unskilled in worldly affairs, in the matter of candles, spiceries, and their counterfeit wares.'

"1

And so, what with one means of influence, what with another, Laud, in the year 1632, being then in the sixtieth year of his age, was the dominant spirit in the English Church, and one of the chiefs of the English state. One would fain think and speak with some respect of any man who has been beheaded; much more of one who was beheaded for a cause to which he had conscientiously devoted his life, and which thousands of his countrymen, two centuries after his death, still adhere to, still expound, still uphold, albeit with the difference, incalculable to themselves, of all that time has flung between. But it is impossible to like or admire Laud. The nearer we get to him, the more all soft illusion falls off, and the more distinctly we have before us the hard reality, as D'Ewes and others saw it, of a "little, low, red-faced man," bustling by the side of that King of the narrow forehead and the melancholy Vandyke air, or pressing his notions with a raspy voice at the council-board till Weston became peevish and Cottington wickedly solemn, or bowing his head in churches not very gracefully. When we examine what remains of his mind in writings, the estimate is not enhanced. The texture of his writing is hard, dry, and common; sufficiently clear as to the meaning, and with no insincerity or superfluity, but without sap, radiance or force. Occasionally, when one of his fundamental topics is touched, a kind of dull heat rises, and one can see that the old man was in earnest. Of anything like depth or comprehensiveness of intellect, there is no evidence; much less of what is understood by genius. There is never a stroke of original insight; never a flash of intellectual generality. In Williams there is genius; not in Laud. Many of his humble clerical contemporaries, not to speak of such known men as Fuller and Hacket, must have been greatly his superiors in talent-more discerning men, as well as more interesting writers. That very ecclesiastical cause which Laud so conspicuously defended, has had, since his time, and has at this day in England, far abler heads among its adherents. How was it, then, that Laud became what he did become, and that slowly, by degrees, and against opposition; how was it that his precise personality and no other worked its way upwards, through the clerical and academical element of the time, to the very top of all, and there fitted itself into the very socket where the joints of things met? Parvo regitur mundus intellectu. A small intellect, once in the position of government, may suffice

1 Add. MS. Brit. Mus. 5873 (one of Cole's).

for the official forms of it; and, with Laud's laboriousness and tenacity of purpose, his power of maintaining his place of minister, under such a master as Charles, needs be no mystery. So long as the proprietor of an estate is satisfied, the tenants must endure the bailiff, whatever the amount of his wisdom. Then, again, in the last stages of Laud's ascent, he rose through Buckingham and Charles, to both of whom surely his nature, without being great, may have recommended itself by adequate affinities. Still, that Laud impressed these men when he did come in contact with them, and that, from his original position as a poor student in an Oxford College, he rose step by step to the point where he could come in contact with them, are facts not explicable by the mere supposition of a series of external accidents. Perhaps it is that a nature does not always or necessarily rise by greatness or intrinsic superiority to the element about it, but may rise by peculiarity, or proper capillary relation to the element about it. When Lord Macaulay speaks of Laud as intellectually an "imbecile," and calls him "a ridiculous old bigot," he seems to omit that peculiarity which gave Laud's nature, whatever its measure by a modern standard, so much force and pungency among his contemporaries. To have hold of the surrounding sensations of men, even by pain and irritation, is a kind of power; and Laud had that kind of power from the first. He affected strongly, if irritatingly, each successive part of the body politic in which he was lodged. As a fellow of a College, he was more felt than liked; as master of a College, he was still felt but not liked; when he came first about Court, he was felt still, but still not liked. And why was he felt? Why, in each successive position to which he attained, did he affect surrounding sensation so as to domineer? For one thing, he was a man whose views, if few, were extraordinarily definite. His nature, if not great, was very tight. Early in life he had taken up certain propositions as to the proper theology of the Anglican Church, and had combined them with certain others as to the divine right of prelacy, and the necessity and possibility of uniformity in creed and worship. These few very definite propositions, each answering to some tendency of society or of opinion at the time in England, he had tied and knotted round him as his sufficient doctrinal outfit. Wherever he went, he carried them with him and before him, acting upon them with a brisk and incessant perseverance, without regard to circumstances, or even to established notions of what was fair, high-minded, and generous. Thus, seeing that the propositions were of a kind upon which some

conclusion or other was or might be made socially imperative, he could force to his own conclusions all laxer, though larger natures, that were tending lazily the same way, and, throwing a continually increasing crowd of such and of others behind him as his followers, leave only in front of him those who were opposed to his conclusions as resolute contraries. His indefatigable official activity contributed to the result. Beyond all this, however, and adding secret force to it all, there was something else about Laud. Though the system which he wanted to enforce was one of strict secular form, the man's own being rested on a trembling basis of the fantastic and unearthly. Herein lay one notable, and perhaps compensating difference between his narrow intellect and the broad but secular genius of Williams. In that strange diary of Laud, which is one of the curiosities of our literature, we see him in an aspect in which he probably never wished that the public should know him. His hard and active public life is represented there but casually, and we see the man in the secrecy of his own thoughts, as he talked to himself when alone. We hear of certain sins, or, at least, "unfortunatenesses," of his early and past life, which clung about his memory, were kept there by anniversaries of sadness or penance, and sometimes intruded grinning faces through the gloom of the chamber when all the house was asleep. We see that, after all, whether from such causes or from some form of constitutional melancholy, the old man, who walked so briskly and cheerily about the court, and was so sharp and unhesitating in all his notions of what was to be done, did in secret carry in him some sense of the burden of life's mystery, and feel the air and the earth to some depth around him to be full of sounds and agencies unfeatured and unimaginable. At any moment they may break through! The twitter of two robin redbreasts in his room, as he is writing a sermon, sets his heart beating; a curtain rustles - what hand touched it? Above all, he has a belief in revelation through dreams and coincidences; and, as the very definiteness of his scheme of external worship may have been a refuge to him from that total mystery, the skirts of which, and only the skirts, were ever touching him, so in his dreams and small omens, he seems to have had, in his daily advocacy of that scheme, some petty sense of near metaphysical aid. Out of his many dreams we are fond of this one:-"January 5 (1626-7), Epiphany Eve and Friday, in the night I dreamed," he says, "that my mother, long since dead, stood by my bed, and drawing aside the clothes a little, looked pleasantly upon me, and that I was glad to see

