11 Jeremy Taylor," by Mr. EDMUND GOSSE, 
 an interesting addition to Messrs. MACMILLAN 
 English Men of Letters series. That th 
 proUge of LAUD, brought up in the stricter 
 principles of Anglicanism, should have als 
 found favour with one of our leading Noncon 
 formist historians, Dr. STOUGHTON, is a remark- 
 able testimony to his merits. His views on 
 toleration gave offence to some orthodox 
 divines in his own day ; yet Dr. JOHNSON, who 
 was no great champion of toleration, had the 
 highest opinion of him. An interesting con- 
 versation between JOHNSON and BOSWELL on 
 TAYLOR'S " Golden Grove " is not noticed by 
 Mr. GOSSE, who, if he thinks little of it as a 
 literary work, should have recorded what JOHN- 
 SON says of its excellence as a manual of devo- 
 tion. TAYLOR'S " Holy Living and Dying " is, 
 however, the work by which he is best known 
 to the public. It originally appeared in two 
 separate parts, between which Mr. GOSSE sees 
 a marked difference, the treatise on Dying 
 being, in his judgment, infinitely superior to 
 that on Living. HALLAM condemns the "Liberty 
 of Prophesying " on account of its alleged in- 
 consistency, and doubts whether TAYLOR was 
 always ingenuous or sincere. But his is a fame 
 which can carry a few shots of this kind without 
 any injury. Of the " Liberty of Prophesying," 
 Dr. STOUGHTON says that "in point of elo- 
 quence no other work of the kind can be 
 compared with it, and, though defective, it is 
 etill worthy, for the sake of its reasoning as 
 well as its rhetoric, to be a text-book for the 
 student of religious liberty." The vicissitudes 
 and sufferings which TAYLOR experienced during 
 tho Civil War and Protectorate, in addition to 
 his eminent services to the Church and the 
 Monarchy, entitled him to a higher reward than 
 he received at tho Restoration. He was twice 
 imprisoned, his living of Uppingham was 
 sequestered, and at times he was on the verge 
 of destitution. In August, 1660, he was ap- 
 pointed to the Bishopric of Down and Connor, 
 and we may well wonder with the late Canon 
 OVERTON why some preferment was not found 
 for him hi England. The rumour that his 
 second wife, JOANNA BRIDGES, was a natural 
 daughter of CHARLES the FIRST would even if 
 true, which there is little reason to believe 
 scarcely furnish a reason for what was pr><* 
 tically a banishment. It is an odd coincide'
 
 . AYI ,OK and BW by th who 
 
 The BISHOP 
 
 
 whether a preacher *^*~ equa li y 
 he arise among us ^ ^ day 
 
 admired. I e PU P* whether that is the 
 
 particularly popuiai. delicate 
 
 fault of the preacher or the^ people^ ^ ^ 
 
 question, *' eil " 1S s ^ en teenth Century it wa, 
 inquiry, in * nraac her was everywhere 
 
 otherwise. A good prea.ne 
 listened to with d ehght^ Lhe . ^ 
 
 =^,-. ? s 
 
 ^ time, the P ul c "? aris i nK from exactly 
 in general, ^^^"^ operated in 
 
 styie UA f . rtrr ..j to would not 
 
 on the 
 ^i 
 
 o,aroh"ne Divine
 
 [BRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CAT [FORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 
 JEREMY TAYLOR
 
 ENGLISH <MEN OF 
 
 JEREMY TAYLOR 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMUND GOSSE 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN fcf CO., LIMITED 
 NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FOUR
 
 Copyright in the United States of America, 1903
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PH 
 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 THIS volume contains a conscientious attempt to 
 present for the first time a detailed biography of 
 Jeremy Taylor. It is remarkable that the career of 
 so eminent and so beloved a writer should not have 
 attracted more attention from literary historians. But 
 its incidents were neglected during the lifetime of 
 those who could have remembered him, and were not 
 made the object of inquiry until external evidence 
 could no longer be obtained. The Funeral Sermon, 
 published by George Rust, Bishop of Dromore, in 1668, 
 is a document invaluable to the biographer, but it 
 stands alone. Some particulars were added by 
 Anthony a Wood, and some by Harris in his 1746 
 edition of the Works of Sir James Ware, who however 
 died before Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 In the eighteenth century several efforts were made 
 to collect notes for Taylor's memoirs, in particular by 
 George Home, Bishop of Norwich, and then by Thomas 
 Zouch, the antiquary, but these were abandoned for 
 lack of material. In 1793, to a volume of selections, 
 Wheeldon prefixed a Life, which is a mere paraphrase 
 of Rust, and is without independent value. The
 
 vi JEREMY TAYLOR 
 
 Rev. Henry Kaye Bonney was the first to succeed 
 in making original researches, which he used in his 
 memoir of Jeremy Taylor published in 1815. This 
 book, however, is inadequate and untrustworthy, and 
 no one became more conscious of its defects than 
 Bonney himself, who set himself to correct it, and 
 who, when he heard that Heber was engaged in 
 editing Jeremy Taylor, generously withdrew his book 
 from circulation, and placed his corrections and fresh 
 information in Heber's hands. 
 
 Every student of Jeremy Taylor owes a debt of 
 gratitude to Reginald Heber, afterwards Bishop of 
 Calcutta, for his edition of the text and for his careful 
 commentary. He worked at the former when he was 
 vicar of Hodnet, Salop, and he finished it just before 
 he went out to India. The Works appeared in 1822, 
 in fifteen volumes, and contained a Life which threw 
 a flood of new light over the biography and biblio- 
 graphy of Jeremy Taylor. As was inevitable, however, 
 in surveying a tract of literary history so long and so 
 completely neglected, Heber's narrative contained a 
 large number of misstatements, and he was moreover 
 the victim of a mystification which will presently be 
 referred to. His exile in India, and his premature 
 death, prevented any revision of his valuable work. 
 Meanwhile, J. S. Hughes, in 1831, prefixed to a 
 selection from Taylor's Works a Life that has no 
 biographical value. But in 1847 the Rev. Robert 
 Aris Willmott, of Bearwood, published a very graceful
 
 PREFATORY NOTE vii 
 
 little book entitled Bishop Jeremy Taylor, his Pre- 
 decessors, Contemporaries, and Successors, a sketch of the 
 English Church in the seventeenth century, in the 
 course of which he corrected Heber in some particulars, 
 and added one or two fresh facts. 
 
 All these biographies were superseded, however, by 
 the labours of the Rev. Charles Page Eden, fellow of 
 Oriel, and vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, who undertook 
 the complete revision of Heber's Jeremy Taylor. His 
 edition of the Works, which was in ten volumes, and 
 occupied several years, was completed in 1854 by 
 what was called volume i., which contained Heber's 
 Life of Jeremy Taylor, corrected, enlarged, and sup- 
 plied with voluminous notes. Eden was a fine scholar, 
 and he must have been one of the most modest of 
 men, for he concealed the importance of his work 
 under the guise of a loyal fidelity to Heber. He is, 
 therefore, scarcely named by the bibliographers, yet 
 it is no more than justice to point out that it is 
 his recension of Heber's memoir, very inconveniently 
 arranged, indeed, being cumbered with notes and 
 appendices, and hidden away in the midst of other 
 editorial matter, which forms the only authoritative 
 biography of Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 Since Eden's day, no Life of Taylor has been issued 
 which can be named as having any independent value. 
 For the collection of documents and quotation of 
 authorities, his still remains the one entirely indis- 
 pensable publication dealing with the career of the
 
 viii JEREMY TAYLOR 
 
 Bishop. But, in the course of the fifty years which 
 have elapsed since Eden put down his pen, the history 
 of the seventeenth century has been greatly elucidated. 
 At various points his narrative needs to be enlarged 
 and corrected in detail, and it is with no sentiment but 
 one of gratitude to Eden, and admiration of his 
 scholarship, that the writer of this volume feels that the 
 time has arrived for a more minute, and a more con- 
 secutive biography of Jeremy Taylor. In particular, 
 the labour of Ulster church antiquaries has discovered, 
 and has published in various fugitive forms, a great 
 deal about the Bishop's Irish experiences which could 
 not be known to Heber or to Eden. These have been 
 well used in the short summary of Taylor's life, con- 
 tributed by the Rev. T. B. Johnstone to the Dictionary 
 of National Biography. 
 
 It is necessary, however, to speak of an element in 
 the biography of Jeremy Taylor which has hitherto 
 been accepted in every account of his life, and which 
 I have slowly and reluctantly been obliged to reject. 
 When Heber was collecting material for the 1822 
 edition, he was favoured with some manuscripts which 
 he described as " among the most interesting hitherto 
 recovered concerning Bishop Taylor's private con- 
 cerns." They purported to be the papers of William 
 Todd Jones of Homra, who had been occupied all his 
 life, so it was averred, in collecting documents for a 
 biography of Jeremy Taylor, from whom he was 
 lineally descended " in the fifth degree." Mr. Jones
 
 PREFATORY NOTE ix 
 
 died suddenly, in 1818, by being thrown out of his 
 carriage, when all his notes and manuscripts were 
 found to have absolutely vanished. In a mysterious 
 way, however, some of them, and particularly remin- 
 iscences said to have been contained in a letter written 
 in 1732 by a Lady Wray, said to have been a grand- 
 daughter of Jeremy Taylor, were eventually placed in 
 Heber's hands. Heber did not print them verbatim, 
 probably because he saw that in many particulars it 
 was impossible that they could be correct. Many of 
 the statements which he did pass were quietly ex- 
 punged later on by Eden, who evidently could not 
 tell what to make of Lady Wray. But many more 
 have hitherto been repeated, until they form part of 
 Taylor's accepted biography. 
 
 In 'very careful examination of what remains of 
 Lady Wray's reminiscences, I have gradually come to 
 the startling conclusion that they are apocryphal, and 
 my narrative is accordingly deprived of some romantic, 
 but ridiculous incidents. In one or two cases I have 
 shown the accepted story to be preposterous ; in others 
 I have simply dropped it out of the record. This 
 is not the place to examine the whole of this curious 
 and disconcerting business of Lady Wray's pretended 
 traditions, but I hope elsewhere to do so in detail. 
 I have no doubt left in my own mind that the whole 
 thing was a mystification or hoax, by which Heber was 
 deceived. The probable origin of this strange fraud it 
 is perhaps too late to conjecture, and it is always
 
 x JEREMY TAYLOR 
 
 possible that the letter of May 31, 1732, may have 
 existed, and may even have been written in good faith, 
 though in that case with a recklessness of ignorance 
 positively amazing. For practical purposes, it is time 
 that it should cease to be quoted among authorities 
 for the biography of Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 E. G. 
 
 October 1903.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH . . . . . . 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE CIVIL WAR 24 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE . . . .66 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 YEARS OF AFFLICTION 106 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 PORTMORE . . . . ' . . . . 148 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 DROMORE * . . . . 184 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY . . . .211 
 
 INDEX , 229 
 
 xi
 
 JEEEMY TAYLOB 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 
 
 (1613-1642) 
 
 KEGARDING the ancestry of Jeremy Taylor much has 
 been conjectured but little is known. During the 
 seventeenth century no suggestion was made that his 
 parentage had been other than obscure and simple. 
 But in 1732 his granddaughter, Lady Wray, is sup- 
 posed to have stated that the family held a respectable 
 rank among the smaller gentry of Gloucestershire, 
 'where they had possessed for many generations an 
 estate in the parish of Frampton-on-Severn.' There 
 has been no confirmation of this statement ; but another 
 pretension of Lady Wray's has proved irresistible by all 
 Jeremy Taylor's biographers, although close examina- 
 tion shows it no less devoid of basis. She said that 
 Nathaniel Taylor, the father of the bishop, 'was the lineal 
 descendant of Dr. Eowland Taylor,' the martyr. This 
 is so delightful a supposition that no one has opposed 
 it ; and Heber even found ' a filial fondness ' in the way 
 in which Jeremy speaks of Rowland in An Apology 
 for Liturgy. He praises him enthusiastically, it is 
 true, but it would be hard if we were supposed to 
 
 A
 
 2 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 claim kinship with all of whom we write in terms of 
 admiration. 
 
 If Nathaniel Taylor was ' the lineal descendant ' of 
 Cranmer's famous chaplain, who was burned at the 
 stake, by Bonner's command, in 1555, he could only 
 have been his grandson, and Edmund Taylor, the 
 churchwarden, must have been one of Eowland Taylor's 
 four surviving children. But if the relationship was 
 so close and dates forbid our making it more remote 
 how are we to explain the fact that in the discreet 
 Cambridge household, where three generations worked 
 humbly side by side, the glory of descending so recently 
 and directly from a prominent local celebrity was not 
 sedulously claimed 1 ? We may, I am afraid, depend 
 upon it that if Jeremy Taylor had been the great- 
 grandson of the martyr, it would not have been left 
 to Lady Wray to be the first to inform us. But Taylor 
 himself seems to lay a vague claim to gentility. He 
 used a seal with the arms ' Ermine, on a chief, indented, 
 sable, three escallops, or : the crest a lion rampant, 
 issuant, ermine, having between his paws a ducal 
 coronet, or ' : these are also engraved on his portraits. 
 This is the coat confirmed to a certain Roger Taylor, 
 in 1614, but by what right the bishop assumed it, if 
 he did so, remains quite unknown. In 1651 he asked 
 Dugdale for information about this coat of arms, but 
 we know not what reply the antiquary made. Where 
 conjectures are so prevalent, I wonder that no one has 
 sought to find a tie between the barber's son and the 
 eminent Dr. Thomas Taylor, who was standing 'as a 
 brazen wall against popery,' and teaching Hebrew at 
 Christ's College, within a stone's-throw of Nathaniel 
 Taylor's shop, all through the boyhood of Jeremy.
 
 i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 3 
 
 When gifts and graces abound so signally as they did 
 in the person of the Bishop of Down and Connor, it 
 is only human to suppose that they must be inherited. 
 
 JEREMY TAYLOR sprang from a respectable Cambridge 
 family of the lower middle class. His grandfather, 
 Edmund Taylor, had been churchwarden of the parish 
 of Trinity, certainly since 1589. The churchwarden's 
 son Nathaniel married Mary Dean in 1605, and they 
 had six children, of whom the subject of this memoir 
 was the fourth child, and the third son. According 
 to tradition, the house in which the Taylors lived was 
 that later known as the Black Bull, 1 opposite Trinity 
 Church, and here doubtless Jeremy Taylor was born. 
 About the date of this event an uncertainty rests. 
 He was baptized on the 15th of August 1613, but it 
 was found to have been suggested by his Irish con- 
 temporary, Sir James Ware, in his posthumous papers, 
 that Taylor was, really, at least two years old at 
 the time. The immediate reason for such a supposi- 
 tion will presently appear ; but it must be said at once 
 that to accept it would be to dislocate the whole 
 record of Jeremy's brothers and sister, who appear on 
 the registers at regular intervals of two years. From 
 earliest infancy the future bishop seems to have been 
 singularly precocious. His father, Nathaniel Taylor, 
 was a barber by trade. There is no evidence that he 
 belonged to the higher grade of barber-surgeon; but 
 
 1 In his Virgidemiarum of 1597, where Joseph Hall celebrates 
 twelve leading hostelries of Cambridge as symbolical of the 
 signs of the Zodiac, he includes the Black Bull and the 
 Wrestlers, both afterwards identified with Jeremy Taylor. 
 This may be the 'creeping into every blind taphouse,' for 
 which Milton reproves Hall.
 
 4 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 he was a man of education, and the son was 'solely 
 grounded in grammar and mathematics ' by his father. 
 
 Early in the childhood of Jeremy Taylor, Dr. Stephen 
 Perse, a fellow and bursar of Caius College, who had 
 large landed property in Cambridge, died, leaving a 
 will by which his town and college were generously 
 benefited. Among other charges, his executors were 
 directed to buy certain grounds and tenements on 
 which to erect a convenient free grammar school for 
 the use of a hundred scholars. The original Perse 
 School, which existed until about sixty years ago, and 
 stood in what was called Luthburne Lane, where the 
 Cavendish Laboratory now stands, was finished and 
 opened in 1619, and its first master was Thomas Lover- 
 ing, a graduate of Pembroke College. Hither, and to the 
 teaching of this excellent master, who was said to make 
 learning so attractive to his pupils that they became 
 " Minerva's darlings," Jeremy Taylor passed at the age 
 of six; he was probably one of the original scholars 
 when the grammar school was opened. About 1621 
 the barber and his family moved to a house afterwards 
 known as the Wrestlers' Inn, in Petty Cury, a few 
 doors from their earlier home, and a little nearer the 
 Perse School. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor spent seven years at school, and then 
 proceeded to Gronville and Caius College, where he was 
 admitted as a sizar on the 18th of August 1626. Here 
 we are confronted with a puzzle, for the admission- 
 book states that he was at the time in the fifteenth 
 year of his age. As a fact he could but very recently 
 have entered his fourteenth. The book goes on to 
 prove itself of slight authority in the matter of dates, 
 by saying that Jeremy had attended the Perse School
 
 i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 5 
 
 for some ten years, whereas that institution had been 
 in existence for no more than seven. We may dis- 
 regard these erroneous entries, merely noticing that 
 the rumour of Taylor's being older than he supposed 
 is doubtless founded upon them, and upon the miracle 
 of his precocious scholarship, for he was ripe for the 
 university before custom would allow of his admittance. 
 Kust, his faithful friend and earliest biographer, cor- 
 rectly records that he entered college as soon as he was 
 thirteen years of age. 
 
 In leaving school, Jeremy Taylor did not deprive 
 himself of the patronage of Stephen Perse. There had 
 of late years been a great expansion of the University 
 of Cambridge and a corresponding lack of accommoda- 
 tion. By his admirable will, Dr. Perse relieved that 
 pressure so far as his own college was concerned, by 
 founding six fellowships and six scholarships, and by 
 leaving money to build lodgings and chambers for the 
 holders of these, and for many other persons. In 1617 
 the Perse buildings rose on the north side of the 
 entrance-court of the college, on ground which Perse 
 had bought from Trinity. The beautiful symbolism 
 of the gates of Caius which was destroyed and 
 rendered absurd by the manipulations of 1869 was 
 still in full force. When Jeremy Taylor came from 
 the barber's shop in Petty Cury, across the Market 
 Place and by St. Mary's, he would enter, as a youthful 
 sizar should, at the Gate of Humility (which then 
 opened into what is now Trinity Street, opposite St. 
 Michael's Church), and would turn to the right across 
 Brick Court. The building, which was his home from 
 1626 until 1635, was one of the most agreeable in the 
 university. Dr. Perse's bequest had been ample, and
 
 6 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 the new chambers were roomy and convenient. There 
 were two stories, containing sets of studies, and oaken 
 staircases led up to a third story of garrets or, as they 
 were called, "excelses." The chambers looked out on 
 St. Michael's Lane in front ; at the back, across Brick 
 Court, to the Gonville buildings and to the chapel, 
 which was being enlarged just when Jeremy Taylor 
 finally left college. On either side the light fell 
 through casements, provided with good Burgundy 
 glass in small, well-soldered lozenges. All was com- 
 fortable, in the simple sense of the time; even the 
 excelses, in one of which Taylor doubtless found his 
 first lodging, were well equipped. 
 
 Of the nine years which the future bishop spent at 
 college we know little. Within the local circle his 
 grace and tact and earnestness won the admiration of 
 his companions. We are told that the impression he 
 produced was such that "had he lived among the 
 ancient pagans he had been ushered into the world 
 with a miracle, and swans must have danced and sung 
 at his birth." He was "a great hero" in the ranks of 
 college scholarship, and was looked upon as "no less 
 than the son of Apollo, the god of wisdom and elo- 
 quence." His tutor was Thomas Batchcroft, a strong 
 royalist, who became Master of the college, and was 
 ultimately ejected by the Parliamentarians. To his 
 teaching we may attribute Taylor's earliest leanings to 
 the king's cause. The boy's progress was steady and 
 rapid: he matriculated on the 17th of March 1627, 
 was elected a Perse scholar at Michaelmas of the follow- 
 ing year, took his degree early in his eighteenth year, 
 and was elected a Perse fellow at the age of twenty. 
 He was a man, Rust tells us, long before he was of
 
 i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 7 
 
 age, and had known "of the state of childhood little 
 more than its innocency and pleasantness." 
 
 In the course of his Liberty of Prophesying, Jeremy 
 Taylor remarked, twelve years after he left college, 
 that "education is so great and so invincible a pre- 
 judice, that he who masters the inconvenience of it is 
 more to be commended than he can justly be blamed 
 that complies ' with it." His own career was a com- 
 ment on this passage. No one was ever more incon- 
 venienced than he by the prejudice of that education 
 which he received at Cambridge, and few have tried 
 more manfully to master it. But the very narrow circle 
 of minds among whom he was trained at college were 
 filled with the passion of prerogative government in 
 Church and State, and the duty of upholding it by all 
 the apparatus of applied patristic literature. In a 
 less intellectual and more physical sense, the laborious 
 youth of Taylor presents itself to us as repressed 
 within such limits as are now not endurable by an 
 agricultural labourer. From the barber's shop in Petty 
 Cury to the Perse School, thence to Caius College, and 
 thence back to the shop, this is a round which can be 
 calmly made in fifteen minutes, yet it comprises all we 
 know of the first twenty years of the life of Jeremy 
 Taylor. During the greater part of his college career, 
 Milton, George Herbert, Fuller, Crashaw, and Henry 
 More were inmates of the same university. Jeremy 
 Taylor may well have brushed against the sleeves of 
 each of them as he passed along the narrow streets 
 of Cambridge. But not one of their lives touched his ; 
 not one thought of theirs diverted him for a moment 
 from his solitary course of study. 
 
 An accident broke up the stillness of Taylor's seques-
 
 8 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 tered life, and flung him into the world. In 1633, 
 being below the canonical age, he took holy orders, 
 and in 1634 became a master of arts. His chamber- 
 fellow (the usual arrangement was that two graduates 
 slept in large beds in the outer chamber of each set 
 of rooms, in the company of two scholars in smaller 
 beds, which in the daytime were pushed out of sight 
 below the larger), a Rev. Thomas Eisden, three years his 
 senior, was engaged as a preacher at St. Paul's. Being 
 prevented from carrying out his duties, Eisden per- 
 suaded Jeremy Taylor to go up to London and preach 
 in his place. It is evident that the younger man must 
 already, perhaps in the college chapel, have proved his 
 aptitude for public speaking, since at Michaelmas 1634 
 he was appointed by the Master to be prselector in 
 rhetoric. At all events, he proceeded to St. Paul's in 
 Eisden's place and preached on successive occasions "to 
 the admiration and astonishment of his auditory." His 
 success was instantaneous, and his sermons the sensa- 
 tion of the moment; it became the fashion to go to 
 hear this young Mr. Taylor from Cambridge. We are 
 told that " by his florid and youthful beauty, and sweet 
 and pleasant air, and sublime and raised discourses, he 
 made his hearers take him for some young angel, newly 
 descended from the visions of glory." No one had 
 preached in this way since the divine Dr. Donne, 
 occupant of that very pulpit, had died three years 
 before. 
 
 We have in all probability reached the autumn of 
 1634, and the opening of Jeremy Taylor's twenty -second 
 year. He had now the fatal fortune of attracting the 
 favour of the most powerful and the most unlucky 
 man in England. The fame of the new star, that
 
 i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 9 
 
 already "outshone" all the rest of the ecclesiastical 
 firmament, came to the ears of Laud, and Jeremy 
 Taylor was commanded to preach before his Grace. 
 If Laud had questioned the reports which had reached 
 him, he doubted no longer. He frankly recognised the 
 genius of the astonishing youth with wonder and satis- 
 faction. Among all Laud's faults, a disdain of learning 
 and subtlety has never been enumerated; he set himself 
 at once to draw music from an instrument so delicate 
 and rich, and already attuned so carefully to the note 
 of prerogative. This was a critical time in Laud's 
 career; since August 1633 he had been Primate of 
 England, and the threads of the whole ecclesiastical 
 system were in his hand. He was at length enabled 
 by vigorous administration of the ecclesiastical law 
 to treat the extreme section of the Puritans with 
 unmitigated severity. He was drawing the cords of 
 discipline with more and more angry impatience 
 around every limb of the unfortunate English Church, 
 and those who resisted him had to fly, as best they 
 might, to Holland, to Maryland, or to Massachusetts. 
 
 For the next two years we know nothing of the 
 fortunes of Jeremy Taylor, except that he lived under 
 the protection and guidance of Laud. Rust has pre- 
 served a pleasant anecdote of the youth's early con- 
 versation with his patron. The archbishop, after 
 hearing him preach, very graciously admitted that his 
 "discourse was beyond exception," and even "beyond 
 imitation." But "the wise prelate thought him too 
 young," and indeed twenty-two years is but a modest 
 age for a divine. Jeremy Taylor proved his wit, and, 
 if we consider the circumstances, his courage, by reply- 
 ing that he humbly begged his Grace to pardon that
 
 10 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 fault of youth, and promised "if he lived he would 
 mend it." It is certain that Laud was greatly pleased 
 with him, and there is no reason to believe that his 
 favour ever flagged. It has been often said that Laud 
 could not appreciate geniality in others, yet he recog- 
 nised it in Juxon and in Taylor. Perhaps it would be 
 safer to say, that he neither appreciated it nor heeded 
 it in those whose views in any measure differed from 
 his own, but it seems as though he recognised the 
 importance of graceful manners in men who were 
 zealously employed in his work. 
 
 This year, 1635, marked the height of Laud's suc- 
 cess. "Without imagination or the power of looking 
 forward, ignorant of the mainsprings of human action, 
 led on by the desire to do what in his contracted 
 earnestness he deemed to be right, at whatever cost to 
 himself or others, the abyss was already opening before 
 him. But he had little conception of it. He thought 
 that he was conquering all along the line of opposition, 
 warding off Rome on the one hand, crushing Puritan 
 nonconformity on the other. In the glorious task he 
 had set himself, he needed aiders and abettors. He 
 could not begin too early to train labourers for his 
 vineyard. Fresh Juxons and Wrens and Montagus 
 must be trained to carry on the irresistible policy of 
 Thorough; where there was any splendour of talent 
 and virtue in the English Church it must be captured 
 young, and be shielded from caprice. Two years were 
 to pass before it was brought home to that stubborn 
 and rigorous nature that he might fail in his purpose, 
 and might drag down in his fall those institutions of 
 monarchy and Episcopacy which he loved so sincerely. 
 
 Meanwhile the juvenile Jeremy Taylor was but one,
 
 I.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 11 
 
 even if the most brilliantly gifted, of the youthful 
 divines of promise whom it was the archbishop's duty 
 to train for the work of repression and reform. We 
 do not know whether Laud permitted him to return 
 to Cambridge, or whether he brought him to London ; 
 Taylor did not vacate his fellowship at Caius College 
 until Lady Day 1636. Laud's admiration of the young 
 man's genius did not blind him to his immaturity; and 
 the " young angel, newly descended from the visions 
 of glory," required careful training in the more mun- 
 dane and instant parts of ecclesiastical discipline. To 
 the prosaic mind of Laud, it is not at all certain that 
 the ecstatic dream, the coloured reverie of Taylor, 
 would greatly appeal. He would admire it, no doubt, 
 and love the holy and charming young proficient, but 
 he would see a danger in it. The great thing was the 
 cause of Thorough. In this was Taylor sound ? 
 
 The answer to this question must be that, so far as 
 we can discern, Taylor was absolutely sound. He had 
 none of the spirit of a revolutionary; his nature, 
 reverential and timid, accepted the authority before him 
 without question. It is not impossible that the arch- 
 bishop took Taylor with him on those metropolitan 
 visitations which he had lately started. It is certain 
 that he found him, at present, too rhetorical and 
 imaginative for his practical purposes, and decided, in 
 language which betrayed an affectionate pride in so 
 candid and docile a disciple, that it was " for the ad- 
 vantage of the world, that such mighty parts should 
 be afforded better opportunities of study and improve- 
 ment than a course of constant preaching would allow 
 of"; he determined that Taylor should settle at 
 Oxford. It has been thought surprising, and compli-
 
 12 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 mentary neither to the learning nor the loyalty of 
 Cambridge, that Laud should have chosen for this 
 purpose the other university. But this shows a failure 
 to comprehend the special meaning attached by the 
 archbishop to " study and improvement." What 
 Laud designed was that Taylor should enter the circle 
 at Oxford which was being carefully prepared as a 
 forcing-house for the ideas which alone seemed salu- 
 tary to his bitter pertinacity of purpose. 
 
 So completely had one society in Oxford become 
 the centre of Laud's system of propaganda, that Rust 
 actually says that at this juncture the archbishop 
 placed Jeremy Taylor "in his own college of All Souls 
 in Oxford," although, of course, in the exact and usual 
 sense, Laud was not even a member of that college. 
 On the 23rd of October 1635, he wrote from Lambeth 
 to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls recommending 
 to them "Mr. Jeremiah Taylor," as "an honest man 
 and a good scholar," and heartily praying that he 
 should be elected to the fellowship left vacant by the 
 enforced retirement of a Mr. Osborne, for whom Laud 
 provided elsewhere. It appears from the archbishop's 
 letter, that Taylor had already been incorporated into 
 Oxford, with an ad eundem degree, at University 
 College. Laud writes in his customary dictatorial 
 tone, and it is certain that formal difficulties presented 
 themselves, Gilbert Sheldon, the Warden of All Souls, 
 afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, protesting 
 against the high-handed procedure of Laud in this 
 delicate matter. Jeremy Taylor, however, after a 
 hurried and probably final visit to Cambridge, presented 
 himself at Oxford, and was inspected by the fellows of 
 All Souls. They fell under his irresistible charm, and
 
 I.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 13 
 
 pronounced him "a person of most wonderful parts, 
 and like to be an ornament " to their society. The 
 formal difficulty was avoided by holding no election, 
 but Laud, in his right as visitor of the college, nomi- 
 nated his protege to the vacant probationary fellowship 
 at All Souls on the 3rd of November 1635, the society 
 being "almost unanimous" in welcoming him. On 
 the 14th of January 1636, he was admitted a "true 
 and perpetual fellow " of the college. 
 
 Here, then, for two years we have to think of him, 
 sedately preparing for the work which seemed to lie 
 before him, and learning, as Anthony a Wood says, 
 what would "enable him to write casuistically." His 
 native eloquence and fancy were checked during this 
 period of preparation in the school of Thorough. It 
 was another Appello Ccesarem that his impetuous patron 
 wished him to produce, and not a Holy Dying or a 
 Great Exemplar. Laud took care not to lose sight of 
 him; he made the young divine his chaplain, and 
 doubtless often summoned him to Lambeth, that he 
 might observe the growth of his mind and strengthen 
 his resolution. 
 
 Several interesting men are known to have come 
 into contact with Jeremy Taylor during his early 
 years at Oxford. His intimacy with Franciscus a 
 Sancta Clara was close, and the memory of it developed 
 after his departure into an Oxford legend. Sancta 
 Clara, whose real name was Christopher Davenport, 
 a man of many pseudonyms, was a missionary friar, 
 who had lately arrived from Douai. He was a subtle 
 and highly adroit personage, whose aim in life was to 
 reconcile the English Church with Eome, and to do so 
 by the gentlest and most insinuating of flatteries. He
 
 14 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 conciliated society with success ; the king became more 
 than tolerant to Sancta Clara ; the queen took him as 
 her chaplain; he grew intimate with many of the 
 Anglican bishops, and Laud himself was afterwards 
 accused by the Puritans of encouraging him. In 
 slightly later years than we have yet reached, the 
 graceful Franciscan pervaded Oxford, carrying with 
 him a purpose of courtly casuistry and insidious en- 
 croachment. That he paid particular attention to the 
 youthful fellow of All Souls, and was careful to culti- 
 vate his conversation, was a proof of the signal promise 
 already given by the nature of Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 A more interesting acquaintance offered itself to 
 Taylor at Oxford. On arriving there, he found the 
 university animated by the presence of a spirit of 
 wonderful brightness, and a conscience personally dis- 
 interested to a rare degree, but fretful, litigious, and 
 violently swayed by every wind of doctrine. This was 
 the extraordinary William Chillingworth, Laud's god- 
 son, who had gone over to Rome, and had actually 
 retired for a time to the Jesuits' college in Douai, but 
 who, in 1631, had been turned again, by Laud's corre- 
 spondence, from "a doubting Papist into a confirmed 
 Protestant." A wavering and sceptical judgment, re- 
 lentlessly lighted by what was doubtless the acutest in- 
 tellect at that time applied in England to ecclesiastical 
 matters, Chillingworth's love of dialectic for its own 
 sake was so pronounced, that it was a jest in Oxford 
 that he might be seen hurrying up and down in Trinity 
 Garden, searching for somebody to dispute with. Thus 
 Chillingworth had gone in and out, seeking rest and 
 finding none. Laud, who admired him, and humoured 
 him with signal patience, was doubtless pleased that
 
 i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 15 
 
 his younger and more docile friend should sharpen 
 his wits against the keenest intelligence in Oxford. 
 And by 1636, Chilling worth was already partly calm- 
 ing himself in the preparation of his own great and 
 famous book. 
 
 We have an interesting glimpse of Taylor in one 
 of Chillingworth's letters of this time, written during 
 an absence from Oxford, in which he begs his corre- 
 spondent, or Mr. (afterwards Sir Henry) Coventry, to 
 tell Jeremy Taylor that " one that knows him " that 
 is Chillingworth himself has been heard to "magnify 
 him exceedingly for other things, but censure him for " 
 one, namely his inattention to the reasonings of others. 
 This keen observer, who had been greatly impressed 
 by the young divine's ability, was nevertheless struck 
 by his neglect of the arguments of his opponent; 
 "methinks," says Chillingworth, "he wants much of 
 the ethical part of a discourser, and slights too much 
 many times the arguments of those he discourses with." 
 Taylor was, in fact, far more of a rhetorician than of a 
 casuist, just as in later years he was to be rather a 
 religious man of letters than a logical theologian. But 
 the terms of Chillingworth's letter, in which he begs 
 his friend to delay his admonitior long enough to 
 prevent Taylor from suspecting who his critic is, and 
 to be candid with the utmost gentleness, prove the 
 high affection and esteem which Taylor inspired. At 
 his own college, we are told, "love and admiration still 
 waited upon him," and the appreciation of his "extra- 
 ordinary worth and sweetness" was universal. No 
 doubt, had Chillingworth spoken directly to Taylor 
 about his want of interest in argument, his young 
 friend would gently and gaily have returned the parry.
 
 16 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 We know that the dialectic of Oxford churchmen 
 seemed dry enough to him in later years, as he looked 
 back with a smile to the days when he listened to 
 "persons of great understanding oftentimes so amused 
 with the authority of their church, that it is pity to 
 see them sweat in answering some objections, which 
 they know not how to do, but yet believe they must, 
 because the church hath said it." A description of 
 Chillingworth, too, seems to have hitherto escaped 
 notice in the labyrinths of Taylor's Dudor Dubitantium : 
 "I knew a scholar once who was a man of a quick 
 apprehension, and easy to receive an objection, who 
 when he read the Roman doctors was very much of 
 their opinion, and as much against them when he read 
 their adversaries ; but kept himself to the religion of 
 his country, concerning which at all times he remem- 
 bered that there were rare arguments and answers 
 respectively, though he could not then think upon 
 them." 
 
 With his twenty-fifth year, Taylor's period of proba- 
 tion came to a close. Laud was satisfied with the success 
 of his experiment, and gave the faithful disciple his first 
 rewards. The year 1638 was critical in Taylor's career. 
 Laud determined on one of those complex shiftings by 
 which he encouraged his followers, and was vigilant in 
 pulling up those weeds of Puritan disaffection which 
 the soil of England was now "too apt to nourish." 
 The valuable incumbency of Uppingham, in Rutland- 
 shire, had been held since 1631 by Dr. Edward Martin, 
 President of Queens' College, and one of Laud's most 
 faithful supporters at Cambridge, ultimately Dean of 
 Ely. Martin never resided at Uppingham, where the 
 duty was performed by his curate, Peter Hausted,
 
 i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 17 
 
 a small dramatist of some note, author of The Rival 
 Friends. Laud, acting in the name of Juxon, who, now 
 that he was Lord High Treasurer, left these questions 
 of minor preferment to his friend and chief, trans- 
 ferred Martin to another rich sinecure, that of Hough- 
 ton Conquest, in Bedfordshire, and on the 23rd of 
 March 1638 instituted Jeremy Taylor to Uppingham. 
 Taylor was not inclined to leave his duties to be per- 
 formed by a curate, and Peter Hausted, who had 
 proved himself a zealous High Churchman, was made 
 rector of Much Hadham in Herts; he died a little 
 later, in the dark year 1645, fighting at the siege of 
 Banbury. 
 
 Taylor made Uppingham his principal place of 
 residence for about four years, during which time 
 the entries in the parish books testify to the zeal 
 with which he carried out his duties as rector. The 
 quiet of the country life, far from the wordy contests 
 of Oxford, was a great consolation to his spirit. He 
 was now, for the first time, able to cultivate the 
 things that he loved best, the reading of the Scrip- 
 tures, and the methods by which the contemplative 
 spirit can suck most sweetness from that honeycomb, 
 namely, as he says himself, industry, meditation, con- 
 ference, the human arts and sciences, and whatever 
 " God and good news " offer as a reward for intellectual 
 service. Of Taylor's experiences at Uppingham we 
 know very little ; doubtless there was not much in his 
 sequestered habits to record. One little vignette we 
 possess, like a peep through the chink of a door. 
 Mrs. Edward Turner of Little Dalby, though a parson's 
 wife, was on her road to Rome, when she consulted 
 Jeremy Taylor at Uppingham. He took her into his 
 
 B
 
 18 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 study, and "did enjoin her penance"; when she saw, 
 and in spite of her tendencies was shocked at the sight, 
 a little altar with a crucifix upon it. The anecdote 
 probably dates from about 1640. 
 
 The conjectures of the scandalised Mrs. Turner 
 must be taken for what they are worth, but it seems 
 certain that about this time Jeremy Taylor, like so 
 many of the partisans of Thorough, like their tremend- 
 ous leader himself, was suspected of a tendency to 
 Popery. It was difficult to hold the straight high 
 path between the zealots and Kome. The very stiffen- 
 ing against Puritans made the English priest natur- 
 ally lean towards ritual, until, as the egregious John 
 Bastwick said, in 1637, the Church became "as full of 
 ceremonies as a dog is full of fleas." 
 
 Taylor's main intellectual centre was still at Oxford, 
 where on the 5th of November 1638 he was appointed 
 to preach at St. Mary's before the University on the 
 anniversary of Guy Fawkes's Day. Wood gives an 
 account, evidently by hearsay, of the circumstances 
 which attended the delivery of this sermon. If we 
 are to believe him, Taylor had no free hand in the 
 composition of his address, which the vice-chancellor 
 first commanded him to prepare, and then enlarged 
 with many passages of his own, offensive to the Eoman 
 Catholics, so that after preaching it Taylor had to 
 apologise to his Roman friends, and express his regret 
 at the opinions which had been put into his mouth. 
 Wood's authority for some of these statements was 
 Sancta Clara, who told him that Jeremy Taylor had 
 "several times expressed some sorrow for those things 
 he had said." The subtle Franciscan was not to be 
 trusted, and if Wood had heard Taylor's sermon, or
 
 i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 19 
 
 had read it, he would hardly have repeated these 
 remarks. The whole address bears the mark of one 
 mind and one voice. There is every probability, 
 indeed, that the gracious divine, meeting his Roman 
 acquaintances in Oxford, and being reproached with 
 his attack on them, would cautiously deprecate the 
 idea of any personal unfriendliness. Further than this 
 it is impossible that he could go. The terms in which 
 he afterwards assures us that at no moment of his life 
 was he tempted to acquiesce in the Roman doctrine 
 are too explicit to be overlooked. 
 
 The Sermon on Gunpowder Treason is the earliest 
 composition of Taylor's which we possess. It is not 
 a sermon in the modern sense, but a dissertation on 
 a point of ecclesiastical law casuistically treated ; some- 
 thing, we may say, between a lecture by the Dixie Pro- 
 fessor and a Hulsean Lecture. It is dedicated, in a 
 strain of excessive modesty, to Laud ; and the preacher 
 states that the Vice-Chancellor had commanded "a 
 publication of these very short and sudden meditations." 
 He speaks as one whose arguments against Rome had 
 long attracted the notice of the authorities, until the 
 university had been drawn to appoint him its " public 
 voice " in a discovery of the king's religious enemies 
 as well as in its " thanksgiving " to Laud himself. So 
 far from attacking the Romanists, the author expresses 
 a lively wish not to seem uncharitable, and, indeed, it 
 is hard to tell how Sancta Clara, or Panzani himself, 
 could reasonably object to a word in the dissertation. 
 The Sermon on Gunpowder Treason is not doctrinal : it 
 is entirely directed to one legal point, the assumed 
 right of rebellion against heretical princes; and the 
 Jesuits at Oxford would have been crazy to complain
 
 20 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 of an official Anglican divine for resisting this particular 
 assumption of theirs. 
 
 The style of this address is dry and crabbed, with 
 that incessant quotation from Latin authorities which 
 was at that time so dangerous a vice of English prose. 
 In only a single instance does it rise above the common- 
 place level of the ecclesiastical jurisprudence of the 
 hour. Near the close we find one paragraph which 
 prophesies of the coming greatness of the writer : 
 
 "Now after such a sublimity of malic?, I will not instance 
 in the sacrilegious ruin of the neighbouring temples, which 
 needs must have perished in the flame, nor in the disturbing 
 the ashes of our entombed kings, devouring their dead rums 
 like sepulchral dogs. These are but minutes, in respect of 
 the ruin prepared for the living temples." 
 
 These are clumsy phrases and halting cadences, but 
 here we see at least, trying his undeveloped wings, the 
 cygnet that was to become so proud and magnificent 
 a swan. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor was now settled in a rising fame as 
 well as fortune ; assured of the favour of the party in 
 power, he had a right to expect rapid and high pro- 
 motion. He proceeded to form for himself a family. 
 Towards the end of his tutorial work at Caius College, 
 he had taught a medical student, Edward Langsdale, 
 the son of a London gentleman. There was great 
 sympathy between the teacher and the pupil, who 
 was but six years his junior, and the relation ripened 
 into a lifelong friendship. Edward Langsdale, who 
 outlived the bishop, became a physician at Gains- 
 borough, and on the 27th of May 1639 Jeremy Taylor 
 married his sister, Phoebe, at Uppingham. Of Phoebe 
 Taylor we know nothing, save that she bore her husband
 
 i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 21 
 
 six (if not seven) children, and that she died during the 
 time of their retirement in Wales; a son, William, 
 having died at Uppingham in May 1642. There has 
 been useless speculation as to the reason of Phoebe 
 Taylor's obscurity, but she was doubtless a simple 
 and house-abiding matron of whom there would be 
 little to record and no one to retail it. Jeremy Taylor 
 was somewhat reserved under his sweetness. We 
 know, from An Apology for Liturgy, that he did not 
 love to discuss his household affairs; he was one of 
 those who " will be so desirous of their liberty as to 
 preserve that in private, when they have no concern- 
 ments but their own, for matter of order or scandal." 
 Such faint indications as we possess point to an un- 
 ruffled domestic felicity. 
 
 Four years now pass in which we are unable to 
 catch a glimpse of Taylor further than what the formal 
 registers of Uppingham and All Souls College have to 
 offer us. In his parish work he was "a rare conductor 
 of souls, and knew how to counsel and to advise, to 
 solve difficulties, and determine cares, and quiet con- 
 sciences." In all this pleasant labour he was certainly 
 happier than in exercising the casuistry which his visits 
 to Oxford forced upon him. Nor did he spare his 
 too passionate colleagues the lambency of his humour, 
 comparing "their subtilties and spinosities" to the 
 feats of Don Quixote. He " would make sport some- 
 times with the romantic sophistry and fantastic adven- 
 tures of school-errantry." It seems that he was slow 
 to perceive the gathering storm of cloud. But when 
 his great patron and the mainstay of his fortunes fell, 
 he must have been stricken with alarm. In February 
 1641 Laud was impeached by Sir Harry Vane; on the
 
 22 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 1st of March he was sent to the Tower ; on the 25th 
 of June he ceased to be Chancellor of Oxford. A 
 little later all his rents and profits as Primate were 
 sequestered. These were fatal dates in the career of 
 Jeremy Taylor. " I am robbed of that which once did 
 bless me," he wrote, and all the house of his hopes 
 must have come crashing about his head. 
 
 It does not appear that he had hitherto recognised 
 in the Puritans a serious danger. He had paid them 
 little attention ; his thoughts and arguments had been 
 centred on the advances of Rome. No doubt he con- 
 sidered that Laud and Juxon were perfectly well able 
 to keep the "sectaries" in order. But against the 
 policy of Thorough had arisen that of Root-and-Branch, 
 and the harshness of the bishops had brought about its 
 equally violent reaction. It was probably not until 
 1641 that Taylor realised that the discipline of Juxon 
 and the authority of Laud had been strained beyond 
 bearing, and that, in fact, they were going to be 
 borne no longer. The scheme of church-government, 
 in implicit obedience to which the whole of Taylor's 
 placid youth had been spent, suddenly passed from 
 the offensive to the defensive attitude. He could 
 disregard the Puritan advance no longer ; he had to 
 join his brethren in resisting its obtrusive energy, 
 step by step. For that great contention was now to 
 be fought out to a definite issue, which the wise poet, 
 Samuel Daniel, had foreseen so long before, when he 
 wrote, in his Musophilus : 
 
 " Sacred Religion, mother of form and fear, 
 
 How gorgeously sometimes dost thou sit decked ! 
 What pompous vestures do we make thee wear ! 
 What stately piles we, prodigal, erect !
 
 i.] CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 23 
 
 How sweet perfum'd thou art ! How shining clear ! 
 How solemnly observ'd, with what respect ! 
 
 Another time, all plain, all quite threadbare, 
 Thou must have all within, 'and nought without ; 
 
 Sit poorly without light, disrob'd, no care 
 Of outward grace to amuse the poor devout ; 
 
 Powerless, unhallowed, scarcely men can spare 
 The necessary rites to set thee out."
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CIVIL WAR 
 
 (1642-1649) 
 
 AT the breaking out of the Civil War, in the summer 
 of 1642, Jeremy Taylor's name ceases to appear in the 
 registers of Uppingham, nor does it recur there later. 
 He was now chaplain-in-ordinary to the king, and in 
 all probability he joined the troops when the standard 
 was raised close by him, at Nottingham (August 22). 
 The rectory at Uppingham doubtless continued for 
 some twelve months more to be occupied by his 
 family, since it was their legal home, and there was 
 no species of personal danger imminent to them there. 
 Moreover, no attempt was made to sequester the 
 living until May 1644. Charles I. left Nottingham 
 for Shrewsbury in September, and then proceeded 
 in a south-eastern line direct for Oxford, which, after 
 the indecisive engagement at Edgehill, he reached 
 at the end of October. We may be certain that 
 whether Jeremy Taylor accompanied the king on the 
 campaign, or awaited his arrival at Oxford, he took 
 part in that delusive and ironic triumphal entry 
 " amidst the plaudits of citizens and scholars," which 
 closed the prologue to the long Civil War. 
 
 A new patron now arose, to take the place of the 
 
 24
 
 CHAP, ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 25 
 
 fallen Laud. Amongst those who joined Charles I. at 
 Oxford in November 1642 was Sir Christopher Hatton, 
 a cousin of the great Chancellor. This gentleman had 
 possibly been acquainted with Jeremy Taylor at Cam- 
 bridge, since he was at Jesus College during some of 
 the years which Taylor spent at Caius. Still more 
 probably, he had known him as a neighbour, for 
 Hatton's residence, Kirby Hall, although on the 
 borders of Eockingham Forest in Northamptonshire, 
 was but a few miles from Uppingham. Hatton enjoyed 
 at this time " a great reputation," as Clarendon him- 
 self, who disliked him, had to admit. He was con- 
 sidered a person of high judgment, and he imposed 
 himself upon Charles I., who frequently deferred to 
 his opinion, and showed him constant favour. For a 
 moment, Hatton seemed about to become a very pro- 
 minent personage in England, but he did not stand 
 the trial of adversity. "In a few years, he found a 
 way utterly to lose " the "reputation he had made, and 
 in his old age he was discredited and obscure. But 
 at the outbreak of the war, he made a brilliant 
 appearance, and the very best fact that history has 
 preserved about him is that for six or seven years 
 he was a liberal patron and faithful friend to Jeremy 
 Taylor. 
 
