siderable attainments, and to mistake his own goodhumoured shrewdness for the statesman's grasp of thought. He meant well, and sought to deal wisely with the pressing questions of his day, but he had no aspiration strong enough to lift him up out of himself; he had no motive of action so continuous as a complacent wish to maintain his personal position as a phoenix of intelligence, and the supremacy in Church and State of his own office of king. He did not regard the supremacy of the Crown in England as means to an end, but as in itself the end towards which he should shape his policy. He had no wish to oppress subjects who did not thwart him. Though he was bred a Protestant, the Roman Catholics might reasonably expect from the son of Mary Queen of Scots relief from a tyranny under which they all incurred the punishment of death for hearing mass, and priests of theirs who led pure and exemplary lives, as well as those who plotted the overthrow of the Protestant rule in England, were sent to the gallows. James was treated with, before his accession to the throne, and gave good hope to the Roman Catholics. No quiet subject, he said, should be persecuted for his religion. That also was his private purpose, though it implied only toleration to the laity. The Roman Catholic priests being, as he felt, natural enemies to the supremacy of the crown in Church matters, he meant to send them all abroad if possible. Desire for the subversion of Protestant rule in England had been, of course, intensified by penalties of death for celebrating mass, and fines on recusants.

There were two under-currents of Roman Catholic plotting when James came to England: one was set in movement by the Jesuits, who looked for help from Spain in setting a Roman Catholic upon the throne; the other was a wild scheme of a secular priest, William Watson, who hated the Jesuits, and had a plan of his own for carrying the king off to the Tower, and there converting him. Discovery of Watson's plot implicated other men in suspicions. Lord Cobham was arrested, and from him accusation passed on to Sir Walter Raleigh, whom James had promptly begun to strip of honour and possessions. After a trial, in November, 1603 (at which Raleigh, of all men in England the one least open to such a charge, had been denounced by the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, as "a monster with an English face, but a Spanish heart"-Raleigh, whose ruling passion might almost be said to be animosity to Spain, and whom James eventually caused to be executed at the wish of Spain), Sir Walter Raleigh was condemned to death as guilty of high treason by sharing in a plot to depose James, and make Arabella Stuart queen. Raleigh was respited, but detained during the next twelve years as a prisoner in the Tower of London. It was there that he resolved to write a History of England, prefaced by the story of the four great Empires of the World; his design being to take a large view of the life of man upon earth that should set forth the Divine wisdom. In his Preface, Raleigh says "The examples of Divine Providence everywhere found (the first divine histories being nothing else but a continuation of such examples) have persuaded me to fetch my beginning from the beginning of all things:

The first chapter of the History opens with argument that the Invisible God is seen in His Creatures, and ends by saying, "Let us resolve with St. Paul, who hath taught us that there is but one God, the Father; of whom are all things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by Him; there are diversities of operations, but God is the same, which worketh all in all." The last chapter of Raleigh's History as far as it was written closes with these thoughts on

THE ELOQUENCE OF DEATH.

Kings and Princes of the World have always laid before them the actions, but not the ends, of those great ones which preceded them. They are always transported with the glory of the one, but they never mind the misery of the other, till they find the experience in themselves. They neglect the advice of God while they enjoy life, or hope it; but they follow the counsel of Death, upon his first approach. It is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the world, without speaking a word; which God with all the words of His law, promises, or threats, doth not infuse. Death, which hateth and destroyeth man, is believed. God, which hath made him and loves him, is always deferred. I have considered, saith Solomon, all the works that are under the sun, and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit: but who believes it, till Death tells it us? It was Death which, opening the conscience of Charles the Fifth, made him enjoin his son Philip to restore Navarre; and King Francis the First of France, to command that justice should be done upon the murderers of the Protestants in Merindol and Cabrieres, which till then he neglected. It is therefore Death alone that can suddenly make man know himself. He tells the proud and insolent, that they are but abjects, and humbles them at the instant; makes them cry, complain, and repent; yea, even to hate their forepassed happiness. He takes the account of the rich, and proves him a beggar; a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing, but in the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful, and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness; and they acknowledge it.

O eloquent, just, and mighty Death, whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man; and covered it all over with these two narrow words: Hic jacet.

