beams in water, that builds upon events, which no man can be master of.

"Irresolution is a worser vice than rashness: he that shoots best may sometimes miss the mark; but he that shoots not at all, shall be sure never to hit it. A rash act may be mended by the activeness of the penitent, when he sees and finds his error. But irresolution loosens all the joints of state: like an ague, it shakes not this or that limb, but all the body is at once in a fit.

"Servants are usually our best friends, or our worst enemies : neuters seldom. For, being known to be privy to our retired actions, and our more continual conversation, they have the advantage of being believed before a removed friend. Friends have more of the tongue, but servants of the hand: and actions, for the most part, speak a man more truly than words. Attendants are like to the locks that belong to a house; while they are strong and close, they preserve us in safety; but weak, or open, we are left a prey to thieves. If they be such as a stranger may pick, or another open with a false key, it is very fit to change them instantly. But if they be well warded, they are then good guards of our fame and welfare.

All families are but diminutives of a court, where most men respect more their own advancement, than the honour of their throned king. The same thing that makes a lying chambermaid tell a foul lady that she looks lovely, makes a base lord sooth up his ill king in mischief. They both counsel, rather to insinuate themselves by floating with a light, loved humour, than to profit the advised, and imbetter his fame.

"Few converse so much with persons abroad, as to shew their humours and inclinations in public. To their superiors, they put on obsequiousness, and pageant out their virtues, but strongly they conceal their vices. To their equals, they strive to shew the gratefulness of a condition; to their inferiors, courtesy and beneficence; to all, there is a disguise. Men in this, like ladies that are careful of their beauty, admit not to be visited, till they be dressed and trimmed to the advantage of their faces. Only in a man's retirement, and among his domestics, he opens himself with more freedom, and with less care; he walks there as nature framed him: he there may be seen not as he seems, but as he is; without either the deceiving properties of art, or the varnish of belied virtue: so, as indeed, no man is able to pass a true judgement upon another, but he that familiarly and inwardly knows him, and has viewed him by the light of time. When Tiberius had a noble fame among strangers, he that read him rhetoric, stuck not to pronounce him luto et sanguine maceratum.

"I like not those that disdain what the world says of them. I shall suspect that woman's modesty, that values not to be accounted modest.

"He that is careless of his fame, I doubt, is not fond of his integrity."

Another of Felltham's merits is bis liberal allowance for

the failings of others, and the kindly feeling with which the sternest of his reproofs is tempered. Thus, on the theme "that no man can be good to all,” he writes,—

"I never yet knew any man so bad, but some have thought him honest, and afforded him love; nor ever any so good, but some have thought him evil and hated him. Few are so stigmatical as that they are not honest to some; and few, again, are so just, as that they seem not to some unequal: either the ignorance, the envy, or the partiality of those that judge, do constitute a various man. Nor can a man in himself always appear alike to all. In some, nature hath invested a disparity; in some, report hath fore-blinded judgement; and in some, accident is the cause of disposing us to love or hate. Or, if not these, the variation of the bodies' humours; or, perhaps, not any of these. The soul is often led by secret motions, and loves, she knows not why. There are impulsive privacies, which urge us to a liking, even against the parliamental acts of the two Houses, reason, and the common sense. As if there were some hidden beauty, of a more magnetic force than all that the eye can see; and this, too, more powerful at one time than another. Undiscovered influences please us now, with what we would sometimes contemn. I have come to the same man that hath now welcomed me with a free expression of love and courtesy, and another time hath left me unsaluted at all; yet, knowing him well, I have been certain of his sound affection; and have found this, not an intended neglect, but an indisposedness, or a mind seriously busied within. Occasion reins the motions of the stirring mind. Like men that walk in their sleep, we are led about, we neither know whither nor how."

