Dr. Juxon, Dean of Worcester, made Clerk of the Closet; he had sued for this, he tells us, that he might have some one whom he could trust near his majesty, if he should himself grow weak and infirm: "as," he adds, "I must have a time." In 1633 he attended the king on his visit to Scotland; on the 15th of June he was sworn of the Privy Council of that country; and on the 4th of August, a few days after his return to London, news came to court of the death that morning of Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury; on which, he tells us, the king resolved presently to give him the place. "That very morning," he also states, " at Greenwich there came one to me seriously, and that avowed ability to perform it, and offered me to be a cardinal. I went presently to the king, and acquainted him both with the thing and the person." About a fortnight afterwards, this offer was renewed: "but," says he, "my answer again was, that something dwelt within me which would not suffer that till Rome were other than it is." On the 14th of September he was chosen Chancellor of the University of Dublin; and on the 19th of the same month he was translated to the archbishopric and the primacy of the English church.

To these ecclesiastical and academical preferments and honours were added others of a less professional sort. On the 5th of February, 1635, he was made a member of the Committee of Trade and Revenue; on the 14th of March, upon the death of the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Portland, he was named one of the Commissioners for the Exchequer; and two days after, he was called by the king into the Foreign Committee, that is, into the Committee of the Privy Council for foreign affairs. But his crowning triumph was achieved when, on the 6th of March in the following year, 1636, he got his friend Juxon, already Bishop of London, appointed to the office of lord high treasurer of England. No churchman," he writes with manifest satisfaction, "had it since Henry VII.'s time. I pray God bless him to carry it so that the church may have honour, and the king and the state service and contentment by it. And now, if the church

will not hold up themselves, under God I can do no more."

But all this greatness was suddenly brought to an end by some of the first proceedings of the ever-memorable parliament which assembled on the 3rd of November, 1640. On the 18th of December, Denzil Hollis, by order of the House of Commons, impeached Laud of high treason and other high crimes and misdemeanours, at the bar of the House of Lords. On the 26th of February, 1641, the articles of impeachment, twenty-six in number, were brought up by Sir Harry Vane, the younger. He was specially charged with having advised his majesty that he might levy money on his subjects without consent of parliament; with attempting to establish absolute power not only in the king, but in himself and other bishops, above and against the laws; with perverting the course of justice by bribes and promises to the judges; with the imposition of divers new ecclesiastical canons, containing matters contrary both to the laws and the royal prerogative; with assuming a papal and tyrannical power in matters both ecclesiastical and temporal; with endeavouring to subvert the true religion and to introduce popish superstition ; and with being the principal adviser and author of the late war against the Scots. On the 23rd of October, at the instigation of his old enemy Williams, now become a great man again, Laud's archiepiscopal jurisdiction was sequestered by the House of Lords, and made over to his inferior officers. About a year after, all the rents and profits of his archbishopric, in common with those of all other archbishoprics, bishoprics, deaneries, and cathedral offices, were sequestered for the use of the commonwealth. On the 9th of May, 1643, all his goods in Lambeth Palace, his books included, were seized. Soon after, his room and person were searched by Prynne, under the authority of a warrant from the House of Commons, and his Diary and all his other papers taken from him. All this while, with the exception of a few months at first, during which he was left in the custody of Mr. Maxwell, Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, he had been

confined in the Tower. At last, on the 12th of March, 1644, he was brought to trial before the lords assembled, as usual, in Westminster Hall. Prynne says in his "History of the Trial,' that "he made as full, as gallant, as pithy a defence of so bad a cause, and spake as much for himself as was possible for the wit of man to invent; and that with much art, sophistry, vivacity, oratory, audacity, and confidence, without the least blush, or acknowledgment of guilt in any thing." It seemed very doubtful if the lords, overawed as they were, would have consented to condemn him; at the end of the trial, which lasted twenty days, they adjourned without coming to a vote on the question of his guilt or innocence; and in this state matters remained till the Commons, abandoning their impeachment, resorted to another method of effecting their object. An ordinance, or bill, for his attainder was brought into the House on the 13th of November, and two days after was passed and immediately sent up to the Lords. They too, at last, passed it in a very thin house, on the 4th of January; and on the 10th Laud was, in conformity with this law overriding all law, beheaded on Tower Hill. He met his death with great firmness.

Thus fell Laud; and, as Heylin observes, the church fell with him. "Of stature," writes that sympathizing, but not indiscriminatingly admiring biographer, towards the close of his narrative," he was low, but of a strong composition; so short a trunk contained so much excellent treasure. His countenance cheerful and well bloodied more fleshy, as I have often heard him say, than any other part of his body; which cheerfulness and vivacity he carried with him to the very block, notwithstanding the afflictions of four years' imprisonment, and the infelicity of the times. A gallant spirit being for the most part like the sun, which shows the greater at his setting. Of apprehension he was quick and sudden, of a very sociable wit, and a pleasant humour, and one that knew as well how to put off the gravity of his place and person when he saw occasion, as any living man whatsoever. Accessible enough at all

times, but when he was tired out with multiplicity and vexation of business, which some who did not understand him ascribed unto the natural ruggedness of his disposition." He built an hospital in his native town of Reading, and was a munificent benefactor to the University of Oxford in various ways; and Heylin mentions that these good works exhausted all the fortune he had made himself master of "in so long a time of power and greatness, wherein he had the principal managing of affairs both in church and state."

Archbishop Laud's literary works, besides his account of the conference with Fisher, already mentioned, which has been several times printed, are Seven Sermons, originally published separately in 4to, and then collected and printed together in one 8vo. volume, at London, in 1651; his Diary and History of his Troubles and Trial, together with some other pieces published by Wharton in 1695; and his History of his Chancellorship of Oxford, &c., forming the second volume of that work, published in 1700.

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JOHN SELDEN was born at Salvington, near Worthing, in the county of Sussex, December 16, 1584. His father, according to Wood, was a sufficient plebeian," who, through some skill in music, obtained as his wife Margaret Baker, a daughter of a knightly family of the county of Kent. The baptism of his eminent son, as well as his own musical talents, are noticed in an existing parish registry in these words: "1584,-Johnne, sonne of John Selden, the minstrell, was baptised the XXXth day of December." The house in which the family lived was called Lacies, and the estate of the father consisted, in 1606, of eighty-one acres, of the annual value of about twenty-three pounds. John Selden, the son, received his early education at the free grammar-school of Chichester. At the age of fourteen he entered at Hart Hall, Oxford, a foundation since merged in Magdalen Hall, Oxford. After residing four years at the University, he was admitted, in 1602, a member of