her with so merry an aspect. She then showed to me a certain old man, long since deceased; whom, while alive, I both knew and loved. He seemed to lie upon the ground, merry enough, but with a wrinkled countenance. His name was Grove. While I prepared to salute him, I awoke." Were one to adopt what seems to have been Laud's own theory, might not one suppose that this wrinkled old man of his dream, squat on the supernatural ground so near its confines with the natural, was Laud's spiritual genius, and so that what of the supernatural there was in his policy, consisted mainly of monitions from Grove of Reading? The question would still remain at what depth back among the dead Grove was permitted to roam?

There is no difficulty now in seeing why Milton changed his resolution of entering the Church of England. To the Church as it was governed by Laud, and as it seemed likely to be governed by Laud or others for many years to come, it was impossible for him honestly to belong. And yet there were other fine and pure spirits of that day who were positively attracted into the Church by that which repelled him from its doors.

It was in April 1630, for example, and mainly through the direct influence of Laud, that George Herbert became an English parish priest. For several years he had been inclining that way. Shortly after the death of James he had given up his hopes of court employment, and retired into the country. Here he had "many conflicts with himself whether he should return to the painted pleasures of a court life, or betake himself to a study of divinity and enter into sacred orders, to which his dear mother had often persuaded him." Having concluded for the holier life, he had taken deacon's orders, had accepted the prebend of Layton Ecclesia in Williams's diocese of Lincoln, and had built in that village, partly with his own money, partly with that of friends, the loveliest gem of a parish church, "being for the workmanship a costly mosaic, and for the form an exact cross." He had also resigned his Public Oratorship at Cambridge, that he might have more time for his sacred duties. Still he had not taken priest's orders nor a cure of souls, and it seemed as if, what with his courtly accomplishments, what with the elegant cast of his sanctity, the court might have him back again. In 1629, however, a severe illness, which brought him to death's door and left in him the seeds of consumption, weaned his last thoughts from all worldly things. Having, as part of his plan, married a lady of kindred disposition, he desired nothing so much. as some country parish where he might bury himself in well-doing.

When, however, in the month above mentioned, his noble relative the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, then new in the earldom of Pembroke by his brother's death, presented him with the rectory of Bemerton in Wiltshire near Salisbury, there arose such questioning in Herbert's mind as to his fitness for the sacred office, that he determined to decline it. He went to Wilton to thank the earl and to give his reasons. It chanced that the King and the whole court were then at Wilton or near it; and so "that night," says Walton, "the earl acquainted Dr. Laud, then Bishop of London, with his kinsman's irresolution, and the bishop did the next day so convince Mr. Herbert that the refusal was a sin, that a tailor was sent for to come speedily from Salisbury to Wilton to take measure and make him canonical clothes against next day; which the tailor did; and Mr. Herbert, being so habited, went with his presentation to the learned Dr. Davenant, who was then Bishop of Salisbury, and he gave him institution immediately." When thus led into the Church, by the hand of Laud himself, and in the proper canonical garb, Herbert (April 26, 1630) was thirty-six years of age. He lived but three years longer, the model of a country parson, and the idol of his parishioners; nor, during these three years, was there a parish in all England in which, by the exertions of one man whose pious. genius had received from nature the due peculiarity, there was a nearer approach than in Bemerton to Laud's ideal of the "beauty of holiness." The parish church, the chapel, the parsonage-house, were all beautified; the church services and ceremonies were punctually fulfilled in every particular; and the people were so taught on Sundays the sacred significance of all the forms and gestures prescribed, that they loved them for their own sake as well as for their pastor's. Over the miry roads, in rain and mist, on week-days walked the delicate, aristocratic man, "contemning his birth," as he said, "or any title or dignity that could be conferred upon him, compared with his title of priest;" and twice every day he and his family, with such gentlemen of the neighborhood as could come, assembled in the chapel for prayers-on which occasions, as the chapel bell was heard over the lands around, the ploughmen would stop reverently in mid-furrow, that the sound might satiate them and do good to their hearts. Here also it was that those sacred strains of "The Temple" were written, which, though some of them were but poetic interpretations of Laud's prose, have come down as the carols of the Church of England in its essence, and are dear beyond that Church to the lovers of sacred wit and quaint metrical speech. Yes, at the very time when Milton was renouncing the Church as his profession, his senior, Herbert, with death's gate shining nearer and