Again," of apprehension in wrongs:"

"We make ourselves more injuries than are offered us; they many times pass for wrongs in our own thoughts, that were never meant so by the heart of him that speaketh. The apprehension of wrong hurts more than the sharpest part of the wrong done. So, by falsely making ourselves patients of wrong, we become the true and first actors. It is not good, in matters of discourtesy, to dive into a man's mind, beyond his own comment; nor to sir upon a doubtful indignity without it, unless we have proofs that carry weight and conviction with them. Words do sometimes fly from the tongue that the heart did neither hatch nor harbour. While we think to revenge an injury, we many times begin one; and, after that, repent our misconceptions. In things that may have a double sense, it is good to think the better was intended; so shall we still both keep our friends and quietness."

"Laughter should dimple the cheek, not furrow the brow into ruggedness. The birth is then prodigious, when mischief is the child

of mirth. All should have liberty to laugh at a jest; but if it throws disgrace upon one, like the crack of a string, it makes a stop in the music. Flouts, we may see, proceeds from an inward contempt; and there is nothing cuts deeper, in a generous mind, than scorn. Nature, at first, makes us all equal; we are differenced but by accident, and outwards; and I think it is a jealousy that she hath infused in man, for the maintaining of her own honour against external causes. And though all have not wit to reject the arrow, yet most have memory to retain the offence; which they will be content to owe awhile, that they may repay it both with advantage and ease. It is but an unhappy wit that stirs up enemies against the owner. A man may spit out his friend from his tongue, or laugh him into an enemy. Gall in mirth is an ill-mixture, and sometimes truth is bitterness. I would wish any man to be pleasingly merry; but let him beware that he bring not truth on the stage, like a wanton with an edged weapon."

Lastly," of reprehension :"

"When thou chidest thy wandering friend, do it secretly; in season, in love; not in the ear of a popular convention. For, in many times, the presence of a multitude makes a man take up an unjust defence, rather than fall into a just shame. Diseased eyes endure not an unmasked sun; nor does the wound but rankle more which is fanned by the public air. Nor can I much blame a man, though he shuns to make the vulgar his confessor; for they are the most uncharitable tell-tales that the burthened earth doth suffer. They understand nothing but the dregs of actions; and with spattering those abroad, they besmear a deserving fame. A man had better be convinced in private than be made guilty by a proclamation. Open rebukes are for magistrates, and courts of justice; for stalled chambers, and for scarlets, in the thronged hall. Private, are for friends; where all the witnesses of the offender's blushes, are blind, and deaf, and dumb. We should do by them as Joseph thought to have done by Mary, seek to cover blemishes with secrecy. Public reproof is like striking of a deer in the herd; it not only wounds him, to the loss of enabling blood, but betrays him to the hound, his enemy; and makes him, by his fellows, be pushed out of company. Even concealment of a fault argues some charity to the delinquent; and when we tell him of it in secret, it shews we wish he should amend, before the world comes to know his amiss."

But the highest excellency of the Resolves-an excellency, before which every merit of composition sinks into insignificance is the purity of the religious and moral principles they exhibit. We can only, in this place, refer the reader to the Essays, entitled, Of Prayer-The Danger of once admitting a Sin-Of Faith and Good Works-Of preparing against Death, &c. which are too long to extract entire, and we would not mar their effect by imperfect quotation; but we cannot refuse ourselves the gratification of instancing the clear and distinct

notions they evince of the mutual relation between religion and morality.

"Religion more properly respects the service of God; yet takes care of man too. Morality looks most to our conversation with men ; yet leaves us not when we come to God and religion. I confess, I understand not why some of our divines have so much cried down morality. A moral man with some is but another word for a reprobate; whereas, truly, charity and probability would induce us to think, that whosoever is morally honest, is so out of conscience, in obedience to the commands of God, and the instinctments of nature, so framed and qualified by God himself, rather than out of sinister, lower, or less noble ends; and, therefore, I hold it to be most true, that as true religion cannot be without morality, no more can morality that is right be without religion. I look upon it as the primitive and everlasting law and religion of man; which, instamped in his soul at his creation, is a ray arising from the image of God. Till the law was given, what religion had he but his own morality, for almost two thousand years? It was the world's religion. What was it else that taught man to pray and humble himself to a Deity; when he had done amiss, to make offertories to appease an angered Godhead; and to think of ways of expiation? And when the law was promulgated in tables of stone, to shew the perpetuity of it, was it not the same reduced to literal precepts, which, even in the world's infancy, was written in the hearts of man? The judicial and ceremonial law of the Jews we see abolished at our Saviour's coming; but the Decalogue, because it is moral, holds."

