daries; and he proposed that the English Church should regard every man who accepted the Apostles' Creed as in substantial agreement with it, and that no man's religious opinions should be interfered with, unless interference were required for the well-being of the State. The acceptance of such a reservation by Jeremy Taylor and its rejection by Milton depend simply upon difference in the point of view natural to each, and not at all upon essential difference in their religious feeling. At the close of the Introduction to the "Liberty of Prophesying" Taylor wrote: ZEAL WITHOUT CHARITY. A holy life will make our belief holy, if we consult not humanity and its imperfections in the choice of our religion, but search for truth without designs save only of acquiring heaven, and then be as careful to preserve charity as we were to get a point of faith. I am much persuaded we should find out more truths by this means; or however (which is the main of all) we shall be secured though we miss them, and then we are well enough. For if it be evinced that one heaven shall hold men of several opinions, if the unity of faith be not destroyed by that which men call differing religions, and if an unity of charity be the duty of us all even towards persons that are not persuaded of every proposition we believe, then I would fain know to what purpose are all those stirs and great noises in Christendom; those names of faction, the several names of churches not distinguished by the division of kingdoms, the church obeying the government, which was the primitive rule and canon, but distinguished by names of sects and men. These are all become instruments of hatred; thence come schisms and parting of communions, and then persecutions, and then wars and rebellion, and then the dissolutions of all friendships and societies. All these mischiefs proceed not from this, that all men are not of one mind, for that is neither necessary nor possible, but that every opinion is made an article of faith, every article is a ground of a quarrel, every quarrel makes a faction, every faction is zealous, and all zeal pretends for God, and whatsoever is for God cannot be too much. We by this time are come to that pass, we think we love not God except we hate our brother; and we have not the virtue of religion, unless we persecute all religions but our own: for lukewarmness is so odious to God and man, that we, proceeding furiously upon these mistakes, by supposing we preserve the body, we destroy the soul of religion; or by being zealous for faith, or which is all one, for that which we mistake for faith, we are cold in charity, and so lose the reward of both. And near the close of the book itself he wrote: TOLERATION. It concerns all persons to see that they do their best to find out truth, and if they do, it is certain that let the error be never so damnable, they shall escape the error or the misery of being damned for it. And if God will not be angry at men for being invincibly deceived, why should men be angry one at another? For he that is most displeased at another man's error, may also be tempted in his own will, and as much deceived in his understanding; for if he may fail in what he can choose, he may also fail in what he cannot choose; his understanding is no more secured than his will, nor his faith more than his obedience. It is his own fault if he offends God in either: but whatsoever is not to be avoided, as errors which are incident oftentimes even to the best and most inquisitive of men, are not offences against God, an therefore not to be punished or restrained by men. But such opinions in which the public interests of the com wealth, and the foundation of faith, and a good life are s concerned, are to be permitted freely: "Let every one be fully persuaded in his own mind," was the doctrine of Paul, and that is argument and conclusion too; and ther were excellent words which St. Ambrose said in attestat. ! of this great truth: "The civil authority has no right t interdict the liberty of speaking, nor the sacerdotal to prevent speaking what you think." The time of his retirement in Wales, which laste until 1658, was the best fruit season of Jer Taylor's life. There he produced, in 1649, his of Christ as the "Great Exemplar;" in 1650, his "Ha! Living;" and in 1651, his "Holy Dying." In also appeared one half, and in 1653 the other half "A Course of Sermons for all Sundays of the Year In these books, in his "Golden Grove, a Manual Daily Prayers," published in 1655; and his "Disc on the Measures and Offices of Friendship," in 165 dedicated to the excellent Mrs. Catherine Phil Jeremy Taylor is the prose poet of the Church England. He wrote also some verse, but is mo poet in his prose, where a fancy alike delicate strong is always subordinate to the religious feeling expresses, in words that satisfy the ear of the music as well as the heart of the Christian. Observe, i example, in this passage from the "Holy D the change of musical time together with the form thought in the course of the sentences beginning "S I have seen a rose:" THE CHANGE BY DEATH. It is a mighty change that is made by the death of person, and it is visible to us who are alive. Recke: from the sprightliness of youth, the fair cheeks and the eyes of childhood, from the vigorous and strong flexu the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three-days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so I have seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece: but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness, and