ree under a new dynasty, a new ecclesiastical constituon, and a new nobility; for the Protector would have rercome the political difficulties which hindered the fulment of his projects, had his days been prolonged. Selden lived during the age of Shakespeare and down o the time of the Protectorate. In his youth he cultivated he friendship of Raleigh and Ben Johnson, and probably f the great poet, the obscurity of whose life is so remarkble a part in his history. He was a friend of Laud and Villiams, the rival prelates at the court of Charles, of Hyde, of Falkland, of Fairfax, of Juxon. After the death of Coke, he was the greatest master of constitutional law nd parliamentary procedure in his age. Like every other man of eminence in that time, he was a confessor when he ecame obnoxious to his political adversaries. Unlike every other man of eminence in that time, he was an advocate of the broadest toleration. To his mind the persecution of Laud was as indefensible as the imprisonment of Eliot. Such a politician is the rarest of phenomena, for the chief practical mischief of persecution is, that it makes its victim intolerant when his turn comes for the mastery. Strafford knew this, and advocated under the phrase of “thorough" the extermination of his political enemies. Narvaez knew it, and had the courage to practice it, if the story told of him is true; for it is said that when, on his death-bed, his confessor urged him to forgive his enemies, he answered that he had none, for he had executed them all. Laud amputated Prynne's ears, and imprisoned him. In his prison Prynne wrote a fresh libel on the English hierarchy, and the roots of the cartilage were grubbed out by a second sentence. When Prynne was released by the Long Parliament, and after Laud's committal to the Tower was entrusted with the task of examining the primate's papers, he had the satisfaction of discovering the diary which is now preserved as a relic of the Anglican martyr in St. John's College, Oxford, and which has formed the subject of much laughter. Extracts from it were published in one of Prynne's huge volumes, which is known by the ominous name of "Canterbury's Doom," and which certainly had not a little to do with the primate's condemnation and death.

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Selden was the only son of a Sussex yeoman, and was born in very humble circumstances. He had a sister, who married a person of her own station. In his old age Selden used to say that his nearest relation was a milkmaid, and to tell a story of Bishop Grostete, whose brother begged his interest, as suggesting his own line of conduct. Brother," said the bishop, "if your plough be broken, I will give you another. If your ox be dead, I will buy you a second. But a ploughman I found you, and a ploughman I will leave you." During his life, Selden amassed a fortune of £40,000, a large sum in those days, which he left to certain friends, among them Chief Justice Vaughan, His great library came to the University of Oxford. It seems that when he received a visit, he used to put his spectacles into the book on which he was engaged, to serve as a marker. He must have bought these aids of sight by the gross, for they were found by dozens in his books when the university received them. It is worth while thinking whether the art of printing would have made progress had not spectacles been invented a little before the time when printing became general.

and Hale.

Selden was an eminent historical critic, in an age when all leading statesmen were such critics. The progress of the English Constitution in the seventeenth century was derived from the precedents of the fourteenth and fifteenth. The same expedients have even been adopted in later times. When Pitt framed the Regency Bill of 1790, he baffled the intrigues of the Prince of Wales, Fox, and Burke by precedents, drawn especially from parliamentary procedure during the insanity of Henry the Sixth. Fox, who argued that the Prince of Wales was, de jure, invested with the regency during the incapacity of the king, was unable to give a single historical precedent for his position, while Pitt could overwhelm him by evidence of the supreme authority of parliament in such a crisis. No doubt the heaven-born statesman was a good deal assisted by a

compact parliamentary majority, when he advocated the constitutional theory. But his argument was strengthened by the precedents, on which he professed to rely, when he put the royal assent into a commission, the head of which was Thurlow, and baffled Carlton House. There never perhaps was a time in which partisans were more angry, perfidy was more imminent, and Pitt was more calm.

