In noticing the history of Dr. Barrow, it is first of all requisite to distinguish him from another Isaac Barrow, (his paternal uncle,) who held various offices in the Church of England in the reign of Charles II. He was successively librarian of Peterhouse, Cambridge; rector of Dowdham; bishop and governor of the Isle of Man; and last of all, bishop of St. Asaph, which office he held till his death, in 1680. None of these places was at any time held by our author.

Dr. Isaac Barrow was son of a London linen-draper, who enjoyed some kind of a monopoly in his trade, by a patent from Charles I. According to the most credible authorities, he was born in October, 1630. At four years old he lost his mother,"a circumstance," remarks Mr. Hamilton, "which may partly account for that boisterousness of disposition by which his boyish years were signalized, just as the linen-patent of the London merchant may have contributed its own share to the devoted loyalty of both father and son." While at school in the metropolis he made little proficiency in learning, but excelled in juvenile delinquencies; for which cause his father removed him to a school at Felsted in Essex, where a skillful application of the necessary discipline had the desired effect. He quickly became studious and orderly in his habits. When prepared for the university, he experienced a disappointment, in being denied admission to Peterhouse, where his uncle had procured for him a place as pensioner. This disappointment was occasioned by a premature meddling with politics by the young cavalier, by which he incurred the displeasure of the ruling party. His father, by his devotion to his fallen prince, had from opulence become reduced to penury, and was at that time attending the king in his forlorn estate at Oxford; so that little help could be expected from him. His son, however, was at length, by the favor of Dr. Henry Hammond, admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he successfully pursued his studies, and in due time took his degrees. In 1649 he was made fellow of his college, and resolved, after some hesitation, to make theology his study. Reading ecclesiastical history, showed him the dependence of chronology upon astronomy, which induced him to study the latter more thoroughly. His astronomical pursuits made him sensible of his need of a more extensive knowledge of geometry, and so he addressed himself to that science. It required not the gift of prophecy to foresee what would be the effect of such a direction of his mind. The result was such as might have been expected; the young divine became a devoted mathematician. As an instance of the avidity with which he pursued his favorite

authors, it is related on good authority, that he went through Apollonius between the 14th of April and the 16th of May.

In 1654 he published an edition of Euclid's Elements, which was followed, after an interval of two years, by an edition of the Data. The year before he had become a candidate for a Greek professorship in his own college, which was, at the trial had this year, given to his rival; but whether his theological and political opinions contributed to his defeat cannot now be determined. He next resolved to travel, and first passed over to France: he visited his father at Paris, whither he had followed his exiled sovereign, and where both were alike in great poverty. Though his own means were small, yet he generously divided them with his parent, and received from him in return an opportunity to become acquainted with the forlorn court of Charles II., and also some of the chief French nobility,-especially Cardinal Mazarin. From Paris he went to Florence, where he remained nearly two years, studying its antiquities, and thence proceeded to the Levant. He tarried a whole year at Constantinople, and then returned by Venice, Germany, and Holland, and arrived in England in 1659, after an absence of more than four years. His stay at the Moslem capital was occupied with the careful study of the works of Chrysostom,a circumstance of some interest in his history. He evidently became an admirer of that prince of the Greek fathers; and without at all detracting from his own fame, it may be affirmed that his theological character was modeled after that of his great preceptor.

On his return to Cambridge he took orders,-a course to which he seems to have been impelled by a regard to the statutes of his college, rather than from a sense of duty directly to God. In this, however, as in all important affairs of his life, he doubtless acted conscientiously. The restoration of the monarchy greatly improved the aspect of his affairs, as well as gratified his political feelings. He celebrated the event in a thanksgiving sermon and two Latin poems, in which he prostituted himself as a freeman, a scholar, and a Christian minister, in fulsome adulations offered to a man who disgraced by his vileness whatever was associated with him. The change in public affairs led to the resignation of Widdrington, his formerly successful rival for the Greek professorship, and Barrow was chosen his successor without opposition. This event demonstrated the wisdom of the choice made when the two were rival candidates, and goes far to vindicate the Puritan doctors from the charge of bigotry and unfairness to their opponents. His Greek lecture proved a failure, and he afterward confessed that for the first year he lectured on Sophocles to empty benches. The next

year he brought out Aristotle; and though we are not informed of his success in obtaining auditors, he evidently pleased himself in the selection. As Chrysostom was his master as a theologian, sa Aristotle became his guide as a dialectician. The discriminating reader will not fail to trace the impress of the mind of the tutor in the Works of the pupil; and there is cause to believe that Barrow was a better writer for having studied Aristotle.

He remained in the Greek chair at Cambridge but two years, and then exchanged it for that of geometry, in Gresham College, London. The department of mathematics was the only one that really suited his genius, and in this he chiefly delighted. He remained at London but one year, and then returned to Cambridge to assume the duties of a new mathematical chair at that place. In this he remained six years, and then, in 1669, resigned it in favor of his pupil, the subsequently renowned Sir Isaac Newton. During the three following years he held two unimportant places in the church,-one a sinecure and the other a prebend,—both of which he resigned when, in 1672, he was chosen master of Trinity College, Cambridge,-the end of his worldly ambition. This place he held till his death, some five years after, serving his calling with his undivided energies, and in that short period a decided and permanent improvement was made in the affairs of the college.