the symptoms of a sickly age: it bowed the head, and broke its stalk, and at night having lost some of its leaves, and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and worn-out faces. The same is the portion of every man and every woman; the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonour, and our beauty so changed, that our acquaintance quickly knows us not; and that change mingled with so much horror, or else meets so with our fears and weak discoursings, that they who six hours ago tended upon us, either with charitable or ambitious services, cannot without some regret stay in the room alone where the body lies stripped of its life and honour. I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friend's desire by giving way, that after a few days' burial they might send a painter to his vault, and, if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death unto the life; they did so, and found his face half eaten, and his midriff and backbone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors. So does the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad with you and me; and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave? what friends to visit us? what officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funeral? IN THE BEGINNING OF MARRIAGE. Man and wife are equally concerned to avoid all offences of each other in the beginning of their conversation. Every little thing can blast an infant blossom; and the breath of the south can shake the little rings of the vine, when first they begin to curl like the locks of a new-weaned boy; but when by age and consolidation they stiffen into the hardness of a stem, and have by the warm embraces of the sun and the kisses of heaven brought forth their clusters, they can endure the storms of the north and the loud noises of a tempest, and yet never be broken. So are the early unions of an unfixed marriage; watchful and observant, jealous and busy, inquisitive and careful, and apt to take alarm at every unkind word. For infirmities do not manifest themselves in the first scenes, but in the succession of a long society; and it is not chance or weakness when it appears at first, but it is want of love or prudence, or it will be so expounded; and that which appears ill at first usually affrights the inexperienced man or woman, who makes unequal conjectures, and fancies mighty sorrows by the proportions of the new and early unkindness. It is a very great passion, or a huge folly, or a certain want of love, that cannot preserve the colours and beauties of kindness, so long as public honesty regaires men to wear their sorrows for the death of a friend. Plutarch compares a new marriage to a vessel before the hoops are on, κατ ̓ ἀρχὰς μὲν ὑπὸ τῆς τυχούσης ραδίως διασπαтаι πроpáσews, everything dissolves their tender imaginations, but χρόνω των ἁρμων σύμπηξιν λαβόντων μόγις ὑπὸ πυρὸς καὶ σιδήρου διαλύεται, when the joints are stiffened and are tied by a firm compliance and proportioned bending, scarcely can it be dissolved without fire or the violence of irons. After the hearts of the man and wife are endeared and hardened by a mutual confidence, and an experience longer than artifice and pretence can last, there are a great many remembrances, and some things present, that dash all little unkindnesses in pieces. The little boy in the Greek epigram, that was creeping down a precipice, was invited to his safety by the sight of his mother's pap, when nothing else could entice him to return; and the bond of common children, and the sight of her that nurses what is most dear to him, and the endearments of each other in the course of a long society, and the same relation, is an excellent security to redintegrate and to call that love back, which folly and trifling accidents would disturb. When it is come thus far, it is hard untwisting the knot; but be careful in its first condition, that there be no rudeness done; for if there be, it will for ever after be apt to start, and to be diseased. Let man and wife be careful to stifle little things, that as fast as they spring, they be cut down and trod upon; for if they be suffered to grow by numbers, they make the spirit peevish, and the society troublesome, and the affections loose and easy by an habitual aversation. Some men are more vexed with a fly than with a wound; and when the gnats disturb our sleep, and the reason is disquieted but not perfectly awakened, it is often seen that he is fuller of trouble than if in the daylight of his reason he were to contest with a potent enemy. In the frequent little accidents of a family a man's reason cannot always be awake; and when his discourses are imperfect, and a trifling trouble makes him yet more restless, he is soon betrayed to the violence of passion. It is certain that the man or woman are in a state of weakness and folly then, when they can be troubled with a trifling accident; and therefore it is not good to tempt their affections when they are in that state of danger. In this case the caution is, to subtract fuel from the sudden flame; for stubble, though it be quickly kindled, yet it is as soon extinguished, if it be not blown by a pertinacious breath, or fed with new materials. Add no new provocations to the accident, and do not inflame this, and peace will soon return, and the discontent will pass away soon, as the sparks from the collision of a flint: ever remembering, that discontents proceeding from daily little things, do breed a secret undiscernible disease, which is more dangerous