consideration. If occasionally their enthusiasm provokes a smile, it
is, or should be, of the kindliest. When you think of 70,000,000
books, instinctively you wish to wash your hands. Nobody knows what
dust is who has not divided his time between the wine-cellar and the
library. The work of classification, of indexing, of packing away,
must be endless. Great men have arisen who have grappled with these
huge problems. We read respectfully of Cutter's rules, which are to
the librarian even as Kepler's laws to the astronomer. We have also
heard of Poole's index. We bow our heads. Both Cutter and Poole are
Americans. The parish of St. Pancras has just, by an overwhelming
majority, declined to have a free library, and consequently a
librarian. Brutish St. Pancras!

Libraries are obviously of two kinds: those intended for popular use
and those meant for the scholar. The ordinary free library, in the
sense of Mr. Ewart's Act of Parliament of 1850, is a popular library
where a wearied population turns for distraction. Fiction plays a
large part. In some libraries 80 per cent. of the books in circulation
are novels. Hence Mr. Goldwin Smith's splenetic remark, 'People have
no more right to novels than to theatre-tickets out of the taxes.'
Quite true; no more they have--or to public gardens or to beautiful
pictures or to anything save to peep through the railings and down the
areas of Mr. Gradgrind's fine new house in Park Lane.

When we are considering popular libraries, it does not do to expect
too much of tired human nature. This popular kind of library was well
represented--perhaps a little over-represented, at the Conference. All
our American cousins are not Cutters and Pooles. There was Mr.
Crunden, who keeps the public library at St. Louis, U.S.A. He is all
against dull text-books. As a boy he derived his inspiration from
Sargent's _Standard Speaker_, and the interesting sketch he gives us
of his education makes us wonder whether amidst his multitudinous
reading he ever encountered Newman's marvellous description and
handling of the young and over-read Mr. Brown, which is to be found
under the heading 'Elementary Studies' in _Lectures and Essays on
University Subjects_.

I shuddered just a little on reading in Mr. Crunden's paper of the boy
who, before he was nine, had read Bulfinch's _Age of Chivalry_ and
_Age of Charlemagne_, Bryant's _Translation of the 'Iliad'_, a prose
translation of the _Odyssey_, Malory's _King Arthur, and several other
versions of the Arthurian legend_, Prescott's _Peru and Mexico_,
Macaulay's _Lays_, Longfellow's _Hiawatha_ and _Miles Standish_, the
Jungle Books, and other books too numerous to mention. A famous list,
but perilously long.

Mr. Crunden supports his case for varied reading by quotations from
all quarters--Dr. William T. Harris, President Eliot, Professor
Mackenzie, Charles Dudley Warner, Sir John Lubbock--but their scraps
of wisdom or of folly do not remove my uneasiness about the digestion
of the little boy who, before he was nine years old, had (not content
with Malory) read several versions of the Arthurian legend!

Ladies make excellent librarians, and have tender hearts for children,
and so we find a paper written by a lady librarian, entitled _Books
that Children Like_. She quotes some interesting letters from
children: 'I like books about ancient history and books about knights,
also stories of adventure, and mostly books with a deep plot and
mystery about them.' 'I do not like _Gulliver's Travels_, because I
think they are silly.' 'I read _Little Men_. I did not like this
book.' 'I like _Ivanhoe_, by Scott, better than any.' 'My favourite
books are _Tom Sawyer_, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, and _Scudder's American
History_. I like Tom Sawyer because he was so jolly, Uncle Tom because
he was so faithful, and Nathan Hale because he was so brave.' These
are unbought verdicts no wise man will despise.

All this is popular enough. But the unpopular library must not be
overlooked, for, after all, libraries are for the learned. We must not
let the babes and sucklings, or the weary seamstress or badgered
clerk, or even the working-man, ride rough-shod over Salmasius and
Scaliger. In the papers of Mr. Garnett, Mr. Pollard, Mr. Dziatzko, Mr.
Cutter, and others, the less popular and nobler side of the library is
duly exhibited.

My anxiety about these librarians, who are beginning to be a
profession by themselves, is how they are to be paid. That librarians
must live is at least as obvious in their case as in that of any other
class. They must also, if they are to be of any use, be educated. In
1878 the late Mr. Robert Harrison, who for many years led a grimy life
in the London Library, advocated £250 as a minimum annual salary for a
competent librarian. But, as Mr. Ogle, of Bootle, pertinently asked at
the Conference, 'Are his views yet accepted?' We fear not. Mr. Ogle
courageously proceeds:

'The fear of a charge of trades unionism has long kept librarians
silent, but this matter is one of public importance, and affects
educational progress. A School-Board rate of 6d. or 1s. is
willingly paid to teach our youth to read. Shall an additional 2d.
be grudged to turn that reading talent into right and safe
channels, where it may work for the public welfare and economy?'