 The king's chaplain was by this time in the thick 
 of the intellectual battle. On the 7th of September 
 the House of Commons had passed a resolution for the 
 abolition of all bishops, and the Lords had ratified the 
 motion. It was necessary to contend immediately with 
 this policy, so violent and monstrous to the consciences 
 of half of the king's subjects. Jeremy Taylor sat 
 down to produce that work of his which is commonly
 
 26 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 known as Episcopacy Asserted, the actual title of which, 
 as published late in 1642, is Of the Sacred Order of Epi- 
 scopacy. In this, Taylor's second book, the student of 
 literature discovers little advance in style. The ex- 
 cessive use of Latin and Greek quotation continues ; 
 from the brief, clear, argumentative statement all 
 rhetoric and all ornament are excluded. The book is 
 more a paraphrase of authorities and a compendium of 
 ruling cases than a specimen of independent author- 
 ship. The original edition of Episcopacy Asserted was 
 dedicated to Hatton in a prefatory discourse, in which 
 Taylor distinctly says that the statesman is his only 
 resource ; "I am forced upon you." He has found 
 out that he has no private advantage to expect from 
 his chaplaincy to the king; "my person must not go 
 thither to sanctuary unless it be to pay my devotion." 
 It is to Hatton that the book is commended, as a 
 " tried friend " ; it is Hatton who must be to its 
 author "a refuge for my need." 
 
 The attitude of the young casuist is one of surprised 
 indignation at the presumption of the sectaries. He 
 cannot believe that the latter will be supported by the 
 country ; " it is the honour of the Church of England 
 that all her children and obedient people are full of 
 indignation against rebels, be they of any interest or 
 party whatsoever." But as he proceeds with his dis- 
 quisition, events are running faster than his pen, and 
 he lifts his eyes from the page to see all Israel scattered 
 upon the mountains as sheep that have no shepherd. 
 Yet his spirits rise again ; he thinks that the authority 
 and seemliness of Episcopacy have only to be made 
 manifest for those who have rebelled to lay down 
 their arms and crave for pardon. He sets himself to
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 27 
 
 prove, with a myriad of instances borrowed from " the 
 holy primitives," that "the bishop is the bond and 
 ligature of the Church's unity," and "separation from 
 the bishop a symbol of faction." He arrogates "a 
 capacity to the bishops " to undertake charges of public 
 trust, "it serves the King, it assists the Republic." 
 He attacks with scorn " the white and watery colours 
 of lay-elders." It is not probable that his arguments 
 convinced a single Puritan in those angry days. His 
 proofs of the necessity of absolute forms of Church 
 government have not found favour with later theo- 
 logians; even Bishop Heber, an enthusiast for the 
 author, dismisses Episcopacy Asserted with the remark 
 that the reasons on which Taylor rests his position 
 are as unsound as the position itself is prima facie 
 questionable. 
 
 The treatise, however, served its controversial pur- 
 pose; it closes, in particular, with a freedom and 
 energy of writing which were highly appreciated in 
 the Oxford circle of Royalist scholars. On the 1st of 
 November, by royal mandate, Taylor received the 
 degree of doctor of divinity ; and early in the follow- 
 ing* year he was presented to a sinecure which was 
 still vaguely within the influence of the king, that 
 of Overstone, between Northampton and Welling- 
 borough. It is not improbable that this appointment 
 was connected with his friendship with the Earl and 
 Countess of Northampton, a relation which seems to 
 have escaped the notice of all Jeremy Taylor's bio- 
 graphers. But Spencer Compton, second Earl of 
 Northampton, was not only the friend of Taylor, but 
 apparently his patron, and his remarkable influence 
 on the literary work of the divine will be mentioned
 
 28 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 later on. Of this Lord Northampton too little is 
 preserved; as Clarendon said, he was "not known 
 until his evening." After living a retired life in the 
 enjoyment of his great wealth, he suddenly developed 
 remarkable public energy at the breaking out of the 
 Civil War. Charles I. perceived his singular import* 
 ance, and in November 1642, after the battle of Edge- 
 hill, Northampton was put in charge of the whole 
 district in Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire which 
 surrounded Banbury. He was extremely active, until 
 his brilliant career was cut short, at the age of forty- 
 two, at the battle of Hopton Heath, on the 19th of 
 March 1643. When we consider that Taylor was his 
 valued friend, and that Overstone was within what 
 we may call Lord Northampton's military district, it 
 is hard to believe that the appointment had no con- 
 nection with the kindness either of the earl or of his 
 lady. The widowed Countess Mary who was the 
 daughter of the poet of Bosworth Field, Sir John 
 Beaumont remained the protector of Taylor, and 
 he described her afterwards, in reference to her kind- 
 ness to him, as "hugely forward to entertain any 
 instrument whereby she might grow and increase in 
 the service of God and the charities of human people." 
 Nothing seems to me more likely than that, when 
 Taylor's wife and children were forced to leave 
 Uppingham, Lady Northampton found a temporary 
 asylum for them, half-way to Oxford, at Overstone. 
 Meanwhile it is to be observed that as Lord North- 
 ampton died early in 1643, and as he had been since 
 the breaking out of the war closely engaged in military 
 business, the long conversations in which " that excel- 
 lent person" discussed theological literature with
 
 it.] THE CIVIL WAR 29 
 
 Jeremy Taylor were probably held before the summer 
 of 1642. 1 
 
 The favour which Christopher Hatton enjoyed with 
 the king was now steadily on the increase. Various 
 distinctions were conferred upon him ; he was raised 
 to the peerage as Lord Hatton of Kirby in the summer 
 of 1643, and before the winter of that year wa) out, 
 was appointed Comptroller of the King's Household, 
 a post which he held as long as Charles had a house- 
 hold to be comptrolled. Hatton's friendship for Taylor 
 became still more practically intimate after this ap- 
 pointment, and, as chaplain-in-ordinary and general 
 manager of household business, the two were brought 
 into constant intercourse. A curious incident unites 
 the names of these companions in a manner difficult 
 to unravel. In 1644 a volume was published at Oxford, 
 called The Psalter of David, "by the Right Honourable 
 Christopher Hatton." A manuscript note by Anthony 
 a Wood, in a copy of the first edition, however, informs 
 us that it was really composed by Jeremy Taylor, and 
 after the death of both, on the title-page of the eighth 
 edition, the name of Taylor was quietly substituted 
 for that of Hatton by the publisher of 1672. Roger 
 North says that Lord Hatton "had bright parts, and 
 
 1 The parochial registers of Overstone, unfortunately, begin 
 with the year of Jeremy Taylor's death, 1667. The Earl of 
 Winchilsea and Nottingham very kindly allowed me to search 
 the vast accretions of his family papers for undescribed letters 
 of Jeremy Taylor which were believed to exist there. These, 
 unhappily, could not be discovered, but during the investiga- 
 tion we came by accident upon a deed of Charles i., with his 
 great seal, granting the rectory of Overstone to Taylor. It is 
 on this document, which remained in Lord Hatton's possession, 
 that the statements in the text are founded.
 
 30 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 professed also to be religious." Eden, although he 
 rejected the Psalter from Taylor's works, was inclined 
 to think that he had a hand in preparing it for the 
 press. It is a little edition of the Psalms, interspersed 
 with collects, and intended for "the closets of divers 
 devout persons." Nothing can be more natural than 
 that Hatton should propose and design such a work, 
 and should employ Taylor to carry it out under his 
 supervision. 
 
 For the next two years, to follow the fortunes of 
 Jeremy Taylor is to trace the adventures of the royal 
 household to which he was attached. Fuller had fled 
 to Oxford, but neither he nor Chillingworth was in 
 complete sympathy with the king or with his courtiers, 
 and both soon passed elsewhere, Chillingworth to die 
 of a wound received early in 1644 at the siege of 
 Arundel. With Fuller, his one great literary rival, 
 it does not seem that Taylor had any relations ; they 
 appear to have lived side by side each unconscious of 
 the other. On the 6th of May 1644 Mercurius Aulicus 
 reports that the members have placed one Isaac Massey 
 to preach at Uppingham, in the place of the true 
 pastor, Doctor Jeremy Taylor, whose house had been 
 "plundered, his estate seized, and his family driven 
 out of doors." But the latter statement probably 
 refers to events of the previous year. On the 3rd of 
 June 1644, the exodus from Oxford began, and there 
 were weary months of marching and counter-marching 
 before, on the 23rd of November, the king re-entered 
 that city in triumph. That temporary exultation soon 
 sank in the depression of the poverty and distress at 
 Oxford, where early in 1645 a wretchedness approach- 
 ing to famine dismayed the royalist garrison. On
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 31 
 
 January 10th, Taylor's earliest and most efficient friend, 
 Laud, was executed. On the 7th of May the king 
 marched out with his army towards the north, leaving 
 Oxford to be starved up to the verge of submission. 
 To and fro, through the Midland counties, Charles 
 conducted his followers in vague and ineffectual man- 
 O3uvres. By what means Jeremy Taylor became 
 separated from the king's household it is impossible 
 to determine ; but he was with Colonel Charles Gerard 
 when that general was defeated in trying to relieve 
 Cardigan Castle on the 4th of February 1645, and 
 he was among the prisoners captured by the Parlia- 
 mentarians. 
 
 The campaign in South Wales raged up and down 
 the valley of the Teify, and particularly round Cardigan 
 Castle, which was the strategic base of that position. 
 It was the brilliant Parliamentary general, Rowland 
 Laugharne, who captured Cardigan at Christmas time 
 1644, although held by a strong garrison, who defended 
 it "until a semi-culverine of brass, belonging to the 
 Leopard, was mounted and played three days upon 
 them, forcing a breach which was gallantly entered." 
 On the 22nd of January 1645, Gerard, descending the 
 Teify to check the invaders, was repulsed, and again, 
 as we have seen, on the 4th of February, when Taylor 
 must have been captured. Laugharne pushed on, 
 impeded by his prisoners and his booty, to the investi- 
 ture of Newcastle Emlyn, on the southern bank of the 
 Teify, a strong fortress which was the key to Carmar- 
 thenshire. Had the Parliamentarians stormed this 
 place, they must have overrun the county. But on 
 the 23rd of April the garrison of Newcastle Emlyn, 
 taking advantage of their magnificent base, attacked
 
 32 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 the army of Laugharne, and completely routed it. 
 Among the prisoners released by this turn in the 
 fortunes of war, Taylor may possibly have been in- 
 cluded. But it is more likely that he had been left 
 behind in Cardigan Castle, and was now exchanged. 
 It is to be noted, perhaps, that he must originally 
 have started from Newcastle Emlyn with Gerard when 
 he marched to attack Laugharne, and that this fortress 
 (the New Castle of Emlyn) was the property and one 
 of the residences of that Earl of Carbery (whose 
 courtesy title was Lord Emlyn) who was shortly to 
 be, if he was not already, Taylor's next patron. We 
 are certain, however, only of the fact that he had now 
 fallen into the hands of the enemy. 
 
 Of the events which followed this catastrophe Taylor 
 gives the following account, in language that is tanta- 
 lisingly guarded : 
 
 " In this great storm which hath dashed the vessel of the 
 Church all in pieces, I have been cast upon the coast of Wales, 
 and in a little boat thought to have enjoyed that rest and 
 quietness which in England in a greater I could not hope for. 
 Here I cast anchor, and thinking to ride safely, the storm 
 followed me with so impetuous violence, that it broke a cable, 
 and I lost my anchor. And here again I was exposed to the 
 mercy of the sea, and the gentleness of an element that could 
 neither distinguish things nor persons. And but that He 
 who stilleth the raging of the sea, and the noise of His waves, 
 and the madness of His people, had provided a plank for me, 
 I had been lost to all the opportunities of content or study. 
 But I know not whether I have been more preserved by the 
 courtesies of my friends, or the gentleness and mercies of a 
 noble enemy." 
 
 From the opening words of this passage we must 
 infer that when Taylor left the king, and retreated to
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 33 
 
 South Wales, it was with the idea of settling to clerical 
 work, not, as has been supposed, of marching as a 
 soldier, since the "little boat" is manifestly contrasted 
 with the "greater " of Oxford, Then, after the capture 
 at Cardigan, from which it is said that he was quickly 
 released, we are here instructed that after being in 
 imminent danger from the Puritan army which was 
 sweeping South Wales, Jeremy Taylor was saved by 
 the joint action of his friends and of "a noble enemy." 
 The identity of the latter is unknown, and has greatly 
 puzzled Taylor's annotators. Heber ingeniously argued 
 that it must be Colonel Laugharne, his captor and the 
 governor of Pembroke Castle, but of this there is no 
 evidence whatever. Nor do I believe that, in the 
 parlance of the seventeenth century, Laugharne or any 
 other of the men who came to the front in Pembrokeshire 
 as the leaders of the popular cause, would be styled a 
 " noble " enemy. This points to one who was techni- 
 cally a nobleman, and unless we may conjecture that 
 Essex was corresponded with, I confess that I am quite 
 at a loss to identify Taylor's possible deliverer. It 
 would greatly simplify our inquiry if we could per- 
 suade ourselves that the " noble enemy " was Richard 
 Vaughan, second Earl of Carbery, with whom Jeremy 
 Taylor was now about to take up his abode at Golden 
 Grove. 
 
 The difficulty is that Lord Carbery was, at least 
 nominally, a royalist, and therefore no "enemy." 
 But the passage which has just been quoted appeared 
 in 1647, in the preface to The Liberty of Prophesying, 
 a book primarily intended to be read by the king. 
 Taylor's language is veiled in an allusive obscurity 
 which is almost unintelligible unless we suppose that to 
 
 C
 
 34 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 have been lucid would have been to be guilty of indis- 
 cretion. Now, it is certain that Taylor's position at 
 Golden Grove was rendered doubly delicate, and yet, 
 with care, doubly secure, by the ambiguous political 
 attitude of Lord Carbery. That nobleman belonged 
 to a type of moderates, few in number in that hour 
 and place, who sympathised with liberty of conscience, 
 while deploring the excesses of the fanatics, and who 
 wished to support the king, while detesting his 
 obstinacy and ignorance. He was, in fact, exactly 
 what, a little later and with great injustice, grew 
 to be called a "trimmer," and all we know of his 
 character fits in with Halifax's inimitable description 
 of the man who could " distinguish and desire a mean 
 between the sauciness of some of the Scotch apostles, 
 and the undecent courtship of some of the silken 
 divines, who do practise to bow at the altar only to 
 learn to make the better legs at court." 
 
 Lord Carbery, who was for many years to be the 
 protector and companion of Jeremy Taylor, was at 
 this time a man of between forty and fifty years of 
 age. His position as one of the wealthiest landlords 
 in South Wales gave him great local importance, and 
 when the Civil War broke out, his loyalty to the 
 king was unquestioned. He organised the formation 
 of militia in his own counties of Carmarthen and 
 Cardigan, and after the first battles he was appointed 
 lieutenant-governor of the army in these shires, and 
 in that of Pembroke. But he showed little zeal, and 
 less as time went on. Doubtless he grew increasingly 
 disturbed by doubts of the entire justice of the Royalist 
 cause. Meanwhile, there were opposed to him the 
 energy and rapidity of Rowland Laugharne; and
 
 li.] THE CIVIL WAR 35 
 
 Lord Carbery became more and more languid as a 
 general. In March 1644 his troops were driven out 
 of Pembrokeshire, and he took the opportunity to 
 resign his appointment in favour of Gerard. He 
 withdrew to his house of Golden Grove, and rumours 
 were soon current of his cultivating the company of 
 his opponents too tamely, until it was more than hinted 
 that his allegiance was dubious. He was certainly 
 the friend and correspondent of Essex ; he was no 
 less certainly treated with singular mildness by the 
 victorious Parliamentarians. Later on in the story 
 we shall find him acquiescing contentedly in the action 
 of the House of Commons. The loyalists broadly 
 impeached both his integrity and his courage. But 
 there is no evidence that Lord Carbery was a coward ; 
 he was a " trimmer," in the original sense. He was 
 a tolerant and thoughtful man, whose conscience 
 hung in the balance between two causes, and gradually 
 leaned over on the liberal side. But by 1647, when 
 Jeremy Taylor wrote his dedication, Carbery might 
 well be regarded by Charles I. as a " noble enemy." 
 
 The storm of 1645, however, cast Taylor, deprived 
 of books, effects, and means, into "a private corner 
 of the world," as Eust tells us, where "a tender 
 providence shrouded him under her wings, and the 
 prophet was fed in the wilderness." In a romantic 
 valley of Carmarthenshire, an Oxford friend of 
 Taylor's, William Wyatt, had recently joined the 
 distinguished grammarian, Dr. William Nicholson, to 
 help him in starting a private school. Taylor may 
 well have known Nicholson also, since the future 
 Bishop of Gloucester was a frequent visitor to Oxford. 
 Since 1626, Nicholson had been rector of Llandilo-
 
 36 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 vawr, and Wyatt of Llanfihangel-Aberbythych, the 
 church of which was contiguous, on the west side, 
 with the park of Golden Grove. In the rectory, we 
 may suppose, the storm-tossed fugitive was originally 
 received, while suggestions were being made for 
 "supplying him with bread and necessaries." One 
 of the earliest initiations would naturally be to take 
 him to the great house, where the general patron, 
 Lord Carbery, fell under Taylor's customary spell, 
 welcomed him to Golden Grove, and presently made 
 him his chaplain. 
 
 These household duties did not prevent him from 
 joining Nicholson and Wyatt in their school, which 
 was held at a house called Newton Hall, which 
 Nicholson rented. This " private academy " was 
 highly successful, until the Restoration rendered its 
 revenue needless to its principal founders. Wood 
 says that "several youths were most loyally edu- 
 cated there, and afterwards sent to the universities." 
 Of these, young Christopher Hatton, the future first 
 Viscount Hatton, was one, and another was the 
 boy who afterwards became a judge, Sir John 
 Powell, and who in 1650 was matriculated from 
 Newton Hall, or Collegium Newtoniense, as the fond 
 pedantry of its founders preferred to call it. Other 
 obscurer pupils have recorded their appreciation of 
 their masters, who, in 1647, issued a Grammar, 
 apparently a joint production, to which Jeremy 
 Taylor contributed a florid dedication in English. 
 
 A third means of support remained within Taylor's 
 reach, his pen. But on his first arrival at Llanfihan- 
 gel-Aberbythych he was sadly hampered by the want of 
 books. He had been accustomed, in his Oxford days,
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 37 
 
 to that excessive and almost incessant reference to 
 authorities, which was so devastating to the prose of 
 that age, and particularly to its theology. In his 
 present retirement he felt, at first, helpless away from 
 a library ; in the "voisinage" of Golden Grove there 
 were no volumes of a casuistical species, and it was 
 long before he took courage to make bricks without 
 patristic straw. He waited to begin to write in Wales, 
 he tells us, until he felt that he "needed no other 
 books or aids than what a man carries with him on 
 horseback." Then he became, for the first time, a free 
 writer and a great master of English. But, at the 
 beginning, his spirits were too far cast down, and his 
 hopes too shattered to enable him to do more than 
 his ordinary daily business. He suffered, after the 
 shock of his disaster and his peril, from a severe 
 reaction, during which he could do no more than 
 brood over "the public dyscrasy" as he loves to 
 call it and all the calamities of his Church and 
 country. "I had seen my design blasted in the bud," 
 he says, "and I despaired in the Calends of doing 
 what I purposed in the Ides before." But gradually 
 this melancholy passed away, and he turned to literary 
 labour. 
 
 He now secured the valuable co-operation of the 
 eminent royalist publisher, Richard Royston, who, in 
 1647, bought up the remainders of Taylor's early works, 
 and issued them with his own imprint. Eoyston, who 
 was to be Taylor's publisher for the future, was a man of 
 much capacity and resource. He was the leader of his 
 profession all through the middle of the seventeenth 
 century, and when he died, full of wealth and con- 
 sideration, in 1686, he was nearly ninety years of age.
 
 38 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Royston was " bookseller to three kings," and in his 
 loyalist enthusiasm frequently got into trouble during 
 the Commonwealth. He was accused, and with perfect 
 justice, of being "a constant factor for all scandalous 
 books " against the decrees of the House of Commons. 
 His relations with Jeremy Taylor, although strained 
 once or twice, were on the whole creditable and 
 advantageous to both. 
 
 In the remainder of this chapter we will confine our- 
 selves to a rapid survey of Jeremy Taylor's publications 
 during the first four years of his residence at Golden 
 Grove, because they all belong, in conception if not in 
 execution, to the earlier period of his career. Although 
 he was stripped, after Cardigan, of all his papers, so 
 that he became " full of apprehension that I should live 
 unprofitably, and die obscurely, and be forgotten," it is 
 evident that he must have left some of his manuscripts 
 at All Souls, whence they were afterwards partly sent 
 to him. This is confirmed by the fact that at least one 
 manuscript, that of his Reverence due to the Altar, being 
 mislaid, remained at Oxford. The first work which 
 Taylor prepared at Golden Grove for the press was 
 that which is now generally known as An Apology for 
 Liturgy, part of which appeared anonymously, as A Dis- 
 course concerning Prayer, towards the close of 1646. 
 Taylor found means to bring this surreptitious issue 
 under the notice of Charles I.; and he produced the 
 complete work, with a daring dedication, "to his most 
 sacred majesty," just before the king's execution; 
 this should not be overlooked as a proof of Taylor's, 
 fidelity and courage. 
 
 An Apology for Liturgy was a very popular work 
 among the High Church party, and was often reprinted
 
 it.] THE CIVIL WAR 39 
 
 in the course of Taylor's life. It is a reply to the 
 decisions of the House of Commons as embodied in the 
 ordinance of January 1645, by which the Book of 
 Common Prayer was abolished, and a Directory of 
 Worship set up to enforce uniformity. But it is not 
 necessary to suppose that Taylor waited for this enact- 
 ment, which was but the official promulgation of views 
 which had been loudly expressed for three years past. 
 The beauty and fitness for its purpose of the English 
 liturgy in its entire constitution, the " ghostly advan- 
 tage " of employing it, the quality of the priest's power 
 in absolution, the importance of praying to God "with 
 consideration," the scandal of allowing the ecclesiastical 
 regiment to become a democracy, all these were themes 
 familiar to his thoughts, although the action of the 
 Directory compelled him to publication. 
 
 From a literary point of view, An Apology for Liturgy 
 shows a growing freedom in style. The colloquial turn 
 of some of the sentences, and the use of " Well ! " in 
 argument betray the orator beneath the casuist. The 
 treatise is rather rich in faint autobiographical touches. 
 Taylor's romantic attachment to the set forms of 
 worship takes beautiful shapes : " I can but with joy 
 and eucharist consider with what advantages and 
 blessings the pious protestant is entertained, and 
 blessed, and armed against all his needs, by the con- 
 stant and religious usage of the Common Prayer 
 Book." We listen with pleasure while he dilates on 
 his own singular relish in the collects, and his joy in 
 the forms of confession and praise. His idea of prayer 
 was of something deliberate and stately; he did not 
 believe in impromptu devotion, or worship conducted 
 without art or deliberation. He faintly and grudgingly
 
 40 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 admits the use of private extempore prayer, but 
 evidently disparages it, and asks why the Holy Spirit 
 should fly from us at the sight of an ink-horn. 
 Jeremy Taylor himself wrote down all his prayers. 
 In An Apology for Liturgy we find him still intolerant, 
 still the enemy of every sort of innovation. The 
 change, therefore, to his next public appearance is 
 something startling. 
 
 On the 28th of June 1647 was published a work, 
 the importance of which cast all Taylor's previous 
 productions into insignificance. The Liberty of Pro- 
 phesying was his first long book, and it was his first 
 independent book. In it, for the first time, he came 
 forward as a great theological innovator. It is true, as 
 S. R. Gardiner has pointed out, that "three-fourths of its 
 argument were written under the influence of Chilling- 
 worth's " Religion of a Protestant. Doubtless all those 
 walks in Oxford gardens, at the close of which Chilling- 
 worth had found cause gently to complain of Taylor's 
 inattention, had produced far more effect on the 
 younger divine than the elder supposed. Never- 
 theless, the attitude of Taylor in 1647 was a pro- 
 foundly individual one, and in one respect, and that 
 the most important, it owed nothing to a predecessor. 
 Chillingworth's entire interest had been swallowed up 
 in his analysis of English divergencies from Rome. 
 In the general " dyscrasy " Taylor gave little thought 
 to the Papal system ; he was absorbed in the troubles 
 nearer home. He has still to be fighting along the 
 narrow Anglican ridge, but his sword is turned mainly 
 now towards the side of Geneva. 
 
 The sword, however, though still unsheathed, takes 
 a far less prominent place than the palm-branch in The
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 41 
 
 Liberty of Prophesying. The discourse opens with a 
 yearning cry for amity. The Oxford attitude, the 
 old Laudian arrogance, have given way to a softer 
 tolerance. Jeremy Taylor has grown gentle and meek 
 in his adversity. He is no longer "hasty in calling 
 every disliked opinion by the name of heresy." There 
 is, we must perhaps admit, the natural difference 
 which comes over the advocate of a majority when he 
 has to appeal for a minority. The natural timidity 
 of Taylor, the too-easily fluttered spirits, have to be 
 taken into account. As Canon Hensley Henson has 
 put it, " his sense of the inherent wrongfulness of 
 forcing conscience was quickened by the discomforts 
 of his lot." But these do not explain the sudden 
 burst of intellectual and moral liberality which make 
 The Liberty of Prophesying such a stimulating volume. 
 We read it with enthusiasm, because it shows a real 
 and surprising growth in virtue and wisdom. 
 
 The spirit which inspires the author of this treatise 
 is the hope to see the English Church, over which the 
 flood has swept, repair its scattered ruins, and be 
 redintegrated in a new Pentecost. He sees that this 
 may be done by the way of peace. He has the brilliant 
 intuition that if the divided tongues of the Spirit are 
 of the same fire, their different operation may be 
 left to lead automatically towards a more splendid 
 illumination of truth. From this conception of unity 
 in difference, casting out the ugliness of discord, The 
 Liberty of Prophesying starts, and the author develops, 
 on these lines, a courageous, and, in spite of what had 
 been said by earlier and more partial opponents of 
 tyranny, in the main a perfectly novel plea for the 
 right of religious liberty. The book is inspired by
 
 42 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 the warmest and the most delicate Christian charity, 
 expounded at an hour and in a country where passion 
 had made charity almost appear untenable. It had 
 occurred to Taylor in his solitude that the general 
 violence of religious anger in England was as absurd 
 as it was hateful ; that it must be " inconsistent with 
 God's goodness to condemn those who err when the 
 error hath nothing of the will in it." Every man 
 must be left free to find out, according to his best 
 lights, what is truth to him. It is the sin against the 
 heavenly vision which is the worst offence, and after 
 all " no man's spirit is known to any but to God and 
 himself." On the other hand, as has been pointed out, 
 Taylor had the signal independence to oppose the 
 theory which was almost universal in the Puritan 
 society of his day, and which was eminently defended 
 by Milton, that sectarianism itself was praiseworthy. 
 
 The importance of this wonderful book, from the 
 theological and philosophical side, is so great that 
 many writers have not scrupled to give it the highest 
 place among the works of its author. Without under- 
 valuing it in the least, however, it must be pointed out 
 that on purely literary grounds The Liberty of Pro- 
 phesying can lay no claim to such pre-eminence. It is 
 written in a style very clear, simple, and unadorned, 
 with a sweetness of temper entirely characteristic of 
 its writer, and with none or few of those impediments, 
 those pedantic snags in the current, which had hitherto 
 impeded the course of Taylor's language. He bitterly 
 deplores his separation from his books ; but we may 
 rejoice at his release from their bondage. He still has 
 his beloved Prudentius, and his not less valued Horace, 
 and he is more free to use them, now that his shelves
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 43 
 
 are no longer crowded with folio Fathers. He does 
 not regret his past study of the schoolmen, but has 
 abandoned them for the present ; he recognises their 
 weak logic and their contradictions and their narrow- 
 ness ; he laughs out loud at the folly of Pope Adrian VI. 
 in believing that " all poetry was heretical." But with 
 all the amenity and all the eloquence of The Liberty of 
 Prophesying, it does not exhibit to us the glory of 
 Taylor. It is bare and a little dry in statement; 
 there is a remarkable absence of that pomp of imagery 
 which is characteristic of his finest writing. Its 
 lucidity is slightly humdrum ; it presents few passages 
 which could be separated from their context, and 
 exhibited as specimens of English. But that his style, 
 though still unadorned, had become admirably pure 
 and direct, a fragment of narrative, not untouched 
 with humour, may exemplify : 
 
 "It was an argument of some wit, but of singularity of 
 understanding, that happened in the great contestation 
 between the missals of S. Ambrose and S. Gregory. The 
 lot was thrown, and God made to be judge, so as He was 
 tempted to a miracle to answer a question which themselves 
 might have ended without much trouble. The two missals 
 were laid upon the altar, and the church door shut and sealed. 
 By the morrow matins they found S. Gregory's missal torn in 
 pieces and thrown about the church, but S. Ambrose's opened 
 and laid upon the altar in a posture of being read. If I had 
 been to judge of the meaning of this miracle, I should have 
 made no scruple to have said it had been the will of God that 
 the missal of S. Ambrose, which had been anciently used and 
 publicly tried and approved of, should still be read in the 
 Church. And that of Gregory let alone, it being torn by an 
 angelical hand as an argument of its imperfection, or of the 
 inconvenience of innovation. But yet they judged it other- 
 wise. For, by the tearing and scattering about, they thought
 
 44 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 it -was meant it should be used over all the world, and that of 
 S. Ambrose read only in the church of Milan. I am more 
 satisfied that the former was the true meaning than I am of 
 the truth of the story ; but we must suppose that." 
 
 The attitude of Taylor must not be confounded with 
 that which had been adopted as early as 1641 by 
 Williams, and after the battle of Edgehill by the 
 party of Holies. Fuller had reminded the House of 
 Commons, unwilling listeners to his plea, that " Blessed 
 are the peace-makers," and others less eloquent than 
 he had desired to discover for the Church of England 
 a middle path between Laud and the Presbyterians. 
 There had been a desire expressed, here and there, in 
 intervals of weariness after the clash of arms, for rest 
 in a reasonable common creed. The Puritans were to 
 concede some points on their side, the Episcopalians 
 to push their demands less stringently ; extremists 
 were to avoid running a-tilt against the scruples of 
 their neighbours. Fuller, for instance, while he was 
 hopeful that the king would show " a fair condescen- 
 sion in matters of church reformation," denied "any 
 transcendent extraordinary miraculous light" to the 
 lay preachers of the Separatists. Williams was more 
 outspoken in his famous pamphlet, The Bloody Tenet 
 of Persecution (1644), in which he deprecated all recourse 
 to the civil arm, and recommended for the correc- 
 tion of spiritual offences a spiritual censure. As 
 Gardiner has excellently said, all these preluders of 
 the principle of toleration longed for peace through 
 mutual concession. As much may be said for the 
 anonymous author of that very remarkable tract, 
 Liberty of Conscience, of which the same historian 
 has given so valuable an account; although that
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 45 
 
 also marks a stage along the road of humanity and 
 charity. 
 
 In spite of the liberality shown, on certain points, 
 by Cromwell, in spite of Milton's voice lifted so nobly 
 in Comus and Areopayitica, in spite, too, of the glimmer- 
 ings exhibited by that odd group of dissenters who 
 were called the Independents, it cannot be said that 
 liberty of conscience, in the broad and modern sense, 
 was brought before the minds of Englishmen until 
 Jeremy Taylor published his Liberty of Prophesying. 
 It is an extraordinary proof of the vigour of his mind, 
 that he, of all men living, trained at Cambridge and 
 Oxford in the very mysteries of Thorough, the proUgt 
 of Laud, the companion of Juxon and Sheldon, should, 
 without passing through any violent crisis, by the 
 sheer evolution of his piety and tenderness, have 
 broken through the thickest crust of prejudice. This 
 danger of being misunderstood or too well under- 
 stood was extreme ; and if his situation had not been 
 eminently propitious, it is probable that he could not 
 have dared to affront the fanaticism of the age with 
 paragraphs so out-spoken as the following : 
 
 " Well, thus far are we come ! Although we are secured 
 in fundamental points from involuntary error by the plain 
 express, and dogmatical places of Scripture, yet in other things 
 we are not, and may be invincibly mistaken, because of the 
 obscurity and difficulty in the controverted parts of Scrip- 
 ture. . . . Councils are contradictory to each other, and there- 
 fore certainly are equally deceived, many of them. Then the 
 Popes of Home are very likely to mislead us, but cannot ascertain 
 us of truth in matter of question. And in this world we believe 
 in part, and prophesy in part, and this imperfection shall 
 never be done away till we be transplanted to a more glorious 
 state. Either, then, we must throw our chances and get truth
 
 46 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 by accident or predestination, or else we must lie safe in a 
 mutual toleration and private liberty of persuasion, unless 
 some other anchor can be thought upon where we may fasten 
 our floating vessels and ride safely." 
 
 Here we have the note which was so absolutely 
 novel in Taylor. Those who preceded him by a year 
 or two, in their meditations on a possible religious peace, 
 had conceived a plan of mutual concession, of agree- 
 ment upon common essentials. But it was Taylor who 
 first conceived of a toleration not founded upon agree- 
 ment or concession, but upon a broad basis of practical 
 piety, of loyal confidence in that church which, as he 
 says in one of his luminous phrases, " is not a chimera, 
 or a shadow, but a company of men believing in Jesus 
 Christ," and therefore able to trust the bona fides of 
 others who approach the same truth from a different 
 standpoint. He called the sour fanatics of his time 
 and in 1644 not to be a fanatic of some sort was almost 
 to be a changeling or pariah back to the humane and 
 merciful doctrine of Jesus Christ, " whose lessons were 
 softer than nard or the juice of the Candian olive." 
 In an age altogether given up to proscription and per- 
 secution, Jeremy Taylor lifted his clear voice in proof 
 of "the unreasonableness of prescribing to other 
 men's faith, and the iniquity of persecuting differing 
 opinions." 
 
 It is not too much to claim for Taylor, in the 
 religious and intellectual order, something of the 
 gratitude which we all pay, or should by common 
 justice pay, to Sir James Simpson in the physical order. 
 It would be impossible to estimate the alleviation which 
 Taylor's tolerant theory, in its successive extensions, 
 has brought to the multitudes of men. Such horrors
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 47 
 
 in the cruel chastisement of impiety as followed the 
 battle of Naseby were to be impossible again among 
 civilised Englishmen as long as the world should last. 
 It was gradually to be understood that sin is not to 
 be punished by torture, and that the liberal opinion 
 that "all papists, and anabaptists, and sacramentaries, 
 are fools and wicked persons " was no longer to be an 
 excuse for ferocious reprisals. Those, and all errors 
 which are of the head and not the heart, were to be 
 treated for the future with argument and a meek 
 humility, the blessed anaesthetics which this great 
 innovator introduced into the practice of religious 
 surgery. What the world has gained in loss of pain is 
 incalculable. There is, perhaps, no man to-day in 
 England, who worships, or who worships not, as his 
 conscience bids him, who does not owe a fraction of 
 his peace to Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 Even in the shades of Golden Grove, and close to 
 the rural " Church of the Angels," such a novel doctrine 
 could not be promulgated without danger. Of course 
 Taylor was careful to guard himself from misconcep- 
 tion ; equally, of course, he was instantly misconceived. 
 He was careful to limit his plea for toleration to those 
 who unite in the Christian Creed, but this was of slight 
 importance in that day, when, in the civilised parts of 
 Europe, it would have been difficult to discover persons 
 not Jews or atheists not nominally covered by this 
 general confession. He does not say, so far as I have 
 been able to discover, a single word which would 
 exclude from toleration those outside the Christian 
 pale; he merely does not consider them. He seems 
 to admit that if there come into being religious systems 
 which teach rebellion or immorality, these may be sub-
 
 48 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 dued by force of arms. This was, perhaps, illogical, 
 but some such admission was inevitable in the face of 
 the war at that moment raging in these islands, a war 
 which Taylor's loyalty to the king would not permit 
 him to stigmatise directly. In every legitimate mode, 
 with every phrase of moderation, he sought to con- 
 ciliate those whom his theory of toleration might be 
 expected to wound and startle. 
 
 Of these, the first was the king himself. When 
 The Liberty of Prophesying was published, Charles I. had 
 recently been seized, after that vivid scene in the 
 garden at Holmby, and had been carried about the 
 country, an embarrassing hostage, by Joyce and his 
 troops. This had been the opening of the fifth act of 
 his tragedy, and now Charles was in more need than 
 any of his subjects of the nard and balsam of charity. 
 By the time Taylor's book could reach him, he was 
 ensconced at Caversham under Lord Craven's care, and 
 there he read, no doubt with fervent interest, the new 
 book of his old chaplain. Intolerant as were his 
 enemies, however, they met with a narrowness no less 
 stubborn in the king. Even in his hour of humilia- 
 tion " causeless they like a bird have chased me " 
 Charles I. could not accept the principle of a free con- 
 science. He expressed his displeasure to his chaplains, 
 and he instructed one of them, Dr. Henry Hammond, 
 who was an old personal friend of Taylor, and had 
 succeeded him in the royal household, to frame 
 a reply. 
 
 The gentle and dignified Hammond was one of the 
 most uplifted spirits who were gathered about Charles I. 
 in his decline ; he had been made his private chaplain 
 in Oxford in 1644, and he kept near him in spite of all
 
 n.] THE CIVIL WAR 49 
 
 machinations of the enemy, who specially dreaded his 
 influence, until Christmas of this year, 1647, when the 
 king was deprived of all his servants. Hammond was 
 famous for his lavish benevolence. Although a great 
 deal of money passed into his hands, he was always 
 poor, for he was always giving. He had much in 
 common with Taylor ; like him, Hammond had written 
 in defence of Episcopacy and of the liturgy ; and later 
 on in this very year he published The Christian's Obliga- 
 tion to Peace and Charity. In this, however, his vieAvs 
 are conventional, and show no grasp of Jeremy Taylor's 
 position. It was in his Letter of Resolution that Ham- 
 mond embodied what seem to have been the king's 
 main objections to Liberty of Prophesying, in a discussion 
 of "six Quares." He traverses Taylor's already sur- 
 prising views about the baptism of children and rebukes 
 his mildness to Anabaptists. But there is no venom in 
 Hammond. He praises the "diligence" of the very 
 arguments he refutes, and is everywhere inspired by 
 friendliness and courtesy. 
 
 There were many attacks of a severer kind made 
 against Taylor's volume. According to Heber, who 
 undertook an examination of these pamphlets, most of 
 which are obscure and insignificant, the most serious 
 was that made by Samuel Rutherford of St. Andrews, in 
 his Free Disputation against pretended Liberty of Conscience. 
 Nor would this savage libel deserve the briefest mention 
 here, were it not that its sordid existence curiously links 
 with the name of Jeremy Taylor those of Milton and 
 of S. T. Coleridge. It is supposed that Milton, who 
 already admired Taylor's genius, and had read The 
 Liberty of Prophesying with approval, was so much in- 
 censed at Eutherford's odious defence of persecution 
 
 D
 
 50 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 and his attack on the gentle charity of Taylor, that, in 
 his sonnet on the "New Forces," he expressed his 
 horror that a "Scotch what d'ye call" should venture 
 to speak in such terms of opprobrium as Rutherford 
 used for Taylor ; and that 
 
 " Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent 
 Would have been held in high esteem with Paul, 
 Must now be nam'd and printed heretics." 
 
 This conjunction of Milton and Jeremy Taylor, in its 
 turn, called forth a century and a half later, from the 
 youthful S. T. Coleridge, an encomiastic parallel of the 
 genius of these two men, which is one of the most 
 splendid tributes to Taylor ever written. 
 
 A little later in the summer of 1647, we have a 
 glimpse of Charles I. at Caversham, reported by Sir 
 Philip Warwick, who was permitted a very brief inter- 
 view with him : 
 
 " I could perceive " (writes Warwick) " he was very appre- 
 hensive in what hands he was, but was not to let it be dis- 
 cerned. Nor had he given his countenance unto Dr. Taylor's 
 Liberty of Prophesying, which some believed he had ; but that 
 really and truly it was refreshment to his spirit to be used 
 with some civility, and to serve God as he was wont, and to 
 see some old faces about him." 
 
 The wording of this phrase seems to convey that 
 Charles had been reproached by his Puritan jailors 
 with his supposed approval of his former chaplain's 
 revolutionary sentiments, with regard to liberty of 
 conscience, and that he was anxious to remove this 
 impression. Probably very few persons, in either 
 camp, were content at first to accept Taylor's position, 
 but he had sown good seed. Meanwhile, in August
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 51 
 
 Charles was brought up to Putney, whence in November 
 he fled to the Isle of Wight, still ready in his amazing 
 blindness to be Pater Patrice on his own terms. But he 
 was approaching the end of his career, and from 
 Christmas 1647, he was a helpless prisoner in Caris- 
 brooke Castle. 
 
 The year 1648 was one of extreme disturbance in 
 South Wales, and must have included the most anxious 
 months of Taylor's residence there. Laugharne, his 
 old enemy, veered round to the king's side, and an 
 officer of his, Poyer, taking the initiative, drove the 
 Parliamentarians out of Pembrokeshire in March. 
 South Wales suddenly declared for the king. Horton 
 was sent down to meet the mutineers, and in April 
 Poyer marched his army across Carmarthenshire to 
 check him, passing close to Golden Grove. By the 
 end of the month, the whole of the neighbourhood was 
 in revolt, and as Horton advanced the Welsh fled to 
 their hills. The business was so serious that Cromwell 
 himself was sent down from London, but before he 
 reached South Wales, Horton had routed Laugharne 
 and the rebels at the battle of St. Fagans, near Llandaff, 
 on the 8th of May. The revolt was crushed, but 
 Cromwell's advance brought terror before it. He cap- 
 tured Chepstow Castle on the 25th, and then marched 
 westwards through Glamorganshire and Carmarthen- 
 shire. His direct road brought him across the Towey 
 at the town of Llandilovawr, where he was almost in 
 sight of Golden Grove : he must have reached this 
 point on or about the 28th of May, 1648. 
 
 Cromwell's approach threw Lord Carbery into a 
 violent apprehension. The general was presently seen, 
 with a troop of horse, riding across country towards
 
 52 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Golden Grove. The pacific owner of that estate, who 
 had already, we are told, been "pardoned" by Laug- 
 harne, was now in danger of seeing all his property 
 sequestered by Laugharne's conqueror. On receiving 
 news that Cromwell was coming, the earl fled across 
 the fields to one of his remoter farms, leaving his 
 countess to receive their alarming guest. Lady Car- 
 bery, no doubt, was encouraged to believe that she 
 could plead her husband's cause with success, if only, 
 like Lady Verney two years earlier, she could "bring 
 her spirit to a soliciting temper, and tell how to use 
 the juice of an onion to soften " her visitor's heart. It 
 was in this spirit that the countess received Cromwell 
 at the doors of Golden Grove, and civilly invited him 
 to dismount. The resident chaplain would, as a 
 matter of course, be at her side to support her ; and we 
 cannot doubt that Taylor's exquisite amenity and 
 courtesy had their share in bringing about the sur- 
 prising result. Cromwell, who came to sequester, 
 stayed to dine; and in the afternoon pursued his 
 march to the beleaguerment of Tenby and Pembroke. 
 The antiquary, who tells the anecdote, does not in so 
 many words inform us what concessions were made at 
 the dinner-table. But Lord Carbery, of all the magnates 
 of South Wales, alone escaped sequestration. With 
 what a sigh of relief the crafty lady and her chaplain 
 must have seen the horsemen move away towards 
 Carmarthen, and with what haste a messenger must 
 have been sent to fetch the earl home from his hiding- 
 place ! Lord Carbery, who was the most conspicuous 
 trimmer of the province, gave no further cause of sus- 
 picion to Parliament, and was left undisturbed. It 
 would even seem that Oliver Cromwell recalled his
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR oS 
 
 visit to Lady Carbery with pleasure, for a few years 
 later he sent down several stags to furnish the park at 
 Golden Grove. 
 
 The king's fortunes were the subject of anxious 
 solicitude to Jeremy Taylor, and he discussed them 
 with zest and prolixity. In this same year, 1648, he 
 had a meeting with Dr. Thomas Bayly, who had been 
 closely identified with Charles I. at Raglan Castle. 
 Bayly professed to guide the king's conscience, and 
 had published an imaginary conversation between the 
 king and the Marquis of Worcester, which was much 
 talked about at the moment. "What I delivered in 
 transitu, when I had the happiness last to meet you, I 
 know I poured into a breast locked up as religiously 
 as the priests of Cybele," is a phrase which Taylor uses 
 in a very long letter, addressed to Bayly on the Vigils 
 of Christmas 1648. According to his biographers, 
 Bayly left England for France and Flanders in the 
 latter part of 1646, and did not return until after the 
 king's death, but this must be a mistake. Bayly was 
 hardly worthy of Taylor's sympathy ; he was a fussy 
 and braggart Royalist, who ultimately turned Romanist, 
 attacked the institutions of England, and died obscurely 
 in Italy. 
 
 Great, however, as was Jeremy Taylor's interest in 
 passing events, and in the fate of those friends who 
 were most dear to him, they did not occupy all his 
 thoughts during these distracted years. In 1649 he 
 completed, and gave to the world, a work of large 
 proportions, and eminently original plan, which ex- 
 hibited his literary powers as they had never been 
 exhibited before. The Great Exemplar was in the purely 
 intellectual field as novel an enterprise as Liberty of
 
 54 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Prophesying had been in the moral and controversial. 
 It was an attempt, on a huge scale, at the production 
 of a class of book, no specimen of which had been pre- 
 sented to the English public before, but which has been 
 abundantly imitated since, and has had its lasting in- 
 fluence on our literature. Before we consider the 
 peculiarly novel characteristics of this work, and its 
 disposition and structure, it will be well to bring to- 
 gether what can be recovered as to its history. 
 
 That it was not designed at Golden Grove, or even 
 mainly written there, is evident, from the part in its 
 preparation which was taken by Lord Northampton. 
 That nobleman, as we have seen, was killed at the 
 battle of Hopton Heath, early in 1643. His share, 
 therefore, in the conception of The Great Exemplar must 
 be precedent to that date; and as he was closely engaged 
 in military duties from the breaking out of the Civil 
 War until his death, Taylor's communications with 
 him on the subject are probably not to be placed later 
 than the middle of 1642. But up to that time, if we 
 possessed no other evidence than that which has been 
 known to Taylor's biographers, we should be justified 
 in believing the divine to be a docile and unquestioning 
 disciple of the Oxford casuists, a submissive pupil of 
 Laud in the propaganda of Thorough, placed at All 
 Souls College, and remaining there, for the sole pur- 
 pose of ministering to the cause by his patriotic learn- 
 ing and storehouse of instances. 
 
 It is, therefore, of extraordinary interest to learn 
 that at a date which cannot be later than 1642 a 
 single far-sighted friend had perceived that Taylor was 
 throwing away his genius upon " the spinosities of the 
 schools," and had determined to divert him into a
 
 II.] THE CIVIL WAR 55 
 
 more primrose path. The language Jeremy Taylor 
 uses must be carefully examined. He says that the 
 Earl of Northampton's mind was the " soil " in which 
 "the first design of these papers," that is to say, of 
 The Great Exemplar, "grew"; that "what that rare 
 person conceived, I was left to the pains and danger 
 of bringing forth." The image here is exactly the same 
 which has fascinated and baffled successive generations 
 of Shakespearian critics. As "W. H. was "the sole 
 begetter" of the Sonnets, so Lord Northampton was 
 the sole " conceiver " of The Great Exemplar. In each 
 case, it is not rational to doubt, there is an intention 
 to attribute to a noble friend the suggestion, the bias, 
 which led the writer along a new experiment in his 
 art. In each case, below the form of compliment, is a 
 statement of cause and effect which it is preposterous 
 to overlook or to minimise. 
 
