Jeremy Taylor, of course, maintained the doctrine held by the church of England in regard to the extent of the atonement as reaching to the whole human race; and often uses on this supposition expressions considerably startling to a Calvinistic ear; while he sides with the majority of Episcopalian divines in holding the doctrine of Baptismal regeneration, or at least in maintaining the efficacy of the "opus operatum" in this holy sacrament to put the recipient into a state of pardon, and to confer upon him a certain fund of grace, to be improved and increased, or to be abused and lost, according to his own choice in future life.

With the exception chiefly of these particulars, the creed of this great author was orthodox. He was a firm believer in the grand fundamental doctrines of the Trinity, the incarnation and atonement of the Son, the renewing, sanctifying, and consoling influences of the Holy Ghost, the necessity of faith and repentance, the resurrection of the dead, the two final states of happiness and misery, and the eternal duration of the one and of the other. And in the course of the following pages numerous statements and illustrations of these great doctrines will be met with, equally calculated to instruct and edify, as to strike, to impress, and to delight. The Editor fondly hopes that, after the candid exposition he has given of the leading defects of Taylor's theology, and the still minuter references which will yet be made to certain objectionable views and phrases, the enlightened Christian will find in the extracts now presented to him much, especially in the way of practical guidance and direction, which will be reckoned of the highest value in respect to matter, and in respect to manner of the highest interest. Taylor was a writer who on every subject thought for himself, and clothed his thoughts in a form entirely original and his own, so that both his ideas and his diction have a freshness and vividness and naïvete of character which render even the dryest subjects under his treatment interesting and almost entertaining. That boundless exuberance of multifarious erudition which he pours into his works, and which, as has been observed, "would baffle the most learned scholar of our day to trace to its varied sources," is far from being the indication of a mind surrendered to the authority of old opinions-the slave of a venerable but outworn and doting antiquity. However credulous on such authority he may show himself of facts, no one has displayed a more lofty and unfettered independence in the formation of his principles, or a more virgin and unhackneyed invention in the mode of their announcement. The sentiments of the ancients are almost always adduced by him as illustrations, not authorities,-as materials of thought, not ultimate dicta, or subjects of belief. Along with this freshness and originality of thought, the reader will find an additional source of interest in the familiarity with nature and life, and the consequent strain of deep and various feeling which runs through all his genuine writings. There are certainly no works of his age, rich as it was in every kind of literary excellence, except

that of elegant and cultivated taste, which show a profounder knowledge of human character and life, or which abound in the same degree with allusions and remarks that thrill directly to the soul, and awaken with resistless spell the slumbering sympathies and emotions of our being-with touches true to nature and the heart, instantaneously recognized by consciousness and memory. The quality, however, in the writings of Jeremy Taylor, which will most immediately arrest the reader's attention, as distinctive of his intellectual and literary character, will be his gorgeous and prodigal imagination. This imagination is, in our apprehension, chiefly of that particular description which has been denominated fancy, and in which there are mingled, in large proportion, with the powers of bold invention and vivid conception, the qualities of the ingenious and the picturesque. He paints his subjects with a liveliness and characteristic particularity which seem drawn from actual perception, and which set them before the mind's eye, as it were, in definite form, and individual colouring, and local habitation. This is the great peculiarity and charm of his imagery-the combination of its fairy richness with its palpability and its precision. There is no accumulation of gaudy words without corresponding antitypes in realitythere is none of the vagueness and generality of that so-called imagination which gathers its resources at second hand, and manufactures its "purpurei panni," as it were by mechanism, from the hackneyed common-places of description. His images are individual objects-and individual objects personally observed. The formula. "So have I seen," with which he is accustomed to introduce his more lengthened comparisons, you feel to be the true account of the way in which the exhaustless storehouse of his fancy has been replenished with its treasures. You imagine that he could tell you what summer morning he himself observed the glorious dayspring which he describes with such exquisite touches of precision and originality, and followed with his own eye the elastic flight of the lark, his favourite bird, into the depths of the morning sky, while with early foot he brushed the dew from the awakening earth. Yet the precision of his fancy is not more remarkable than its affluence and its readiness. In describing the most prosaic scenes of nature or of life, he either finds or forms in them features of sublimity, or beauty, or solemnity, or tenderness, which exalt them into poetry; and, when he lights upon a theme which affords his fancy scope for free and prolonged enjoyment, how eagerly she plunges into the midst of it, and revels in her chosen element like some nymph of faery amidst the liquid brightness of some enchanted lake, shaking from her radiant locks a shower of spray that sparkles as it falls with all the colours of the rainbow, till, overwhelmed with beauty and delight, she sinks at last into golden slumbers on the green bank's embroidered couch.

