9. John Evelyn was born in 1620, and educated at Oxford. He was active in promoting the restoration of Charles II., and was one of the first members of the Royal Society. He held many responsible positions under Charles II., James II., and William III. His famous garden at Sayes Court was described in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Among his numerous writings were "The French Gardener: Instructing how to Cultivate all Sorts of Fruit-Trees and Herbs for the Garden" (1658); "Fumifugium; or, the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated" (1661); "Sculptura; or, the History and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper" (1662); "Kalendarium Hortense; or, the Gardener's Almanac" (1664); "Sylva" (1664), a Treatise on Forest-Trees, the first book printed for the Royal Society, and the book with which his name is most associated; "Terra" (1675), also printed for the Royal Society; "Navigation and Commerce: their Original and Progress" (1674), this being an introduction to a projected History of the Dutch War; "Public Employment and an Active Life preferred to Solitude" (1667), an answer to one of Sir George Mackenzie's books, which was a "Moral Essay preferring Solitude to Public Employment." Under William III., Evelyn produced, in 1690, a satire on the frippery of ladies, "Mundus Muliebris; or, the Ladies' Dressing Room Unlocked, and her Toilet Spread. In Burlesque. Together with the Fop-Dictionary, Compiled for the Use of the Fair Sex." In 1697, Evelyn published "Numismata: a Discourse of Medals;" with a digression concerning Physiognomy; and in 1699,"Acetaria: a Discourse of Sallets." His fame now principally rests on his "Diary," which he began in early life, and continued to near his death, in 1706. It was first published in 1818, edited by William Bray.

10. Sir William Temple, born in 1628, the son of Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, studied under Cudworth, at Cambridge, in the days of the Civil War. After two years at Emmanuel College, he left without a degree, travelled, became master of French and Spanish, married, and towards the close of the Commonwealth lived with his father in Ireland. In 1663 he came to London with his wife, and at

tached himself to the rising fortunes of Lord Arlington, who sent him during the Dutch war as an English agent, with promise of subsidy, to our ally the Bishop of Munster. He was then appointed Resident at the viceregal court of Brussels. There he developed his skill in diplomacy. He was made a baronet in 1666. In 1671, when the secret treaty between France and England was ratified, Temple was dismissed, and retired to his estate at Sheen, and either there or at Moor Park, excepting for occasional employments in public duty, he passed the remainder of his life, and was visited and consulted as an oracle of political wisdom, by Charles II., James II., and William III. He died in 1699. He wrote an "Essay on Government; "Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands; "Memoirs" of public transactions in which he had been engaged; Essays on "Gardening," on "Health and Long Life," on "Heroic Virtue,' on "Poetry," and on "Ancient and Modern Learning." The last involved him in the great dispute, which originated in France, and lasted for several years, over the comparative merits of the ancients and moderns as writers.

11. After private letters and occasional printed pamphlets of news, Mercuries of the Civil War had been the first active beginnings of the newspaper. Marchamont Needham had attacked Charles I. in the "Mercurius Britannicus," was imprisoned, pardoned, and set up a "Mercurius Pragmaticus" against the king's enemies. By the king's enemies Needham was imprisoned, pardoned, and then wrote for about ten years "Mercurius Politicus" against the Royalists. Charles II. pardoned him, and he died in 1678. Sir Roger L'Estrange, youngest son of Sir Hammond L'Estrange, born in Norfolk in 1616, and educated at Cambridge, had been a friend of Charles I., and narrowly escaped execution in the Civil Wars. In 1663 he published a pamphlet entitled, "Considerations and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press; together with Diverse Instances of Treasonous and Seditious Pamphlets, proving the Necessity thereof." This got him the post of Licenser, in succession to Sir John Birkenhead, and also "all the sole privilege of printing and publishing all narratives, advertisements, Mercuries, intelligencers, diurnals, and other books of public intelligence." He began business at the end of August, 1663, with "The Public Intelligencer," and introduced it with this doctrine: "As to the point of printed intelligence, I do declare myself (as I hope I may in a matter left so absoJutely indifferent, whether any or none) that supposing the press in

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order, the people in their right wits, and news or no news to be the question, a public Mercury should never have my vote; because I think it makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors, too pragmatical and censorious, and gives them not only an itch, but a kind of colourable right and license to be meddling with the government." Still he would do what he might to "redeem the vulgar from their former mistakes and illusions." As for reports of debates in Parliament, "I have observed," says L'Estrange, "very ill effects many times from the ordinary written papers of Parliament news"—such as Andrew Marvell supplied regularly to his constituents —“by making the coffee-houses and all the popular clubs judges of those councils and deliberations which they have nothing to do withall." In November, 1665, when the plague in London had driven the Court to Oxford, appeared No. 1 of "The Oxford Gazette." When the Court returned to London, it appeared, on the 5th of February, 1666, as The London Gazette," under which name it still exists. It was placed at once under Sir Joseph Williamson, Under-Secretary of State (from whom Addison had his Christian name), and his deputy writer of it was, for the first five years, Charles Perrot, M.A., of Oriel. L'Estrange set up, in November, 1675, the first commercial journal, “The City Mercury," and in 1679 an "Observator," in defence of the king's party. In April, 1680, the first literary journal appeared, as a weekly or fortnightly catalogue of new books, the "Mercurius Librarius." Roger L'Estrange was a busy man. He published, in 1678, an abstract of "Seneca's Morals," and in 1680 a translation of "Tully's Offices." James II. knighted him, and he published in 1687, in the king's interest, "A Brief History of the Times," chiefly about what was called the Popish Plot. He died in 1704.