 In Taylor's case, when he made his statement, the 
 widowed Countess of Northampton, who remained his 
 friend, was alive and well aware of the circumstances. 
 He appeals to her recollections : " Your Honour best 
 knows " how mere a matter of honesty it is for the 
 author to recall the facts. When the lady reads 
 the pages of The Great Exemplar she will recollect at 
 once that her late husband, " that excellent personage, 
 was their first root," and that they are "the fruits of 
 his," Lord Northampton's, " abode." This is a curious 
 phrase, but I take it to mean no more than his abode 
 on earth, before he was " transplanted to heaven " by 
 his sudden death. Lady Northampton is conjured to 
 welcome the book "for its first relation," that is to say, 
 no doubt, for the fact that its origin and substance will 
 both of them recall sad and yet proud memories to her
 
 56 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 mind; and to set its imperfections down not to its 
 "fountain," her husband, but to Jeremy Taylor, who 
 is " the channel of its progress and emanation." 
 
 If these phrases have any meaning at all, it is plain 
 that they indicate that Lord Northampton, who must 
 have had close opportunities of studying the mind of 
 Taylor, was sorry to see so splendid a gift of rhetoric 
 and pathos expended on "problems and inactive dis- 
 courses," that is to say on hair-splitting casuistry. He 
 persuaded the pupil of Laud and Eichard Montagu 
 that it was " the nature of disputings, that they begin 
 commonly in mistakes, proceed with zeal and fancy, and 
 end not at all but in schisms and uncharitable names, 
 and too often dip their feet in blood." In saying this, 
 Lord Northampton found an eager listener. Humble 
 and tractable as Taylor was, and honest in his service 
 for Laud, he had to confess that he was "weary and 
 toiled with rowing up and down in the seas of ques- 
 tions which the interests of Christendom have com- 
 menced." The design which his noble friend sketched 
 out, and which the earl's premature death forbade him 
 to enjoy in its execution, was no less than this, " to put 
 a portion of the holy fire into a repository, which might 
 help to re-enkindle the incense, when it shall please 
 God religion shall return, and all His servants sing In 
 convertendo captivitatem Sion with a voice of eucharist." 
 
 If we turn to Tlie Great Exemplar to see how this 
 experiment was carried out, we are first of all impressed 
 by the negative qualities of the book. It has none of 
 the dryness, none of the nakedness which had indis- 
 putably been the growing faults of English theology. 
 The author glances at the works of his contemporaries, 
 and he decides that " they may be learned, but they
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 57 
 
 are not wise." He will sacrifice the display of learn- 
 ing ; there shall be no discussion of knotty points ; he 
 will not write a thesis, or engage in a controversy, or 
 quote the opinions of contending fathers in a dry light 
 of "unprofitable and ineffective contemplation"; he 
 will make a living book, and address it to those " who 
 can believe and love," not to those that can merely 
 " consider and love." He has the boldest views about 
 his literary mission. He will not scold or argue, 
 he will entertain. He is afraid neither of the word nor 
 the idea ; let us be equally bold, and admit that his 
 design is to please, even to enthrall. He rates the 
 theologians with their narrow range of intellectual 
 interest. He says that it is far wiser to read Homer, 
 JEschylus, and Euripides than to bury one's self in the 
 patristic triflings of the schoolmen. 
 
 He was not ignorant of the scandal which his book 
 would cause. It was not thought more decent for a 
 churchman to appear without his Latinity upon him 
 than to go up into the pulpit in secular habit. Even 
 Chillingworth had been blamed for pursuing his 
 theme on lines too logical, without the constant applica- 
 tion of tags from the Church authorities ; he had been 
 roundly accused of want of "learning." It required 
 immense courage on Taylor's part to defy all the 
 criticism of his class, and fold away his unquestioned 
 erudition as a robe not fit to be worn on this particular 
 occasion. He says " I have despised my own reputa- 
 tion " ; he has written a popular book, " embossed with 
 unnecessary but graceful ornament." He knows that 
 his clerical brethren will be scandalised, but he believes 
 that he is divinely led. "My spark," he cries, "may 
 grow greater by kindling my brother's taper, and God
 
 58 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 may be glorified in us both." So he bravely puts forth 
 the earliest modern treatise of popular piety, "inter- 
 mixing something of pleasure with the use," and not 
 shrinking from the hope that his readers will find in 
 it that " which will better entertain their spirits than 
 a romance." The result was a noble and too-often 
 forgotten manual which was the pioneer of a whole 
 literature of piety. 
 
 The Great Exemplar is a celebration of the beauty of 
 the Lord Jesus, God and Man. The up-raised, ecstatic 
 movement of the paragraphs betrays the enthusiasm of 
 the writer ; he is Christ-possessed. The most gracious 
 voice then to be heard in England is lifted like that of 
 a nightingale above the frogs and ravens of the age. 
 The form he adopts is interesting; it is cunningly 
 devised to sustain and divert the attention, to prevent 
 weariness, to prolong the pleasure of the reader by 
 division and variety. It opens with a preface, one of 
 Taylor's exquisitely winning introductions, in which 
 the great family of Man is described, the necessity 
 of discipline in its organism demonstrated, and Chris- 
 tianity shown to be the most perfect law conceivable 
 for its direction. Then, after an exhortation to the 
 imitation of Jesus, the romance begins. 
 
 The string on which the whole sequence of pearls 
 is hung is the narrative of the life of Christ on earth. 
 The author tells the story as he chooses. There is no 
 attempt at Biblical criticism, even as in those days 
 it was understood; no dealing with difficulties of 
 parallel Evangelists ; no weighing of evidence. Taylor 
 selects such versions of the narrative as best suit his 
 purpose, not shrinking from the traditions of a later 
 age, if they attract him. For instance, he accepts
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 59 
 
 without a question the legend of the prostration of 
 the Egyptian gods when the Infant crossed the border. 
 If an incident inflames his imagination, he lingers over 
 it as long as he chooses; he weaves his fancy, for 
 instance, for page after page, around the apparition 
 of the Star of Epiphany. What he dwells upon, ex- 
 clusively, is the imaginative and the pathetic. He 
 wishes to draw men away from the weariness of con- 
 trdversy to the exquisite mysteries of pure religion. 
 
 But he knows that sustained rhetoric fatigues the 
 mind. He is careful to vary his theme. Accordingly, 
 after each section of his narrative, he applies that frag- 
 ment of the story to a disquisition on its practical 
 bearing upon life, to general remarks about men's 
 religious duty as illustrated by what he has just 
 described. He rivets the attention of his readers by 
 abrupt application of the history to the needs of 
 modern society, to the family, to the state, to friend- 
 ship and to the conduct of affairs. Nor is this enough 
 to secure the cunning variety of his design, which is 
 further gained by the introduction of short prayers, 
 each like a gush of music. In these devotions, the 
 most exquisite of their kind in the English language, 
 Jeremy Taylor has had no rival. They display, in the 
 most complete manner, the delicate wholesomeness of 
 his conscience and the inimitable distinction of his 
 style. Nowhere does he open a well of English more 
 undefiled than in his admirable private prayers. 
 
 It has been made a matter for regret that all the 
 early sermons of Jeremy Taylor (for the lecture on 
 Gunpowder Plot was no true sermon) are lost to us. 
 The regret is needless; they are certainly embedded 
 in The Great Exemplar. The careful reader will
 
 60 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 distinguish twenty " discourses " in the body of that 
 work, and we may be sure that each of these was 
 preached from a pulpit. It is obvious that it was the 
 consideration of the rare originality and beauty of some 
 of these sermons which inspired Lord Northampton 
 with his fortunate idea of urging Jeremy Taylor to 
 weave around them a popular life of Christ. Internal 
 evidence would alone be sufficient to persuade us of 
 this fact, were there not a point of external evidence 
 which confirms it. Some years after Taylor's death, 
 two manuscript sermons of his were discovered, and pub- 
 lished in 1675 : these are known as Christ's Yoke an Easy 
 Yoke and The Gate to Heaven a strait Gate. They were 
 issued together, with a new portrait of the bishop, and 
 as having been supplied by "a person of honour yet 
 living," probably the third Earl of Northampton, who 
 did not die until 1681. Of these sermons, on examina- 
 tion, the first in its entirety, and portions of the second, 
 are found in the mass of The Great Exemplar. They 
 were inadvertently printed, as novelties, and no doubt 
 from copies left behind him by Taylor in his flight to 
 Wales in 1644. 
 
 It would be idle to pretend that there are not flaws in 
 the execution of this wonderful book. It is not sus- 
 tained throughout at the very high level of its finest 
 sections. At its best, it is written with enchanting 
 fluidity and sweetness, the bright, elastic phrase leaping 
 into light. But we begin already to perceive that 
 Jeremy Taylor has two manners, the one far less 
 attractive than the other. When he says : 
 
 "Filling the rooms of the understanding with airy and 
 ineffective notions is just such an excellency as it is in a man
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 61 
 
 to imitate the voice of birds ; at his very best the nightingale 
 shall excel him " ; 
 
 or, 
 
 " God's authority is like sacred fire in an earthen censer, as 
 holy as if it were kindled with the fanning of a cherub's wing, 
 or placed just under the propitiatory 1 upon a golden altar," 
 
 the effect is, as Coleridge has excellently put it, 
 dazzling. But this highly ornate manner often gives 
 place to a style that is rigorously plain and simple, and 
 this latter is apt to decline to the pedestrian. It does 
 so decline, too often, in what the reader then comes to 
 regard as the interminable prolongation of The Great 
 Exemplar. Indeed, to be plain, the excessive length 
 of the book is to-day its principal, and perhaps its 
 hopeless fault. 
 
 This was not a fault at the time of its composition. 
 In the middle of the seventeenth century, people pre- 
 ferred their books of entertainment to be of immense 
 length. The kind of popular literature which Jeremy 
 Taylor directly challenged in The Great Exemplar was 
 the heroic novel recently introduced from France. In 
 his prison, Charles I. was now reading the Cassandra 
 of Calprenede, a romance in no fewer than twenty- 
 three volumes. Dorothy Osborne, in these same years, 
 was making lists of the lovers in the interminable 
 Almahide, and in the elephantine Grand Cyrus of M lle de 
 Scudery. Hitherto these huge books had been chiefly 
 read in French, but the tide of translation was begin- 
 ning to set in. Polexandre had been published in 
 English in 1647, and Artamenes was shortly to follow, 
 in six colossal folio volumes. Bulk and prolixity were 
 
 1 Mercy -seat.
 
 2 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 no disadvantages in that age of the Commonwealth, 
 when Puritan asceticism had sealed up the sources of 
 genial enjoyment. In the country all festivities and 
 sports had been abolished ; in the town, with edicts of 
 vindictive ferocity, all play-houses and places of amuse- 
 ment had been closed. The only entertainment left 
 was literature, and people could not have it too elabor- 
 ately prolonged. Yet even Jeremy Taylor, except in 
 one notable instance, was never again so inordinately 
 lengthy. 
 
 His holy romance, since he permits us to style it so, 
 was eminently successful. But it did not pass entirely 
 without attack. Jeremy Taylor, the most ingenuous 
 of writers, was impudently accused of a literary fraud. 
 It was asserted that his book was not his own, but 
 merely translated from a folio Vita Jesu Christi, printed 
 at Paris in 1509, by Ludolphus of Saxony. There 
 seems to be always somebody ready to embark on 
 these Shandean investigations, eager "to pluck my 
 mother's thread-paper out of Slawkenbergius' book." 
 Ludolphus, even in those days, cannot have been an 
 author of easy reference, but a century and a half later 
 Heber succeeded in discovering him, and allayed sus- 
 picion. "It is scarcely possible," Heber says, "to 
 find two books written on any one subject which have 
 so few coincidences of arrangement, sentiment, or 
 expression." Deeply imprinted in the human breast 
 is the desire to prove that every work was not written 
 by its own author but by another man. Those who 
 are convinced that all the poetry and drama in our 
 literature was the composition of Bacon, should not 
 pause until they have proved that all our theology was 
 written by Ludolphus of Saxony.
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 63 
 
 A deep serenity of spirit is the key-note of The &reat 
 Exemplar ; but it is not fantastic to read in the eighth 
 section of the first part, where a curious effect of alarm 
 and agitation is produced, a record of Taylor's feelings 
 in the midst of the revolt of 1648. He speaks of the 
 signs of the times, " no sermons there but when soli- 
 tude is made popular, and the city moves into the 
 wilderness ; no comforts of a public religion, or visible 
 remonstrances of the communion of saints. Of all 
 the kinds of spiritual mercy, only one can there 
 properly be exercised, and of the corporeal none at 
 all." But, as he presently remembers, "the passions 
 of the sensitive soul are like an exhalation," and when 
 the danger had passed by, his peace returned. The 
 first part of The Great Exemplar is dedicated, in terms 
 of unimpaired affection, to Lord Hatton of Kirby, but 
 this is almost the last occasion on which we meet the 
 name of this nobleman in our narrative. Already in 
 August 1648 he had withdrawn to Paris, where he 
 began by keeping open house for the emigres, but soon 
 fell into poverty, and suffered a degradation of char- 
 acter from which he never recovered. So long as 
 his son Christopher remained at Newton Hall School, 
 this would be a link between Taylor and his former 
 patron. 
 
 A persistent legend connects Jeremy Taylor with 
 the last hours of Charles I. One of his descendants 
 possesses a watch said to have belonged to the king ; 
 and two diamonds and a ruby, set in a ring, which are 
 now in New York, are supposed to be royal gifts made 
 on the road to execution. We are told, also, of "a few 
 pearls and rubies which had ornamented the ebony 
 case in which the king kept his Bible." Without
 
 64 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 throwing any doubt upon the authenticity of these 
 relics, it may be observed that Charles I. may have 
 presented them to his former chaplain on various and 
 less tragic occasions than that of his death. It is 
 difficult to find room for Jeremy Taylor at that last 
 memorable scene. On the 23rd of December 1648, 
 Charles was conveyed from Hurst Castle, closely guarded, 
 to Windsor. It is possible that certain friends might 
 be smuggled in to take their leave of him before the 
 19th of January, when he was brought up to St. 
 James's Palace. But up to the latter date, Charles 
 had not arrived at such a realisation of his fate as 
 would lead him to divide his possessions into keep- 
 sakes. After it, and up till the fatal 30th, even Juxon 
 and Herbert could scarcely pass through the rude 
 guard of soldiers, smoking and drinking in the very 
 precincts of the king's bedroom. One of the objects 
 mentioned above is said to bear the date, August 1647. 
 This, we have been recently told, "is evidently too 
 early." It appears to me, on the contrary, the date 
 most easy to reconcile with history. In August 1647 
 the king was at Putney, permitted to see his friends, 
 in comparative liberty and comfort. He had a few 
 weeks previously been reading Liberty of Prophesying 
 with extreme interest, and had been unable on all 
 points to coincide with the views expressed in it. He 
 naturally may have wished to discuss it with its author. 
 For the moment, everything was quiet in South Wales ; 
 for the moment Cromwell was anxious to indulge and 
 conciliate Charles. No conjectural date for the last 
 meeting between Jeremy Taylor and his royal master 
 seems to offer less difficulty than this legendary one of 
 August 1647. But that he went up to London early
 
 ii.] THE CIVIL WAR 65 
 
 in 1649, partly to carry the manuscript of The Great 
 Exemplar to the publishers, and partly to see Juxon, 
 Duppa, and other friends is highly probable. He is 
 . said to have been consulted about the king's papers, 
 and to have suggested the title of the Eikon Basilike.
 
 CHAPTEE III 
 
 RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 
 (1650-1653) 
 
 THE retreat into which Jeremy Taylor had now with- 
 drawn, under conditions the most fortunate which his 
 genius could have desired, is situated in a part of South 
 Wales, which is now very beautiful, and which there 
 is reason to believe was then more beautiful still. 
 Golden Grove was a large house, standing in its own 
 undulating park, on the south side of the Towey, but 
 about a mile from that river. It looked across the 
 valley to a still lovelier and more romantic estate, 
 Dynevor Castle. It was a little to the east of Grongar 
 Hill, and shared the view which Dyer described some 
 seventy years later in his famous poem, being situated 
 an the midst of that 
 
 " long and level lawn, 
 On which a dark hill, steep and high, 
 Holds and charms the wandering eye ; 
 Deep are his feet in Towey's flood, 
 His sides are clothed with waving wood ; 
 And ancient towers crown his brow, 
 That cast an awful look below." 
 
 This was the scene which rose before Jeremy Taylor 
 every morning, as he left Golden Grove, struck north- 
 ward across the meadows, crossed the winding Towey 
 
 66
 
 CHAP, in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 67 
 
 at some fording-place or by the bridge to Llangathen, 
 and ascended, past the ruin which Dyer describes, 
 round 
 
 " Whose ragged walls the ivy creeps, 
 And with her arms from falling keeps," 
 
 on his way to the school-house at Newton Hall. 
 
 The ancient market-town of Llandilovawr was some 
 three miles off to the north-east, and from it, skirting 
 the palings of Golden Grove park, ran the high road 
 south to Llanelly. At that time the valley of the 
 Towey seems to have been richly wooded, though later 
 on the timber was destroyed, and re-plantation was so 
 neglected, that late in the eighteenth century it bore 
 a very naked aspect. In the period when Jeremy 
 Taylor lived there, the whole surroundings of Golden 
 Grove must have been romantic in the extreme, and 
 their delicate and picturesque beauty was in perfect 
 harmony with his florid genius. No doubt, in his 
 day, the 
 
 " woods, where echo talks, 
 The gardens trim, the terrace-walks, 
 The wildernesses, fragrant brakes, 
 The gloomy bowers and shining lakes " 
 
 of the Towey valley were, if possible, still more en- 
 chanting than when Dyer sang of them in the dawn 
 of the naturalistic revival. 
 
 The church of Llanfihangel - Aberbythych, where 
 Taylor's friend, Nicholson, ministered, stood at the 
 western confines of the park, and was but a few 
 minutes' distance from the rooms placed at Taylor's 
 disposal at the mansion. Here, with his school and 
 his ministrations in the great house, and with long 
 talks with a few wise friends, Taylor lay protected
 
 68 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 from the world for many happy years, surrounded 
 by every innocent pleasure, and left to the unbroken 
 cultivation of his eloquence and his fancy. It is to 
 this beautiful retreat, in a rich valley of South Wales, 
 that we owe the ripest products of his intellect. The 
 stamp of the physical beauty which surrounded him 
 is imprinted upon the best and happiest of his writings, 
 and we may say that Jeremy Taylor was nourished by 
 the Muses in the park of Golden Grove, as the goat- 
 herd Comatas was fed with honey by the bees while 
 he lay imprisoned in his master's cedarn chest. 1 
 
 The conditions of Taylor's life at Golden Grove, his 
 extremely sequestered habits, the narrow circle in 
 which he laboured during so many years, his direct 
 responsibility as private chaplain to the lord and lady 
 of the place, give us authority to treat as autobiographi- 
 cal certain phrases in the books which he wrote in 
 Wales, which, if he had lived in the world of London, 
 or in a wide and uncritical society elsewhere, might be 
 taken as conventional. For instance, when he says 
 that every truly pious man " sets apart some solemn 
 time every year, in which, for the time quitting all 
 worldly business, he may attend wholly to fasting and 
 prayer, and the dressing of his soul by confessions, 
 meditations and attendances upon God," it is obvious 
 that he must himself have made such an annual retreat 
 his practice, or any one of the few inhabitants of Llan- 
 fihangel-Aberbythych could have charged him with in- 
 consistency. There is the same evidence that he was 
 
 1 A rough engraving of Golden Grove adorns the 1657 edition 
 of the Polemical Discourses. The house was entirely burned 
 down in 1729. In 1816 an avenue of trees in the park was still 
 traditionally known as Jeremy Taylor's Walk.
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 69 
 
 in the habit, several times during the day, of slipping 
 aside to " make frequent colloquies or short discoursings 
 between God and his own soul," on which occasions, 
 as we know that he did not approve of extempore 
 prayer, he certainly made use of some of the innumer- 
 able short "devotions" which form so considerable a 
 part of his published writings. Again, when he speaks, 
 not once or twice, of the advantage of getting out of 
 bed " sometimes " so as " to see the preparation which 
 the sun makes when he is coming forth from his 
 chambers of the east," it is hardly unreasonable to feel 
 assured that these remarks reflect one of his personal 
 habits. These little touches must not be pushed too 
 far, but they help to build up for us a portrait of the 
 man. 
 
 The earliest literary exercise on which Jeremy Taylor 
 was occupied after the death of the king was a practi- 
 cal work on conduct, almost a technical directory or 
 manual, the celebrated Rule and Exercises of Holy Living. 
 This was published in 1650, with a long titlepage ex- 
 plaining that the treatise dealt with " the means and 
 instruments of obtaining every virtue, and the remedies 
 against every vice, and considerations serving to the 
 resisting all temptations, together with prayers con- 
 taining the Whole Duty of a Christian," a summary 
 which neatly defines the contents of the volume. It is 
 not very easy to speak critically of this famous book, 
 which is certainly the best known of all Taylor's works, 
 and that which represents his thought and language 
 most directly to the majority of readers. It has been 
 incessantly reprinted, and is to be found in most house- 
 holds where books of any gravity of composition are 
 admitted. So widely circulated is it, indeed, that its
 
 70 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 form and tenour have without doubt tended to create 
 a certain notion of Jeremy Taylor's style and manner. 
 It is not easy, however, to find terms in which to ac- 
 knowledge the value of the Holy Living, and yet to 
 deprecate its being taken as an example of the habitual 
 or of the best side of its author's writing. But it is 
 necessary to do this, and to insist on the defects of the 
 book. 
 
 These defects rise out of its practical merits. It 
 is a didactic guide to the holy life. It is above all 
 things technical. It is "fitted to all occasions, fur- 
 nished for all necessities " ; it is a guide to per- 
 fection, a map of all the virtues pushed to their 
 most inaccessible altitude. The author admits no 
 excuse for any kind of frailty ; he pleads throughout 
 for the most austere and lofty practice as if it were 
 easily to be obtained. His ideal saint walks in spotless 
 glory along the mountain-tops, stepping upon virgin 
 snow. In order to enhance this imaginary perfection, 
 the preacher treats all forms of human weakness with 
 disdain, admits no pardonable frailties, demands the debt 
 of law to be paid in full, to the last farthing. This is 
 a point of view which may lend itself to admirable 
 effects in the hands of a theological philosopher, but 
 this Jeremy Taylor was not. He was a very great 
 writer, but it Avill scarcely be pretended that he was a 
 great thinker. The scope of the Holy Living is one 
 peculiarly unfavourable to a writer of Taylor's genius. 
 It is essentially impersonal and objective; it is all 
 written from the outside, in general terms. But we 
 have already suspected, and we shall have abundant 
 opportunity of proving as we proceed, that Jeremy 
 Taylor's treatment of conduct is apt to be obvious,
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 71 
 
 trite, and starved unless he has occasion to enrich it 
 with the fruits of his own experience, or to colour it 
 with his own vision. An impersonal work of Jeremy 
 Taylor, therefore, sinks immediately to the second 
 level in a critical survey, even although its practical 
 value, its " usefulness " may have kept it on the highest 
 level in the ordinary life of the Church. Let us have 
 the courage to say it high as the devotional value is 
 the Holy Living cannot be regarded as one of its 
 author's principal contributions to literature. 
 
 It has, however, parts of great passion and beauty, 
 where the individual note is not lacking. The dedica- 
 tion, for instance, is a piece of splendid invective, a 
 lamentation over the miseries which followed 1649, and 
 an implied denunciation of the men who caused them. 
 The author breaks out in a cry of angry grief : 
 
 " I have lived to see religion painted upon banners, and 
 thrust out of churches, and the temple turned into a taber- 
 nacle, and that tabernacle made ambulatory, and covered with 
 skins of beasts and torn curtains, and God to be worshipped, 
 not as He is, the Father of our Lord Jesus, an afflicted Prince, 
 the King of sufferings, . . . but rather as the Lord of hosts." 
 
 But this wail presently dies away in resignation. 
 No man shall have reason to be angry with Taylor 
 "for refusing to mingle in his unnecessary or vicious 
 persecution." He bows the head, he accepts retirement, 
 poverty, humiliation. The note sinks deeper and 
 deeper. He will neither strive nor cry. In earlier 
 years he fought for his prince and for his church, but 
 what is there now left to contend about ? Life is 
 empty and barren; there is nothing to expect or to 
 fear. He is no longer apprehensive, no longer hopeful ; 
 the king is dead, the bishops are dishonoured, the
 
 72 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Church degraded. What is there left to struggle for, 
 since the game is up ? In this mood he prefers to lay 
 down a clear creed and directory for conduct. In the 
 new naked era which has set in, men are bewildered 
 how to live. He will draft regulations for behaviour 
 after the flood, for men who crowd back to the village 
 only to find priest and altar, bell and prayer-book, 
 swept away. We shall not appreciate the appeal which 
 the Holy Living made to Anglican minds, if we do 
 not recognise the fierce and ironical resignation of its 
 despairing, royalist preface. 
 
 Of the general plan of the treatise, it must be said 
 that it has the formal defects of all such cut-and-dried 
 formularies, but especially of those of the seventeenth 
 century. Its four main chapters deal with holiness, 
 and how to practise and maintain it; with sobriety 
 under five or six heads ; with justice, a chapter which 
 has been praised as a specimen of " casuistry in its 
 highest and noblest sense"; and with the duties of 
 religion. The great difficulty which lies before those 
 who unreservedly praise the Holy Living is the lack of 
 clear reasoning in the mind of the author. He is 
 eloquent about the vices, but rather vague and ineffec- 
 tive in his definitions of those which do not particularly 
 assail him. It is amusing to see how very sensible and 
 cautious he is in his treatment of excessive indulgence 
 in the pleasures of the table. Lord Carbery, one is 
 tempted to believe, was something of a gourmand. It 
 must be remembered, if this criticism should seem to 
 be touched with flippancy, that all the directions for the 
 conduct of life were bound to be either entirely vague, or 
 else marked with a curious precision, in consequence of 
 the author's office as private chaplain in a great house,
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 73 
 
 isolated from the rest of mankind. Hence, the extreme 
 looseness and indefiniteness of his diatribes against 
 temptations which were not likely to fall in the way of 
 his small circle of auditors. 
 
 Nor, in this connection, must we pass without one 
 word of discrimination over the section on carnal 
 voluptuousness, which he found it proper to include. 
 Even as compared with the language of other seven- 
 teenth-century theologians, who were anything but 
 mealy-mouthed, Taylor here is disagreeably broad and 
 rough. It is useless to deny, what is an historical 
 fact, that this part of his book has been a stumbling- 
 block to hundreds of readers. Taylor was conscious, 
 himself, that his treatment of this delicate theme would 
 be distasteful to many, and might possibly give offence. 
 He apologises for it, and his apology is not happy ; he 
 says : 
 
 " If any man will snatch the pure taper from my hand and 
 hold it to the devil, he will only burn his own fingers, but 
 shall not rob me of the reward of my care and good inten- 
 tion." 
 
 This shows that he had been inclined, and perhaps 
 advised, to omit or to modify his expressions. It is a 
 pity that he did not act on the suggestion, for these 
 paragraphs do not make for edification. Nor can a 
 reader to-day forbear gently reminding Jeremy Taylor 
 of what he has himself to say, so wisely and liberally, 
 on this question of discretion, in the sermon called 
 "The Good and Evil Tongue." It needs a sterner 
 satirist or else a more human and pitiful moralist than 
 he was to deal successfully with so very embarrassing 
 a matter. But the section was needed in his formal
 
 74 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 scheme, and he felt obliged to include it. In the 
 course of a chapter which we may be disposed to regret, 
 however, occurs a mystical paragraph about virginity 
 which we should have been unwilling indeed to 
 spare : 
 
 " Virginity is a life of angels, the enamel of the soul, the 
 huge advantage of religion, the great opportunity for the re- 
 tirements of devotion, and, being empty of cares, it is full of 
 prayers." 
 
 From another passage in the same chapter, we learn 
 for the first time that Jeremy Taylor was a believer in 
 the possibility of contemporary witchcraft. 
 
 A literary feature which is very strongly marked in 
 the Holy Living is the author's dependence at this time 
 on the poets of antiquity. His arguments against the 
 vices are often taken, for pages together, entirely from 
 the Latin and Greek classics, and sometimes a charm- 
 ing turn is given to a phrase borrowed straight from 
 ^Eschylus or Martial. The systematic evolution of his 
 theme, divided in the provoking seventeenth-century 
 manner into heads and numbered paragraphs which 
 Sir William Cornwallis, in his Essays, had amusingly 
 described as " the divisions that neat scholars use to 
 tie up the breeches of an argument or an oration with," 
 disturbs the reader's pleasure, and we are not 
 troubled to charge the preacher with inconsistency 
 when he throws this tiresome apparatus away, or 
 forgets it for awhile, as in the noble apostrophe on 
 divine love in the fourth chapter, or that on contented- 
 ness in the second chapter, where we come upon 
 enchanting Horatian phrases, in the author's true 
 manner, such as :
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 75 
 
 " Corn from Sardinia, herds of Calabrian cattle, meadows 
 through which pleasant Liris glides, silks from Tyrus, and 
 golden chalices to drown my health in, are nothing but instru- 
 ments of vanity or sin, and suppose a disease in the soul of 
 him that longs for them, or admires them." 
 
 He does not divide his subject very consistently, 
 and falls into illogical overlappings and repetitions of 
 it, -which sometimes suggest such patchwork as we have 
 noted, though there carried out with far greater skill, 
 in The Great Exemplar. Towards the end of the treatise, 
 Taylor inveighs again very strongly against the 
 efficacy of death-bed repentances, an attitude which 
 was frequently to recur in his writings, and to awaken 
 much animadversion. Finally, he adds to the treatise, 
 and closes with, an essay which is evidently of inde- 
 pendent composition, a grave and harmonious prepara- 
 tion to the receiving of the Holy Sacrament. Such 
 in its variegated literary aspect is the Holy Living, a 
 treatise to which, from the purely intellectual and 
 artistic points of view, certain exceptions have to be 
 made, but which has been used for edification by pious 
 churchmen for two hundred and fifty years. 
 
 The sequestered stillness of Jeremy Taylor's life was 
 now to be broken in upon by some tragical events. 
 It is evident that a very warm feeling of mutual 
 esteem had grown up between the divine and his 
 patron's wife. Frances, Countess of Carbery, was the 
 "tender providence that shrouded him under her wings," 
 and her wisdom, goodness, and practical ability had 
 come to be the mainstays of his fortune. This prop 
 was removed by her sudden death at Golden Grove, on 
 the 9th of October 1650. The atmosphere of Oxhey, 
 where she was brought up, had been contemplative and
 
 76 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 intellectual ; her training was strict and austere ; and 
 we are told, although the exact meaning of these words 
 is doubtful, that "God had provided a severe and 
 angry education to chastise the forwardnesses of a 
 young spirit and a fair fortune." She married Lord 
 Carbery in June 1637, being very youthful at the 
 time. At the date of her death she was still in flore 
 cetatis, probably not more than two or three and thirty 
 years of age. Whatever vicissitudes her early life may 
 have suffered, her career at Golden Grove seems to 
 have been tranquil and pleasant enough. She was 
 very clever and tactful; a placens uxor, she had an 
 excellent influence over her husband, who adored 
 her; she was a charming talker, and eminently easy 
 of access conversation's suavissimce. As her years 
 advanced, she became more remarkable for " severity, 
 modesty, and close religion," and of so exquisite a 
 moral delicacy that " you might as well have suspected 
 the sun to smell of the poppy that he looks on, as 
 that she could have been a person apt to be sullied 
 by the breath of a foul question." Her constitution 
 was undermined by a too-constant burden of child- 
 bearing. During her brief married life, she brought 
 into the world ten children, of whom eight survived 
 her, and from the bed of her latest daughter, Althamia, 
 she never rose again. It appears that she had an 
 intuition of her approaching end, and she told Jeremy 
 Taylor, before Althamia was born, that she had to 
 "go a great way in a little time," and must trim her 
 lamp and be ready to depart. 
 
 Accordingly, long before there was any sign of 
 mortal weakness of body, Lady Carbery, having "a 
 strange secret persuasion that the bringing this child
 
 m.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 77 
 
 should be her last scene of life," passed through a 
 paroxysm of terror, which presently gave way to 
 resignation, except when she thought that her death 
 might be attended with agonising pain, of which she 
 had a constitutional dread. Her fears passed away, 
 however, and the birth of her child was normal, but 
 she never regained her strength, and faded painlessly 
 out of life, merely shivering twice, as with " two fits of 
 a common ague." Jeremy Taylor, who attended her 
 in her last moments with spiritual consolation, wrote 
 for her monument a long Latin inscription, and the 
 following English portrait, which he calls a drawing 
 in water colours : 
 
 "She was ... of a temperate, plain and natural diet, 
 without curiosity or an intemperate palate. She spent less 
 time in dressing than many servants. Her recreations were 
 little and seldom, her prayers often, her reading much. She 
 was of a most noble and charitable soul ; a great lover of 
 honourable actions, and as great a despiser of base things. 
 Hugely loving to oblige others, she was very unwilling to be 
 in arrear to any upon the stock of courtesies and liberality. 
 So free in all acts of favour, that she would not stay to hear 
 herself thanked. . . . She was an excellent friend, and hugely 
 dear to very many, especially to the best and most discerning 
 persons ; to all that conversed with her, and could understand 
 her great worth and sweetness. She was of an honourable, 
 nice and tender reputation ; and of the pleasures of the world, 
 which were laid before her in heaps, she took a very small 
 and inconsiderable share." 
 
 This passage is quoted from the Funeral Sermon 
 which Taylor preached at her grave, and immediately 
 published in quarto. This address was a model of its 
 kind, and was widely circulated, finding admirers 
 among the large public of those to whom Lady
 
 78 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Carbery was an object of no interest, but who accepted 
 the sermon as a piece of mortuary art, like the elaborate 
 verse-elegies for which several poets of a slightly earlier 
 age, but particularly Francis Quarles, had been famous. 
 The Funeral Sermon at tJie Obsequies of the Countess of 
 Carbery marks, however, an advance upon the con- 
 ventional type of elegy in prose and verse, in that it 
 offers no preposterous panegyric of the deceased, but 
 a reasonable and thoughtful enumeration of her 
 qualities. It took the form of a biography, and we 
 may note that it is the pattern upon which Rust was 
 closely to model his own invaluable tribute to its 
 author. 
 
 Taylor speaks with approbation of those "women 
 of noble birth and great fortunes" who "nurse their chil- 
 dren, look to the affairs of the house, visit poor cottages, 
 and relieve their necessities, are courteous in the neigh- 
 bourhood, learn in silence of their husbands or their 
 spiritual guides, read good books, pray often and speak 
 little," and devote themselves "to good housewifery 
 and charitable provisions for their family and neigh- 
 bourhood." This was obviously a picture of the useful 
 and active life of the only " woman of noble birth and 
 great fortunes" whom his seclusion at Golden Grove 
 gave him an opportunity of observing. Nor does it 
 appear that, with these agreeable duties, Lady Carbery 
 combined the temper of a fanatic ; she held it lawful 
 to relax and unbend the bow, like "St. John, who 
 recreated himself with sporting with a tame partridge," 
 if we may believe Cassianus. On the whole, we have 
 a charming impression presented to us of the great lady, 
 whose mind and soul were so closely watched for some 
 five quiet years by her delicately appreciative chaplain.
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 79 
 
 When Lady Carbery died, Taylor was already en- 
 gaged in a literary work of great importance, on which 
 the character and enthusiasm of that admirable woman 
 had put their stamp. We have noticed already, and 
 shall have again to observe, a curious docility in the 
 intellectual disposition of Jeremy Taylor, the result, 
 perhaps, of a certain timidity, which usually demanded 
 a stimulus from without to start him on an enterprise. 
 We have already seen how much he owed to the 
 initiation first of Laud and then of Lord Northampton ; 
 at Golden Grove it was evidently Lady Carbery who 
 was his muse and his directing genius. Among other 
 designs of her suggesting was that of a collection of 
 his sermons, so arranged as to serve as a manual of 
 piety for a whole year. This was a matter in which 
 Taylor was slow to act ; he was not sure that such a 
 publication would be prudent or acceptable. But 
 " the appetites of the hunger and thirst after righteous- 
 ness" of that "dear lady, that rare soul," would brook 
 no objections, and when she died, it was being prepared 
 for the press. 
 
 Taylor immediately issued an instalment, in the form 
 of Twenty-eight Sermons preached at Golden Grove, in 1651. 
 This is the second, or "Summer" half of the entire 
 work, the first part of which, the " Winter " section, 
 appeared in 1653; the two were united in all sub- 
 sequent reprints, under the title of Eniautos. 1 This 
 is the main storehouse or miscellany of Taylor's 
 homilies. As we hold it, at present, however, the 
 two parts are reversed from the original order of 
 publication, and the history of the book thus obscured. 
 Although Advent Sunday, of course, begins the eccle- 
 1 That is to say, ' A Year ' (evtauris).
 
 80 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 siastical year, in dealing with the Eniautos we ought 
 to turn to the sermon for Whitsunday, and to consider 
 that the collection begins there. It is important, too, 
 to read first the dedication to the " Summer " half, and 
 to bear in mind that it refers to events which were 
 more than two years earlier than those dealt with in 
 what is now the opening address. If we do this, we 
 see that in 1651 Jeremy Taylor published his Twenty- 
 eight Sermons, as a legacy due to Lord Carbery from his 
 countess, but reluctantly, timidly, almost despairingly. 
 He expected no praise for them ; he feared that their 
 publication could little serve his reputation. By often 
 reading over and revising these essays, the pleasure 
 which he took in their composition had all evaporated. 
 He had "begun to grow weary and displeased " with 
 his own oratory, and he was very doubtful whether it 
 would either please or edify others. 
 
 Part of this was due to physical depression of spirits, 
 no doubt; part of it to the excessive disappointment 
 caused by the sudden removal of her for whom he had 
 prepared the work, and to whom he had looked for- 
 ward as its earliest and most ardent reader. But it 
 was an attitude too complex and too unusual to be 
 easily explained. This was far from being the cus- 
 tomary pose of the seventeenth-century divine, whether 
 he was Presbyterian or Jansenist, English or French. 
 As a rule no shadow of a suspicion that his publication 
 could be unwelcome to the pious agitated the Boanerges 
 of the moment. Not to welcome his sermons was to 
 show how gravely you were in need of them. But 
 Jeremy Taylor was not like the clamorous Rutherfords 
 on the one hand ; nor on the other was he like such 
 fashionable preachers as Massillon, who, in telling M lle
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 81 
 
 de Scude'ry about the sermons he was preparing for the 
 press, assured her that when she read them she would 
 fancy herself listening to St. Augustine or to St. Bernard. 
 It is curious that a collection of addresses more magni- 
 ficent than any which a theologian of the English 
 Church had hitherto addressed to the world should 
 appear with the painful and faltering dedication of the 
 Twenty-Eight Sermons of 1651. 
 
 But there were reasons for Taylor's reluctance. He 
 was afraid of the results of withdrawing the personal 
 element. These addresses had been written for and 
 delivered in the presence of a very small cluster of 
 peculiarly refined and highly-cultivated persons, who 
 had a strong admiration for the preacher. Jeremy 
 Taylor had been flattered for his delivery, for his 
 address, doubtless for his golden voice and his angelic 
 aspect, since compliments were not stinted in those 
 days. He had been praised "as you should crown a 
 conqueror with a garland of roses, or a bride with 
 laurel." He had, by all testimony, what Bossuet 
 defines as "une eloquence vive et impetueuse qui 
 entralnait" those who listened, and entranced them. 
 And he was carried on himself, and felt the Delphic 
 fumes in his brain. But it is one thing to make 
 great music " unto a little clan," and another to 
 address, in cold print, the world at large. Taylor, in 
 his delicate hermitage, shrank from the idea of a 
 publicity which might wound him. 
 
 His orthodoxy, too, might be called in question, 
 and, a little later on, it was. He would not care much 
 for what the Parliamentarian divines would say, but 
 the criticism of men like Duppa and Sheldon, his own 
 friends and fellow-sufferers, made him anxious. There 
 
 F
 
 82 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 was, for instance, his disbelief in the efficacy of 
 death-bed repentance, which was becoming a sort of 
 fanaticism with him. There were other matters, some 
 of which will come before us in the course of this 
 inquiry, although the nature of it is literary and not 
 theological, in which Taylor held and was obliged con- 
 scientiously to advance views not shared by the rest 
 of the High Church clergy of his time. He would 
 naturally be nervous lest these should lead to con- 
 troversy, for which, at the moment, his mood parti- 
 cularly disinclined him. 
 
 A profound respect for the limitations and apparatus 
 of religious oratory is strongly marked in these 
 sermons. Jeremy Taylor was distinguished from 
 those English preachers who had most prominently 
 preceded him in that he was in no sense an impro- 
 visatore. His best sermons those which we possess 
 in the completed Eniautos are composed with extreme 
 care ; on every page they bear evidence of the long 
 delays of art. His own injunctions to those who 
 preach dwell on the need of competency, of labour, 
 of deliberation. It is important to observe that he 
 arrived at the full stature of his genius at a moment 
 when the English Church had no need of a Tertullian. 
 In 1651 no obligation lay upon one of the hunted 
 ministers of a fallen Episcopacy to strike at such 
 vices as ambition, or gallantry, or the greed of gold. 
 What was wanted, in that melancholy hour, was a 
 physician of souls, one who had the skill to comfort 
 the racked nerves and pour oil into the aching wounds 
 of the Church. This precisely suited the temperament 
 of Jeremy Taylor, who was nothing of a pontiff and 
 nothing of a satirist, but whose seraphic gentleness
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 83 
 
 exhaled itself in the deep and comfortable balms of 
 consolation. 
 
 Accordingly, in the Sermons of Taylor we find a 
 studied avoidance of the fury of the preachers of an 
 earlier time. All is in the spirit of St. Chrysostom; 
 these are aurea dicta. His acquaintance with the human 
 heart inspired homilies which were addressed, not to 
 indifferent or hostile listeners, but to those who were 
 greedy of pious counsel. He advances to his task with 
 tact, with insinuation, with an energetic imagery which 
 will fetter a refined fancy and uplift it. In those days 
 the sermon was beginning to be a literary instrument, 
 and Taylor bends his genius to use it so as to correct 
 bad taste as well as bad morals. His Sermons give a 
 curious impression of cosmopolitan distinction. He 
 constantly introduces a phrase, such as " we walk by 
 the obelisk, and meditate in piazzas, that they that 
 meet us may talk of us," which seems in a moment 
 to lift us completely out of the provincial environment 
 of the ordinary Anglican divine of the period. And 
 Taylor does this without falling, on the other hand, 
 into the affectation of the "pretty sermon," into that 
 rainbow-coloured Marinism which was all the mode 
 in London, and of which Anthony a Wood has pre- 
 served ridiculous examples. Taylor's appeal to the 
 conscience is always direct, and he throws his art, the 
 unequalled beauty of his style, into the presentment 
 of dogma, with a passion of strenuous piety. 
 
 So, for instance, when we read, in " The Faith and 
 Patience of the Saints " : 
 
 " Jesus was like the rainbow, which God set in the clouds 
 as a sacrament to confirm a promise and establish a grace. 
 He was half made of the glories of the light, and half of the
 
 84 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP, 
 
 moisture of a cloud. In His best days, He was but half 
 triumph and half sorrow " 
 
 the incomparable melody and delicacy of the phrase 
 must no more be condemned as the screen of a conceit 
 than must one of Shakespeare's unusual and pene- 
 trating turns. It is beautiful, but it is true as well ; 
 it bears thinking about; it illuminates, it does not 
 astonish and obscure the idea by the glare of false 
 ornament. 
 
 The splendour of these Tiveniy-Eight Sermons is very 
 striking. In no work of Jeremy Taylor's are there 
 to be found so many images taken from light and 
 colour and living creatures on the wing. He exercises 
 every legitimate art of finished literary oratory, from 
 the abrupt beginning, "And lose his own soul?" or 
 "This is the epicure's proverb!" to the solemn and 
 stately close. The curious reader will find that he almost 
 invariably ends in a studied verbal harmony. Between 
 these two extremes there is an infinite, but carefully 
 balanced, variety of treatment. He is always endea- 
 vouring to appeal to his auditors' common sense, to 
 touch them by images from nature, by analogies from 
 contemporary life. He is always careful to give a 
 tangible form, if possible, to his abstract ideas, by 
 a metaphor, or an illustration. Each of these sermons 
 occupied about three-quarters of an hour in tranquil 
 delivery, some a little less, none more than an hour. 
 And this may lead us to a consideration of a point 
 which has been frequently raised, For whom were 
 these elaborate works of art intended 1 
 
 It has been suggested that discourses as finished in 
 form as those which Bossuet was, a decade later, to 
 pronounce before the Court of Louis xiv. could not
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 85 
 
 have been composed for a circle of acquaintances in a 
 Welsh country-house. Heber himself acceded to this, 
 and being confronted with the plain statement that 
 Taylor's Eniautos was "preached at Golden Grove," 
 started the theory, which has been generally accepted, 
 that in preparing his sermons for the press he materi- 
 ally changed them from "what he had delivered to 
 his rustic auditory in Wales," and that, as so delivered, 
 the ornamental and philosophical portions were omitted. 
 This I am by no means prepared to believe. First, 
 because the sermons, as they were printed, were not 
 longer, but decidedly shorter, than was the custom 
 with such compositions, and secondly, because the 
 "ornament" and "philosophy" are not of a nature 
 which could be detached, but make a part of the 
 integral texture. Moreover, no Welsh-speaking " rustic 
 auditory " would be present in the private chapel of 
 Golden Grove, but primarily the lord and lady of the 
 place, with their pronounced appetite for the refine- 
 ments of theological literature, and secondarily the 
 other clergy from Newton Hall, and such neighbouring 
 gentry as, in their religious isolation, would drive 
 over in their equipages from distant parts of the 
 country to be thus refreshed and delighted. 
 
 To a discreet and enthusiastic auditory of this kind, 
 the Eniautos would not sound too academical. It might 
 even seem too popular. The recondite nature of the 
 allusions would not appear excessive to persons accus- 
 tomed to hear long passages of Greek and Latin recited 
 from the fathers. Heber himself has noted that of 
 Pococke, although one of the first scholars of the day, 
 it was slightingly complained in his parish that, 
 "though a kind and neighbourly man, he was no
 
 86 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Latinist," simply because he preached in homely Eng- 
 lish. Jeremy Taylor seems, on more than one occasion, 
 to express a certain apprehension of a similar blame. 
 In his case, it might arise, however, not so much from 
 his neglect of the patristic authorities as from his extra- 
 ordinary fondness for dissolving little crystals of such 
 very profane writers as Martial, Catullus, and Petronius 
 in his holy discourse. Of this no more curious example 
 can be pointed to than the way in which he has (in 
 " The Spirit of Grace ") built up a most brilliant 
 summary of the mysteries of our faith on a basis so 
 little to be anticipated as a tag from an ode of Anacreon. 
 If the shock of Lady Carbery's death, striking 
 " more suddenly than upon the poor slave that made 
 sport upon the theatre," deeply affected Taylor's 
 spirits, they were still further depressed by a blow 
 which came even closer to him. Absolutely no light 
 has hitherto been thrown on the movements of the 
 wife whom he had married at Uppingham early in 
 1639, but she had probably joined her husband at 
 Llanfihangel in 1645. Their eldest child, William, 
 had died at Uppingham in 1642 ; five others had come 
 in rapid succession. The allusions to Mrs. Taylor, 
 which can without overbold conjecture be traced in 
 writings of her husband, are few. But there can be 
 no doubt that she is the "affectionate wife" whom 
 Taylor tenderly recalls, who, 
 
 "when she hath been in fear of parting with her beloved 
 husband, heartily desired of God his life or society upon any 
 conditions that were not sinful, and chose to beg with him 
 rather than to feast without him ; and the same person hath 
 upon that consideration borne poverty nobly, when God hath 
 heard her prayer in the other matter."
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 87 
 
 It may be that Mrs. Taylor's health suffered a slow 
 decline, for references to the burden of illness in a 
 house, and its attendant fatigues and anxieties, are 
 frequent in her husband's writings at this period. In 
 a passage where the inconveniences of their poverty 
 are plainly referred to, he adds, "sickness doth so 
 often embitter the content of a family." It seems 
 probable that the parents were not entirely of one 
 mind about the education of children. In the Holy 
 Dying he speaks with strange severity of the bad 
 influence of mothers on their children : 
 
 " These soften them with kisses and imperfect noises, -with 
 the pap and breast-milk of soft endearments. They rescue 
 them from tutors, and snatch them from discipline ; they 
 desire to keep them fat and warm, and their feet dry and 
 their bellies full ; and then the children govern, and cry, and 
 prove fools and troublesome, so long as the feminine republic 
 does endure." 
 
