which are longer than the memory of man can fathom. I see not but that divinity, put into apt significants, might ravish as well as poetry. They are sermons but of baser metal, which lead the eyes to slumber. He answered well that, after often asking, said still, that action was the chief part of an orator. Surely that oration is most powerful where the tongue is eloquent, and speaks in a native decency, even in every limb. A good orator should pierce the ear, allure the eye, and invade the mind of his hearer. And this is Seneca's opinion: fit words are better than fine ones: I like not those which are injudiciously employed; but such as are expressively pertinent, which lead the mind to something beside the naked term. And he that speaks thus must not look to speak thus every day. A kembed oration will cost both labour and the rubbing of the brain. And kembed I wish it, not frizzled nor curled. Divinity should not be wanton. Harmless jests I like well; but they are fitter for the tavern than the majesty of the temple. Christ taught the people with authority. Gravity becomes the pulpit. I admire the valour of some men who, before their studies, dare ascend the pulpit; and do there take more pains than they have done in their library. But having done this, I wonder not that they there spend sometimes three hours, only to weary the people into sleep. And this makes some such fugitive divines that, like cowards, they run away from their text. Words are not all, nor is matter all, nor gesture; yet, together they are. It is very moving in an orator when the soul seems to speak as well as the tongue. St. Augustin says, Tully was admired more for his tongue than his mind; Aristotle more for his mind than his tongue: but Plato for both. And surely nothing is more necessary in an oration, than a judgment able well to conceive and utter. I know God hath chosen by weak things to confound the wise: yet I see not but, in all times, attention has been paid to language. And even the Scriptures (though not the Hebrew) I believe are penned in a tongue of deep expression, wherein almost every word has a metaphorical sense, which illustrates by some allusion. How political is Moses in his Pentateuch! How philosophical Job! How massy and sententious is Solomon in his proverbs! how grave and solemn in his Ecclesiastes; that in the world, there is not such another dissection of the world as it! How were the Jews astonished at Christ's doctrine! How eloquent a pleader is Paul at the bar; in disputation how subtle! And he who reads the Fathers shall I wish no man to be find them as if written with a fine pen. too dark and full of shadow. There is a way to be pleasingly plain; and some have found it. Mercury himself may move his tongue in vain if he has none to hear him but a non-intelligent. They that speak to children assume a pretty lisping. Birds are caught by the counterfeit of their own shrill notes. There is a * magic in the tongue which can charm even the rude and untaught. Eloquence is a bridle, wherewith a wise man rides the monster of the world, the people. The affections of the hearer depend upon the tongue of the speaker. Flet, flere jubes; gaudet, gaudere coactus : Et te dante, capit Judex quum non habet iram.-LUCAN. Thou may'st give smiles, or tears which joys do blot; I grieve that any thing so excellent as divinity should fall into a sluttish handling. Surely, though other obstructions do eclipse her, yet this is a principal one. I never yet knew a good tongue that wanted ears to hear it. I will honour her in her plain trim; but I would desire her in her graceful jewels; not that they give addition to her goodness, but that she is thereby rendered more persuasive in working on the soul she meets with. When I meet with worth which I cannot overlove, I can well endure that art which is a means to heighten liking. (From the Same.) DESCRIPTION OF A DUTCH HOUSE WHEN you are entered the house the first thing you encounter is a looking-glass. No question but a true emblem of politic hospitality; for though it reflects yourself in your own figure, 'tis yet no longer than while you are there before it. When you are gone once, it flatters the next comer, without the least remembrance that you ere were there. The next are the vessels of the house marshalled about the room like watchmen. All as neat as if you were in a citizens' wives' cabinet for unless it be themselves, they let none of God's creatures lose anything of their native beauty. Their houses, especially in their cities, are the best eye beauties VOL. II U of their country. For cost and sight they far exceed our English, but they want their magnificence. Their lining is yet more rich than their outside; not in hangings, but in pictures, which even the poorest are there furnisht with. Not a cobbler but has his toys for ornament. Were the knacks of all their houses set together, there would not be such another Bartholomew Fair in Europe. Whatsoever their estates be, their house must be fair. There fore from Amsterdam they have banished sea-coal, lest it soil their buildings, of which the statelier sort are sometimes sententious, and in the front carry some conceit of the owner. As to give you a taste in these: Christus Adjutor Meus; Hoc abdicato Perenne Quæro ; Every door seems studded with diamonds. The nails