that greatness had done from which he was fallen. I shall beg leave to write down the prayer itself, with the title to it, as it was found amongst his lordship's papers, written in his own hand; not being able to furnish my readers with an enter

tainment more suitable to this solemn time."

A PRAYER, OR PSALM, MADE BY MY LORD BACON, CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND.

Most gracious Lord God, my merciful Father; from my youth up my Creator, my Redeemer, my Comforter! Thou, O Lord, soundest and searchest the depths and secrets of all hearts; thou acknowledgest the upright of heart; thou judgest the hypocrite; thou ponderest men's thoughts and doings as in a balance; thou measurest their intentions as with a line; vanity and crooked ways cannot be hid from thee.

Remember, O Lord! how thy servant hath walked before thee; remember what I have first sought, and what hath been principal in my intentions. I have loved thy assemblies, I have mourned for the divisions of thy church, I have delighted in the brightness of thy sanctuary.

This vine which thy right hand hath planted in this nation, I have ever prayed unto thee that it might have the first and the latter rain, and that it might stretch her branches to the seas and to the floods. The state and bread of the poor and oppressed have been precious in mine eyes; I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart; I have, though in a despised weed, procured the good of all men. If any have been my enemies, I thought not of them, neither hath the sun almost set upon my displeasure; but I have been as a dove, free from superfluity of maliciousness. My creatures have been my books, but thy Scriptures much more. I have sought thee in the courts, fields, and gardens; but I have found thee in thy temples. Thousands have been my sins and ten thousands my transgressions, but thy sanctifications have remained with me, and my heart, through thy grace, hath been an unquenched coal upon thine altar.

O Lord, my strength! I have since my youth met with thee in all my ways, by thy fatherly compassions, by thy comfortable chastisements, and by thy most visible providence. As thy favours have increased upon me, so have thy corrections: so as thou hast been always near me, O Lord! and ever as my worldly blessings were exalted, so secret darts from thee have pierced me; and when I have ascended before men, I have descended in humiliation before thee. And now, when I thought most of peace and honour, thy hand is heavy upon me, and hath humbled me according to thy former loving kindness, keeping me still in thy fatherly school, not as a bastard, but as a child.

Just are thy judgments upon me for my sins, which are more in number than the sands of the sea, but have no proportion to thy mercies; for what are the sands of the seas? Earth, heaven, and all these are nothing to thy mercies. Besides my innumerable sins, I confess before thee that I am debtor to thee for the gracious talent of thy gifts and graces, which I have neither put in a napkin, nor put it, as I ought, to exchangers, where it might have made best profit, but misspent it in things for which I was least fit: so I may truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage. Be merciful unto me, O Lord, for my Saviour's sake, and receive me unto thy bosom, or guide me in thy ways.

JAMES VI. OF SCOTLAND

AND I. OF ENGLAND, born 1566, died 1625. His best known publication is Dæmonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue divided into three Bookes, Edin., 1597, 4to.

"One remark I cannot avoid making: the

king's speech is always supposed by Parliament to be the speech of the minister: how cruel would it have been on King James's ministers if that interpretation had prevailed in his reign!... Bishop Montague translated all his majesty's works into Latin; a man of so much patience was well worthy of favour." - HORACE WALPOLE: Royal and Noble Authors, Park's ed., i. 115–116,

120.

ON SORCERY AND WITCHCRAFT.

The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the witches or enchanters, hath moved me (beloved reader) to despatch in post this following treatise of mine, not in any wise, (as I protest) to serve for a show of my learning and ingine, but only, moved of conscience, to press thereby, so far as I can, to resolve the doubting hearts of many; both that such assaults of Sathan are most certainly practised, and that the instruments thereof merits most severely to be punished: against the damnable opinions of two principally in our age, whereof the one called Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed ir public print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft; and so maintains the old error of the Sadducees in denying of spirits. The other called Wierus, a German physician, sets out a public apology for all these crafts-folks, whereby, procuring for their impunity, he plainly bewrays himself to have been one of that profession. And to make this treatise the more pleasant and facile, I have put it in form of a dialogue,

