training young clergymen to evangelise America. Swift, who took a somewhat cynical view of the matter, nevertheless commended it for Berkeley's sake to Carteret, saying, "I entreat you either to keep one of the first men in this kingdom quiet at home, or else assist him to compass his romantic design, which is My Good Lord Cloyne March 5.1746-7 Your Lordships, letter with which I was last pop a needed no perfect recovery apology. I wish it may a و haw come حممر time enough to be of use to the patient. Her Distemper bing of so long continuance, ermined to to great height, and nahere prend and worn and by different courses of medicine, the commet hope for wither length of time and a more attentive case their health. I have neve than people commenly have of of their health son to hope she will find a few month, great relief from stant drinking of tar water joined with a prident region and abStinence from all other medicines. advise that a gallen of water half en a in a with a flat, Sticks a con that at first her har water be made by Stiring quest of for strongly, for the space only of two minutes. and that the take of this daily a part and a in fix glopes, a quarter of a punt in each glass. The may drink it cold or wann as the best likes upen Tryal. But Irgal. But the may drink it first wold, and if they agrees with for, continue it to. It should be drank mold and and at an having distance at least from for meals I venly think they coul and a mejor regimen of early hours, light nourishing food, and gentle exercise in good air will by air will by the Pleking of morning Extract from a Letter of George Berkeley's very noble and generous." The members of the Scriblerus Club were called together to dine with Lord Bathurst, for the purpose of rallying Berkeley out of his project, but he listened quietly to their jokes and then laid his plans before them with such astonishing force of enthusiasm, that the wits stood up together and exclaimed, "Let us all set out with him immediately!" In June 1725 Berkeley contrived to get from the Government a charter for his college, and published a Proposal. His ideas were accepted in London with extraordinary zeal, and a vote of £20,000 to endow the missionary university was carried with acclamation through both Houses of Parliament. It was not, however, until September 1728, that, having married a month before, Berkeley set sail for America, and then, not for Bermuda, but Rhode Island. Sir Robert Walpole, however, was determined to wreck the scheme, and from information received from the Treasury, the Bishop of London recommended Berkeley to return in 1731. He had resigned his deanery, but on the written understanding that the deed should not take force until after the Government had paid the grant of £20,000; he was therefore able to return to Derry. In 1733 Berkeley was made Bishop of Cloyne, having returned the year before to literature, by the publication of his Alciphron, the largest of his works, which he had composed in Rhode Island. He lived at Cloyne from 1734 to 1752, although in 1745 he was offered the much more valuable diocese of Clogher. He set up in the palace at Cloyne a distillery of tar-water, a medicine which had long attracted him, because he conceived it to have the anti-materialistic quality of being charged with "pure invisible fire, the most subtle and elastic of bodies." Accordingly, in 1744, Berkeley published his Chain of Philosophical Reflections concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, to which, in the second and all subsequent editions, was given the more convenient title of Siris. This extraordinary work has been more read than any other of its author's writings, and exhibits in perfection the admirable beauty of his style. It was expanded by Farther Thoughts on Tar-Water in 1752. In the summer of that year Berkeley seems to have grown tired of his long exile at Cloyne, and asked George II. to permit him to resign. The King replied that he might reside wherever he liked, but that live and die a Bishop he should. Berkeley, therefore, in the summer of 1752, found occasion in his son George's proceeding to Oxford as a student of Christ Church, to settle near him, and he took a house in Holywell Street. But his residence there was short, for on the evening of Sunday, January 14, 1753, appearing to have never been in better health, and having just expounded a chapter of the first Corinthians to his family, Berkeley withdrew to the sofa for a nap, from which he never awakened. He was buried in the cathedral of Christ Church, Oxford. It was not Pope alone, but all his contemporaries, who attributed "to Berkeley every virtue under heaven.” No one, in that age of plain speaking, had a word to say to his disadvantage. His beauty of person, his grace of manner, his kindliness, his unselfishness, his intelligence, his simplicity are celebrated by all who knew him; even Voltaire was impressed with his goodness of heart, and in Swift's eyes he was the one "absolute philosopher." As one of his clergy said, "If ever there lived a Christian, it was Dr. Berkeley." I desire it may be considered that most men want leisure, opportunity, or faculties, to derive conclusions from their principles, and establish morality on a foundation of human science. True it is-as St. Paul observes-that the "invisible things of God, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen;" and from thence the duties of natural religion may be discovered. But these things are seen and discovered by those alone who open their eyes and look narrowly for them. Now, if you look throughout the world, you shall find but few of these narrow inspectors and inquirers, very few who make it their business to analyse opinions, and pursue them to their rational source, to examine whence truths spring, and how they are inferred. In short, you shall find all men full of opinions, but knowledge only in a few. It is impossible, from the nature and circumstances of humankind, that the multitude should be philosophers, or that they should know things in their causes. We see every day that the rules, or conclusions alone, are sufficient for the shopkeeper to state his account, the sailor to navigate his ship, or the carpenter to measure his timber; none of which understand the theory, that is to say, the grounds and reasons either of arithmetic or geometry. Even so in moral, political, and religious matters, it is manifest that the rules and opinions early imbibed at the first dawn of understanding, and without the least glimpse of science, may yet produce excellent effects, and be very useful to the world; and that, in fact, they are so, will be