 The modern reader will be all with Mrs. Taylor in 
 this matter, and will surmise that if "the bold and 
 valiant " divine had taken more pains to see that his 
 little children's feet were dry, the dreadful mortality 
 that presently pursued them might have been averted. 
 But Jeremy Taylor is himself too human to be quite 
 consistent, and in other places commends the physical 
 care of little children. 
 
 News of the death of Phoebe Taylor is preserved 
 for us in a curious way, in a piece of a letter which 
 has been torn across. It was written, on the 1st of 
 April 1651, to Sir William Dugdale, the antiquary; 
 what remains of it is of deep interest. Among other 
 things, Taylor says, "I have but lately buried my 
 dear wife." He also mentions, "I have some things
 
 88 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 now in [ ] preparing, The Rule of Holy Dying ; 
 
 I have [ ]ow transcribing it." The book, of 
 
 which the first draft is here mentioned, was completed 
 and sent to the press in October of the same year, the 
 dedication being signed on the anniversary of Lady 
 Carbery's death. It was adorned with a folding plate 
 by Peter Lombart, representing the hall of a country 
 house, where a clergyman displays the life-sized picture 
 of a skeleton to a handsome lady, with her husband 
 and child. This group is supposed to contain portraits 
 of Taylor himself and of the Carberys. In the dedica- 
 tion addressed to the Earl, Taylor speaks with dignity 
 of their common bereavement; "both your lordship 
 and myself have lately seen and felt such sorrows of 
 death, and such sad departure of dearest friends, that 
 it is more than high time we should think ourselves 
 nearly concerned." Death had come so near them 
 both as to fetch away a portion from their very hearts, 
 and a community of grief drew the survivors together 
 in a solemn and pious bond. 
 
 The praise, which it was not possible to give to 
 the Holy Living without reserve, will be withheld by 
 no competent critic from The Rules and Exercises of 
 Holy Dying. The resemblance between these two 
 treatises, which are often confounded, is a purely 
 superficial one. Considered as literature, the superiority 
 of the latter over the former is immense; since that 
 genius which is only fitfully and feebly apparent in 
 the Holy Living, illuminates the Holy Dying in a 
 limpid and continuous glory. Between the two 
 volumes there is all the difference which there must 
 be between a piece of task-work, honestly and com- 
 petently performed, and a product of vehement inspira-
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 89 
 
 tion. Jeremy Taylor had formed no project of a 
 continuation of the Holy Living. On the contrary, 
 that work had included meditations and prayers to 
 be used at the approach of death. But now Taylor 
 had himself passed through the crisis of watching the 
 demise of a beloved and sentient being ; he had passed 
 through this crisis twice in a few months. It was no 
 longer a question of conventional piety, of what all 
 Christians felt or should feel at this extraordinary 
 juncture; it was an observation of what his own 
 heart had throbbed with in agony and terror and 
 incurable regret. In the coldness of his own hearth- 
 stone, in the like coldness at Golden Grove, he sat 
 down and wrote one of the most beautiful prose 
 compositions of the seventeenth century, a threnody 
 palpitating with enthusiasm and emotion. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor claimed that the Holy Dying was 
 the earliest work of its kind "that I remember to 
 have been published in the Church of England." He 
 admits that there had been many in the Church of 
 Rome, but he holds the resemblance of his treatise 
 with these to be quite superficial. He claims an 
 originality; "in this affair I was forced almost to 
 walk alone"; the only help he has had having come 
 from the fountains of Scripture and from "some 
 experience in the cure of souls." This, then, is the 
 first point which it may be useful to consider in 
 dealing with the causes of the vitality of the Holy 
 Dying as a work of art. Its brilliant freshness is 
 owing, in the outset, to the fact that the author is 
 not, like so many theologians of his time, chewing 
 the cud of the old accepted platitudes and holy saws, 
 but is feeding the arteries of his imagination with
 
 90 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 a constant flow of recent personal observation. These 
 are clinical notes, sharply perceived in protracted 
 hours of acute mental activity ; and they are used to 
 produce a sort of pathology of the soul in physical 
 pain. He has evidently been deeply impressed by the 
 experiences of these dear persons in their hour of agony, 
 by their "unequal courages and accidental fortitude." 
 Being brought face to face, in this way, with all the 
 violence of death, he is at once fascinated and exalted 
 by it. He fears a kind of hysterical reaction from 
 what he has endured and seen, and he determines to 
 use his emotion for a purpose at once creative and 
 sedative, because "nothing is more unreasonable than 
 to entangle our spirits in wildness and amazement, 
 like a partridge in a net, which she breaks not, though 
 she breaks her wings." 
 
 Few points are more interesting than the modern- 
 ness of Taylor's attitude to many themes which were 
 still in his time subjected to the traditions of the 
 Renaissance. The conception of death which pre- 
 vailed in the poetry, the sermons, and the philosophy 
 of the early part of the seventeenth century was a 
 survival of the " Danses Macabres " of the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth. Death was still generally regarded anthropo- 
 morphically and positively, as a great pale tyrant, an 
 executioner, a headsman concealed behind a curtain. 
 He was " the unsparing pursuivant with eagles' wings " ; 
 he was even the grisly, cynical humorist, waiting to 
 pounce on the king as he ascends his throne, or to 
 strike down the beggar as he reels out of the tavern. 
 In literature, this sentiment of death as the skeleton 
 that hides to take his victim unawares, because, if met 
 in front, he might be parleyed with and even tricked,
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 91 
 
 had produced some magnificent apologies and out- 
 bursts. It had lent a wing to the heavy, historic muse 
 of Ralegh ; it had spread its velvet over the sermons 
 of Donne; it had inspired a choir of doleful lyrists. 
 But it was cast out of court, and relegated to a place 
 among things childish and outworn, by the Holy Dying 
 of Jeremy Taylor, and never again could this con- 
 ception of death, as a gymnastic skeleton with a dart 
 springing from the tomb, be put forward without 
 danger of awakening a smile of disgust. 
 
 To the elegists of a decayed Renaissance, death 
 had seemed a sort of central actor in a tragedy. To 
 Taylor, as to a physician of to-day, it is not a figure 
 at all, but a negation ; a state in which the powers of 
 movement and assimilation have ceased their activity, a 
 point where the equilibrium in which life has consisted 
 has broken down, and where what is left is nothing. 
 Taylor's originality consists in the firmness with which 
 he turns away from the conception of a grinning shape 
 behind the arras, ready to strike, and concentrates his 
 attention on the psychology of the still living, but 
 rapidly declining and obscured humanity. Accordingly 
 he does not, in the manner of his predecessors, expatiate 
 on the majesty of death, or cultivate the pretension 
 and splendour of high family funerals. In particular, 
 he has little or nothing to say about the subject which 
 had so deeply stirred the imagination of the previous 
 age, the conduct of obsequies. That does not in- 
 terest him in the least. There is no dwelling upon 
 the deaths of great persons, a matter in which the 
 early seventeenth century had been so disagreeably 
 insistent. Jeremy Taylor finds the death of "a poor 
 shepherd or a maid-servant" quite as interesting as
 
 92 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 that of a prince or a countess. And in an age so 
 copious and tumultuous in its funerals, he is severe 
 in denouncing anything like ambitious or pompous 
 sorrow, and in deprecating all ostentatious lamentation 
 for the dead. 
 
 Another very interesting example of the modernity 
 of Taylor's mind, and his freedom from the trammels 
 of his time, is to be observed in the curious notes on 
 the approach and development of illness, and on the 
 behaviour of those who surround the sick, in the 
 later part of the Holy Dying. He seems to have 
 divined, by sheer exercise of the imagination, some 
 of the great truths of modern medicine, so far at least 
 as to reject, or question, that universal idea of disease 
 as the work of a malignant spirit outside the body, of 
 which Sir Frederick Treves has lately spoken in his 
 interesting strictures on a great physician younger 
 than Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich. Jeremy 
 Taylor, in his closely observed notes on the psychology 
 of persons attacked by sickness, seems to rise above 
 the preternatural view, and to accept, with clairvoy- 
 ance, the simple natural theory of the processes of 
 dissolution. He even seems to have foreseen some- 
 thing of that very theory of the beneficence of some 
 of the symptoms of disease which is claimed as a 
 discovery almost of our own day. He points out the 
 benefit of some illnesses in giving the nerves an 
 opportunity of rest; sickness becoming "the more 
 tolerable because it cures very many evils, and takes 
 away the sense of all the cross fortunes which amaze 
 the spirits of some men, and transport them beyond 
 the limits of all patience." And he actually perceives 
 that some acute forms of illness may be, as our great
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 93 
 
 modern surgeon puts it, "the outcome of nature's 
 vigorous effort to minimise the calamity," and force 
 the patient to a recumbent posture, where, says the 
 divine, "all losses and disgraces, domestic cares and 
 public evils, ... lie down and rest upon the sick 
 man's pillow." 
 
 In the more enthusiastic parts of the Holy Dying, the 
 sustained brightness and abundance of the style are 
 extraordinary. The images bud and branch under our 
 eyes in a miraculous profusion. To this work Jeremy 
 Taylor brought a mind steeped in the loftiest poetry 
 of antiquity ; nowhere are the references so frequent 
 as they are here to Lucretius, Horace, and Lucan, 
 to Persius, Ovid, and Petronius Arbiter. Almost the 
 only modern books which he quotes are the then very 
 popular Odes of the Polish poet, Casimir, who had lately 
 died, and the Funeral Monuments of John Weever, the 
 antiquary. But although the ancients colour so much 
 of the tissue of his style, he has now almost entirely 
 abandoned the vexatious habit of quoting them in bulk. 
 He has learned at last the very useful lesson which 
 English prose had been so slow to learn, but which 
 Joachim du Bellay had successfully taught the French 
 authors a hundred years before namely, that good 
 masons do not build their new buildings partly of fresh 
 brick, and partly of stones torn out of stately ancient 
 houses, but leave what other men have built, and try 
 to construct as beautifully as they did, in reverent 
 imitation, but with a different material. An example, 
 taken at random from the Holy Dying, may serve to 
 exemplify Taylor's method. Here a tag from the 
 Hippolytus of the pseudo-Seneca serves as the grain 
 of sand around which the nacreous ingenuity of
 
 94 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 the English writer secretes its layers of mother-of- 
 pearl : 
 
 " Since we stay not here, being people but of a day's abode, 
 and our age is like that of a fly and contemporary with a 
 gourd, we must look somewhere else for an abiding city, a 
 place in another country to fix our house in, whose walls and 
 foundation is God, where we must find rest, or else be restless 
 for ever. For whatever ease we can have or fancy here is 
 shortly to be changed into sadness or tediousness. It goes 
 away too soon, like the periods of our life ; or stays too long, 
 like the sorrows of a sinner. Its own weariness, or a contrary 
 disturbance, is its load, or it is eased by its revolution into 
 vanity and forgetfulness. And where either there is sorrow 
 or an end of joy there can be no true felicity, which must be 
 had by some instrument and in some period of our duration. 
 We must carry up our affections to the mansions prepared for 
 us above, where eternity is the measure, felicity is the state, 
 angels are the company, the Lamb is the light, and God is the 
 portion and inheritance." 
 
 Of all the Avritings of Jeremy Taylor, the Holy Dying 
 achieved the most direct and durable popularity. 
 Twenty authorised editions of it appeared before the 
 close of the seventeenth century. It produced an 
 instant effect in humanising the piety of English 
 readers, which controversy had bitterly exacerbated. 
 Taylor's attitude, his philosophy of action, was holy, 
 but it was neither morose, fanatical, nor uncharitable. 
 It was inspired by a gentle sobriety, a brooding 
 tenderness and pity. On some points it displayed an 
 extraordinary liberality, and in its melancholy it was 
 marvellously wholesome. The curious morbidity of 
 the age found no support in Taylor's healthy sweetness. 
 The dying are to be led to examine their conscience, 
 but not in gloom ; the scrutiny is not to be distracted 
 by the terrors of law and punishment. All this was
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 95 
 
 eminently serviceable to the irritated nerves of his 
 contemporaries ; it was a balm to their spiritual wounds. 
 
 We may hope that the success of this and other of 
 his literary writings was of practical benefit to Taylor's 
 fortunes, which were at a low ebb in 1651. In that 
 year he was embarrassed by a cessation of the patron- 
 age of Lord Hatton. " I am troubled," he says, " that 
 he will not honour me with a letter." He was doubt- 
 less unaware of the penury into which Lord Hatton 
 had now sunk in Paris. He makes a very strong 
 appeal to Lord Carbery's generosity in the dedication 
 to the Holy Living, which book he compares, with more 
 quaintness than propriety, to the gift of "apiece of 
 gum or the fat of a cheap lamb." In the same work 
 he seems to describe himself as " a little bee that feeds 
 on dew or manna, and lives upon what falls every 
 morning from the storehouses of heaven, clouds and 
 providence." In the Holy Dying he is still more 
 explicit, and speaks of the joy with which he ministers 
 to the sick and penitent, "having scarce any other 
 possibilities left me of doing alms, or exercising that 
 charity by which we shall all be judged at doomsday." 
 His salary as chaplain at Golden Grove must have 
 been small, and perhaps irregularly paid. 
 
 It was possibly the opportunity to sell yet another 
 manuscript to a London bookseller which led to the pub- 
 lication, in this same year, of a folio pamphlet entitled 
 Clerus Domini. This is one of the rarest and most 
 obscure of Taylor's writings, though copies of it are 
 sometimes found bound up with the Eniautos. It was 
 a relic of his old Oxford days, and had been written, some 
 eight or nine years previously, at the special command 
 of "our late king." So much had happened, so much
 
 96 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 had been overturned and ruined in the English Church 
 since its composition, that it must have seemed obsolete 
 to readers of 1651. It was issued without dedication 
 or prefatory matter of any kind, perhaps surreptitiously. 
 It is concerned with arguments for the ministerial order 
 as an absolute religious necessity. The author asserts 
 that the strictness and severity of the hierarchy are 
 pleasing to God, and have descended to us directly 
 from that primal Consecrator, the Holy Ghost. There 
 must be experts in religion, as in art and science, men 
 of careful training, supernaturally selected, by whose 
 delicate and skilful care alone piety can escape being 
 " bruised by the hard hand of mechanics." 
 
 The treatise is very outspoken, and must have been 
 excessively distasteful to the Parliamentarian divines, 
 if any of them came across it. It treats their preten- 
 sions with the utmost contempt. They are all pre- 
 sumptuous amateurs, who pretend to work a machine 
 of the nature of which they are profoundly ignorant. 
 Four great mysteries are defined as lying within the 
 exclusive province of the consecrated minister : these 
 are remission of sins, the preaching of the Gospel, 
 baptism, and the distribution of the Sacrament. The 
 minister is lifted above common humanity by his 
 apostolical prerogative. He is ordained that he may 
 bridge over the mysterious and wonderful chasm 
 between God and man; this none but "a settled 
 ministry" can do. The self-chosen presbyter or 
 preacher has no apparatus for crossing the abyss, and 
 his offers of ministration are as absurd as they are 
 profane. This is the temper of Jeremy Taylor before 
 his afflictions had mellowed him, and the chief interest 
 of Clerus Domini is the evidence which it gives us of
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 97 
 
 the advance of every species of liberality which he had 
 made during his years of seclusion in Wales. It is 
 quite possible that he had nothing to do with its 
 publication in 1651, but that Eoyston acquired it from 
 some one at Oxford in whose hands it had remained 
 ever since Taylor's flight in 1644. 
 
 From a literary point of view Clerus Domini is 
 almost valueless, except, to the reader who approaches 
 his works in the order of their publication, as a 
 startling instance of the development of Taylor's 
 intellect and style since he came to Golden Grove. 
 Here we have the tedious, constant quotation from 
 the fathers in Latin and Greek, the equally tedious, 
 casuistical building-up of a structure which seems like 
 argument and is not, the clumsy sentences without 
 felicity or music. Indeed, it would hardly be worth 
 while to mention Clerus Domini, if it were not so 
 useful a text upon which to discourse on the wonder- 
 ful advance in all the powers of its author which 
 followed his flight to Wales. The contrast may be 
 still further emphasised by comparison of it with two 
 compositions which appeared in the same year (1651), 
 in a little book called Choice Forms of Prayer. This 
 was the venture of a publisher who collected from 
 a large number of popular divines the devotions which 
 they were in the habit of using before and after 
 preaching a sermon. Jeremy Taylor's contributions, 
 particularly the first, are models of purity and grace. 
 
 For the next three years what we know of Taylor is 
 almost exclusively confined to a record of his publica- 
 tions. His life seems to have become more and more 
 sequestered. Eust speaks of his "solitude" and of 
 his "retirement" at this time, and of his implicit 
 
 G
 
 98 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 devotion to the composition of " those excellent dis- 
 courses, which are enough of themselves to furnish a 
 library." During these years the only friend of whose 
 presence we are allowed to be conscious is Lord 
 Carbery, who seems to have preserved an even tenor 
 of protective sympathy. But Taylor was now in cor- 
 respondence with theologians in various parts of the 
 kingdom. In a letter to Gilbert Sheldon, his old friend, 
 the former warden of All Souls College, Oxford, dated 
 April 11, 1653, he speaks of obtaining for a certain 
 manuscript treatise of his as much criticism from the 
 neighbouring Welsh clergy as he could ; and of a con- 
 ference he has lately had " with a Jesuit in these parts." 
 The work which he mentions thus to Sheldon is the 
 Real Presence, of 1654, and he states that he has sent 
 a copy in proof-sheets to Dr. Brian Duppa, the aged 
 Bishop of Salisbury, who was now living a life of strict 
 retirement at Richmond in Surrey ; this eminent divine 
 was another of the old All Souls friends of happier 
 times. We find Taylor thanking Sheldon, who has 
 done him the very welcome favour of paying him what 
 appear to be some partial arrears of his college stipend 
 Taylor " resolving to take up the remaining portion 
 of the debt at the great Audit " and sending him a 
 new edition of The Great Exemplar and his new volume 
 of Sermons. 
 
 The last-mentioned book, which Taylor refers to in 
 this letter to Sheldon as published before April 1653, 
 is perhaps, from a purely literary point of view, the 
 most important which he ever produced. It was issued 
 as Twenty-Five Sermons preached at Golden Grove, being 
 for the Winter Half -Year, and completes the series of 
 which the first instalment appeared in 1651. Like its
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 99 
 
 predecessor, it mainly consists of pairs of sermons, 
 although in many cases there are groups of three, and 
 there is one of four ; but the entire Eniautos does not 
 contain a single address which is complete in itself. 
 It follows, therefore, that no effort is made to provide 
 appropriate teaching for particular feast days, and, in 
 fact, with the exceptions of Whitsuntide and Advent, 
 no special or topical allusiveness is attempted. What 
 has been already said in general about the sermons of 
 Jeremy Taylor is true of this, his most magnificent 
 collection of them. The dedication, once more to Lord 
 Carbery, is a brilliant essay on the value of sermons. 
 The author observes that "all the great necessities of 
 the Church have been served by the zeal of preaching 
 in public," which " restored the splendour of the Church, 
 when barbarism and wars and ignorance, either sate in, 
 or broke the doctor's chair in pieces." It is therefore 
 peculiarly proper that in this dreadful age of heresy 
 and schism, God's ministers should proclaim "those 
 truths which are the enamel and beauty of our 
 churches." There is no trace in this dedication of the 
 reluctance and regret which marked that of 1651. In 
 1653 Taylor has no more diffidence. He knows now 
 that he had a great and fruitful work to perform from 
 the pulpit. This is an interesting psychological point 
 which has not hitherto been observed by the succes- 
 sive editors who have reversed the order of the two 
 sections of the Eniauto. 
 
 Again, in the body of the sermons, we are conscious, 
 if we read them as they were written, of an important 
 advance in the genius of the author. The Twenty-Five 
 have all the lucidity and harmony of the Twenty-Eight, 
 but they have in addition a certain sublimity of tone
 
 100 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 which is unknown to the works which Taylor com- 
 posed before the deaths of Lady Carbery and of his 
 wife. In some of these homilies he touches the very 
 highest level of human oratory. He proposes no new 
 theology, he discusses no spinosities of creed ; he maps 
 the path of conduct, and enlightens it with all the 
 colour and radiance of his luminous experience. In 
 each sermon there comes the direct appeal to the 
 imagination of his auditors. The skill with which 
 he presents picture after picture to the eyes of the 
 listeners is wonderful. Let us take, for example, the 
 first sermon on "Christ's Advent." Here we are 
 hurried from vivid scene to scene ; in rapid succession 
 we watch the passage of the plague-cart through a 
 doomed city ; we have a Michelangelesque present- 
 ment of the terrors of the Day of Judgment; we 
 watch a party of youths and girls carousing at the 
 wine-cup ; we listen to a Greek philosopher addressing 
 his disciples in an enclosure ; we have the pathetic 
 drama of a young gentleman breaking from his ungodly 
 mother, with her repentance, and his backsliding, and 
 her ultimate reproaches ; we are the spectators at a sun- 
 rise, and then at an earthquake on the shores of the 
 Mediterranean, and then at an apocalyptic scene when 
 
 "the birds shall mourn and change their songs to threnes 
 and sad accents. Rivers of fires shall rise from the east and 
 the west, and the stars shall be rent into threads of light, and 
 scatter like the beards of comets." 
 
 Nor does all this exhaust the variety of the preacher's 
 images, while this wealth of illustration and allusion 
 never interferes for a moment with the clear flow of 
 the orator's solemn, evangelical argument.
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 101 
 
 In dealing with the mysteries of religion, it is 
 interesting to see how completely Taylor continues 
 master of his voice. We see him in a sort of ecstasy ; 
 his fancy, with outspread wings, soars up into the 
 empyrean, yet he retains it wholly under his control. 
 Nowhere, in the series of his writings, does he deal 
 with themes in which the enthusiastic cry of the 
 preacher is so apt to break in a kind of hysterical 
 falsetto as he does in the Twenty-Five Sermons. Yet 
 he remains always master of his art. In his three 
 great addresses on "Doomsday-Book" his reticence 
 is extraordinary. Here, where the temptation to 
 expatiate on horror is so great, Taylor is careful to 
 dwell more on the recompenses than on the punish- 
 ments. He shrinks from all those material catalogues 
 of terrific experience in which the Mediaeval theo- 
 logians delighted. He is loath to admit the doctrine 
 of eternal torment, but leans to the kindlier hope 
 that the wicked soul is broken up and destroyed, 
 although he warns all those who still lie "in the 
 neighbourhood and fringes of the flames of hell " not 
 to trust to this. 
 
 In the different numbers of these sermons Jeremy 
 Taylor sounds the whole diapason of majestic elo- 
 quence. Nor does he neglect the craving of the ear 
 for quieter periods and a more broken cadence. The 
 group of sermons on "The Return of Prayers" offers 
 us instances, as many as we can desire, of both forms 
 of beauty. Here is a fragment in the more ornate 
 manner : 
 
 " Our prayers upbraid our spirits when we beg coldly and 
 tamely for those things for which we ought to die, which are 
 more precious than the globes of kings and weightier than
 
 102 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 imperial sceptres, richer than the spoils of the sea, or the 
 treasures of the Indian hills." 
 
 And here is a passage in which the short, nervous 
 sentences are like those of our latest masters of 
 colloquial English : 
 
 " Holy prayer procures the ministry and service of angels. 
 It rescinds the decrees of God. It cures sicknesses and obtains 
 pardon. It arrests the sun in its course, and stays the wheels 
 of the chariot of the moon. It rules over all God's creatures, 
 and opens and shuts the storehouses of rain. It unlocks the 
 cabinet of the womb, and quenches the violence of fire. It 
 stops the mouths of lions, and reconciles our sufferance and 
 weak faculties with the violence of torment and sharpness of 
 persecution. It pleases God and supplies all our needs. But 
 prayer, that can do this much for us, can do nothing at all 
 without holiness, for God heareth not sinners, but if any man 
 be a worshipper of God, and doth His will, him He heareth." 
 
 There was no one else in England in 1653, there 
 was no one to arise for a long time after that date, 
 who could write sustained prose with this simplicity 
 and force and delicate precision. 
 
 From this volume, in which the variety and fulness 
 of Taylor's imagination are seen in their highest 
 development, it is difficult to part ourselves. The 
 whole Eniautos might take as its motto a phrase which 
 occurs in one of its most beautiful sections, "The 
 Marriage Ring " : 
 
 " These are the little lines of a man's duty, which, like 
 threads of light from the body of the sun, do clearly describe 
 all the regions of his proper obligations." 
 
 The simplicity and gravity, the light and swiftness 
 of Taylor's exhortations are all summed up in this 
 paragraph, which includes even, if we look deep 

 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 103 
 
 enough, their humanity and their humanism. This last 
 deserves special notice. We can even trace with what 
 books the preacher had been refreshing his memory. 
 When he wrote "Apples of Sodom" his mind was 
 steeped in the Hecuba of Euripides; "The Marriage 
 Ring" testifies to his deep enjoyment of the Greek 
 Anthology; when he sat down to meditate on "Christian 
 Simplicity," he had just been reading the third book 
 of Cicero's Offices. In this he is the greatest, as he was 
 the last, of the seventeenth century theologians who 
 took the picturesque parts of the classics as their store- 
 house of allusion ; in him a phase of the pure Renais- 
 sance reaches its highest point. No one before him 
 had filled his pages with half so many images of 
 plastic beauty : in this he is in our prose what Spenser 
 had been in our poetry. And after him was to follow, 
 almost immediately, a generation blind alike to natural 
 phenomena and to the corporeal loveliness embodied in 
 ancient literature. 
 
 One curious omission will be noted in the sermons, 
 as in the other writings of Jeremy Taylor. The 
 absence of almost all allusion to the life of the poor 
 is very curious. Such references as we may discover 
 are perfunctory and vague. The teaching of Taylor 
 is in the main aristocratic; it is delivered from a 
 seraphic height, and addressed to all classes of men, 
 but particularly to those who are influential and well- 
 to-do. No temptation, no frailty of the rich is allowed 
 to pass unindicated or unreproved. The preacher is 
 speaking in the private chapel of a great house, and 
 mainly to those who are responsible from their wealth, 
 their intellect, or their influence. Outside are the 
 hordes of the wild Welsh, but of them the preacher
 
 104 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 never speaks and never seems to think. The select 
 folk who came to Golden Grove to listen to him ate 
 sumptuously every day; their danger was to forget 
 God in their pleasures and in their indolence ; and the 
 preacher reproves them, seeks to awaken their con- 
 sciences, draws them back to duty by such exquisite 
 arts and appeals as would come most directly home to 
 their refinement. This involves, to be just, no harsh 
 judgment upon Jeremy Taylor, even in this one 
 particular, for he did exactly what it was his duty 
 to do. Yet we cannot help wishing that the demo- 
 cratic element in society had also had an opportunity 
 to attract him. It did not, and it was really not at 
 Golden Grove, but ten years later in the court of 
 Louis Xiv., that this essentially modern note was to 
 be sounded. It was Bossuet, and not Taylor, who 
 was to introduce the definite consideration of the cause 
 of the poor, and to bid the Christian world listen to 
 the "cri de misere a 1'entour de nous, qui devrait nous 
 fondre le cceur." 
 
 For ten years the current of Jeremy Taylor's life 
 had now been absolutely unbroken, except by the 
 hand of death. He had lived, almost as retired as 
 Moses in his cloud, in a sequestered valley of South 
 Wales, which was full of the sound of waters, and un- 
 disturbed by human voices. By a dispensation which 
 might easily have seemed miraculous, through the 
 cruellest time of distraction and peril, this exquisite 
 talent had been preserved intact, hidden as if in the 
 hollow of a mighty hand, granted every favourable 
 opportunity for growing to its full stature. Nothing 
 had been omitted which could enhance the advantages 
 of this hermitage, where there was poverty and yet
 
 in.] RETIREMENT AT GOLDEN GROVE 105 
 
 no want, leisure enough, and yet some healthful busi- 
 ness, no crowd to distract and press, but a little circle 
 of auditors, sympathetic, earnest and appreciative. In 
 this beautiful woodland, with a roll of the winding 
 Towey bent round him like an arm, Jeremy Taylor 
 had grown to be the greatest prose writer in England. 
 He had no rival among those who understood and 
 knew. It might well be that he was sometimes 
 content to drop further struggle, and to look forward 
 with satisfaction to a quiet burial in the churchyard of 
 Llanfihangel. Like the prophet in Alfred de Vigny's 
 poem, he might cry 
 
 " O Seigneur, j'ai ve"cu puissant et solitaire, 
 Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre." 
 
 But this was not to be. * A variety of circum- 
 stances, without immediately severing his connection 
 with Golden Grove, was now to draw him out into the 
 light of common day, and cause him to take part in 
 the anxieties and afflictions of his fellow-men.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 YEARS OF AFFLICTION 
 
 (1654-1658) 
 
 JEREMY TAYLOR had enjoyed complete immunity at 
 Golden Grove. No one had disturbed the growth of 
 his soul. His genius had spread its branches and 
 flowered like a magnolia under the shadow of a 
 southern wall in a quiet courtyard. In that period of 
 the cruel discomfiture of his friends, he alone was 
 protected by his powerlessness, by the modesty of his 
 fortunes. As he said himself, "No man goes about 
 to poison a poor man's pitcher, nor lays plots to forage 
 his little garden, made for the hospital of two bee-hives, 
 and the feasting of a few Pythagorean herb-eaters." 
 But when the poor man leaves his rosemary and his 
 rue, and wanders forth into the market-place, he finds 
 himself jostled by the throng, and may be can never 
 recover his hermitage. This is precisely what happened 
 to our divine, whom circumstances, or his own im- 
 patience, now tempted forth into the world, at first 
 only on short visits, and then altogether, with the 
 result that, lover of contemplation as he was, he never 
 again knew what perfect security and perfect rest 
 meant. 
 
 It is probable that for some time past he had been 
 
 106 

 
 CHAP, iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 107 
 
 in the habit of coming up to town whenever he was 
 about to publish a book. He seems to have been in 
 frequent personal contact with Royston, his publisher, 
 who is much less likely to have travelled down into 
 Carmarthenshire to see his client than to have offered 
 him hospitality in London. From 1654 onwards this 
 ceases to be a matter of conjecture; we find Jeremy 
 Taylor frequently going up to town, and light is 
 thrown upon his movements by his forming a new 
 and most valuable friendship, namely with John Evelyn. 
 This gentleman was one of the most entertaining and 
 intelligent persons of that age; endowed with extra- 
 ordinary activity both of mind and body, a "philo- 
 sopher," as men of science were then called, who was 
 doing as much as any one in Europe to encourage 
 research and prepare for the reception of new truth. 
 He was scarcely less actively interested in the fine 
 arts and in literature, and he wrote exceedingly well 
 in English. Evelyn was one of those beings who 
 dazzle their own generation, and puzzle ours to account 
 for the fact that they were not absolutely first-rate. 
 It seems as though nothing but a little more intensity 
 in any one particular direction was needed to turn 
 Evelyn from a paragon of all the talents into an 
 undisputed genius. 
 
 This delightful man was in his thirty-fourth year 
 when Taylor became acquainted with him. Evelyn 
 had been a gentleman-commoner of Balliol when 
 Taylor preached his university sermon, but we do not 
 know that they had met. He had left England when 
 the Civil War broke out, and he had lived for several 
 years in Italy, making a very close study of the 
 antiquities and of modern Italian painting, architec-
 
 108 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAF. 
 
 ture, and sculpture. He had certainly grown to be 
 the leading English connoisseur of his time. Then he 
 had slowly returned northwards, and having married 
 an English heiress in Paris, he had determined to 
 venture upon returning to this country, in order to 
 take up an estate which devolved upon his wife. But 
 he was unsettled, until, at the opening of 1653, he 
 obtained possession of the Browne property called 
 Sayes Court, near Deptford, in Kent, which had 
 belonged to his wife's family. He was tired of 
 wandering about the world ; he wanted to give 
 literary form to the innumerable scientific and anti- 
 quarian notes he had taken, and he began at once, 
 with feverish eagerness, to lay out the grounds and 
 furnish the apartments of Sayes Court, that it might 
 become his retreat. 
 
 Evelyn, who at the end of his crowded life was able 
 truthfully to say that his experience was "all is vanity 
 which is not honest, and there is no solid wisdom but 
 in piety," was a devoted Anglican, and was very 
 desirous of attaching to his household some sequestrated 
 minister of the national church. It was necessary to 
 act with caution, for any public patronage of clergy- 
 men was suspiciously regarded. His choice originally 
 fell on a worthy divine of Eltham, Richard Owen, who 
 seems to have acted for a time as private chaplain at 
 Sayes Court. The active and illuminated mind of 
 Evelyn, however, with its buoyant ambition, could 
 hardly receive full satisfaction from the discourses of 
 a humdrum country practitioner. At this time Crom- 
 well tacitly permitted a single pulpit in London, that 
 of St. Gregory's, a little church which stood close to 
 St. Paul's, to be filled by a succession of Anglican
 
 IT.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 109 
 
 clergy. He doubtless considered that this was a 
 salutary relief for an eloquence which, if pent up too 
 rigorously, might cause a dangerous explosion. On 
 the 15th of March 1654 Evelyn "went to London to 
 hear the famous Dr. Jeremy Taylor at St. Gregory's, 
 concerning evangelical perfection." This was perhaps 
 Evelyn's earliest approach to one who was to take a 
 place among the dearest of his friends. 
 
 One of those churchmen with whom Jeremy Taylor 
 was now in frequent correspondence was John Warner, 
 Bishop of Rochester, to whom he dedicated the treatise 
 on Transubstantiation, called The Real Presence of Christ 
 in the Blessed Sacrament, which was his solitary publica- 
 tion in 1654. Warner, who was now in his seventieth 
 year, had been one of the most inflexible supporters 
 of Charles I.; in him, as Fuller said, "dying Episcopacy 
 gave the last groan in the House of Lords." He was 
 a most generous benefactor, out of his private purse, 
 to the distressed and ejected clergy ; for several years 
 he had been wandering about Wales, doing what kind- 
 ness he could, and had come into personal contact with 
 Jeremy Taylor, who speaks of the "favours" with 
 which Warner has "already endeared his thankfulness 
 and service," and of the Bishop's having "assisted his 
 condition" out of "the remains" of his "lessened 
 fortunes." The activity and munificence of the ejected 
 Bishop of Rochester were constant thorns in the side 
 of the Parliamentarians, who sequestrated nine-tenths 
 of his large personal estate, and would have imprisoned 
 the indomitable old man if they could only have 
 caught him. Considering that Warner was in the 
 most careful retirement in 1654, it was perhaps more 
 zealous than tactful of Taylor to dedicate a treatise to
 
 110 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 him by name, although there is nothing in Tfo Real 
 Presence fitted to exasperate the political authorities. 
 
 In this work Taylor returns to the fight with an 
 old enemy, whom he had long neglected, Rome. He 
 says that the supposed destruction of the Church of 
 England has filled the Romanists with a "strange 
 triumphal gaiety." In particular, he speaks with 
 bitter indignation of one who was formerly the son 
 of the Church of England, " but who ran away from 
 her sorrow, and disinherited himself because she was 
 not able to give him a temporal portion." The utter- 
 ances of this man, whom Taylor refuses to name, have 
 principally stirred him up to write this book; it is 
 believed that he refers to Bishop Morton's former 
 secretary, John Sarjeaunt, who threw up his post at 
 the beginning of the Civil War, and lived as a priest 
 in a college of seculars at Lisbon until 1652, when 
 he came back to England as a Roman propagandist. 
 Taylor had perhaps had a visit at Golden Grove from 
 Sarjeaunt, for he says that he "has been by chance 
 engaged in a conference with a person of another 
 persuasion," whom in a letter to Sheldon he calls a 
 Jesuit, "the man not unlearned nor unwary." 
 
 In The Real Presence we are made to feel that Taylor, 
 as a pure man of letters, is slipping away from us. 
 This is a piece of composition seriously inferior to any- 
 thing else that he had written since he arrived in 
 Wales. It is apparently thrown off in great haste, 
 and Taylor was never at his best when he improvised. 
 It is written to impress those who will be quite 
 indifferent to the charm of his language and the 
 luxuriance of his imagery, and on whom, therefore, 
 he is careful to waste neither of these deliberate
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 111 
 
 ornaments. On the other hand, here, if ever, what 
 was called, in theological circles, "learning," would be 
 effective, if nowhere else, and Taylor is redundant, 
 from Porphyry and Justin Martyr, in sentences of 
 monstrous prolixity. The arguments of The Real 
 Presence were contested, even by those whom they 
 were intended to support, and the author was charged, 
 as of old by Chillingworth in Oxford, with not listen- 
 ing to what his opponents said, and with indulging 
 in illogical rhetoric. The book contains some fine 
 passages, and a few lively ones, but on the whole it is 
 controversy and not literature. It may be noted in 
 passing that Taylor shows himself well acquainted 
 with his Catholic contemporaries in France, and quotes, 
 among others, from the great Arnauld of Port-Royal, as 
 again in later volumes. 
 
 Evelyn had evidently introduced himself to Taylor 
 soon after his sitting under him in St. Gregory's. But 
 their intimacy seems to have sprung up in connection 
 with a misfortune which happened to Taylor at the 
 beginning of 1655. It appears that the divine had 
 shown the preface of a new book, The Golden Grove, 
 either in manuscript or proof, to Evelyn, who had 
 highly commended its outspoken statement that " never 
 did the excellency of Episcopal government appear so 
 demonstratively and conspicuously as now." That was 
 a hard saying for Parliament and the governing pres- 
 byters, who were, moreover, determining upon a more 
 vigorous suppression of Anglican preachers. 
 
 In December 1654 the laxity of which the Anglican 
 clergy had been slowly taking advantage was sharply 
 reproved by Parliament. There appeared a general 
 tendency to return to the old intolerant methods, and
 
 112 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 the whole question of permitting sectarian worship 
 was discussed. When Jeremy Taylor went on to 
 speak of Cromwell as "the son of Zippor," it is no 
 wonder that Evelyn thought that he was daring the 
 government to undo him. The Golden Grove was 
 entered at Stationers' Hall on the 26th of January 
 1655, and exactly a fortnight afterwards Evelyn, who 
 had been away at Woodcot since New Year's Day, 
 came home to Sayes Court, and found two letters, 
 one informing him of Taylor's arrest and the other 
 of his release. As Evelyn, in consideration of what 
 TJie Golden Grove contained, had been very anxious 
 about his friend's safety, and had been quite prepared 
 to hear " sad news and deplore your restraint," it is 
 evident that Taylor's imprisonment was very brief. 
 Perhaps the proclamation of religious liberty, pro- 
 mulgated on the 15th of February, was the immediate 
 excuse for his release. We have no light at all upon 
 the locality where he was confined, but it was probably 
 the Tower of London; he would be required to pay 
 a fine, and detained until his friends had produced 
 the money. 
 
 Deeply sympathising with Taylor's affliction, Evelyn 
 hastened to strengthen their friendship, and on the 18th 
 of March went to town on purpose to hear the great 
 divine preach. Less than a fortnight later Evelyn 
 had made up his mind to take a serious step, and on 
 the 31st he "made a visit to Dr. Jeremy Taylor to 
 confer with him about some spiritual matters, using 
 him thenceforward as my ghostly father." Many 
 years afterwards, looking back upon the past, Evelyn 
 besought God Almighty to keep him thankful for the 
 impulse which carried him to Taylor, and to make
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 113 
 
 him always mindful of "his heavenly assistances." 
 Taylor was manifestly now in danger, but preserved 
 from it by the zeal and influence of Evelyn, to whom 
 it was probably due that he was so slow in returning to 
 his Welsh home. In the meantime the early months 
 of 1655 present two works for our consideration. 
 
 The picturesque title of The Golden Grove and its 
 fiery preface of revolt from under " the harrows and 
 saws of impertinent and ignorant preachers," are likely 
 to awaken anticipations in the literary reader which 
 the body of the treatise can only disappoint. It is a 
 manual of daily prayers and litanies, so phrased as to 
 contain a brief summary of all that a Christian should 
 believe, practise, or desire. It begins with a Short 
 Catechism, which Taylor hoped would be accepted by 
 moderate churchmen as a temporary substitute for that 
 which had been suppressed with the Liturgy. This is 
 followed by an exposition of the Creed, and that by 
 "Agenda," or a list of acts of piety to be performed 
 throughout the day. The next section, "Via Pacis," 
 is largely a paraphrase from the Imitation of Christ, and 
 is followed by " Postulanda," a dilution for we can 
 call it nothing else of the Lord's Prayer. Then follow, 
 concluding the treatise, a set of devotions for the week ; 
 many of these have the purity, and one or two some- 
 thing of the magnificence, of their author, but they are 
 in his least personal vein. On the whole TJie Golden 
 Grove offers very little worthy the notice of the literary 
 student of Taylor's works. 
 
 But at the close of it, and appended to it as by an 
 afterthought, is a slender collection of poems, Festival 
 Hymns, which has the special interest attaching to the 
 only work in verse which Jeremy Taylor published. 
 
 H
 
 114 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 He himself indulged in no illusions about the merit of 
 these exercises. A year later he looked back upon 
 their publication with a blush, and when Evelyn had 
 the complaisance to praise them, their author replied, 
 "I could not but smile at my own weaknesses, and 
 very much love the great candour and sweetness of 
 your nature, that you were pleased to endure my 
 English poetry. But I could not be removed from my 
 certain knowledge of my own greatest weaknesses in 
 it." Taylor was also, about this time, translating part 
 of the De Rerum Natura into English verse, but desisted 
 when he was shown by Evelyn the version of Lucretius 
 which that philosopher had made. All this is curious 
 as showing that Jeremy Taylor, about 1655, having 
 risen to the height of his mastery of prose, was 
 attempting to extend his sovereignty into the province 
 of verse. Had he attempted this twenty years earlier, 
 it is probable that he might have trained himself to be 
 an accomplished poet of the artificial order ; but he made 
 the experiment too late. 
 
 The greater part of the Festival Hymns is a sort of 
 cantata on the mysteries of religion, arranged in con- 
 nected sections. A quarter of a century had passed 
 since certain eccentricities of the least happily inspired 
 pieces in Herbert's Temple had opened the door to mere 
 oddity in the form of religious poetry. The example 
 of Cowley although his Pindarique Odes, those great 
 dissolvers of the public taste, were as yet hardly known 
 may have had some influence on Taylor. But the 
 one precedent author whom he had manifestly read, 
 and whose fantastic innovations in metre he accepted 
 with alacrity, was Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, the 
 first part of whose Silex Scintillans had appeared in
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 115 
 
 1650 while the second was dated 1655. It is impossible 
 to connect Vaughan with Taylor in any historical way. 
 But it should be remembered that the lord of Golden 
 Grove was a distant kinsman of the Silurist, that Llan- 
 dilo and Llansaintffraid were within riding distance 
 of one another, and that in Mrs. Philips, " the Match- 
 less Orinda," of whom we shall presently speak, Henry 
 Vaughan and Jeremy Taylor had an enthusiastic com- 
 mon friend. 
 
 The versification in the Festival Hymns consists of 
 short lines, arbitrarily broken up by rhymes, and 
 arranged on no rhythmical principle. No system could 
 be less tuneful, and in comparison with these hymns 
 the worst odes of Cowley and even of Flatman are 
 musical ; what is curious in so learned a writer, Taylor's 
 rhymes are often scarcely assonances. It was certainly 
 in the Silex Scintillans that Taylor found his model for 
 his eccentricity of metre ; we may perhaps go further, 
 and in Vaughan's irregular canticles called " The Jews " 
 and " Jesus Weeping " detect the identical poems which 
 Taylor read at the close of 1654 and straightway sat 
 down to imitate. He was far too skilful a craftsman 
 to fail to produce something ingenious, and the follow- 
 ing passage may be quoted as presenting Jeremy Taylor 
 at his best as a poet : 
 
 " What ravish'd heart, seraphic tongue or eyes, 
 Clear as the morning's rise, 
 Can speak, or think, or see 
 That bright eternity ? 
 There the King's great transparent throne 
 Is of an entire jasper stone : 
 
 There the eye 
 Of the chrysolite, 
 And a sky
 
 116 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Of diamonds, rubies, chrysoprase, 
 And above all, Thy holy face, 
 Makes an eternal clarity. 
 When Thou Thy jewels up dost bind, that day 
 Remember us, we pray." 
 
 It would be difficult to find a more instructive text 
 on which to expatiate upon the essential difference 
 between poetry and prose. For here are all the ele- 
 ments of imagination and of language which Taylor 
 would have employed in building up one of his dazzling 
 prose sentences, lifting it into our vision like some 
 perfect marble campanile against the blue Italian sky. 
 But this strophe is a mere mistake ; it has neither the 
 plastic harmony of prose, nor the severer and more 
 mechanical beauty of verse. It misses either perfec- 
 tion, and is merely a brilliant instance of the failure 
 of a great genius to express itself in an unfamiliar 
 medium. 
 
 On the 3rd of May 1655 Jeremy Taylor's unlucky 
 volume, the Unum Necessarium, the production of which, 
 though he acted in the purest good faith, was to destroy 
 his peace of mind and make him an army of enemies, 
 was entered at Stationers' Hall. It was not published, 
 however, until October, and we now enter a very 
 troubled and painful period of Taylor's life, where the 
 sequence of causes and events is extremely obscure. 
 What seems to be certain is that, having corrected the 
 proofs of his book, he left for Wales in May, and on 
 the road was arrested and thrown into Chepstow Castle. 
 What was the reason of this second imprisonment? 
 It has been attributed to the sentiments of the Unum 
 Necessarium, but the tenor of that work offered no excuse 
 for such persecution had it been known, and, as we now
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 117 
 
 find, it was not yet published. If the divine had been 
 arrested for unlawful preaching in London, it would 
 not have been in Chepstow but in the Tower that we 
 should have found him. And the harsh treatment 
 which he received from old church friends, like Duppa 
 and Warner, would have been peculiarly untimely and 
 unkind. The correspondence with these people, and 
 with others, during Taylor's captivity, offers no sort of 
 suggestion that he was confined for conscience' sake. 
 The present writer has unwillingly come to the con- 
 clusion that Taylor was probably arrested at the suit 
 of some Welsh creditor, and for a debt which he could 
 not pay. 
 
 Taylor's poverty at this period of his life was ex- 
 treme. Bishop Heber thought that he was married by 
 this time to Joanna Bridges, and through this second 
 wife possessed "a competent estate." But a careful 
 examination of the correspondence shows this to be a 
 mistake. Taylor's letters of this time are pitiful in 
 their confession of poverty, and for reasons which are 
 not beyond conjecture neither Evelyn on the one hand 
 nor Carbery on the other seemed to be willing to 
 advance him money. The Unum Necessarium has a 
 dedication to Lord Carbery, which is dragged in very 
 awkwardly, because the book had already, and much 
 more appropriately, been introduced by a letter to 
 Duppa and Warner. Perhaps, as his distresses gathered 
 about him, he rapidly wrote the dedication to Lord 
 Carbery as an appeal to his generosity, and in that 
 case he was disappointed, for Lord Carbery evidently 
 did not respond. And now, quite abruptly, Lord 
 Carbery's name disappears from the chronicle of Taylor's 
 life. When he was released from Chepstow, it was not
 
 118 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 to Llanfihangel-Aberbythych that lie proceeded, but 
 to the house of Joanna Bridges, at Man-dinam. Nor, 
 in spite of all that his biographers have said, is there 
 any evidence that Taylor ever visited Golden Grove 
 again. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor had lived too long in the shelter of 
 an irresponsible asylum to face the world, and such a 
 rough world, with any discretion. Everything which 
 he did, on the occasion of his venturing from his Welsh 
 retreat, was lacking in ripeness of judgment. The year 
 1655 is marked at every turn by the amiable and 
 enthusiastic divine's defect of common sense. In the 
 first place, it was most rash and unworldly to advertise 
 his retreat publicly and needlessly by calling his 
 catechism for the use of anti-Parliamentarian persons, 
 with its reckless preface, The Golden Grove. It is reason- 
 able to infer that when he was thrown into prison, 
 on the first occasion, for the outspoken opposition of 
 this work to the ruling of the House of Commons, 
 Cromwell's attention was drawn to the title, and that 
 Lord Carbery was sharply called to order for the in- 
 discretions of his chaplain. Moreover, it had been 
 announced that after November 1 it would be illegal 
 for him to keep a chaplain in his house at all, on pain 
 of banishment and sequestration. The position of the 
 ejected clergy had therefore become one of great peril 
 to their friends, though, as it proved, the practice of 
 the law was less vindictive than its theory. But Lord 
 Carbery was a timid man, and nothing we know of his 
 character would lead us to suppose that he would 
 hesitate for one moment in sacrificing his clerical friend 
 to the safety of his estates. If this be the case, it 
 accounts for the sudden cessation of all reference to
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 119 
 
 Golden Grove, and for Taylor's unpleasant surprise 
 when, poor already, he approached his home, to find 
 himself deprived of the only means of support left to 
 him. 
 