_Festina lente_, good Mr. Ogle, I beseech you. That way fierce
controversy and, it may be, disaster lies. Do not stir the Philistine
within us. The British nation is still savage under the skin. It has
no real love for books, libraries, or librarians. In its hidden heart
it deems them all superfluous. Anger it, and it may in a fit of temper
sweep you all away. The loss of our free librarians would indeed be
grievous. Never again could they meet in conference and read papers
full of quaint things and odd memories. What, for example, can be more
amusing than Mr. Cowell's reminiscences of forty years' library work
in Liverpool, of the primitive days when a youthful Dicky Sam (for so
do the inhabitants of that city call themselves) mistook the _Flora of
Liverpool_ for a book either about a ship or a heroine? He knows
better now. And what shall we say of the Liverpool brushmaker who, at
a meeting of the library committee, recited a poem in praise of woman,
containing the following really magnificent line?--

'The heart that beats fondest is found in the stays.'

There is nothing in Roscoe or Mrs. Hemans (local bards) one half so
fine. Long may librarians live and flourish! May their salaries
increase, if not by leaps and bounds, yet in steady proportions. Yet
will they do well to remember that books are not everything.



LAWYERS AT PLAY


That dreary morass, that Serbonian bog, the Bacon-Shakespeare
controversy, has been lately lit up as by the flickering light of a
will-o'-the-wisp, by the almost simultaneous publication of an
imaginary charge delivered to an equally imaginary jury by a judge of
no less eminence than the late Lord Penzance (that tough Erastian) and
of the still bolder _jeu d'esprit_, _A Report of the Trial of an Issue
in Westminster Hall_, June 20, 1627, which is the work of the
unbridled fancy of His Honour Judge Willis, late Treasurer of the
Inner Temple, and a man most intimately acquainted with the literature
of the seventeenth century.

Neither production of these playful lawyers, clothed though they be in
the garb of judicial procedure, is in the least likely to impress the
lay mind with that sense of 'impartiality' or 'indifference' which is
supposed to be an attribute of justice, or, indeed, with anything
save the unfitness of the machinery of an action at law for the
determination of any matter which invokes the canons of criticism and
demands the arbitrament of a well-informed and lively taste.

Lord Penzance, who favours the Baconians, made no pretence of
impartiality, and says outright in his preface that his readers 'must
not expect to find in these pages an equal and impartial leaning of
the judge alternately to the case of both parties, as would, I hope,
be found in any judicial summing-up of the evidence in a real judicial
inquiry.' And, he adds, 'the form of a summing-up is only adopted for
convenience, but it is in truth very little short of an argument for
the plaintiffs, _i.e._, the Baconians.'

Why any man, judge or no judge, who wished to prepare an argument on
one side of a question should think fit to cast that argument for
convenience' sake in the form of a judicial summing-up of both sides
is, and must remain, a puzzle.

Judge Willis, who is a Shakespearean, bold and unabashed, is not
content with a mere summing-up, but, with a gravity and wealth of
detail worthy of De Foe, has presented us with what purports to be a
verbatim report of so much of the proceedings in a suit of Hall _v._
Russell as were concerned with the trial before a jury of the simple
issue--whether William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, 'the
testator in the cause of _Hall v. Russell_,' was the author of the
plays in the Folio of 1623. We are favoured with the names of counsel
employed, who snarl at one another with such startling verisimilitude,
whilst the remarks that fall from the bench do so with such
naturalness, that it is perhaps not surprising, or any very severe
reflection upon his literary _esprit_, that a member of the Bar,
having heard Judge Willis deliver his lecture in the Inner Temple
Hall, repaired next day to the library to study at his leisure the
hitherto unnoted case of _Hall v. Russell_. Ten witnesses are put in
the box to prove the affirmative--that Shakespeare was the author of
the plays. Mr. Blount and M. Jaggard, the publishers of the Folio,
give a most satisfactory account of the somewhat crucial point--how
they came by the manuscripts, with all the amendments and corrections,
and pass lightly over the fact that those manuscripts had disappeared.
'Rare Ben Jonson' in the witness-box is a masterpiece of dramatic
invention; he demolishes Bacon's advocate with magnificent vitality.
John Selden makes a stately witness, and Francis Meres a very useful
one. Generally speaking, the weakest part in these interesting
proceedings is the cross-examination. I have heard the learned judge
do better in old days. No witnesses are called for the Baconians,
though all the writings of the great philosopher were put in for what
they were worth. The Lord Chief Justice, who seems to have been a
friend of Shakespeare's, sums up dead in his favour, and the jury
(with whose names we are not supplied, which is a pity--Bunyan or De
Foe would have given them to us), after a short absence, a quarter of
an hour, return a Shakespearean verdict, which of course ought by
rights to make the whole question _res judicata_.