There remains one added paragraph. "Lastly, whereas this book, by the title it hath, calls itself the First Part of the General History of the World, implying a Second and Third Volume, which I also intended and have hewn out; besides many other discouragements persuading my silence, it hath

world to whom they were directed; whose unspeakable and never-enough lamented loss hath taught me to say with Job, Versa est in luctum cithara mea, et organum meum in vocem flentium' (My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep)." The reference is to the death, in November, 1612, of the king's popular eldest son, Prince Henry, who had not long before obtained his father's promise that Raleigh should be set free at Christmas. Raleigh was set free in January, 1616, to prepare for the voyage to Guiana, by which he expected to enrich the English Crown with a discovery of gold. The voyage was disastrous, and Raleigh, "with English face and Spanish heart," could not resist a chance it gave him of again attacking Spain. The King of Spain asked for his head; and James I. decreed his execution, without trial, upon the fifteen-years-old conviction of treason. Raleigh was executed in October, 1618.

Raleigh's conviction had arisen from events connected with the earliest Roman Catholic plots against Protestant sovereignty in England. They were associated at the opening of his reign with other incidents that confirmed James in one of his views of policy, and on the 22nd of February he issued a proclamation ordering all Jesuits and seminary priests to leave the realm before the 19th of March. But he forgave the Roman Catholic laity their fines as recusants; he had placed a Roman Catholic upon his Privy Council; and he was making peace with Spain. The proclamation for expulsion of the priests immediately produced another plot. The day of issue of the proclamation was the day after Ash Wednesday, 1604; and in the beginning of Lent, Robert Catesby called Thomas Winter to London to join with himself and John Wright in a plot for blowing up the Parliament House. At the end of April, an Englishman of known audacity, Guido Fawkes, was brought from Flanders. Thomas Percy, who was related to the Earl of Northumberland, completed the number of five, who were first bound by an oath of secrecy to united effort for attainment of their purpose. On the 24th of May, 1604, Percy took a house adjoining the Parliament House, and Guido Fawkes, under the name of John Johnson, lived with him as a servant. The house at Lambeth in which Catesby lodged was taken for use in storing materials. At the end of the year, Parliament being expected to meet in February, 1605, underground boring was begun at the wall of the Parliament House, which was nine feet thick. When Parliament was prorogued until October, the work was relaxed; it was then resumed again under difficulties, till the conspirators heard that there ran under the Parlia ment House a cellar from which a stock of coals was being sold off, and of which they could obtain a lease. Thomas Percy bought the lease of the cellar, which he said he needed for his coals. They soon placed in it twenty barrels of powder from the house at Lambeth, and covered them with billets of wood and fagots. Then they rested till September, when fresh powder was brought in to make good any damage by damp. But Parliament was prorogued to the 5th of November, and they had again leisure

to arrange for the course to be taken after the king, his eldest son, and the Parliament had been struck away, and the conspirators, now become thirteen in number, were masters of the situation. It is enough to recall with a word or two how a note warning Lord Monteagle to absent himself from the meeting of Parliament led to suspicion; how the terms of the note being held to suggest danger of gunpowder, search was quietly made, as if for stuff of the king's that might have been left in the cellar which was known to be under the Parliament House; and how on the 4th of November, 1605, the powder was discovered that was to have blown up king and Parliament on the following morning.

While this plot was in progress, the king had found the number of recusants increased by ten thousand after the remission of the fines. In November, 1604, fines were again levied, and in the following February the king required that all penal laws against the Roman Catholics should be enforced; but that the priests should be expelled, not executed. Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot led to increased severity of the laws against recusants. Roman Catholics were not to escape fine by attendance at a parish church; they were to be tested also by requirement of attendance at the sacrament. The enforcement of this test, repugnant to religious feeling on both sides, happily soon fell into disuse. Recusants did not escape with fine alone. They had to submit to various civil disabilities. It was at this time that a new Oath of Allegiance was devised for distinguishing those Roman Catholics who refused to abjure the Pope's claim to a deposing power. Roman Catholics who refused that oath incurred penalties of a præmunire in addition to the burdens laid upon all recusants.