 At such a moment, a man more worldly-wise would 
 have acted with discretion, but Taylor had nothing of 
 the serpent in his disposition. For some reason, which 
 it is impossible to determine, Evelyn thought it proper, 
 or wise, or perhaps really kind, to allow him to remain 
 in Chepstow Castle for the present, merely looking 
 about to provide a means of living for him when once 
 he was released. In this conjuncture, Taylor had no 
 influential friends but the High Church associates of 
 his old Oxford days, several of whom were wealthy, 
 and all had been well-disposed to him. But precisely 
 in May 1655, as we shall now find, he had contrived 
 to offend every one of them. 
 
 In March, soon after his original release, Taylor had 
 had an interview with the Bishop of Salisbury, Brian 
 Duppa, who was up in London on one of his rare 
 visits. Two or three years earlier Taylor had con- 
 sulted Duppa, the one living churchman whose opinion 
 he always seems most eager to conciliate, about "the 
 body of cases of conscience " which he had so long had 
 on his mind, and which eventually, after a thousand 
 vicissitudes, saw the light as that most elephantine of 
 all theological works, the Ductor Dubitantium. In the 
 preparation of this book Jeremy Taylor displayed 
 an extraordinary firmness, which it is perhaps not 
 derogatory to his virtue to call an amazing obstinacy. 
 Nobody welcomed the Ductor Dubitantium. The pub- 
 lisher, eager to receive whatever else came from 
 Taylor's pen, rejected or postponed it time after time.
 
 120 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Duppa, indeed, not only "assented " to the scheme of it, 
 when it was first laid before him, but " desired Taylor 
 to proceed seriously and soberly with it," and promised 
 "to pray for a blessing on the undertaking." But 
 when Duppa said that, he had not seen the work. 
 
 Driven inexorably by his conscience, and caring 
 nothing for what the temporal results might be, 
 Taylor pushed forward the vast scher , but the more 
 his friends saw of it the less they liked it. Mean- 
 while, Taylor became aware that it was " necessary by 
 way of introduction [to a monograph on the conscience] 
 to premit in a more general way the doctrine and 
 practice of repentance." He laid this scheme also 
 before Duppa, and the Bishop of Salisbury, though 
 obviously a little anxious, gave a prudent sanction 
 to this, although he suspected that on the subject of 
 a late repentance Jeremy Taylor held unusual views. 
 But while Duppa warned him, " with a fatherly con- 
 fidence," that in the very difficult matter he had / 
 undertaken he would "need a prudence more than 
 ordinary," the Bishop did not so much as dream that 
 Taylor would leap into a still more terrible thorn- 
 bush, and advance .what seemed to be positive heresy 
 on the dogma of original sin. In the face of all this, 
 it was indeed a saintly simplicity which led Taylor 
 to inscribe the, book on repentance, which neither 
 prelate had seen, to Brian Duppa, as Bishop of Salis- 
 bury, and to John Warner, as Bishop of Rochester. 
 Meanwhile, Chepstow Castle opened its jaws and 
 swallowed up the hapless Taylor. 
 
 But Koyston, who had secured the manuscript, 
 alarmed by the catastrophe, stopped the printing for 
 some months, and it was not until August that he
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 121 
 
 bethought him of sending to Duppa a portion of the 
 book. He forwarded a bundle of proofs, without 
 beginning or end, and without any indication whether 
 it was by Taylor's wish or not that he sent them. 
 Duppa read Avhat was consigned to him, first with 
 bewilderment, then with horror, then with angry 
 indignation. Here was a book, the publication of 
 which Duppa had no power to stop, which might 
 be supposed to have received the approbation of the 
 Bishop of Rochester and himself, a book which 
 attacked, in his judgment and Warner's, that "in- 
 tegrity," that is to say that orthodoxy, which was 
 dearer to them both than their own lives. And here 
 was the author of that book absolutely unapproach- 
 able, in prison ; while the least publicity would only 
 increase the scandal which the sequestrated bishops 
 feared so much. 
 
 At all events, if Jeremy Taylor could not be ap- 
 proached, he could be written to. Duppa, though the 
 mildest and kindest of men, was roused to vehement 
 anger. He wrote to the imprisoned Taylor, and told 
 him in the sharpest terms " what a scandal it would 
 bring upon his poor desolate mother, the Church, 
 which is likely to receive a greater wound by this 
 unwary blow of his than by all the unreasonable acts 
 of persecution which her malicious enemies have done 
 against her." Duppa wrote a great deal more of this 
 kind, and even "could not forbear to write sharper 
 things than these." Jeremy Taylor replied, gently 
 and regretfully, but "it seems," as Duppa complained 
 to his friends, "that nothing could work upon him." 
 Taylor wrote to defend his views, not to excuse them. 
 When Duppa wrote again, Taylor did not answer.
 
 122 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 The bishops comforted themselves that perhaps the 
 book would never appear, and that if it did, no one 
 would know that they had seemed to encourage it in 
 its inception. Meanwhile, Royston, having plucked 
 up heart, proceeded with the printing, and in October 
 the Unum Necessarium was published in London. What 
 was the horror of Duppa and Warner to find, when 
 they turned to it, that the terrible and embarrassing 
 volume was dedicated to them both. All our love for 
 Jeremy Taylor cannot prevent our sympathising with 
 the Bishop of Salisbury in his scream of indignation. 
 " Without any way of acquainting me with it, he has 
 been pleased to make use of my name in the very 
 forehead of it ! " 
 
 It was part of Taylor's unworldly simplicity that he 
 could not be made to see that he ought not to have 
 done this. He had written a very severe treatise on 
 a difficult theological point, which he desired to bring 
 strenuously under the notice of the Bishops of Salis- 
 bury and Rochester. He did not for a moment realise 
 that by dedicating the work to them he pledged them 
 to a support of his views. In his lack of business 
 experience, he did not perceive the extremely delicate 
 position in which he was placing the ex-prelates, nor 
 the injury he was doing them in identifying them 
 with doctrines Avhich were detestable to them. Warner 
 seems to have taken the matter philosophically, but 
 Duppa was excessively agitated, and actually sent round 
 privately, among his friends, a sort of circular denoun- 
 cing Taylor's arguments. He says, " If I by my silence 
 should have given way to them, I should have been 
 highly guilty, and deservedly lost myself in the opinion 
 of all good men." The stir produced among churchmen
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 123 
 
 by the Unum Necessarium justified, it must be admitted, 
 Duppa's nervous apprehensions. 
 
 The book has long ceased to awaken alarm, and its 
 principal fault may now seem to be a wearisome pro- 
 lixity, a hammering at nails which were already up to 
 their heads in every instructed conscience. Probably, 
 but for one chapter, the nature of which has already 
 been briefly mentioned, even seventeenth-century readers 
 would not have been scandalised by it. The Unum 
 Necessarium is a treatise written with the purpose "that 
 the strictnesses of a holy life be thought necessary, and 
 that repentance may be no more that trifling little 
 piece of duty to which the errors of the late schools 
 of learning, and the desires of men to be deceived in 
 this article, have reduced it." This was a subject fit 
 for a single sermon, but it scarcely needed such very 
 lengthy treatment in so thick a volume. But the 
 importance of repentance had been interesting Taylor 
 more and more ; it was "a catholicon to the evils of the 
 soul of every man." The book is, in fact, a chip, or 
 rather a log, from the workshop of his immense Ductor 
 Dubitantium. His investigations into the psychology of 
 conscience led him to insist on the necessity of a holy 
 life. He found people willing to go on living in a 
 condition of sin without danger or reproof, hoping 
 all would be well at the last. This state of mind was 
 a stumbling-block to Jeremy Taylor, who argued, 
 properly enough, that if a holy life is not necessary, 
 it is mere waste of time for a theologian to go into 
 a vast series of nice cases of conscience. But what 
 are men bound to repent of ? This question led him 
 into the very thorny province of original sin, where 
 unfortunately he was the victim of what one of his
 
 124 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 warmest admirers has called " an inaccuracy of reason- 
 ing which led him into a partial heterodoxy." The 
 heresy consisted in a denial "that the depravation of 
 man's nature after the fall was so total as had been 
 generally apprehended." This conviction led Taylor 
 to hold that repentance is not applicable to original 
 sin, because a man cannot be asked to repent of a state 
 of things entirely beyond his own control. 
 
 It was the chapter on original sin, and not the 
 treatment of death-bed repentances, which caused 
 the scandal. In fact, as regards the second of these 
 dogmas, the author slightly reduces the severity which 
 he had shown in earlier books, and here he was sup- 
 ported by a capable champion in Hammond. But his 
 treatment of the former found no friends, and Taylor 
 continued to languish under a suspicion of Pelagian 
 error which affected all the rest of his career. The 
 private correspondence of the time, even more than 
 the published attacks, proves the dismay with which 
 the chapter on original sin was received. An appeal was 
 made to the venerable Sanderson, as the most dignified 
 churchman of the age, to refute it ; but, as a curious 
 letter, now in the Bodleian, from Sanderson to Barlow 
 shows, without avail. Sanderson shrewdly considered 
 that "in these times of so much distraction, as little 
 notice should be taken of differences amongst ourselves 
 as is possible." Moreover, Taylor, who usually for- 
 warded presentation copies of his works to Sanderson 
 as soon as they appeared, had been careful not to 
 send the Unurn Necessarium to that Bishop, who, as 
 late as September 25, 1656, had not so much as seen it. 
 Others were not so discreet as Sanderson. Dr. Peter 
 Samwayes, writing apparently to Sancroft, declares
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 125 
 
 in an unpublished letter that he " values not what 
 Dr. Taylor says unless it be according to the Scrip- 
 tures and the doctrine of the Church," and urges a 
 general repudiation of his errors. Warner was dread- 
 fully distressed, and declared that "Pelagius had 
 puddied the stream " of Taylor's faith. The amiable 
 and indulgent Sheldon expostulated with Taylor for 
 his " folly and frowardness." Never was such a con- 
 sensus of reprobation. But Taylor remained quite 
 calm under the storm, and theological opinion nowa- 
 days will record, without the least horror, that, in his 
 opinion, though not, perhaps, in his arguments, he 
 was, as usual, far ahead of his age in liberality. 
 
 He occupied the close of his imprisonment at Chep- 
 stow Castle in replying to the objections of his critics 
 in a little volume, called Deus Justificatus, in which he 
 stood to his guns, and charged the Anglican divines 
 with having borrowed their gloss from the Presby- 
 terians. This reply took the form of a letter to 
 Christiana, Dowager Countess of Devonshire, who 
 appears to have befriended him in prison, and who 
 perhips sent him, with a gift of money, a request 
 for a further explanation of his theory. This lady 
 was equally interested in poetry and in theology. 
 She kept open house for the Royalist wits at 
 Roehampton, and had been celebrated in verse by 
 Donne in her girlhood, and by Waller in her middle 
 life. It is not certain in what manner the Deus Justi- 
 ficatus reached the public. Royston published it in 
 1656, not only without the author's consent, but 
 apparently without Lady Devonshire's knowledge. 
 In a letter, Royston says that Taylor was very angry 
 with him, arid the publisher grovelled with excuses,
 
 126 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 for Taylor was perhaps the most valuable author on 
 his list. We may doubt whether Taylor was really 
 displeased at this publication, or at that of his cor- 
 respondence on the same subject with Bishop Warner. 
 In writing from Chepstow Castle in September 1656 
 Taylor says that " the gentlemen under whose custody 
 I am, as they are careful of their charges, so are they 
 civil to my person." At first they seem to have 
 prevented him from receiving letters, but this embargo 
 was presently removed. On the 5th of November 
 Sheldon forgave him in a kind letter, in which he 
 relieved him of an old debt, and apparently lent him a 
 further sum which enabled him to regain his freedom. 
 A few days later Taylor has left his prison, but he 
 retires, not to Golden Grove, which was to see him 
 no more, but to Man-dinam, whither, apparently, his 
 children had already found an asylum with Joanna 
 Bridges. Of this lady little is known, and a mystery 
 hangs over her birth. The egregious Lady Wray 
 pretended to believe that Joanna was a natural child 
 of King Charles I. ; the estate of Man-dinam was 
 certainly her personal property. Whether Taylor 
 was already married to her is quite unknown, but 
 his extreme poverty in the winter of 1655-56 seems 
 to preclude the idea. She was probably at this time 
 merely his benefactress, whose hospitality was ex- 
 tended to him as a celebrated and afflicted clergyman, 
 to whom any Royalist lady of means would be happy 
 to offer a home. Man-dinam, which was her property, 
 was, and still is, a small country-house on an estate 
 two miles east of the village of Llangadock. It is 
 romantically situated on a hill above the south side 
 of the Bran River, just where that stream narrows its
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 127 
 
 gorge before spreading into the Vale of Towey; it 
 commands a fine view south to the Rhiwiau Hills and 
 the Black Mountain. Man-dinam is ten or twelve miles 
 from Golden Grove, by the road which passes through 
 Llandilo and Llangadock ; it remained the property 
 of Joanna Bridges after she became Mrs. Taylor, and 
 until her death. 
 
 Lord Carbery had by this time married again. His 
 new wife was Lady Alice Egerton, daughter of the 
 first Earl of Bridgewater, who had died in 1649. It 
 was she who, as a child, had taken parts in the Comus 
 and in the Arcades of Milton, and to whom, on account 
 of her known interest in the art of music, Lawes dedi- 
 cated his Airs and Dialogues in 1653. There is evidence 
 that Jeremy Taylor tried to propitiate her, in rather 
 a clumsy way ; for, when printing a third edition of 
 The Great Exemplar, he cancelled the dedication of the 
 third book, which he had inscribed to the first countess, 
 his dear friend, and inserted a letter of compliment in 
 its place to the stranger. There is no evidence that 
 Alice, Lady Carbery, took any interest in Taylor, or 
 extended any species of patronage to him, and perhaps 
 she was not pleased at the divine's reminder that she 
 came to Golden Grove as the " successor to a very dear 
 and most excellent person." 
 
 Evelyn, who, as has been said, seems to have had 
 some good reason for being unwilling to help his friend 
 as long as he was in Chepstow Castle, now hastened to 
 offer counsel and aid. He advised Taylor to come at 
 once to town, but the reply (on the 5th of January 1656) 
 was, " Sir, I know not when I shall be able to come to 
 London, for our being stripped of the little relics of our 
 fortune remaining after the shipwreck leaves not cordage
 
 128 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 or sails sufficient to bear me thither." He was in sorry- 
 plight, indeed, for some one now "blew the coals, "and 
 stirred up fresh resentment in his only friend among 
 the bishops, Sheldon. In spite of his wretched poverty, 
 however, and the pressure from all sides, Taylor per- 
 sisted in refusing to recant his views, or explain them 
 away. But Evelyn had now interested in the case 
 Mr. Thurland (afterwards Sir Edward and a baron of 
 the Exchequer), who was a prominent Royalist lawyer, 
 and a zealous supporter of the church. A proposition 
 was made that Taylor should undertake some work of 
 propaganda, and on the 19th of January he is expecting 
 suddenly to go into Nottinghamshire for a fortnight. 
 As he had no money of his own, this must have been 
 a professional journey paid for by a client, in all pro- 
 bability Thurland, whose country-house was G-amelton 
 Hall, in Nottinghamshire. Nothing seems to have been 
 arranged at once, and it was a very dangerous time, 
 for there was a recrudescence of persecution, and 
 Cromwell was showing renewed severity to the clergy. 
 Two months later Evelyn is alarmed with " apprehen- 
 sions" of Taylor's "danger," an alarm which presently 
 subsides under some report of a fortunate nature. 
 But " the daily sacrifice is ceasing, and the exercise of 
 [sacerdotal] functions is made criminal, and the light 
 of Israel is quenched." But " Julianus Redivivus can 
 shut the schools, indeed, and the temples, but he cannot 
 hinder our private intercourses and devotions, where 
 the breast is the chapel and our heart is the altar." 
 Then follows a little period of repose, when the eye 
 of the accuser seems to be removed from our divine, 
 and we find him enjoying easy social intercourse with 
 the excellent Evelyn and his friends.
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 129 
 
 Evelyn carried his confessor off to Sayes Court, 
 where on the 12th of April the house-party comprised, 
 besides Taylor, two of the most eminent living men 
 of science, Robert Boyle, the natural philosopher, and 
 John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham, who was just 
 about to marry Cromwell's sister Robinia. The 
 acquaintance of Wilkins, who, although on the popular 
 side, was anxious to propitiate the distressed clergy 
 and to lighten their burdens, must have been par- 
 ticularly valuable to Taylor at this juncture. Wilkins 
 and Evelyn were now extremely intimate, while the 
 new relation of the latter with Taylor was increasing 
 Evelyn's zeal for the Anglican form of religion. 
 
 It is now necessary to examine a bibliographical 
 crux which has greatly puzzled Jeremy Taylor's 
 biographers, and is of some vital importance. If we 
 were to decide that the Auxiliary Beauty is a genuine 
 work of Taylor, we should be obliged to modify our 
 estimate of his character in some curious particulars. 
 In the course of the agitated year 1656 Royston 
 published a small anonymous volume, entitled A Dis- 
 course of Auxiliary Beauty, or Artificial Handsomeness. 
 In Point of Conscience between Two Ladies. This is in 
 fact a treatise in defence of the use of cosmetics, in 
 the form of a dialogue between two persons of quality, 
 the one an austerely Puritanic lady, "a severe 
 censurer of all extern helps to beauty," the other an 
 orthodox churchwoman of a more modern type, who 
 claims the right, as a Christian woman, of repairing 
 by the use of rouge and similar appliances the ravages 
 of her complexion. The Puritan makes a very feeble 
 resistance, and, although she produces "a black and 
 ponderous cloud of witnesses," she is borne down by 
 
 I
 
 130 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 the tide of arguments and instances poured forth by 
 her opponent. The line of defence is briefly this, that 
 no one objects to the restoration of the teeth or even 
 the hair by artificial means; for instance, we may 
 "use, if we list, a crystal, painted eye," and give no 
 offence to the most precise. The cosmeticist asks, in 
 triumph, "When was your ladyship scandalised with 
 any grave and sober matron because she laid out the 
 combings or cuttings of her own hair or others' more 
 youthful hair, when her own, now more withered and 
 autumnal, seemed less becoming to her ? " Why, then, 
 be so pedantic as to object to a touch of ceruse on the 
 faded cheek 1 
 
 Quite early there arose a legend that Jeremy Taylor 
 was connected with this somewhat ingenious piece of 
 special pleading. It was brought out by Taylor's 
 publisher, and in 1662 a second edition of it appeared 
 with the initials " J. T., D.D." on the title-page, initials 
 which Taylor himself had used in publishing his own 
 avowed secular production, the Discourse of Friendship. 
 This was five years before his death, and we have no 
 evidence that he took any steps to deny the impeach- 
 ment ; it is true that he had left London at the time, 
 and was in Ireland. In the third edition the attribu- 
 tion to "a late learned bishop" was more explicit still, 
 and the work continues to figure in our bibliographical 
 catalogues of Taylor's works. Meanwhile Anthony a 
 Wood had included the Auxiliary Beauty in a list of 
 the writings of Jeremy Taylor, while, finally, White 
 Kennett, Bishop of Peterborough, also attributed it to 
 him. This evidence of Kennett's merely shows that 
 after the Restoration it was general subject of gossip 
 that Taylor had composed this discourse. Such is the
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 131 
 
 external eridence, and if it collected around a work 
 which was in harmony with Taylor's character and 
 bore evidence of his style, it must be confessed that it 
 could hardly be resisted. 
 
 But in this case internal evidence is overwhelming 
 in the other scale of the balance. In the first instance, 
 if we turn to the treatise itself we find the publisher 
 making a definite statement. The MS. was brought to 
 him, he says, anonymously; but, "of this discourse, 
 as I am certainly informed, a woman was not only the 
 chief occasion, but the author and writer." Every- 
 thing in the body of the tract supports this view. It 
 is an example of the kind of picturesque, audacious 
 writing which women were, at that moment in the 
 history of our literature, beginning to introduce, and 
 of which there had already been . several striking 
 examples. There is a certain amount of theology in 
 it, especially towards the end, where two Puritan 
 books of the reign of James I., Downham's Christian 
 Warfare and Perkins's Cases of Conscience, are carefully 
 controverted so far as they forbid the use of cosmetics. 
 Some of Taylor's pet phrases are introduced, not, how- 
 ever, as he would use them himself, but as a lady who 
 had attended his ministrations might be expected to 
 repeat them. Taylor may be referred to as "a witty 
 and eloquent preacher whom we both heard at Oxford. " 
 Examples of what may be called the pseudo-Taylorian 
 manner may easily be found ; for instance, the Cosmetic 
 Lady speaks of "persons who sometimes appear 
 pallidly sad, as if they were going to their graves, 
 otherwhiles with such a rosy cheerfulness, as if they 
 had begun their resurrection." This is a conscious or 
 unconscious parody of Taylor's style, but no one who
 
 132 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 is accustomed to his phrases will mistake it for the 
 genuine thing. Even more hopelessly unlike is the 
 attitude of the writer, her pious levity, her lack of 
 all real spirituality, her superficial unction in making 
 the best of both worlds. Finally, all the external 
 evidence which could be produced would fail to per- 
 suade us that Jeremy Taylor wrote, especially in the 
 sad and troubled year 1656, pert sentences of which 
 the following is a very fair example, where the author, 
 after saying that the clergy had objected to tobacco, 
 remarks that now they have generally taken it to 
 themselves, "fancying at last that they never had 
 more devout meditations or sharp inventions than 
 those begotten by a pipe of good tobacco, which now 
 perfumes their clothes, their books, their studies, and 
 their sermons " ; and this, not in reproof, but in sheer 
 levity. 
 
 It would be pitiful to take this satyr for our 
 Hyperion, yet there persists in the mind a feeling that 
 Taylor must have been in some way concerned with 
 the Auxiliary Beauty for so strenuous a legend to 
 connect him with it. There is every likelihood that 
 the title is his. In my own mind the probable issue 
 is that Taylor was intrusted with the MS., perhaps 
 against his will, by some great lady in the orthodox 
 camp, whose request that he would submit it to 
 Royston it was impossible for him to refuse. Such a 
 lady might very probably be Christiana, Countess of 
 Devonshire, a blue-stocking, an ardent churchwoman, 
 a relic of the old Oxford days, and a frequenter of the 
 worldly wits. She was an admirer of Taylor, she had 
 lately made him a debtor by her benevolence, and for 
 all her formal piety, she was nothing of a precisian.
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 133 
 
 If we suppose Lady Devonshire making the request, it 
 is difficult to see how Taylor could possibly decline to 
 submit her MS. to Royston, and if she went further 
 and asked him to read it and even to revise, he would 
 find in it nothing to which he could take any direct 
 objection. The present writer must, however, endorse 
 Heber's opinion, and say that he little cares who may 
 have written the Auxiliary Beauty, "provided it does 
 not pass for Taylor's." The difficulty, however, still 
 remains that Taylor did not deny the authorship in 
 his lifetime. 
 
 The exact business which attracted Taylor to 
 London in the early months of 1656 is nowhere pre- 
 cisely stated, but it was connected with Mr. Thurland, 
 and it was of a confidentially ecclesiastical character. 
 The jealousy of the government and the watchful zeal 
 of Cromwell's myrmidons well account for the secrecy 
 which was preserved. But Taylor was evidently 
 engaged in some agency which aimed at keeping up 
 communication between the ejected bishops and their 
 clergy. On the 6th of May Evelyn brought a young 
 French Sorbonnist, M. Le Franc, who was an Anglican 
 convert, "to converse with Dr. Taylor," who was much 
 pleased with him, and recommended him to a divine 
 whom Evelyn calls "the Bishop of Meath." This is a 
 slip of the pen, for the deprived Bishop of Meath had 
 long been dead, and none other, of course, could be 
 appointed to the vacant see, until the Restoration. 
 Whoever the prelate was, he was " very poor and in 
 great want," and only too glad to get the fees, which 
 Evelyn paid, with the exclamation, " To that necessity 
 are our clergy reduced ! " In July Mr. Thurland's 
 "kindnesses" make it possible that Taylor will be
 
 134 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 able to settle in or near London, which he would do at 
 once, if only he were not " hindered by my res angusta 
 domi." He is waiting to see the Deus Justificatus 
 published, and then hopes to come to a definite under- 
 standing with Mr. Thurland. 
 
 We have heard nothing of Jeremy Taylor's family 
 since the death of his wife in 1651. It appears that 
 his mother-in-law, Mrs. Langsdale, formed part of his 
 household at Golden Grove, having doubtless come to 
 take charge of his motherless children. A letter dated 
 November 24, 1653, written to his brother-in-law, "at 
 his apothecary's house in Gainsborough," exemplifies 
 the writer's tenderness. Edward Langsdale has been 
 dangerously ill, but Taylor had not had the heart to 
 alarm his mother, until news came of the patient's 
 recovery, when she could be " troubled and pleased at 
 the same time." He was a kind and solicitous parent, 
 cultivating towards his children "sweetness of con- 
 versation, affability, frequent admonitions, all significa- 
 tions of love and tenderness, care and watchfulness." 
 After they had lost their mother, he redoubled his 
 solicitude, and was more than ever "pitiful and gentle, 
 complying with all their infirmities." But now, just 
 at the moment when he was broken in fortune and 
 uprooted from his resting-place, he was to be most 
 cruelly afflicted in his tenderest feelings. Early in 
 July 1656 a little son died, "A boy," says his father 
 in writing to Evelyn, " that lately made us very glad, 
 but now he rejoices in his little orb, while we think 
 and sigh and long to be as safe as he is." But there 
 was worse in store for him. 
 
 Early in 1657 there broke out an epidemic of small- 
 pox at Man-dinam, and " two sweet hopeful boys " of 

 
 rv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 136 
 
 Jeremy Taylor's were among the victims. He had 
 now, of five sons, but one surviving, Charles, who was 
 to die a few days before his father in 1667. The sons 
 who died in 1657 have been spoken of as "young 
 men," but the elder of them could not have been more 
 than fourteen years of age. The blow to their father 
 was overwhelming; "I shall tell you," he writes to 
 Evelyn, "that I have passed through a great cloud 
 which hath wetted me deeper than the skin." His 
 sorrow was so bitter that it rendered him "an object 
 of every good man's pity and commiseration." He 
 could think of nothing else, and had to beg pardon of 
 Thurland for neglecting his business and failing to 
 reply to his letters. At length, about Easter, he shook 
 off his depression, and determined to leave Wales for 
 good. Rust says that the loss of his sons so sensibly 
 affected his spirits, that he could no longer endure to 
 live in the place where they had been. He came up 
 to London and settled in secret, doubtless under 
 Thurland's protection. Jeremy Taylor now withdraws 
 for a while beneath a dense cloud, through which we 
 perceive no more light than is given us by the state- 
 ment that "he officiated in a private congregation of 
 loyalists, to his great hazard and danger." As the 
 year proceeded, the difficulties in the way of Anglican 
 public worship became insurmountable. In August 
 Evelyn notes that for the first time the Church has 
 been "reduced to a chamber and a conventicle, so 
 sharp is the persecution," and zealous Christians met in 
 private houses. Even then they were liable to be 
 disturbed by sudden raids of soldiers, who dispersed 
 the worshippers with their muskets. In this sorrowful 
 condition the godly were thrust back upon contempla-
 
 136 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 tion and reverie, and from the suffering Church of 
 England there arose a murmur of resignation, and a 
 song of 
 
 " O crux ave spes unica 
 Hoc passionis tempore : 
 Auge piis justitiam, 
 Reisque dona veniam." 
 
 Taylor's patience had sustained the burden of all the 
 attacks which had been made upon it, when it suddenly 
 gave way beneath a straw. A certain bitter Puritan 
 divine, Henry Jeanes by name, was rector of Chedzoy 
 in Somerset. He was a provocative disputant, dab- 
 bling much in printers' ink, and "pecking and hewing 
 continually at logic and physics." On a summer's day, 
 a friend of his came out from Bridgwater to visit 
 Jeanes; this gentleman, Mr. T. C., was a very ardent 
 admirer of Jeremy Taylor. He sang his praises so 
 loudly that Jeanes, who had begun by assenting, and 
 by acknowledging Taylor's "admirable wit, great 
 parts, quick and elegant pen, abilities in critical learn- 
 ing, and profound skill in antiquity," felt obliged to 
 remark what a pity it was that Taylor held erroneous 
 ideas on various points, and particularly on the subject 
 of original sin. A copy of the Deus Jitstificatus 
 happened to lie on the window-sill of the rectory at 
 Chedzoy, and the friends began to turn over its pages. 
 When Jeanes, thoroughly exasperated, had called the 
 book a mass of gross nonsense and blasphemy, T. C. 
 became scandalised, refused to argue any more, and 
 announced that he should lay Jeanes's objections before 
 Jeremy Taylor himself. Jeanes agreed, but insisted 
 on writing out those objections in a letter ; which was 
 duly forwarded. To this Taylor made a stubborn
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 137 
 
 reply, and Jeanes, now quite in his element, flung 
 himself into the fray. Taylor was full of troubles and 
 anxieties at the time, and, as he wrote to the Matchless 
 Orinda, "so pushed at by herds and flocks of people 
 that follow anybody that whistles to them, or drives 
 them to pasture, that I am grown afraid of any truth 
 that seems chargeable with singularity." His replies 
 to Jeanes's attacks show his irritability by their 
 violence and roughness. Jeanes, who was engaged in 
 fighting Hammond in 1657, did not print the corre- 
 spondence with Taylor until 1660, when he brought it 
 out in a little quarto, and also published a volume 
 called Original Righteousness, which was a venomous 
 diatribe against Taylor. It is to be feared that, in 
 delaying the publication of his attacks until the 
 Restoration, Jeanes was acting maliciously. Taylor 
 took no further notice of him. 
 
 In May of this year a plan which Evelyn had long 
 entertained of a subscription for the support of Jeremy 
 Taylor seems to have been carried out. Several 
 wealthy Royalists, " sensible of this opportunity to do 
 God and their country an acceptable service," guaran- 
 teed an annual salary, in return for which he was to 
 preach in private houses, administer the communion, 
 and perform other priestly offices confidentially, with- 
 out attracting the notice of the authorities. An ex- 
 tremely grateful and loving letter from Taylor (May 
 15) testifies to the relief which this arrangement 
 gave to his anxious care. His whole prospect, which 
 had been very dark for the past three years, now 
 sensibly brightened, and we see the effect in the gay 
 and graceful composition which proceeded next from 
 his pen. In the month of June he finished and sent
 
 138 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 to press his beautiful Discourse of Friendship, which 
 appeared before the summer of 1657 reached its close. 
 All through this year the references to Evelyn are 
 numerous, and we find Taylor frequently going down 
 to Sayes Court for a burial or a christening, to confirm 
 the faith of the residents, or simply to be himself 
 refreshed by his host's liberal and graceful hospitality. 
 At what date Jeremy Taylor formed the acquaint- 
 ance of Orinda is uncertain. That eminent lady, whose 
 real name was Mrs. Katherine Philips, had come to 
 South Wales in 1647, in her seventeenth year, as the 
 wife of a Royalist gentleman, the owner of Cardigan 
 Priory. One of her pieces is a greeting to the third 
 Countess of Carbery on her marriage; but with this 
 exception her curious and tantalising collection of very 
 personal poems does not connect her with the little 
 group of friends at Golden Grove. Mrs. Philips is 
 supposed to have adopted the name of Orinda in 1651, 
 when she began to collect around her at Cardigan a 
 Society of Friendship, to which men were admitted, 
 but which mainly consisted of women. Orinda was 
 not pretty, but she was extremely animated, witty, 
 and agreeable. She became, in those dark days, very 
 easily the unquestioned Muse and Sibyl of South 
 Wales. She dubbed the members of her society by 
 romantic names, such as Rosania, Polycrite, Poliarchus, 
 and Regina. Under these pseudonyms she addressed 
 her friends, but particularly the ladies, in terms of 
 burning enthusiasm. Sometimes she inadvertently 
 gave the same name to two persons in succession, as 
 when she called a Mr. Francis Finch "the excellent 
 Palsemon," and then transferred the title, as " the noble 
 Palaemon," to Jeremy Taylor, with this result, that a
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 139 
 
 long poem which she addressed either to the one or to 
 the other " on his incomparable Discourse of Friendship " 
 has been supposed to belong to Finch,, although there 
 is no reason to believe that he ever wrote anything of 
 the kind. 
 
 Although she lived buried in the country, was only 
 twenty-six years of age, and had published nothing, 
 Orinda was already celebrated. She was introducing 
 a new sort of sentimentality, an effusive celebration of 
 friendship between persons of the same sex, which was 
 quite fresh in England, and which attracted a great 
 deal of attention. Her verses, which lack colour and 
 music, but are not without intellectual strength, were 
 passed eagerly from hand to hand. Orinda took very 
 high ground ; she proposed something novel in philo- 
 sophy and in morals, and she wished to link her newly 
 discovered virtue with piety. In one of her odes to 
 the most adored of her companions, Miss Anne Owen 
 of Landshipping, she had exclaimed 
 
 " Come, my Lucasia, since we see 
 
 That miracles man's faith do move, 
 By wonder and by prodigy 
 
 To the dull, angry world let 's prove 
 There 's a religion in our love." 
 
 Perhaps the dull, angry world of Cardigan had 
 challenged this assertion, for Orinda laid before Jeremy 
 Taylor the inquiry : " How far is a dear and perfect 
 friendship authorised by the principles of Christianity 1" 
 His reply grew into what is one of the most beautiful 
 of his minor writings, A Discourse of the Nature and 
 Offices of Friendship, which appeared in 1657, with a 
 dedication to " the most ingenious and excellent Mrs. 
 Katharine Philips."
 
 140 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 After a splendid compliment to the lady, already 
 " so eminent in friendships," Taylor begins to examine 
 the theme in his customary lucid way, but with more 
 melody and amenity than he had shown in his writings 
 for several years past. He is less strenuous in this 
 social matter than he is accustomed to be in matters of 
 theology. He admits that the New Testament does 
 not recognise friendship as a Christian virtue, in 
 Orinda's sense, but deals with charity to mankind, 
 which is of universal warrant. Yet the whole may 
 include the part, and as our graces here below are all 
 imperfect, we must make the best we can of those 
 partial and fragmentary instincts which drive us to 
 cultivate the affections of certain persons whom we 
 isolate from the mass of those who claim our universal 
 charity. In theory friendship should embrace all the 
 inhabitants of the globe ; but our hearts are finite, and 
 in practice our love is limited. 
 
 "Some have only a dark day and a long night from [the 
 sun], snows and white cattle, a miserable life, and a perpetual 
 harvest of catarrhs and consumptions, apoplexies and dead 
 palsies. But some have splendid fires and aromatic spices, 
 rich wines and well-digested fruits, great wit r.nd great courage, 
 because they dwell in his eye, and look in his face, and are 
 the courtiers of the sun, aud wait upon him in his chambers 
 of the east. Just so it is in friendships. Some are worthy, 
 and some are necessary. Some dwell hard by and are fitted 
 for converse. Nature joins some to us, and religion combines 
 us with others. Society and accidents, parity of fortune and 
 equal dispositions do actuate our friendships ; which, of them- 
 selves and in their prime disposition, are prepared for all man- 
 kind according as any one can receive them." 
 
 From this Taylor proceeds to indicate how strong, 
 and how legitimate a part must be taken by instinctive
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 141 
 
 attraction in the approach to one another of those who 
 are about to become friends. Many qualities enter 
 into the alchymy of this enchanting state, which is 
 "nothing but love and society mixed together." He 
 dwells on the innocency of it, the subtlety, the refresh- 
 ment and cordial which it gives to the soul, and he 
 bids those who are mutually attracted not to resist 
 the magnetism, but to fly to one another, to enjoy the 
 transports of sympathy and happiness, only being 
 careful not to be so infatuated as to be unable to 
 pass judgment on the moral worth of the proposed 
 friend. Charm of conversation, unity of interests, wit, 
 physical beauty and harmony of thought, all these he 
 admits as natural and proper forces leading to the 
 mystery of friendship, but there should be close care 
 taken, before the two souls are blinded by intimacy, 
 that none of these is at work alone, but that the soul 
 of him towards which our soul leans forward is pure 
 and honest. He will not make a man his privado, his 
 special and peculiar friend, unless he be a good as well 
 as an attractive one. 
 
 " I choose this man " he says " to be my friend, because he is 
 able to give me counsel, to restrain my wanderings, to comfort 
 me in my sorrows. He is pleasant to me in private and useful 
 in public. He will make my joys double, and divide my grief 
 between himself and me. For what else should I choose him ? 
 For being a fool and useless ? For a pretty face and a smooth 
 chin ? I confess it is possible to be a friend to one who is 
 ignorant and pitiable, handsome and good-for-nothing, that 
 eats well and drinks deep. But he cannot be a friend to me, 
 and I love him with a fondness or a pity, but it cannot be a 
 noble friendship." 
 
 When once he is launched on a disquisition of what 
 friendship is, and what it means in a man's private
 
 142 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 life, as a source of comfort and refreshment, his elo- 
 quence knows no bounds; he proceeds in a kind of 
 golden rapture, the fancies clustering round him and 
 delaying the progress of his argument. Nowhere is 
 he more dithyrambic : 
 
 " I will love a worthy friend that can delight me as well as 
 profit me, rather than him who cannot delight me at all, and 
 profit me no more. Yet I will not weigh the gayest flowers, 
 or the wings of butterflies, against wheat ; but when I am to 
 choose wheat, I may take that which looks the brightest. I 
 had rather see thyme and roses, marjoram and July flowers, 
 that are fair and sweet and medicinal, than the prettiest tulips 
 that are good for nothing. My sheep and kie are better 
 servants than race-horses and greyhounds, and I shall rather 
 furnish my study with Plutarch and Cicero, with Livy and 
 Polybius, than with Cassandra and Ibrahim Bassa. If I do 
 give an hour to these for divertisement or pleasure, yet I will 
 dwell with them that can instruct me, and make me wise and 
 eloquent, severe and useful to myself and others." 
 
 He refers to the "immortal abstracted pure friend- 
 ships " of the Greeks, and gratifies the pedantry of the 
 Matchless Orinda by quotations from Theognis and 
 Theocritus, to which he is careful to append translations 
 of his own. In particular, he dwells on that "com- 
 mendation of the bravest friendship" which he finds 
 in the twelfth idyl, the 'An-r/s, of the Sicilian poet, part 
 of which he turns into English neatly enough : 
 
 " They loved each other with a love 
 That did in all things equal prove ; 
 The world was under Saturn's reign, 
 When he that loved was loved again." 
 
 It is interesting, and characteristic of the exquisite tact 
 with which, in all his works, Taylor employs the honey 
 of the classics without a touch of their poison, that he
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 143 
 
 passes so deftly over the rather delicate ground in- 
 volved in these citations. 
 
 But all his reflections have been leading him to 
 glorify the friendship of man with man. His gallantry 
 reminds him that Orinda's verses celebrate that of 
 woman with woman. He will not exclude this class 
 of emotion, though he thinks it rarer, and apt to be 
 more trivial and on a lower plane. Alas ! if all could 
 share the transcendental raptures of the incomparable 
 Mrs. Philips, then indeed 
 
 " twin souls in one should grow, 
 And teach the world new love, 
 Redeem the age and sex, and show 
 A flame Fate dares not move." 
 
 But Taylor hints that his enthusiastic young corre- 
 spondent has achieved this redemption, or is on the 
 high road to achieve it. Her example will show that 
 although a woman is not likely to prove so good a 
 counsellor as a wise man, she may be no less tender 
 and no less loyal. " A woman can love as passionately, 
 and converse as pleasantly, and retain a secret as 
 faithfully"; and "she can die for her friend as well 
 as the bravest Eoman knight." It is hard if Mrs. 
 Philips was not satisfied with this. But her advocate 
 must guard and guide, so he proceeds to draw up a 
 code of laws, or maxims, for the prudent conduct of 
 friendship ; and then sums up with a burst of emotional 
 eloquence not to be surpassed even in his own 
 writings : 
 
 " As an eye that dwells long upon a star must be refreshed 
 with greens and looking-glasses, lest the sight become amazed 
 with too great a splendour, so must the love of friends some- 
 times be refreshed with material and low caresses. Lest by
 
 144 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 striving to be too divine it become less human, it must be 
 allowed its share of both. It is human in giving pardon, and 
 fair construction, and openness, and ingenuity, and keeping 
 secrets. It hath something that is divine, because it is 
 beneficent, but much, because it is eternal." 
 
 It has been needful to dwell at some length on the 
 Discourse of Friendship, not merely because it is Taylor's 
 sole contribution to secular literature, but because it 
 reveals to us sides of his character and temperament 
 which would otherwise be unknown. Sometimes, as 
 particularly in the rather harsh letter in which he 
 reproves, by implication, Evelyn's pride in the gardens 
 and buildings of Sayes Court, Jeremy Taylor faintly 
 repels us by an excess of sanctity. He seems a little 
 too seraphic for human nature's needs. He was a 
 firm and jealous guide of souls. But A Discourse of 
 Friendship survives to assure us of his geniality, his 
 acceptance of the social requirements of the creature, 
 and of his own participation in the unselfish joys of 
 life. Here he is neither mystical, nor sacerdotal. 
 Here he confesses to the weakness which longs for 
 comfort, to the depression of spirits which finds a 
 cure in friendly sympathy, to the attraction which 
 rests on no logical basis but is an instinct. He seems 
 to have read, and to have accepted, Montaigne's 
 phrase about La Boe'tie : " Je 1'aimais parce. que 
 c'e"tait lui, parce que c'etait moi." The other writings 
 of Jeremy Taylor supply us with ample reason to 
 admire him ; the Discourse gives us authority to love 
 him. 
 
 Taylor was anxious that this treatise should not 
 pass into the wrong hands. He asked Orinda, if she 
 did not wish to publish it herself, to consign the MS.
 
 rv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 145 
 
 to the keeping of Sir John Wedderburn. But she had 
 no idea of wrapping up her treasure in a napkin ; she 
 published it immediately in folio. Wedderburn, who 
 was "reckoned among his best friends" by Jeremy 
 Taylor, was the great Royalist physician of the day. 
 He had attended Charles I. and he was useful to 
 Charles II. before and after the Restoration. Although, 
 or perhaps because, he made no secret of his ardent 
 Royalist proclivities, he amassed a large fortune during 
 the Commonwealth. Anthony a Wood celebrates the 
 Scotch doctor's noble hospitality and kindness to all 
 who were learned and virtuous, and he was not only 
 Taylor's intimate friend, but he attended him in each 
 of his illnesses. 
 
 Although, from an obscure reference in a letter 
 from Evelyn to the Governor of the Tower, it has been 
 conjectured that in January 1657 Taylor for a third 
 time suffered brief imprisonment, his position on the 
 whole, though still perilous, was now less uncomfort- 
 able. We hear no more of grinding poverty; his 
 subscriptions from the pious sufficed for his needs. 
 English churchmen were now rigorously deprived of 
 "the priest's power and external act," but persecution 
 was more often threatened than carried out. 
 
 In May 1657 Taylor collected his works for the first 
 time in a substantial folio volume ; he continued to make 
 efforts to publish his Ductor Dubitantium, and as Royston 
 still shrank from so huge an undertaking, he proposed 
 to print it at his own expense. He did not do this, but 
 that he should have thought of doing it shows that he 
 was no longer pressed for money. He was now the 
 most popular theologian of the age, but he wrote little 
 during these two years. He probably had no time for 
 
 K
 
 146 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 literature, for lie was amply engaged by his mysterious 
 occupations. 
 
 A glimpse of Jeremy Taylor in his pastoral capacity 
 is offered us by his sermon preached at the funeral of 
 Sir George Dalstone. This gentleman was a member 
 of parliament from the county of Cumberland, who, 
 being troubled by vexatious lawsuits, had given up the 
 charge of his estates into the hands of his son, and had 
 come up to London, where he devoted himself entirely 
 to religion and philanthropy. He was in church one 
 day, listening to the discourse, "for he was a great 
 lover of sermons," when he was attacked by a paralytic 
 seizure, and, being very old, was not expected to 
 recover. Jeremy Taylor, who was probably the very 
 preacher to whom he had been listening, was hastily 
 called upon to attend him with the Holy Sacrament ; 
 it does not appear that they had ever spoken to one 
 another before. But Sir George Dalstone did not 
 immediately die, and during his last illness Taylor 
 "often visited him," and found in him "a very quiet 
 conscience." His decline was prolonged much beyond 
 expectation, and through the course of it Taylor was 
 greatly edified by the aged knight's serenity and 
 beautiful attitude of readiness, and formed a very 
 warm attachment to him. When at length Sir George 
 Dalstone died, and was buried on the 28th of Sep- 
 tember 1657, Jeremy Taylor preached an unusually 
 long and elaborate sermon at the funeral. 
 
 The nature of his clerical work seems to have been 
 principally consultative rather than pastoral. He had 
 a special charge to deal with persons who were tempted 
 to change their religion, in particular, to join the 
 Church of Rome. Some of his confidential letters to
 
 iv.] YEARS OF AFFLICTION 147 
 
 great ladies on points of conscience and delicate family 
 matters have been preserved ; one of them, still among 
 the Duke of Rutland's MSS. at Belvoir, is addressed, in 
 1658, from Annesley to the Countess of Rutland. 
 These letters hint at the personal risk Jeremy Taylor 
 runs in carrying out his priestly task. He writes, for 
 instance in 1657, " I bless God I am safely arrived where 
 I desired to be after my unwilling departure from the 
 place of your abode and danger." This is very 
 cryptic, but it suggests the peril which attended one 
 whose business in life it had become secretly to urge 
 people to preserve the advantages of orthodox doctrine. 
 But no further personal inconvenience seems to have 
 attended him, until in 1658 he was translated to 
 another and a fatal sphere of labour.
 
 CHAPTEE V 
 
 PORTMORE 
 (1658-1661) 
 
 Or Edward, the third viscount (and afterwards first 
 earl of) Conway, not much is preserved. But he was a 
 pious and active Irish landlord, devoted to the Anglican 
 church, and a convinced although not fanatical loyalist. 
 He took his second title of Lord Killultagh from a 
 district, "the woods of Ulster," in the south-western 
 part of County Antrim, where his estates were bordered 
 by Lough Neagh. His residence was called Portmore, 
 in the parish of Ballinderry; it was a magnificent 
 house, erected by the first viscount, after plans executed 
 by Inigo Jones, and here Lord Conway resided in 
 great state. The nearest town to him was Lisburn, or, 
 as it was then called, Lismagarry, where there seems to 
 have existed a collegiate church, in which the vicar 
 taught divinity. This incumbent was a Presbyterian 
 (or rather what was styled an Independent), but part 
 of his fees, it would appear, were paid by Lord 
 Conway and other subscribers, who therefore felt at 
 liberty to exercise some pressure upon him. His name 
 was Andrew Weeke, a man of some notable force of 
 character, who had been minister of Lisburn since 
 1651. The attention of Lord Conway was drawn 
 
 148
 
 CHAP, v.] PORTMORE 149 
 
 to the neglected state of the English church in that 
 part of Ireland, and he formed the idea of inviting 
 a leading churchman over to Lisburn to keep the 
 nickering lamp of Anglicanism from being utterly 
 extinguished. 
 
