TO THE HONORABLE

MR. JUSTICE HALE,

ONE OF THE JUDGES OF THE COMMON PLEAS,

AND TO THE MUCH HONORED

EDWARD HEYWARD, JOHN VAUGHAN,

AND

ROWLAND JEWKS, ESQUIRES.

MOST WORTHY GENTLEMEN,

WERE you not executors to that person, who, while he lived, was the glory of the nation, yet I am confident any thing of his would find acceptance with you ; and truly the sense and notion here is wholly his, and most of the words. I had the opportunity to hear his discourse twenty years together; and lest all those excellent things that usually fell from him might be lost, some of them from time to time I faith

fully committed to writing, which, here digested into this method, I humbly present to your hands. You will quickly perceive them to be his by the familiar illustrations wherewith they are set off, and in which way you know he was so happy, that, with a marvellous delight to those that heard him, he would presently convey the highest points of religion and the most important affairs of state to an ordinary apprehension.

In reading be pleased to distinguish times, and in your fancy carry along with you the when and the why many of these things were spoken this will give them the more life and the smarter relish. 'T is possible the entertainment you find in them may render you the more inclinable to pardon the presumption of Your most obliged and

most humble servant,

RI. MILWARD.

TABLE-TALK.*

ABBEYS, PRIORIES.

1. THE unwillingness of the monks to part with their land, will fall out to be just nothing, because they were yielded up to the king by a supreme hand, viz. a parliament. If a king conquer another country, the people are loath to lose their lands; yet no divine will deny but the king may give them to whom he please. If a parliament make a law concerning leather, or any other commodity, you and I, for example, are parliament men; perhaps, in respect to our own private interests, we are against it;

* The original title was as follows; "Table-Talk, being the Discourses of John Selden, Esq., or his sense of various matters of weight and high consequence, relating especially to religion and state."

yet the major part conclude it; involved, and the law is good.

we are then

2. When the founders of abbeys laid a curse upon those that should take away those lands, I would fain know what power they had to curse me. T is not the curses that come from the poor, or from any body, that hurt me because they come from them, but because I do something ill against them that deserves God should curse me for it. On the other side, 't is not a man's blessing me that makes me blessed: he only declares me to be so; and if I do well I shall be blessed, whether any bless me

or not.

Indeed the prior

3. At the time of dissolution, they were tender in taking from the abbots and priors their lands and their houses, till they surrendered them, as most of them did. of St. John's, Sir Richard Weston, being a stout man, got into France, and stood out a whole year, at last submitted, and the king took in that priory also, to which the Temple belonged, and many other houses in England. They did not then cry, no abbots, no priors, as we do now, no bishops, no bishops.

4. Henry the Fifth put away the friars, aliens, and seized to himself £100,000 a year; and therefore they were not the Protestants only that took away church lands.