This Oath of Allegiance was one that many Roman Catholic Englishmen could honestly take, for it repudiated only a recognition of the Pope's claim to depose a sovereign and release his Roman Catholic subjects from all ties of obedience to him.

But on

the other hand, the Pope, in September, 1606, formally declared that the oath could not be taken by English Roman Catholics without peril to their souls. In August, 1607, he reiterated this.

In 1608 King James replied to the two briefs of the Pope, and to the remonstrance of Cardinal Bellarmin addressed, on the 28th of September, 1607, to the Roman Catholic Archpriest Blackwell. Blackwell (being imprisoned in the Gate House) had himself taken the oath, and advised others to do so; an act for which he was deprived of his office by the Court of Rome. The king, with the strained ingenuity of the time, entitled his Apology for the Oath of Allegiance "Triplici Nodo Triplex Cuneus" (To the Triple Knot a Triple Wedge). The triple knot was represented by the three letters: two from the Pope, and one from Cardinal Bellarmin. The triple wedge was the answer King James gave to each after quoting it in full. Cardinal Bellarmin replied ; writing under the name of his secretary, Matthew Tortus. To Matthew Tortus Lancelot Andrewes replied for the king, also in Latin, with a volume called "Tortura Torti." Bellarmin added in 1610 an "Apology" for his Reply to King James, which was

nearly twice as long as the Reply itself. In the same year, 1610, John Donne first commended himself to James's hearty goodwill by adding to the controversy, on the king's side, an English book, which suggested in its title that the English Roman Catholics who suffered through refusal of the oath were idly making of themselves false martyrs. The book was called "Pseudo-martyr. Wherein out of certaine Propositions and Gradations, this conclusion is evicted. That those which are of the Romane Religion in this Kingdome, may and ought to take the Oath of Allegeance."

John Donne when he wrote the book was about thirty-seven years old, and not prosperous. He and his wife and family were indebted much to the kindness of Sir Robert Drury, by whom they were housed in a part of that town mansion which has left its whereabouts marked by the name of Drury Lane. Influential friends who appreciated Donne's genius sought to advance him at court in some secular employment, for he had not yet entered the church. The king liked his presence and conversation, but gave him no substantial help until "Pseudo-martyr' appeared. The book had an ingenious dedication to his Majesty, which is here given as specimen of the written English of its time, without alteration in its spelling, punctuation, and use of capitals.

To the High and Mightie Prince James, by the grace of God King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, defender of the Faith.

Most mightie and sacred Soueraigne,

As Temporall armies consist of Press'd men, and voluntaries, so doe they also in this warfare, in which your Maiestie hath appear'd by your Bookes. And not only your strong and full Garisons, which are your Cleargie, and your Vniuersities, but also obscure Villages can minister Souldiours. For, the equall interest, which all your Subiects haue in the cause (all being equally endanger'd in your dangers) giues euery one of vs a Title to the Dignitie of this warfare; And so makes those, whom the Ciuill Lawes made opposite, all one, Paganos, Milites. Besides, since in this Battaile, your Maiestie, by your Bookes, is gone in Person out of the Kingdome, who can be exempt from waiting vpon you in such an expedition? For this Oath must worke vpon vs all: and as it must draw from the Papists a Profession, so it must from vs, a Confirmation of our Obedience; They must testifie an Alleageance by the Oath, we, an Alleageance to it. For, since in providing for your Maiesties securitie, the Oath defends vs, it is reason, that wee defend it. The strongest Castle that is, cannot defend the Inhabitants, if they slepe, or neglect the defence of that, which defends them; No more can this Oath, though framed with all aduantagious Christianly wisedome, secure your Maiestie, and vs in you, if by our negligence wee should open it, either to the aduersaries Batteries, or to his vnderminings.