But it has done nothing of the kind. Could we really ask Blount and
Jaggard how they came by the manuscripts, and who made the
corrections, and did we believe their replies, why, then a stray
Baconian here and there might reluctantly abandon his strange fancy;
but as _Hall v. Russell_ is Judge Willis's joke, it will convert no
Baconians any more than Dean Sherlock's once celebrated _Trial of the
Witnesses_ compels belief in the Resurrection.

The question in reality is a compound one. Did Shakespeare write the
plays? If yes, the matter is at rest. If no--who did? If an author can
be found--Bacon or anyone else--well and good. If no author can be
found--Anon. wrote them--a conclusion which need terrify no one, since
the plays would still remain within our reach, and William
Shakespeare, apart from the plays, is very little to anybody who has
not written his life.

But this is not the form the controversy has assumed. The
anti-Shakespeareans are to a man Baconians, and fondly imagine that if
only Will Shakespeare were put out of the way their man must step into
the vacant throne. Lord Penzance in charging his jury told them that
those of their number 'who had studied the writings of Bacon' and were
'keenly alive to his marvellous mental powers' would probably have 'no
difficulty,' if once satisfied that the author they were seeking after
was _not_ Shakespeare, in finding as a fact that he _was_ Bacon. But
suppose James Spedding had been on that jury, and, rising in his
place, had spoken as follows:

'My Lord,--If any man has ever studied the writings of Bacon, I
have. For twenty-five years I have done little else. If any man is
keenly alive to his marvellous mental powers, I am that man. I am
also deeply read in the plays attributed to Shakespeare, and I
think I am in a condition to say that, whoever was the real author,
it was _not_ Bacon.'

That this is exactly what Spedding would have said we know from the
letter he wrote on the subject to Mr. Holmes, reprinted in _Essays
and Discussions_, and it completely upsets the whole scheme of
arrangement of Lord Penzance's summing-up, which proceeds on the easy
footing that the more difficulties you throw in Shakespeare's path the
smoother becomes Bacon's.

That there are difficulties in Shakespeare's path, some things very
hard to explain, must be admitted. Lord Penzance makes the most of
these. It is, indeed, a most extraordinary thing that anybody should
have had the mother-wit to write the plays traditionally assigned to
Shakespeare. Where did he get it from? How on earth did the plays get
themselves written? Where, when, and how did the author pick up his
multifarious learnings? Lord Penzance, good, honest man, is simply
staggered by the extent of the play-wright's information. The plays,
so he says, 'teem with erudition,' and can only have been written by
someone who had the classics at his finger-ends, modern languages on
the tip of his tongue--by someone who had travelled far and read
deeply; and, above all, by a man who had spent at least a year in a
conveyancer's chambers! And yet, when this has been said, would Lord
Penzance have added that the style and character of the playwright is
the style and character of a really learned man of his period! Can
anything less like such a style be imagined? Once genius is granted,
heaven-born genius, a mother-wit beyond the dreams of fancy, and then
plain humdrum men, ordinary judicial intelligences, will do well to be
on their guard against it. 'Beware--beware! he is fooling thee.'
Shakespeare's genius has simply befooled Lord Penzance. Seafaring men,
after reading _The Tempest_, are ready to maintain that its author
must have been for at least a year before the mast. As for
Shakespeare's law, which has taken in so many matter-of-fact
practitioners, one can now refer to Ben Jonson's evidence in _Hall v.
Russell_, where that great dramatist has no difficulty in showing that
if none but a lawyer could have written Shakespeare's plays, a lawyer
alone could have preached Thomas Adams's sermons. Judge Willis's
profound knowledge of sound old divinity has served him here in good
stead. The fact is it is simply impossible to exaggerate the
quick-wittedness and light-heartedness of a great literary genius. The
absorbing power, the lightning-like faculty of apprehension, the
instant recognition of the uses to which any fact or fancy can be put,
the infinite number and delicacy of the mental feelers, thrust out in
all directions, which belong to the creative brain and keep it in
tremulous and restless activity, are quite enough so to differentiate
the possessor of these endowments from his fellow mortals as to make
comparison impossible. Shakespeare the actor was by the common consent
of his enemies one of the deftest fellows that ever made use of other
men's materials--'Convey, the wise it call.' I will again quote
Spedding:

'If Shakespeare was not trained as a scholar or a man of science,
neither do the works attributed to him show traces of trained
scholarship or scientific education. Given the _faculties_, you
will find that all the acquired knowledge, art, and dexterity which
the Shakespearean plays imply were easily attainable by a man who
was labouring in his vocation and had nothing else to do.'

