John Evelyn. BORN A. D. 1620.-DIED A. D. 1706. JOHN, the son of Richard Evelyn of Wotton, in the county of Surrey, was born at Wotton, on the 31st of October, 1620. When he was eight years old, he began to learn Latin at Lewes, and was afterwards sent to the free school at Southover. In 1637, he was placed as a fellow commoner at Baliol college, Oxford, whither he went, he says, "rather out of shame of abiding longer at school than from any fitness, as by sad experience I found, which put me to relearn all that I had neglected, or but perfunctorily gained." The young Evelyn had, in truth, been a very idle fellow at school, having been entrusted to the charge of his maternal grandmother during this period, whose overfondness had nearly spoiled him. Yet with all his consciousness of deficiency, Evelyn continued to turn his attention to a variety of studies while at college, not neglecting those personal accomplishments which were deemed indispensable to ali gentlemen in these times. Soon after having removed to the Middle Temple, his father died; his mother had died when he was only fifteen years of age, so that he and his brothers were left alone at a very critical period of life. The ominous appearance of public affairs determined young Evelyn, now in his twenty-first year, to pass some time abroad. Genappe was at this time besieged by the French and Dutch; thither Evelyn directed his steps, but did not reach it till four or five days after it had capitulated. He was, however, complimented by being received a volunteer in Captain Apsley's corps; but after trailing a pike for a week, he took his leave of foreign service, and returned to England, where he studied a little, but, to use his own words, "danced and fooled more." On the breaking out of the civil war, Evelyn offered his services to the king at Brentford, but soon afterwards retired to his brother's house at Wotton; and finally, when the covenant was pressed, finding it "impossible to evade the doing very unhandsome things," he obtained the king's permission to go abroad. Evelyn was a minute and delighted observer of every thing rare and curious in art and nature, and has inserted a journal of his continental tour in his auto-biography. The 'gallant citie' of Paris, the treasures at St Denis, the gardens of the Tuilleries and Luxembourg, Cardinal Richelieu's villa and painted arch, the galleys at Marseilles, Prince Doria's aviary at Genoa, and a hundred other objects besides, are all described by him with laboured minuteness of detail. In passing through Italy, his attention seems to have been chiefly attracted by palaces and pictures, gardens and museums, and other objects of art, to the exclusion of the more glorious charms with which nature has invested that 'sunny land.' At Naples he was seized with a fit of home-sickness; but hearing of an English ship bound for the Holy land, he determined to visit the East before resuming the life of a country-gentleman in England,—a determination which was, to his great mortification, frustrated, by his vessel being pressed for the service of the state to carry provisions to Candia, then newly attacked by the Turks. At Padua he was elected Syndicus Artistarum, but declined the honour because it was 'chargeable' and would have interfered with his plans of travel. Whilst in that city, he embraced the opportunity of hearing the celebrated anatomy lectures in the university, and purchased from Leonæuas a set of drawings of the veins and nerves of the human frame, which he presented, on his return home, to the Royal society. Previous to embarking for England, he married the daughter of Sir Richard Browne, the British resident at the court of France. This lady was only in the fourteenth year of her age at the time of her marriage, but she appears to have made a most affectionate and discreet wife, and, when in her will she desired to be buried by her husband's side, she speaks in the following terms of him: "his care of my education was such as might become a father, a lover, a friend, and husband, for instruction, tenderness, affection, and fidelity, to the last moment of his life." In the autumn of 1647, he arrived in England, and was presented at Hampton-court. After unkingship,' as he calls it, had been proclaimed, he applied for and obtained passports from Bradshaw for France; but in January, 1651, he returned to England, and settled himself on his estate of Sayes-court, near Deptford, to which he had succeeded in right of his wife. From this place he appears to have kept up a correspondence with the exiled king and his ministers, but the kindness of an old school-fellow, Colonel Morley, then one of the council of state, was successfully exerted to protect him from annoyance on account of the suspicions which he incurred. Evelyn's tastes, however, were fortunately for himself more strongly directed to other objects than those of politics. Sylvan employments, particularly gardening and ornamental planting formed his passion, and to these tranquil and delightful pursuits he devoted himself with a zeal, and industry, and genius, which few have brought to higher tasks. But artificial gardening was in Evelyn's eyes no mean mystery. His scheme of a royal garden comprehended knots, trayle-work, parterres, compartements, borders, banks and