Melvini Scoti Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoriam), form a savagely satirical reply to some strictures on the ordinances of the Church of England. This reply is the bitterest thing he ever penned; but it was written in the heyday of youth. He translated Cornaro's Treatise on Temperance; and made a collection of proverbs called Jacula Prudentum, or Outlandish Proverbs, Sentences, &c. I will quote three good proverbs from this collection. "He that studies his content wants it." "A cool mouth and warm feet live long." "Would know what money is, go you borrow some." None of his works were printed until after his death; but most of them, when published, were very successful. The Temple, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations-first printed in Cambridge in 1633— went through six editions in eight years. Let me now guide you reverently (reverently, both because the place is holy, and because the maker thereof was a man of men) into this Temple, wherein the memory of holy Mr. Herbert is embalmed for us, among beautiful gems of thought and caskets of golden diction.

Pause here, in the "church porch," and read the table of laws hung therein, for the guidance of those who would seek the inner altar. Beware of lust. Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame when once it is within thee; be not a beast in courtesy. Swear not; lie not; look to thy mouth, for diseases enter there. Use sometimes to be alone; salute thyself, and examine your soul. Be thrifty, not covetous. Never exceed thine income.

"Laugh not too much: the witty man laughs least;

For wit is news only to ignorance."

Favour high projects, but be humble and magnanimous.

"Be not surety, if thou art a father.

Love is a personal debt. I cannot give

My children's right, nor ought to take it; rather
Both friends should die than hinder them to live.

Fathers first enter bonds to nature's ends,

And are her sureties ere they are a friend's."

Scorn no man's love, though of mean degree; for "love is a present for a mighty king." "Man is God's image, but a poor man is Christ's stamp to boot." Uncover in church. Judge not the preacher. These are moral laws, you see, and they form the basis of the religious ones. Pass on: there is the "altar," and on it the "sacrifice." You are next inducted into the holy ceremonies and seasons, the ritual and sacraments, and the prayers for divers occasions. Mark the church-floor: the square speckled stone is Patience; the black stone, chequering all, is Humility; the gentle rising, leading to the choir, is Confidence; the sweet cements of all are Love and Charity. Glance at the windows, decorated with scriptural subjects, and in which doctrine and life, colours and light, mingle beautifully. Looking upward, you perceive the "cross.” And now, after "prayer" and "holy baptism," pass on again to the altar, from which a censer called "life" is diffusing light and incense.

"LIFE.

I made a posy while the day ran by:
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.

But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,

And withered in my hand.

My hand was next to them, and then my heart;
I took, without more thinking, in good part
Time's gentle admonition.

Who did so sweetly death's sad taste convey,
Making my mind to smell my fatal day,
Yet sug'ring the suspicion.

Farewell, dear flowers! sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye lived, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.

I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since if my scent be good, I care not if
It be as short as yours."

With our thoughts made purer and our hearts made stouter by the quiet beauty and stately music of this monument of dead holiness, let us again pass out. But I trust, fair and gentle reader, that you will take my advice, and visit the Temple again, alone. Let your visit, moreover, be a longer one; for the beauty of the place is a beauty that grows upon one, and cannot be drunk in it at a glance.

Coleridge said truly, that the quaintness of Herbert's poetry lay rather in the thoughts than in the diction. The language itself is a pure well of English undefiled; though what Shakespeare's Armado styled the "sweet smoke of rhetoric" is not wholly wanting. Not that the thoughts lack loveliness; if it were so, the poetry would be bad. Poetry, in the narrow sense, is imagination set to tune-fancy rendered delicious by a regular succession of harmonious sounds. "You cannot build palaces on the sea-waves," said some Persian poet; and you cannot build the name of a poet on meaningless and restless rhymes. The thoughts of Herbert, naked and unadorned, expressed prosily and unmusically, would still possess intellectual value, though proportionally wanting in imaginative attraction. Yet let us not undervalue the auxiliary value of mere language. A poetical abstraction is absolutely useless, unless it gratifies the craving of the intellect for enjoyment; and an arbitrary connection exists between ideas themselves and the music through which they are conveyed. Herbert's English, I repeat, is a well pure and wholesome; and I wish some admirers of Mr. Carlyle would dip their buckets into it. Herbert's poetry is good poetry, and good verse too. As verse, it is coated like sugar-plums, and tickles the palate; as poetry, it must be digested to be nutricious. Let us not, however, identify verse and poetry, or we shall run into errors in our literary estimates. Boccacio tells us that individuals who wore the surplice, and walked about with shaven polls, and who were deemed perfect by worthy Italian burghers, were far from being priests of God.

Holy Mr. Herbert stands very high as a poet, but he stood higher, to my thinking, as a country clergyman. His saintly life was worthy old Isaak Walton's Chronicle; and any man worthy of Walton's eulogium must necessarily have been a fine thinker and a Christian gentleCharles Cotton-the friend of Walton, who loved angling, and who translated Montaigne so nicely-has written about Herbert in a fitting strain of poetry:

man.