I greatly prefer this cool judgment of a scholar deeply read in
Elizabethan lore to Lord Penzance's heated and almost breathless
admiration for the 'teeming erudition' of the plays.

Lord Penzance likewise displays a very creditable non-acquaintance
with the disposition of authors one to another. He is quite shocked at
the callousness of Shakespeare's contemporaries to Shakespeare if he
were indeed the author of the Quartos which bore his name in his
lifetime. But as it cannot be suggested that in, say, 1600 it was
generally known that Shakespeare was not the author of these plays, it
is hard to see how his contemporaries can be acquitted of indifference
to his prodigious superiority over themselves. Authors, however, never
take this view. Shakespeare's contemporaries thought him a mighty
clever fellow and no more. Why, even Wordsworth was well persuaded he
could write like Shakespeare had he been so minded. Mr. Arnold
remained all his life honestly indifferent to and sceptical about the
fame of both Tennyson and Browning. Great living lawyers and doctors
do not invariably idolize each other, nor do the lawyers and doctors
in a small way of business always speak well of those in a big way.
The poets and learned critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries--Dryden, Pope, Johnson--looked upon Shakespeare with an
indulgent eye, as a great but irregular genius, after much the same
fashion as did the old sea-dogs of Nelson's day regard the hero of
Trafalgar. 'Do not criticise him too harshly,' said Lord St. Vincent;
'there can only be one Nelson.'

These are not the real difficulties, though they seem to have pressed
somewhat heavily on Lord Penzance.

The circumstances attendant upon the publication of the Folio of 1623
are undoubtedly puzzling. Shakespeare died in 1616, leaving behind
him more than forty plays circulating in London and more or less
associated with his name. His will, a most elaborate document, does
not contain a single reference to his literary life or labours. Seven
years after his death the Folio appears, which contains twenty-six
plays out of the odd forty just referred to, and ten extra plays which
had never before been in print, and about six of which there is a very
scanty Shakespearean tradition. Of the twenty-six old plays, seventeen
had been printed in small Quartos, possibly surreptitiously, in
Shakespeare's lifetime, but the Folio does not reprint from these
Quartos, but from enlarged, amended, and enormously improved copies.
Messrs. Heminge and Condell, the editor of this priceless treasure,
the First Folio, wrote a long-winded dedication to Lords Pembroke and
Montgomery, which contains but one pertinent passage, in which they
ask their readers to believe that it had been the office of the
editors to collect and publish the author's 'mere writings,' he being
dead, and to offer them, not 'maimed and deformed,' in surreptitious
and stolen copies, but 'cured and perfect of their limbs and all the
rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them, who as he was a
happie imitator of Nature was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind
and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that
easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.'

From whose custody did those 'papers' come? Where had they been all
the seven years? Of what did they consist? If in truth unblotted, all
the seventeen Quartos as well as the new plays must have been printed
from fair manuscript copies. From whom were these unblotted copies
received, and what became of them? The silence of these players is
irritating and perplexing,--though, possibly, the explanation of the
mystery, were it forthcoming, would be, as often happens, of the
simplest. It may be that these unblotted copies were in the theatre
library all the time.

Whether these interrogatories, now unanswerable, raise doubts in the
mind of sufficient potency to destroy the tradition of centuries, and
to prevent us from sharing the conviction of Milton, of Dryden, of
Pope, and Johnson that Shakespeare was the author of Shakespeare's
plays must be left for individual consideration. But, however
destructive these doubts may prove, they do not go a yard of the way
to let in Bacon.

