essays be the choicest pearls in the jewel house of moral philosophy, yet I ever thought that they were set off to the best advantage, and appeared with the greatest lustre, when they were laced upon a romance; so that the curiosity might be satisfied, as well as the judgment informed, especially in this age wherein the appetite of men's judgments is become so queasy, that it can relish nothing that is not either vinegared with satires, or sugared with eloquence.

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(From Preface to Aretina.)

WHY MAN FELL

THAT brain hath too little pia mater, that is too curious to know why God, who evidences so great a desire to save poor man, and is so powerful as that his salvation needed never have run the hazard, if his infinite wisdom had so decreed, did yet suffer him to fall for if we enter once the list of that debate, our reason is too weak to bear the burden of so great a difficulty. And albeit it may be answered, that God might have restrained man, but that restraint did not stand with the freedom of man's will which God

hath bestowed upon him; yet, this answer stops not the mouth of the difficulty. For certainly, if one should detain a madman from running over a precipice, he could not be thereby said to have wronged his liberty and seeing man is, by many divines, allowed a freedom of will, albeit he must of necessity do what is evil, and that his freedom is salved by a liberty to choose only one of more evils, it would appear strange why his liberty might not have consisted well enough with a moral impossibility of sinning, and might not have been abundantly conserved in his freedom to choose one of more goods: yet, these reasonings are the calling God to an account; and so impious. For, if God had first created man surrounded with our present infirmities, could we have complained? Why then should we now complain, seeing we are but fallen to a better estate than we deserved; seeing we stumbled not for want of light, but because we extinguished our own light; and seeing our Saviour's dying for us may yet reinstate us in a happier estate than that from which we are now fallen ?

Albeit the glass of my years hath not yet turned five and twenty, yet the curiosity I have to know the different limbos of departed souls, and to view the card of the region of death, would give me abundance of courage to encounter this king of terrors, though I were a pagan; but when I consider what joys are prepared for them who fear the Almighty; and what craziness attends such as sleep in Methusalem's cradle, I pity them who make long life one of the oftest repeated petitions of their Paternoster; and yet those sure are the more advanced in folly, who desire to have their names enshrined, after death, in the airy monument of fame: whereas it is one of the promises made to the elect, that they shall rest from their labours, and their works shall follow them. Most men's mouths are so foul, that it is a punishment to be much in them: for my own part, I desire the same good offices from my good name that I do from my clothes; which is to screen me from the violence of exterior accidents.

As those criminals might be judged distracted, who, being condemned to die, would spend their short reprival in disputing about the situation and fabric of their gibbets: so may I justly think those literati mad, who spend the short time allotted them for repentance, in debating about the seat of hell, and the torments of tortured spirits. To satisfy my curiosity, I was once resolved, with the Platonic, to take the promise of some dying

friend, that he should return and satisfy me in all my private doubts, concerning hell and heaven; yet I was justly afraid that he might have returned me the same answer which Abraham returned to Dives, Have they not Moses and the Prophets? If they hear not them; wherefore will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead? (From The Religious Stoic.)

THOMAS SPRAT

[Thomas Sprat was born at Tallaton, Devon, in 1636; he became a commoner of Wadham College, Oxford, under the famous Dr John Wilkins, in 1651, and a Fellow in 1657. On the death of Cromwell he wrote an Ode in the manner of Cowley, and, as he supposed, of Pindar, which was published along with two poems on the same theme by Waller and Dryden. After the Restoration he took orders, and became successively chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, whom he is said to have assisted in the Rehearsal, and to the king. He published in 1667 the History of the Royal Society, of which he was one of the early Fellows, and in 1668 the Latin Life of Cowley, afterwards translated into English and enlarged, besides the Observations on M. de Sorbière's Voyage into England. He became Canon of Windsor in 1680, and Bishop of Rochester in 1684. His later works, besides Sermons, are a History of the Rye House Plot (1685), and a Relation of his own Examination on a charge of treason trumped up against him by two professional impostors. He died in his Bishopric, May 1713.]

AN early biographer of Sprat remarks that his name deserves the first rank in history for "his raising the English tongue to that purity and beauty which former writers were wholly strangers to, and those who come after him can but imitate." Dr Johnson, who caught the echoes of Sprat's short-lived fame, adds that each of his books has its own distinct and characteristical excellence. Sprat is undoubtedly a versatile writer, his "relations of matters of fact are written in a succinct and lucid style, his wit, exercised in defence of his countrymen against the strictures of the French traveller Sorbière, is easy and telling, his Life of Cowley is a model of dignified panegyric. Yet his chief claim to remembrance lies in his efforts both by precept and example to purge English prose of its rhetorical and decorative encumbrances, and to show that there is as much art "to have only plain conceptions on some arguments as there is in others to have extraordinary flights." It may well be urged that Sprat deserves a share in the credit, so commonly yielded to Dryden alone, of having inaugurated modern