be inserted, the former affirming the king's prerogative, the latter giving effect to its individual exercise. This stop-gap "the Stuart lawyers designated a non obstante clause, a proviso dispensing with the patentee's compliance with the enactment in the Test Act (25 Car. II. cap. 2) which rendered it obligatory upon every officer, civil and military, fulfilling an appointment "of trust or emolument" under the Crown, to receive the Holy Communion according to the rites of the Church of England within a specified time -three months-before entering upon the duties of his post, a measure notoriously in its inception directed against the Duke of York, the brother of the then reigning monarch, and the enactment of which had, in fact, the effect it was intended to have, of causing the prince against whom it was aimed at once to surrender all the employments of trust and emolument he held under the Crown. That coerced prince was now the sovereign of the realm.

I have already mentioned that Sir John's letters patent contained two exceptional clauses conceding indulgence to the incoming Lord Mayor's wellknown sectarian tenets. With one-the two branched proviso, one limb of which conferred latitude in respect of the religious services during the mayoralty in the Guildhall Chapel, and the other endowed his lordship the mayor with a complementary liberty in the choice of a chaplain-I have dealt already. I have now to examine the other enabling clause, the consideration of which I then deferred. This, in the then condition of the political world, was-constitutionally speaking -the more significant innovation of the two. Under the judgment of Quo Warranto the mayor had become the sovereign's patentee, and no statute stood in the way of the patron to limit him in any powers of indulgence he chose to exercise; but the non obstante clause involved a distinct assertion of the sovereign's power to dispense at his pleasure with the observance by a subject of the statute law of the land. A constitutional officer might with a clear conscience avail himself to the full of the concessions given by the double-barrelled clause, for the judgment of Quo Warranto, which must be considered law until over-ruled, impliedly warranted such an extension of the royal grace; and if the patentee waived these privileges, he must be taken to do so from considerations of political prudence, not from regard to legal obligation. As a fact, however, as we shall see hereafter, Sir John only very partially availed himself of this part of his privilege-if, indeed, he can be said to have

happy time the king's officers pure and simple, the lord mayor in particular being as essentially the sovereign's custos of the City as were any of the custodes, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, appointed centuries before in the dark ages by John or Henry III., the succeeding Edwards or Richard II.

done so at all; but to act under the powers of the non obstante clause-as Sir John and all his party and a national party much more comprehensive than his merely sectarian following felt-would be to acquiesce in pretensions all patriots were unanimous in denying and denouncing. Thus, then, if Jeffreys was wary, the Presbyterian mayor was well advised. If the Crown had shrewd lawyers behind it, the "country party" had at its command "gentlemen of the long robe" as learned and astute. Shorter's course in relation to Jeffreys's last device must be regarded as a counter-move. In the game of the great Revolution it was a very emphatic and ominous cry of "Check!" Ex abundanti cautela, the newly nominated lord mayor deliberately declined to avail himself of the interpolated concessions, and, in the first place, after conference with and under the sanction— nay, with the ample approval of the chief leaders of the Puritan party-nay, more, after consultation with the Commission of Bishops of the Established Church then administering the affairs of the see of London*-Alderman Sir John Shorter publicly took the sacrament according to the usage of the Church of England in the interval between the date of his patent and his taking the oath of office. Moreover, the contemporary diarist Luttrell informs us that during his mayoralty Sir John cautiously avoided formally acting on either of the privileges conceded by the other-the dual-indulging clause in the patent, one part of which empowered him to have what form of religious service he thought proper observed in the Guildhall Chapel during his mayoralty, and the other licensed him to appoint a minister of whatsoever denomination he pleased as his chaplain, or, as the patent expressed it, "to preach before him." He evaded taking advantage of the first branch of the concession by closing Guildhall Chapel altogether, and no divine service of any kind was performed in that sacred edifice during his mayoralty+ and

* During the suspension of its bishop, Dr. Compton, under a sentence of the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission (which had arbitrarily assumed the powers of the abolished Court of High Commission), for refusing to suspend Dr. John Sharp, Rector of St. Giles-in-theof York), for preaching against Popery. Dr. Compton Fields and Dean of Norwich (afterwards Archbishop had, however, recommended the eloquent divine to discontinue his sermons for the present.

