his fantastic romance, a diatribe against the Jesuits, called Ignatius his Conclave, unquestionably exhibit sympathy with what was morbid in the temper of the time. They are to theology what the tragedies of Ford are to drama.

But when we turn to the Sermons of Donne we rise to a much higher plane. Walton, who heard many of these discourses delivered, has left us a wonderful description of their author in the majesty of his prestige at St. Paul's:

Preaching the Word so as showed his own heart was possessed with those very thoughts and joys that he laboured to distil into others: a preacher in earnest ; weeping sometimes for his auditory, sometimes with them; always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives: here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those that practised it, and a virtue so as to make it beloved even by those that loved it not; and all this with a most particular grace and an inexpressible addition of comeliness.

Jane gour to Royston, and I make
over
and I make account
that hy mitic may recruic the bucker thy,

Eve minge. So that you may it got fir by

There is a doubt as to the degree in which these magnificent sermons were orally delivered. The preacher certainly held no manuscript before him, while yet he effort of retaining in the memory such a rich coil of interminably complicated sentences is hardly credible. It seems probable that the sermon was carefully composed and written, as we now possess it, but that the preacher merely spoke a discourse on the same lines which he kept as close to his original as he could. His rule was to preach for exactly sixty minutes; he had "his

hour and but an hour," Brathwayte tells us. Andrewes died in 1626, the year that Donne began to preach at St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, and the celebrity of Donne soon surpassed that of his most renowned predecessor. Age added splendour to the voice of the fiery and yet sombre Dean of St. Paul's. His hearers, borne along upon the flow of his sinuous melody, now soft and winning, now vehement in storm, now piercing like a clarion, now rolling in the meditative music of an organ, felt themselves lifted up to heaven itself. In the early days of Charles I. a sermon delivered by Dean Donne was the most brilliant public entertainment which London had to offer. One of the most magnificently sustained pieces of religious composition in English literature is the Second Prebend Sermon, a long poem

Bishop Hall

of victory over death, which he winds up in this imperial peroration:

As my soul shall not go towards heaven, but go by heaven to heaven, to the heaven of heavens, so the true joy of a good soul in this world is the very joy of heaven; and we go hither, not that being without joy, we might have joy infused into us, but that, as Christ says, Our joy might be full, perfected, sealed with an everlastingness; for, as He promises, That no man shall take our joy from us, so neither shall death itself take it away, nor so much as interrupt it, or discontinue it, but as in the face of death, when he lays hold upon me, and in the face of the devil, when he attempts me, I shall see the face of God (for everything shall be a glass, to reflect God upon me), so in the agonies of death, in the anguish of that dissolution, in the sorrows of that valediction, in the irreversibleness of that transmigration, I shall have a joy, which shall no more evaporate, than my soul shall evaporate, a joy, that shall pass up, and put on a more glorious garment above, and be joy superinvested in glory.

The student may with advantage compare the structure of this sentence with that of some of De Quincey's most studied and rolling paragraphs. Less frequent in Donne, but not less welcome when they come, are his descents to the familiar and the confidential. In the Funeral Sermon for Sir William Cockayne he tells us how difficult he found it to concentrate his thoughts in pure devotion:

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither; and when they are there, I neglect God and His angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door; I talk on, in the same posture of prayer; eyes lifted up, knees bowed down, as though I prayed to God; and if God should ask me when I thought last of God in that prayer I cannot tell : sometimes I find that I forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer.

Donne's famous treatise on self-homicide, the Biathanatos, is difficult to quote from, but one striking passage may be detached from its chain of cited instances and legal arguments:

Since I may without flying, or eating, when I have means, attend an executioner or famine; since I may offer my life, even for another's temporal good; since I must do it for his spiritual; since I may give another my board [plank] in a shipwreck, and so drown; since I may hasten my arrival to heaven by consuming penances,-it is a wayward and unnoble stubbornness in argument to say, still, I must not kill myself, but I may let myself die; since, of affirmations and denials, of omissions and committings, of enjoining and prohibi

tory commands, ever the one implies and enwraps the other. And if the matter shall be resolved and governed only by an outward act, and ever by that; if I forbear to swim [when thrown into] a river, and so perish, because there is no act, I shall not be guilty; and yet I shall be guilty if I discharge a pistol upon myself, which I know not to be charged, nor intended harm, because there is an act.

