and he appears to have been very active in the discharge of the duties imposed upon him by that appointment.

In the following spring he had to lament the death of Dr. Breton, the vicar of Deptford, upon whose piety and virtues he dwells with a melancholy pleasure." Dr. Breton," he says, "had preached on the 28th and 30th of January; on the Friday, having fasted all day, making his provisionary sermon for the Sunday following, he went well to bed, but was taken suddenly ill, and expired before help could come to him. Never had a parish a greater loss, not only as he was an excellent preacher, and fitted for our great and humble auditory, but for his excellent life and charity, his meekness and obliging nature, industrious, helpful, and full of good works. He left near 400l. to the poor in his will, and that what children of his should die in their minority, their portion should be so employed. I lost in particular a special friend, and one that had an extraordinary love to me and mine."

Mrs. Evelyn's character of this beloved pastor agrees with that of her husband. "Should I tell you," she writes to Mr. Bohun," how full of sorrow I have been for the loss of Dr. Breton, you only would blame me. After death, flattery ceases; therefore you may believe there was some cause to lament, when thousands of weeping eyes witnessed the affliction their souls were in. One would have imagined that every one in this parish had lost a father, brother, or husband, so great was the bewailing; and in earnest it does appear there never was a better nor a more worthy man. Such was his temper, prudence, charity, and good conduct, that he gained the weak, and preserved the wise. The suddenness of his death was a surprise only to his friends; as for himself, it might be looked upon as a deliverance from pain, the

effect of sickness; and I am almost persuaded God snatched him from us, lest He might have been prevailed with by the number of petitions, to have left him still amongst us. If you suspect kindness in me makes me speak too much, Dr. Parr is a person against whom you cannot object; it was he who preached the funeral sermon, and as an effect of truth as well as eloquence, he himself could not forbear weeping in the pulpit. It was his own expression, that there were three for whom he had infinitely grieved, the martyred king, my lord primate (Usher), and Dr. Breton; and as a confirmation of the right that was done him in that oration, there was not a dry eye, nor a dissenting person."

A few days after the funeral, wishing to have "a grave and learned man" for the successor of his departed friend, Mr. Evelyn made interest with the patron to appoint Mr. Frampton (afterwards bishop of Gloucester) to the living, he being "not only a very pious and holy man, but excellent in the pulpit for moving the affections." Mr. Holden, however, was the new vicar of Deptford. "This gentleman," says Evelyn, " is a very excellent and universal scholar, a good and wise man; but he had not the popular way of preaching, nor is he in any measure fit for our plain and vulgar auditory, as his predecessor was. There was, however, no comparison betwixt their parts for profound learning; but time and experience may form him to a more practical way than that he is in of university lectures and erudition, which is now universally left off for what is much more profitable."

Notwithstanding the awful visitations by which the nation had been chastened, profligacy and impiety maintained their dominion over the court and people. Evelyn was grieved to witness "the horrid vice of gam

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ing," and the licentious conduct which more resembled luxurious and abandoned rout, than a christian court." It also afflicted him, he says, to see the same open disregard of morality in the places of public amusement. The stage was "degenerated and polluted by the licentious times," and "abused to an atheistical liberty," and he considered that it contributed largely to the general degeneracy, impiety, and profligacy. He was not surprised that God should bring reverses and calamities upon a people which "minded nothing but luxury and ambition, and to procure money for our vices. To this add our irreligion and atheism, great ingratitude, and self-interest, in a word, we are wanton, mad, surfeiting with prosperity; every moment unsettling the old foundations, and never constant to anything. The Lord in mercy avert the sad omen, and that we do not provoke Him till He bear it no longer!" He contemplated with great sadness of heart the tendency of many of the publications issued during the reign of Charles the second. On one occasion, in 1682, we find him writing to Dr. Fell, bishop of Oxford, evidently under the most lively emotions, respecting a translation of the Histoire Critique of Father, Simon, a work of most evil design, from the contents of which he said he could not easily "discover whether it were written by a papist, a socinian, a theist, or something of all three." "For the love of God," he exclaims, “ let not our universities, my lord, remain silent. It is the cause of God and of our church! said your (professors') chairs take no notice of a more pernicious plot than any that yet has alarmed us. Whilst everybody lets it alone, men think there is nothing to be said against it; and it hugely prevails already and you will be sensible of its progress when it is too

Let it not be

late to take off the reproach. I most humbly therefore implore your reverend lordship to consider of it seriously, that the pens and the chairs may openly, and on all occasions, assert and defend the common cause, and that Oxford may have the honour of appearing first in the field. For from whom, my lord, should we expect relief, if not from you, the fathers of the church, and the schools of the prophets?.... My lord, he who makes bold to transmit this to your lordship, though he be no man of the church, is yet a son of the church, and greatly concerned for her; and though he be not learned, he converses much with books, and men that are as well at court as in town and the country, and thinks it his duty to give your lordship an account of what he hears and sees, and is expected and called for from you, who are the superintendents and watchmen whom Christ has set over his church, and appointed to take care of his flock...... 'Tis not, my lord, sufficient to have beaten down the head of the hydra once, but, as often as they rise, to use the club, though the same weapon be used, the same thing repeated; it refreshes the faint, and resolves the doubtful, and stirs up the slothful, and is what our adversaries continually do, to keep up and maintain their own party, whenever they receive the least rebuke from us; we may learn from our enemies. Nor, my lord, whilst I am writing this, do I at all doubt of your lordship's great wisdom, zeal, and religious care, to obviate and prevent this and all other adversaries of our most holy faith, as built upon the sacred Scriptures of the prophets and apostles, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone. But if the excess of my affection for the university (which I have sometimes heard perstringed [reproached] as not taking the alarm so concernedly upon these occasions), have a little too far

transported me, I most humbly supplicate your lordship's pardon for my presumption, and, for my zeal and good wishes to the prosperity of our Zion, your lordship's blessing."

Mr. Evelyn, who occasionally passed the winter in London, was resident there at the time of the great frost in the winter of 1683-4, "having many important affairs to despatch, and for the education of his daughters." The ice on the Thames became "so thick, as to bear not only streets of booths, in which they roasted meat, and had divers shops of wares, quite across as in a town, but coaches, carts, and horses passed over." That winter committed lamentable depredations in the garden at Sayes Court. "I went," he says, (Feb. 4, 1684,) to see how the frost had dealt with my garden, where I found many of the [ever]greens and rare plants utterly destroyed. The oranges and myrtles very sick, the rosemary and laurels dead to all appearance, but the cypress likely to endure it." In the spring he sent to the Royal Society, a full and pathetic account of "the terrible effects" of that winter upon his garden, which was printed in the Philosophical Transactions, and is curious both as affording information of the perennial plants at that time chiefly cultivated in English gardens, and as stating the effects of rigorous frost upon them.

In 1685 king Charles underwent that change which happens alike to the prince who sits upon his throne, and to the beggar who lies on the dunghill. On the previous Sunday, the court had exhibited a scene of " inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God.".....“ Six days after all was dust." He remarks in another place— "God was incensed to make his reign very troublesome and unprosperous, by wars, plagues, fires, loss of reputa