A Whig Clarendon, without the genius and the art.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 523.

GENERAL

This mitred historian, who seems to know more personal secrets than any that ever writ before him.-CIBBER, COLLEY, 1739, An Apology for His Life.

When the nation was no longer agitated by domestic faction, literature was again cultivated and restored with unexampled success. During the civil wars, the classical learning for which the Scots were early distinguished, was absorbed and lost in the controversial vortex of religion and liberty; two names ever dear to mankind, with which the world has alternately been guided or deceived. From the restoration down to the union, the only author of eminence whom Scotland produced, was Burnet, the celebrated bishop of Sarum, who, when transplanted into England, was conspicuous as a political writer, an historian, and a divine. As an historian alone he descends to posterity; and his curious research into facts, the unaffected ease and simplicity of his dramatic narrative, his bold and glowing delineations of character, are far superior to every historical production of the period.-LAING, MALCOLM, 1800-4, History of Scotland, vol. IV, p. 389.

The Spirit of Party has touched with its plague-spot the character of Burnet; it has mildewed the page of a powerful mind, and tainted by its suspicions, its rumours, and its censures, his probity as a man. Can we forbear listening to all the vociferations which faction has thrown out? Do we not fear to trust ourselves amid the multiplicity of his facts? And when we are familiarised with the variety of his historical portraits, are we not startled when it is suggested that "they are tinged with his own passions and his own weaknesses?" Burnet has indeed made his humble appeal to the Great God of Truth" that he has given it as fully as he could find it; and he has expressed his abhorrence of "a lie in history," so much greater a sin than a lie in common discourse, from its lasting and universal nature. Yet these hallowing protestations have not saved him! A cloud of witnesses, from different motives, have risen up to attaint his veracity and

A

his candour; while all the Tory wits have ridiculed his style, impatiently inaccurate, and uncouthly negligent, and would sink his vigour and ardour, while they expose the meanness and poverty of his genius. Thus the literary and the moral character of no ordinary author have fallen a victim to party-feeling.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1814, Political Criticism, Quarrels of Authors.

With all his talents and integrity, was sometimes rather hasty than wise.-DIBDIN, THOMAS FROGNALL, 1824, The Library Companion, p. 114, note.

A writer, whose voluminous works, in several branches of literature, find numerous readers a hundred and thirty years after his death, may have great faults, but must also have had great merits; and Burnet had great merits, a fertile and vigorous mind, and a style far indeed removed from faultless purity, but always clear, often lively, and sometimes rising to solemn and fervid eloquence.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1843, Bishop Burnet, Critical and Historical Essays.

Burnet's writings are still popular. His "History of the Reformation" is in the hands of every student of religious progress. The lives of Hale and Wilmot are widely read. The "History of his Own Times" is a work of unusual interest. Even its great faults lend it a peculiar charm. The innocent vanity, the earnest sincerity, his fear and hatred of tory principles, his blind approval of those of the whigs, lend to Burnet's narrative a vigor and an artlessness that win the attention of the reader. His learning, upon any single topic, was not great, but his knowledge extended over a wide circle of subjects peculiarly well suited to the designs upon which he entered. His chief works had a political and controversial bearing. They were intended to serve the purposes of his party in the government or the church. They were written hastily, and seem rather to satisfy the understanding than the taste. It is a sufficient test, therefore, of his real ability, that notwithstanding many faults, they have attained a reputation with posterity that has not yet died out. His histories are arranged without art, and with none of those philosophic views which indicate a reflective power. He thought justly but not deeply; he wrote clearly but too hastily; and the only trait that will give vitality to his

writings is the constancy with which they defend freedom of thought in politics and religion. LAWRENCE, EUGENE, 1855, The Lives of the British Historians, vol. 1, pp. 304, 311.

Fox considered Burnet's style to be perfect. We were once talking of our historian's introducing occasionally the words of other writers into his work without marking them as quotations, when Fox said, "that the style of some of the authors so treated might need a little mending, but that Burnet's required none." -ROGERS, SAMUEL, 1855? Table Talk.