There are two kinds of historical criticism. One, which is characteristic of our age, discusses premises or authorities. The other, which was cultivated in Selden's time, accepts authorities and examines inferences. Both processes have their advantages and their defects. The former supplies general rules of credibility, taste, art; but is apt to destroy all credibility, all taste, all art. Its tendencies are cleverly parodied in Whately's "Historic Doubts," and exaggerated in all Sir George Lewis's writings. Its weakness consists in the habit, which the critics of such a school constantly exhibit, of setting up their standard of likelihood as a measure of the unlikelihood of what others have recorded. Historical critics of this kind seem to forget that if two witnesses, equally truthful and disinterested, were to narrate the same set of facts, they would be certain to differ in their relation, owing to the different manner in which two such independent minds observe and interpret what they see. If two such persons watch intently what they see, the discrepancy increases. Philosophers tell us that the rainbow which one man notices is a different refraction from that which another spectator of the same familiar phenomenon discerns. But what rainbow is equal, for variation, complexity, and interest, to the drama of human action, when expectation is intense and observation sustained?

The other kind of criticism accepts the authorities, and applies itself to the inference. One of the best illustrations of such a method is to be found in Machiavelli's "Comments on the first Decade of Livy." It is more than probable that, historically, the authority on which the Florentine secretary discourses, is a mere romance, destitute of all historical certainty. But the political sagacity of the great Italian publicist is not disparaged by the weakness of the premises on which he founds his reasoning. Livy may have recorded a set of myths. But Livy was a man of letters, living under the full influence of the most compact and organized government which the world ever knew. His narrative-whatever was its other merits took inevitably the color of the life which surrounded him, since it is the rarest gift imaginable for a man to be able to abstract his habit and his thoughts from the facts which surround him and control him, and project himself into a different set of facts. As far as we know, no person but Shakespeare has always been able to do this, and it is in this singular gift that the dramatic power, and even the philosophy of Shakespeare consists. The story of Livy, then, colored by an experience gathered from the reign of Augustus, was precisely what Machiavelli wanted in order to inculcate his theory of Italian politics.

Selden was a critic of the latter school. The former had not yet been developed, and indeed in the seventeenth century very moderate scepticism would have been signally dangerous. Criticism, even though it was based on an authority to which all paid reverence, was perilous work under the first Stuarts. A man might easily be too learned for his own safety. For this offence Selden was three times imprisoned. Sir Robert Cotton was supposed to have supplied him with materials out of his vast library, and in 1630 Cotton was debarred the use of his own books. D'Ewes went to see him when he was suffering under this peculiarly malignant form of imprisonment, and found him stricken to death. The hale and ruddy old man was made pallid and shrunken under the refined cruelty to which he was subjected. They have broken my heart," he said, "because they have locked my library from me." Among the many strange delusions which occupied the mind of Charles, even to the last, the oddest was his belief that when he had causelessly and mercilessly outraged and of his subjects, he had still possession of their ardent any dutiful allegiance. He imagined when he wrote to Henri

66

etta Maria, that he hoped to fit the rogues with a halter, that he could count on the duty of those who had disarmed and imprisoned him, and who did not trust him the more when they intercepted his correspondence. He fancied, and said so, that he "had as great an interest in the army' as Cromwell had, when the army was meditating the tragedy of the 30th of January.

The critics of Selden's day often sought for precedents in very doubtful authorities. They traced parliamentary privilege back to the times of the Saxon witan. They even cited the deposition of Vortigern as a proof that the law and the parliament were above the king. They supported their constitutional theories out of the Old Testament, just as the advocates of divine right relied on the somewhat perilous example of the Hebrew monarchy. They never doubted that Alfred the Great was the founder of the English constitution. They were convinced that the polity of the Jews was an infallible guide for the modern statesman. The more heady among them called their adversaries Philistines, Canaanites, and the like, and took Joshua for the hero whose deeds they were bound to imi

tate.

Selden plunged into the records of the Tower, studying the rolls of parliament, the documents which told of that strange time when parliaments rebuked, controlled, deposed, elected kings, and constituted themselves a co-ordinate power with the monarch. Whatever the advocates of divine right might allege, now, it was clear that the doctrine of passive obedience was not held by the parliaments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The nation acquiesced in the despotism of the first four Tudors, at the beginning, because it wished to escape from the intolerable evils of anarchy in that of the last, because Elizabeth's life, even with her parsimony, her caprices, and her irresolution, was the guarantee of the new settlement. In the latter years of the queen's reign the nation became restive. They were no longer afraid of reaction within or conquest from without, after the Reformation had thoroughly traversed the English nation, and the Spaniard had been baffled. The pretensions, therefore, of James, put forward more arrogantly and sustained more ludicrously than by any other English monarch, were at once irritating and contemptible. The cold nature of Charles and the violence of his ministers were more irritating still. An organized parliamentary opposition to the court was started in the Lords as well as in the Commons, and the opposition appealed to precedents. Selden was imprisoned for having called attention to such facts, and for having claimed the dormant privileges of the House in which he sat.

