God's children must suffer affliction. "He declaimed against the vanities of the world before he had seen any," says his father, so that the declamation must have been somewhat unreal and superfluous. He would ask those who came to see him to pray by him. The day before his death he called his father to his side, and, with much seriousness, told him that he must give house and land and all his possessions to his younger son, John, for that he, Richard, would have none of them. Next morning, being very ill, he was persuaded to keep his hands under the bedclothes, whereupon he asked, with a natural touch of childish simplicity, whether he might pray to God with his hands unfolded. Shortly afterwards, as his sufferings became severer, he inquired whether he should not offend God by using His holy name so often in calling for ease. His parents, watching by his bedside, were moved to tears by his frequent pathetic ejaculations. And so he passed away from a world in which he could not have tarried longer without receiving some stain or blot on the whiteness of his childish soul.

Deep and strong as was Evelyn's sorrow, he did not permit it to interrupt his literary pursuits or to deaden his interest in the welfare of his country. He published translations from Lucretius and St. Chrysostom, and his horticultural tastes found expression in "The French Gardener." In 1659 he issued what he himself calls his "bold" "Apology for the Royal Party," and a vigorous reply to an attack upon Charles II., which he entitled, "The Late News, or Message from Brussels Unmasked." It is a signal tribute to his high character, and a proof of the respect it commanded, that, though well-known to be a Royalist, he was left unmolested during the Common

wealth period. His long life covered the stirring and chequered times of the Civil War, the Restoration, and the Revolution; yet, though he never abandoned a conscientious opinion, nor stooped to adulation of the ruling powers, he sustained no injury in person or property. This fact may also be accepted as evidence of the comparatively slight social dislocation occasioned by the changes in the government of the country. Evelyn's friendships, we may add, included men of all parties in Church and State, who were prompt to admire the honourable consistency with which he adhered to his own principles, while extending an enlightened and a liberal tolerance to those of others. On the whole, it may fairly be said that a young Englishman cannot do better than bear in his mind the example of Evelyn, as containing nothing but what is imitable, and nothing but what is good. All persons, indeed, may find in his character something worthy of imitation; but for an English gentleman he is, as Southey says, the perfect model.

In one of his letters to the poet Cowley, who had made for himself, at Chertsey, a retreat from the busy world, whence he professed to regard, in the Lucretian spirit, the magnum mare of its passions and ambitions, Evelyn writes: "I pronounce it to you from my heart as oft as I consider it, that I look on your fruitions with inexpressible emulation, and should think myself more happy than crowned heads were I, as you, the arbiter of mine own life, and could break from those gilded toys to taste your well-described joys with such a wife and such a friend, whose conversation exceeds all that the mistaken world calls happiness." Such may, at times, have been Evelyn's private aspiration, but he fully recognized it to

be the duty of every citizen to undertake such service as the commonwealth may impose upon him; and, indeed, in his "Public Employment, and an Active Life, Preferred to Solitude and All Its Appendages," a reply to Sir George Mackenzie's well-known panegyric on Solitude, he very forcibly presses the argument in favour of active intercourse with the world as a means of doing good. As he taught, so he practised. He held a succession of responsible and laborious posts which did not carry with them any great distinction or considerable emoluments; those posts in which an honest man may serve his country unobtrusively, but effectively. In 1662, we find him appointed a Commissioner for reforming the ways, streets, and buildings of London. In 1664, he was on a Commission for reorganizing and regulating the Mint; and in the same year was chosen one of the Commissioners for the care of the sick and wounded in the Dutch Wars. He was also on the Commission for the repair of St. Paul's Cathedral, whose labours were rendered unnecessary by the destruction of the Cathedral in the Great Fire of 1666. In the same year we find him engaged on a Commission for regulating the manufacture of saltpetre; and in 1671, he appears as a Commissioner of Plantations on the establishment of that Board, to which, in 1672, was added the Council of Trade. In 1685, the last year of Charles II.'s reign, he acted as one of the Commissioners of the Privy Seal during the absence of the Earl of Clarendon in Ireland. On the foundation of Greenwich Hospital, in 1695, he was appointed a Commissioner; and on the 30th of June, 1696, laid the first stone of the stately pile which commemorates Queen Mary's patriotic interest in the mariners of England. He was also ap

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pointed to the Treasurership, worth £200 a year, but he tells us that a long time elapsed before he received any portion of his salary.

There can be no doubt that in these various public capacities he did the State good service, not only by the industrious exercise of his administrative talents, but by the splendid example he set of disinterestedness and integrity, and the true patriotic spirit. Still more valuable, however, was the result of his literary labours; especially that "Diary" of his, which has not only an historical importance, but is deeply interesting as a vivid picture of certain phases of the social life of England in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is in connection with this "Diary" that his name is chiefly celebrated. It differs greatly from that of garrulous Pepys-it is graver, more earnest, is less crowded with personal details ; has in it more of the judicious historian, and less of the scandalous gossiper. Naturally, the two Diaries differ exactly in those points in which the characters of the two writers differed. Much that Evelyn revered Pepys despised or ignored; and what interested Pepys had no attraction for the serious Evelyn. The latter had no curiosity; the former was the Paul Pry of diarists, going everywhere, seeing everything, and inquiring about everybody. He was as graphic as a modern reporter, as inquisitive as an American interviewer. But Evelyn is always the sedate and scholarly gentleman, who regards men and manners from an elevated standpoint. He wrote his "Diary," as it were, in full dress, in the leisure and lettered seclusion of his library; Pepys jotted down his ciphers in the privacy of his chamber, with his wig thrown off, and his hose down at heel. The two resemble each other only in their zeal for the public service.

Upon his literary work, as a whole, we may adopt the criticism of the elder Disraeli: "His manner of arranging his materials, and his mode of composition, appear excellent. Having chosen a subject, he analysed it into his various parts, under certain heads, or titles, to be filled up at leisure. Under these heads he set down his own thoughts as they occurred, occasionally inserting whatever was useful from his reading. When his collections were thus formed, he digested his own thoughts regularly, and strengthened them by authorities from ancient and modern authors, or alleged his reasons for dissenting from them. His collections in time became voluminous, but he then exercised that judgment which the framers of such collections are usually deficit in. With Hesiod he knew that half is better than the whole,' and it was his aim to express the quintessence of his reading, but not to give it in a crude state to the world, and when his treatises were sent to the press, they were not half the size of his collections."

Next to his "Diary," his most valuable composition is the famous "Sylva; or, a Discourse of Forest Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions," in which an enormous number of useful details and valuable facts have been felicitously arranged and admirably condensed. It was written in consequence of an application to the Royal Society, of which Evelyn was one of the founders, by the Commissioners of the Navy, who dreaded a scarcity of timber in the country. Its effect was immediate, and a national benefit. In the dedication to Charles II., prefixed to one of the later editions, its author says: "I need not acquaint your Majesty how many millions of timber-trees, besides infinite others, have been propagated and planted