Bishop Burnet was very strenuous for the passing of the Comprehension Bill. Having been all his life connected with the Church, but able to look at her condition and wants with eyes of one who had looked at her from a distance, and had mingled much with men of other churches, he seemed to have discerned better than any other prelate, at least of his time, wherein her true policy lay. By no means a Puritan himself, in the strict sense of the word

too much a courtier for that-he yet saw the reasonableness of many of the objections of the Puritans, and marvelled at the obstinacy of many of his brethren to retain, simply out of pride, many of those things whose removal would have been every way a gain to the Church. But the good bishop in this matter was a man in advance of his age, and had to pay the penalty of failing to aid those whom

he wished to serve, and not failing to incur the odium of his own friends.-CONDER, G. W., 1863, Bishop Burnet and the English Revolution, Exeter Hall Lectures.

Bishop Burnet was the greatest name in literature which Scotland produced in the seventeenth century. He had a

wide and ready command of language, and his historical method and style are equal, if not superior, to the best English writers of his day. His narrative is always methodical, and runs on naturally with much simplicity and ease. His chief historical works are still valuable as sources of information, and they are also more interesting reading than almost any writings on the same subjects of that generation or the succeeding one.-MACKINTOSH, JOHN, 1878-92, The History of Civilisation in Scotland, vol. III, pp. 364, 365.

Burnet's prejudices were at least those of a great mind and a benevolent heart, and his narrative is perhaps as fair as it was possible for a man of that generation to pen.-WYON, FREDERICK WILLIAM, 1875, The History of Great Britain During the Reign of Queen Anne, vol. 11, p. 328.

Burnet had talent and merit, but was hot-headed, pragmatical, and injudicious. -SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1886, Specimens of English Prose Style, p. 119.

The active, fussy, good-natured Whig partisan.-TOUT, T. F., 1890, History of England, pt. iii, p. 4.

THE SACRED THEORY OF THE
EARTH

We know the highest pleasure our minds are capable of enjoying with composure, when we read sublime thoughts communicated to us by men of great genius and eloquence. Such is the entertainment we meet with in the philosophic parts of Cicero's writings. Truth and good sense

have there so charming a dress, that they could hardly be more agreeably represented with the addition of poetical fiction, and the power of numbers. This ancient author, and a modern one, have fallen into my hands within these few days; and the impressions they have left upon me, have at the present quite spoiled me for a merry fellow. The modern is that admir

able writer the author of "the Theory of the Earth."-STEELE, RICHARD, 1711, The Spectator, No. 146, Aug. 17.

The novelty of his ideas, the perspicuity and elegance of his style recommended his works to the attention of the learned.ENFIELD, WILLIAM, 1791, History of Philosophy.

They, who are indifferent to science, will find, in this "Theory of the Earth,' a philosophical romance which delights by its admirable contrivances, its vigorous language, its noble descriptions of the stupendous objects of nature, its new views of ages and of scenes, which, though they never rolled over this habitable globe, easily might, and which if they did not, one cannot help wishing they had. All that is grand and awful in mundane commotions, in a deluge, or in a conflagration, of a world, is here described, by a pencil that puts the picture before the eyes. Those blissful ages, when storms and winds, and changes of seasons, were unknown in a globe of perpetual spring, when centuries were as years, and the human frame rejoiced in the purity and pellucidness of the atmosphere, which fed instead of corroding it, are here not only presented to the imagination, but almost proved to the understanding. And with a pen of equal power, are sketched the close of the world, the moment when the foundations of the earth sink, its joints and ligatures burst asunder, the mountains melt, and the sea is evaporated.-SOUTHERN, H., 1822, Dr. Burnet's Theory of the Earth, Retrospective Review, vol. 6, p. 133.

Apart from his mistakes, his works contain some things relating to the Scriptures worth reading; while the reader ought to be on his guard against their sophistry and skepticism. ORME, WILLIAM, 1824, Bibliotheca Biblica.

As regards ingenuity of hypothesis and majesty of style, the work is beyond praise; as a philosophical system, it is beneath criticism.-ALLIBONE, S. AUSTIN, 185458, Dictionary of English Literature, vol. I, p. 298.

With his genius and imagination and consummate scholarship, he is a very different species of writer from his garrulous and mitred namesake: his English style is singularly flowing and harmonious, as well as perspicuous and animated, and rises on

fit occasions to much majesty and even splendor.-CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature, and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 191.

