much altered, his nature and carriage seeming much fiercer than they did before; and without question when he first drew the sword he threw away the scabbard." Of his personal character and habits Clarendon says, "He was very temperate in diet, and a supreme governor over all his passions and affections, and had thereby a great power over other men's. He was of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not to be imposed upon by the most subtle and sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best parts; so that he was an enemy not to be wished wherever he might have been made a friend; and as much to be apprehended where he was so as any man could deserve to be." "What was said of Cinna might well be applied to him, 'He had a head to contrive, and a tongue to persuade, and a head to execute any mischief." Clarendon thought that Hampden was engaged in a mischievous cause; those who thought and think differently, instead of any mischief' would write any benefit.' The political bias of Clarendon is obvious enough, but the character, of which we have only selected certain portions, is drawn with much discrimination and skill.

6

A later and more elaborate account of this eminent patriot has been given by Lord Nugent, from which the greater part of our memoir is derived. But the memoirs and pamphlets of the time must be intimately studied by those who wish for full information concerning Hampden's parliamentary life.

THE history of Laud is in a manner the history both of church and state in England for some twenty or more most memorable years; and if it were to be written with a copiousness corresponding to the quantity of the materials, volumes on volumes might be filled with it. Indeed it does actually stand recorded in several folios. Besides State Trials, and Parliamentary History, and Strafford Letters, and other collections of State Papers, in which he fills much space, there is the history of his 'Life and Death' in one folio volume, by Dr. Peter Heylin, and that of his 'Troubles and Trial' in another, considerably larger, edited from his own papers by the learned Henry Wharton. We have his own Diary, besides many of his letters, and a mass of other authentic documents. The facts of the greater part of his history therefore are before us in extraordinary distinctness. Whatever we may think of him, there he is, the man and his acts, still, if we choose, almost as plainly to be

seen by us as by his contemporaries. Some things respecting him, indeed, we know better than they did. His life was more than most lives passed in the light, and few have had the light so unsparingly let in upon them as he has had even in his deepest privacies. We have his written words intended only for the eye of the most intimate friendship, or for no eye but his own. We ought not to forget, in judging him, this trying ordeal through which it has been his fate to be made to pass.

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Myself, "whom

Curiously enough, in all this plentiful supply of information, nobody appears to know the Christian name of Laud's father. Laud himself has not recorded it in his own Diary, which begins by telling us merely that he was born on the 7th of October, 1573, at Reading, as if he had been literally an autochthon, terræ filius, or 66 gum of the earth," as one of his brother bishops, Field of Llandaff, calls himself in a begging letter to the universal patron the Duke of Buckingham, which is preserved in the Cabala, and is one of the greatest curiosities which have come down to us from that age. a gum of the carth," says Field insinuatingly, some eight years ago you raised out of the dust for raising but a thought so high as to serve your highness.' But Laud was not of this self-abasing temper. He had no pleasure in looking back from his elevated fortunes upon the comparative humility of his origin. His biographer Heylin tells us that the libellers, who no doubt knew what would sting him, used frequently to upbraid him in the days of his greatness with his mean birth. Once Heylin found him walking in his garden at Lambeth" with more than ordinary trouble in his countenance,' ," "of which," continues our author, "not having confidence enough to inquire the reason, he showed me a paper in his hand, and told me it was a printed sheet of a scandalous libel which had been stopped at the press, in which he found himself reproached with so base a parentage as if he had been raked out of the dunghill; adding withal, that though he had not the good fortune to be born a gentleman, yet he thanked God he had been born of honest parents, who lived in a plentiful con

dition, employed many poor people in their way, and left a good report behind him." After some little time, seeing his countenance beginning to clear up, ready Heylin told him the story of Pope Sixtus the Fifth, who used to say that he was domo natus illustri, "because the sunbeams, passing through the broken walls and ragged roof, illustrated every corner of that homely cottage in which he was born." The Latin words, which would be naturally translated born of an illustrious house or family, will also bear this other interpretation, however strange it may sound to the English reader. And the facetious anecdote, thus aptly applied, quite succeeded, we are assured, in restoring the equanimity of the ruffled prelate.

Laud's father, whatever was his name, was a master cloth-worker, and is described as having been well to do in the world." He kept," says Heylin, "not only many looms in his house, but many weavers, spinners, and fullers at continual work; living in good esteem and reputation amongst his neighbours to the very last.' His son, named William, was his only child; but his wife had been married before to another Reading clothier, John Robinson, by whom she had had a family. She was a Lucy Webb, sister to Sir William Webb, who was lord mayor of London in 1591. Of her children by Robinson, half-brothers and half-sisters of the archbishop, his biographer mentions a William, the youngest son, who became a doctor of divinity, prebend of Westminster, and archdeacon of Nottingham; and two daughters, married, the one to a Dr. Cotsford, the other to a Dr. Layfield. It is possible that these relations of Laud's may have prospered the better in the world for their connection with him; but his uncle at least, the lord mayor, had made his way to eminence long before the great churchman had got upon the ladder of preferment. It is more likely that he may have been of service to some later Webbs and Robinsons: Heylin speaks of a grandson of the lord mayor, also a Sir William Webb, as having died not long before he wrote, that is to say, perhaps, about the time of the Restoration; and his book, pub

lished posthumously, in 1671, is dedicated by his son to a Sir John Robinson, Bart., his majesty's lieutenant of the Tower of London, who is addressed as nearly related to the subject of it, and who may therefore be presumed to have been a descendant of Laud's mother's first husband.

Laud, who appears to have been designed for the church from his boyhood, was sent first to the free grammar-school of his native town; whence, in July, 1589, before he was sixteen, "which," Heylin remarks, was very early for those times," he was sent to Oxford, and entered a commoner of St. John's. Here his tutor was Mr. Buckridge, one of the fellows, a zealous opponent of Puritanism, which had troubled the church almost from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, and, for all that could be done to keep it down, was evidently enough growing stronger every day. Buckridge's teaching was not thrown away upon Laud.

The events noted in his Diary for the next ten or twelve years are: that he was chosen a scholar of his college in June, 1590, and admitted a fellow in June, 1593; that his father died on Wednesday, 11th April, 1594; that he proceeded bachelor of arts in June of that year; that in 1596 he had a great sickness, and in 1597 another (he had also been brought to death's door by an illness in his infancy); that in July, 1598, he took his degree of master of arts, and the same year was grammar reader; that at the end of that year he fell into another great sickness; that his mother died 24th November, 1600; that on the 4th of January, 1601, he was ordained deacon, and priest on the 5th of April thereafter.

He had already obtained a considerable academic reputation, and, having been admitted in 1602 to read a divinity lecture then maintained in his college, in which he acquitted himself to general satisfaction, he became next year a candidate for the proctorship of the university, and obtained it. In this year, 1603, Heylin says he publicly maintained, either in his divinity lecture or in some other chapel exercise, his famous doctrine of the perpetual visibility of the church, as derived from the

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