which I have divided into three books: the first speaking of magic in general, and necromancy in special; the second, of sorcery and witchcraft; and the third contains a discourse of all these kinds of spirits and spectres that appears and troubles persons: together with a conclusion of the whole work. My intention in this labour is only to prove two things, as I have already said: the one, that such devilish arts have been and are; the other, what exact trial and severe punishment they merit: and therefore reason I, what kind of things are possible to be performed in these arts, and by what natural causes they may be. Not that I touch every particular thing of the devil's power, for that were infinite: but only to speak scholasticly (since this cannot be spoken in our language), I reason upon genus, leaving species and differentia to be comprehended therein. As, for example, speaking of the power of magicians in the first book and sixth chapter, I say that they can suddenly cause be brought unto them all kinds of dainty dishes by their familiar spirit; since as a thief he delights to steal, and as a spirit he can subtilly and suddenly enough transport the same. Now under this genus may be comprehended all particulars depending thereupon; such as the bringing wine out of a wall (as we have heard oft to have been practised) and such others; which particulars are sufficiently proved by the reasons of the general. Dæmonologie.

HOW WITCHES TRAVEL. Philomathes. But by what way say they, or think ye it possible, they can come to these unlawful conventions?

Epistemon. There is the thing which I esteem their senses to be deluded in, and, though they lie not in confessing of it, because they think it to be true, yet not to be so in substance or effect, for they say, that by divers means they may convene either to the adoring of their master or to the putting in practice any service of his committed unto their charge: one way is natural, which is natural riding, going, or sailing, at what hour their master comes and advertises them. And this way may be easily believed. Another way is somewhat more strange, and yet it is possible to be true: which is by being carried by the force of the spirit which is their conductor, either above the earth or above the sea, swiftly, to the place where they are to meet; which I am persuaded to be likewise possible, in respect that as IIabakkuk was carried by the angel in that form to the den where Daniel lay, so think I the devil will be ready to imitate God, as well in that as in other things; which is much

more possible to him to do, being a spirit, than to a mighty wind, being but a natural meteor, to transport from one place to another a solid body, as is commonly and daily seen in practice. But in this violent form they cannot be carried but a short bounds, agreeing with the space that they may retain their breath; for if it were longer, their breath could not remain unextinguished, their body being carried in such a violent and forcible manner, as, by example, if one fall off a small height, his life is but in peril according to the hard or soft lighting; but if one fall from a high and stay [steep] rock, his breath will be forcibly banished from the body before he can win [get] to the earth, as is oft seen by experience. And in this transporting they say themselves that they are invisible to any other, except amongst themselves. For if the devil may form what kind of impressions he pleases in the air, as I have said before, speaking of magic, why may he not far easier thicken and obscure so the air that is next about them, by contracting it strait together, that the beams of any other man's eyes cannot pierce through the same to see them? But the third way of their coming to their conventions is that wherein I think them deluded; for some of them saith that, being transformed in the likeness of a little beast or fowl, they will come and pierce through whatsoever honse or church, though all ordinary passages be closed, by whatsoever open the air may enter in at. And some saith that their bodies lying still, as in an ecstacy, their spirits will be ravished out of their bodies and carried to such places; and for verifying thereof will give evident tokens, as well by witnesses that have seen their body lying senseless in the mean time, as by naming persons whom with they met, and giving tokens what purpose was against them, whom otherwise they could not have known; for this form of journeying they affirm to use most when they are transported from one country to another.

Dæmonologie.

JOSEPH HALL, D.D., born at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 1574; became Bishop of Exeter, 1627; was translated to Norwich, 1641; and died 1656. His Works, now first collected, with some Account of his Life and Sufferings, written by himself, etc., new edition (by the Rev. Peter Hall), was published, Oxford, 1837-9, 12 vols. 8vo.

