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Morning and Evening Hymns, using them himself, and singing them to his lute when he rose and when he went to rest. 1669 the Bishop of Winchester gave Ken other promotion, and he left the Isle of Wight. In 1675 he visited Rome with his nephew, young Izaak Walton. In 1681 he published his Manual of Prayers for the Scholars of Winchester College. In 1683, Ken went as chaplain-in-chief of the fleet sent to Tangier, and found, when he came home in April, that his brother-in-law, Izaak Walton, had died in December, 1683, aged ninety-one.

It had been in 1670 that Walton published in one volume the Lives-written from time to time-of Hooker, Sanderson, Wotton, Donne, and Herbert; and in 1676 that Charles Cotton (b. 1630, d. 1687), a translator of Corneille's "Les Horaces" and Montaigne's Essays, and author of a Travestie of Virgil, added the "Second Part of the Complete Angler: being Instructions how to Angle for Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream."

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In October, 1684, Ken was at the deathbed of his friend George Morley, whose writings had been collected in 1683 Several Treatises written upon Several Occasions, by the Right Reverend Father in God, George, Lord Bishop of Winton, both before and since the King's Restauration : wherein his judgment is fully made known concerning the Church of Rome, and most of those Doctrines which are controverted betwixt her and the Church of England." Thomas Ken then became chaplain to Charles II., and was made Bishop of Bath and Wells not many days before the king's death. Ken published a Manual of Prayer, Seraphical Meditations, and a poem called Hymnotheo; or, the Penitent, but his fame rests on the Morning and Evening Hymns, and on his place among the Seven Bishops.

60. By some means the petition of the bishops was printed and hawked about London. When the appointed Sunday came the Declaration was read only in four London churches. It was read by not more than 200 of the clergy in all England. On the 8th of June the seven bishops were committed to the Tower for seditious libel, but enlarged on recognizances before their trial. They were tried and acquitted. The shouts of popular rejoicing were echoed by the soldiers in the camp at Hounslow. On the 10th of June, two days after the bishops had been sent to the Tower, a son was born to James and his queen. This event might ensure a Roman Catholic succession to the throne, and

TO A.D. 1689.]

THE REVOLUTION.

735

The

gave, therefore, the finishing blow to the king's cause. passions of the time produced also a common false impression that the child was an imposture. But John Dryden, as laureate, hailed this event with Britannia Rediviva: a Poem on the Birth of the Prince. Of course there are in this poem of panegyric for the parents and hope for the child indications that Dryden knew as well as other men the dangers of the time :

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By living well let us secure his days;
Moderate in hopes and humble in our ways.
No force the free-born spirit can constrain,
But charity and great examples gain.
Forgiveness is our thanks for such a day ;
'Tis god-like God in his own coin to pay."

On the 30th of June, the day of the acquittal of the seven bishops, a messenger was sent to invite William of Orange to enter England at the head of troops. On the 5th of November William's fleet entered Torbay, and William landed at Brixham. James found himself deserted. On the 19th of December the Prince of Orange held a court at St. James's. On the 13th of February, 1689, William and Mary became king and queen of England. Conditions and limitations of royal authority embodied in the Declaration of Rights and Liberties of the English People were joined to the offer of the throne. It was accepted presently with those limitations, and they were afterwards embodied in the Bill of Rights.

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CHAPTER XI.

UNDER WILLIAM III. AND ANNE.

I. IN the course of English Literature after the Revolution, the old contest about the limit of authority (ch. iii. § 10) became less and less prominent. For a time the same parties continued the same battle; the upholders of supreme authority sought to reconquer ground that had been won by their antagonists. There were years even in which many doubted whether we had seen the last of civil war. But the limitation of the monarchy was maintained. The machinery of government was brought by degrees into good working order, and slow changes tended

constantly to the removal of undue restraints upon each life within the body of the people. Meanwhile, also, there was a slow rise in the average power of the unit in the population. We shall find, therefore, in the literature now to be described a gradual abatement of that strife of thought through which we won our liberties, and an increasing sense of the true use of freedom. A land is free when there is nothing to restrain and much to aid the full development of each one mind in it.

Not many years after the Revolution we shall begin to find encroachment upon the French influence over our literature, by writers who do not address the polite patron, but find readers enough in the main body of their countrymen. As the natural mind of the people acted upon the Elizabethan dramatists who had England fairly represented in the playhouse audience, we shall find it also using healthy influence upon those writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century who did not follow the doctrine expressed in the Poétique of La Mesnadière, that literature is only for kings, lords, and fine ladies, scholars and philosophers.. As the many-headed monster learns to read, we come into the last of the Four Periods into which our literature falls (ch. iv. § 10), the Period of Popular Influence. This we shall find encroaching more and more on the French influence during many years of its decline. There will be, indeed, another form of French influence upon our literature, not of polite French on polite English, but of nation upon nation. Our political settlement of 1689, following that of the Dutch, influenced opinion in other countries. It was a starting-point of thought which in France, under conditions unlike ours, advanced during the next hundred years to the Revolution of 1789. Out of intense feeling and quick wit of the French came bold suggestion of social systems that were to solve all problems and go far beyond any results attained by our dull habit of accommodating ourselves to the possible. We should have been worth little as a people if our neighbours had not stirred us by their noble ardour to achieve, if it might be, a perfect reconstruction of society, based on a complete reconsideration of the rights and duties of the individual in relation to himself, his family, his country, and his Maker if he had one. That spirit

of inquiry which we have seen gathering strength since Elizabeth's time, we shall find active still; bold in its testing of accepted facts and search after new truth in all the realms of knowledge. In some directions we shall find it quickened

A.D. 1689]

PERIOD OF POPULAR INFLUENCE.

