the rubbish; and as soon as it was cleared, procured builders and artizans to restore the pile. In this he was so successful, contributing a great part of the expense from his own bounty, and aided by benefactions from the gentry of the neighbouring counties, that before his death he saw the whole church more complete than before, the stone roof set up, and every injury of the civil wars repaired. He also laid out a large sum in repairing his house of residence at Lichfield, that of his predecessors having been destroyed in the same time of rebellion, and did much to settle a pious and laborious clergy in his diocese; not allowing his age to be a plea for indulgence, but setting a good example to them of constant preaching. The people of his charge received him, as he travelled round to his visitations, with great marks of popular esteem; and thousands came to receive at his hands the long neglected rite of confirmation. The worthy bishop, having dedicated the restored cathedral on Christmas eve, 1669, died on the 28th of October, 1670. He was buried in his cathedral, where a handsome monument was erected to his memory by his son Sir Andrew Hacket, sometime one of the masters in Chancery. The tradition of the place says, that having, as the

last act of the repairs, raised a great bell to its place in the steeple of the cathedral, the first knell it sounded was for his own peaceful departure.

The only portion of his writings, which is known to have been published under his name, is "A Century of Sermons," which had been preached by him; to which is prefixed a short account of his life, by the editor, Thomas Plume, D. D. afterwards archdeacon of Rochester, fol. 1676. It now is thought proper to revive his claim to the beautiful old treatise here presented to the christian reader; as, though there must remain some uncertainty about the true author, it is presumed that no writer of the same rank and reputation has so good a claim to it as Bishop Hacket.

It was first published anonymously, as it is stated by Antony Wood, in 1671, the year following the bishop's death, with the Address to the Reader here reprinted, in which it is said to have been "written by a late reverend prelate," "for the private use of a noble and religious lady." Wood, in the first edition of his Fasti Oxonienses, ann. 1616, had ascribed the work to Bishop Hacket, but in a subsequent edition supposes it to be the production of a

Dr. Robert Hacket, whose picture he states to be prefixed. But the copies of the old edition, one of which is in the Bodleian Library, and another in the library of the Rev. H. H. Norris, of Hackney, contain no portrait. This book is so exceedingly scarce, that Bishop Heber, in his scarch for the remains of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, was unable to meet with any other than the Bodleian copy. The editor, whoever he was, expressly says that it was written by a late reverend prelate, to which description Dr. Robert Hacket is not known to answer. It seems most probable that Wood was not perfectly informed on the subject of this book, and had not himself seen a copy of it, as he elsewhere has set down the same title at length among the treatises he assigns to Bishop Taylor.

As to Bishop Taylor's claim to it, it is true that the late Bishop Heber was induced to ascribe it to him, as he does also another treatise entitled "Contemplations on the State of Man." This too he might have found in Wood's list as a posthumous work of Taylor's; but it is falsely assigned to him. It did not appear till near twenty years after Bishop Taylor's death; and bears plain internal marks of having been composed by a pious Romanist, probably a Jesuit.

A short time after the appearance of the "Christian Consolations," in Bishop Heber's edition of Jeremy Taylor, the late Alexander Knox, Esq. of Dublin, in his Correspondence with Bishop Jebb, (vol. ii. pp. 508, 513,) pointed out the mistake into which Bishop Heber had fallen. He shewed that the date of the treatise could not be, as Heber had supposed, near the close of Taylor's life, as the treatise itself speaks of the Usurpation as then dominant: and he shewed that in one or two instances it was inconsistent with Taylor's interpretation of certain texts of Scripture. It appears that Bishop Jebb was at that time in possession of information which assigned it to Bishop Hacket and to him it is assigned in a manuscript note in Mr. Norris's copy.

Mr. Knox proceeds to point out a few passages in this treatise, which, as they seemed to oppose his favourite Wesleyan doctrine of spiritual perfection, he accuses of Calvinism. For this, although every opinion of Mr. Knox is entitled to respect, it appears that there is no ground. The object of the treatise, as stated in the Introduction, is to comfort those Christians who are led by the spirit of love, and to relieve that "heaviness," which is sometimes felt by the

most devout souls, from the "manifold temptations" of this life (1 Pet. i. 6.); to remove the despondency which such persons are disposed to feel most, as they are most sensible of their own daily infirmities. Of course any cautions against antinomian abuses would be out of place in such a treatise; and of the passages selected by Mr. Knox, the remark in answer to the pagan writer Zosimus (p. 17) against Constantine, is precisely the same as is made, in answer to the same writer, by Dr. Isaac Barrow, a divine never suspected of Calvinism, in his fifth Sermon on the Creed. (Works, vol. IV. p. 136.) The other, in which the writer of this treatise refers to Rom. vii. 25, involves too difficult a question for discussion in this brief notice. It is probable that Bishop Jeremy Taylor, Kettlewell, and other eminent divines, have adopted the true interpretation of that chapter, following the best Greek fathers, St. Basil and St.Chrysostom; with whom St. Augustine sometimes seems to agree, but sometimes in controversy uses the texts in a different sense. The author of the "Consolations" (p. 40) says that he apprehends the mind of the apostle to be to refresh our guilty consciences, by the doctrine, that a regenerate man is not obnoxious to con