Once more I will quote Spedding, for he, of all the moderns, by virtue
of his taste and devouring studies, is the best qualified to speak:

'Aristotle was an extraordinary man. Plato was an extraordinary
man. That two men each severally so extraordinary should have been
living at the same time in the same place was a very extraordinary
thing. But would it diminish the wonder to suppose the two to be
one? So I say of Bacon and Shakespeare. That a human being
possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Shakespeare should
exist is extraordinary. That a human being possessed of the
necessary faculties to make Bacon should exist is extraordinary.
That two such human beings should have been living in London at the
same time was more extraordinary still. But that one man should
have existed possessing the faculties and opportunities necessary
to make _both_ would have been the most extraordinary thing of
all' (see Spedding's _Essays and Discussions_, 1879, pp. 371, 372).

'Great writers, especially being contemporary, have many features
in common, but if they are really great writers they write
naturally, and nature is always individual. I doubt whether there
are five lines together to be found in Bacon which could be
mistaken for Shakespeare, or five lines in Shakespeare which could
be mistaken for Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several
styles and practised in such observations' (_Ibid._, p. 373).



THE NON-JURORS


To anyone blessed or cursed with an ironical humour the troublesome
history of the Church of England since the Reformation cannot fail to
be an endless source of delight. It really is exciting. Just a little
more of Calvin and of Beza, half a dozen words here, or Cranmer's
pencil through a single phrase elsewhere; a 'quantum suff.' of the men
'that allowed no Eucharistic sacrifice,' and away must have gone
beyond recall the possibility of the Laudian revival and all that
still appertains thereunto. We must have lost the 'primitive' men, the
Kens, the Wilsons, the Knoxes, the Kebles, the Puseys. On the other
hand, but for the unfaltering language of the Articles, the hearty
tone of the Homilies, and the agreeable readiness of both sides to
curse the Italian impudence of the Bishop of Rome and all his
'detestable enormities,' our Anglican Church history could never have
been enriched with the names or sweetened by the memories of the
Romaines, the Flavels, the Venns, the Simeons, and of many thousand
unnamed saints who finished their course in the fervent faith of
Evangelicalism. But on what a thread it has always hung! An
ill-considered Act of Parliament, an amendment hastily accepted by a
pestered layman at midnight, a decision in a court of law, a Jerusalem
Bishoprick, a passage in an early Father, an ancient heresy restudied,
and off to Rome goes a Newman or a Manning, whilst a Baptist Noel
finds his less romantic refuge in Protestant Dissent. Schism is for
ever in the air. Disruption a lively possibility. It has always been a
ticklish business belonging to the Church of England, unless you can
muster up enough courage to be a frank Erastian, and on the rare
occasions when you attend your parish church handle the Book of Common
Prayer with all the reverence due to a schedule to an Act of
Parliament.

Among the many noticeable humours of the present situation is the tone
adopted by an average Churchman like Canon Overton to the Non-Jurors.
When the late Mr. Lathbury published his admirable _History of the
Non-Jurors_,[A] he had to prepare himself for a very different public
of Churchmen and Churchwomen than will turn over Canon Overton's
agreeable pages.[B] In 1845 the average Churchman, after he had
conquered the serious initial difficulty of comprehending the
Non-Juror's position, was only too apt to consider him a fool for his
pains. 'It has been the custom,' wrote Mr. Lathbury, 'to speak of the
Non-Jurors as a set of unreasonable men, and should I succeed in any
measure in correcting those erroneous impressions, I shall feel that
my labour has not been in vain.' But in 1902, as Canon Overton is
ready enough to perceive, 'their position is a little better
understood.' The well-nigh 'fools' are all but 'confessors.'

[Footnote A: _A History of the Non-Jurors_. By Thomas Lathbury.
London: Pickering, 1845.]

[Footnote B: _The Non-Jurors_. By J.H. Overton, D.D. London: Smith,
Elder and Co., 1902, 16s.]

The early history of the Non-Jurors is as fascinating and as fruitful
as their later history is dull, melancholy, and disappointing.

Nobody will deny that the Bishops, clergy, and laity of the Church of
England who refused to take the oaths to William and Mary and George
I., when tendered to them, were amply justified in the Court of
Conscience. They were ridiculed by the politicians of the day for
their supersensitiveness; but what were they to do? If they took the
oaths, they apostalized from the faith they had once professed.

Before the Revolution it was the faith of all High Churchmen--part of
the _deposition_ they had to guard--that the doctrine of
non-resistance and passive obedience was Gospel truth, primitive
doctrine, and a chief 'characteristic' of the Anglican Church.

The saintly John Kettlewell, in his tractate, _Christianity: a
Doctrine of the Cross, or Passive Obedience under any Pretended
Invasion of Legal Rights and Liberties_ (1696), makes this perfectly
plain; and when Ken came to compose his famous will, wherein he
declared that he died in the Communion of the Church of England, 'as
it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross,' the good Bishop did not mean
what many a pious soul in later days has been edified by thinking he
did mean, the doctrine of the Atonement, but that of passive
obedience, which was the Non-Juror's cross.