 Having consulted Evelyn, Lord Conway was advised 
 to try and secure Jeremy Taylor, and in May 1658 he 
 wrote to propose that the divine should accept the 
 position of assistant lecturer at Lisburn. Unfortun- 
 ately, the stipend offered was so inconsiderable, that it 
 would not have paid for the expense and trouble of 
 moving himself and his family to Ireland. Moreover, 
 the idea of becoming a teacher under the disposal of a 
 person like Andrew Weeke, who held views on church 
 government diametrically opposed to his, was unwel- 
 come to Taylor. He therefore desired Evelyn to give 
 his thanks to Lord Conway, but to say that he declined 
 the honour. In response to a further appeal, offering 
 fresh inducements, Taylor asked Major George Kaw- 
 don, Lord Conway's brother-in-law, who commanded 
 the garrison in Lisburn, for a frank account of the 
 social conditions of that part of Ireland, and his reply 
 was so extremely unfavourable that "it discouraged 
 him and all his friends from any further thought of 
 that country." Lord Conway, however, had thoroughly 
 set his heart on securing Taylor, and in June he made 
 a third attempt. He was " certain that [Taylor] was 
 the choicest person in England appertaining to the 
 conscience, ... of excellent parts and an excellent life," 
 and he was determined that come to Ulster he should. 
 However, he was not blind to the difficulties, and he 
 set about removing them on a large scale. As he 
 admitted that Taylor's private virtues were not power-
 
 150 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 ful enough "to purchase his quiet" in that bigoted 
 province, Lord Conway took infinite pains to protect 
 him. He secured him, through William Petty and Dr. 
 Thomas Harrison, "a purchase of land at great advan- 
 tage." Dr. Thomas Coxe, afterwards president of the 
 College of Physicians, was induced to write and com- 
 mend Taylor " very passionately " to the Irish Chan- 
 cellor. Taylor was invited to come and converse with 
 Lord Conway during a visit the latter paid to Kensing- 
 ton, and in all possible ways was urged to try and 
 smile on the scheme. Finally, the Lord Protector was 
 induced to give him a pass and a protection for himself 
 and his family, under his sign-manual and privy signet. 
 The difficulty of the stipend was got over, by the 
 arrangement that he and his family were to occupy 
 rooms in the great house at Portmore, and there was, 
 without question, a salary offered as chaplain in Lord 
 Conway's family. 
 
 This last arrangement was against the law, and could 
 not be discussed in writing. No doubt it was broached 
 when Taylor made his preliminary visit early in June 
 1658. He yielded; Lord Conway had done so much 
 that it would have been ungracious to resist any further. 
 The viscount triumphed to his brother-in-law ; he 
 recounted the infinite trouble he had taken, and added, 
 in reference to his success with Cromwell, " so that I 
 hope it will not be treason to look upon [Taylor] and 
 own him." Accordingly, Jeremy Taylor's scruples 
 were removed, and before the summer of 1658 closed, 
 he and all his family removed from London to Port- 
 more, to an asylum under the hospitable roof of Lord 
 Conway, who seems to have been proud of his company, 
 and always delicately solicitous as to his comfort and
 
 v.] PORTMORE 151 
 
 safety. The quiet and repose were extremely welcome 
 to our author. He signs one of the very few letters 
 of this period "ex amcenissimo recessu in Portmore," 
 "from my most delightful retreat." He left it, as is 
 supposed, once a week, to deliver his lecture in Lisburn, 
 which was but six Irish miles distant. 
 
 The only ambition Taylor had at this time was to be 
 let alone, to be undisturbed in his retreat. The recom- 
 mendations which his London friends had made on his 
 behalf to people in authority at Dublin were cunningly 
 devised to achieve this object In the first place, he 
 was assured of the protection of " the Lord Peepes," in 
 whom we recognise Sir Eichard Pepys, who had been 
 Lord Chief Justice of Ireland since 1654, and in contra- 
 vention to whose wishes no serious legal step could 
 be taken. But unfortunately Pepys died on the 2nd of 
 January 1659. Before coming to Ireland, Jeremy Taylor 
 had formed what now proved a valuable friendship with 
 the eminent Irish orientalist, Dr. Dudley Loftus, who 
 was settled in Dublin as vicar-general and judge of the 
 prerogative court. Loftus, a fine scholar, though it is 
 said rather a nighty person, stood high in Cromwell's 
 favour. Very important, too, was the protection of Dr. 
 Thomas Harrison, who must not be confounded with 
 the regicide. The former was the minister of a dis- 
 senting chapel in Dublin, who had made himself very 
 prominent in politics, and who in 1657 went over 
 rather ostentatiously to Henry Cromwell's party. He 
 was rewarded by the governor's confidence, and his 
 advice was constantly asked for and acted upon. He 
 became almost a court chaplain in Dublin, and when in 
 1658 he published his extremely successful manual of 
 piety called Topica Sacra, he was the most popular
 
 152 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 divine in Ireland. This was a very valuable friend for 
 Jeremy Taylor to secure. 
 
 But among them all, probably none was so practi- 
 cally useful as Dr. (afterwards Sir William) Petty, the 
 great statistician and engineer. He had gone over to 
 Ireland in 1652, and had at once taken an interest in 
 the schemes for transplantation and the redistribution 
 of land. To him had been intrusted the famous 
 " Down " Survey of the whole of Ireland, and the map 
 in which he put the features " down " remains as a 
 monument to his industry. He was engaged for years 
 in delimiting the forfeited estates throughout Ireland, 
 and he had unrivalled opportunities not merely of 
 knowing where land was to be got, but of enabling 
 favoured persons to secure it on the most moderate 
 terms. It is likely that he enabled Taylor to buy the 
 farm at Magheralin, which he "provided" for him "at 
 great advantage," that is to say, for very little money 
 or for none at all. Experienced English farmers were 
 extremely welcome, and might almost be bribed to 
 settle. Magheralin is just within that portion of 
 County Down in which there were specially put aside 
 baronies to be divided among the disbanded soldiers 
 who were willing to settle. There can be little ques- 
 tion that it was one of these which Petty secured for 
 Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 One friend at Dublin whom Taylor seems to have won 
 for himself, since this was one who was careful to dis- 
 play no political bias, was Dr. John Sterne, Archbishop 
 Ussher's grand-nephew. He was a very learned man, 
 a great doctor, and later on the founder of the Irish 
 College of Physicians. Sterne was certainly one of 
 the most accomplished persons then living in Ireland.
 
 v.] PORTMORE 153 
 
 Although distinguished in science, he nourished a great 
 fondness for theology, and this was the side of his 
 character, no doubt, which attracted Taylor. A warm 
 affection sprang up between them, and when Sterne 
 published his Thanatologia in 1658, Taylor prefixed to 
 it a long Latin epistle of congratulation and com- 
 pliment. In 1660 Taylor was able to be of service 
 to Sterne, by warmly recommending him, as a man 
 of " great learning and skill in the college affairs," to 
 Lord Ormonde for a senior fellowship at Trinity which 
 was at the disposal of the chancellor. 
 
 Portmore is ignored by the guide-books, and its very 
 site hardly remembered by the antiquaries, but in 
 Jeremy Taylor's time it was, as has been said, the 
 most magnificent mansion in Ulster. It stood on the 
 western side of Lough Beg, a circular satellite of 
 the vast Lough Neagh. At present it is difficult to 
 find the remains of Portmore, but as the wanderer 
 plashes about in the marshy flats, he becomes aware 
 of a long line of broken brickwork on the crest of 
 a slight eminence looking westward. This ridge, with 
 what was evidently a bowling-green or garden in front 
 of it, descending to the lake, marks the direction of the 
 great terrace which rose from the plans of Inigo Jones 
 soon after the rebellion of 1641. Portmore was not 
 only a noble residence; it was a fortress garrisoned 
 against the Tories of the west. Where now the eye 
 perceives nothing but a low harsh horizon of grazing 
 land to the north and east, in Lord Conway's time there 
 lay a large deer-park of oak-trees. It is probable 
 that a bridge, all traces of which have disappeared, 
 conducted, in a few minutes from Portmore, across 
 the brown and broad trout-stream, to the church in
 
 154 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 which Jeremy Taylor habitually officiated. To reach 
 the latter now it is necessary to take a long, circuitous 
 route. One arrives at last quite suddenly at its 
 impressive desolation. It stands high on an artificial 
 island in the marshes, with a shallow moat encircling 
 it, although quite close to the banks of Lough Beg, 
 which are so low that the round lake looks like a 
 brimming cask buried in the soft soil. The fragments 
 of the church are covered heavily with ivy, and a loose 
 hedge of seedling larches and sweet-briar enrings them, 
 while here and there great cypresses, relics, it is pos- 
 sible, of the Italian gardens of Portmore, soar impres- 
 sively in the wild, bright place, where there has long 
 ceased to be heard any other sound than the cries of 
 wildfowl. From up among these ruins, the old frag- 
 mentary brickwork of Portmore is better visible than 
 from any other point, and imagination may here 
 rebuild the vision of it as Jeremy Taylor saw it when 
 he arrived in 1658, sumptuous and elaborate, with 
 its upper windows looking towards the sunset over 
 Lough Beg to the melancholy little inland ocean of 
 Lough Neagh. The church was dismantled by Taylor 
 himself, when he fitted up his new chapel in Ballin- 
 derry, just before his death. Portmore, after being 
 enlarged in 1664, lasted scarcely a century longer, and 
 was pulled down in 1761 after the extinction of the 
 Conway peerage. 
 
 Tradition will have it that the little Sallegh Island, 
 or isle of willows, which now lies a few hundred yards 
 out in Lough Beg directly north of Portmore, contained 
 a study where Jeremy Taylor loved to meditate. It has 
 been said that he wrote there in an "arbour," which 
 is probably a mere miscomprehension of his phrase
 
 v.] PORTMORE 155 
 
 about Portmore itself, that it was his "harbour" or 
 asylum. At present Sallegh Island, a tangled raft 
 of osiers, is unapproachable, and looks from shore as 
 though it were mere marshland. It is probable, how- 
 ever, that while Portmore was a-building, there was 
 framed a little fort on Sallegh, and Taylor may have 
 fitted up a study there afterwards. In the old (or 
 western) village of Ballinderry are one or two tall 
 warehouses, which probably belong to Lord Conway's 
 time. The legend that Taylor wrote on Ram's Island, 
 far out in Lough Neagh, is preposterous. All we can 
 safely say is, that he and his family occupied a suite 
 of rooms, from 1658 to 1660, in one of the wings of 
 Portmore, and that, doubtless, he stole away from the 
 noise of the great house to the islet which is now 
 sodden with rains, and to the church which is now two 
 gables of crumbling masonry. 
 
 The Presbyterian ministers, who had withdrawn 
 from persecution to Scotland, had come back to their 
 parishes in 1653 and 1654. They were particularly 
 welcome in the diocese of Down and Connor, where 
 they found a powerful patron in Lady Clotworthy, 
 mother of the first Lord Massereene. "This poor 
 church," says Patrick Adair, had [in 1654] "a new 
 sunshine of liberty of all ordinances," and the Presby- 
 terians flourished in the counties of Down and Antrim 
 for five years. They were, however, vexed by the 
 existence of the Anabaptists on one side and by that 
 of Jeremy Taylor's Episcopal friends on the other, and 
 even their own partial historian admits that they were 
 divided amongst themselves by " some jealousies and 
 animosities." To settle these internal factions and to 
 protect themselves against external enemies, the Pres-
 
 156 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 bytery passed what was called "the Act of Bangor," 
 which proved extremely consolidating, and enabled 
 them to carry out a detailed policy with great effec- 
 tiveness. "Even in the sight and to the angering of 
 their adversaries, the old Episcopal party and the 
 Anabaptists and other sectaries," the Presbyterians 
 succeeded in getting firm hold of the diocese. They 
 ruled it, indeed, with a rod of iron, tempered only by 
 the determination of Henry Cromwell to prevent all 
 overt acts of intolerance. But at the time of Jeremy 
 Taylor's arrival in Ireland, the attitude of the Pres- 
 byterians to Churchmen had grown as offensive as fear 
 of Cromwell would permit it to be. Those friends 
 of Taylor's whose names have been recounted were 
 prominent leaders of the Cromwellian party, who 
 were in favour of religious liberty, and who kept the 
 Presbyterians in check. 
 
 But three or four months after Taylor's arrival 
 the death of Oliver Cromwell (September 3, 1658) 
 altered the whole aspect of affairs. From having en- 
 joyed a steady authority, the party of Henry Cromwell 
 in Ireland immediately became " staggering and reel- 
 ing." The Presbyterians in Down and Antrim lost no 
 time in taking advantage of the change, and they 
 adopted the double policy of intriguing for the king's 
 recall and of making the position of the Episcopalians 
 untenable. When, later on, we are confronted with the 
 undeniable, and much to be regretted, harshness of 
 Taylor as a bishop, it is only fair to remember that the 
 year 1659 was made intolerable to him by the enmity 
 which he met with from the surrounding ministers. It 
 is almost certain that the departure of Henry Cromwell 
 from Dublin was the signal of Taylor's dismissal from
 
 v.] PORTMORE 157 
 
 his lectureship at Lisburn. He withdrew altogether to 
 his retreat within the park of Portmore, and even there 
 it would seem that he was not safe from the insults of 
 the predominant party. He kept close all the winter of 
 1658-59, engaged in finishing Ductor Dubitantiwn, which 
 he hoped at length to see in the printer's hands, although 
 as a matter of fact its publication was again delayed. 
 Colonel Hill, the strongest supporter of Episcopacy in 
 the county of Down, occasionally entertained him at 
 his house in Hillsborough, and this seems to have 
 drawn the particular attention of the Presbytery to 
 him. A peculiarly busy fanatic, of the name of 
 Tandy, who divided his hostile attentions between the 
 Anabaptists and the Churchmen, became especially 
 offensive. In June 1659 Taylor wrote Lord Conway, 
 who was in London, a letter which " almost broke his 
 his heart." Tandy had denounced Taylor to the Lord 
 Deputy and the council for illegal practices, and par- 
 ticularly for having baptized a child with the sign of 
 the cross. Taylor was deeply alarmed, and expected 
 to be sent to prison. Lord Conway wrote to Colonel 
 Hill, entreating him to protect the doctor so far as his 
 ability went, and forwarded a sum of money for his legal 
 defence. Taylor was in despair ; "I fear my peace in 
 Ireland is likely to be short," he wrote to Evelyn, " for 
 a Presbyterian and a madman have informed against 
 me as a dangerous man to their religion." He hoped 
 to be able to escape to England, although he would 
 fain stay where he is, "if I can enjoy my quietness 
 here." 
 
 The persecution, however, grew more intense, and 
 Taylor passed a distressing summer. On the llth of 
 August his calamities culminated in his arrest, at the
 
 158 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 instance of Thomas Herbert, who directed Colonel 
 Bryan Smith, governor of Carrickfergus, forthwith at 
 sight to " cause the body of Dr. Jeremiah Taylor to be 
 sent up to Dublin under safe custody, to the end that 
 he may make his personal appearance before the said 
 Commissioners to answer unto such things as shall be 
 objected against him in behalf of the Commonwealth." 
 We are told that the agitation of this arrest and the 
 subsequent enforced journey to Dublin threw him into 
 a serious illness ; but this is perhaps an echo of a later 
 imprisonment. Dublin, however, was not the County 
 Down ; the zeal of the Presbyterians was not greatly 
 appreciated in the capital, and here Taylor found a 
 friend who had survived the fall of the Cromwell party, 
 Sir Matthew Thomlinson, a leader of the military 
 faction, whose attitude to Irish politics was looked 
 upon so unfavourably by the English Parliamentarians 
 that an effort was now made to impeach him. For 
 a brief moment Thomlinson, who was well affected to 
 Jeremy Taylor, was one of the most influential persons 
 in Ireland. 
 
 Taylor seems not to have met with any harsh 
 treatment in Dublin, and he returned to Portmore, 
 where he resumed his quiet life. But relations with 
 England were disturbed; the postal system was 
 entirely dislocated, and he was left in anxiety about 
 the condition of affairs. A reassuring letter from 
 Evelyn, sent off on the 23rd of July, was not delivered 
 at Portmore until the 1st of November. Taylor was 
 now, a second time, sent for to Dublin by the Commis- 
 sioners, " in the worst of our winter weather," and he 
 "found the evil of it so great, that in my going I 
 began to be ill," and "in my return, had my illness
 
 v.] PORTMORE 159 
 
 redoubled and fixed," so that it was not until February 
 1660 that his health was restored. He quite gave up 
 all idea of remaining in Ireland, harassed as he was by 
 the malevolence of the Presbyterian ministers, and he 
 only waited for better weather "by God's permission 
 to return to England." It was the darkest hour before 
 the dawn. All this has been very slightly touched 
 upon by those who have been only too ready to 
 emphasise Taylor's subsequent rigour to the Presby- 
 terians of his diocese. Without ceasing to regret that 
 he did not see his way to treat them, in the hour of his 
 authority, with greater indulgence, we must insist on 
 pointing out how very offensive they had been to him, 
 and to his fellow-churchmen, when Presbyterianism 
 seemed to be enjoying a settled supremacy in Ulster. 
 
 When Jeremy Taylor, however, wrote the letter 
 which has just been quoted, at the beginning of 
 February 1660, the tide was flowing fast towards 
 tolerance, for the new Convention, which had been 
 called together in Dublin to replace the dissolved Irish 
 parliament, was a complex body, in which, although 
 the Presbyterians seemed predominant, the prelatical 
 party had a great deal to say. As the restoration 
 of the Stuarts became more and more certain, the 
 ministers protested their fondness for the Royal family. 
 But the Irish were suspicious, and Patrick Adair 
 pathetically complains, " Yea, where a man was sober 
 and godly, his loyalty was by the common sort of 
 people more suspected." Meanwhile Jeremy Taylor 
 was again in great poverty ; if it had not been for a 
 gift from Evelyn he could not have paid his debts. 
 He was able, however, to pass through Dublin early in 
 the spring, and to arrive in London in April. On the
 
 160 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 24th of that month he affixed his signature to the 
 declaration of those leading loyalists who expressed their 
 satisfaction with Monk's policy and their confidence 
 in his judgment, and who declared for a constitutional 
 form of government. Of Taylor's attitude at this 
 time, Rust gives an account, which no doubt gives a 
 very fair impression of the delirious excitement which 
 prevailed in the bosoms of all loyalists and churchmen. 
 "By this time the wheel of providence brought about 
 the King's happy restoration, and there began a new 
 world, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of 
 the waters, and out of a confused chaos brought forth 
 beauty and order, and all the three nations were 
 inspired with a new life, and became drunk with an 
 excess of joy. Among the rest, this loyal subject 
 [Jeremy Taylor] went over to congratulate the prince 
 and people's happiness, and bear a part in the universal 
 triumph." 
 
 On his passage through Dublin, Taylor had been 
 able to observe the astonishing improvement in the 
 prospects of his party, which the mere communication 
 with the King at Breda had brought with it. If the 
 populace were sympathisers with the Presbytery, men 
 of light and leading were numerous on the Episcopal 
 side. The stronger bishops, particularly Bramhall and 
 Henry Leslie, hastened to Dublin with, what their 
 antagonists lacked, a definite plan of campaign. Leslie, 
 who, throughout the troublous times had courageously 
 stuck to it that he was, by the grace of God and the 
 King, still Lord Bishop of Down and Connor, was in 
 close communication with Taylor. Meanwhilo, the 
 Presbyterians felt the lack of commanding personages 
 in their democracy. One of the cleverest of them,
 
 v.] PORTMORE 161 
 
 Patrick Adair, has described the condition of things in 
 mournful terms : " The Presbyterians had not men of 
 note and quality to be leaders in these affairs." Trans- 
 lated from their homes in Ulster, the ministers were 
 out of their element in Dublin, whither Adair himself 
 resorted to witness the melancholy change. "Our 
 grandees," he says, "began to court the few old 
 bishops who were in Ireland, and who had then 
 repaired to Dublin. They allowed them considerable 
 salaries in the meantime, and began to give them their 
 titles. . . . Some bishops who, at my arrival there, 
 had very hardly access to the Commissioners upon any 
 business, no one seeming to own them in the streets, 
 and who had been content with the countenance of 
 any private person, before I left [within three months 
 of his arrival] had become high, and much courted, 
 and their titles given them." 
 
 But Jeremy Taylor was now in London, and very 
 shortly after the King's arrival, giving his publisher 
 only just time to hurry through the press a jubilant 
 preface of welcome to "the most Sacred Majesty of 
 Charles n.," he published at length the enormous work 
 on which we have seen him engaged at intervals for at 
 least twenty years. He had made effort after effort 
 to produce it before, but always without success. His 
 publisher was shy of so huge an enterprise ; his fellow- 
 divines had eyed it with suspicion. That he could not 
 issue his great book of cases of conscience had been 
 the disappointment of his literary life. But now, as 
 he says, "our duty stands upon the sunny side"; any- 
 thing published by the most eminent of living divines 
 was sure of a sale ; and Royston hesitated no longer. 
 Jeremy Taylor, forever adding instances and heaping 
 
 L
 
 162 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 up details, had come at last to the conclusion that his 
 book was finished. He may well have been put out 
 of countenance by the mountain of his manuscript. 
 On the 5th of October 1659 he closed the last sentence 
 of his preface in " my study in Portmore in Killultagh," 
 although tradition asserts that the words were written 
 in a building on what is now the desolate islet which 
 has been described in Lough Beg. He decided on a 
 title at last, Ductor Dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience 
 in all her general measures. He anticipated for his boolc 
 a universal welcome ; this, or nothing, was to be his 
 masterpiece. 
 
 Posterity has refused anything more than respectful 
 recognition to the Ductor Dubitantium. Its bulk, its 
 Avant of variety, its utter discord with what we demand 
 in the form of theology, have left it to moulder on 
 high library shelves. But it has too hurriedly been 
 stated that it was a failure from the beginning. 
 Considered as an enterprise, Taylor's judgment was 
 justified as against the reluctance of Royston. It was 
 issued first in two folio volumes, then in one, and, costly 
 as it was, it was reprinted at least three times before 
 the close of the century. Of the bulk of the Ductor, 
 some impression may be formed from the fact that, if 
 printed from the same type, it would occupy some 
 twelve volumes equivalent to the present monograph. 
 This is a surprising amplitude for a treatise on the 
 conscience. But it must be recollected that it was 
 produced during an age of scruple, although, it is true, 
 towards the decline of that age. Taylor intended it, 
 too, to be, as far as possible, exhaustive. Moreover 
 there were still those alive who recollected the official 
 establishment which had been opened at Oxford for
 
 v.] PORTMORE 163 
 
 the settlement of cases of conscience, and some who 
 would have welcomed the re-establishment of what 
 scoffers had called " the scruple-shop." 
 
 All through the early part of the seventeenth 
 century efforts had been made to compile a definitive 
 manual of Anglican casuistry. There had been felt 
 "a great scarcity of books of cases of conscience"; a 
 Avant not supplied by the innumerable expositions 
 and lectures of William Perkins, nor even by Joseph 
 Hall's Resolutions and Decisions. Taylor speaks of what 
 Hooker essayed to do; he does not mention what 
 Donne in one generation and Sanderson in the next 
 had planned. All had either sketched the work too 
 lightly, or had shrunk from its onerous elaboration. 
 Taylor attributed all these failures to the lack of that 
 psychological knowledge which experience only can 
 supply. " The careless and needless neglect of receiv- 
 ing private confessions hath been too great a cause of 
 our not providing materials apt for so pious and useful 
 a ministration." He speaks of "private conferences" 
 and of "admonitions and answers given when some 
 more pious and religious persons came to confessions," 
 as the true preparation for such a manual of casuistical 
 theology. Well, perhaps no one else in that troubled 
 age had enjoyed exactly the same or anything like the 
 same advantages in this direction as Jeremy Taylor 
 had enjoyed in his confidential peregrinations. All 
 manner of strange scruples, all sophistications and 
 subtleties of conscience, all meanderings of souls to 
 whom life was "a wood before your doors, and a 
 labyrinth within the wood, and locks and bars to every 
 door within that labyrinth," had been submitted to 
 him in secret by anxious penitents, and for each his
 
 164 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 lucid and ingenious spirit had devised some sort of 
 guidance. 
 
 The result of twenty years of cases noted in a suc- 
 cession of pocket-books, that is the Ductor Dubi- 
 tantium ; and it is hopeless to pretend that it offers a 
 vivid interest now to a generation which has shelved 
 its scruples altogether, or has generously simplified 
 them. How can we excite ourselves to-day with a 
 discussion as to whether a man who has taken a vow 
 to abstain from wine may "nevertheless drink sherbets 
 and delicious beverages, strong ale and spirits " 1 
 Although " a man is very much better than a beast," 
 is not the life of a beast "better than the superfluous 
 hair of a man's beard " ? Common sense decides th4s 
 without casuistical effort. Still more remote from us 
 is the inquiry whether " he that buys the body of a 
 slave hath right to all the ministries of his soul " 1 
 A hospitably -minded Christian no longer rushes to his 
 parish priest to be told whether it is lawful to help an 
 honoured guest to get drunk at his table. These seem 
 to us, what the still subtler hair-splittings of the Fathers 
 seemed to Taylor, " ridiculous commentaries and useless 
 glosses." They do explicit injustice to the intelligence 
 and good sense which he rarely fails to display in his 
 commentaries, as where he openly declares that a great 
 deal that passes for scrupulosity of conscience is no- 
 thing but the direct result of fatigue or ill-health. 
 His object is really to apply medicine to the morbid 
 nerves of his age. He does not encourage useless 
 "tremblings"; he is distinctly averse to unnecessary 
 rules and the multiplication of unbearable burdens. 
 The Ductor Dubitantium is, in theology, very much 
 what Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica is in
 
 v.] PORTMORE 165 
 
 zoology. It is the work of a great modern spirit, 
 enlightened far beyond the average of his own day, yet 
 bearing about with him, and exhibiting on every page, 
 the evidences of the surrounding popular darkness. 
 
 In the course of a work from which and this is one 
 great source of its tedium to-day the autobiographical 
 element is severely excluded, we come with pleasure 
 on a single paragraph, which gives the general reader 
 all that he needs to know of Jeremy Taylor's attitude 
 towards his " cases of conscience " : 
 
 " In hard and intricate questions I take that which is easy 
 and intelligible, and concerning which it will be easy to judge 
 whether it be right or wrong. In odious things, and matters 
 of burden and envy, I take that part which is least, unless 
 there be evident reason to the contrary. In favours, I always 
 choose the largest sense, when any one is bettered by that 
 sense, and no man is the worse. In things and matters 
 relating to men, I give those answers that take away scruples, 
 and bring peace and a quiet mind. In things relating to God 
 I always choose to speak that thing which to Him is most 
 honourable. In matters of duty I always choose that which 
 is most holy. In doubts I choose what is safest. In pro- 
 babilities I prefer that which is the more reasonable, never 
 allowing to any one a leave of choosing that which is con- 
 fessedly the less reasonable in the whole conjunction of 
 circumstances." 
 
 The pity of this lucid and admirably just summary 
 of the right temper of priestly sympathy is, that it raises 
 the question whether the conscience requires more 
 guidance than is, precisely in these sentences, indicated ; 
 whether, in short, from the practical point of view, the 
 remainder of the vast folio is not a superfluity. At the 
 worst it is an entertaining miscellany of stories and 
 maxims, which might be read with pleasure to-day, if it
 
 166 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 were not clogged with such masses of Latin and Greek, 
 and if it were not so interminably lengthy. But there is 
 another reason, and one too curious to be omitted, why 
 the Dmtor Dubitantium is no longer to be recommended 
 as a convenient guide for the scrupulous. Jeremy 
 Taylor's vast, confidential experience had proved to 
 him how paramount a place is taken by what he calls 
 " odious things " in the scruples of the sincere. The 
 consequence is that the Ductor Dubitantium is crowded 
 with considerations which a wise and liberal-minded 
 priest might discuss in private conversation with adult 
 persons, but which must, one thinks, even in 1660, 
 have seemed indiscreet and embarrassing Avhen set 
 down in print in a popular manual. 
 
 The saturation of Taylor's memory by the pagan 
 classics had given him a certain perduration of mind, 
 so that things which he sternly reproved, and most 
 sincerely abhorred, were yet no longer outside the 
 range of what he was prepared quietly to discuss. He 
 no longer discerned what things those are which it 
 is better that untrained consciences should not even 
 contemplate, nor realised that there are turpitudes 
 which demand silence more than exhortation. So 
 singularly large a place is taken by " odious things " 
 throughout the Ductor, that it would be disingenuous 
 not to face this characteristic, which is partly, of 
 course, but not at all entirely, common to the age in 
 which Taylor wrote. In all these matters, and in the 
 treatment of other scruples of conscience, his absolute 
 mental aloofness is very interesting. He had the 
 judicial mind in its quintessence, and in practice must 
 have been the most imperturbable of confessors. Him r 
 at all events, we may without levity admit, no penitent
 
 T.] PORTMORE 167 
 
 could "shock" out of his decorum. And throughout, 
 nevertheless, with his legal air of the tribunal, he 
 admits that in all things, within a certain oscillation 
 of the rules, each man is a law unto himself, and 
 truth itself not rigorously positive, but " like a dove's 
 neck or a changeable taffeta." It may be added that 
 if any reader desires to-day no small adventure to 
 read the Ductor Dubitantium, he may do so with profit 
 in the laborious edition brought out in 1851 by a 
 namesake of the author, the Rev. Alexander Taylor. 
 
 Charles II. arrived in London on the 29th of May 
 1660, and Taylor was one of those who took part in the 
 rapturous reception. Sixteen years had passed since, 
 as his father's domestic chaplain, Taylor had seen the 
 prince, and we may speculate in vain how the changes 
 in his appearance and demeanour struck him. This 
 was the moment when all lovers of Jeremy Taylor's 
 genius must unite in wishing that he had been en- 
 couraged to remain in England, but it is evident that 
 Bramhall, who was shortly nominated Archbishop of 
 Armagh, and Leslie, who was to be translated from 
 Down to Meath, must have represented that the presence 
 of Taylor was essential to the wellbeing of the Irish 
 Church. Accordingly, on the 6th of August 1660 he 
 was nominated, under the privy seal, to the vacant 
 bishopric of Down and Connor, and shortly afterwards, 
 on his way back to his see, was, at Ormonde's recom- 
 mendation, appointed vice-chancellor of the University 
 of Dublin. Although he did not take the oaths for the 
 latter office until early in 1661, he lost no time in 
 devoting himself to the labour of university reform. 
 On arriving in Dublin, he immediately set himself to 
 visit Trinity College, and on the 3rd of October
 
 168 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 presented his first report to Lord Ormonde. He found 
 all the internal affairs of the University "in a perfect 
 disorder." The Provost was the only surviving relic 
 of the whole foundation, and it was necessarj^ to set 
 aside all the usual methods of election to fill the vacant 
 fellowships. 
 
 He proposed, therefore, that a committee, consisting 
 of himself, James Margetson, Archbishop of Dublin, 
 as visitor, and the Provost of Trinity, should 
 nominate seven senior fellows, three of whom, Dr. 
 Sterne, Joshua Cowley, and Patrick Sheridan, we know 
 to have been personal friends of Taylor's. Great 
 practical difficulties, however, intervened ; Ormonde 
 was not willing to resign his own prerogative of 
 nomination, and it was not until December that "the 
 college was in its former state and possibility of 
 proceeding according to the elections." Just before 
 Christmas, Taylor laments that " we have no public 
 statutes relating to an university, no established forms 
 of collating degrees, no public lecturers, no schools, no 
 Regius professor of Divinity, and scarce any ensignes 
 academical." But gradually all these things were set 
 on foot, and it was not until he had seen "the 
 university rising to its full state and splendour " that 
 he ventured to quit Dublin and proceed to his 
 northern diocese. In his Life of Ormonde, Carte dwells 
 on Taylor's prodigious industry in collecting, arranging, 
 revising, and completing the body of statutes which 
 Bedell had left in confusion. But later writers have 
 hardly done justice to the extraordinary merit of 
 Taylor's labours in reconstituting the ancient centre of 
 Protestant learning in Ireland, when it had become a 
 mere " heap of men and boys, but no body of a college,
 
 v.] PORTMORE 169 
 
 no one member, either fellow or scholar, having any 
 legal title to his place." He carried out this great 
 work, too, in the midst of distracting and humiliating 
 interruptions of a most painful kind, for his nomina- 
 tion to the see of Down and Connor had been received 
 with a storm of protest in the Ulster presbyteries. 
 It should not be forgotten by us, what is doubtless 
 well remembered in Trinity College, that Jeremy 
 Taylor was the regenerating force which drew to 
 one common system the scattered elements of Irish 
 learning. 
 
 Late in the summer of 1660 Royston published 
 another work of considerable importance by Jeremy 
 Taylor, The Worthy Communicant. This was a treatise of 
 a wholly uncontroversial character, composed in a spirit 
 of serenity to which the author's conditions had long 
 made him a stranger. It has been hastily described as 
 written to instruct the newly victorious Royalists in 
 their duty to God. But careful examination will show 
 that this is a mistake. Near the end of The Worthy 
 Communicant we find the author speaking of the age in 
 which he writes, as one where piety has suffered ship- 
 wreck, where all discipline has been lost in the storm, 
 and where good manners have been thrown overboard. 
 "The best remedy in the world that yet remains and 
 is in use amongst the most pious sons and daughters of 
 the church, is that they should conduct their repent- 
 ance by the continual advices and ministry of a 
 spiritual guide." These Avords evidently point to the 
 time, from 1657 to 1659, when Jeremy Taylor was 
 acting as a secret pastor, in the darkest hour, and 
 among those who had still no hope of ecclesiastical 
 restoration.
 
 170 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 The advent of Charles n., however, offered him an 
 opportunity to bring forth his MS. and publish it. It 
 is at any time a fatherly task for a divine to sum up 
 the duties of those who gather to receive the Holy 
 Communion. Still, it is impossible not to see that 
 something of the appropriateness of this particular 
 treatise had passed away as soon as the embargo upon 
 public Anglican worship had been removed. The 
 mystery, the air of ghostly comfort to a beleaguered 
 camp of the faithful, the unction of adversity, these 
 are lost when all is prosperity and sunshine ; and the 
 attitude of affliction seems misdirected when the long- 
 persecuted remnant are in the very act of being 
 rewarded with posts of dignity and emolument. 
 Hence, perhaps, although this is in some respects 
 one of Taylor's least-contestable works, it was never 
 a great popular favourite. The Worthy Communicant 
 was dedicated to the Princess Mary of Orange, the 
 King's sister. This lady, who had been left a widow 
 at nineteen, had developed a strong character. A con- 
 vinced Protestant in spite of all the pressure towards 
 Eome brought to bear upon her by her mother, Queen 
 Henrietta Maria, she had become a particular patron of 
 English divinity. Her court in Holland "hath been 
 in all these late days of sorrow a sanctuary to the 
 afflicted, a chapel for the religious," and it was hoped 
 that her arrival in England would be of good omen for 
 the English Church. 
 
 Princess Mary of Orange was a great admirer of 
 Taylor's genius. She "read and used divers of my 
 books," he says. He had not seen her since she was a 
 child of twelve, and he was disappointed of resuming 
 an acquaintance which would now have been of great
 
 v.] PORTMORE 171 
 
 value to him. The Princess delayed her coming, and 
 before she arrived, on the 30th of September, Taylor's 
 duties had called him back to Ireland. Her visit to 
 England was ill-starred in the highest degree ; she was 
 displeased with many things, her health failed, and on 
 the 24th of December she died, only twenty-nine years 
 of age, leaving behind her, besides a reputation for 
 piety and for something of the family obstinacy, a 
 child who was destined to be King William ill. It is 
 almost certain that if the Princess had remained at the 
 court of Whitehall, she would have insisted on securing 
 for Jeremy Taylor promotion to one of the great 
 English sees for which his loyalty, his eloquence, and 
 his unrivalled reputation so manifestly designed him. 
 
 Towards the close of The Worthy Communicant Jeremy 
 Taylor uses words which accurately sum up the scope 
 of that book. "Every worthy communicant," he says, 
 " must prepare himself by a holy life, by mortification 
 of all his sins, by the acquisition of all Christian graces. 
 And this is not the work of a day, or a week ; but by how 
 much the more these things are done, by so much the 
 better are we prepared." The treatise is non-conten- 
 tious; its tone is gentle and persuasive. It is a dis- 
 course of the nature and uses of the Lord's Supper, 
 " the blessings and fruits of the Sacrament," and of how 
 we must initiate ourselves into them. It is, in short, 
 u manual of conduct in these solemn circumstances ; it 
 contains many wise and beautiful reflections, might be 
 shredded into an anthology of maxims, and is inter- 
 spersed, after Jeremy Taylor's favourite fashion, with 
 exquisitely fervent prayers. " The fierce saying of a 
 few warm and holy words is not a sufficient preparation 
 to these sacred mysteries," and we are, throughout, in
 
 172 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 the presence of one who is deeply soliciteus for the 
 persistent holiness of the souls to whom he is the guide. 
 Ever-recurring are Taylor's extreme solicitude about 
 the importance of vital repentance, and about the 
 necessity of keeping the conscience sensitive and sound. 
 
 From a literary point of view, Tlie Worthy Communi- 
 cant exhibits the natural, we may almost say the 
 physical, progress of its author's mind. It is marked 
 by strength and warmth of expression, and by an 
 absence of all oddity of verbiage. The style is per- 
 fectly pure and simple, clarified by maturity and 
 experience. At the same time the rich perfume of the 
 Golden Grove period seems to have evaporated. The 
 images taken from external nature have almost dis- 
 appeared. The apologues are still beautifully told, but 
 without audacities of phrase ; they are told in a new 
 way, which leans towards the coming Eighteenth 
 Century. Many pages here, in their lucidity, without 
 colour or picturesqueness, might almost be the writing 
 of Tillotson, so reasonable and succinct are their con- 
 structions. So that we see, in this book, the genius 
 of Jeremy Taylor unconsciously responding to the 
 appeal of European taste, and adapting its step to the 
 fashion of the times. But already how far are we from 
 the splendour of the great period, while in exchange 
 for correctness and sobriety of style we have parted 
 with a charm that now never can return. This 
 estimable book consoles us for the fact that events now 
 interrupted and presently closed the life of Taylor as 
 a man of letters, since it shows us that what we love 
 best in his writing, its rapturous mounting note, had 
 departed from it for ever. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor was not left under any illusion as to
 
 v.] PORTMORE 173 
 
 his welcome in County Down. A preliminary visit to 
 his intended diocese filled him with alarm and dis- 
 appointment. In the face of impending events, his 
 first impressions, as reported to Ormonde in a letter 
 of December 19, 1660, deserve our careful notice : 
 
 "His sacred Majesty and your Excellence intended to 
 prefer me, in giving me the bishopric of Down. But, 
 besides that I find it very much short of what it was repre- 
 sented to me, and much of the rents litigious and uncertain, 
 of which I will not complain, I perceive myself thrown into 
 a place of torment. The country would quickly be very well, 
 if the Scotch ministers were away, at least some of the prime 
 incendiaries. All the nobility and gentry, one only [Lord 
 Massereene] excepted, are very right, but the ministers are 
 implacable. They have for these four months past solemnly 
 agreed, and very lately renewed their resolution, of preaching 
 vigorously and constantly against episcopacy and liturgy. . . . 
 They talk of resisting unto blood, and stir up the people to 
 sedition. . . . They have now gone about to asperse me as an 
 Arminian, and a Socinian, and a Papist, or at least half a 
 Papist, . . . and I am not at all guilty, as having no other 
 religion but that of the Church of England, for which I have 
 suffered the persecution of eighteen years. . . . But yet they 
 have lately bought my books, and appointed a committee of 
 Scotch spiders to see if they can gather or make poison out of 
 them, and have drawn some little thing, I know not what, into 
 a paper, and intend to petition to his Majesty that I may not 
 be their bishop." 
 
 It is amusing to see an amiable inconsistency 
 between Taylor's anger at "Scotch spiders" buying 
 his books, and his advice, given a few days later, 
 to a fellow of Trinity of the name of Graham, 
 who asked for a list of the best existing works on 
 practical theology, perhaps for the College Library. 
 In the latter case, Taylor cheerfully supplied a brief
 
 174 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 catalogue of publications which "he that would 
 improve in the doctrine of the Church of England " 
 must "be very perfect in every part of"; and there 
 is scarcely a book or a pamphlet which Taylor had 
 ever printed which does not appear somewhere or 
 other on this list. Meanwhile his complaint to Ormonde 
 was perhaps a little more tragical than the circumstances 
 demanded, although these were awkward enough. He 
 went down from Dublin to preach every Sunday some- 
 where or other in his future diocese, and had already 
 made a good impression upon the affections of "the 
 gentry and the better sort of the people.", Among the 
 non-Presbyterian part of the population he met with 
 universal esteem. Unhappily, of course, it was pre- 
 cisely the Presbyterians who were vastly in the majority, 
 and Jeremy Taylor was forced to the conclusion that 
 their ministers, at least, were implacable. His report 
 of their rejection of his advances is not to their credit. 
 The bishop wrote : 
 
 " They threaten to murder me. They use all the arts they 
 can to disgrace me, and to take the people's hearts from me, 
 and to make my life uncomfortable and useless to the service 
 of his Majesty and the Church. ... It were better for me to 
 be a poor curate in a village church than a bishop over such 
 intolerable persons ; and I will petition your Excellence to 
 give me some parsonage in Munster, that I may end my days 
 in peace, rather than abide here, unless I may be enabled with 
 comfort to contest against such violent persons. . . . My 
 charge hath in it more trouble than all the dioceses in his 
 Majesty's dominions put together." 
 
 He was quite sincere in wishing to withdraw from 
 Down and Connor. He begged Ormonde to let him 
 come back to Dublin and devote himself entirely " to
 
 v.] PORTMORE 175 
 
 the service and resettling of the University," which 
 still required great care and labour. When the govern- 
 ment merely smiled, and said that he must stay in 
 Ulster and do his best, Taylor replied that in that case 
 he must be assisted by the secular arm. Ormonde 
 then signified that the Bishop would receive full 
 support in doing his duty, and that he must not take 
 such a despairing view. If the Scotch spiders were 
 sulky, he must handle a long broom and sweep them 
 out of their webs. Accordingly, he took what heart 
 he could, but he had no peace or happiness all the 
 time that he was bishop in Down; and there can 
 be no question that the constant friction with his 
 Presbyterian neighbours, and those "insufferable dis- 
 couragements " of which he never ceased to complain, 
 paralysed his usefulness and shortened his life. 
 
 The ecclesiastical arrangements for the filling of the 
 Irish sees were not finally completed until the 18th of 
 January 1661, when two archbishops and ten bishops 
 were instituted in St. Patrick's Cathedral. John 
 Bramhall, now Archbishop of Armagh, in succession 
 to Ussher, who had died five years before, presided 
 at the consecration, and Jeremy Taylor preached the 
 sermon. Old Henry Leslie, who was in his eighty- 
 first year, was transferred from Down and Connor 
 to Meath, and Jeremy Taylor took his place. Eobert 
 Leslie, who "was nothing short of his father in 
 cruelty to Nonconformists, but rather exceeded him," 
 went to Dromore. It was in these contiguous Ulster 
 dioceses that the Presbyterians were strongest, and 
 " there were not three such bishops in Ireland " 
 for the stringency of their Episcopalianism. It is 
 melancholy to have to record that even Bramhall,
 
 176 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 who was called " the Irish Laud," did not contrive to 
 vex the souls of the Presbyterian ministers so much 
 as did the author of the Liberty of Prophesying. Taylor 
 was but carrying out, however, the theories of his 
 predecessor, Henry Leslie, who had compared the 
 Independents and the Presbyterians to the thieves 
 between whom our Lord was crucified. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor's headquarters when he first took up 
 the labours of his diocese was Hillsborough, where he 
 is believed to have occupied rooms, with his family, in 
 " the noble large house," fitted up as a regular fortress, 
 which had been built and manned by Colonel Arthur 
 Hill. There is no other place in Ireland where the 
 impression of Taylor's daily life can be reconstructed 
 with so great a measure of success as it can at Hills- 
 borough. The castle of the Hills had been built on 
 the abrupt eminence of Crumlin, by Colonel Hill 
 during the reign of Charles I., as an outpost against 
 the rebels of the west. It was accidentally burned 
 down, in main part, early in the eighteenth century, 
 and the family then removed to the great house, a 
 little to the west, which is still the residence of the 
 Marquis of Downshire. But enough is left of the old 
 fortress to permit us to restore the general plan of 
 its construction. A little ecclesiastical building, ruined 
 but still largely intact, on the ring of wall, was doubt- 
 less the chapel in which Jeremy Taylor officiated. 
 To this day the traces of buildings around the court- 
 yard are brought to light whenever the spade is used, 
 and before any town existed the whole life of the 
 place was included within their circle. 
 
 The pretty and neat little borough town, very 
 English in character, which now struggles up the steep
 
 v.] PORTMORE 177 
 
 rock from the north, cannot have existed in the seven- 
 teenth century; it dates from about 1750. But there 
 may have been a rude village lower down, where, at 
 the bridge, there stood a small parish church when 
 Taylor first came to Hillsborough. This was falling 
 into ruins, and in 1662 the Bishop and Colonel Hill 
 constructed, a few yards from the old castle and almost 
 within its precincts, a spacious, well-contrived church, 
 dedicated to St. Malachy, in the form of a cross, on 
 the very brow of the hill. This, which was called 
 Jeremy Taylor's church, was rebuilt and much enlarged, 
 after a fire, in the eighteenth century, and all that 
 remains of it is the base of one of the outer walls built 
 into the present edifice. 
 
 It has quite recently (1 903) been discovered by Canon 
 Lett of Loughbrickland, the distinguished antiquary, 
 that Homra House, a little solitary mansion two miles 
 to the west of Hillsborough, just off the road to Comber, 
 belonged to Jeremy Taylor, and that in the later part 
 of his life the prelate often resided there. He is also 
 said to have occupied, and even to have built, a house 
 in Castle Street, Lisburn, opposite the door of the 
 church which then served as cathedral to the united 
 dioceses. It was, however, a very short ride from 
 Hillsborough to Lisburn, and it is most reasonable to 
 suppose that the bishop mainly resided, at all events 
 at first, in the castle at Hillsborough, where he was 
 safer than anywhere else in his diocese from the enmity 
 of his Presbyterian ministers, and from their petty 
 annoyances. In Lisburn, although its cathedral, with 
 a tower and an octagonal spire, may vaguely remain 
 the same, there is little else to recall the seventeenth 
 century. That town was destroyed by fire early in the 
 
 M
 
 178 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 nineteenth, and has scarcely an old house in it. The 
 traveller, however, who follows the undulating road 
 between Lisburn and Hillsborough, is on a track which 
 must have been incessantly traversed by the bishop, 
 as he rode from his castle to his cathedral church ; and 
 the general aspect of the brisk, rolling landscape has 
 probably changed but little in two centuries and a half. 
 It has, however, changed in one particular which must 
 not be forgotten. As Lord Londonderry said in a 
 recent speech, the county of Down, which is now the 
 richest in Ireland, was, at the Restoration, perhaps the 
 poorest. 
 
 It was in a spirit grievously exasperated against the 
 rebellious shepherds of his flock that, in March 1661, 
 Jeremy Taylor made his first visitation. He sent before 
 him into Antrim and Down a proclamation from the 
 Dublin courts of justice, discharging all Presbyterian 
 meetings. The terrified ministers, at his approach, 
 hurriedly met in synod at Ballymena. A troop of horse 
 was sent by Taylor's friend, Sir George Rawdon, to 
 disperse them, but they had concluded their meeting 
 before the troopers arrived. They forwarded a deputa- 
 tion of their body to Dublin to plead their cause before 
 Lord Ormonde. Jeremy Taylor immediately left for the 
 north, having received an assurance that no encourage- 
 ment would be given to the ministers. He waited at 
 his apartments in Hillsborough until they returned 
 home, and then summoned them all to meet him at 
 Lisburn. Meanwhile, at this peculiar juncture, their 
 principal patron, Lady Clotworthy, died, and at her 
 funeral, which took place at Belfast the day before 
 that which the bishop had fixed for the visitation, 
 the ministers took counsel together. Then and there
 
 v.] PORTMORE 179 
 
 they sent three of their number to Hillsborough, to 
 tell Jeremy Taylor that they did not acknowledge his 
 Episcopal jurisdiction, and should not appear next day 
 in answer to his summons. 
 