Sir John Bramston's contemporaneous narrative (Autobiography,' Camden Society, p. 315) rather conflicts with this statement; but I am inclined, from the result of the examination of a great mass of inferential and concurring independent contemporary testimony, to conclude that Luttrell (who is my direct authority for this detail, which he repeats on different dates at intervals many months apart) is right, and that the learned judge of the Court of King's Bench is wrong, as that pleasantly gossiping lawyer is inaccurate, or, to say the least, careless, in another entry of civic historically domestic lore.

the brief tenure of office of his successor, that mayor "of a month's mind," the Anabaptist Sir John Eyles. The chapel remained closed for one year all but three weeks, but Lord Mayor Shorter, we are told, "fitted up a conventicle" in Grocers' Hall, where he had his official residence, and although he avoided acquiescing in the king's ulterior designs-declining to avail himself of the second part of the twofold licence-by not appointing any particular divine as his ordinary chaplain or officially "to preach before him," he invited to Grocers' Hall from time to time eminent dissenting ministers of various denominations, among whom we find recorded the name of the eloquent Mead,† the widely esteemed minister of "Stepney Meeting," the tradition of whose talent survived the plain brick edifice his oratory made famous, and still lingers in the pretentious Gothic structure that has superseded that quaint old "tabernacle." It seems, then, but reasonable to infer that the popular Baptist preacher John Bunyan was similarly distinguished, perhaps more than once, and from this circumstance, as I have said, may have sprung the notion that he acted nominally as the lord mayor's chaplain. Then we are told-and it is an interesting illustration of the reputed flexibility of Shorter's religious tenets -that between the last days of October, 1687, and those of August, 1688, the Lord Mayor, though "he went sometimes to the meetings of dissenters, went frequently to church......This disobliged the king to a very high degree, insomuch that he said the dissenters were an ill-natured sort of people that could not be gained."

This, then, was the public conduct, as Lord Mayor nominate, of citizen Sir John Shorter, whose claims to citizenship Strype's 'Stow,' as it stands, denies altogether, denying also that he ever qualified for the civic chair by serving sheriff, oblivious of the statement of the undoubted fact on p. 149 that he fulfilled that office in the mayoralties of Sir Robert Vyner and Sir Joseph Sheldon, 1674-5. I venture to assert that no writer on our

* Bramston and Luttrell agree as to this. See also the Ellis Correspondence,' vol. ii. p. 161, confirmatory. I do not for every assertion I make burden my text with references to authorities. Luttrell's Brief Relation' (vol. i., passim), Neale's History of the Puritans' (vol. v., passim), Burnet's Own Times,' the London Gazette and the other meagre metropolitan newspaper press of the period, &c., extending over the years 1686-87, 1687-88, all works of ready accessibility, must be assumed to be generally vouched by me as supporting my statements and justifying my conclusions. They can be easily referred to for my verification or refutation.

Luttrell, under date November 6, 1687.

Neale's History of the Puritans,' vol. v. p. 42. Bramston's Autobiography,' p. 315, contemporaneously confirms Sir John's reputed indifference as to the forms of religious worship he patronized while serving as the civic sovereign. See also Ralph's History of England,' vol. i. P. 966.

constitutional history has rendered adequate justice to the attitude taken up by this distinguished man towards the Crown (whose nominee he was) on the one hand, and towards the citizens (of whose franchises he nobly regarded himself the champion) on the other. To sum up; while accepting office under the royal powers defined by a judgment which remained law until the principles affirmed by the glorious Revolution pronounced it invalid, he was careful not only never to go beyond the terms of that decision, but to exercise but very sparingly, if at all, the privileges his royal patron, by virtue of it, assumed the right to confer. I submit that this patriotic citizen's conduct should be coupled with, and considered as complementary to, the course pursued by those nonconformists who stood shoulder to shoulder with the seven bishops in their martyr-like trouble during the first of the last three months of Shorter's life, even going so far as to depute ten of the most eminent of their divines to visit the imprisoned prelates in the Tower and convey to them assurances of the sympathy and support of the dissenting congregations throughout the length and breadth of the beloved land that trusted deputation represented; neither the first, nor has it proved the last, instance of the suspension of domestic discord in presence of alien menace-of national union against the attack of a common foe. NEMO. Temple.

(To be continued.)

SHAKSPEARIANA.

'HENRY VIII.'-Fresh from observation of the

orderly as well as enthusiastic crowd which greeted Queen Victoria's Jubilee, it is not unnatural that a Shakespearean student should revert to the presentation of the excited mob at the christening of Elizabeth, her great predecessor.

The stage direction of the fourth scene of the fifth act of Henry VIII.' is "noise and tumult within," and the dialogue proceeds between the porter and his man, representatives of the "force" employed to keep Palace Yard clear. The man protests that he has been doing his best :

So

I am not Samson, nor Sir Guy, nor Colbrand, to
Mow 'em down before me: but if I spared any
That had a head to hit, either young or old,
He or she, cuckold or cuckold-maker,
Let me ne'er hope to see a chine again,

And that I would not for a sow, God bless her! regulate and so read, substituting "sow" for COW "of all the editions. Collier proposed " for a crown." Those still live who have sat at a table where a huge pork chine has steamed-"warm, reeking, rich." Chines of beef are known ('2 Henry VI.,' IV.), but enthusiasm does not attach to cow beef. The porter's man was, doubtless, more familiar with pork, and his affectionate reminiscence is humorous as reverting to the sty.