Nothing indicates the temper of the English nation in that parliament which met on the 3d of November, 1640, which many at first thought would never have a beginning, and which very soon the same persons thought would never have an end, than the return of Selden for the University of Oxford. In almost every parliament that ancient, famous, and occasionally learned university has been represented by the narrowest partisans whom it could select. Twice it has quarrelled with and dismissed its member, because he has shown some sympathy with a generous policy. In 1640, it had been under the discipline of Laud for ten years, and Laud had been weeding it of malcontents. Its convocation had solemnly averred, in a rebuke which it administered to a preacher who had declared that there were some limits to passive obedience, that a woman was not to defend her virtue if she were assailed by the king. But now the whole people was roused, and the Oxford clergy returned, as one of their members, Selden, who had been imprisoned on behalf of public liberty, and who had dared to print a book in which he disputed the divine origin of tithes. But, in fact, the most energetic advocates of passive obedience were more busy in urging it upon others than in following the tenet themselves. The English hierarchy, in undertaking the labor of demonstrating the divine right of the king, intended to substantiate as fully the divine right of their own order. The first and second Stuart knew this, and encouraged the largest pretensions of the clergy. The fourth Stuart forgot it, and

found out that the allegiance of the clergy was a rope of sand, as soon as ever he invaded their privileges and insulted their independence. So, in the election of the Long Parliament, Selden must have appeared to the Oxford electors as the friend of Pym, Holles, Eliot - now dead, or rather murdered Kimbolton, Strode, Hampden, and the political foe of Laud, Wentworth, and the tribe of Finches and Westons - an iconoclast, of all which Oxford had hitherto worshipped and upheld. In the heat of the reaction they elected such a representative.

When the "History of Tithes was published, the hierarchy did not see that it was to their advantage that the settlement of their estate on a legal instead of a supernat ural basis, on a parliamentary authority instead of being put upon the interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures, was the best confirmation which could be given of their title In those days no one dreamed of a separation between church and state. The mischief was that successive sects strove to make their tenets the creed and discipline of the church. It should never be forgotten what were the consequences of this action. The Puritan laity brought about the revolution of 1649, the Puritan clergy provoked the restoration of 1660. But no one was willing to accept Selden's advice in the crisis which he foresaw, when he uttered his adage, "Chain up the clergy on all sides."

The hierarchy denounced and persecuted the antiquary. Selden was willing to be a confessor, as he afterwards showed. But it is probable that even martyrs would like to select the tenets for which they would suffer, and will seldom be content to sacrifice themselves for a trivial article. So Selden made his apology in the High Commission Court, "humbly acknowledging his error in interpreting Scripture, the fathers, councils, and canons in such a way as might seem to challenge the divine right of the ministers to their benefices," and having expressed his sorrowful penitence, prayed forgiveness. In later days, when the revolution came, Selden was gratified to find that his book was quoted by those who had attacked him. It is very seldom the case that those who suffer the penalty of being wiser than their age have the satisfaction, when another age has come up to their level, of finding their claims acknowledged. It was with pardonable pride that he compared his book, when the retribution came, to the spear of Achilles, which gave the wound and supplied the remedy.

