tance." In 1668, he was made Bishop of Chester; and in the same year his most interesting work, "An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language,' was printed by the Royal Society. This applied natural philosophy to language, and labored towards the deduction from first principles of quickened intercourse among men, by an easy common language in which significant signs were to build up the meaning of each word. Bishop Wilkins died in 1672, at his friend Tillotson's house in Chancery Lane.

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22. Samuel Hartlib was of a good Polish family; ancestors of his had been Privy Councillors to Emperors of Germany. He came to England about 1628, and his active beneficent mind brought him into friendship with many of the earnest thinkers of the time. In 1641, Hartlib published "A Brief Relation of that which hath been lately attempted to procure Ecclesiastical Peace among Protestants," and a Description of Macaria," his ideal of a well-ordered state. In the midst of the strife of civil war, Hartlib was wholly occupied with scientific study, having especial regard to the extension and improvement of education, and the development of agriculture and manufactures. In 1642 he translated from the Latin of a Moravian pastor, John Amos Comenius, two treatises on "A Reformation of Schooles." His zeal for the better education of the people, as a remedy for their distresses, caused him not only to give thought to the education of the poor, but also to attempt the establishment of a school for the improved education of the rich; and he asked Milton to print his ideas on the subject; hence the tract of eight pages published by Milton, in 1644, without titlepage, but inscribed on the top in one line, "Of Education. To Mr. Samuel Hartlib." In 1651 Hartlib edited a treatise on "Flemish Agriculture," which gave counsel that added greatly to the wealth of England. Among Hartlib's schemes was a plan for a sort of guild of science, which should unite students of nature into a brotherhood while they sought knowledge in the way set forth by Francis Bacon.

23. A young man of science who did not separate himself from the contest of the time was the mathematician, John Wallis, born in 1616, son of a rich incumbent of Ashford, Kent. His father died when he was six years old, his mother educated him for a learned profession, he went at sixteen to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is said to have been the first student who maintained Harvey's new doctrine of the circulation of the blood. There was no study of mathematics then in Cambridge; the best mathematicians were in London, and their science was little esteemed. Wallis graduated, obtained a fellowship at Queen's College, took orders in 1640, and acted as chaplain in private families until the Civil War. He then took the side of the Parliament, and used his mathematical skill in reading the secret ciphers of the Royalists. In 1643, he obtained the living of St. Gabriel, Fenchurch Street. In the same year the death of his mother gave him independent fortune. In 1644 he married, and was one of the secretaries of

the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. In 1645 he was among the men of science, and took part in the meetings which led to the formation of the Royal Society. In 1648 he was rector of a church in Ironmonger Lane. He remonstrated against the execution of Charles I., and in 1649 he was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford. He died in 1703.

CHAPTER VII.

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: RELIGIOUS, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND POLITICAL WRITERS.

1. Owen Feltham.-2. Henry More.-3. Richard Sibbes.-4. Jeremy Taylor. - 5. William Prynne.-6. Peter Heylin.-7. William Chillingworth.-8. Philip Hunton; Sir Robert Filmer.-9. John Gauden. - 10. John Milton.

1. THE religious mind of England had in the days of James I. and of Charles I., as always, manifold expression. There were many readers of the "Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political," published about 1628, by Owen Feltham, a man of middle-class ability, with a religious mind, who was maintained in the household of the Earl of Thomond. His Resolves are one hundred and forty-six essays on moral and religious themes, the writing of a quiet churchman, who paid little attention to the rising controversies of his day.

2. Henry More represented Platonism. He was born in 1614, at Grantham, in Lincolnshire, educated at Eton and Christ Church, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship. He abandoned Calvinism, was influenced by Tauler's "Theologia Germanica," and fed his spiritual aspirations with writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Iamblichus, and Platonists of Italy at the time of the revival of scholarship. Henry More was for a time tutor in noble families, obtained a prebend at Gloucester, but soon resigned it in favor of a friend. Content with a small competence, he declined preferment, and sought to live up to his own ideal as a Christian Platonist. He lived on through the reign of Charles II., and died in 1687, aged seventy-three. The Platonism which had been a living influence upon Europe at the close of the fifteenth century had its last representative in Henry More. In 1642 he published "uzodia Platonica; or, a Platonical Song of the Soul," in four books ;