In a subsequent speech of the man there is distinct appearance of a displaced line, and one word is very questionable :

Man. The spoons will be the bigger, sir. There is a fellow somewhat near the door; he should Be a brazier by his face, for, o' my conscience, Twenty of the dog-days now reign in 's nose. That fire-drake did I hit three times on the head For kindling such combustion in the state, and Three times was his nose discharged against me. There

was

A haberdasher's wife of small wares near him,
That railed upon me till her pinked porringer
Fell off her head;

I missed the meteor once and hit that woman, Who cried out" Clubs," when I might see from far Some forty truncheoneers draw to her succour, &c. For "wares" the copies have "wit," and "haberdasher of small wit" does occur in Ben Jonson, but probably in consequence, as here also, of the familiarity of the phrase "small wit" misleading the compositor.

The line "For kindling such combustion in the state" has good meaning as inserted above, but not so as universally printed, preceding "I missed that meteor once," &c. The red nose of the fire-drake is a "meteor" -8 political portent ever-and as such spoken of as provoking combustion in the state. There is a manifest explanation of the transposition in the word "head," which it follows in its right place, recurring lower down. The text of 'Henry VIII.' as current is remarkable for neglect of sound emendations already indicated, and for not a few other false readings, which such neglect makes it little encouraging to point out.

'HAMLET,' V. ii. 42.—

W. WATKISS LLOYD.

And stand a comma 'tweene their amities.

The now non-use and the real oddness of this conceit or simile have led to other readings being proposed, and amongst such I perpetrated one in my greener sallet days. Further readings, however, in Elizabethan literature showed me that references to commas and periods were conceits of that day, or at least for a short time in that day. Students must have come across instances where "period" has been used with at least a quibbling or subreference to the printed stop so called, and as to the comma I had collected several instances. Some of these have, unfortunately, been mislaid or lost. Three, however, I can give, merely premising that the present Hamletian passage is undoubtedly the best of all that I have come across, because, admitting its oddness, it must be allowed to be a most accurate simile, and one that gives excellent sense. In it Peace, as personified, stands between the two parties, holding each by the hand, or rather conjoining their hands, in like manner as a comma physically disjoins its two clauses-by its body separates them-while for all intents and purposes of sense it conjoins them.

The first instance is from Shakespeare himself. In 'Timon,' I. i., speaking as the adulatory poet, he says:

My free drift

Halts not particularly, but moves itself
In a wide sea of wax: no levell'd malice
Infects one comma in the course I hold;
But flies an eagle flight.

Here "comma" either stands for even the smallest part of what he writes, or, and perhaps more probably, the most insignificant of the commonalty; not even does he level his malice at a Tucca or a Hannam. Clearly it is not so happy a passage as the 'Hamlet' one.

The second is from 'A Packet of Mad Letters,' by N. Breton, the first edition of which is undated but which is entered in the Stationers' Registers "xviii Maii," 1602, and republished "Newly Inlarged" in 1603. Letter 37 is one of “Challenge":

"That God the Judge of right, may determine of our wrongs, and the point of the sword put a period to our discourses."

In the "Answer," No. 38, we have :

"Where God and good Conscience will quickly deter mine the quarrell: but I feare the point of the sword will make a Comma to your cunning, which if it doe, you shall find what will follow."

I am not called upon to defend or even explain his use of "comma' here, though its excitant "the period of our discourses" is good. But I note that the date is about contemporary with the Hamlet' passage, and that Breton, as he did in the instance of "Croydon sanguine," was one of those ever ready to take up the phrases and ideas of the day, and as readily drop them, when they got out of date, for those of the next issue; and this I say without referring to his principles, which were more stable.

My third is from the 'Parthenophil and Parthenophe' of Barnabe Barnes, a series of love sonnets and of other love poems, published in 1593, and written, therefore, when he was about twenty-four. From his youth, and these being his first published attempts at verse, he was the more likely to adopt the conceits of his day, especially as he evidently went in this series of poems to the very limits of his imagination and remembrances when treating of the old, old subject. At p. 76 [b], and speaking in Elegie II. of his "Mistresse,” he has :

And thine eyes dartes at every colon hittes
My soule with double prickes which myne harte splittes.
Whose faintyng breath with sighing commaes broken
Drawes on the sentence of my death by pawses:
Ever prolonging ont myne endlesse clauses
With iffs Parenthesis, yet finde no token
When with my greefe, I should stand even or odd :
My life still making preparations

Through thy loves dartes to beare the periodde,
Yet stumbleth on interrogations.

There is a little more, unnecessary to quote, but