than a fever proceeding from a discerned notorious surfeit. Let them be sure to abstain from all those things, which by experience and observation they find to be contrary to each other. They that govern elephants never appear before them in white; and the masters of bulls keep from them all garments of blood and scarlet, as knowing that they will be impatient of civil usages and discipline when their natures are provoked by their proper antipathies. The ancients in their marital hieroglyphics used to depict Mercury standing by Venus, to signify, that by fair language and sweet entreaties, the minds of each other should be united; and hard by them Suadam et Gratias descripserunt, they would have all deliciousness of manners, compliance, and mutual observance to abide. That passage is taken from the first of the two sermons, this from the second : MARRIED LOVE. It contains in it all sweetness, and all society, and all felicity, and all prudence, and all wisdom. For there is nothing can please a man without love; and if a man be weary of the wise discourses of the Apostles, and of the innocency of an even and a private fortune, or hates peace or a fruitful year, he hath reaped thorns and thistles from the choicest flowers of Paradise; for nothing can sweeten felicity itself but love. . . . No man can tell but he that loves his children how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society; but he that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows, and blessing itself cannot make him happy; so that all the commandments of God enjoining a man to love his wife are nothing but so many necessities and capacities of joy. She that is loved is safe, and he that loves is joyful. Love is a union of all things excellent; it contains in it proportion, and satisfaction, and rest, and confidence; and I wish that this were so much proceeded in that the heathens themselves could not go beyond us in this virtue and in its proper and its appendant happiness. Tiberius Gracchus chose to die for the safety of his wife; and yet methinks to a Christian to do so should be no hard thing; for many servants will die for their masters, and many gentlemen will die for their friend; but the examples are not so many of those that are ready to do it for their dearest relatives, and yet some there have been. Baptista Fregosa tells of a Neapolitan that gave himself a slave to the Moors that he might follow his wife; and Dominicus Catalusius, the Prince of Lesbos, kept company with his lady when she was a leper; and these are greater things than to die. Henry and Thomas Vaughan, twin sons of Henry Vaughan of Tretower Castle and Newton in Brecknockshire, were born in 1621, in the house of Lower Newton, by the village of Scethrog, in the parish of Llansaintfread. Henry Vaughan, whose home was thus placed by the Usk, in lovely scenery near the road between Crickhowel and Brecon, became the best of the religious poets who received an impulse from the genius of George Herbert. Vaughan's place, indeed, is beside Herbert rather than below him. For six years after the age of eleven the twin brothers were taught by the rector of the neighbouring parish of Llangattock, and then, in 1638, were entered at Jesus College, Oxford. Henry Vaughan left Oxford after the year 1640, and perhaps studied medicine in London. He had experience of London life among the poets, reverenced Ben Jonson, and contributed to the memorial verses on the death of William Cartwright. His first volume of poems-love verses -was published in 1646. He had then taken the degree of M.D., and began practice of medicine in Brecknock (Brecon), but not staying there long, he presently settled for life as a country doctor in his native village of Scethrog. He married twice, and had five or six children. His brother Thomas had taken orders, and become the parson of the parish to which Scethrog and Newton belong. But when he and other of the loyal clergy were ejected from their livings, Thomas Vaughan returned to Oxford and gave to chemistry, on which he wrote eleven little books, under the name of "Eugenius Philalethes,” the rest of his life until his death in 1665; when Elias Ashmole says that he was poisoned by some chemical fumes. Henry Vaughan published under the Conmonwealth, in 1650, the first part of his religios poems gathered under the title of "Silex Scintil lans "The Flint (of the Heart) yielding sparks of fire. There followed, in 1651, the chief body of his secular poems, as "Olor Iscanus" (the Swan of Esk then, in 1652, devotional prose pieces as "The Mou: of Olives;" in 1654, "Flores Solitudinis" (Flowers of Solitude), translations of religious pieces made m the time of sickness that had turned his mind to sacred poetry; and in 1655 the second part of Silex Scintillans." Then followed "Hermetical Physic and for the rest of his life until his death in 1695, at the age of seventy-three, he held quietly by his voca tion as a country doctor, and published no more vere except, in 1678, a little duodecimo called "Thais Rediviva, the Pastimes and Diversions of a Countr Man," including some remains of his brou Thomas. An obvious relation of thought between Heat Vaughan's "Retreat Retreat" and Wordsworth's "Ode the Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood makes it interesting to know that Wordswork possessed a copy of Vaughan's "Silex Scintillans," E which it is contained. THE RETREAT. Happy those early days, when I Before I taught my tongue to wound A sev'ral sin to ev'ry sense, Oh, how I long to travel back, |