It is sad to think a doctrine dear to so many saintly men, maintained
with an erudition so vast and exemplified by sacrifices so great,
should have disappeared in the vortex of present-day conflict. It may
some day reappear in Convocation. Kettlewell, who was a precise writer
and accurate thinker, defined sovereignty as supremacy. 'Kings,' he
said, 'can be no longer sovereigns, but subjects, if they have any
superiors'; and he points out with much acumen that the best security
under a sovereign 'which sovereignty allows' is that the Kings and
Ministers are accountable and liable for breach of law as well as
others. Kettlewell, had he lived long enough, might have come to
transfer his idea of sovereignty to Kings, Lords, and Commons speaking
through an Act of Parliament, and if so, he would have urged _active
obedience_ to its enactments, when not contrary to conscience, and
_passive obedience_ if they were so contrary. Therefore, were he alive
to-day, and did he think it contrary to conscience (as he easily
might) to pay a school-rate for an 'undenominational' school, he would
not draw a cheque for the amount, but neither would he punch the
bailiff's head who came to seize his furniture. Kettlewell's treatise
is well worth reading. Its last paragraph is most spirited.

There could be no doubt about it. The High Church party were bound
hand and foot to the doctrine of the Cross--_i.e._, passive obedience
to the Lord's Anointed. Whoever else might actively resist or forsake
the King, they could not without apostasy. But the Revolution of 1688
was not content to pierce the High Churchmen through one hand. Not
only did the Revolution require the Church to forswear its King, but
also to see its spiritual fathers deprived and intruders set in their
places without even the semblance of any spiritual authority. If it
was hard to have James II. a fugitive in foreign lands and Dutch
William in Whitehall, it was perhaps even harder to see Sancroft
expelled from Lambeth, and the Erastian and latitudinarian Tillotson,
who was prepared to sacrifice even episcopacy for peace, usurping the
title of Archbishop of Canterbury. After all, no man, not even a
Churchman, can serve two masters. The loyalty of a High Churchman to
the throne is always subject to his loyalty to the Church, and at the
Revolution he was wounded in both houses.

When Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, and established what was
then unblushingly called 'the new religion,' the whole Anglican
Hierarchy, with the paltry exception of the Bishop of Llandaff,
refused the oaths of supremacy, and were superseded. In a little
more than 100 years the Protestant Bench was bombarded with a
heart-searching oath--this time of allegiance. Opinion was divided;
the point was not so clear as in 1559. The Archbishop of York and his
brethren of London, Lincoln, Bristol, Winchester, Rochester, Llandaff
and St. Asaph, Carlisle and St. David's, swore to bear true allegiance
to Their Majesties King William and Queen Mary. The Archbishop of
Canterbury and the Bishops of Bath and Wells, Ely, Gloucester,
Norwich, Peterborough, Worcester, Chichester, and Chester refused to
swear anything of the kind, and were consequently, in pursuance of the
terms of an Act of Parliament, and of an Act of Parliament only,
deprived of their ecclesiastical preferments. They thus became the
first Non-Jurors, and were long, except two who died before actual
sentence of exclusion, affectionately known and piously venerated in
all High Church homes as 'the Deprived Fathers.'

Who can doubt that they were right, holding the faith they did? Yet
Englishmen do not take kindly to martyrdom, and some of the Bishops
were strangely puzzled. The excellent Ken, who, like Keble, was an
Englishman first and a Catholic afterwards (in other words, no true
Catholic at all), when told that James was ready to give Ireland to
France, as nearly as possible conformed, so angry was he with the
Lord's Anointed; and even the fiery Leslie, one of our most agreeable
writers, was always ready to forgive those pious, peaceful souls who
thought it no sin, though great sorrow, to comply with the demands of
Caesar, but still managed to retain their old Church and King
principles. Leslie reserved his wrath for the Tillotsons and the
Tenisons and the Burnets, who first, to use his own words, swallowed
'the morsels of usurpation' and then dressed them up 'with all the
gaudy and ridiculous flourishes that an Apostate eloquence can put
upon them.'