The influence of those your Maiesties Bookes, as the Sunne, ich penetrates all corners, hath wrought vppon me, and awen up, and exhaled from my poore Meditations, these scourses: Which, with all reverence and deuotion, I present your Maiestie, who in this also haue the power and office the Sunne, that those things which you exhale, you may your pleasure dissipate, and annull; or suffer them to fall wne againe, as a wholesome and fruitfull dew, vpon your urch and Commonwealth. Of my boldnesse in this dresse, I most humbly beseech your Maiestie, to admit this cuse, that hauing obserued, how much your Maiestie had uchsafed to descend to a conuersation with your Subiects, - way of your Bookes, I also conceiu'd an ambition, of cending to your presence, by the same way, and of paripating, by this means, their happinesse, of whome, that ying of the Queene of Sheba, may bee vsurp'd: Happie are y men, and happie are those thy Seruants, which stand fore thee alwayes, and heare thy wisedome, For, in this, I ake account, that I haue performed a duetie, by expressing an exterior, and (by your Maiesties permission) a publicke et, the same desire, which God heares in my daily prayers, at your Maiestie may very long gouerne vs in your Person, d euer, in your Race and Progenie.

Your Maiesties most humble and loyall Subiect:

IоHN DONNE.

The book began by distinguishing between the digity of true martyrdom and the inordinate and corrupt fectation of it. It then argued that the Roman eligion encouraged this vicious affectation of danger, y erroneous doctrines: as the interference with ecular magistrates, the undue extolling of merits, specially the merit of martyrdom, and by the docine of Purgatory, from which martyrs are promised n escape. It set forth that the Jesuits especially ncouraged this corrupt desire of false martyrdom; nd that they could not have the comfort of honest artyrdom because they obeyed the Pope, if they isobeyed other laws. Then Donne proceeded to the uestion of the several obediences due to princes nd claimed by the Roman Church. The way was hus laid open for detailed argument in support of the ath of Allegiance. In the course of his Preface to he Priests and Jesuits and to their Disciples in this Kingdom, Donne says of

THE POPE'S TEMPORAL JURISDICTION.

This doctrine of temporal jurisdiction is not only a violent nd dispatching poison, but it is of the nature of those poisons hich destroy not by heat nor cold, nor corrosion, nor any ther discernible quality, but, as physicians say, out of the pecific form and secret malignity and out of the whole subtance. For as no artist can find out how this malignant trength grows in that poison nor how it works, so can none f your writers tell how this Temporal Jurisdiction got into he Pope, or how he executes it, but are anguished and ortured when they come to talk of it, as physicians and aturalists are when they speak of these specific poisons, or f the cause and origin thereof, which is Antipathy. And yet we find it reported of one woman, that she had

1 Forester, "De Venenis." Peter Forester, born at Alemar in 522, became Professor of Medicine at Leyden, and died in 1597.

so long accustomed her body to these poisons, by making them her ordinary food, that she had brought herself and her whole complexion and constitution to be of the same power as the poison was, and yet retained so much beauty as she allured kings to her embracement, and killed and poisoned them by that means: so hath the Roman faith been for many years, so fed and pampered with this venomous doctrine of temporal jurisdiction that it is grown to some few of them to be matter of faith itself; and she is able to draw and hold some princes to her love because, for all this infection, she retains some colour and probability of being the same she was. And as that fish which Elianus speaks of, lies near to the rock, and because it is of the colour of the rock surprises many fishes which come to refresh themselves at the rock; so doth the Roman doctrine, because it can pretend by a local and personal succession (though both interrupted) that it is so much of the colour of the rock, and so near it, as Petrus and Petra, inveigle and entrap many credulous persons, who have a zealous desire to build upon the rock itself.

Donne even now condemned rather the worldly than the spiritual element in the creed to which he had been bred. Of his "Divine Poems" part certainly were written while he was a Roman Catholic, and when King James, delighted with his "Pseudomartyr," urged him to enter the ministry of the English Church, he held back for almost three years, during which he gave himself to such study of divinity as should assure his conscience and fit him for the work if he found that he could undertake it. The result was that he did at last enter the ministry of the church, with his whole heart in its duties. King James then made him his Chaplain in Ordinary; the University of Cambridge, at the King's wish, made him a Doctor of Divinity; and Dr. Donne became one of the greatest preachers of King James's reign. His wife died, leaving him with seven children, just as the days of their adversity were at an end. mourned her loss deeply, and did not marry again. The Benchers of Lincoln's Inn made Donne their lecturer; the King made him Dean of St. Paul's; the Vicarage of St. Dunstan's in the West fell to him also. After the age of fifty his worldly means became very easy. He provided for the future of his children, and was liberal to the poor during the next nine or ten years of his life; and then he died, in the reign of Charles I., in April, 1631. In a former sickness Donne had written a hymn to God, which afterwards he set to a solemn tune, and caused frequently to be sung, especially at evening service, when he was present at St. Paul's. was this

He

It

HYMN.