It cannot be denied that the more exalted qualities of Jeremy Taylor as an author are unfortunately clouded, and their impression blunted, by the obscurity and affectation of his style; that his imagery often degenerates

into the grotesque and wild, and treats with sovereign contempt the rhetorical rules against the use of "mixed figures;" that he wanted the art of rejection, and disdained the "labour of the file;" that he is hasty in the belief of insufficiently attested facts, and pedantically familiar in allusions to obscure and unheard-of persons. It were easy to increase the catalogue of literary faults and deficiencies like these, but the result would only be to afford a brighter illustration of that conquering might of genius by which we feel them all redeemed," that ray of lightning," that "diviner inspiration" which places him apart among the privileged spirits of the race, that "mens divinior atque os magna sonaturum," which "bold beyond rule or art" breathe over his dazzling page "the pomp and prodigality of heaven."

After these general remarks on the character of Taylor as a divine and as an author, we proceed to lay before our readers a brief account of his life, interspersed with notices of his various writings in the order in which they were given to the world.

Jeremy Taylor was born in the year 1613, in Trinity parish, Cambridge, a place less "native" than "hospitable to famous wits." By his father, who, though he followed the humble occupation of a barber, was of respectable family, our author was descended from Dr Rowland Taylor, the distinguished chaplain of archbishop Cranmer, and rector of Hadleigh, Suffolk, who suffered martyrdom for the doctrines of the Reformation under queen Mary. From this illustrious witness for Christ, the family, though decayed in the outward advantages of fortune, seem to have inherited a taste for intellectual culture and refinement. We find bishop Taylor, long afterwards, speaking of his father as having been, even in the obscurity of his circumstances, "reasonably learned," and as having himself "solely grounded his children in grammar and the mathematics."

In addition to his father's instructions Jeremy enjoyed the advantage of being a pupil at Perse's grammar school, then recently founded in Cambridge; and, at the unusually early age of thirteen, was admitted into Caius college in the renowned university of his native city. He entered the university as a sizar. This in Cambridge is the name of a class of students denominated servitors in Oxford, who, in return for certain menial services performed by them in the college to which they belong, receive gratuitous subsistence and education; and our author is one of those illustrious men, the splendour of whose fame, reflected back on the academic station from which they sprang, has done so much to relieve it from the character of invidious degradation which it once possessed. Before taking his degree of A. M. he was admitted to holy orders, and soon afterwards officiated for a college companion named Risden, as lecturer in St Paul's cathedral, whereby his florid and youthful beauty, his sweet and pleasant air, his sublime and learned discourses," he excited universal admiration, not un