Yet, even Felltham, though a righteous man, was not righteous over much." He extols innocent diversions-is a friend to dancing, poetry, and music-and by no means averse to the moderate enjoyment of the pleasures of the table. He had examples enough, in his time, of pretenders to superior sanctity, and they neither escaped his acute observation, nor his vigorous reprehension. "I'find many," he remarks, "that are called Puritans, yet few, or none, that will own the name. Whereof the reason sure is this, that it is for the most part held a name of infamy; and is so new, that it hath scarcely yet obtained a definition: nor is it an appellation derived from one man's name, whose tenets we may find digested into a volume; whereby we do much err in the application. It imports a kind of excellency above another, which man (being conscious of his own frail bendings) is ashamed to assume to himself. So that I believe there are men which would be Puritans, but, indeed, not any that are." And he comes to this conclusion:

"As there be many, that in their life assume too great a liberty, so I believe there are some that abridge themselves of what they might lawfully use. Ignorance is an ill steward, to provide for either soul

or body. A man that submits to reverent order, that sometimes unbends himself in a moderate relaxation; and in all, labours to approve himself, in the sereneness of a healthful conscience: such a puritan I will love immutably. But when a man, in things but ceremonial, shall spurn at the grave authority of the church, and out of a needless nicety, be a thief to himself of those benefits which God hath allowed him; or out of a blind and uncharitable pride, censure and scorn others, as reprobates; or out of obstinacy, fill the world with brawls, about undeterminable tenets: I shall think him one of those, whose opinion hath severed his zeal to madness and distraction. I have more faith in one Solomon, than in a thousand Dutch parlours of such opinionists. Behold then, what I have seen good! That it is comely to eat, and to drink, and to take pleasure in all his labour wherein he travaileth under the sun, the whole number of the days of his life, which God giveth him. For, this is his portion, nay, there is no profit to man, but that he eat and drink, and delight his soul with the profit of his labour. For, he that saw other things but vanity, saw this also, that it was the hand of God. Methinks the reading of Ecclesiastes should make a puritan undress his brain, and lay off those fanatic toys that jingle about his understanding. For my own part, I think the world hath not better men, than some that suffer under that name: nor withall, more scelistique villaines. For when they are once elated with that pride, they so contemn others, that they infringe the laws of all human society."

We have devoted so much space to the most important production of Owen Felltham, that we must be very brief in our notice of the other matter contained in the folio edition of his works now before us, which comprises, beside the "Resolves," "A brief Character of the Low Countries under the States, written long since, being three weeks' Observation of the Vices and Virtues of the Inhabitants." Lusoria: : or occasional Pieces; with a taste of some Letters." "The brief Character" is written in a strain of exaggerated humour, which we do not much admire, and shall not therefore exemplify by quotation; but we must extract a few of the serious reflections at the conclusion, for the sake of the noble sentiments they inculcate :

66

"They (the Batavians) have struggled long with Spain's Pharaoh, and they have at length inforced him to let them go. They are a Gideon's army upon the march again. They are the Indian rat, gnawing the bowels of the Spanish crocodile, to which they got when he gaped to swallow them. They are a serpent wreathed about the legs of that elephant. They are the little swordfish, pricking the belly of the whale. They are the wane of that empire, which increased in Isabella; and in Charles the fifth, was at full.

"They are a glass, wherein kings may see, that though they be sovereign over lives and goods, yet when they usurp upon God's part, and will be kings over conscience too, they are sometimes