His pictures of the devastation caused by the unbridled powers of Nature are grand and magnificent, and give him a claim to be placed among the most eloquent and poetical of prose-writers.BACKUS, TRUMAN J., 1875, ed., Shaw's New History of English Literature, p. 195.

The secret of this effect upon his readers was that Burnet was enamoured of his own pre-geological dream. He thought himself inspired with superhuman insight.

He believed that it was his divine mission to retrieve the scene of the Golden Age and to chronicle its ruin. He introduces his singular book with no mock-modesty; he confesses that what we are about to read has "more masculine beauty than any poem or romance." This mystical conviction carried away the learned alike and the unlearned, and even Burnet's fiercest opponents admitted, as Keill does, that "never was any book of philosophy written in a more lofty and plausible style." When a vision is presented to us with such gestures of rapture, in accents of such melodious solemnity, it seems almost rude to hint that it is mathematically and geologically absurd. Burnet was like the sorcerer in "Kubla Khan;" the reader had to flee from his enchantment, for "he on honey dew had fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise." He was so positive that he fell into an opposite extreme of danger, and was accused of scepticism because he would insist that things must have been as he dreamed they might have been. -GOSSE, EDMUND, 1894, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. III, p. 246.

He

Burnet's mind was the mind of a poet; he had just enough science to misguide him, and more than enough learning to gloss over the vagaries of his science. is quite as much at home in expounding the catastrophe of the future, the final conflagration, as the watery catastrophe of which he believes the traces to be visible everywhere around him. At the same time he has a strong affinity to the rationalizing divines, even more visible in his strictly theological writings, and would not for the world propound anything of whose reasonableness he has not first convinced himself. As a writer he stands

high, combining the splendour and melody of a former age with the ease and lucidity of his own. GARNETT, RICHARD, 1895, The Age of Dryden, p. 230.

Burnet's book is a fanciful explanation of cosmogony and cosmolysis, in which the Deluge is the great event in the past and the final conflagration the great event of the future. From this point of view it is chiefly interesting as an attempt to combine the nascent interest in physical science with the expiring tendency to imaginative romance. Something of the same mixture appears in the manner, for

there are touches of the vernacularity, and even the meanness, which was invading style. But on the whole the older magnificence prevails, and Burnet has a just, though probably rather a vague, repute as commanding real eloquence of description, marred at times by a tawdriness which reminds us that we are in the halfcentury of Lee, not in that of Shakespeare, but showing in prose not a little of the redeeming splendour which Lee shows in verse. SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 518.

GENERAL

The book "Institutiones"] discovers an accuracy in this language beyond the attainments of any that had gone before him in that study, and will be of most necessary use to such as shall apply themselves to the right understanding of the ancient history and laws of this kingdom. But, as all first draughts of any sort are usually imperfect, so there seem to be some defects in it that might have been supplied. For example: There wanted at chapter of the variety of dialects, which might have been had out of the northern interlineary versions of the gospel, mentioned by Dr. Marshall; one whereof is peremptorily affirmed to have belonged to St. Cuthbert, as the other, in all likelihood, did to venerable Bede.-NICOLSON, WILLIAM, 1696-1714, English Historical Library.

A few other nonjurors ought to be particularly noticed. High among them in rank was George Hickes, Dean of Worcester. Of all the Englishmen of his time he was the most versed in the old Teutonic languages; and his knowledge of the early Christian literature was extensive. As to

his capacity for political discussions, it may be sufficient to say that his favourite argument for passive obedience was drawn from the story of the Theban legion.MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1855, History of England, ch. xiv.

His learning has been commended by Ingram the Saxon scholar, by Bishops Nicolson, Horne, and Van Mildert, and even by Burnet, Kennett, and others most opposed to him on polemical grounds. Horne and Van Mildert agree in praising his skill and judgment in the controversy with Rome. His many controversial treatises have deservedly sunk into oblivion, but the most ephermeral of them abound in recondite allusions to the Fathers and the classical writers, as well as in the facts and precedents of ecclesiastical history. His fame, however, rests upon his researches into the history of the languages kindred to the mother tongue of the English race.-MASKELL, J., 1885, George Hickes the Nonjuror, Notes and Queries, Sixth Series, vol. 12, p. 402.

In 1703-5 his best-known work appeared, in one large folio volume, from the university press at Oxford, the “Linguarum