OCCASIONAL ACCOUNTS OF THE LIVES AND WRITINGS OF SOME OF THE BEST OF OUR OLD DIVINES.

"There is a quaintness and an awkwardness about the style of our old divines, for they lived at a time when men laboured to think rather than speak, and to dig truth out of the mine, than to form it into polish and elegance; but their writings contain a large portion of intellectual treasure, and abound with the most felicitous illustrations and expositions of holy writ."

NATHANAEL CULVERWELL,

THE AUTHOR OF A DISCOURSE ON THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 4to. 1652.

OUR readers will be apt to think that the author to whom we are now introducing them was very ill-qualified to write a discourse on the Light of Nature, as he has left his own character and history covered with so thick a cloud of darkness as to render all attempts to disperse it hopeless; but in truth it is not the fate alone of this scarcely-remembered writer dare lucem ex tenebris. The great proportion of authors, like the fireflies of tropical climates, are themselves invisible. amidst the very light which they cast on the objects around them; and were we permitted to carry out the similitude, we might say the life of both is equally ephemeral. We are accustomed to talk of the imperishable fame of authorship, but it is all a mistake that brazen line of Horace, Exegi monumentum ære perennius, has deluded us, and if he were not himself more ære lavatus than his poetry, he would blush to remember how many an ill-starred wight he has induced to forsake the honest business of a stone-mason or bricklayer, so much more profitable for the present, and offering so much more plausible a promise of posthumous durability, with the vain hope of erecting to himself an enduring statue in the air-built temple of

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literary fame. The deyship of Algiers is not more difficult to obtain, and when obtained to preserve, than this same sovereignty of letters; it never remains for half a-century in the same dynasty, and in both cases the regal power is gained only by the murder of the preceding monarch. Out of the somewhat more than the million writers of this country, not one has ever worn his chaplet long enough to permit us to determine whether it were or were not naturally amaranthine. Shakspeare never had a wreath till after his decease, and as that with which he was then honoured was made of stone, it stood as fair a chance for immortality as any other; but even that is now broken, and his writings may possibly become as obsolete as those of Venerable Bede. Milton who, poor man, during his life-time had a far more probable expectation of the crown of martyrdom than that of the laureat, and who obtained an acknow.. ledged superiority over the rival claims of Waller and Cowley by slow and well-contested gradations, enjoyed for some time an enviable pre-eminence,—but what a pre-eminence! The honour of being perpetually praised and never read,-of being explained by Paterson, and corrected by Bentley ! Locke's postnate ideas had but a very short existence: he proved that their birth was more recent than the world had previously imagined, and the world in return shortened their life at the other end, and consigned them very early to the tomb of oblivion. We have now a school which teaches that we have no ideas at all, and truly the professors of this doctrine are admirable arguments in its favour. Hartley has long since ceased to vibrate, and whether knowledge has its origin in matter, or whether, according to the dim abstractions of Petvin, ideas have a purely immaterial birth, is a point so indifferent and immaterial in this age of materialism, and is a principle affording so little interest, that the lucubrations of both are left undisturbed in their own darkness, possessed by few, and read by none except that most persevering and least progressing of all creatures, the genuine bookworm. By-the-bye we possess, and what is more, we

have read through, the dark sayings of the last-named Platonist, and can the more safely recommend his very rare volume to our readers, as it is very improbable that they will ever succeed in procuring it, and quite impossible that they should understand it if they should even have sufficient patience to undergo its perusal. Brown is already white with the snows of age, and we never think of reading Reid. They have passed away, and this, at least, to use the word in its proper Greek sense, is not metaphysical; as the subject on which they treat surpasses matter in the subtlety of its nature, so indubitably it ought in the velocity of its motion; and for our part we think, that a thorough good system of metaphysics, from the very delicacy of its texture, is intended to be worn out in one season.

This brevity of life is at least the case with our authors in Europe; in China, we believe it is different. Confucius appears to maintain the same place in public estimation in that country, that he did some thousand years past; but this is accordant with the usual elongation of existence enjoyed by all the creatures breathing the air of the celestial empire: and in truth the language which demands an age for the acquisition of its thirty thousand hieroglyphics, should requite its writers with an answerable longevity of posthumous

fame.