embossments, labyrinths, dedals, cabinets, cradles, close-walks, galleries, pavilions, porticos, lanterns, and other relievos of topiary and hortulan architecture, fountains, jettos, cascades, piscines, rocks, grotts, cryptæ, mounts, precipices and ventiduets, gazon-theatres, artificial echoes, automato and hydraulic music. No wonder then that with such an idea of what was necessary to constitute a complete garden, Evelyn should think that "it would still require the revolution of many ages, with deep and long experience, for any man to emerge a perfect and accomplished artist-gardener." Equally great was Evelyn's passion for the more practical science of horticulture. Quoting from Milton, the verses which describe "the first empress of the world regaling her celestial guest," he observes exultingly, "then the hortulan provision of the golden age fitted all places, times, and persons; and when man is restored to that state again, it will be as it was in the beginning." The reader will smile at our artist-gardener's' enthusiasm, but it was in such pursuits that Evelyn attracted the esteem and admiration of some of the most eminent men of his age, who bore willing testimony to the amiableness of his character, and commended the pursuits to which he had devoted himself. Jeremy Taylor declares, in a letter which he wrote to him after his first visit to Sayes-court, that he found all his circumstances "to be an heape and union of blessings" and Cowley has the following address to Evelyn: Happy art thou whom God does bless In books and gardens thou hast placed aright And in thy virtuous wife, where thou again dost meet Both pleasure more refined and sweet, The fairest garden in her looks, And in her mind the wisest books. Evelyn was a staunch adherent to the forms and usages of the church of England, and afforded shelter in his house to several of the silenced clergy. The incumbent of his parish church was, to use his own words, "somewhat of the Independent, yet he ordinarily preached sound doctrine;" but he says, he "seldom went to church on solemn feasts, but rather went to London, where some of the orthodox sequestered divines did privately use the common prayer, administer sacraments, &c. or else I procured one to officiate in my own house." On Sunday afternoons he frequently stayed at home to catechize and instruct his family. The death of Cromwell revived the hopes of the royalists, and emboldened them to act more openly for the restoration of Charles. Evelyn caught the general impulse of his party, and, in November 1659, published an apology for his party and for the king, which he says took universally. He had already appeared as an author; but in his former publications had studiously eschewed politics. The Restoration crowned Evelyn's earthly felicity, by bringing home his father-in-law, Sir Richard Browne. In 1664, when war was declared against the Dutch, he was appointed one of the four commissioners for taking care of the sick and wounded. While engaged in the humane but laborious duties of his office, the plague broke out in London; but, although Evelyn saw proper to send away his wife and family from the chance of contagion, he continued himself to look after his charge as commissioner, trusting in the providence and goodness of God. An extract from one of his letters written at this time, places his character in the most amiable point of view in which we have yet contemplated it: "one fortnight," he says, "has made me feel the utmost of miseries that can befall a person in my station and with my affections. To have 25,000 prisoners, and 1500 sick and wounded men, to take care of, without one penny of money, and above £2000 indebted." Again he writes to an official personage, "I beseech your honour let us not be reputed barbarians; or, if at last we must be so, let me not be the executor of so much inhumanity, when the price of one good subject's life is rightly considered of more value than the wealth of the Indies." The fire of London made another call on Evelyn's patriotism, and within two days after that terrible conflagration, we find him presenting to the king a plan for a new city, which coincided in many points with that of Wren. Evelyn enjoyed the uniform confidence of the king, who treated him with much affability and kindness; but the vices of the dissolute monarch, and the general licentiousness introduced by his practices, were a source of IV. 2 T unaffected regret to his faithful subject, and are often touchingly adverted to in his diary. Under James, he was nominated one of the commissioners for executing the office of privy-seal during Henry Lord Clarendon's lieutenancy in Ireland. The Revolution could hardly be said to find a staunch supporter in Evelyn; but it is certain, that from his attachment to the church of England, and dread of James's known leaning to popery, he approved of resistance at least being offered to some of that infatuated monarch's plans. After the Revolution he was made treasurer of Greenwich hospital. 