Besides the works already mentioned, he published, about the time he left his mathematical chair at Cambridge, new and greatly improved editions of Archimedes, Apollonius, and Theodosius, and also a Treatise on Optics. This last was his great work in mathematics, whose highest praise is, that, when it had been published several years, only two persons were known to have given it a careful reading. In the preface he acknowledges his indebtedness to his pupil, "Dom. Isaacus Newton," who "had revised the text, and not only suggested some corrections, but supplied some important additions from his own store." How nearly our author was related to those sublime discoveries which have immortalized the name of his pupil may be conjectured, but not known.

Our present purpose leads us to give special notice to Dr. Barrow's theological writings, to which we shall now confine our remarks. Their literary excellence will be differently estimated according to the tastes and mental capacities of his readers. It was his custom to exhaust whatever subject he took in hands; so that King Charles' small wit led him to call Barrow an unfair preacher, because he left nothing for anybody else to say. In his set treatises this fullness is an excellence; but it is a serious defect in his sermons,

which class of literary productions is subject to stricter rules as to length, than most others. In justice, however, it should be remembered that he never was properly a preacher; he never had a pulpit of his own, and only preached occasionally and at distant periods for others. His sermons were for the most part written without any special designation as to their being preached, and many of them were never so delivered by him. Nor is their length their only defect, as sermons. The sentences are long, complex, and involved; some of them containing three or four complete propositions, and requiring not less than the same number of minutes for their enunciation; so that in listening to them as spoken, it must have been exceedingly difficult to follow the train of thought. This faulty style was not, however, the effect of feebleness of thought, as is often the case where diffuseness and complexity abound; but rather the reverse. He held his ideas so firmly, and saw them so clearly, that he could dwell upon them at his leisure, turning them in all directions, and viewing them in all their aspects. As he was fertile of thought and clear of perception, his reasoning was conclusive and his language full of energy. But so completely did the sense occupy his attention, that he almost entirely overlooked whatever was only incidental to it, and consequently his language is often inelegant and his style. slovenly. Of imagination he was almost wholly destitute. His mathematical exercitations had habituated him to address the understanding exclusively, and therefore he employs but few figures, and these only of the tamest kind. But this defect is but little felt, on account of the vigor and earnestness with which he writes. It is pleasant to contemplate the majestic tread, and the mighty struggles of a giant intellect wrestling with themes worthy of such efforts; and the mind thus occupied, inflamed by the sublimity of manifested power, becomes itself strong to act, and eager for the conflict. It were well if such writings were more in use, instead of the fashionable, slipshod, namby-pamby, which neither affords matter for thought nor fits the mind for action. These sermons, however, as such, would be intolerable; and if it were his purpose to preach them, it was a proper preparatory exercise to lecture a year to empty benches. Le Clerc justly remarks, "The sermons of this author are rather treatises or concise dissertations, than simple harangues suitable to a mixed audience." He thought and wrote as a gownsman among his associates, rather than as a man of the world among the varied characters of a mixed community. But these faults pertain only in a small degree to his printed sermons, and almost entirely vanish in the expository discourses,

which, with the Treatise against the Pope, are his best productions.

As a divine Dr. Barrow was far removed from the Puritanical divines of his own and earlier times. The period of the Restoration was distinguished not only for violent fluctuations in men's professed opinions and sentiments, but for the contemporaneous existence of the most opposite notions. Puritanical theology had, by strong infusions from the continent and from Scotland, assumed a highly partial character. Not only had the general features of the doctrines of the reformed churches in those parts been adopted, but a slavish adherence to their mere forms of expression was required. With the ruling parties, Calvinism and Christianity were nearly equivalent terms; and because, elsewhere, Calvinism had been associated with ministerial parity, (though that connection was wholly accidental,) so, in England episcopacy must give place to the divine claims of the presbytery. Calvinism and Presbyterianism were the religious tenets of the rebellious commonwealth-men, and that fact alone was sufficient to render these tenets odious to the royalists. The late ruling party was also distinguished for religious zeal, and for a clear manner of stating the principal doctrines of the gospel, especially that of justification by faith when, therefore, their enemies triumphed, these became badges of reproach, so that to profess salvation by faith alone was nearly allied to disloyalty, and to go to God for pardon without priestly intervention was little short of treason. The effect was such as the premises would lead one to expect. A great decline took place in the tone of religious teaching,-a change affecting not only speculative divinity, but also practical and experimental godliness. In passing from the Puritan divines of the times of the civil wars to those of the established church, at the period of the Restoration, one seems to breathe another atmosphere and to inhabit another climate. In the former, we feel the genial glowing of the vital spirit, and the healthful pulsation of the life-blood of the soul; in the latter, though there may be some degree of both heat and life, they are but a single remove from the coldness of death itself. How marked the difference between such writers, on the one side, as Baxter, Flavel, Bunyan, and Owen,-and Tillotson, Barrow, Burnet, and Sherlock, on the other!

That a sad decline in evangelical piety occurred about this time is now generally admitted; and it was so declared by many of the principal divines of the established church in the next generation. Whoever will be at the trouble to examine the pastoral letters, visitation sermons, and episcopal charges, delivered during the