"A writer as distinguished in works of practition, his Contemplations, and indeed many of his cal piety was Hall. His Art of Divine Meditawritings, remind us frequently of [Jeremy] Taylor. Both had equally pious and devotional ter

pers; both were full of learning; both fertile of illustration; both may be said to have strong im agination and poetical genius, though Taylor let his predominate a little more. Taylor is also

rather more subtle and argumentative; his copi

ousness has more real variety. Hall keeps more closely to his subject, dilates upon it sometimes more tediously, but more appositely. In his sermons there is some excess of quotation and farfetched illustration, but less than in those of Taylor. In some of their writings these two great divines resemble each other, on the whole, so much, that we might for a short time not discover which we were reading. I do not know that any third writer comes close to either."-HALLAM: Lit. Hist. of Europe.

ON THE HYPOCRITE.

An hypocrite is the worst kind of player, by so much that he acts the better part; which hath always two faces, ofttimes two hearts; that can compose his forehead to sadness and gravity, while he bids his heart be wanton and careless within, and, in the mean time, laughs within himself to think how smoothly he hath cozened the beholder. In whose silent face are written the characters of religion, which his tongue and gestures pronounce, but his hands recant. That hath a clear face and garment, with a foul soul; whose mouth belies his heart, and his fingers bely his mouth. Walking early up into the city, he turns into the great church, and salutes one of the pillars on one knee, worshipping that God which at home he cares not for, while his eye is fixed on some window or some passenger, and his heart knows not whither his lips go. He rises, and looking about with admiration, complains of our frozen charity, commends the ancient. At church he will ever sit where he may be seen best, and in the midst of the sermon pulls out his tables in haste, as if he feared to lose that note; when he writes either his forgotten errand or nothing. Then he turns his Bible with a noise, to seek an omitted quotation, and folds the leaf as if he had found it, and asks aloud the name of the preacher, and repeats it, whom he publicly salutes, thanks, praises in an honest mouth. He can command tears when he speaks of his youth, indeed, because it is past, not because it was sinful; himself is now better, but the times are worse. All other sins he reckons up with detestation, while he loves and hides his darling in his bosom: all his speech returns to himself, and every concurrent draws in a story to his own praise. When he should give, he looks about him, and says, Who sees me? No alms nor prayers fall from him without a witness; belike lest God should deny that he hath received them; and when he hath done (lest the world should not know it), his own mouth is his trumpet to proclaim it. With

When a rhymer reads his poem to him, he begs a copy, and persuades the press. There is nothing that he dislikes in presence, that in absence he censures not. He comes to the sick bed of his step-mother and weeps, when he secretly fears her recovery. He greets his friend in the street with a clear countenance, so fast a closure, that the other thinks he reads his heart in his face; and shakes hands with an indefinite invitation of When will you come? and when his back is turned, joys that he is so well rid of a guest; yet if that guest visit him unfeared, he counterfeits a smiling welcome, and excuses his cheer, when closely he frowns on his wife for too much. He shows well, and says well, and himself is the worst thing he hath. In brief, he is the stranger's saint, the neighbour's disease, the blot of goodness, a rotten stick in a dark night, the poppy in a cornfield, an ill-tempered candle with a great snuff, that in going out smells ill; an angel abroad, a devil at home; and worse when an angel than when a devil.

ON THE BUSY-BODY.

His estate is too narrow for his mind; and, therefore, he is fain to make himself room in other's affairs, yet ever in pretence of love. No news can stir but by his door; neither can he know that which he must not tell. What every man ventures in a Guiana voyage, and what they gained, he knows to a hair. Whether Holland will have peace he knows; and on what conditions, and with what success, is familiar to him, ere it be concluded. No post can pass him without a question; and rather than he will lose the news, he rides back with him to appose [question] him of tidings; and then to the next man he meets he supplies the wants of his hasty intelligence, and makes up a perfect tale; wherewith he so haunteth the patient auditor, that, after many excuses, he is fain to endure rather the censures of his manners in running away, than the tediousness of an impertinent discourse. His speech is oft broken off with a succession of long parentheses, which he ever vows to fill up ere the conclusion; and perhaps would effect it, if the other's ear were as unweariable as his