 It does not seem that he treated the representative 
 ministers, for this act of extreme insubordination, 
 with severity. He told them that if they would define 
 their position on paper, he would discuss it with them. 
 He then asked them whether they considered the 
 Presbyterian form of government exclusively the right 
 one, and dejure divino. They said at once that they 
 did. It is not easy to see what else they could say, 
 but on the other hand it made compromise impossible. 
 The bishop was left in the dilemma that he must 
 either subdue the ministers, or resign his see. This 
 he pointed out to them, and added "that there needed 
 no further discourse of the matter of accommodation," 
 if they held to their unyielding position. They pro- 
 fessed that they were willing to discuss their views in 
 public at the visitation, but the bishop naturally felt 
 that it was impossible to allow that. Taylor's patience 
 seems to have broken down, and he sharply instructed 
 them that "if they should make profession contrary 
 to law at the visitation, they would smart for it." 
 Then, speaking more gently, he advised them, as 
 a friend, not to attempt to justify their position 
 by argument. But iu the subsequent conversation, 
 much bad blood was stirred on both sides, and we 
 do not recognise our gentle Taylor, although we have 
 had experience of his obstinacy, when he told his 
 visitors, who hesitated about the Oath of Supremacy, 
 that they " were the greatest enemies to monarchy, and 
 most disobedient to kings, which he instanced in the
 
 180 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 case of the Assembly of Scotland, and in Calvin, Knox, 
 and Buchanan." He compared them with the Jesuits, 
 and they returned, greatly troubled at their reception, 
 to their brethren, who had meanwhile collected at 
 Lisburn, but who now, on hearing the report of their 
 friends, dispersed to their parishes. 
 
 When Taylor arrived at Lisburn next day, and 
 found that only two of his entire clergy had responded 
 to his summons, he was very angry. We must admit 
 that he had cause for his vexation. Those who have 
 blamed him have hardly, it seems to me, taken into 
 due consideration the humiliating impasse in which the 
 rigidity of his opponents placed him. They would 
 neither go to him nor leave him alone. He had 
 hardly retired to his house in Hillsborough when 
 another deputation of ministers waited upon him. 
 He asked them why they had treated him with so 
 much contempt by not coming to his visitation. They 
 replied "it was the awe of God and conscience that 
 made them not appear." Seeing that he could obtain 
 no concession of any kind from the deputation, he 
 dismissed them ; but he called several of them to him 
 in private, and spoke to them, as they admitted, with 
 the greatest kindness and indulgence. But, says 
 Patrick Adair, grimly, "he obtained not his purpose," 
 and they repaired to their respective congregations in 
 a state of open rebellion. The plan of the ministers 
 can easily be comprehended ; they aimed at making the 
 diocese of Down and Connor one which it was impossible 
 for a bishop of the Church of England to hold. They 
 thought that by acting in unison, and by refusing to 
 recognise Jeremy Taylor's authority in any way, and 
 by hinting broadly about "resisting unto blood," they
 
 v.] PORTMORE 181 
 
 would so distress and intimidate the bishop that he 
 would retire, and leave Ulster to the. undisputed sway 
 of the Presbytery. They had seen that he was a gentle, 
 sensitive, and kind-hearted man, and they thought that 
 they could break down his nerves. 
 
 But the Presbyterian ministers reckoned without a 
 quality in Jeremy Taylor's character, to which we have 
 several times referred, namely, his obstinacy. Timid 
 and tractable as he was, there was easily reached a 
 point in controversy with him where he suddenly 
 refused to yield a step further. Before his visitation 
 at Lisburn, and at the mere thought of having to 
 face the "dour" ministers, he had passed through an 
 agony of trepidation. But when once their will had 
 clashed with his, he recovered his moral equilibrium. 
 If we look at the events, not in a party spirit, with 
 a leaning to either side in religion or politics, but as 
 at a human spectacle, I know not how we can refuse 
 our admiration to Jeremy Taylor when he now turns, 
 and, standing almost alone, a stranger and an English- 
 man in this fanatical diocese, defies the whole body of 
 his unscrupulous foes. He saw that the moment for 
 weakness was past. The Presbyterian ministers had 
 openly risen in revolt against him, and it was neces- 
 sary to choose between crushing them and being 
 crushed by them. If he chose the latter, he betrayed 
 the Church and the King, his own principles, the 
 populations among whom he had been sent as a shep- 
 herd. He did not hesitate a moment; he imme- 
 diately declared thirty-six parishes vacant, and filled 
 these incumbencies with clergy whom he invited out 
 from England. What with these, and with the curates 
 who accompanied them, Taylor brought over quite a
 
 182 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 large ecclesiastical colony, and one of these emigrants, 
 the excellent George Rust, he appointed Dean of 
 Connor. The work of turning out the Presbyterian 
 ministers, who struggled to retain their parsonages 
 "till it became physically impossible for them to 
 continue," of installing and protecting the new clergy, 
 of conciliating the congregations, of exhorting and 
 cheering and rebuking his flock in all corners of the 
 diocese, of deciding cases where, as at Killead and 
 Antrim, the ministers could safely be allowed a six 
 months' grace, all this occupied Jeremy Taylor 
 through the stormy year 1661. Throughout it was 
 a painful business, involving bitterness and exaspera- 
 tion; but all the evidence, and it is mainly on the 
 Presbyterian side, goes to prove that the bishop 
 carried out his distasteful duty with firmness and 
 courage, and, superficially at least, with not a little 
 success. The diocese, at all events, became quiet, 
 and the Episcopalian form of worship established. 
 
 Taylor often lost hope, however, and he was never 
 happy in County Down. At the end of March 1661, 
 when he had resided there only a couple of months, 
 he begged that if the aged Henry Leslie should die, he 
 might be translated to the diocese of Meath, which 
 would be much more convenient for his duties in 
 Dublin, since he was now not merely vice-chancellor 
 of the University, but a member of the Irish Privy 
 Council. He wrote to Ormonde : " Here I am per- 
 petually contending with the worst of the Scotch 
 ministers. I have a most uncomfortable employment, 
 but, I bless God, I have broken their knot, I have over- 
 come the biggest difficulty, and made the charge easy 
 for my successor." To Taylor's extreme disappoint-
 
 v.] PORTMORE 183 
 
 ment, when Leslie died, on the 9th of April 1661, Henry- 
 Jones, the veteran bishop of Clogher, was appointed to 
 the vacant diocese, and it was again indicated to Taylor 
 that he must stay where he was. Doubtless he felt that 
 it was unreasonable to take his hand from the plough 
 so soon, for we hear no more complaint from him for 
 some years. Meanwhile he laboured in the thorny 
 field, and in such a manner that Rust, speaking to 
 those who had been most closely associated with him, 
 could say "with what care and faithfulness he dis- 
 charged his office, we are all his witnesses."
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 DROMORE 
 
 (1661-1667) 
 
 JEREMY TAYLOR is often described as "Lord-Bishop 
 of Down, Connor, and Dromore," and this is even the 
 style which his editor and biographer, Heber, gives 
 him on the title-page of the Whole Works. He seems 
 to have been, however, at no time Bishop of Dromore, 
 although, after the early months of 1661, that diocese 
 became a very important centre of his activities. 
 Dromore was a bishopric founded by St. Colman in the 
 sixth century, but its independent existence in post- 
 Reformation days began when James I. severed it 
 from the diocese of Down, in which it had been 
 merged. It was at first a small cluster of parishes in 
 the western part of the county, and contained, at the 
 Restoration, only five incumbencies, together with 
 several "dignities of the church," which made a great 
 strain upon its slender revenues. The rebellion of 
 1641 had utterly ruined it. Buck worth, the bishop, had 
 just completed, at great expense, a palace close to the 
 cathedral, and this, with every building in the town, 
 was burned by the Tories. When Jeremy Taylor 
 arrived at Hillsborough, and rode over to Dromore, 
 which is only four English miles to the south of that 
 
 184
 
 CHAP, vi.] DROMORE 185 
 
 fastness, lie found a poor cluster of huts beginning to 
 struggle up the hill from the river Lagan, but no attempt 
 made to restore the charred ruins of the cathedral. 
 
 The diocese of Dromore was practically bankrupt, 
 and Taylor received a deputation from the neighbour- 
 ing nobility and gentry, proposing that it should be 
 merged once more in Down and Connor. It was, as 
 he told Ormonde, " not of extent or charge enough for a 
 bishop," and on the 28th of March 1661, when Henry 
 Leslie lay a-dying, Taylor, as we have seen, applied to 
 the government that he should be translated to Meath, 
 and that the united northern diocese should be resigned 
 to Robert Leslie, who would then be bishop, not merely 
 of Dromore, but of Down and Connor as well. It is 
 unfortunate that this arrangement was not carried 
 out, for in Meath Taylor would not only have been 
 placed in the midst of a friendly population, but he 
 would have been close to Dublin and to his valuable 
 work at Trinity College. Ormonde, however, would 
 not hear of it, but Eobert Leslie was translated to 
 Eaphoe, and on the 30th of April Taylor was appointed 
 by royal letter "administrator" of the diocese of 
 Dromore. The plan was, by temporarily suspending 
 the election of a bishop to that see, to give it a sort of 
 minority, during which it could recover its solvency. 
 This seems to have been fairly acceptable to Jeremy 
 Taylor, who received, not indeed an Episcopal salary, 
 but considerable fees for his administration, and 
 Dromore had no bishop until, in 1667, George Rust 
 was appointed. The writ under the privy seal sets 
 forth that the stewardship was given to Taylor "on 
 account of his virtue, wisdom, and industry." He 
 seems to have administered the revenues of the see
 
 186 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 with unusual dexterity, and to have placed Dromore on 
 a prosperous footing. 
 
 One of the first things he did was to raise a cathedral 
 on the site of the church which the rebels had destroyed. 
 He built a small and decent edifice, not constructed in 
 the form of a cross, but consisting of a nave with a 
 choir which he added at his own expense. It is to be 
 regretted that Dromore, with which Jeremy Taylor 
 was so closely identified, now offers the visitor very 
 little indeed which can be connected with him. The 
 small grey town seems to contain not a single house 
 which is not long subsequent to Taylor's death. The 
 two-arched bridge over the river may be one of his 
 constructions. The palace, now (1903) unoccupied, 
 on the hill to the north-west of the station, is quite 
 modern ; probably the ruined palace was not rebuilt 
 in Jeremy Taylor's time. Even the cathedral, re- 
 constructed rather than restored, is most disappoint- 
 ing, and a certain amount of basal masonry is all 
 that has survived of the church which he built in 
 1661. We shall speak later on of such relics of 
 Taylor as the present cathedral contains. It would 
 be useless to search for any traces of his residence 
 in Dromore, since it is certain that he administered 
 the little diocese from his apartments in Hillsborough 
 Castle. 
 
 We hear extremely little of Jeremy Taylor's family 
 life in Ireland. His son Edward, perhaps his only 
 son by his wife Joanna, was buried at Lisburn on 
 the 10th of March 1661; he could not have been 
 more than five years old at the time. There is 
 evidence that through the year 1661 Taylor was 
 making what proved a hopeless struggle to keep up
 
 vi.] DROMORE 1ST 
 
 his intimacy with his old English friends. It is a 
 very pathetic fact that after this date their names 
 disappear from his correspondence. The distance 
 between Ulster and London was great, and methods of 
 communication were primitive and slow. The new 
 conditions introduced into English life by the Restora- 
 tion gave every one a great deal to think about ; leisure 
 was restricted, and business vastly increased. When 
 Jeremy Taylor went over to London to welcome 
 Charles II., he had renewed his friendship with his 
 old patron, Lord Hatton of Kirby, and many memories 
 had been awakened in his bosom. When he returned to 
 Ireland he hoped that Lord Hatton, although time and 
 misfortune had greatly changed him, would continue 
 their former correspondence, but the peer had other 
 matters on his mind. Taylor tried to fancy that his 
 own importunate letters had " some way or other mis- 
 carried," but Lord Hatton was obstinately mute. "If 
 I might have leave, and knew how, whither, and in 
 what circumstances to address my letters to your 
 Lordship, so that they might come readily to your 
 hand," the bishop wrote on the 23rd of November, "I 
 would write often, for though I be a useless person, 
 yet nobody loves and honours my dear Lord Hatton 
 so much as I do " ; but Ireland was a long way off, and 
 he was not encouraged to persevere. 
 
 Nor was his experience any better with a dearer and 
 a better friend, Evelyn, to whom Jeremy Taylor wrote 
 in the course of the same week. " I pray you let me 
 hear from you as often as you can, for you will very 
 much oblige me if you will continue to love me still." 
 He confesses " I am so full of public concerns and the 
 troubles of business in my diocese, that I cannot yet
 
 188 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 have leisure to think of much of my old delightful 
 employment " of writing letters to Evelyn. But " I 
 hope I have brought my affairs almost to a consis- 
 tence," and then, surely, the friends may begin again 
 on the former pleasant footing of mutual correspon- 
 dence and intimacy. Evelyn sends him some printed 
 tracts, but no more letters, and he too drops noiselessly 
 out of the affectionate bishop's life. It is the same 
 with "worthy Mr. Thurland," although Taylor tries 
 to excite him by the transmission of " my love and 
 dear regards." He had to be content with new faces 
 and the Irish intimacies ; a curtain fell between 
 England and his home-sickness. It was not that the 
 hearts there had grown cold to him; but he was as 
 distant from their interests then, as he would be from 
 ours to-day in Madagascar or the Falkland Islands, and 
 he had to be content, like exiles all the world over, 
 with the conviction that his friends would still love 
 him if they could only recollect him. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor was now recognised as by far the finest 
 orator in Ireland, and was indispensable upon great occa- 
 sions. For his sermon, preached at the opening of 
 Parliament on the 8th of May 1661, he received the 
 thanks of both Houses, and its publication was ordered. 
 The preacher hesitated to obey ; but when it was 
 represented to him that what he had so brilliantly 
 said would otherwise fade from the memory of 
 those who listened to it, he replied, "I would not 
 shed that chalice which my own hands have newly 
 filled with waters issuing from the fountains of 
 salvation," and consented. In the preface to this 
 sermon he complains that his " eyes are almost grown 
 old with seeing the horrid mischiefs which come from
 
 vi.] DROMORE 189 
 
 rebellion and disobedience." But so far as bowing the 
 head goes, he is determined to be firm. He will not 
 be one of those weak brethren " who plead for tolera- 
 tion and compliance," and he lets it be known, in the 
 clearest possible tones, that he means to impress the 
 law against the Presbyterian "wild asses in the 
 wilderness." His sermon at the opening of Parliament 
 is one of his cleverest and most trenchant minor 
 writings, admirably colloquial, and even, at times, 
 humorous. The line of argument is that there can be 
 no happiness and no prosperity for the troubles of 
 Ireland, unless she is docile. It is the duty of 
 Parliament to enforce docility. "God hath put a 
 royal mantle, and fastened it with a golden clasp, 
 upon the shoulder of the King; and He hath given 
 you the judge's robe ; the King holds the sceptre, and 
 he hath now permitted you to touch the golden ball." 
 He promises that the bishops will be firm in doctrine, 
 if the Houses will be equally firm in law, and together 
 they shall proceed to the salvation of Ireland. Above 
 all things, he deprecates "a pitiful, a disheartened, a 
 discouraged clergy, that waters the ground with a 
 waterpot, here and there a little." The sermon is a 
 very strong document, which must have encouraged 
 the government greatly in its task. We have only to 
 read it to comprehend the sensation which it produced 
 and the enthusiasm which it awakened. It marks the 
 moment of Jeremy Taylor's highest complacency about 
 his work in Ulster, when he was flushed with his 
 original triumph, and had not experienced the reaction. 
 Another publication of 1661 was the Via Intelli- 
 gentice, an expansion of an address first delivered to 
 the University of Dublin, and afterwards, in a modified
 
 190 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 form, to the clergy of Taylor's diocese during a 
 metropolitan visitation which the Archbishop of 
 Armagh, the aged John Bramhall, made in the summer 
 of 1661. Taylor had now collected his imported 
 clergy from England, and they rallied about him and 
 about the Primate in a highly gratifying manner. 
 There was, we are told, "a clergy-show," and after it a 
 banquet was given by Taylor, probably at Hills- 
 borough, in honour of Bramhall, and the party is 
 described as an extremely successful one. The newly 
 appointed incumbents learned to know one another, 
 and to see their bishop in the light of an assiduous 
 and generous host. They might also admire, not 
 without a touch of awe, the "stupendous parts, and 
 mighty diligence, and unusual zeal " of the not a little 
 formidable Primate, who was fighting still, "only 
 mortality was too hard for him," and years beginning 
 to tell upon the fierceness of his energies. Before 
 the "excellent dinner" was served, Jeremy Taylor 
 preached to the assembled Primate and clergy, and 
 all the gentry that had come to his table, a sermon 
 which he presently published and distributed. 
 
 If 1661 was a very full year in the history of 
 Jeremy Taylor, 1662 is marked only by anecdotes. 
 As we have already seen, he was inclined to a moderate 
 credulity about the spirit-world. He has been un- 
 justly accused of believing grossly in ghosts ; it would 
 be more just to say that he was in favour of psychical 
 research. He was now thrown into the midst of a 
 very superstitious population, and he was by no means 
 helpless, though vividly curious, in presence of their 
 tales of wonder. Late on the night of Michaelmas 
 1662, a porter called Francis Taverner, who had been
 
 vi.] DROMORE 191 
 
 at Hillsborough, was riding to his house near Belfast, 
 when he came to the Drum bridge, which crosses the 
 Lagan at Drumbeg. He was " a lusty proper stout 
 felloAv," about twenty-five years of age. At the foot 
 of the bridge his horse stopped suddenly; Taverner 
 dismounted, urged the beast forward, and as he started 
 again, was aware of two shadowy horsemen who rode 
 beside him, like the great Twin Brethren by the shore 
 of Lake Regillus. At the same moment a third man, 
 in a white coat, was at his elbow, and, turning, 
 Taverner perceived that this resembled one James 
 Haddock, who had died five years before. Taverner 
 asked the apparition who in the name of God he was. 
 Haddock told his name, and bade him not be afraid, 
 reminding him of a trivial circumstance, how Taverner 
 had brought some nuts to Haddock and to the two 
 friends who were now noiselessly riding on before 
 them. A brief conversation brought the party to four 
 cross roads, where the path from Dunmurray to 
 Lismoyne crosses the Belfast road. Here the ghost 
 desired the young man to turn aside with him, but 
 Taverner would not, and, galloping on, left him there. 
 Whereupon, " there arose a great wind, and withal he 
 heard very hideous screeches and noises, to his amaze- 
 ment." But presently morning broke, the cocks crew, 
 and, slipping off his horse, Taverner knelt in prayer to 
 God, and so came safely to Belfast. 
 
 Next night, as he sat by the fire with his wife, the 
 ghost of Haddock appeared to him again, and sent a 
 vague message about a will and a lease to a certain 
 widow, Eleanor Welsh, at Malone, a hamlet close by, 
 where Taverner's family lived. This message would 
 have upset the whole neighbourhood, and Taverner
 
 192 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 could not bring himself to give it. Night after night 
 the ghost appeared, more and more importunate and 
 angry, now when the porter was sitting at the hearth, 
 now when he was in bed. It was never visible to 
 Mrs. Taverner, although she was a terrified witness of 
 her husband's agitation. For a whole month James 
 Haddock, in a white coat, haunted the unfortunate 
 young man, who, to escape from the visitation, left 
 his home in the hills, and took refuge with a shoe- 
 maker in Belfast ; but all in vain. The story gradually 
 filled the whole country-side, and reached the bishop, 
 who was holding his court in Dromore. 
 
 Thomas Alcock, Jeremy Taylor's secretary, who 
 has preserved the story, was instructed to send for 
 Taverner, as the bishop was extremely interested in 
 what he called "this strange scene of Providence." 
 He held a judicial inquiry at Dromore, and cross- 
 examined, not Taverner only, but various other 
 witnesses who were collected for the purpose. The 
 young porter's evidence was not shaken, and Taylor 
 came to the conclusion that this was a genuine instance 
 of the apparition of the souls of the dead. Lady 
 Conway, a learned blue-stocking whose headaches 
 were among the most celebrated indispositions of that 
 day, and who affected a universal intellectual curiosity, 
 asked to have the case retried for her benefit at Hills- 
 borough, which Taylor, taking Taverner and all the 
 witnesses over from Dromore, actually did before a 
 fashionable company. The bishop then supplied 
 Taverner with a set of questions, which he was to 
 put to the ghost, if it appeared again ; and at night 
 sent him off to Lisburn, where he was put up in Lord 
 Con way's house. There Taverner and his brother were
 
 vi.] DROMORE 193 
 
 in the courtyard, when the former saw the spectre in 
 its white coat come over the wall to them. Taverner 
 plucked up courage and asked his set of questions, but 
 the ghost "gave him no answer, but crawled on his 
 hands and feet over the wall again, and so vanished 
 in white, with a most melodious harmony." And that 
 was the close of the incident. But that it was a true 
 story of a real ghost, " all wise and good men did 
 believe, especially the bishop, and Dr. Rust, the Dean 
 of Connor." 
 
 We possess the questions which Jeremy Taylor 
 proposed to the ghost, and they are of a nature to 
 suggest that in his judgment it might be a spirit of 
 evil masquerading in Haddock's shape. Among the 
 questions was this: "Why do you appear in so small 
 a matter, when so many widows and orphans in the 
 world are defrauded of greater matters ? " This is 
 exactly in the spirit of Huxley. On the other hand, 
 " How are you regimented in the other world 1 " would 
 have commended itself to Frederic W. H. Myers. It 
 is odd that Defoe, in his Secrets of the Invisible World, 
 roundly scolded Jeremy Taylor for these queries, 
 which he considered "needless and impertinent"; 
 while that earnest believer in witches and goblins, 
 Increase Mather, was even more deeply scandalised 
 at Taylor's levity. We see in his questions to 
 Taverner's tormentor, not exactly disbelief in the 
 reality of the apparition, but undoubtedly that hesi- 
 tancy which led him, in the Dissuasion from Popery, 
 to point out how dangerous credulity is, and how 
 unlikely it must be that God should give devils an 
 opportunity to "abuse the world with notices and 
 revelations of their own." 
 
 N
 
 194 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Another wild tale came before him in the adventure 
 of a neatherd who was in his service at Portmore, and 
 who was " amazed " by the apparition of an old woman, 
 who pursued him for nearly nine months. In this 
 case the ghost was also seen and followed by the 
 neatherd's little dog. The old woman had buried 
 twenty-eight shillings in her lifetime, and wished that 
 this money, accompanied by an extremely tart reproof 
 for his wicked and dissolute conduct, should go to one 
 of her sons. At last, it would seem that the man 
 consented to search for the money, which was buried 
 under a hearth-stone "beyond the Bann Water," 
 whereat the old woman was so rejoiced that she bade 
 him lift her in his arms. He did so, and found her as 
 light as a bag of feathers; whereupon she vanished 
 forever in a most delicate music. Unfortunately, we 
 are not told whether the twenty-eight shillings were 
 discovered under the hearth-stone. In this story, also, 
 both Jeremy Taylor and old Lady Conway took the 
 acutest interest, but Alcock neglects to report the 
 bishop's opinion on this case. 
 
 As soon as his clergy were settled in the diocese, 
 Taylor collected them at Lisburn, and earnestly exhorted 
 them on their personal and public deportment. His 
 words betray his cordial desire for reconciliation with 
 all classes of his flock. The incumbents, so embarrass- 
 ingly deposited in unwelcome propinquity to obstruc- 
 tive parishioners, were above all things to "remember 
 that discretion is the mistress of all graces." They 
 were to discourage useless disputations ; they were to 
 devote themselves to the spirit of meekness, and to 
 endeavour to gain over their flock "by the impor- 
 tunity of wise discourses." They were to "strive
 
 vi.] DROMORE 195 
 
 to get the love of the congregation," yet "let it 
 not degenerate into popularity." As High Church 
 Anglicans they were to be careful to introduce no 
 needless rites and gestures which would be offensive 
 to parishioners, but to keep to what was required by 
 the Church and established by law. They were to 
 be most particular not to incense the congregation 
 by exasperating or scolding them, nor to use irritating 
 forms of language, " fantastical or schismatical terms." 
 They must remember that they are ministering among 
 persons, who from ignorance or prejudice are ready 
 to be troublesome, and they must give no occasion to 
 disturbance. If the minister finds in his congregation 
 a contentious person, he is not to dispute with him ; he 
 is to employ the man's zeal " in something that is good, 
 let it be pressed to fight against sin." Nothing could 
 be gentler or wiser than this advice, nothing more 
 evangelical. 
 
 But Jeremy Taylor, while earnestly recommending 
 meekness, would not corrupt it into cowardice. The 
 clergy are not to forget that they are to rule and to 
 instruct, and that " he that receives from the people 
 what he shall teach them, is like a nurse that asks 
 of her child what physic she shall give him." They 
 are not to suffer the common people to prattle about 
 religious questions. They must see that no person 
 in their parishes is ignorant of the foundations of 
 faith, but they are forbidden to destroy their duty 
 by "unreasonable compliance with the humours" of 
 the flock. They are to check severely the common 
 fault of the sectaries, who were wont, it seems, after a 
 good dinner, to sit down and backbite their neighbours. 
 In short, the clergy of Down and Connor were to be
 
 196 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 mild and yet firm, tender disciplinarians and constitu- 
 tional rulers. It was a counsel of perfection, and little 
 time went by before Jeremy Taylor and George Rust, 
 who was his right-hand man, had a painful awakening 
 from their dream of a pacified and grateful Ulster. 
 For two years, from the summer of 1661 to that of 
 1663, all seems to have been tolerably calm in the 
 dioceses, and then a storm of Presbyterian recusancy 
 broke out again. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor became aware of what was going 
 on in the course of a visitation to the eastern part 
 of his diocese. The village of Killinchy, on Strang- 
 ford Lough, was the centre of a disaffection which 
 was caused by a visit paid to County Down by the 
 notorious adventurer, Colonel Thomas Blood. This 
 man had set no value upon the religious life, but he 
 knew how to play upon the sensibilities of fanatics. 
 He pretended to be a convinced Presbyterian, and he 
 was introduced to a knot of the ejected ministers by 
 his brother-in-law, of the name of Lecky. It is only 
 fair, however, to the Ulster Presbyterians to say that, 
 though they were in a state of great religious fermenta- 
 tion, they would have none of Blood and his plot, 
 which was discovered in Dublin on the 22nd of May, 
 and prevented. Blood escaped to England, where he 
 had a chequered career as a rebel and a thief. But 
 all these events greatly disturbed opinion in Down 
 and Antrim, and led the government to some arbitrary 
 acts. Taylor exaggerated the danger, and, on the 
 llth of June, wrote in great trepidation to the Duke 
 of Ormonde. He had discovered that John Drysdale, 
 one of the most formidable of the ejected ministers, 
 had returned from his exile in Scotland, and believed
 
 vi.] DROMORE 197 
 
 that he was stirring up disaffection. He rashly 
 arrested Drysdale, although "on no particular charge," 
 and then asked the Duke for instructions. The Dublin 
 government took prompt action ; all the Presbyterian 
 ministers who could be found in the counties of Antrim 
 and Down were arrested, and imprisoned respectively 
 at Carrickf ergus and at Carlingford. After a consider- 
 able period of incarceration, as no charge could be 
 proved against them, they were allowed to withdraw 
 to Scotland, and the storm passed over. 
 
 In the new attitude which Jeremy Taylor adopted 
 to his flock in 1663, it is possible that he was affected 
 by the revival of zeal in England, of which the Ichabod 
 of Ken, published in this very year, gives evidence. 
 There was a strong feeling among youthful Anglicans 
 that their elders were not showing a proper resent- 
 ment against the "sad race of dissenters." Taylor 
 may have been stirred by letters from England to 
 show greater activity in silencing the disturbers of 
 the peace of his diocese. 
 
 The executive took all the responsibility for these 
 acts of violence, but it is impossible to overlook the 
 fact that it was Jeremy Taylor who had appealed to the 
 Duke for help, and that it was he who sketched the 
 policy which the Dublin government carried out. He 
 had appealed to the force of the law to remove the 
 ministers, on the ground that as long as they remained 
 in his diocese it would be "a perpetual seminary of 
 schism and discontents," and he had roundly accused 
 them of being "all more than consenting " to Blood's 
 plot. In this last matter there is evidence that he 
 was misinformed, but he has to bear the responsi- 
 bility of the results of his grievous error.
 
 198 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 In the midst of all these perturbations Archbishop 
 Bramhall died, on the 25th of June, and was succeeded 
 as Primate by Margetson, the Archbishop of Dublin, 
 a man of much milder temper, who inaugurated a 
 policy of conciliation in the northern provinces. I 
 think it probable that Jeremy Taylor not merely 
 acquiesced in this change, but positively welcomed 
 it. At Bramhall's funeral he preached a sermon 
 which, so willing are readers to find what they really 
 bring with them, has been mentioned as an instance of 
 Taylor's harsh and domineering temper, and of the 
 tormented conditions of his mind. I can only say that 
 I have searched this brilliant performance in vain for 
 any such evidence of bias. The Funeral Sermon on 
 Archbishop Bramhall is a composition in Taylor's most 
 careful manner ; it is partly a rhapsody on the sure and 
 certain hope of resurrection, and partly a very skilful 
 and picturesque biography. The former section is curi- 
 ously reminiscent of Sir Thomas Browne's then recent 
 Urn-Burial; the preacher "will not now insist upon 
 the story of the rising bones seen every year in Egypt, 
 nor the pretences of the chemists that they from the 
 ashes of flowers can reproduce the same beauties in 
 colour and figure," but he runs his parallels through 
 " night and day, the sun returning to the same point 
 of east, every change of species, the eagle renewing her 
 youth, and the snake her skin, the silkworm and the 
 swallows, winter and summer, the fall and spring," all 
 of them symbols and reflections of the glorious mystery 
 of resurrection. We seem to be back again at Golden 
 Grove, so graceful is the imagery, so ethereal the verbal 
 music. 
 
 He turns from these contemplations to a portrait of
 
 vi.] DROMORE 199 
 
 the great man whom they have met to bury. He 
 dwells on his energy, his intellect, his virtue ; he 
 insists, with indignant zeal, upon Bramhall's heroic 
 passion for the Church, and upon all that he was 
 called upon to suffer. He was driven into poverty and 
 exile by that wild storm "by which great Strafford 
 and Canterbury fell " ; he returned to Ireland and to 
 honour at an hour so late that neither the King nor 
 Ormonde, "the King's great vicegerent," could reap 
 from his restoration the whole benefit they had antici- 
 pated. For Bramhall, with all his greatness, was then 
 already old and broken. "It is true he was in the 
 declension of his age and health. But his very ruins 
 were goodly. And they who saw the broken heaps of 
 Pompey's Theatre, and the crushed obelisks, and the old 
 face of beauteous Philenium, could not but admire the 
 disordered glories of such magnificent structures, 
 which were venerable in their very dust." In dilating 
 upon these qualities, it must have been a great temp- 
 tation to Jeremy Taylor to denounce the Presbyterians, 
 whose tempestuous resistance had embittered Bram- 
 hall's last hours, and who pursued him beyond the grave 
 with their hatred. But not a word of anger escapes 
 the preacher ; he does not so much as hint at any trouble 
 in the northern dioceses. The Funeral Sermon on 
 Bramhall is perfect in dignity and Christian reserve. 
 It appears to me that in later times it has been read too 
 little and too carelessly. It is the one piece of litera- 
 ture produced by Jeremy Taylor in Ireland which is 
 entirely worthy of his reputation as an artist. It is 
 the one effusion of those agitated years which shows 
 no decline from the lofty standard of his imagination 
 and intellect.
 
 200 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor's principal literary occupation, how- 
 ever, during the closing years of his life was the 
 composition of an extremely lengthy Dissuasion from 
 Popery addressed to the people of Ireland. He tells us 
 that his brethren, the prelates of that country, set this 
 task upon him, and that at first he was unwilling to 
 adventure upon it. But, having once taken it up, he 
 seemed incapable of dropping it. The viscous task 
 adhered to his fingers, and one whose memory was 
 so accurately stored with patristic instances needed 
 but the very smallest intellectual stress to continue 
 the disquisition almost indefinitely. A first and 
 surely a sufficient instalment appeared in quarto 
 in 1664; but Jeremy Taylor could not breakthrough 
 the glutinous chain of his animadversions, and pro- 
 ceeded to produce a Second Part, being a Vindication 
 of the First, and further Reproof of Roman Error. 
 This he had sent to press when he died, and it appeared 
 in the autumn of 1667. Had his life been prolonged, 
 we might now possess a Third Part, and a Fourth. 
 This is the most languid and unreadable of Jeremy 
 Taylor's writings. It is deformed by patronising 
 remarks about "the poor deluded Irish," and in par- 
 ticular goes out of its way to attack the use and study 
 of the Irish language, which Taylor thought barbarous 
 and deforming, and wished to prohibit. His entire want 
 of sympathy with the Celtic mind is illustrated by the 
 agony of distress into which he is thrown by certain 
 instances of its " miserable superstition and blindness." 
 In every sentence we are conscious of the chasm which 
 divided him from all sections of his flock, of what 
 Matthew Arnold might call "the profound sense of 
 estrangement " from them, " immense, incurable, fatal."
 
 vi.] DROMORE 201 
 
 A recent learned writer on Jeremy Taylor has 
 called A Dissuasion from Popery " one of the most in- 
 teresting of his writings." The interest which Mr. 
 Alexander Gordon finds, must reside, I think, solely 
 in the definite statement of the dead-lock existing 
 between the old religion of Ireland and the new, and 
 that is surely sufficiently contained in the dedication 
 to the Duke of Ormonde. The rest of this huge treatise 
 we must not allow partiality for Taylor, or sympathy 
 for his isolated position, to make us attempt to admire. 
 The antipathy it displays to the people of Ireland, its 
 incurable Philistinism and ignorance of the Celtic 
 temperament, are not less disappointing because they 
 were shared by the majority of Englishmen in that 
 dreary period. And, as for Jeremy Taylor himself, so 
 far from thinking it " interesting " that he should spend 
 his last years almost exclusively in this multiplication 
 of insulting diatribes against the ancestral religion 
 of his country, we should regard his labour mournfully 
 as a cardinal example of that objectless waste of energy 
 which Coleridge deplored as the worst of misfortunes : 
 
 " With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll ; 
 And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ? 
 Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, 
 And Hope without an object cannot live." 
 
 Meanwhile the bishop was carrying on his campaign 
 against the Presbyterians of his diocese, and in this 
 he was aided by Sir Richard Kennedy, who acted in 
 Ulster as Judge of Assize. This lawyer, who was one 
 of the Barons of the Exchequer for Ireland, supported 
 Taylor in all his decisions, and in fanatical zeal even 
 went beyond the bishop's desires. Kennedy "infinitely
 
 202 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 discountenanced and punished" the Nonconformists, 
 and showed an intemperate activity in all the affairs 
 of the Church. He went to such extremities that he 
 had to be checked by orders from the Privy Council, 
 which became alarmed at the reports of his severity. 
 Among the gentry of Ulster, Lord Massereene was 
 solitary in his efforts for peace and general indulgence, 
 although others, such as Lady Ards and Lord Dun- 
 cannon, interceded for personal friends of their own. 
 By the early months of 1664 "the generality of the 
 ministers of the North were either banished, imprisoned 
 or driven into corners," but the anger of the populace 
 was so great that the Duke of Ormonde found it wise 
 to insist upon a slackening of the persecution. Jeremy 
 Taylor "stormed at this vague favour for noncon- 
 formity," and encouraged Kennedy to pursue his work. 
 But the Irish Primate had determined to be "civil to 
 the brethren of Down," and Sir Richard Kennedy was 
 felt to be so embarrassing to the government at Dublin, 
 that he was urged to take occasion of the Lord Lieuten- 
 ant's going over to England to accompany him, and 
 not to return to Ireland. Jeremy Taylor found him- 
 self deserted and solitary. 
 
 On the 25th of May 1664 he wrote a pressing letter 
 to his old friend Sheldon, now Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, imploring to be translated to a less arduous see. 
 Sheldon, it seems, had said that Jeremy Taylor him- 
 self was the only hindrance to his being removed to 
 an English bishopric. Taylor protested that he could 
 not conjecture what the Primate meant, but it is easy 
 to see that his reputation for lack of suppleness and 
 moderation had brought him into disgrace with the 
 Court. No one appreciated his painful zeal, no one
 
 vi.] DROMORE 203 
 
 had wished him to be so stern and unbending to his 
 clergy. His appeal to be solaced by a see in some other 
 part of England or Ireland is pathetic. He writes : 
 
 " I humbly desire that your grace will not wholly lay me 
 aside, and cast off all thoughts of removing me. For no man 
 shall with a greater diligence, humility imd observance en- 
 deavour to make up his other disabilities than I shall. The 
 case is so that the country does not agree with my health as 
 it hath done formerly, till the last Michaelmas ; and if your 
 grace be not willing I should die immaturely, I shall still hope 
 you will bring ine to or near yourself once more. But to God 
 and to your grace I humbly submit the whole affair, humbly 
 desiring a kind return to this letter, and the comfort of a little 
 hope." 
 
 But Charles II. seems to have been told that the Pres- 
 byterians of Ulster "had been sufferers for the King," 
 and Jeremy Taylor's last chance of promotion or even 
 of translation passed away. He had pleased nobody ; 
 his flock were persuaded that he was cruel and unjust, 
 and the government regarded him as dangerous and 
 embarrassing. For the rest of his life, as it was indi- 
 cated to him again, he must make the best he could 
 of Down and Connor. He buried himself in literature, 
 and resigned himself to inevitable disappointment. 
 From this time forward his animal spirits seem to 
 have decayed. He had lost his hope, and with it 
 went his energy. To this moment probably belongs 
 the curious story preserved by Michael Lort, the 
 antiquary, that Taylor desired his secretary to procure 
 all the copies of his Liberty of Prophesying which could 
 be found, and made a bonfire of them in the market- 
 place of Dromore. It was not, indeed, like Jeremy 
 Taylor to destroy one of his own works although 
 it may be noticed that Liberty of Prophesying is prac-
 
 204 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 tically the only one of all his didactic books which 
 he did not include in the list of modern English 
 divinity drawn up at Graham's request in 1660 but, 
 if the tale is true, it shows a repudiation of his early 
 theories of toleration which is melancholy in itself, 
 and not out of keeping with his distressing implaca- 
 bility as a bishop. The iron had entered into his 
 soul, and he was no longer the Jeremy Taylor whose 
 patient energy and active sympathy we have loved. 
 
 We hear little more of him in a public capacity. 
 He had a farm of forty acres at Magheralin, probably 
 the same which had been allotted to him through Sir 
 William Petty's offices when he first arrived in Ireland. 
 He devoted himself to this estate, and traces of 
 his beneficence remain in the whole district around 
 it. Traditions of him are said to be still extant in 
 several of the surrounding villages, at Soldierstown, 
 at Derriaghy, at Magheragall, at Ballinderry. The 
 places where Jeremy Taylor is said to have " resided " 
 are numerous in the south-west of Antrim and the 
 north-west of Down. It must be remembered that 
 wherever a man of such prominence spent a single 
 night would easily be quoted in tradition as one of 
 his " residences." He probably lived chiefly at Hills- 
 borough until April 1663, when Colonel Arthur Hill 
 died, an event which robbed the bishop of one of 
 his few close friends. He certainly still had a home 
 in or near Portmore, and when he left Hillsborough, 
 the house he had built in the Castle Street of 
 Lisburn, opposite the doors of the cathedral, would be 
 his official residence. Everything seems to point to 
 a rapid decline, in vitality during the last three years 
 of his disenchanted life. He had been an enthusiast
 
 vr.] DROMORE 205 
 
 for liberty and love, but circumstances had forced him 
 to adopt the guise of a tyrant. He had lived for the 
 affection of his friends, and he found himself solitary 
 in a strange land. When the emotions of a sensitive 
 man cease to have an object, he soon pines away. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor's interest in architecture was notice- 
 able, and as a builder he stamped his mark upon his 
 diocese. Unhappily, fire and the restorer have left 
 but few examples of his art for us to judge of its merit. 
 Until 1902, however, one specimen of Taylor as an 
 architect still survived intact. On a little eminence 
 south of the road which winds through the parish of 
 Ballinderry, in Antrim, four miles north of Moira, was 
 to be seen a deserted church, white-washed, with an 
 empty bell-cot, its chancel-end loaded with ivy, its only 
 remarkable feature being a row of circular-headed 
 mullion windows. This was the shell of that church 
 which Jeremy Taylor started building in 1665, and 
 to furnish which he dismantled of its oak fittings the 
 old chapel on Lough Beg, where he had officiated while 
 he was at Portmore. He brought slates for its roof 
 from Aberdovey, in Wales, and he seems to have spent a 
 good deal of money in making it a really pretty specimen 
 of belated Jacobean church architecture. It was in 
 danger of falling into complete ruin, when Mr. F. J. 
 Biggar, of Ardrie, Belfast, brought its rare interest to 
 the notice of Mrs. Walkington of Ballinderry, who had 
 it very carefully restored by Mr. W. J. Fennell, under 
 the inspection of Sir Thomas Drew. No new feature 
 was introduced, and the work was carried out with 
 the most conservative care. It was reconsecrated, in 
 October 1902, by Dr. Welland, the present Bishop of 
 Down, Connor and Dromore, and it is by far the most
 
 206 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 interesting personal relic of Jeremy Taylor which 
 exists in Ireland. 
 
 There is little more to be recorded of his life. 
 About three years after the death of Arthur Hill, he 
 became engaged in a vexatious dispute with the 
 Colonel's son, Moses Hill, as to certain revenues from 
 the Castlereagh estate, which Jeremy Taylor had 
 enjoyed, and to which he said that he possessed a 
 right as bishop. In this Lord Conway agreed with 
 him, but Moses Hill protested that these had merely 
 been paid to Taylor as a matter of courtesy and 
 personal friendship. A lawsuit was the result, which 
 came before both Houses of the Irish Parliament ; the 
 rents were sequestered and the suit was still pending 
 when the bishop died. This was a sad conclusion to 
 the long and harmonious friendship between Jeremy 
 Taylor and the house of Hillsborough. By this time 
 it is evident that Taylor was irritable with failing 
 strength. Until the autumn of 1663, however, Ireland 
 had suited his bodily health, and the conjecture that 
 he fell a victim to the supposed swampiness of his 
 dwelling rests on no evidence. As long as he resided 
 on the heights of Hillsborough he was in one of the 
 wholesomest spots in the county of Down. Later on, 
 in February 1666, when all Ireland, and England too, 
 was ringing with the strange, half-miraculous cures 
 which Valentine Greatrakes, "the Stroker," was effect- 
 ing by a kind of massage, Lord Conway wished Jeremy 
 Taylor to try whether the itinerant magician could 
 not recover him of his "distemper," but we know not 
 whether Taylor allowed Greatrakes to rub him, nor 
 what his distemper was. 
 
 His only surviving son, Charles, was now about
 
 vi.] DROMORE 207 
 
 twenty-four years of age. He was consumptive, and 
 he died at the close of July 1667; on the 2nd of 
 August he was buried in London, in the church of 
 St. Margaret's, Westminster. On the following day 
 Jeremy Taylor, who had visited the bedside of a fever- 
 patient in Lisburn on the 24th of July, was taken ill, 
 and though he can hardly have heard of Charles's death, 
 the desperate condition of his only son must have been 
 known to him, and doubtless had its effect in depress- 
 ing his vital force. He lay sick for ten days in his 
 house at Lisburn, the disease being described as a 
 fever, and on the 13th of August 1667 he died, being 
 in all probability within a few days of completing his 
 fifty-fourth year. It is probable that he expected to 
 die, and perhaps made no effort to recover ; he is said 
 to have wished to lie in his new church at Ballinderry, 
 but that was not yet consecrated. He added, there- 
 fore, and these are recorded as being his last words, 
 "Bury me at Dromore." His body, accordingly, was 
 taken on the 21st of August to the cathedral which 
 he had built in that little town. It was deposited in 
 the vault beneath the chancel, the funeral service being 
 performed by George Rust. 
 
 Such was the death of Jeremy Taylor, an event 
 which seems to have attracted no notice at all in 
 England and to have created little sensation even in 
 Ireland. There is something poignantly sad, and 
 almost ignominious, in this close to the life of a sensitive 
 man of genius. After a long experience of poverty and 
 glory, he had become wealthy at the sacrifice of almost 
 everything else which makes life desirable. We mourn 
 at the spectacle of the passing of one who had deserved 
 to be happy, and who had escaped happiness by so
 
 208 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 small an interval, yet had escaped it wholly at the end ; 
 who had manifestly striven to do his duty, yet with so 
 strange a want of tact in himself and of appositeness 
 in his surroundings, that the result in the eye of 
 history bears a worse air even than dereliction would. 
 His Irish friends in the non-clerical world of 
 the diocese were all dead, or, like Lord Conway, 
 settled in England. No one seems to have cared to 
 preserve Jeremy Taylor's memory, which was not 
 recalled until, in 1827, Richard Mant, who was then 
 Bishop of Down and Connor, was roused by Heber's 
 reproaches to set up in the cathedral church of Lisburn 
 a tablet; this contained a lengthy and eulogistic 
 epitaph, claiming for Jeremy Taylor that his renown 
 was "second to that of none of the illustrious sons 
 whom the Anglican Church hath brought forth." Mean- 
 while no stone was erected to mark the place of 
 Taylor's sepulture in Dromore Cathedral, and in 1670 
 the same fate befell the remains of his successor, 
 George Rust. There is a story that the bones of 
 these prelates were removed and scattered to make 
 room for a later Bishop of Dromore, and that when 
 Percy came to the diocese in 1782, he had them 
 collected and piously reinterred. This tradition has 
 been shown to rest on very slender evidence, but no 
 doubt the remains of the bishops did disappear. When 
 the Cathedral of Dromore was rebuilt in 1866, certain 
 bones were discovered lying in confusion. It was 
 taken for granted that these were the remains of the 
 bishops, and as one of the skulls was very much larger 
 than the rest, it was thought that it must belong to 
 the most intellectual of them. On this slender basis 
 of identification, it was buried in the choir, and a brass
 
 vi.3 DROMORE 209 
 
 proclaims the doubtful fact that here lie the bones of 
 the celebrated Dr. Jeremy Taylor. 1 
 
 A better authenticated and a far more durable 
 monument to him was raised by his faithful companion 
 and affectionate admirer, George Kust, Dean of Connor, 
 the last and warmest of his friends. This took the 
 shape of a funeral sermon, which is a composition 
 beautiful in itself, and as a contribution to Taylor's 
 biography simply invaluable. It was preached at 
 Dromore on the 21st of August, and repeated in 
 Dublin, at the funeral service, on the 3rd of September 
 1667. Kust, who is not known to have been personally 
 acquainted with Taylor until the latter invited him over 
 in 1661 to aid him in administering the diocese, must 
 have obtained his information regarding earlier years 
 mainly from the conversation of the bishop himself. 
 Much that we know of Jeremy Taylor's life we owe 
 entirely to Rust, and it is remarkable that on many 
 points where Rust's statements have been distrusted or 
 even rejected, further examination has proved him to 
 
 1 It is impossible, while recording the obscurity in which the 
 bones of this glorious son of the English Church were permitted 
 to lie in his Irish exile, not to recall the burning epitaph which 
 Boileau wrote in 1694 for the unhonoured grave in Brussels of 
 one whom Jeremy Taylor valued above all the other conti- 
 nental divines of his time : 
 
 Au pied de cet autel de structure grossiere, 
 Git sans pompe, enferme dans une vile biere, 
 Le plus savant mortel qui jamais ait e"crit : 
 ABNAULD, qui sur la grace, instruit par Jesus-Christ, 
 Combattant pour 1'Eglise, a, dans 1'Eglise meme, 
 Souffert plus d'un outrage et plus d'un anatheme. 
 