The early Non-Jurors included among their number a very large
proportion of holy, learned, and primitive-minded men. At least 400 of
the general body of the clergy refused the oaths and accepted for
themselves and those dependent on them lives of poverty and seclusion.
They were from the beginning an unpopular body. They were not
Puritans, they were not Deists, they were not Presbyterians, they
would not go to their parish churches; and yet they vehemently
objected to being called Papists. What troublesome people! Five of the
deprived fathers, including the Primate, had known what it was, when
they defied their Sovereign, to be the idols of the mob; but when
they adhered to his fallen cause they were deprived of their sees, and
sent packing from their palaces without a single growl of popular
discontent. Oblivion was their portion, even as it was of their Roman
Catholic predecessors at the time of the Reformation.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, when turned out of Lambeth by a judgment
of the Court of King's Bench to make way for Tillotson, retired to his
native village in Fressingfield, where he did not attend the parish
church, nor would allow any but non-juring clergy to perform Divine
service in his presence. Dr. Sancroft (who was a book-lover, and had
designed a binding of his own) died on November 24, 1693, and the
epitaph, of his own composition, on his tombstone may still be read
with profit by time-servers of all degrees and denominations, cleric
and lay, in Parliament and out of it. All the deprived Bishops, so Mr.
Lathbury assures us, were in very narrow circumstances, and of Turner,
of Ely, Mr. Lathbury very properly writes: 'This man who, by adhering
to the new Sovereign, and taking the oath, might have ended his day
amidst an abundance of earthly blessings, was actually sustained in
his declining years by the bounty of those who sympathized with him in
his distresses.' Bishop Turner died in 1700.

Despite this distressing and most genuine poverty, the reader of old
books will not infrequently come across traces of many happy and
well-spent hours during which these poor Non-Jurors managed 'to fleet
the time' in their own society, for they were, many of them, men of
the most varied tastes and endowed with Christian tempers; whilst
their writings exhibit, as no other writings of the period do, the
saintliness and devotion which are supposed to be among the 'notes'
of the Catholic Church. Two better men than Kettlewell and Dodwell
are nowhere to be found, and as for vigorous writing, where is Charles
Leslie to be matched?

So long as the deprived fathers continued to live, the schism--for
complete schism it was between 'the faithful remnant of the Church of
England' and the Established Church--was on firm ground. But what was
to happen when the last Bishop died? Dodwell, who, next to Hickes,
seems to have dominated the Non-Juring mind, did not wish the schism
to continue after the death of the deprived Bishops; for though he
admitted that the prayers for the Revolution Sovereigns would be
'unlawful prayers,' to which assent could not properly be given, he
still thought that communion with the Church of England was possible.
Hickes thought otherwise, and Hickes, it must not be forgotten, though
only known to the world and even to Non-Jurors generally, as the
deprived Dean of Worcester, was in sober truth and reality Bishop of
Thetford, having been consecrated a Suffragan Bishop under that title
by the deprived Bishops of Norwich, Peterborough, and Ely, at
Southgate, in Middlesex, on February 24, 1693, in the Bishop of
Peterborough's lodgings. At the same time the accomplished Thomas
Wagstaffe was consecrated Suffragan Bishop of Ipswich, though he
continued to earn his living as a physician all the rest of his days.

These were clandestine consecrations, for even so well-tried and
whole-hearted a Non-Juror as Thomas Hearne, of Oxford, knew nothing
about them, though a great friend of both the new Bishops, until long
years had sped. It would be idle at this distance of time, and having
regard to the events which have happened since February, 1693, to
consider the nice questions how far the Act of Henry VIII. relating to
the appointment of suffragans could have any applicability to such
consecrations, or what degree of Episcopal authority was thereby
conferred, or for how long.

As things turned out, Ken proved the longest liver of the deprived
fathers. The good Bishop died at Longleat, one of the few great houses
which sheltered Non-Jurors, on March 19, 1711. But before his death he
had made cession of his rights to his friend Hooper, who on the
violent death of Kidder, the intruding revolution Bishop, had been
appointed by Queen Anne, who had wished to reinstate Ken, to Bath and
Wells. It was the wish of Ken that the schism should come to an end on
his death.

It did nothing of the kind, though some very leading Non-Jurors,
including the learned Dodwell and Nelson, rejoined the main body of
the Church, saving all just exceptions to the 'unlawful prayers.'

Bishop Wagstaffe died in 1712, leaving Bishop Hickes alone in his
glory, who in 1713, assisted by two Scottish Bishops, consecrated
Jeremy Collier, Samuel Hawes, and Nathaniel Spinckes, Bishops of 'the
faithful remnant.' Hickes died in 1715, and the following year the
great and hugely learned Thomas Brett became a Bishop, as also did
Henry Gawdy.