tongue. If he see but two men talk, and read a letter in the street, he runs to them, and asks if he may not be partner of that secret relation; and if they deny it, he offers to tell, since he may not hear, wonders; and then falls upon the report of the Scottish mine, or of the great fish taken up at Lynn, or of the freezing of the Thames and, after many thanks and dismissions, is hardly intreated silence. He undertakes as much as he performs little. This man will thrust himself forward to be the guide of the way he knows not; and calls at his neighbour's window, and asks why his servants are not at work. The market hath no commodity which he prizeth not, and which the next table shall not hear recited. His tongue, like the tail of Samson's foxes, carries firebrands, and is enough to set the whole field of the world on a flame. Himself begins table-talk of his neighbour at another's board, to whom he bears the first news, and adjures him to conceal the reporter: whose choleric answer he returns to his first host, enlarged with a second edition: so, as it uses to be done in the fight of unwilling mastiffs, he claps each on the side apart, and provokes them to an eager conflict. There can no act pass without his comment; which is ever far-fetched, rash, suspicious, dilatory. His ears are long, and his eyes quick, but most of all to imperfections; which, as he easily sees, so he increases with intermeddling.

He harbours another man's servant; and amidst his entertainment, asks what fare is usual at home, what hours are kept, what talk passeth at their meals, what his master's disposition is, what his government, what his guests; and when he hath, by curious inquiries, extracted all the juice and spirit of hoped intelligence, turns him off whence he came, and works on a new. He hates constancy, as an earthen dulness, unfit for men of spirit; and loves to change his work and his place: neither yet can he be so soon weary of any place, as every place is weary of him; for, as he sets himself on work, so others pay him with hatred; and look, how many masters he hath, so many enemies; neither is it possible that any should not hate him, but who know him not. So then, he labours without thanks, talks without credit, lives without love, dies without tears, without pity-save that some say, 'It was pity he died no sooner.'

ROBERT BURTON

Burton was the author of the famous Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621, 4to.

"Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,' he said, was the only book that ever took him [Dr. Johnson] out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise."-Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, year 1771. ing his own melancholy, but increased it to such a "He composed this book with a view of relievdegree that nothing could make him laugh but going to the bridge-foot and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen, which rarely failed to throw him iuto a violent fit of laughter. Before he was overcome with this horrid disorder, he, in the intervals

of his vapours, was esteemed one of the most facetious companions in the university."-GRANGER: Biog. Hist. of England.

MELANCHOLY AND CONTEMPLATION. Voluntary solitariness is that which is familiar with melancholy, and gently brings on, like a siren, a shooing-horn, or some sphinx, to this irrevocable gulf: a primary cause Piso calls it; most pleasant it is at first, to such as are melancholy given, to lie in bed whole days, and keep their chambers; to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by a brook-side; to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect them most; "amabilis insania," and "mentis gratissimus error." A most incomparable delight it is so to melancholise, and build castles in the air; to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose and strongly imagine they represent, or that they see acted or done. "Blanda guidem ab initio," saith Lemnius, to conceive and meditate of such pleasant things, sometimes, present, past, or to come, as Rhasis speaks. So delightsome these toys are at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years alone in such contemplations and fantastical meditations, which are like unto dreams; and they will hardly be drawn from them, or willingly interrupt. So pleasant their vain conceits are, that they hinder their ordinary tasks and necessary business; they cannot address themselves to them, or almost to any study or employment: these fantastical and bewitching thoughts so covertly, so feelingly, so urgently, so continually set upon, creep in, insinuate, possess, overcome, distract, and detain them; they cannot, I say, go about their more necessary business, stave off or extricate themselves, but are ever musing, melancholising, and carried along as he (they say) that is led about an heath, with a puck in the night. They run earnestly on in this labyrinth of anxious and solicitous melancholy meditations, and cannot well or willingly refrain, or easily leave off winding and unwinding themselves, as so many