If Selden had lived a generation or two later, he would have been called a Trimmer. He was wholly averse to violence, always an advocate of moderate measures. He wished to degrade or remove the counsellors of Charles, not to proscribe and destroy them. Hence he was one of the minority of fifty-nine who voted against Strafford's attainder. He wrote the answer, as was supposed, to the king's declaration on the commission of array, but he was opposed to the retaliatory action of parliament in the ordinance of militia, which was the immediate cause of the civil war. In his early career he wished to save the constitution against the king; in his later years he sought to save the constitution for the king. He would have saved the church from the bishops in the days of Neale, Laud, Montague, and Mainwaring. When the storm came, and the Scotch Covenanters demanded the abolition of episcopacy as the price of their support, he strove to save the bishops for the church. "If," he was always telling the prelates, "you were willing to be less, you would be greater." And yet, though he was always counselling moderate measures, till his voice was lost in the din, he was a universal favorite. Clarendon said of him that no character could flatter him, that no expressions could sufliciently describe his learning and virtue. Seventy years after his death, when his works were collected and edited by Williams, everything was carefully and exactly printed, even those matters which the editor thought erroneous, since "the omission would insult the memory of a dead lion." After his death, Bathurst, the President of Trinity College, Oxford, an ardent Royalist, and a keen hater of Roundheads, wrote laudatory verses to his memory. In 1646, parliament, which had grown remarkably suspicious

I lukewarm partisans, voted him five thousand pounds, in onsideration of the sufferings which he had undergone in 529. Cromwell offered him a pension. But he graciously eclined the offers of the parliament and the Protector. When the violence of political passions made his attendnee in parliament infrequent, he took part in the assembly divines, which met in 1643, and contained ten peers, wenty members of parliament, twenty Episcopalian diines, and a hundred others. Clarendon rails at this asembly; Baxter said it was as excellent as any gathering f men since the days of the Apostles. The censure and e praise are in all likelihood equally extravagant. Selden ade fun of it in his dryest way. He ridiculed the theogians who sat there, he says, with their little gilt-edged Bibles, and without possessing any knowledge of Hebrew r Greek, affected to settle everything out of their own ancies. When the House of Commons, he said, had tired im with their new law, these men refreshed him with heir mad gospel. But he was eventually obliged to subcribe to the solemn league and covenant; for Baillie, the Scotch commissioner, from whose journal we learn so much bout the minor politics of the time, dwells with peculiar atisfaction on Selden's gnashing his teeth over the process. At the crisis of the revolution Selden did great service o the two universities. He was appealed to by Reynolds, he Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Christ Church, and he saved Oxford from the grip of Bradshaw, the President of the High Court of Justice, and a man who would have shown no more mercy to a malignant city and university than he did to the king. He had influence enough to prevent the molestation of any person in Oxford who showed ordinary prudence, before Oliver was strong enough to tolerate those who dissented from the new establishment. He saved Laud's Arabic professorship, and got Bancroft's and Abbot's books to Cambridge, after the downfall of the hierarchy, and the secularization of Lambeth. After the Restoration these books were restored to Juxon, and form part of that Lambeth library which we are told, forsooth, the Archbishop of Canterbury is too poor to preserve. assisted meritorious scholars out of his own fortune. protected Usher, supplied Casaubon with money, subscribed handsomely to Walton's "Polyglot," and was munificent to Kelly, Ashurst, and others.

He

He

The principal literary work for which Selden was famous was his vindication of the right of the English to the narrow seas. Grotius had claimed them for all nations, and Selden resisted the claim. Selden's book was long in manuscript before it was published. Some said that this delay was due to the irritation which the author felt at the treatment which he had met with in consequence of his work on tithes. Those who have the opportunity of being better informed, aver that it was withheld at the instance of James, who wished to negotiate certain loans with his neighbors, and was wise enough to see that he might discourage the lender if he set up a claim to the exclusive enjoyment of that which it was their interest to consider common property. The book was not printed till 1636, when it was received with extraordinary favor. Charles sent it by Sir William Beecher, the Clerk of the Council, to the Barons of the Exchequer, and to the Admiralty, bidding the officials of those two functions lay it up in their archives as a choice treasure. After the publication of this work Selden's parliamentary offenses were forgiven

for a time.