very visible to every one who shall observe what passeth round about him. THE SPIRIT OF PLANTS. The balsam or essential oil of vegetables contains a spirit, wherein consist the specific qualities, the smell and taste of the plant. Boerhave holds the native presiding spirit to be neither oil, salt, earth, nor water, but somewhat too fine and subtle to be caught alone and rendered visible to the eye. This, when suffered to fly off, for instance, from the oil of rosemary, leaves it destitute of all flavour. This spark of life, this spirit or soul, if we may so say, of the vegetable, departs without any sensible diminution of the oil or water wherein it was lodged. It should seem that the forms, souls, or principles of vegetable life subsist in the light or solar emanation, which in respect to the macrocosm is what the animal spirit is to the microcosm-the interior tegu ment, the subtle instrument and vehicle of power. No wonder, then, that the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu The most prominent woman-writer of the first half of the eighteenth century was Lady Mary Pierrepont (16891762), daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, afterwards Duke of Kingston, who was born in lodgings in Covent Garden, on the 26th May 1689, and who married Edward Wortley Montagu in 1712. By means of her husband, who was much older than she, Lady Mary was introduced to Addison, Congreve, and Steele, and her earliest writings were suppressed by the advice of the first-named. She persevered, however, and in 1716 her Court Poems were privately and anonymously printed. In that year she left England with her husband, and remained in Vienna and Constantinople until the autumn of 1718; her letters during this period were of high value and interest. Returning to London, she made the personal acquaintance of Pope, with whom she had been in correspondence. A violent friendship sprang up between them and blazed for awhile, but had died down when, about 1723, it ended in a great explosion of mutual rage and ill-breeding. In 1739 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu left her husband under circumstances which have never been lucidly explained, and was a resident abroad, mainly in Italy, for the next twenty-two years. She was in Venice in 1761 when the news of her husband's death reached her; she was in poor health, but she determined to return to England to settle his estate. She arrived in January 1762, and did not return, but died in her house in Montagu Square on the 21st August 1762. She is remarkable for having introduced into western Europe the practice of inoculation for small-pox, which she tried first on her own son, Edward, at Constantinople in 1715. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a woman of a fiery spirit, penetrated with literature and curiosity, ardent and unabashed, insolent and generous. Her letters, which have neither the tenderness nor the eloquence of a Sevigné, testify to the ripeness of her judgment and the clearness of her eye. FROM A LETTER FROM CONSTANTINOPLE. The climate is delightful in the extremest degree. I am now sitting, this present fourth of January [1718], with the windows open, enjoying the warm shine of the sun, while you Benjamin Hoadly After the Portrait by Mrs. Hoadly are freezing over a sad sea-coal fire; and my chamber set out with carnations, roses and jonquils, fresh from my garden. I am also charmed with many points of the Turkish law, to our shame, be it spoken, better designed and better executed than ours; particularly the punishment of convicted liars (triumphant criminals in our country, God knows!) They are burnt in the forehead with a hot iron, being proved the authors of any notorious falsehood. How many white foreheads should we see disfigured, how many fine gentlemen would be forced to wear their wigs as low as their eyebrows, were this law in practice with us! Theology, which had taken so prominent a place in the literature of the seventeenth century, fell into insignificance after the year 1700. We have already spoken of Clarke, a stiff and tire some writer, but the best of his class. To compare Hoadly with Massillon, or Sherlock with Saurin, is but to discover how great an advantage the French still preserved over us, HOADLY: SHERLOCK 265 who had never, even in the palmy days of our theology, enjoyed a Bossuet. Perhaps the most spirited contribution to religious literature published in the early years of the century was Law's Serious Call, a book isolated from its compeers in all qualities of style and temper, the work of a Christian mystic who seemed to his contemporaries that hateful thing "an enthusiast." Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761) was born at Westerham, in Kent, on the 14th of November 1676. He was the second son of the Rev. Samuel Hoadly, who gave him his early education, and then sent him direct to St. Catherine Hall, Cambridge. He became an active and useful London clergyman, of advanced political and religious views. In 1715 he was made Bishop of Bangor, and it is recorded, as a singular proof of Hoadly's simplicity and absence of ambition, that "when he went to Court to kiss hands on being made a bishop, he did not know the way upstairs." His famous treatise on The Principles and Practices of the Non-Jurors, which caused a sort of earthquake in the Church of England, was published in 1716. Hoadly's brilliant sermon on The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ was preached on the 31st of March 1717. The celebrated Bangorian Controversy was the result. In spite of the rage of his enemies, Hoadly was rapidly promoted, through Hereford and Salisbury, to the princely see of Winchester in 1734. 66 Throughout the storms which raged around him, Hoadly preserved a dignified and apostolic caim, and he was a man of undoubted greatness of character. He was the reputed author of more than fifty publications, mainly controversial. He reached his eighty-sixth year, and was so happy as to live long enough to reap the full earthly reward of his labours, to see his Christian and moderate opinions prevail over the kingdom, and the Nonconformists at a very low ebb, for want of the opposition. and persecution they were used to experience." Hoadly died in his palace at Chelsea, on the 17th of April 1761, having outlived all opposition, "beloved and revered by all good men." Thomas Sherlock (1678-1761), the elder son of the famous divine, Dr. Thomas Sherlock After an Engraving by J. M'Ardell William Sherlock, was born in London, where his father was rector of St. George's, Botolph Lane. He was educated at Eton and at St. Catherine Hall, Cambridge, |