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12. In March, 1698, Jeremy Collier (b. 1650, d. 1726) published "A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage: Together with the Sense of Antiquity upon the Argument." It spoke clearly and sharply the minds of many, passed through several editions within a year, and raised a controversy in which the wits were worsted. Collier was a divine educated at Cambridge, who had been Rector of Ampton, Suffolk, then Lecturer at Gray's Inn, and one of the non-jurors at the Revolution, and had been imprisoned in Newgate for maintaining the cause of James II. He had earned credit by writing "Essays upon Several Moral Subjects" Pride, Duelling, General Kindness, Fame, etc.when he made his plain-spoken but intemperate attack on the immodesty and profaneness of the stage of his own time, with

evidence drawn from Dryden, and from the last new plays of Congreve and Vanbrugh. He published in the year of Queen Anne's death the second of the two folio volumes of his "Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, chiefly of England, from the First Planting of Christianity to the End of the Reign of King Charles the Second, with a brief Account of the Affairs of Religion in Ireland, collected from the best Ancient Historians." In 1721 appeared the original supplement to his translation of Moreri's "Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical Dictionary," which he had issued in three volumes folio in 1701 and 1706.

13. Gerard Langbaine was son of a learned father of like name, who edited Longinus, and became keeper of the archives and provost of Queen's College, Oxford. Langbaine, the younger, was born at Oxford, in 1656, and took lively interest in the stage. He became senior beadle of the university, and died in 1692. He wrote an appendix to a cataJogue of graduates, a new catalogue of English plays, and published at Oxford, in 1691, "An Account of the English Dramatic Poets; or, some Observations and Remarks on the Lives and Writings of all those that have published either Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, Pastorals, Masques, Interludes, Farces, or Operas, in the English Tongue." Langbaine spoke in this book of Wycherley as one whom he was proud to call his friend, and a "gentleman whom I may boldly reckon among poets of the first rank, no man that I know, except the excellent Jonson, having outdone him in comedy." Of Shadwell, Langbaine said, "I own I like his comedies better than Mr. Dryden's, as having more variety of characters, and those drawn from the life. That Mr. Shadwell has preferred Ben Jonson for his model I am very certain of; and those who will read the preface to 'The Humorists' may be sufficiently satisfied what a value he has for that great man; but how far he has succeeded in his design I shall leave to the reader's examination." Of Shadwell's play of "The Virtuoso," printed in 1676, Langbaine said that the University of Oxford had applauded it, "and, as no man ever undertook to discover the frailties of such pretenders to this kind of knowledge before Mr. Shadwell, so none since Mr. Jonson's time ever drew so many different characters of humor, and with such success.”

CHAPTER XI.

SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS

WRITERS.

1. John Bunyan.-2. Richard Baxter.-3. John Howe.-4. George Fox.-5. Robert Barclay.-6. William Penn.-7. Sir George Mackenzie.-8. Isaac Barrow. 9. John Tillotson.-10. Robert Leighton.-11. William Beveridge.-12. Samuel Parker.-13. Thomas Ken; George Morley.-14. William Sherlock. -15. Robert South; Edward Stilling fleet; Thomas Tenison.

1. John Bunyan was born in 1628, the son of a poor tinker, at Elstow, in Bedfordshire. He was sent to a free school for the poor, and then worked with his father. As a youth of seventeen he was combatant in the civil war. He was married, at nineteen, to a wife who helped him to recover the art of reading, over the only books she had "The Practice of Piety" and "The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven." He went regu

larly to church, but joined in the sports after the Sunday afternoon's service, which had been a point of special defiance to the Puritans, by the proclamation of James I. in 1618, re-issued by Charles I. in 1633. Once Bunyan was arrested in his Sunday sport by the imagination of a voice from heaven. Presently he gave up swearing, bell-ringing, and games and dances on the green. Then came the time of what he looked upon as his conversion, brought about by hearing the conversation of some women as he stood near with his tinker's barrow. They referred him to their minister. He says that he was tempted to sell Christ, and heard, when in bed one morning, a voice that reiterated," Sell Him, sell Him, sell Him." This condition was followed by illness which was mistaken for consumption; but Bunyan recovered, and became robust. In 1657 he was deacon of his church at Bedford, and his private exhortations caused him to be invited to take turns in village preaching.