In the seventeenth century the English hated the Dutch. The dislike appears to have been purely commercial, for the interest of the English was strongly engaged in the independence and prosperity of Holland. Twice in modern history has the Dutch Republic baffled the aspirant after European empire. Holland was the breakwater against the designs of Philip the Second at the end of the sixteenth century, of Louis the Fourteenth at the end of the seventeenth. But in the interval, while Spain was sinking into dotage, and the strength of France was only growing, England and Holland hated each other cordially. The Dutch origin of William the Third was a fruitful source of the Deliverer's unpopularity. Selden

"To

shared the national antipathy, heightened in his case by literary rivalry. He relished his attack on Grotius. The last literary labor of his life was a republication of his work on the narrow seas, with an additional defense of his position against the Dutch lawyer, Graswinkel. quote a Dutchman," he says, "when I may use a classic author, is as if I had to justify my reputation, and thereupon neglected all persons of note and quality who knew me, but brought up the testimonial of the scullion from the kitchen." At last the rivalry and hostility of the two nations broke out into war. The bitterest attacks upon the English republic proceeded from the printing-presses of Holland. Hundreds of broadsides, inviting attention to the merits of the royal martyr, and repudiating the leaders of the great rebellion, were printed in the States for circulation in England. Charles the Second found an asylum there, when Cromwell compelled his exclusion from France. Then the Dutch had to bow to the superiority of the great Protector and his lieutenant, only to recover their reputation under the disgraceful administration of Charles the Second, when they burnt the English fleet in the Medway, and insulted the city of London. But Charles spent the funds provided for the national defense on his concubines and their children, and when these were squandered, became the pensioner of France, bargaining, in return for the job, to curtail, as far as possible, the liberties of the country which had restored him.

It has been stated that the hostility of the two nations was developed, or at least strengthened, by commercial rivalry. The Dutch had their East India Company, and the English had theirs. In the latter half of the seventeenth century the profits of this trade were enormous. The origin of many an English estate and title is to be traced back to these profits. The indirect influence of the company was freely exercised in order to protect the monopoly of the traders. It contrived to keep itself pretty safe at home by lavishing bribes on those who could manage political influence, and they knew whose palm was open. Their wiliest agent was Osborne, the Yorkshire baronet, whom history knows as Danby, Carmarthen, Leeds, who rose in a few years to the highest step in the peerage for services which were the reverse of advantageous to the country whose affairs he undertook. But there were two competitors who gave them, after their first struggles were over, a vast deal of trouble. These were English interlopers and foreign rivals, especially the Dutch, who were now in full vigor, very able and willing to avenge themselves on their ancient enemy, Spain, and by no means scrupulous in their dealings with other nations.

Till the time in which Louis the Fourteenth came to maturity, and full of vast designs of aggrandizement, could make himself a great and dangerous power in Europe, every other state in the west was exhausted. The Thirty Years' War had ruined Germany. Scandinavia had exhausted her energies in the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus. Spain was sinking into decrepitude. The Pope, who had been the most powerful of European sovereigns during the early years of the Roman Catholic reaction, sank into the condition of a petty Italian prince before the Thirty Years' War came to an end. The Dutch were alone free, prosperous, and triumphant, and occupied a political position largely in excess of their natural importance. We owe the doctrine of the balance of power to the resistance which England and Holland, for a time united, showed to the designs of Louis the Fourteenth.

Selden, as has been said, was a confessor in the cause of parliamentary privilege and public liberty. There were persons in England, chiefly court lawyers and the higher clergy, who held that all law was the voice of the king, that all right was of his grant, and that the voice could unsay what it had avowed, and recall the right which it had granted. Not that the court was unanimous. When James asked one of his bishops whether the king could take his subjects' money without their consent, the prelate answered, that he certainly could, for he was the breath of their nostrils. But when the king put the same question to Bishop Andrews, and this prelate declined to an

swer, as a matter of state beyond his comprehension, the king pressed for his opinion. He still evaded the general question, but said he had no doubt the king could take his brother bishop's money since he offered it.

In law, nothing is or can be undefined. The existence of a monarchial form of government was understood to imply that the king's prerogative was capable of a legal limitation, and that the rights of the subject were co-existent with it. An absolute monarch is the negation of law, for such a personage must be supposed to absorb every ordinance, statute, or charter in his personal will. Life, property, the rights and duties of husband and wife, father and child, could not really exist if the private enjoyment or fulfilment of each could be suspended, withdrawn, or confiscated at the king's pleasure. It seems that some such despotism was actually realized under the Bagdad Khalifat, when the commander of the faithful was also Sheyk-ul-Islam, at once chief of the military, civil, and religious organization, and all his subjects were at his mercy. Even the obedience of the monk was deference to the will of a superior, who was himself subject to the rule of the order.