and hinges hold a constant brightness, as if rust there were not a quality incident to iron. Their houses they keep cleaner than their bodies; their bodies than their souls. Go to one you shall find the andirons shut up in net-work. At a second, the warmingpan muffled in Italian cut-work. At a third the sconce clad in cambric. (From A Brief Character of the Two Countries.) SIR KENELM DIGBY [Kenelm Digby was the son of Sir Everard Digby, executed for his participation in the Gunpowder Plot. He was born in 1603, at Gayhurst, Bucks, an estate which was preserved to him by the care of his mother. For a time he seems to have been educated as a Protestant under the charge of Laud, then Dean of Gloucester; but although there are doubts as to the date of his adherence to the Roman Catholic Church, he certainly became an avowed Roman Catholic before 1636. He studied first at Gloucester Hall (afterwards Worcester College) in the University of Oxford, and next in the University of Paris, and spent a large part of his early manhood abroad. In 1623, he received the honour of knighthood, and in 1624 was privately married to Venetia Stanley, descended from the Earls of Derby and the house of Percy— a lady of great beauty and talents, with whose reputation, however, scandal had been busy. In 1627, he started, under royal licence, as head of a privateering expedition, in which he defeated a Venetian and French fleet. On the outbreak of the disputes between the Crown and the Parliament, he fell under the suspicion of the Parliamentary party and was banished; and it was while in France, under the protection of Henrietta Maria and her mother, that he published his chief work, On the Nature of Bodies, and the Nature of Man's Soul. The sincerity of his political principles is rendered doubtful by his subsequent friendly relations with Cromwell; but strangely enough, he seems never to have broken off his connection with the Royalist party, and was well received at Court after the Restoration. He took an interest in the establishment of the Royal Society in 1663, and died in London in 1665.] AMONGST the many strange personalities of the 17th century, there are few whose character it is more difficult to gauge than that of Kenelm Digby. He played his part as courtier, man of fashion, romancer, critic, soldier, virtuoso, and philosopher; and although he was distinguished in each, there was no sphere in which some suspicion of charlatanism did not attach to him. It is indeed difficult to avoid the conclusion that an element of madness entered into his composition, or at least that his versatility was united to an abnormal eccentricity, which, if it partly relieves him of the worst charges, yet explains how small his influence was in any single sphere of activity. His vanity was prodigious, and is naturally most conspicuous where his writings (as is frequently the case) relate to his own actions. His Private Memoirs, first printed from his MS. in 1827, give us an account of his life down to 1628; and the larger part is occupied with a singular history of his early love and marriage with Venetia Stanley. The story is told as a romance under assumed names, and it is impossible to tell what part of it is true and what part pure romancing. In style it is inflated and turgid, and exhibits all the absurd magniloquence of diction characteristic of the romances of the day, with a strange perversity in its moralisings which is peculiar to Digby himself. Besides this we have some shorter narratives; one entitled Sir Kenelm Digby's Honour Maintained, in which his prowess in resenting an insult to his king by single combat is set forth; and another, the journal of his privateering expedition, which is simple and direct narrative. In 1643, he printed his Observations on Religio Medici, written in feverish haste, and with something of captious criticism of Browne's work; in 1644, his Observations on an obscure passage in Spenser's Fairie Queene; and in the same year his chief philosophical work, On the Nature of Bodies, and the Nature of Man's Soul. Some of his most marked peculiarities are best exhibited by the contrast between Browne and himself, which appears in his Observations on Religio Medici. In Browne's mysticism the imagination is always stronger than the ingenuity, and the breadth of a generous and liberal sympathy is more conspicuous than any definiteness of formal belief. But Digby is always straining after a system; and he evidently wrote the criticism under the influence of the philosophical theory which he sets forth more elaborately in the longer treatise on the Nature of Bodies and the Nature of Man's Soul. What attracts us most in Browne is his keen perception of the bearing of religious belief upon the faculties of man; he never obtrudes any dogmatism, but he steers his way through the labyrinth of creeds, with a calm and steady equipoise which never loses its courteous dignity. Digby, with far less of philosophic calm, is much more of the schoolman; without attacking any religious dogma, he yet pursues, with greater pertinacity, a sort of rationalistic system. He will not subscribe to Browne's gentle contempt for the impotence of human reason, but would fain base religion upon the foundations of reason, The germ of freethinking was there; and it is difficult to avoid the |