used to say, "Religion* is going over seas." They were earnest, hard workers, to be sure, who wentkeen-thoughted-far-seeing-most diligent-not up to poems indeed, save some little occasional burst of melodious thanksgiving. But they carried memories of the best and of the strongest that belonged to the intellectual life of England. The ponderous periods of Richard Hooker, and the harshly worded wise things of John Selden,† found lodgement in souls that were battling with the snows and pine-woods where Andover and Salem and Newburyport were being planted. And over there, maybe, first of all, would hope kindle and faith brighten at sound of that fair young Puritan

* "Religion stands on tiptoe in our land
Ready to pass to the American strand.

My God, Thou dost prepare for them a way,
By carrying first their gold from them away;
For gold and grace did never yet agree;
Religion always sides with Poverty."

-HERBERT's The Church Militant.

John Selden, b. 1584; d. 1654. His Table-Talk, by which he is best known, was published in 1689. Coleridge said, "It contains more weighty bullion sense than I have ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer."

poet, who has just now, in Cambridge, sung his "Hymn of the Nativity."

But the storm and the wreck were coming. There were forewarnings of it in the air; forewarnings of it in the court and in Parliament; forewarnings of it in every household. City was to be pitted against city; brother against brother; and in that "sea of trouble," down went the King and the leaders of old, and up rose the Commonwealth and the leaders of the new faith.

In our next talk we shall find all England rocking on that red wave of war. You would think poets should be silent, and the eloquent dumb; but we shall hear, lifting above the uproar, the golden language of Jeremy Taylor- the measured cadences of Waller-the mellifluous jingle of Suckling and of his Royalist brothers, and drowning all these with its grand sweep of sound, the majestic organmusic of Milton.

*John Milton: written 1629.

I

CHAPTER IV.

DID not hold the reader's attention long to

the nightmare tragedies of Webster and Ford, though they show shining passages of amazing dramatic power. Marston was touched upon, and that satiric vein of his, better known perhaps than his more ambitious work. We spoke of Massinger, whose money-monster, Giles Overreach, makes one think of the railway wreckers of our time; then came the gracious and popular Beaumont and Fletcher, twins in work and in friendship; the former dying in the same year with Shakespeare, and Fletcher dying the same year with King James (1625). I spoke of that Prince Harry who promised well, but died young, and of Charles, whose sad story will come to ampler mention in our present talk. We made record of the death of Ben Jonson

of the hack-writing service of James Howell- of

the dilettante qualities of Sir Henry Wotton, and of the ever-delightful work and enduring fame of the old angler, Izaak Walton. And last we closed our talk with sketches of two poets: the one, George Herbert, to whom his priestly work and his saintly verse were "all in all;" and the other, Robert Herrick, born to a goldsmith's craft, but making verses that glittered more than all the jewels of Cheapside.

King Charles and his Friends.

We open this morning upon times when NewEngland towns were being planted among the pine-woods, and the decorous, courtly, unfortunate Charles I. had newly come to the throne. Had the King been only plain Charles Stuart, he would doubtless have gone through life with the reputation of an amiable, courteous gentleman, not oversturdy in his friendships* a fond father and good husband, with a pretty taste in art and in books, but strongly marked with some obstinacies about the ways of wearing his rapier, or of tying his cravat, or of overdrawing his bank account.

Specially instanced in his final desertion of Strafford.

In the station that really fell to him those obstinacies took hold upon matters which brought him to grief. The man who stood next to Charles, and who virtually governed him, was that George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who by his fine doublets, fine dancing, and fine presence, had very early commended himself to the old King James, and now lorded it with the son. He was that Steenie who in Scott's Fortunes of Nigel plays the braggadocio of the court: he had attended Prince Charles upon that Quixotic errand of his, incognito, across Europe, to play the wooer at the feet of the Infanta of Spain; and when nothing came of all that show of gallantry and the lavishment of jewels upon the dusky heiress of Castile, the same Buckingham had negotiated the marriage with the French princess, Henrietta. He was a brazen courtier, a shrewd man of the world; full of all accomplishments; full of all profligacy. He made and unmade bishops and judges, and bolstered the King in that antagonism to the Commons of England which was rousing the dangerous indignation of such men as Eliot and Hampden and Pym. Private assassination, however, took him off before the coming of the great day of wrath. You