Every Englishman felt that no such theory of government had ever existed in England, that no monarch had ever assumed or exercised an exhaustive prerogative, that even in the earliest times the king sat in a council, the members of which were his peers, and joint assessors with him. It was universally understood that towns had their franchises and charters, and that even in the feudal manor, which had a jurisdiction independent of the sovereign, there was a counterpart of parliament in the court baron, and of the view of frank-pledge, in the court roll and the court leet. All lawyers knew, and some lawyers ventured to assert, that the great charter, the first statute in order of time, and the first also in importance, was an acknowledgment of existing right, an averment of standing law and custom, and not a mere concession of new privileges extorted from the fears or necessities of a baffled and deserted ruler. From the days of the first Edward too, the people had been summoned to discuss and advise on the most important business of the kingdom. Nor had the acknowledgment of the subjects' rights ceased with the confirmation of the charters. Statute upon statute, precedent upon precedent, an unbroken series of legal records and decisions, had recognized the fact, that the law was above the king, and that the office of the monarch was inchoate till such time as he had made oath to maintain the laws by which he governed his people. Now a statute-book and a despotism are incompatible. The monarch's power must be limited if a subject's rights are real. Nor could the king claim any prerogative, except by appealing to those very precedents from which the lawyers inferred their theory of the royal office and discretion. When the industry of Noy discovered what the judges conceived to be a justification of ship-money, the authority of the records was necessarily held to be more absolute than the will of the monarch. Now the admission that the crown could proceed only by law, as it controlled the executive in the first instance, so it ultimately transferred all the functions of government to those forces and that assembly from which law itself emanates. The very claim to dispense with the law in particular cases was an indirect acknowledgment of its general authority.

The benefits which the publicists of Charles the First's reign conferred on English liberty, and thereafter on the English nation, and ultimately on the civilized world, were enormous. They collected a mass of authorities which could not be wholly set aside. They awakened a spirit which could not be quenched. It is true that the

violence of the civil war induced a reaction. Men found the discipline of the Puritan clergy intolerable. Oliver, baffled in his attempts to found a constitutional monarchy, felt constrained, or thought he was constrained, to govern the country by military adventurers, and to tamper with the courts of law. The government of the army, the existence of a standing army, with its harsh stern hand everywhere, though this army was the strongest, and on

the whole the best disciplined which England had eve known, was unbearable. And when this army was m nipulated by fanatics, who had all Oliver's ambition and none of his administrative talents, it is no wonder that i the restoration of Charles men really saw, as the parli ment of the restoration expressed it, a relief from thre dom, oppression, and misery. Had Selden been listenes to, he would have reformed the constitution, not have a tempted its reconstruction. Had even the cavaliers fore seen the reign of Charles, they would not have been, it probable, an exception to the rule, that if men could on forecast the coming ten years of their life, they would lose all energy of purpose in view of the coming evil. Selden did not quite foresee it. But there is a sentiment of his uttered when he was more than ordinarily vexed at the din of sectarian strife. "Those two words, Search the Scriptures," he said, "have undone the world." Few er pressions are more sad than this, few are such a concentra tion of disappointment.

All the work, however, which these men did was not lost. For first, no honest work is utter waste, still less is solid work. Next, there is no true reaction from a real progress. A counter-revolution always adopts much of that revolution from which it is a rebound. The France of 1815 was not the France of 1789. The great Europeas movement of 1848, with its mad dream of violent equality, and its attempt to make the cities a paradise for artisans, whose schemes should be fed by the forced contributions of every one else, was sternly repressed. But Europe has not gone back to the theory of the Holy Alliance, not strengthened the hands of absolutism. So in 1660. The church was restored with the monarchy, but the High Commission Court was suffered to lie dead. The law courts were revived, and the law administered, perhaps by the most infamous judges that ever sat on the bench, but the arbitrary procedure of the Star Chamber was not resuscitated. Free speech in parliament was accorded, and members of the two Houses were no longer in peril of their liberty when they uttered the sentiments which they were called together to express. The legislature, to be sure, was bribed; but bad as this policy was, it was an admission that the reign of violence was past; for despotism is restrained when it condescends to corruption.

