weakening his power of dealing direct blows on the instinct or intuition of the moment.

But, while this man was without the austerer virtues of humanity, we must not forget that he was also without its sour and malignant vices; and he stands almost alone in literature, as a vast, dispassionate intellect, in which the sentiment of philanthropy has been refined and purified into the subtile essence of thought. Without this philanthropy or goodness, he tells us, " man is but a better kind of vermin "; and love of mankind, with Bacon, is not merely the noblest feeling but the highest reason. This beneficence, thus transformed into intelligence, is not a hard opinion, but a rich and mellow spirit of humanity, which communicates the life of the quality it embodies; and we cannot more fitly conclude than by quoting the noble sentence in which Bacon, after pointing out the common mistakes regarding the true end of knowledge, closes by divorcing it from all selfish egotism and ambition. "Men," he says, "have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely, to give a true account of their gift of reason, to

the benefit and use of man as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding-ground for strife or contention ; or a shop for profit and sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate."

HOOKER.

THE life of the "learned and judicious" Mr. Rich

ard Hooker, by Izaak Walton, is one of the most perfect biographies of its kind in literature. But it is biography on its knees; and though it contains some exquisite touches of characterization, it does not, perhaps, convey an adequate impression of the energy and enlargement of the soul whose meekness it so tenderly and reverentially portrays. The individuality of the writer is blended with that of his subject, and much of his representation of Hooker is an unconscious idealization of himself. The intellectual limitations of Walton are felt even while we are most charmed by the sweetness of his spirit, and the mind of the greatest thinker the Church of England has produced is not reflected on the page which celebrates his virtues.

Hooker's life is the record of the upward growth of a human nature into that region of sentiments and ideas where sagacity and sanctity, intelligence and goodness, are but different names for one vital fact. His soul, and the character his soul had organized, the invisible but intensely and immortally alive part of him,

was domesticated away up in the heavens, even while the weak visible frame, which seemed to contain it, walked the earth; and though in this world thrown controversially, at least, into the Church Militant, the Church Militant caught, through him, a gleam of the consecrating radiance, and a glimpse of the heavenwide ideas, of the Church Triumphant. There is much careless talk, in our day, of" spiritual" communication; but it must never be forgotten that the condition of real spiritual communication is height of soul; and that the true "mediums" are those rare persons through whom, as through Hooker, spiritual communications stream, in the conceptions of purified, spiritualized, celestialized

reason.

Hooker was born in 1553, and was the son of poor parents, better qualified to rejoice in his early piety than to appreciate his early intelligence. The schoolmaster to whom the boy was sent, happy in a pupil whose inquisitive and acquisitive intellect was accompanied with docility of temper, believed him, in the words of Walton, "to be blessed with an inward divine light"; thought him a little wonder; and when his parents expressed their intention to bind him apprentice to some trade, the good man spared no efforts until he succeeded in interesting Bishop Jewell in the stripling genius. Hooker, at the age of fourteen, was sent by Jewell to the Uni

versity of Oxford; and after Jewell's death Dr. Sandys, the Bishop of London, became his patron. He partly supported himself at the university by taking pupils; and though these pupils were of his own age, they seem to have regarded their young instructor with as much reverence as they gave to the venerable professors, and a great deal more love. Two of these pupils, Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, rose to distinction. As a teacher, Hooker communicated not merely the results of study, but the spirit of study; some radiations from his own soul fell upon the minds he informed; and the youth fortunate enough to be his pupil might have echoed the grateful eulogy of the poet :

"For he was like the sun, giving me light,

Pouring into the caves of my young brain
Knowledge from his bright fountains."

No one, perhaps, was better prepared to enter holy orders than Hooker, when, after fourteen years of the profoundest meditation and the most exhaustive study, he, in his twenty-eighth year, was made deacon and priest. And now came the most unfortunate event of his life; and it came in consequence of an honor. He was appointed to preach at St. Paul's Cross, a pulpit cross erected in the churchyard of St. Paul's Cathedral, and from which a sermon was preached every Sunday by some eminent divine, before an assemblage composed of