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mingled with astonishment at the displays he gave of genius and acquirements far beyond his years. The popularity which he acquired in this situation attracted the notice and patronage of Laud, then recently advanced to the primacy, among whose few good qualities as a churchman and a politician, that of munificence in the encouragement of learning and learned men deserves to be conspicuously noticed. The archbishop, notwithstanding the satisfaction which he derived from a personal hearing of Taylor, thought him too young to remain in London; and, although we are told the youthful orator humbly begged his Grace to pardon that fault, and promised to mend it if he lived, yet thought, perhaps justly, that he conferred a greater favour by procuring him the nomination to a fellowship in All-Souls, Oxon-a distinction which is among the most valuable of its kind in Oxford, and, now at least, is almost inaccessible except to individuals of high birth and connexions. During his residence at AllSouls he attracted general attachment by the sweetness of his manners, and was greatly admired, as we are informed by the historian of the Oxonian Athens, for "his excellent casuistical preaching." During the period that he held his fellowship at Oxford, his residence seems to have been only occasional; but Wood represents him as having greatly profited by the opportunities of intellectual improvement which his connexion with the university afforded; and to this part of his life, while he enjoyed the united advantages of a dignified leisure, a liberal maintenance, and an almost unlimited access to books, may not unnaturally be referred the acquirement, in a great degree, of those immense and multifarious stores of erudition of which the proofs are so importunately abundant in his works. Of equal importance, however, in the formation of character with the studies which a young academician pursues, may be reckoned the friendships which he forms and cherishes; and, we have no doubt, that however unfounded the suspicions to which the circumstance exposed him, of having an inclination towards Popery as a general system-an intimacy which he cultivated at this time to the serious offence of many, with a learned Franciscan friar, known by the monastic name of Francis a Sanctâ Clarâ, who afterwards was principal chaplain to Henrietta, the Roman Catholic queen of Charles II. exerted a marked influence over many of his habits both of thought and of feeling. It is not too much to suppose that by this intimacy he was introduced to much of that monastic and legendary lore, his familiarity with which is scarcely less remarkable than his boundless store of classical erudition; that it contributed to cherish the sentiments he entertained of the value of ascetic austerities and corporeal mortifications as instruments and exercises of Christian piety; and that it served to encourage that spirit of somewhat latitudinarian charity towards the members of the Romish communion which many of his works and his allusions exhibit. That, as far as the suspicion alluded to ascribed to him a distinct willingness-far more a regularly formed resolution-to return to the bosom of the Roman

mother, it was totally unfounded and calumnious, is plain, not only from his own statement that such a report was "perfectly a slander," but from the proofs he presently gave, both in his discourses and in his plans of life, of opposition to Popery in its main tenets and requirements. On the 5th of Nov., 1638, the anniversary of the gunpowder plot, he preached before the University of Oxford, showing at large, in a style much more liable to the charge of scholastic pedantry than most of his following works, but with a boundless display of acquaintance with Popish theological literature, how that portentous treason was no more than the natural result of the principles and doctrines owned and taught by the highest authorities of the hierarchy; while shortly after he proved how little value he put on one principal part at least of the Romish ecclesiastical discipline, by espousing Phoebe Landisdale, (a lady of whose family or previous history no important particulars are known,) on the 27th of May, 1639. The marriage took place at Uppingham, a parish in Rutlandshire, to the rectory of which Taylor had been appointed the year before by the patronage of Dr Juxon, then Bishop of London. By Phoebe Landisdale he had three sons, one of whom, William, died in May, 1642, and was soon after followed by his mother to the grave.

When the rupture between the king and the parliament, which terminated in the death of the former on the scaffold, was brought to a crisis by Charles's departure to Oxford, Jeremy Taylor early attached himself to the royal cause, and was rewarded with such tokens of approbation as the king had it then in his power to bestow, having been appointed, soon after joining Charles at Oxford in 1642, his domestic chaplain, and admitted by royal mandate to the degree of Doctor in Divinity. His loyalty, however, cost him his living, which was sequestered by authority of Parliament, and he himself reduced in consequence to great pecuniary distress. It is to this period of Taylor's life that the composition is to be assigned of two among his controversial works in support of the then tottering Church of England-the "Defence of Episcopacy," published in 1642, in which, even those who acknowledge his conclusions, admit that he has often taken up ground too high to be tenable; and the "Apology for authorized and set Forms of Liturgy," given to the world in 1646, a work, upon the other hand, which those who differ from its main doctrine will admit to be characterized by no ordinary ability and ingenuity. Of his subsequent adventures in the course of these convulsed and perilous times, we have nothing more precise in the way of information than is contained in the following poetical but vague and indistinct passage from the dedication of his Liberty of Prophesying to Christopher Lord Hatton

"My Lord," he says, "in this great storm, which hath dashed the vessel of the church all to pieces, I have been cast upon the coast of Wales, and, in a little boat, thought to have enjoyed that rest and quietness, which, in England, in a greater, I could not hope for. Here I cast anchor, and