When Selden was yet a young man, the Earl of Kent, Baron Grey de Ruthin, made him his steward. After the earl died in 1639, he resided with the countess, a daughter and co-heiress of Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. The earl was childless, and his title passed to a very distant kinsman. The house of the countess was in Whitefriars, at the east end of the Temple, built on a site where a generation before all the thieves and footpads in London, enjoying the sanctuary which a past superstition had accorded, lived in a diabolic republic. The gossips of the time said that Selden was married to the countess, and had one or two daughters by her. But there seems to have been no foundation for the story beyond the intimacy which existed between him and the lady which in those days involved no scandal. When the countess died she bequeathed the house to him, and here he lived till he died on the 30th of November, 1654. He had been made Keeper of the Rolls in 1643; and when the Admiralty was put into commission in 1645, he was one of those to whom the administration of the navy was entrusted. How those commissioners managed the business in their hands was proved by the war with the Dutch.

an intimacy

Selden's company and conversation were courted by all his contemporaries, though his habits and sentiments were a puzzle to the age in which he lived. An Erastian in church politics, a moderate in secular politics, he was the most learned theologian of his age, but was unnaturally indifferent to dogmas. Some thought him a scoffer, an esprit fort, and detected his scepticism in the unsparing wit with which he treated ecclesiastical questions. He was charged with friendship towards Hobbes, while others said that he had an infinite distaste for the Malmesbury sceptic. That he did not sympathize with the theory of government which Hobbes promulgated is clear, for Sel

n's public career was in distinct opposition to the absotion which Hobbes commended. Besides the adage ich he wrote in every book of his library, "Liberty in erything," was designed by him to indicate that comete toleration for all innocent opinions and all innocent actice is and should be a fundamental rule of social life. A tall, handsome man, with oval face, gray eyes, small ad, prominent nose, with lines of strong humor about e mouth; Selden was always reading, or writing, or Iking, for he was very accessible, and always ready to ustrate any topic on which people conversed in those ays by his wit and experience. He had his Boswell (not deed a personage so unique as the Scotchman who deoted his life to Johnson, and who was at once so supremely diculous and so signally successful) in an amanuensis, ne Richard Milward, whom he engaged during the last ew years of his life, and who noted down some of his atron's comments on men, things, and social institutions. The collection was published some years after Milward's eath, under the name of "Selden's Table Talk," the title eing taken from that voluminous folio in which Luther's onversations are said to be recorded. The book has its lefects as well as its merits. The notes are often taken urriedly and even carelessly. Some of the memorabilia have no point, a few are almost unintelligible. But, on he other hand, all are genuine attempts to reproduce conversations which Selden never thought would be recorded. Most indirect autobiographies are suggestive of posture. Johnson knew what Boswell was about. Pope wrote every letter under the conviction that it would be published. The people whom Senior met knew all about his journal, and occasionally, it seems, talked to order. But Selden's conversation was impromptu.

By far the largest part of the ana of Selden's "Table Talk" bear on ecclesiastical questions, naturally, for they were the topics of the age. But his sayings are strangely unlike what we might expect from such a time. "Every man," said he, "has his own religion; we differ only about the trimming." "If there be any superstition, properly so called, it is observing the Sabbath after the Jewish manner." "Put laymen into every synod of the clergy, just as a woman puts a cat into the dairy to kill mice, and sends a maid to look after her, lest she eat up the cream." "Many men look after religion as a butcher does after his knife, when he has it all the while in his mouth." "When priests come into a family, they do as man who wishes to set fire to a house. He does not put it to a brick wall, but thrusts it into the thatch. So they leave men alone, and work on the women.", "Enjoy life, and be not melancholy and wish thyself in heaven. If a king should give you the keeping of a castle and grounds, and bid you use them, promising in twenty years' time to make you a privy councillor, do not neglect the castle, refuse the fruits, and sit down, whine and wish yourself a privy councillor." "A great place strangely qualifies. There was one Jack Read, groom of the chamber to the Earl of Kent. On the death of Attorney-General Noy he said,Any man can execute his place.' 'How? could you?' said the earl. Let the king make me attorney,' answered Jack, and I would fain see the man who durst tell me there's anything I understand not.'

