THE LIFE OF SIR JOHN ELIOT.

*

THERE is no man living who is so well entitled to be heard on any preliminary or incident of the great struggle between the English Monarchy and the English Parliament as Mr. John Forster, who has made it the honourable pleasure, pride, and labour of his life to illustrate the construction of our present English liberties. He occupies this position very naturally and fairly, because, more than almost any of his studious contemporaries, he has resolutely devoted himself to one object of great compass, but of which the particulars have a very close connexion as cause or effect. It is a felicitous application of a man's energies to accomplish this concentration, especially as the opportunities of so applying them are rare. Moreover, Mr. Forster has been lucky in the lie of the game in the particular manor over which he has so exclusively sported. For his earlier biographies of the Statesmen of the Com

* 'Sir John Eliot: a Biography, 1590-1632.' By John Forster. 2 vols. Longmans, 1864.

monwealth, for his histories of the Grand Remonstrance and of the Arrest of the Five Members, of a later date, he has obtained access to certain stores of information which were practically unknown to any of his predecessors, if we except only Mr. Sanford, as to certain portions of them. In the present instance, Mr. Forster has set the crown on his former good fortune by deciphering, among other papers at Port Eliot (Lord St. Germans), a memoir of the first Parliament of Charles I. by Eliot himself, of which the historical importance is great and the personal interest unrivalled-in which we have the record, not insufficient, however incomplete, of the opening scenes of one of the grandest conflicts in which the men of one generation ever engaged to secure the happiness and freedom of generations that were to follow. "In the very title given to his manuscript by Eliot himself," says Mr. Forster, "that idea appears. Not for ourselves we did these things, made these sacrifices, underwent these toils and sufferings, but for you. It was not our business we were then transacting, but yours-Negotium Posterorum."

This nobly significant title of Eliot's memoir is amply borne out by the nature of its contents, while Mr. Forster, on his side, has brought the stores of his erudition to the illustration of the papers of Eliot himself, and has combined them together in a biography of the great patriot, the excellence of which it would be exceedingly difficult to over-estimate. Our constitutional historian, Hallam, who compassed the whole range of English history, singled

out and set apart Sir John Eliot as "the most illustrious confessor in the cause of liberty whom that time produced;" and now comes Mr. Forster with a monumental biography to make him familiar to the posterity to whom he confided his work. Where the avenue of statues leading into our Houses of Parliament commences, Mr. Forster as it were, adds him to the august series, as their predecessor, if not superior, and as entitled to the same tribute of posthumous fame.

Now Mr. Forster has performed his office very faithfully, though he certainly pants a little in the process, like a stout man who is tramping over a heavy soil. It is possible, however, with a little mutual assistance, to get at a resumé of this biography, which shall show the chief points in Eliot's character and conduct; and to this we accordingly proceed. John Eliot was "a Cornishman. born, and an esquire's son." He was born at the Priory of Port Eliot, on the river Tamar, on the 20th of April, 1590, though his family were of old Devonshire descent. His youth had few of the restraints which should have been applied to a temper impetuous and ardent, and he committed one outrage while he was hardly yet a man, which brought upon him some temporary discredit. In a fit of passion he drew his sword and wounded a neighbour in his own house, but his subsequent apology for the injury he had done was honestly redeemed, and he even obtained the love of the man whom hastily he had injured. Mr. Forster reminds us of the prevalence of duelling in

the time of James I., and he specifies several examples; but these are hardly to the point. The main consideration is this, that Eliot frankly acknowledged his fault, and was startled for the future into a perfect self-control.

In Michaelmas Term, 1607, at the age of fifteen, he became a gentleman commoner of Exeter College, Oxford. He remained about three years there; but though he left without a degree, he afterwards showed that the three years were not misspent, and that he was most familiar with the schools of philosophy of Greece and Rome. The evidences of his early training appear in every part of his story, and "to the habits and commencement of this early time must also be ascribed the fervency and simplicity of his religious belief. He was not a Puritan; but his sympathies went strongly with all that advocacy of the pure in faith and worship to which the term was applied. In the first speech he delivered after the accession of Charles I., as in his last letter to Hampden from the prison to which Charles consigned him, the Bible is the compass by which he steers his course to the haven in which he finds his rest." The consolations derived from religion were interfused with all his habits of thought, and sustained him in every part of his career.

Another characteristic was his love of active and athletic exercise, evinced not only in his own practice, but in his urgent charge to his boys' tutor that their recreations and exercise should be, not less than their scholarship, the When a friend had fallen into

object of his solicitude.