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sealing of articles, whereby I have secured to myself 30001.; but after the death of the father and mother, whose only child the gentlewoman is, I beleive there will be at least 15007. more. I little thought I should ever come to this; but abundance of motives have overpowered me.' We forgot to mention that some time before this, Prideaux, on going into residence at Norwich, had commissioned Ellis to buy him a beaver, such as is proper for a divine, provided not too big, which was to be sent to the Oxford carriers either at the Saracen's Head in Snow Hill, or the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane.' Thus furnished with a wife with means, and a beaver fit for a divine, Prideaux retired from Oxford to Norwich to enjoy his preferments and his wife's income in peace and quiet. He adds that he had the further temptation to go thither, because it is the pleasantest countrey in England, beeing all open and dry; the only inconvenience is the want of good bread; but this, proceeding from a cause which any one may remedy that will, I beleive I shall not soe much stick at it.' Thus comfortably situated, his chief anxiety was now for his friend, who was in Ireland, Secretary to the Commissioners of Revenue. Had the reign of James lasted, Ellis no doubt would have had rapid promotion, for one of his brothers, Philip, had been kidnapped by the Jesuits while at Westminster School, and brought up at St. Omer, where he is said to have been accidentally recognised by his Westminster nickname of 'Jolly Phil.' Becoming a Benedictine monk, he was now Chaplain to Mary of Modena. But the duration of his influence was too short; and in spite of Prideaux's exhortations that, while his brother's power was so great at Court, Ellis should get 'established in some good place in England,' the Revolution surprised both the friends before anything was done, and worse than that, Ellis, who had come over at the Revolution to see how the land lay, found himself supplanted in his Secretaryship on his return to Ireland.

Of the Revolution itself these letters contain no particulars. There is a blank in them from July, 1688, to June, 1691; and even then we hear little except that, as the world was then going, a London curacy was better than a country living, for all country commodities being soe low and taxes soe high, all livings that depend upon predial tiths are fallen more than halfe in value.' So that Prideaux mentions, but not this time as an arcanum, that his own living of nominally 1207. was not then worth 407. per annum clear. In that year Ellis got a new place and a rise in the world, having been appointed one of the Commissioners of Transports, after which he rapidly enriched himself by transacting the affairs of the nation. In June, 1692, Ellis received a

letter,

letter, which must have made him smile, like the Augur, if he remembered some of Prideaux's earlier communications. This was a letter thanking him for the good news he had sent, that news being the victory off Cape La Hogue. 'Till this happy turn, our Jacobites were come to that heighth of confidence to talke openly that now all was their owne, and some of them suspended their payment of taxes.' Then he goes on to say how they had made their submission, and how he thanked God that they were all disappointed. All the last three years, he adds, for he was now Archdeacon, he had been exceedingly troubled at Ipswich with an untoward Jacobite clergyman there; but he having embarked in this Jacobite design, had been taken up in the disguise of a tinker, and laid in jail for treason, which puts an end to the whole controversy.' With this facility in changing his principles, Prideaux's life would have now been happy enough, but for three flies in his ointment. The first was the Act of Toleration passed in 1689, which, after three years' experience, he declared in 1692 to be nothing else but an Act to turn half the nation into downright athiesme; so that it was now difficult to get any to go to church.' The second was a threatened Abjuration Bill, which contained to him the very last bristle which would choke him and others, who had already swallowed the whole pig. 'If that goes,' he writes, on the 4th of December, 1694, I must out, for I cannot take it; for I am told that the contents of that oath are that there lys no obligation upon us from the oaths taken to King James, and that William is lawful and rightful King of this realm. As to the first part, I think none can stick at it that have sworn to King William and Queen Mary; for certainly we cannot ow allegiance to King James and them too.' Then he proceeds to argue that allegiance may be suspended till James returns, and that William and Mary may be lawful sovereigns; but the word rightful is that I cannot get over, for that is to swear to King William's title.' It was fortunate for Prideaux that this Abjuration Oath was dropped, as otherwise we fear he might have taken it after all.

The third fly in his ointment remains, and this in the person of the Dean of Norwich, no less a man than that stout Henry Fairfax, who defended the liberties of Magdalen College so sturdily against the aggressions of James II. If Prideaux's account of him, when Dean of Norwich, to which he had been preferred on the Revolution, be true, we must say it would have been better for his fame had Fairfax been thrown into prison by James, and died there; for certainly a man more unfit to be a dignitary of the Church it is hard to imagine. As early as