Then, alas! arose a schism which rent the faithful remnant in twain.
It was about a great subject, the Communion Service. Collier and Brett
were in favour of altering the Book of Common Prayer so as to restore
it to the First Book of King Edward VI., which provided for (1) The
mixed chalice; (2) prayers for the faithful departed; (3) prayer for
the descent of the Holy Ghost on the consecrated elements; (4) the
Oblatory Prayer, offering the elements to the Father as symbols of His
Son's body and blood. This side of the controversy became known as
'The Usagers,' whilst those Non-Jurors, headed by Bishop Spinckes, who
held by King Charles's Prayer-Book, were called 'the Non-Usagers.' The
discussion lasted long, and was distinguished by immense learning and
acumen.

The Usagers may be said to have carried the day, for after the
controversy had lasted fourteen years, in 1731 Timothy Mawman was
consecrated a Bishop by three Bishops, two of whom were 'Usagers' and
one a 'Non-Usager.' But in the meantime what had become of the
congregations committed to their charge? Never large, they had
dwindled almost entirely away.

The last regular Bishop was Robert Gordon, who was consecrated in 1741
by Brett, Smith, and Mawman. Gordon, who was an out-and-out Jacobite,
died in 1779.

I have not even mentioned the name of perhaps the greatest of the
Non-Jurors, William Law, nor that of Carte, an historian, the fruits
of whose labour may still be seen in other men's orchards.

The whole story, were it properly told, would prove how hard it is in
a country like England, where nobody really cares about such things,
to run a schism. But who knows what may happen to-morrow?



LORD CHESTERFIELD


'Buy good books and read them; the best books are the commonest, and
the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not
blockheads.' So wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son, that
highly-favoured and much bewritten youth, on March 19, 1750, and his
words have been chosen with great cunning by Mr. Charles Strachey as a
motto for his new edition of these famous letters.[A]

[Footnote A: Published by Methuen and Co. in 2 vols.]

The quotation is full of the practical wisdom, but is at the same
time--so much, at least, an old book-collector may be allowed to
say--a little suggestive of the too-well-defined limitations of their
writer's genius and character. Lord Chesterfield is always clear and
frequently convincing, yet his wisdom is that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman,
and not only never points in the direction of the Celestial City, but
seldom displays sympathy with any generous emotion or liberal taste.
Yet as we have nobody like him in the whole body of our literature, we
can welcome even another edition--portable, complete, and cheap--of
his letters to his son with as much enthusiasm as is compatible with
the graces, and with the maxim, so dear to his lordship's heart, _Nil
admirari!_

What, I have often wondered, induced Lord Chesterfield to write this
enormously long and troublesome series of letters to a son who was not
even his heir? Their sincerity cannot be called in question. William
Wilberforce did not more fervently desire the conversion to God of his
infant Samuel than apparently did Lord Chesterfield the transformation
of his lumpish offspring into 'the all-accomplished man' he wished to
have him.

'All this,' so the father writes in tones of fervent pleading--'all
this you may compass if you please. You have the means, you have the
opportunities; employ them, for God's sake, while you may, and make
yourself the all-accomplished man I wish to have you. It entirely
depends upon the next two years; they are the decisive ones' (Letter
CLXXVII.).

It is the very language of an evangelical piety applied to the
manufacture of a worldling. But what promoted the anxiety? Was it
natural affection--a father's love? If it was, never before or since
has that world-wide and homely emotion been so concealed. There is a
detestable, a forbidding, an all-pervading harshness of tone
throughout this correspondence that seems to banish affection, to
murder love. Read Letter CLXXVIII., and judge for yourselves. I will
quote a passage:

'The more I love you now from the good opinion I have of you, the
greater will be my indignation if I should have reason to change
it. Hitherto you have had every possible proof of my affection,
because you have deserved it, but when you cease to deserve it you
may expect every possible mark of my resentment. To leave nothing
doubtful upon this important point, I will tell you fairly
beforehand by what rule I shall judge of your conduct: by Mr.
Harte's account.... If he complains you must be guilty, and I shall
not have the least regard for anything you may allege in your own
defence.'

Ugh! what a father! Lord Chesterfield despised the Gospels, and made
little of St. Paul; yet the New Testament could have taught him
something concerning the nature of a father's love. His language is
repulsive, repugnant, and yet how few fathers have taken the trouble
to write 400 educational letters of great length to their sons! All
one can say is that Chesterfield's letters are without natural
affection:

'If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, and no man ever loved.'

If affection did not dictate these letters, what did? Could it be
ambition? So astute a man as Chesterfield, who was kept well informed