til at last the scene is turned upon a sudden,

by some bad object; and they, being now habituated to such vain meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can ruminate of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, "subrusticus pudor," discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them in a moment; and they can think of nothing else: continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds, which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions, they can avoid; "hæret lateri lethalis arundo;" they may not be rid of it; they cannot resist. I may not deny but there is some profitable meditation, contemplation, and kind of solitariness to be embraced which the fathers so highly commended (Hierom, Chrysostome, Cyprian, Austin, in whole tracts, which Petrarch, Erasmus, Stella, and others so much magnify in their books); a paradise, a heaven on earth, if it be used aright, good for the body and better for the soul; as many of these old monks used it to divine contemplation; as Simulus, a courtier in Adrian's time, Dioclesian, the emperor, retired themselves, &c. In that sense, "Vatia solus scit vivere," which the Romans were wont to say when they commended a country life; or to the bettering of their knowledge, as Democritus, Cleanthes, and those excellent philosophers have ever done, to sequester themselves from the tumultuous world; or as in Pliny's Villa Laurentana, Tully's Tusculu, Jovius's study, that they might better "vacare studiis et Deo." Methinks, therefore, our too zealous innovators were not so well advised in that general subversion of abbeys and religious houses, promiscuously to fling down all. They might have taken away those gross abuses crept in amongst them, rectified such inconveniences, and not so far to have raved and ravaged against those fair buildings and everlasting monuments of our forefathers' devotion, consecrated to pious uses. Anatomy of Melancholy.

GEORGE SANDYS, seventh son of Archbishop Sandys, was born in 1577; became a great traveller; was for some time in Virginia as Treasurer for the English colony, and completed his excellent translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid on the banks of the James; returned to England, and died there 1643.

He published A Relation of a Journey begun A.D. 1610; Four Bookes, containing a Description of the Turkish Empire, of Egypt, of the Holy Land, of the remote

Parts of Italy, and Islands adjoining, Lond., 1615, fol.

"The descriptions and draughts of our learned, remarkable places in and about Jerusalem, must sagacious countryman, Mr. Sandys, respecting the be acknowledged so faithful and perfect that they leave very little to be added by after-comers, and nothing to be corrected."-MAUNDRELL: Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem, Oxf., 1703, 8vo, p. 68.

tion of his Relation to Prince Charles, afterWe give an extract from Sandys's dedicawards King Charles I.

MODERN STATE OF ANCIENT COUNTRIES.

The parts I speak of are the most renowned countries and kingdoms; once the seats of most glorious and triumphant empires; the theatres of valour and heroical actions; the soils enriched with all earthly felicities; the places where Nature hath produced her wonderful works; where arts and sciences have been invented and perfected; where wisdom, virtue, policy, and civility have been planted, have flourished; and, lastly, where God himself did place his own commonwealth, gave laws and oracles, inspired his prophets, sent angels to converse with men; above all, where the Son of God descended to become man; where he honoured the earth with his beautiful steps, wrought the works of our redemption, triumphed over death, and ascended into glory; which countries, once so glorious and famous for their happy estate, are now, through vice and ingratitude, become the most deplored spectacles of extreme misery; the wild beasts of mankind having broken in upon them, and rooted out all civility, and the pride of a stern and barbarous tyrant possessing the thrones of ancient and just dominion. Who, aiming only at the height of greatness and sensuality, hath in tract of time reduced so great and goodly a part of the world to that lamentable distress and servitude, under which (to the astonishment of the understanding beholders) it now faints and groaneth. Those rich lands at this present remain waste and overgrown with bushes, receptacles of wild beasts, of thieves and murderers; large territories dispeopled or thinly inhabited; goodly cities made desolate; sumptuous buildings become ruins; glorious temples either subverted or prostituted to impiety; true religion discountenanced and oppressed; all nobility extinguished; no light of learning permitted, nor virtue cherished; violence and rapine insulting over all, and leaving no security except to an abject mind, and unlooked-on poverty; which calamities of theirs, so great and deserved, are to the rest of the world as threatening instructions. For assistance