October

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October 1691, Prideaux writes thus of him to his friend: 'Our Dean tells me that you have now got some employment; I should be glad to wish you joy of it, if I knew what. you had him with you at your coffee-house, and I wish you had him there still, for any good he doth at Norwich; for the truth is, he is good for nothing but his pipe and his pot, and we are wretchedly holp'd up with him.' This is not good; but in December, 1693, Prideaux writes, We are here at a miserable pass with this horrid sot we have got for our Dean. He cannot sleep at night till dosed with drink; and therefore, when in bed, his man's businesse is to drink with him till he hath his dose. . . . He acts by noe rules of justice, honesty, civility, or good manners towards any one; but after an obstinate, self-willed, irrational manner in all sorts of businesse . . . He goes little to church, and never to sacrament. His whole life is the pot and the pipe, and goe to him when you will, you will find him walking about his roome with a pipe in his mouth, and a bottle of claret and a bottle of old strong beer-which in this county they call nog-upon the table, and every other turn he takes a glass of one or other of them. If Hodges-one of the prebendarys-cometh to him, for scarce any other doth, then he reads "Don Quixot," while the other walkes about with his pipe as before." We agree entirely with Prideaux in thinking that the preferments of the Church were never designed for such drones; but he had to bear this infliction for ten years longer. Then Prideaux was rewarded by being appointed to the vacant deanery. He was fifty-four, and of an unusually vigorous constitution; but seven years afterwards he was attacked by the stone and had to submit to an operation. It was during this illness that he compiled The Old and New Testaments Connected,' the first part of which he published in 1715. Three years later his health began to break; but he lingered on till 1724, when he died, aged seventy-six. At an earlier period, in 1697, he published a 'Life of Mahomet,' which was well received at the time, but is now forgotten. Much light is thrown on the latter portion of the Dean's life by those letters to his sister, which we have already mentioned. Thus, writing from his living at Saham, in 1693, he tells her: 'I have now two sons and a daughter. She makes sport for the whole house, and will govern all wherever she comes. She is, I thank God, a very sprightly witty child, and very healthy, which hath encouraged me to venture 2007. on her head in the Million Fund, which will bring in 281. per annum, and will be a reserve, to keep her from starving, whatever misfortunes she may meet with in the world.' In 1700 the Dean lost his wife, that lady who brought him

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the fortune, and whom he had married in such a matter-of-fact way. But he had lived long enough with her to love her. 'I am in the utmost concern for her,' he writes, because I fear I must loose her, and her losse will be very great to me.' In May, 1701, he writes: My children, I thank God, are very well; and I am takeing all due care to give them as good an education as I can, but I much want their dear mother to help me in this matter.' Then, true to his old nature, he goes on: 'I am myghtyly pressed to marry again, with abundance of offers, and very valuable ones;' but, considering all the circumstances, he would not marry again, though there was a lady ready to his hand, of ancient family and with money. She is past forty, and was never yet married.'

Ellis, though, as we have said, some years older than Prideaux, survived his correspondent by many years. From being Commissioner of Transports he was raised to be UnderSecretary of State, and in Queen Anne's reign to be Comptroller to the Mint. He represented Harwich in the Parliaments of 1705 and 1707, and having probably made good use, as Mr. Thompson says, 'of those opportunities by which, in his time, it was considered quite fair for a public man to benefit,' he grew exceedingly wealthy. He died, unmarried, on the 8th of July, 1738, having reached the great age of ninety-three years. He was probably, mutatis mutandis, what would now be called a good public servant, plodding, and industrious, and even pushing enough to raise himself to the second rank; but without genius or ability to rise to real distinction in the State. Unfortunately for his private character, Mr. Thompson tells us, he was entangled in some intrigue with the Duchess of Cleveland, and gibbeted by name in verse along with certain disreputable company by Pope.

We have now said our say of these very amusing, if not very edifying, letters. It is not often that the Council of the Camden Society present their readers with letters of such gossiping interest as these. Of Ellis we know little but what Prideaux tells us of him. For himself he is a muta persona throughout. Nor of Prideaux need we say much, whatever may be his reputation as a divine towards the close of his life. In younger years his own hand has presented us with his likeness in no very favourable light. When we find a pen so universally ready to vilify and defame, we are apt as we read to hope that, after all, these Colleges of Oxford and their Fellows, these Town Corporations and their aldermen, this world in England in the seventeenth century, as compared with Prideaux and his few friends in particular, were, after all, perhaps, not quite so bad

as

as he has represented them. Even if we look on that sturdy old Dean of Norwich, listening to 'Don Quixote' with his pipe and his pot, with that eye of charity of which his successor in the Deanery so seldom made use, we may find that, perhaps, he was not so bad as he seemed to one who, after all, may only have been defaming him with a view to the succession-that he was telling tales on him, just as he told tales years before of Woodroffe and Hyde; not to mention the fact which we have confessed under his own hand, that he was not above playing the part of the spy on the movements of the illustrious John Locke.

ART. IV.-1. The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy. Essays in Political Economy, theoretical and applied. Some Leading Principles of Political Economy newly expounded. By J. E. Cairnes, M.A., Emeritus Professor of Political Economy in University College, London. London, 1873-75.

2. A Few Remarks upon certain Practical Questions of Political Economy. A Few Remarks on Professor Cairnes's recent contribution to Political Economy. By a former Member of the Political Economy Club. London, 1874-75.

3. The Theory of Political Economy. By W. Stanley Jevons, M.A. London, Professor of Logic and Political Economy in Owens College, Manchester. London, 1871.

4. The Principles of Economical Philosophy.

By Henry Dunning Macleod, Esq., M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-law. Vols. I. II. Second edition. London, 1872-1875.

5. Plutology, or the Theory of the Efforts to satisfy Human Wants. By William Edward Hearn, LL.D., Professor of History and Political Economy in the University of Melbourne. London and Melbourne, 1864.

6. Studies in Political Economy. By Anthony Musgrave, C.M.G.,* Governor of South Australia. London, 1875.

7. Political Economy for Beginners. Tales in Political Economy. By Millicent Garrett Fawcett. London, 1874.

8. Thirteen Short Lectures on the Political Economy of Daily Life: delivered at Queen's College, Liverpool, in the Session 1875-6. By J. T. Danson, Chairman of the Council. London and Liverpool, 1876.

* Now Sir Anthony Musgrave, and Governor of Jamaica.

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