To God the Father.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,

Which was my sin, though it were done before? Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run, And do run still, though still I do deplore? When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, For I have more.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin, which I have won Others to sin, and made my sin their door? Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun A year or two;-but wallow'd in a score? When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,

For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done,

I fear no more.

In his last illness Donne wrote also this

HYMN TO GOD, MY GOD.
In my Sickness.

Since I am coming to that holy room
Where with the quire of saints for evermore
I shall be made Thy music; as I come,

I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map who lie
Flat on this bed that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery-
Per fretum febris-by these straits to die:

I joy, that in those straits I see my West,

For though those currents yield return to none, What shall my West hurt me? As west and east In all flat maps (and I am one) are one, So Death doth touch the Resurrection.

Is the Pacific sea my home? or are

The eastern riches? is Jerusalem? Anyan' and Magellan and Gibraltar are

All straits, and none but straits are ways to them, Whether where Japhet dwelt or Ham or Shem.

We think that Paradise and Calvarie,

Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place: Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me!

As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace!

1 Anyan, the Mozambique Channel, named from the island of Anyouam, Anjouan, or Johannes at its northern entrance. The Mozambique Straits lead to the "eastern riches" of Africa, dwelling of Ham. The Straits of Magellan are a way from the Atlantic into the Pacific, which ocean is bordered on its west by the Asiatic home of those who were regarded as the sons of Shem. The Straits of Gibraltar led into the Mediteranean those who sought the sons of Japheth, and made voyage to the Holy Land.

So, in His purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord!
By these His thorns, give me His other crown!
And as to others' souls I preached Thy Word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:-
Therefore, that He may raise, the Lord throws down.

Donne's last sermon was preached on the first Friday in Lent, according to an appointment which his friends in vain sought to dissuade him from keeping, telling him that the effort to preach would shorten his life. Izaak Walton, in telling of Donne's life, says upon this that

He passionately denied their requests, saying "he would not doubt that that God, who in so many weaknesses had assisted him with an unexpected strength, would now withdraw it in his last employment; professing an holy ambition to perform that sacred work." And when, to the amazement of some beholders, he appeared in the pulpit, many of them thought he presented himself not to preach mortification by a living voice, but mortality by a decayed body, and a dying face. And doubtless many did secretly ask that question in Ezekiel (chap. xxxvii. 3), "Do these bones live?' or, can that soul organise that tongue, to speak so long time as the sand in that glass will move towards its centre, and measure out an hour of this dying man's unspent life? Doubtless it cannot." And yet, after some faint pauses in his zealous prayer, his strong desires enabled his weak body to discharge his memory of his preconceived meditations, which were of dying; the text being, "To God the Lord belong the issues from death." Many that then saw his tears, and heard his faint and hollow voice, professing they thought the text prophetically chosen, and that Dr. Donne had preached his own Funeral Sermon.

Being full of joy that God had enabled him to perform this desired duty, he hastened to his house; out of which he never moved, till, like St. Stephen, "he was carried by devout men to his grave."

To this may be added Walton's account of the manner in which the dying man stood for the portrait from which the effigy was made that marks his interment in St. Paul's2::

A monument being resolved upon, Dr. Donne sent for a carver to make for him in wood the figure of an urn, giving him directions for the compass and height of it; and to bring with it a board, of the just height of his body. "These being got, then without delay a choice painter was got to be in readiness to draw his picture, which was taken as followeth. -Several charcoal fires being first made in his large study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand, and having put off all his clothes, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed as dead bodies are usually fitted, to be shrouded and put into their coffin, or grave. Upon this urn he thus stood, with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might shew his lean, pale, and death-like face, which was purposely turned towards the East, from whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour Jesus." In this posture he was drawn at his just height; and when the picture was fully finished, he caused it to be set by his bed-side, where it continued and became his hourly object till his death, and was then given to his dearest friend

2 The marble statue of Donne was one of those recovered after the Fire of London from the ruins of the old cathedral