 Not a word in this but is directly true of Taylor. But a 
 reference to Pelagius follows, and Boileau's epitaph ceases to 
 be applicable. 
 
 O
 
 210 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. vi. 
 
 be in the right. No life of Jeremy Taylor would be 
 complete without the words in which, closely and 
 successfully imitating the style of his subject, George 
 Rust paints him as he knew him : 
 
 " This great prelate had the good humour of a gentleman, the 
 eloquence of an orator, the fancy of a poet, and the acuteness 
 of a schoolman, the profoundness of a philosopher, the -wisdom 
 of a councillor, the sagacity of a prophet, the reason of an 
 angel, and the piety of a saint. He had devotion enough for 
 a cloister, learning enough for a university, and wit enough 
 for a college of virtuosi ; and had his parts and endowments 
 been parcelled out among his poor clergymen that he left 
 behind him, it would perhaps have made one of the best 
 dioceses in the world. . . . He is fixed in an orb of glory, and 
 shines among his brethren-stars, that in their several ages gave 
 light to the world, and turned many souls unto righteousness ; 
 and we that are left behind, though we can never reach his 
 perfections, must study to imitate his virtues, that we may at 
 last come to sit at his feet in the mansions of glory.'
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 
 
 No one has asserted with more boldness than Coleridge 
 the pre-eminence of Jeremy Taylor as a man of letters. 
 He recognised his limitations as a theologian, as a 
 thinker, but he insisted on his art as a writer, on the 
 majesty of his "great arid lovely mind." Coleridge 
 placed Jeremy Taylor among the four principal masters 
 of the English language in the august first half of the 
 seventeenth century ; he " used to reckon Shakespeare 
 and Bacon, Milton and Taylor, four-square, each 
 against each." So luminous and penetrating are the 
 words of Coleridge on Jeremy Taylor that we can but 
 deeply regret the fact that they are casual and 
 occasional, and are scattered here and there over the 
 extent of his writings. "I believe such a complete 
 man hardly shall we see again . . . such a miraculous 
 combination of erudition, broad, deep, and omnigeneous, 
 of logic subtle as well as acute, and as robust as agile 
 . . . and of genuine imagination, with its streaming 
 force unifying all at one moment like that of the setting 
 sun when, through an interspace of blue sky no larger 
 than itself, it emerges from the cloud to sink behind 
 the mountain." How admirably just this is, with a 
 felicity of expression worthy of the subject himself, 
 
 211
 
 212 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 only those can fully realise who turn to it from immer- 
 sion in the alternate cloud and sunshine of Taylor's 
 own marvellous writings. 
 
 It is remarkable that in this case of a genius com- 
 parable only with those of Shakespeare, Bacon, and 
 Milton, we find ourselves confronted by a comparative 
 neglect which requires some explanation. By the 
 side of the fulness of exposition which has been given 
 to the lives and writings of the three, the obscurity 
 of the fourth is noticeable. But, in the first place, we 
 must observe that the fame of Jeremy Taylor has been 
 injured among general readers by the fact that he is 
 a divine, and among divines by the fact that he is 
 an artist. The theologian who is also a man of letters 
 suffers from several disadvantages which criticism finds 
 it easier to state than to remove. In the first place, like 
 other professional and scientific authors, much of what 
 he says, and indeed the important part of it, is definite 
 statement into which the element of style cannot enter. 
 The theologian, moreover, is obliged to use a great 
 number of formulas and instances which are not his 
 own, and with the form of which he dare not tamper. 
 He is bound to have those words of Scripture, which 
 never can be his own words, for ever on his lips. Be- 
 fore, therefore, we can reach the claim of the theologian 
 to be an independent man of letters, we have to clear 
 away a great deal which is said solely for purpose of 
 instruction, and a great deal, too, which is beautiful, 
 but which is not the substance of his own mind. 
 
 The theologian who devotes much attention to 
 literary form is liable to suspicion of neglect of his 
 primal duty. It is not to be questioned that Jeremy 
 Taylor's astonishing brilliancy has damaged his influ-
 
 vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 213 
 
 ence as a pure divine. From the very first he was not 
 a favourite with persons of a strenuous or Puritanical 
 bent of mind, and could not be ; because his pre-occupa- 
 tion with beauty was bound to be viewed with disfavour 
 amongst those who felt that the humblest and baldest 
 types of speech were sufficient to express exhortation, 
 supplication, and contrition. But together with this 
 too copious use of the ornaments of speech, there 
 entered a certain forbidding sense of moral ineffective- 
 ness, which, I believe, has done more than anything 
 else to deprive Jeremy Taylor of the predominant 
 rank which his art and his intellect demand for him. 
 People are pleased that an author should be positive, 
 definite, almost stubborn, while the personal attitude 
 of Taylor to the faith is curiously irresolute. This 
 strange condition is illuminated by a flash of intuition 
 in one of Coleridge's letters (Nov. 3, 1814), where he 
 says that the real "opinion" of Jeremy Taylor, as 
 contrasted with the glorious rush of his eloquence, 
 is "all weather-eaten, dim, useless, a ghost in marble." 
 To illustrate this, by emphasising the contrast be- 
 tween Taylor's rigidity concerning the authority of 
 the Church and his latitude in interpreting its Articles, 
 would carry us into a field which must be carefully 
 avoided in these pages; but this is an important 
 element of what we may call discomfort in the attitude 
 of the reader to his writings. 
 
 It is possible that the antagonisms and schisms 
 within the English Church of the seventeenth century 
 tended to depreciate the directness of its literary 
 appeal. The result of always having to remember that 
 offence might be taken by a large proportion of 
 hearers must have been a constant disturbance of the
 
 214 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 reflecting faculties of the preacher. It was only a very 
 resolute character which could not be moved, either to 
 timidity or else to acrimony, by this sense of latent 
 opposition. The great English theologians of the 
 seventeenth century with one or two exceptions, 
 among whom Barrow is prominent strike us as want- 
 ing in that profound physical vitality, of which, on 
 the other side of the Channel, Bossuet and F6nelon 
 were the types. But the absence of a powerful 
 Nonconformity is not to be overlooked as an immense 
 aid to French Catholic oratory. 
 
 We must now rapidly indicate Jeremy Taylor's 
 position. The theological literature of the seventeenth 
 century possesses a certain fixed character which to 
 the casual student of to-day is apt to seem monotonous 
 and to exclude individuality. But when we begin to 
 examine it, the different tones of voice, the different keys 
 of colour, do not fail to assert themselves. When once 
 we perceive the distinctions, we are even in danger 
 of exaggerating them. We find ourselves wondering 
 that any one can ever have supposed that a page of 
 Pearson was like a page of Tillotson. We close our 
 ears, and the tones of the voices seem entirely various, 
 although in some cases it is difficult to define the 
 difference. More than all, where the general texture 
 is bare and rough, the presence of brilliant ornament 
 becomes almost painfully insistent. One can imagine 
 a reader, long steeped in Barrow, turning away, 
 dazzled and embarrassed, from the gorgeous embroi- 
 deries of Jeremy Taylor. And, indeed, the first dis- 
 tinction a critic has to make in defining the literary 
 position of Taylor is founded on his own temperament. 
 We must cut him off at once from pure theologians
 
 vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 215 
 
 like Pearson and from pure grammarians like Wilkins. 
 With those who cared for nothing but the pursuit of 
 naked truth and with those whose pleasure lay in the 
 logical sequence of language, he had no vital sympathy. 
 He cared for truth mainly as a pathway to emotion, and 
 for words only in the effect of their harmonious and 
 telling arrangement. 
 
 The recognition of this fact greatly simplifies our 
 task in seeking to define Taylor's position in English 
 literature. His preoccupation with form, his magni- 
 ficence in ornament, relegate him to a class in which 
 but few of the divines of the seventeenth century 
 make so much as an effort to accompany him. In the 
 generation which preceded his, Donne and Joseph 
 Hall had cultivated prose with studied care. In his 
 own, Chillingworth possessed grace and rapidity of 
 movement, Fuller, Henry More, and Cudworth were 
 writers of great excellence. Without, however, in the 
 slightest degree depreciating any of these admirable 
 men, it is plain that in a serious comparison of them, 
 as mere wielders of English, with Jeremy Taylor, all 
 but Donne and Fuller withdraw into the second place 
 at once. With the sonorous majesty of Donne's 
 organ-sentences, the simpler and sweeter phrases of 
 Taylor have some relation. Donne, with all his 
 differences, is the one English preacher who seems to 
 have left a mark on the style of Taylor. But the 
 younger advanced beyond the elder in suppleness and 
 variety, and even in splendour, as far as Pope advanced 
 beyond Dryden in neatness and wit. 
 
 The only rival to Taylor is Fuller, who, if we 
 examine closely, proves to be not so much a rival as a 
 happy contrast. The present generation has no need
 
 216 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 to be reminded of the familiar genius of Fuller, 
 garrulous and jocular, that " most appetising bundle of 
 Contradictions," as Professor Saintsbury has defined it. 
 But we are perhaps in danger of overvaluing the 
 prosaic picturesqueness of Fullers active mind. He 
 has been one of the most fortunate of English writers, 
 indulged, excused, and petted by criticism, so that his 
 very faults are found charming in the eyes of his 
 doting admirers. Wit, as we know, was the sum and 
 substance of his intellect, and it produced delightful 
 effects, fresh and entertaining and boundlessly quaint. 
 But to turn from it to the solemn art of Jeremy 
 Taylor is to rise into a higher, if a rarer, atmosphere, 
 to be nearer heaven, to come within earshot of a 
 sublimer music. There is really no object in com- 
 paring two writers, the one so amiably mundane, the 
 other so shining and seraphical. 
 
 In the foregoing chapters the writings of Jeremy 
 Taylor have been briefly described in the order of 
 their composition, as portions of the biographical 
 narrative. This procedure seemed convenient for several 
 reasons. In the first place, for its novelty, since 
 hitherto the various critical examinations of his works, 
 of which Heber's is the most elaborate, have invariably 
 discussed them in groups, the devotional books to- 
 gether, the casuistical together. In the second place, 
 to give each publication its historical position, with a 
 brief statement of its character and contents, was to 
 leave us free, in the general summing-up, to ignore 
 altogether what is not essential. By resigning the bio- 
 graphical order, we should lose most important evidence 
 as to the growth, maturity, and decline of Taylor's 
 genius. By retaining it, we give ourselves an oppor-
 
 vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 217 
 
 tunity of examining that genius only when it reaches 
 its zenith of force and splendour. No writer is more 
 cruelly misjudged if we throw his writings into a sack, 
 and take from them samples at random. In his case 
 it is imperative that criticism should select before it 
 gives its final judgment. 
 
 The importance of approaching Jeremy Taylor when 
 he is at his best is obvious when we examine the habit 
 of his mind. No great author displays more curiously 
 the phenomenon of growth. The style of Taylor, in 
 all its happiest effects, is sensorial ; he did not begin 
 to write well until he saw with distinctness. That is 
 the keynote of the genius of the man, it was one 
 which fed on pictures and impressions. This class of 
 intellect is always slow in growth, because it depends 
 on the accumulation of rich and complex reminiscences, 
 which have to be stored in the archives of the brain 
 before they can be brought out and used. A French 
 critic has noted that " un style d'images n'est jamais 
 precoce," and it is not until Jeremy Taylor is thirty 
 years of age that he begins to write what it gives a 
 sympathetic reader pleasure to follow. When he 
 arrived at Golden Grove, he had tasted the agitation 
 of life ; he had acquired, in peril and unrest, the habit 
 of keen sensation. There followed complete repose of 
 brain and nerves, just at the moment when the precious 
 gift was sufficiently stored, when the mechanism was 
 completed, and needed but the touch of the operator ; 
 when, in fact, Taylor had arrived at the condition 
 which Fenelon described when he said, " Mon cerveau 
 est comme un cabinet de peintures dont tous les 
 tableaux remueraient et se rangeraient au gre du 
 maitre de la maison."
 
 218 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 But if a style so concrete as Jeremy Taylor's does 
 not belong to early life, neither is it characteristic of 
 old age. We need therefore not be surprised to find 
 the pictures fading early from the walls of Jeremy 
 Taylor's brain. In fact, his visual faculty slackened 
 soon, although the linguistic faculty survived to the 
 end. But as we have seen that his genius was essen- 
 tially sensorial, we can feel no surprise that when it 
 ceased to be stirred by images and sensations, it ceased 
 to be attractive. Our biographical method, then, has 
 emphasised the rise and fall, and it has prepared us to 
 make here the somewhat sweeping statement that all of 
 Jeremy Taylor's work which is first-rate was published 
 between 1650 and 1655; that outside this absolutely 
 consummate group of his writings there is a less bril- 
 liant but still admirable group extending from Liberty 
 of Prophesying in 1647 to The Worthy Communicant in 
 1660; and that the rest of his works, with very slight 
 exceptions, may be dismissed from literary criticism 
 altogether. 
 
 In examining the books in which the style of 
 Jeremy Taylor is seen at his best, we notice first, as 
 their prominently distinguishing feature, their beauty. 
 Taylor is not afraid of bold and brilliant effects, he is 
 even ready to court them. His preoccupation with 
 beauty, not in any secondary or suggested form, but in 
 the most gorgeous scarlet and gold of fancy, and accom- 
 panied by flutes and hautboys of calculated cadence, 
 distinguishes him at once from all his fellows. There 
 is nobody, except Sir Thomas Browne, in the hundred 
 years of English prose between the Euphuists and 
 Shaftesbury, who can be mentioned in the same breath 
 with Taylor for this richness of imaginative ornament.
 
 vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 219 
 
 But he is lifted above all prose-writers of the seven- 
 teenth century, even above Browne, by his simplicity, 
 his natural air. He says things which are audacious 
 enough for Shakespeare, and gorgeous enough for 
 Ruskin, but he says them in perfect naturalness. It 
 is in this that his powerful charm resides, and it is to 
 do Jeremy Taylor the cruelest injury to confound his 
 manner with that of Lyly or the later disciples of 
 Marini. When the author of Euplmes tells us that 
 " the precious stone autharsitis, being thrown into the 
 fire, looketh black and half dead, but being cast into 
 the water, glisteneth like the sunbeams," he is intro- 
 ducing into his narrative a piece of dead ornament to 
 dazzle us. He knows absolutely nothing about "the 
 precious stone autharsitis," but he thinks that it will 
 impress the reader. But when Taylor says, " A brother 
 if he be worthy is the readiest and nearest to be a 
 friend, but till he be so, he is but the twilight of the 
 day, and but the blossom to the fairest fruit of 
 paradise," the illustration is apt and just, and, as it 
 were, an inevitable aid in the expansion of the thought. 
 It is in this extraordinary vitality and organic 
 growth of his metaphors that Taylor is really, what he 
 is so often called, "the Shakespeare of English prose." 1 
 His visual memory was a well of images into which his 
 fancy was incessantly descending, to return brimful 
 of new combinations and illustrations. His taste was 
 very pure, and for all his florid ornament, there is 
 perhaps no writer of the time whose metaphors seem 
 
 1 This epithet was first applied to Jeremy Taylor not, as is 
 commonly supposed, by Gray, but by William Mason, the 
 biographer of Gray. Mason is not rich enough to bear being 
 robbed of the happiest of all his phrases.
 
 220 JEREMY TAYLOR [OHAF. 
 
 to us less forced, or less incongruous. Certain primal 
 elements are extremely fascinating to him; of the 
 attraction to him of effects of light and of water we 
 shall presently speak. But it is to be noted that all 
 his inductions from natural phenomena have that 
 fervour which is needful to give this species of orna- 
 ment real value. When his prose is richest, when it 
 leaps with greatest daring from image to image, it 
 always preserves " that entire, unsuspecting, unf earing, 
 childlike profusion of feeling" which Coleridge so 
 accurately noted as its leading characteristic. Whether 
 Taylor illustrates his meaning by the roughness of a 
 sour grape upon the palate or by the penetration of a 
 bee's sting in the finger, whether it is the unskilful 
 navigation of lads in a boat rocked upon the tide 
 which inflames his reflection, or the flutter of leaf-gold 
 under the breath of an artisan, it is always his sincere 
 and vivid emotion which shines forth below the image. 
 He writes with extraordinary happiness about light 
 and water. Nothing would be easier, if we had the 
 space, than to produce an anthology from his works, 
 and confine it scrupulously to those two themes. He 
 is quick, beyond any other man then living, in observ- 
 ing the effects of flashes of lightning in a dark room, 
 of beams of the sun breaking through the vapour of 
 rain, and divided by it into sheaves of rays, of wax 
 candles burning in the sunshine, of different qualities 
 of beautiful radiance in the eyes of a woman, of a 
 child, of a hawk. Light escaping from, or dispersed 
 by, or streaming through cloud, is incessantly in- 
 teresting to him. But perhaps it is in all the forms 
 of water that he most delights, water bubbling up 
 through turf, or standing in drops on stone, or racing
 
 vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 221 
 
 down a country lane ; the motion and whisper of little 
 wandering rivulets ; the " purls of a spring that sweats 
 through the bottom of a bank, and intenerates the 
 stubborn pavement till it hath made it fit for the im- 
 pression of a child's foot." He seems to have been 
 for ever watching the eddies of the Towey and the 
 windings and bubblings of its tributaries, and the 
 music of those erratic waters passed into his speech. 
 
 Like all his contemporaries, he examines nature with 
 near-sighted eyes. The mountains of Wales, even that 
 panorama which was seventy years later to fill the 
 first landscape-painters and descriptive poets with 
 rapture, are as unseen by Jeremy Taylor as the tors 
 of Dartmoor are by Herrick. The author of the 
 Eniautos has no word about the great outlines of the 
 country-side, but in the articulations of an insect or 
 the softness of the stalk of a violet nothing escapes 
 him. He notes the darting movement of a mouse 
 over his shoe j the elasticity and the tenderness of the 
 young ringed tendrils of a vine ; the metamorphosis of 
 the silkworm-moth, that " casting its pearly seeds for 
 the young to breed, leaveth its silk for man, and dieth 
 all white and winged in the shape of a flying creature, 
 so is the progress of souls." For glow-worms, grass- 
 hoppers, butterflies, and the little dark ephemera that 
 cling to walls, he has a searching eye, and fixes on 
 their characteristic phenomena. He notes all the 
 vicissitudes in the life of an apple-tree, its gum, its 
 sterile branches, the fragility of its blossoms. He is 
 acutely sensitive to odours, and finds metaphors for 
 his use in the volatility of balsam and nard and 
 camphor, in the keenness of their attack upon the 
 brain, in the curious association of perfumes with
 
 222 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 events and places. Ugly things take their rank, too, 
 in the records of his memory ; he stores up for illus- 
 tration the icy stiffness of a dead man's fingers, the 
 intolerable beating of a watch in the darkness, the 
 disagreeable sound of gravel on a wheel. These 
 instances of Jeremy Taylor's sensorial style might be 
 prolonged almost indefinitely. With the solitary 
 exception of Shakespeare, there is no writer in all 
 our early literature who has made so fresh and copious 
 and effective a use of metaphor taken directly from the 
 observation of natural objects. 
 
 With this pre-occupation with phenomena, Jeremy 
 Taylor combines a habit which we may hastily fancy to 
 be antagonistic to it. There is no great writer, except 
 Burton, who introduces into his English prose such 
 incessant citation of or reference to the classics as 
 Taylor does. But this custom does not often impair 
 the freshness of his outlook upon life. It has always 
 to be remembered that the imitation of the ancients 
 was a form of originality in the seventeenth century ; 
 it enabled writers to be daring and yet safe. The 
 method of use of the classical poets by a master of 
 such genius as Jeremy Taylor was either that he said, 
 with their help, but by no means in literal translation, 
 what had not been said in English before ; or else that 
 he transposed the style of the ancients into another 
 style, entirely distinct from theirs and personal to 
 himself. Even Democritus Junior had taken that 
 view of the independence of his industry " as a good 
 housewife out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of 
 cloth, a bee gathers wax and honey out of many 
 flowers, and makes a new bundle of all, I have labori- 
 ously collected this cento out of divers writers."
 
 vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 223 
 
 Taylor, however, does not dream of collecting such 
 a cento, or of illustrating the ancient authors in any 
 way ; he forces them to illustrate him, generally very 
 much indeed against their will, with haughty dis- 
 regard of their intention. He is impregnated with 
 the odour of some of the ancients, and he uses them, 
 as we saw that he used the natural phenomena around 
 him, as a well of images into which he dips his 
 imagination. 
 
 Sometimes he fuses the fragment of Latin poetry into 
 his prose without much alteration, as when, in The 
 Worthy Communicant, we find, "What if you empty all 
 the Msevanian valleys, and drive the fat lambs in 
 flocks unto the altars 1 What if you sacrifice a herd 
 of white bulls from Clitumnus ? " because Statius had 
 said : 
 
 " Nee si vacuet Maevania valles, 
 
 Ant prsestent niveos Clitumna novalia tauros, 
 
 Sufficiam." 
 
 But he does not prefer this metallic method, and 
 much more often he uses the classical quotation or 
 reference merely as an ingredient, sometimes faintly 
 suggested, sometimes left so obvious as to give its 
 unction to the passage while yet defying definite 
 paraphrase, as in A Discourse of Friendship, where an 
 exquisitely graceful chain of reflections is based upon 
 the 
 
 " Ut prsestem Pyladen, aliquis mihi prsestet Oresten " 
 
 of Martial without a single word being borrowed from 
 the epigrammatist, although the sense of the Latin 
 is unmistakably dissolved into the English. It must 
 be confessed that the latter method, employing the
 
 224 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 ancients as a gradus of experiences, is by far the 
 more fortunate, and that the English style of Jeremy 
 Taylor is usually spoiled when he attempts the crude 
 transference of classic poetry into his own prose. 
 
 It is impossible not to wonder whether the profusion 
 of Latin and Greek quotation in Jeremy Taylor's 
 sermons was appreciated by his auditors. There can be 
 no doubt that it was admired ; yet even in that learned 
 age Burton had refrained from Greek, because this 
 language was unfamiliar to the public. Taylor almost 
 invariably translates, at once, any passage which he 
 has quoted in the original, and it is not impossible 
 that the translation only was spoken, and the Greek 
 added when the sermon was published. We know, 
 indeed, that pulpit-learning was in fashion, and that 
 there were people who, as Earle tells us in his Micro- 
 cosmographic', came to sermons only that they might 
 approve of the references to Tacitus and Seneca. But 
 Taylor would not have encouraged mere pretentious 
 pedantry. He doubtless considered, in the spirit of 
 the then dying Renaissance, that there was no safety 
 for literature, no solid basis for taste, but in depend- 
 ence on the classics. There is scarcely a single passage 
 in his variegated writings in which he admits con- 
 sciousness of the existence of a modern author who 
 does not write in Latin. This scorn of vernacular 
 literature is very paradoxical in a man who laboured 
 to write English with the most exquisite art and 
 delicacy. It has already been observed that Taylor 
 had a peculiar cult for Prudentius, whom he is never 
 tired of quoting. The Spanish poet would have for 
 him the double charm of belonging to the classical tradi- 
 tion, and yet of being Christian. Perhaps something
 
 vii.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 225 
 
 in the career of Prudentius, a courtier and soldier, 
 who withdrew from the world into a literary seclusion, 
 may have reminded him of his own adventures. But 
 an indifference to critical distinctions seems involved 
 in the habitual reference to Cicero and to Lactantius, 
 to Virgil and to Prudentius, as if these were names 
 of precisely the same intrinsic value. It must be con- 
 fessed, too, that it is annoying to feel that an orator 
 who found such acute enjoyment in the verse of 
 ^Eschylus was prevented by a prejudice from finding 
 it also in that of Shakespeare. 
 
 It is perhaps connected with his critical insensibility, 
 if it may so be called, that Jeremy Taylor, although 
 he devotes so much attention to the classics, is singu- 
 larly little affected by their principles in his grammar. 
 His syntax is not founded, as is that of Sir Thomas ./_ 
 Browne, on an obstinate preference for the Latin x 
 system. Taylor's ideas of grammatical composition 
 were whimsical in the highest degree, and in the course 
 of one of his long breathless sentences he will shift 
 his tenses and link his noun to some neighbouring 
 verb that shrinks, intimidated, from the unwelcome 
 conjunction. The laxity of Taylor's grammar, so 
 widely opposed to the elegant correctness of Dryden 
 and Cowley, his younger contemporaries, has, however, 
 not scandalised all his critics. Coleridge boldly defends 
 it, and declares that if the syntax of Taylor is occasion- 
 ally eccentric, it involves no difficulties of compre- 
 hension. But even if we admit that "a man long 
 accustomed to silent and solitary meditation is apt 
 to lose or lessen the talent of communicating his 
 thoughts with grace and perspicuity," the excuse 
 hardly touches the question of Jeremy Taylor's gram- 
 
 P
 
 226 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. 
 
 mar ; since he is not accused of lack of grace, nor of 
 any want of perspicuity save what directly arises from 
 the fault which Mr. Saintsbury notes, that "he breaks 
 Priscian's head with the calmest unconcern." 
 
 The long sentences of Jeremy Taylor have, on the 
 other hand, been unjustly blamed. In his finest 
 writings the volume of the " stately march and diffi- 
 cult evolutions" is mainly a matter of punctuation. 
 Taylor's printers had an objection to the full stop, and 
 they covered the page with commas and semicolons 
 when a point was what they should have used. To 
 repunctuate Taylor would be an act of real editorial 
 kindness, and no author suffers more than he from that 
 affectation which loves to reproduce in a modern book 
 the irrational errors of an old printer. Another cause 
 of the apparent length of Taylor's sentences is the 
 rhetorical "and" with which he loves to link the 
 independent sequents of them. It is a trick of oratory ; 
 by his conjunctions he thinks to hold the attention of 
 the listener. If we leave out the needless "ands," 
 mere inspirations of the breath, in reading, we find 
 some of his longest sentences broken up into intelli- 
 gible and completely effective modern prose. He was 
 a conscious rhetorician, and in his most studied passages 
 it is rather to the ear than to the eye that he appeals. 
 His use of "Stay!" and "What?" and "Well!" as 
 modes of opening a sentence, or cluster of sentences, 
 is notable in this connection. 
 
 The main quality of Taylor's style is its splendour, 
 and the fact that he is extraordinarily florid and ornate 
 has led to his being charged with artificiality. But 
 although, as Coleridge has noted, Taylor's discursive 
 intellect sometimes "dazzle-darkened his intuition,"
 
 vn.] TAYLOR'S PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY 227 
 
 making him desire to say, at the same moment, and 
 in prodigious language, more things than a human 
 brain can endure in concert, his actual writing was 
 rarely turgid or difficult. In that age great magni- 
 ficence of imagery was easily excused for robing itself 
 in pomposity of language. The Gyp-ess Grove of Wil- 
 liam Drummond had introduced a habit of excessively 
 rich and sonorous prose, which developed, when it was 
 abused, into mere tumidity. Taylor's meditations upon 
 death are related, like those of Burnet, Browne, and 
 Leighton, to this habit of superlative grandiloquence. 
 But he never allows himself to lose his balance. He re- 
 deems his emotion, at the most critical moment, by some 
 phrase of extreme simplicity. In this tact of his, and 
 in the command he never loses over his wealth of meta- 
 phors and chains of sonorous polysyllables, he again 
 constantly reminds the reader of Shakespeare. At the 
 close of one of his most perilous outbursts of mortuary 
 splendour, his voice drops into a whisper : " She lived 
 as we all should live, and she died as I fain would 
 die." These sudden, pathetic felicities are always at 
 his command. They greatly add to the charm of one 
 of the most elaborate of the sections of his work, his 
 beautifully constructed biographical funeral sermons. 
 
 As a rule the vocabulary of Taylor is easy and 
 modern. He clung less than most of his contem- 
 poraries to obsolete forms of speech, and his genius 
 naturally predisposed him to an easy elegance in the 
 choice of words. By the side of Milton, for instance, 
 whose curious vocabulary in prose seems sometimes 
 almost affected in its oddity, Taylor appears of a newer 
 fashion, less eccentric, anxious to avoid what is 
 grotesque. Taylor would not have been a child of
 
 228 JEREMY TAYLOR [CHAP. vn. 
 
 the late Renaissance, if he had not justified his right 
 to impose certain words on the vernacular. He has 
 a few favourite locutions of his own, and the close 
 reader of his books soon comes to recognise lipothymy, 
 eutaxy, dyscrasy, coloquintida, and discalceate as old friends. 
 All these have preserved their place in our dictionaries, 
 and although none of them is in common use to-day, 
 they must pass as English words. We do not find 
 in the pages of Jeremy Taylor those newfangled 
 terms of pedantry which, all unacceptable and un- 
 accepted, were urged in vain by his contemporaries 
 on the unwilling English grammarians, and dropped 
 immediately into oblivion. 
 
 THE END
 
 INDEX 
 
 Adair, Patrick, 155, 159, 161, 180. 
 
 ^Eschylus, 74, 225. 
 
 Airs and Dialogues (Lawes), 127. 
 
 Anacreon, 86. 
 
 Anthology, The Greek, 103. 
 
 Apology for Liturgy, An, 1, 21, 38. 
 
 "Apples of Sodom " (sermon), 103. 
 
 Arcades ( Milton), 127. 
 
 Areopagitica (Milton), 45. 
 
 Arnauld of Port-Royal, 111, 209. 
 
 Auxiliary Beauty, 129-33. 
 
 B 
 
 Bacon, 211, 212. 
 
 Barlow, Bishop, 124. 
 
 Barrow, 214. 
 
 Batchcroft, Thomas, 6. 
 
 Bayly, Dr. Thomas, 53. 
 
 Bellay, Joachim du, 93. 
 
 Blood, Colonel Thomas, 196. 
 
 Bloody Tenet of Persecution, The 
 
 (Williams), 44. 
 Boileau, 209. 
 Bossuet, 81, 84, 104, 214. 
 Boyle, Robert. ] 29. 
 Bramhall, Archbishop, 160, 167, 
 
 175, 198, 199. 
 Bramhall, Archbishop, Funeral 
 
 Sermon on, 198, 199. 
 Bridges, Joanna, see Taylor, Joanna. 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 92, 164, 198, 
 
 218, 225, 227. 
 
 Burnet, Bishop, 227. 
 Burton, 222, 224. 
 
 C 
 
 Caius College, Cambridge, 5. 
 Carbery, Richard, Earl of, 32, 33, 
 
 34, 35, 51, 72, 95, 98, 117, 118, 
 
 127. 
 
 Frances, Countess of, 75-78. 
 
 Carte, Thomas, 168. 
 
 Casimir's Odes, 93. 
 
 Catullus, 86. 
 
 Charles I., 24, 25, 48, 50, 51, 63, 64, 
 
 109, 126, 145. 
 
 ii., 145, 161, 203. 
 
 Chillingworth, William, 14, 15, 16, 
 
 30, 40, 57, 111, 215. 
 Choice Forms of Prayer, 97. 
 " Christian Simplicity " (sermon), 
 
 103. 
 Christian's Obligation to Peace and 
 
 Charity, The (Hammond), 49. 
 Cicero, 225. 
 
 Cicero's De Officiis, 103. 
 Civil War, The, 24 seq. 
 Clara, Franciscus a Sancta, 13, 14, 
 
 18, 19. 
 
 Clcrus Domini, 95-97. 
 Coleridge, S. T., 49, 50, 201, 211, 
 
 213, 220, 225, 226. 
 Compton, Spencer, second Earl of 
 
 Northampton, 27, 28, 54, 55, 56, 
 
 60. 
 
 Comus (Milton), 45, 127. 
 229
 
 230 
 
 JEREMY TAYLOR 
 
 Conway, Edward, third Viscount, 
 148, 149, 150, 153, 157, 206, 208. 
 
 Lady, 192, 194. 
 
 Cornwallis, Sir William's, .Essays, 74. 
 
 Cowley, 114, 225. 
 
 Crashaw, 7. 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 51, 52, 108, 112, 
 128, 150, 151, 156. 
 
 Cromwell, Henry, 151, 156. 
 
 Cudworth, 215. 
 
 Cypress Grove, The (William 
 Drummond), 227. 
 
 D 
 
 " Danses Macabres," 90. 
 Dalstone, Sir George, 146. 
 Davenport, Christopher, see Clara. 
 Death, Conception of, in Jeremy 
 
 Taylor's time, 90. 
 Defoe, 193. 
 
 Deus Justificatus, 125, 134, 136. 
 Devonshire, Christiana, Countess of, 
 
 125, 132, 133. 
 Discourse of Friendship, The, 130, 
 
 138, 139, 140-44. 
 Dissuasion from Popery, 193, 200, 
 
 201. 
 
 Donne, John, 8, 91, 125, 163, 215. 
 "Doomsday -Book" (sermons), 101. 
 Dromore, 184-210. 
 Dryden, 225. 
 Ductor Dubitantium, 16, 119, 120, 
 
 121, 123, 145, 157, 161-67. 
 Dugdale, Sir William, 2, 87. 
 Duppa, Bishop Brian, 98, 117, 119, 
 
 120, 121, 122, 123. 
 
 E 
 
 Earle's Microcosmographie, 224. 
 Egerton, Lady Alice, 127. 
 Eikon Basilike, 65. 
 Eniautos, 79-86, 95, 99, 102. 
 Episcopacy A sserted, 26, 27. 
 Euphues (Lily), 219. 
 Euripides, 103. 
 
 Evelyn, John, 107-109, 112, 114, 
 117, 119, 127, 128, 133, 137, 138, 
 145, 187, 188. 
 
 F 
 " Faith and Patience of the Saints, 
 
 The " (sermon), 83. 
 Fe"nelon, 214, 217. 
 Festival Hymns, 113-16. 
 Flatman, 115. 
 Free Disputation against pretended 
 
 Liberty of Conscience (Ruther- 
 ford), 49. 
 
 Friendship, 140-44. 
 Fuller, 7, 30, 44, 109, 215, 216. 
 Funeral Monuments (John 
 
 Weever), 93. 
 Funeral Sermons, Taylor's, 77, 146, 
 
 227. 
 Funerals, Taylor's attitude to, 91, 
 
 92. 
 
 G 
 
 Gardiner, Samuel R., 40, 44. 
 Gerard, Colonel, 31, 32, 35. 
 Ghosts, Belief in, 190-94. 
 Golden Grove, 66-105. 
 Golden Grove, The, 111, 112, 113, 
 
 118. 
 
 Gordon, Mr. Alexander, 201. 
 Gray, 219. 
 
 Greatrakes, Valentine, 206. 
 Great Exemplar, TJie, 53-65, 127. 
 Gunpowder Plot, Sermon on, 18, 
 
 19, 59. 
 
 H 
 
 Hall, Joseph, 3, 215. 
 Hammond, Bishop, 48, 49, 124, 137. 
 Harrison, Dr. Thomas, 151. 
 Hatton, Christopher, Lord, 25, 26, 
 
 29, 63, 95, 187. 
 Hausted, Peter, 16, 17. 
 Heber, Bishop, 1, 27, 62, 85, 184. 
 Hecuba (Euripides), 103. 
 Henson, Canon Hensley, 41.
 
 INDEX 
 
 231 
 
 Herbert, George, 7, 64, 114. 
 
 Hill, Colonel Arthur, 157, 176, 177, 
 
 204, 206. 
 Hill, Moses, 206. 
 Hillsborough 176, 177, 178, 206. 
 Hippolytus (pseudo-Seneca), 93. 
 Holy Dying, 87, 88 seq., 95. 
 Holy Living, 69-75, 95. 
 Homra House, 177. 
 Hooker, 163. 
 Horace, 93. 
 
 I 
 
 Ichabod (Ken), 197. 
 Imitation of Christ, The, 113. 
 
 J 
 
 Jeanes, Henry, 136, 137. 
 
 Jones, Inigo, 148, 153. 
 
 Juxon, Bishop, 10, 17, 22, 64, 65. 
 
 K 
 
 Ken, Bishop, 197. 
 Kennedy, Sir Kichard, 201, 202. 
 Kennett, Bishop, 130. 
 
 L 
 
 Lactantius, 225. 
 
 Langsdale, Edward, 134. 
 
 Mrs. (Taylor's mother-in-la\v), 
 
 134. 
 Laud, Archbishop, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 
 
 14, 16, 17, 21, 22, 31. 
 Laugharne, Colonel, 31, 32, 33, 34, 
 
 51. 
 
 Lawes, Henry, 127. 
 Leighton, Robert, 227. 
 Leslie, Henry, Bishop, 160, 175, 182. 
 
 Robert, Bishop, 175, 185. 
 
 Lett, Canon, 177. 
 
 Letter of Resolution (Hammond), 49. 
 
 Liberty of Prophesying, The, 7, 33, 
 
 40-50, 203, 218. 
 
 Liberty of Conscience (Anon.), 44. 
 Lisburn, 148, 149, 151, 177, 178. 
 Llanfihangel-Aberbythych, 36, 67, 
 
 68, 86, 118. 
 
 Lombard, Peter, 88. 
 
 Londonderry, Marquis of, 178. 
 
 Lort, Michael, 203. 
 
 Louis xiv., 104. 
 
 Lucan, 93. 
 
 Lucretius, 93. 
 
 Lyly, 219. 
 
 M 
 
 Margetson, Archbishop, 168, 198. 
 "Marriage Ring, The" (sermon), 
 
 102, 103. 
 
 Martial, 74, 86, 223. 
 Mason, William, 219. 
 Massereene, John, first Viscount, 
 
 155, 173, 202. 
 Massillon, 80. 
 
 Microcosmographie (Earle), 224. 
 Milton, 3, 7, 45, 49, 50, 127, 211, 
 
 212, 227. 
 
 Monk, General, 160. 
 More, Henry, 7, 215. 
 Musophilus (Samuel Daniel), 22. 
 
 N 
 
 Nicholson, Dr. Richard, 35. 
 Northampton, Earl of, see Compton. 
 Novels, French heroic, 61, 142. 
 
 
 
 Orange, Princess Mary of, 170, 171. 
 Original Righteousness (Henry 
 
 Jeanes), 137. 
 
 Original Sin, 120, 123, 124. 
 " Orinda," see Philips, Mrs. 
 Ormonde, James, first Duke of, 
 
 167, 173, 174, 196, 197, 201. 
 Osborne, Dorothy, 61. 
 Ovid, 93. 
 Oxford, 11-15, 18, 25-28. 
 
 P 
 
 Panzani, 19. 
 
 Pearson, 214. 
 
 Perse, Dr. Stephen, 4, 5. 
 
 School, 4, 5. 
 
 Persius, 93.
 
 232 
 
 JEREMY TAYLOR 
 
 Petty, Sir William, 152, 204. 
 
 Petronius, 86, 93. 
 
 Philips, Mrs. ("The Matchless 
 
 Orinda"), 115,137, 138, 139, 140, 
 
 142, 143, 144, 145. 
 Pindarique Odes (Cowley), 114. 
 Pococke, 85. 
 Portmore, 148-83, 194. 
 Presbyterianism in Ireland, 156-61, 
 
 173-75, 178-81. 
 Prudentius, 224, 225. 
 Psalter of David, The, Hatton's, 29. 
 Pseudodoxiapidemica(Sir Thomas 
 
 Browne), 164. 
 Puritanism, 22. 
 
 R 
 
 Raleigh, 91. 
 
 Real Presence of Christ in the 
 
 Blessed Sacrament, The, 98, 109, 
 
 110, 111. 
 
 Religion of a Protestant (Chilling- 
 worth), 40. 
 Repentance, Deathbed, 75, 82, 120, 
 
 123, 124. 
 Resolutions and Decisions (Joseph 
 
 Hall), 163. 
 
 Reverence due to the Altar, 38. 
 Restoration, The, 160, 161, 187. 
 Risden, Thomas, 8. 
 Rome, Church of, 110, 146, 170, 
 
 200, 201. 
 Royston, Richard (publisher), 37, 
 
 38, 107, 120, 122, 125, 129, 131, 
 
 145, 161, 162, 169. 
 Ruskin, 219. 
 Rust, Bishop George, 5, 9, 12, 35, 
 
 97, 160, 182, 183, 185, 193, 196, 
 
 207, 209, 210. 
 Rutland, Countess of, 147. 
 
 S 
 
 Saintsbury, Professor, 216, 226. 
 Samwayes, Dr. Peter, 124. 
 Sancroft, Bishop, 124. 
 Sanderson, Bishop, 124, 163. 
 
 Sarjeaunt, John, 110. 
 
 Secrets of the Invisible World (Defoe), 
 
 193. 
 
 Sermon on Gunpowder Treason, 19. 
 Sermons preached at Golden Grove, 
 
 79 seq. 
 Shakespeare, 211, 212, 219, 222, 
 
 225, 227. 
 Sheldon, Gilbert, 12, 98, 110, 125, 
 
 126, 128, 202. 
 Silex ScintUlans (Henry Vaughan), 
 
 114, 115. 
 
 Sin, Original, 120, 123, 124. 
 Sonnets (Shakespeare), 55. 
 "Spirit of Grace, The" (sermon), 
 
 86. 
 
 Statius, 223. 
 Sterne, Dr. John, 152. 
 
 T 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy : 
 Family history, 1-3. 
 Birth, 3. 
 
 Enters the Perse School, 4. 
 Goes to Gonvilleand Cains College, 
 
 4-6. 
 Contemporaries at the University, 
 
 7. 
 
 Takes Holy Orders, 8. 
 Preaches at St. Paul's, 8. 
 Patronised by Laud, 9. 
 Goes to All Souls, Oxford, 12. 
 Chaplain to Laud, 13. 
 Acquaintances at Oxford, 13-16. 
 Rector of Uppingham, 17. 
 Supposed Roman tendencies, 18 
 
 seq. 
 Sermon on Gunpowder Treason, 
 
 18, 19. 
 
 Marries Phrebe Langsdale, 20. 
 His children, 21, 86, 186, 206, 207. 
 Fall of his patron Laud, 21, 22. 
 His part in the Civil War, 23 seq. 
 Friendship with Sir Christopher 
 
 Hatton, 25.
 
 INDEX 
 
 233 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy : 
 Episcopacy Asserted, 26, 27. 
 Rector of Overstone, 27-29. 
 Captured by the Parliamen- 
 tarians, 31. 
 
 Chaplain to Lord Carbery, 36. 
 Literary work at Golden Grove, 
 
 An Apology for Liturgy, 38. 
 The Liberty of Prophesying, 40. 
 The Great Exemplar, 53. 
 Life at Golden Grove, 66. 
 Ride and Exercises of Holy 
 
 Living, 69-75. 
 
 Twenty- flight Sermons, 79-86. 
 Death of Lady Carbery, 76. 
 His orthodoxy suspected, 82, 120, 
 
 123, 124, 125, 136. 
 Death of his wife, 87. 
 The Rides and Exercises of Holy 
 
 Dying, 88-95. 
 Clerus Domini, 95. 
 Twenty-Five Sermons, 98-103. 
 Years of affliction, 106-47. 
 Friendship with John Evelyn, 107. 
 The Real Presence of Christ in the 
 
 Blessed Sacrament, 109. 
 The Golden Grove, 112, 113. 
 Suifers imprisonment, 112. 
 Festival Hymns, 113-16. 
 Unum Necessarium, 116-25. 
 Again imprisoned, 116. 
 Poverty, 117, 159. 
 Second marriage, 117-18, 126-7. 
 Deus Justificatus, 125. 
 Retires to Man-dinam, 126. 
 Repiited author of Auxiliary 
 
 Beauty, 129-133. 
 Family afflictions, 134-35. 
 Leaves Wales, 135. 
 Controversy with Henry Jeanes, 
 
 136, 137. 
 
 Brighter days, 137. 
 His friendship with "Orinda," 
 
 138 seq. 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy : 
 
 A Discourse of the Nature and 
 Offices of Friendship, 139-44. 
 
 Goes to Portmore, 148. 
 
 Chaplain to Lord Conway, 150. 
 
 Friends and acquaintances in Ire- 
 land, 149-53, 168. 
 
 Persecuted by Presbyterian Party, 
 156-59. 
 
 Arrested and taken to Dublin, 158. 
 
 Returns to London, 159. 
 
 Ductor Dubitantium, 161-67. 
 
 Welcomes Charles n., 161, 167- 
 
 Nominated Bishop of Down and 
 Connor, 167. 
 
 His sternness as a Bishop, 156, 
 159, 204. 
 
 Vice - Chancellor of Trinity 
 College, Dublin, 167. 
 
 The Worthy Communicant, 169- 
 72. 
 
 Difficulties with the Presbyterian 
 Clergy, 178-83, 196 seq., 201 
 seq. 
 
 Preaches at the opening of Parlia- 
 ment, 189. 
 
 Via Intelligentice, 189. 
 
 His labours in Ireland, 185-90. 
 
 Funeral Sermon on Archbishop 
 Bramhall, 198. 
 
 Dissuasion from Popery, 200. 
 
 His decline, 204. 
 
 Death, 207. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor as a father, 134 ; as 
 a counsellor, 163, 166; as an 
 orator, 188; his belief in ghosts, 
 190 seq. ; interest in architec- 
 ture, 205. 
 
 His style, 43, 59, 60, 88, 93, 102, 
 172 ; 217, 218 seq.; originality, 
 89 ; modernity of his mind, 90- 
 92 ; popularity as a writer, 94, 
 145 ; constant reference to the 
 Classics, 74, 86, 93, 103, 222 
 seq. ; verse writings, 114-16 ;
 
 234 
 
 JEREMY TAYLOR 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy : 
 
 position in English literature, 
 105, 211-28; close observation of 
 nature,220-21; Coleridge's great 
 admiration for his genius, 211, 
 213, 225, 226 ; brilliancy as an 
 artist, 212 ; compared with pre- 
 ceding divines, 215 ; growth of 
 his genius, 217 ; his best work, 
 218; beauty of his writings, 213, 
 
 218 ; their naturalness and sim- 
 plicity, 219 ; purity of his taste, 
 
 219 ; daring use of metaphors, 
 219-20 ; laxity of his grammar, 
 225 ; his vocabulary, 227-28. 
 
 Dr Rowland, 1, 2. 
 
 Nathaniel (father), 1, 2. 
 
 Edmund (grandfather), 2, 3. 
 
 Mary, nee Dean (mother), 3. 
 
 Phoebe, nee Langsdale (wife), 
 
 20, 21, 86, 87. 
 
 William (son), 86. 
 
 Edward (son), 186. 
 
 Charles (son), 206, 207. 
 
 Joanna, nee Bridges (2nd wife), 
 
 117, 118, 126, 186. 
 Thanatologia (Dr. John Sterne), 153. 
 Theocritus, 142. 
 Theognis, 142. 
 Theological literature of the 17th 
 
 century, 214. 
 
 Thurland, Sir Edward, 128, 133, 188. 
 Tillotson, 214. 
 
 Topica Sacra (Harrison), 151. 
 Treves, Sir Frederic, 92, 93. 
 Trinity College, Dublin, 167-69. 
 
 Twenty-Eight Sermons, 79 seq., 99. 
 Twenty -Five Sermons, 98, 99, 101. 
 
 U 
 Unum Necessarium, 116, 117, 122, 
 
 123, 124. 
 
 Uppingham, 16-24. 
 Urn-Burial (Sir Thomas Browne), 
 
 198. 
 
 V 
 
 Vane, Sir Harry, 21. 
 Vaughan, Henry, 114, 115. 
 Vaughan, Richard, see Carbery. 
 Via Intelligentice, 189. 
 Vigny, Alfred de, 105. 
 Virgil, 225. 
 Virginity, 74. 
 Vita Jesu Christi (Ludolphus of 
 
 Saxony), 62. 
 
 W 
 
 Waller, 125. 
 
 Ware, Sir James, 3. 
 
 Warner, Bishop John, 109, 117, 
 
 120, 125, 126. 
 
 Wedderburn, Sir John, 145. 
 Weeke, Andrew, 148, 149. 
 Wilkins, John, 129. 
 William ill. , 171. 
 Witchcraft, 74. 
 Wood, Anthony a, 13, 18, 83, 130, 
 
 145. 
 Worthy Communicant, The, 169-72, 
 
 218, 223. 
 
 Wray, Lady, 1, 2, 126. 
 Wyatt, William, 35. 
 
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