With us the rapidity of this march of intellect-this being the only sense in which we can understand that trite proverb-is truly astonishing. Of our ancient schoolmen, once the boast of our country, and the sole basis, on which the claims of England as the birth-place of genius and the nursery of thought, were rested by us and allowed by foreigners, how few even of our most curious scholars know more than the name! William Ockham, the head of the nominalists, and who would stand on the loftiest pinnacle of the temple of fame, if acuteness and strength of intellect were to adjust the relative stations of the different claimants, is now more really a nominalist than ever, and his ponderous folios of crabbed latinity never cause one solitary dispute, a fate which that veteran belligerent

would have feared more than any death. His polemical propensities are not infacetiously alluded to in the old rhyming epitaph composed to his memory, most probably by one who had felt the power of his argu

mentations.

"Sed jam mortuus est ut apparet,

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Quod si viveret, id negaret."

Yes, now indeed he's dead, it cannot be disputed,

Or you it ne'er had said without your being confuted." The very name of Roger Swinset is almost perished, there being even a doubt as to the orthography of his surname, whether it were Swinset or Swisset. Yet of this man Scaliger has said, “ pene modum excessit ingenii humani," that he almost surpassed the capabilities of human nature. Naudius complains in his time, and with great propriety may we in ours, that "we cannot find Swinset's works in the most famous libraries." Brunet mentions one of his many works, "The Calculator," and perhaps the only reason which has prevailed to keep its name more uninjured than that of its author, is its happy ambiguity, as "The Calculator" might, by a very pardonable error, in this most mercantile and least logical of all ages, have been supposed the proper appellation of a different and better mode of book-keeping than that now in use. Roger Bacon has preserved his reputation alive in the powder which has conveyed death to so many others; so much more grateful are we for those inventions which give us the power of destroying others, than for those which teach us how to mend ourselves. Had the good friar never stumbled on that fortunate preparation of nitre, all the learning of his "Opus Magnum" would not have procured him one modern reader. Bradwardine has met with a better fate: he is not merely famous in himself, but the cause of fame to others; as the zealous defenders of the doctrines of Calvin have poached so constantly on this manor in pursuit of arguments against the Dutch professor, and have so dexterously transpaged them to their own little estate, as almost to tempt us to believe that the sarcastic little

volume, "Fur Predestinatus," was intended to convey as severe a sarcasm in its title on the conduct of the Anti-Remonstrants, as it does in its contents on their doctrine. Of the rest,-of Holcot, Burley, Baconthorpe, Ulverstone, and Alexander Hales,—but we refrain out of commiseration to the nerves of our readers, lest they should fear to encounter this second irruption of Gothic and black-lettered giants, and hasten to present them with a more intelligible page of our literary history.

The book, to which we now call the attention of those who cast their eyes on this section of "The Evangelist," is one of those thousand and one treatises which were composed about the same time to enlighten the light of nature, the intellectual guide-posts which were set up by ingenious men with the intention of proving that so plain a road needed no direction, and by which the impossibility of any mistake was rather facetiously proved in demonstrating that every preceding attempt was an egregious failure. The author, "Nathanael Culverwell, Fellow of Emanuel College, Cambridge," died in the year 1652, leaving behind him the present quarto treatise and a few sermons usually attached to it, pieces affording a promise of future eminence of literary character had he been spared to arrive at maturity. We have always suspected that he was a son of that celebrated puritan divine, Ezekiel Culverwell, and that therefore he was born in Essex, where that well-known and excellent preacher was settled. Richard Culverwell, the brother of our author, was appointed the parochial minister of Grundisborough in Suffolk, in the time of the protectorate; and from this fact and the well known religious opinions of Dr. Tuckney, to whom the volume is dedicated, and lastly from the character of the sermons appended to the principal portions of this posthumous publication, it may be safely concluded, that this promising young man was of nonconformist principles, though, dying before the Act of Uniformity, the fact is not proved by a visible secession, and leaving nothing