737 and emboldened by this new influence of France. We shall find also the reaction against despotism connected throughout Europe with the rise of a strong spirit of nationality, strong in England, aiding the reaction against petty classicism and Latin-English, and bringing us, as a Teutonic race, to fellowfeeling with the kindred literature of the Germans at a time when that was vigorously representing the new impulse of thought. During all their contests against despotism, we have felt with our neighbours, but, without need of another revolution for ourselves, have plodded on, and have not been misguided by that quiet religious sense of duty which does keep us, with all our individual stupidities, from first to last as a nation, steady upon a road that cannot lead to ruin. We have now to trace in our literature the mind of England passing by natural sequence to a form of endeavour in our own times as distinctly marked as that of any one age in its earlier life; the form of endeavour towards which all past struggle tended, and which works towards results that five hundred years hence may be not half attained.

2. John Bunyan and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who differed only a few months in age, both died in 1688. Ralph Cudworth also died within the year before the accession of William and Mary. Edmund Waller, Henry More, and Sir William Petty had passed away within the last two years. Aphra Behn, Sir George Etherege, and Sydenham, the physician, died within the first year of the reign. The great living writers were John Dryden, who was in the first year of this reign fifty-eight years old; John Locke, fifty-seven; and Isaac Newton, forty-seven. The oldest living writer was William Prynne, eighty-nine, and he lived to be ninety-nine. John Wallis, the mathematician, and Sir Roger l'Estrange were seventy-three, and both lived through the reign; so did John Evelyn, who, at the beginning of the reign of William and Mary was sixty-nine, and Samuel Pepys, who was fifty-seven. Sir William Temple and Robert Boyle were sixty-one; John Howe and John Tillotson were fifty-nine. Robert South and Edward Stillingfleet were fifty-four; Gilbert Burnet, forty-six ; William Sherlock about the same, and William Penn a year younger. The Earl of Dorset was fifty-two; Thomas Rymer was about fifty; the Earl of Mulgrave forty, and John Dennis, with fame to come as a critic, thirty-two. Of the dramatists, past and future, William Wycherley was forty-nine; John Vanbrugh, twenty-three; William Congreve, nineteen; and

George Farquhar, eleven. Thomas Shadwell was forty-nine; Elkanah Settle, forty-one; John Crowne, over forty; Sir Charles Sedley, about forty; Thomas Southern, thirty; Colley Cibber, eighteen; Nicholas Rowe, fifteen. Jeremy Collier was thirty-nine; Richard Blackmore, thirty-six. Daniel Defoe and Charles Montague were twenty-eight; Francis Atterbury and Richard Bentley were twenty-seven; Matthew Prior was twenty-five; Samuel Garth, about twenty-five; George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, twenty-two: and among the young men and boys, with all their work before them, were Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, seventeen; Isaac Watts, fifteen; John Arbuthnot, fourteen; Henry St. John, eleven; Thomas Parnell, nine; Edward Young, five; Allan Ramsay, four; Pope and Gay, babies.

3. When the first Earl of Shaftesbury died, in 1683, John Locke (ch. x. § 53) remained in Holland. James II. demanded him of the States, on false suspicion of his having been concerned in Monmouth's invasion, and he was in concealment till the close of 1686. In 1687 he was in safe harbour at Amsterdam, where his chief friends were the leaders of the Arminian or Remonstrant school, which had its head-quarters there. Arminius himself (ch. viii. § 18) had once been pastor at Amsterdam; his successor, Simon Bisschop, born at Amsterdam in 1583, was, under the name of Episcopius, the man who first expressed, though not systematically, the doctrines of the Arminians or Remonstrants in various theological writings. When the persecution of the Remonstrants slackened, after the death, in 1625, of Stadtholder Maurice, Episcopius, who had been expatriated by the Synod of Dordrecht, settled at Amsterdam, opened there the Oratory of the Remonstrants, and took the chair of Theology in their seminary. Episcopius died in 1643; his successor was Etienne Courcelles, who collected his works in two volumes, published at Amsterdam in 1650 and 1663. The successor of Courcelles was Locke's Dutch friend, Philip van Limborch, nephew of Episcopius, whose life he wrote. Limborch was born at Amsterdam, and was within a year of the same age as Locke. In 1668 he had become pastor of the Remonstrants' church, and next year also Professor of Theology at the Remonstrants' seminary. He held those offices until his death, in 1712; and Locke, at Amsterdam, was a member of his congregation. There was also a philosophical society over which Limborch presided, and of which Locke and

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