"And Herbert: he whose education,

Manners, and parts, by high applauses blown,
Was deeply tainted with ambition;

And fitted for a court, made that his aim;
At last, without regard to birth or name,
For a poor country cure does all disclaim;

Where, with a soul composed of harmonies,
Like a sweet swan, he warbles as he dies
His Maker's praise and his own obsequies."

VOL. II.

R. W. B.

KK

Spell-bound.

I.

It seems to me that there is very little pleasure in locomotion under conditions that compel one to be entirely helpless and passive in the matter. The vaunted exhilaration of rapid movement vanishes when it is felt to proceed from causes quite independent of oneself. Whirling along in an express-train even is rather depressing than exciting; individuality is so completely surrendered, with all voice in, or control over, route, or speed, or pause. Finger the reins, tug at an oar, handle the helm, or but haul a rope now and then, and your mind moves with your body, and shares in the glow of exertion and the excitement of voluntary action. But a mere chattel locked in a padded carriage, stagnating, uncared for, not consulted, one settles into deep gloom and intense tedium, praying for the end of the journey and the resumption of personality.

So I thought travelling down in the spring of the year to Chewton Manor House to pay a long-promised visit. A week's visit only, for I could spare no more time; and, indeed, the promise had been reluctantly given, and I entered upon its fulfilment unwillingly. Imperceptibly a solitary student-life in secluded chambers in London betrays one into habits of thought and conduct at variance with prescription. Crotchet and caprice undermine routine and settled programme, and bring about unfitness and disinclination for life in "other people's houses." The continued practice of existing in accordance with one's own momentary views simply renders it difficult at last to yield to the different plans of

others.

Why, then, did I go to Chewton Manor House at all? I had been ill; I had grown tired of my work, low-spirited, with a sort of feeling that my nerves had somehow unnaturally worked their way to the surface, and rendered me acutely sensitive. Small disappointments annoyed me extremely, unexpected noises set my heart beating, a sudden knock at the door startled me. I slept but lightly and badly, and rose unrefreshed by my rest. "Pack up a carpet-bag and go into the country for a week's holiday," said every body to whom I made complaint of my symptoms. Then I met William Forde, and he begged me at once to join him at Chewton Manor, his father's house, situated in a pleasant western county. I looked forward to a week's idleness, and the sight of green trees, and a blue horizon of waving hills dying into the sky, quite restoring me to health. So I took my ticket, and found myself on the South-Western Railway.

And, had I not gone on my own account, I believe I should have gone on William Forde's. There was something strange, as I fancied, in the way in which he pressed on me this country visit; it was more like

imploring than inviting. Such restless wandering eyes, white face, and quivering lips the while he spoke! But then he had always been of a nervous, excitable, sanguine temperament, of most delicate organisation. Quite as a boy at school he was the same, I remember. Much younger than I, he had been commended to me as an elder boy, and to my care, by his father, who had been an early and intimate friend of my father's. I am afraid I discharged my trust with the indifference usual to schoolboys similarly situated. My interest in my protégé was not without bounds. He was a little, shy, white-haired, white-faced boy, with rather a shrinking, frightened manner, inclined to submit patiently to school ill-treatment, though now and then he had been known to fire up into angry resistance, when he would draw himself together, toss his long hair from his forehead, and, his eyes dilating and gaining in colour and brilliance, he would stand prepared to do battle against any odds. The acquaintance, commenced at school, we had carried into after-years. The friendship of our parents descended to us in a sort of hereditary way, and if it might not be very fervid, it was still substantial enough. While he was renewing his request that I would visit Chewton Manor, I remembered that I had heard a rumour of his engagement and approaching marriage. I adverted to this; but he put the remark away from him hurriedly, and as though ill pleased with it.

"Not yet, not yet; there's nothing settled-nothing;" and he turned to other topics. I have noticed that men have often a shamefaced manner of speaking of marriage when it affects themselves, as though, from a bachelor point of view, the subject had a very weak and assailable front; but I never saw any one spring away from it so strangely as did William Forde. It was not easy to light upon any very satisfactory explanation of my friend's manner. There might be other causes certainly, but still to his old excitability much might be referable, and perhaps he also had been hard working in London, and fretted, and weakened, and shaken by his work, longing too for change of air and scene.

A pleasant sunshiny day, the green of the trees and fields very young and transparent, and the sky very clear and blue; the old Manor House looking almost handsome with such attractive surroundings, though naturally inclined to be an ugly building, it must be confessed. Of a Queen-Anne date probably-but much patched, and altered, and repaired of later years-the old red bricks coated with stucco, the clock-tower diminished by one-half, and foolish dwarf battlements-a burst of bad taste on the part of a proprietor of half a century back-surmounting the coping-stone. A flat-faced building, the cream-coloured stucco here and there relieved by an agreeable patch of ivy-like a mouche on the cheek of beauty-ivy, too, over the ill-shaped porch; the upper windows, of many panes, with broad white sashes, the lower modernised upon French principles, with plate-glass, and opening to the ground. Very pleasant and quiet, almost drowsily so; for there is a sort of balm and opiate to London nerves in the deep quiet of the country, now broken only by the