"The pope

is infallible, when he hath the power to be obeyed, like any other prince. To stretch his infallibility further is to do you know not what." "There never was a merry world since the fairies left off dancing and the parson left off conjuring." "To have no ministers but presbyters is the same as having no officers but constables." "Ceremony (good breeding) is like a penny glass to a rich spirit, without it the spirit were lost." Perhaps the following hardly satisfies modern notions of gallantry. "A husband," said Selden, "should be made to pay for his wife's trinkets. If a man will keep a monkey, he should pay for the glasses it breaks." The above are illustrations of Selden's "Table Talk." Some of his wittiest parallels will not bear quotation, for very plain speaking was the fashion of the seventeenth century, in the pulpit, in the senate, in common life. The

age was not nice in its analogies, and Selden was no nicer than his times. A generation later that of the Restoration was simply nasty. To the Rochesters and Grammonts and Sedleys Selden would have seemed prudish. An enemy to clerical pretensions, Selden was equally hostile to clerical disabilities, to the jealousy which makes the clergy a separate caste, and debars them from undertaking secular functions. He held them, to use a modern phrase, to be a very important branch of the civil service, which might be supremely useful, but was apt to be singularly mischievous, never more mischievous than when they are conceived to be beings with other duties and other purposes than the rest of Christians. "It is a foolish thing," he argued, " to say that a minister should not meddle with secular matters." "It is a foolish thing," he said, “to love a man who damns us." He wished to steer a middle course between the restraint which encouraged a sacerdotal spirit and the democratic theory of church government. He felt as strongly as Milton did that "new presbyter is but old priest writ large." He thought the Anglican hierarchy a convenient form of church government, but he did not think it fit to rule at its own discretion. To his mind, the best way in which it could work out its ends was by forcing a considerable amount of secular duty on the clergy. By enlarging their labors he believed he could modify their pretensions.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY.

Now that the beautiful art of photography has reached its present high state of perfection, it may be interesting to relate to the generation which has sprung up since its discovery, the struggles of its first founders in the difficulties and perplexities which beset their paths - those paths which are now comparatively smooth and easy.

We undertake the task because it will enable us to give, from personal knowledge, a number of illustrations of a phase in the scientific life of Sir David Brewster, which are not recorded in any of the biographies which have appeared since, full of years and honors, he passed away.

Shortly after M. Daguerre made his great discovery, and succeeded in fixing the images formed by a lens in the camera obscura, it occurred to an English gentleman, Mr. Fox Talbot, that the same thing could be done by a different process, though the 'principle in both processes was the same.

Daguerre had succeeded in producing a surface so sensitive that a picture could be impressed upon it by the rays of light, by subjecting a perfectly smooth and clean surface of metallic silver to the fumes of iodine. The contact of the two elements produced the iodide of silver, which was the substance impressible by the action of light. In thinking over the rationale of the process, the happy thought occurred to Mr. Talbot that the same thing could be done by employing a sheet of paper instead of the unyielding metallic plate.

Without entering into details, his process consisted in saturating the pores of a sheet of paper with a weak solution of iodine, and then floating it upon a pretty strong solution of nitrate of silver. The silver and iodine were thus brought in contact, and the iodide of silver was produced in the tissues of the paper. The pictures thus produced by Mr. Talbot were far inferior in sharpness and beauty of details to those produced by M. Daguerre, but it was found that they had a grand advantage, namely, from the original picture produced in the camera an indefinite number of copies could, by an easy process, be taken, without the original being injured.

Mr. Talbot immediately communicated his discovery to Sir David Brewster, then the head of the optical world. At the time he received the interesting communication, Sir David was the guest of Lord Kinnaird, at his beautiful residence, Rossie Priory. The communication was read to a scientific party there assembled, the pictures forwarded to Sir David exhibited, and the prospects of the new art freely discussed.