VIRGIDEMIARVM,

Sixe Bookes.

First three Bookes,

Of Tooth-leffe Satyrs.
1. Poeticall.

2. Academicall.
13. Morall.

The sermons of Hall are lively and sententious, but not convincing. His adversaries charged him, to his great indignation, with loquacity, and advised him. to let his "words be less in number." In spite of his anger, the advice was needed; Hall's verbose and chattering style is very tedious, when he allows it to carry him away "in an unprofitable babbling." But he did not suffer from the Jacobean crabbedness, or from that stagnation of sentences which makes some earlier divines so difficult to read. He flows along easily enough, even diffusely, even laxly. In controversy Hall remembers his early training as a satirist; in his devotional exercises he strikes us as rather ingenious than fervent, more intelligent than impassioned.

LONDON

Printed by Thomas Creede,for Rober
Dexter. 1597.

Title-page of Hall's "Virgidemiarum," 1597

There was little promise of its saintly close in the early part of the career of Joseph Hall (1574-1656). He was born at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Here he seems to have resided, and to have been prominent among the wild University wits. In 1597 he published his six books "of toothless satires"-Virgidemiarum-of which some account has already been given. These display an undisciplined spirit, much hot anger against the poets of the time, and a narrow antagonism to progress. Nothing could be less spiritual than Hall's attitude to life in these juvenile satires, the fallacies of which Milton afterwards exposed. In 1601, however, he took the college living of Halsted, but his residence was not such as to prevent him from travelling

Characters

much in the Netherlands and elsewhere. After a somewhat stormy career, Hall was made Dean of Worcester, and then, in 1627, Bishop of Exeter, being translated in 1641 to Norwich. During the Civil War his cathedral was desecrated and he himself driven with ignominy from his palace, reduced to beggary and imprisoned, as he describes in his Hard Measure of 1674. But he survived until 1656, after having written a sort of autobiography in his Observations on some Specialities of Divine Providence. In his last illness Hall was attended by Sir Thomas Browne, who venerated him.

A passage from one of Hall's sermons gives a fair impression of his manner as a preacher : From "IT IS FINISHED"

Every one of our sins is a thorn and a nail and a spear to him. While thou

pourest down thy drunken carouses, thou givest thy Saviour a potion of gall. While thou dispiritest His poor servants, thou spittest on his face. While thou puttest on thy proud dresses and liftest up thy vain heart with high conceits, thou settest a crown of thorns on his head. While thou wringest and oppressest his poor children, thou whippest him and drawest blood of his hands and feet. Thou hypocrite, how darest thou offer to receive the sacrament of God with that hand which is thus imbued with the blood of him whom thou receivest? In every ordinary thy profane tongue walks, in the disgrace of the religious and conscionable. . . . Now are we set on the sandy pavement of our theatre, and are matched with all sorts of evils; evil men, evil spirits, evil accidents, and, which is worst, our own evil hearts. Temptations, crosses, persecutions, sicknesses, wants, infamies, death,-all these must in our courses be encountered by the law of our profession. . . . God and his angels sit upon the scaffolds of heaven and behold us. Our crown is ready. Our day of deliverance shall come. Yea, our redemption is near, when all tears shall be wiped away from our eyes, and we that have sown in tears shall reap in joy.

With an important movement in the English literature of this time Hall was also identified. If we hold that in the greater part of the reigns of James I. and Charles I. the development of prose style was generally arrested, it must be admitted that it did blossom forth in the fashionable imitations of the clear and lively sketches which the antique world attributed to Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle. In 1592, Casaubon, to whom and to Scaliger the modern literatures of Europe owe so great a debt, had edited Theophrastus with a luminous commentary. This attracted the attention of English writers to him, and Hall, in his Characters of Virtues and Vices of 1608, and his "occasional meditations," introduced the fashion for composing short essays in humorous philosophy. Theophrastus had confined himself to studies of the intrinsic behaviour