6 The successive deaths of his two daughters and only remaining son were deeply felt by Evelyn, now bending under the weight of nearly fourscore years; but he retained his health and faculties unimpaired, until the 86th year of his age, when death removed him to a better world. Evelyn's Sylva,' or treatise on forest trees, and his Diary,' are both of them very delightful productions. The former is a great repository of all that was known, in the author's time, concerning the forest-trees of Great Britain, their growth and culture, and their uses and qualities real or imaginary. It has gone through nine editions since its first publication in 1664. The latter is one of the most amusing pieces of autobiography in the English language. His work entitled Numismata, a discourse of Medals,' is still held in high estimation. He was interred at Wotton, where his tomb bears an inscription expressing, according to his own intention, that "living in an age of extraordinary events and revolutions, he had learned from thence this truth, which he deemed might be thus communicated to posterity: that all is vanity which is not honest, and that there is no solid wisdom but in real piety."-His son, John Evelyn, was the author of several pieces in Dryden's miscellanies. Sir Charles Sedley. BORN A. D. 1639.-died A. D. 1702. THE witty and accomplished Sir Charles Sedley was the son of Sir John Sedley of Aylesford in Kent. He was born about the year 1639. His family were staunch royalists; and, at the Restoration, young Sedley was sent up to London to push his fortunes at court. His accomplishments, his handsome person, his wit, and his poetical talents, won him universal favour at the court of "the merrie monarch," where he soon became a leader in the universal revelry and debauchery, The poetasters did homage to his superior genius and better stars ; Buckingham raved about "Sedley's witchcraft;" and the king himsel declared that, in the person of Sir Charles, his court was honoured with the attendance of Apollo's deputy. Yet the man to whom all this intoxicating flattery was presented was, as to poetical talents, nothing more than a writer of amorous verses, in which grossness of expression, and indelicacy of sentiment, were substituted for tenderness, pathos, and sensibility. The truth is, the manners of the man did more for him than his poetical talents. He was certainly one of the most accomplished gentlemen of his age, and in this respect was held up as a perfect model amongst the fashionable men of the day: wit ness the verses of Lord Rochester, beginning with "Sedley has that prevailing gentle art," in which the allusion evidently is to the unrivalled grace and ease of his personal address But our courtier's reputation for wit and gallantry was purchased at a heavy expense: his means were squandered, his morals utterly perverted, and he was daily sinking deeper and deeper into hopeless profligacy, when, by one of those sudden revulsions of feeling which occasionally though rarely occur in the history of early libertines, he was snatched from impending ruin, and induced to apply his thoughts and time to occupations more worthy of his genius and rank. He entered parliament, and soon became a frequent and distinguished speaker. During the reign of James II. he vigorously withstood the inroads which the infatuated monarch attempted to make upon the constitution; and he took an active part in bringing about the Revolution. His political conduct, however, it has been alleged, was prompted in this instance by personal hostility to James, who had corrupted Sir Charles' daughter, and rendered her infamy more conspicuous by creating her countess of Dorchester. Sedley's works were printed in two volumes, 8vo. in 1719. Robert Hooke. BORN A. D. 1635.-DIED A. D. 1702. THIS eminent mathematician and natural philosopher, was the son of the Rev. John Hooke of Freshwater, in the isle of Wight. He early betrayed a strong mechanical genius, to which he added more than ordinary docility in the acquisition of languages. The celebrated Dr Busby was for a time his preceptor, and under him he acquired a very respectable knowledge of Greek and Latin, to which he subsequently added some acquaintance with the Oriental languages. In 1653 he entered Christ-church college, Oxford; and in 1655 he became a member of the philosophical society there. At this period he assisted Dr Wallis in his chemical experiments, and Dr Seth Ward in his astronomical observations. Under the guidance of these two men young Hooke made rapid advances in natural philosophy, and soon became their worthy collaborateur. He invented several astronomical instruments, and improved others; he was also particularly ser viceable to Mr Boyle while perfecting his invention of the air-pump. In 1664 the Royal society elected Hooke their curator of experiments. In 1666 he was employed in surveying the city of London previous to its being rebuilt after the great fire. In 1677 he succeed ed Oldenburg as secretary to the Royal society. From this period he seems to have devoted himself exclusively to the study of natural philosophy in all its branches, and the inventing and perfecting of philosophical instruments. His health was considerably impaired, and his sight failed him some time previous to his death, which took place in 1702, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. He was interred in St Helen's church, London, his funeral being attended by nearly all the members of the Royal society. He was of an active and indefatigable genius, often continuing his studies all night. His temper was melan |