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with prefaces and interpretations, published in 1647, as "Philosophicall Poems." The first book, "Psychozoia" (the Life of the Soul), contained a "Christiano-Platonicall display of life.” The Immortality of the Soul was the theme of the second part, Psychathanasia," annexed to which was a metrical " Essay upon the Infinity of Worlds out of Platonick Principles." The third book contained "A Confutation of the Sleep of the Soul, after Death," and was called " Antipsychopannychia,” with an Appendix on "The Præ-existency of the Soul." Then came "Antimonopsychia," or the fourth part of the "Song of the Soul," containing a confutation of the Unity of Souls; whereunto is annexed a paraphrase upon Apollo's answer concerning Plotinus's soul departed this life. This poem was throughout written in the Spenserian stanza, with imitation also of Spenser's English. The books were divided into cantos, and each canto headed in Spenser's manner. Thus, the first canto of Book I.

is headed :

"Struck with the sense of God's good will,

The immortality

Of souls I sing; praise with my quill
Plato's philosophy."

But there is no better reason why it should not have been all written in prose, than the evidence it gives that Platonism came as poetry to Henry More, although he was not himself a great poet. He also published, with a dedication to Cudworth, the Hebrew Professor at Cambridge, his "Conjectura Cabbalistica," a triple interpretation of the three first chapters of Genesis, with a "Defence" of it. The Jewish Cabala was conceived to be a traditional doctrine or exposition of the Pentateuch, which Moses received from the mouth of God while he was on the mount with him. Henry More's book expounded "a threefold Cabala," which was, he said, "the dictate of the free reason of my mind, heedfully considering the written text of Moses, and carefully canvassing the expositions of such interpreters as are ordinarily to be had upon him." The threefold division of his "Cabala" was into literal, philosophic, and moral. More wrote also against atheism, and on theological topics.

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3. Intense religious feeling, Puritan in tone, was expressed in the ser

mons and books of Richard Sibbes (born in 1577), who was master of Catherine Hall when Milton was at Cambridge, and a frequent preacher in the university. Of the two great English universities, Cambridge was the stronghold of the Puritans. Sermons by Sibbes were published as his "Saints' Cordials," in 1629. To his "Bruised Reede and Smoking Flax," in which other sermons were collected, Baxter said that he owed his conversion. Richard Sibbes died in 1635.

4. Jeremy Taylor was born at Cambridge, in August, 1613, the son of a barber, who, according to one account, sent him, when three years old, to a free school then just founded by Dr. Stephen Perse. At thirteen, Jeremy Taylor left this school to enter Caius College as a sizar, or poor scholar. He had proceeded to the degree of B.A., and been ordained, by the time he was twenty-one. A college friend then asked young Taylor to preach for him at St. Paul's. He had, like Milton, outward as well as inward beauty, and a poet's mind. Archbishop Laud heard of his sermons, called him to preach at Lambeth, and became his friend. Laud having more patronage and influence at Oxford than at Cambridge, Taylor was incorporated there, and the archbishop procured for him a fellowship of All Souls, by using his sole authority as Visitor of the College to overrule the statutes which required that candidates should be of three years' standing in the university. Laud also made the young divine his chaplain; and in March, 1638, obtained for him the rectory of Uppingham, in Rutlandshire. One year later, in May, 1639, Taylor was married. Three years afterwards his youngest son died, in May, 1642, and his wife died shortly afterwards. He was left with two infant sons, at the time when the breach between the king and Commons had become irreparable. Then he was made one of the king's chaplains, and joined the king; perhaps when, in August, the latter was on his way to hoist the royal standard at Nottingham. In October, 1642, the Parliament resolved on sequestration of the livings of the loyal clergy. Jeremy Taylor, like Herrick and others, was deprived. The indecisive battle of Edge Hill was fought in the same month. In November, the king marched upon London; there was a fight at Brentford. The Londoners mustered their trained bands. It was the occasion of Milton's sonnet, "When the