be preferred before yours," as on the one side I do not understand by your religion the doctrine of Bellarmine, or Baronius, or any other private man among you; nor the doctrine of the Sorbon, or of the Jesuits, or of any other particular company among you, but that whereon you all agree, or profess to agree, the doctrine of the Council of Trent: so accordingly on the other I do not understand the doctrine of Luther, or Calvin, or Melancthon; nor the Confession of Augusta, or Geneva; nor the Catechism of Heidleberg; nor the Articles of the Church of England; no, nor the harmony of Protestant confessions; but that wherein they all agree, and which they all subscribe with a greater harmony, as the perfect rule of their faith and actions,—that is, THE BIBLE. The BIBLE-I say the BIBLE only-is the religion of Protestants! Whatsoever else they believe besides it, and the plain, irrefragable, indubitable consequenees of it, well may they hold it as a matter of opinion; but, as matter of faith and religion, neither can they, with coherence to their own grounds, believe it themselves, nor require the belief of it of others, without most high and most schismatical presumption. I, for my part, after a long and (as I verily believe and hope) impartial search of the true way to eternal happiness, do profess plainly that I cannot find any rest to the sole of my foot but upon this Rock only. I see plainly, and with my own eyes, that there are popes against popes; councils against councils; some fathers against others; the same fathers against themselves; a consent of fathers of one age against a consent of fathers of another age; the Church of one age against the Church of another age. Traditive interpretations of Scripture are pretended, but there are few or none to be found. No tradition, but only of Scripture, can derive itself from the Fountain, but may be plainly proved either to have been brought in, in such an age after Christ, or that in such an age it was not in. In a word, there is no sufficient certainty, but of Scripture only, for any considering man to build upon. This, therefore, and this only, I have reason to believe; this I will profess; according to this I will live; and for this, if there be occasion, I will not only willingly, but even gladly, lose my life, though I should be sorry that Christians should take it from me. Propose me anything out of this Book, and require whether I believe it or no, and seem it never so incomi. c., The Roman Catholic. bi. e., Augsburg

prehensible to human reason, I will subscribe it with hand and heart, as knowing no demonstration can be stronger than this :God hath said so; therefore it is true. In other things I will take no man's liberty of judgment from him, neither shall any man take mine from me. I will think no man the worse man, nor the worse Christian; I will love no man the less for differing in opinion from me. And what measure I mete to others, I expect from them again. I am fully assured that God does not, and therefore that man ought not, to require any more of any man than this, to believe the Scripture to be God's Word; to endeavour to find the true sense of it; and to live according to it.

57. This is the religion which I have chosen, after a long deliberation; and I am verily persuaded that I have chosen wisely, much more wisely, than if I had guided myself according to your Church's authority.

Religion of Protestants. Chap. vi. pp. 271, 2.

96. Edmund Waller, 1605-1687. (Handbook, pars. 152, 382.)

Go, lovely rose !

Song.

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,

And shuns to have her graces spied,

That hadst thou sprung

In deserts where no men abide,

Thou must have uncommended died. . . .

Then die! that she

The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee,

How small a part of time they share

That are so wondrous sweet and fair.

On a Girdle.

That which her slender waist confin'd
Shall now my joyful temples bind :
No monarch but would give his crown,
His arms might do what this has done.

A narrow compass! and yet there

Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair;
Give me but what this riband bound,

Take all the rest the sun goes round.

Closing Lines on the Death of Cromwell, who passed away on the night of a great storm.

Ungrateful then! if we no tears allow

To him that gave us peace and empire too.
Princes that fear'd him, grieve; concern'd to see
No pitch of glory from the grave is free.

Nature herself took notice of his death,
And sighing, swelled the sea with such a breath
That to remotest shores her billows roll'd
The approaching fate of their great ruler told.
The Naval Glory of England.

Others may use the ocean as their road,
Only the English make it their abode,
Whose ready sails with every wind can fly,

And make a covenant with the inconstant sky;
Our oaks secure as if they there took root,
We tread on billows with a steady foot.

From Verses on a War with Spain.

97. Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682. (Handbook, pars. 91, 94, 327.) His style is at once intensely latinised and idiomatic. Johnson, who wrote his life, greatly admired, and is said to have copied it. The discourse on Urn Burial, from which the following is taken, was occasioned by the discovery of some very old sepulchral urns in Norfolk.

Urn Burial.

Now since these dead bones have already out-lasted the living ones of Methuselah, and in a yard under ground, and thin walls of clay, out-worn all the strong and specious buildings above it; and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests: what prince can promise such diuturnity unto his relics? Time, which antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments. In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conservatories,

when to be unknown was the means of their continuation, and obscurity their protection. If they died by violent hands, and were thrust into their urns, these bones become considerable, and some old philosophers would honour them, whose souls they conceived most pure, which were thus snatched from their bodies, and to retain a stronger propension unto them; whereas they weariedly left a languishing corpse, and with faint desires of reunion. If they fell by long and aged decay, yet wrapt up in the bundle of time, they fall into indistinction, and make but one blot with infants. If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment. How many pulses made up the life of Methuselah were work for Archimedes: common counters sum up the life of Moses his man. Our days become considerable, like petty sums, by minute accumulations; where numerous fractions make up but small round numbers; and our days of a span long make not one little finger.

If the nearness of our last necessity brought a nearer conformity into it, there were a happiness in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half-senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying, when avarice makes us the sport of death, when even David grew politically cruel, and Solomon could hardly be said to be the wisest of men. But many are too early old, and before the date of age. Adversity stretcheth our days, misery makes Alcmena's nights, and time hath no wings unto it. But the most tedious being is that which can unwish itself, content to be nothing, or never to have been, which was beyond the malcontent of Job, who cursed not the day of his life, but his nativity; content to have so far been, as to have a title to future being, although he had lived here but in an hidden state of life, and as it were an abortion.

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarianism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary observators. Had they

made as good provision for their names as they have done for their relics, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves a fruitless continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as emblems of mortal vanities, antidotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition; and, finding no atropos unto the immortality of their names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempts of their vain-glories, who acting early, and before the probable meridian of time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their designs, whereby the ancient heroes have already out-lasted their monuments, and mechanical preservations. But in this latter scene of time, we cannot expect such mummies unto our memories, when ambition may fear the prophecy of Elias, and Charles the Fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselahs of Hector.

And, therefore, restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto present considerations seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names, as some have done in their persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. "Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs. To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment.

Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all. There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally ccnsidereth all things: our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our

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