reason, somewhat divine and heavenly, which with hidden exultation it rather surmiseth than conceiveth." This highest perfection man conceives in the nature of a reward. Rewards presuppose duties performed. Our natural means to this infinite reward are our works; nor is it possible that nature should ever find any other way to salvation than only this. But our works cannot deserve; there is none who can say, My ways are pure. "There resteth, therefore, either no way unto salvation, or if any, then surely a way which is supernatural, a way which could never have entered into the heart of man as much as once to conceive or imagine, if God Himself had not revealed it extraordinarily." Thus Hooker passes from the Law of Reason to the Revealed Way of Salvation Faith, the principal object whereof is that eternal verity which hath discovered the treasures of hidden wisdom in Christ; Hope, the highest object whereof is that everlasting goodness which in Christ doth quicken the dead; Charity, the final object whereof is that incomprehensible beauty which shineth in the countenance of Christ, the Son of the living God. Laws concerning these things are supernatural, being "such as have not in nature any cause from which they flow, but were, by the voluntary appointment of God, ordained besides the course of nature, to rectify nature's obliquity withal." The revealed law of God does not supersede natural law, but is added to it, and is indeed fraught with precepts of the other also. These precepts are used to prove things less manifest; they are applied with singular use and profit to particular cases; "besides be they plain of themselves or obscure, the evidence of God's own testimony added to the natural assent of Reason concerning the certainty of them, doth not a little comfort and confirm the same." Here we are at the second resting-place in Hooker's argument, at which he pauses again to glance over the ground he has traversed, in a little summary. In the first age of the world memories served for books, but the writing of the Law of God has been, by God's wisdom, a means of preserving it from oblivion and corruption. The writing is not that which adds authority and strength to the Law of God; but it preserves it from the hazards of tradition. "When the question therefore is, whether we be now to seek for any revealed Law of God otherwhere than only in the sacred Scripture. . . . : our answer is, no." Hooker next dwells on the fact that "the principal intent of Scripture is to deliver the laws of duties supernatural," and discusses the sense in which Scripture is said to contain all things necessary to salvation. It does not contain necessarily everything in the law of reason that man can discover for himself, but this is no defect. "It sufficeth that Nature and Scripture do serve in such full sort, that they both jointly, and not severally either of them, be so complete, that unto everlasting felicity we need not the knowledge of anything more than these two may easily furnish our minds with on all sides; and therefore they which . add traditions, as a part of supernatural necessary truth, have not the truth, but are in error." Laws are imposed (1) by each man on himself; (2) by a public society upon its members; (3) by all nations upon each nation; (4) by the Lord Himself on any or all of these. In each of these four kinds of laws there are (a) Natural laws which always bind, and (b) Positive laws which only bind after they have been expressly and wittingly imposed. Only the positive laws are mutable, but of these not all; some are permanent, some changeable, as changes in the matter concerning which they were first made may exact. But all laws adapted to conditions that do not always continue, may require to be otherwise ordered than before. "And this doth seem to have been the very cause why St. John doth so peculiarly term the doctrine that teacheth salvation by Jesus Christ, Evangelium Æternum, an eternal Gospel ; whereas the whole law of rites and ceremonies, although delivered with so great solemnity, is, notwithstanding, clean abrogated, inasmuch as it had but temporary cause of God's ordaining it." This was the substance of the first of the "Four Books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie," first published by Richard Hooker, then rector of Boscombe, Wiltshire, in 1594--first of the four, and strong foundation on which all the work was built. The fifth book, longer than all those four, followed in 1597, when he was rector of Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury. Hooker died in 1600, and left notes which were taken, not always rightly, as the rough draught of the remaining three books. These were not published. until eighteen years after his death. Spenser and Shake speare. CHAPTER XII. THE LAST YEARS OF EDMUND SPENSER. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was thirty-two years old when Spenser, aged about forty-four, published the third, fourth, and fifth books of "The Faerie Queene.” Shakespeare had published, in 1593 and 1594, his poems of "Venus and Adonis” and "Lucrece." In those years he had already begun to write plays of his own, which were produced at the rate of about two a year. In 1597, quarto editions of plays by him began to be printed. The first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, in 1597, was an unlicensed printer's venture, but there were, in the year 1597, the duly licensed Richard II. and Richard III. Shakespeare, therefore, must now come into our story, and also those parts of the literature of Spenser's time that are best taken with a study of Shakespeare. It is clear, too, that writers whose careers began under Elizabeth, and were continued under James I., are best associated, not with Spenser, who died before the Queen, but with Shakespeare, who passed also from one reign into the other. We turn, therefore, to Shakespeare when this book has been closed with an account of the last years of Edmund Spenser. In the year of the publication of the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of "The Faerie Queene" (1596), Spenser, while still in London, wrote a "spousal verse" upon the marriage, on the same day, of Elizabeth and Catherine, the In the same year Last two daughters of Edward Somerset, who had succeeded, in 1589, to the Earldom of Worcester. Their bridegrooms were Henry Guilford and William Petre. This piece was printed as a “Prothalamion" by Spenser's William Ponsonby, in 1596. Ponsonby published Spenser's Four Hymns of Earthly and Heavenly Love and Beauty, with a preface of dedication, dated on the first of September, 1596. There were appended elegies by several friends upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney, for which Spenser wrote an introduction. These were the last works that Spenser published in his lifetime. Spenser's "View of the Present State of Ireland," written or completed during this visit to London, was, no doubt, read in manuscript by the Queen and those at her Court who were most interested in the subject, but it was not printed until 1633. Then it appeared as a folio at Dublin, with a preface written by Sir James Ware. The "Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, which, both for forme and matter, appeare to be parcell of some following Booke of the Faerie Queene, under the Legend of Constancie," were also published after Spenser's death. They first appeared in the first folio of Spenser, which was published in 1609. "Brittain's Ida" is here only to be named because it was first published as "written by that renowned poet, Edmond Spencer," when it was printed by Thomas Walkley, in duodecimo, in 1628. It is good verse, but not from Spenser's hand. Prothalamion, A song before the double marriage of two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, is musical, though in its expression of the poet's courtesy to high-born ladies there is no place for the rapture of gladness that inspired his homage to his wife on his own marriage day. Of himself, indeed, Spenser sings here Prothala mion. with a touch of sadness. His congratulations are those of a melancholy man. Ten stanzas, each of eighteen lines, that vary cunningly the chime of verse in rhyme and measure, and are all alike in structure, close their music each with the refrain, "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song." The poet walked by the river in the soft breath of a summer's day for ease from care Through discontent of my long fruitless stay In Princes Court, and expectation vain Of idle hopes, that still do fly away He saw nymphs of the river gather flowers in a meadow The He saw two swans come softly swimming down along the Lea. nymphs ran to admire them. They did not seem to be of earth-here Spenser puns-" yet were they bred of Somers-heat they say ". "So fresh they seemed as day, Even as their bridal day, which was not long : One of the nymphs sang-invoking joy, peace, plenty, and a fruitful issue on the bridal of those gentle birds. She ended, her companions joined the song, and the Lea murmured low, as he would speak his glad affection to those two joyous birds, who were followed on their way by "all the fowl which in his flood did dwell." "At length they all to merry London came, There when they came whereas those bricky towers |