imagined would be developed in him by his transference from a small rough unsettled country to one which by forty years of steady government had acquired a unity, a solidity, a definite and noble position among the nations of the world, of which all true Englishmen were proud, have no where been brought so clearly before us, as in the pages of our Diarist. Such anticipations were like the fire of brushwood. It is painful to think of the disappointment to which they were doomed.

Besides these events of an historical character, there are scattered through the Diary a multitude of notices of persons of less social position than Elizabeth and James, but not by any means of less interest. Living among lawyers, it was of course that many of the young student's notes would relate to them. But many of the lawyers of that day, both those who had earned the honours of their profession and those who still remained in statu pupillari, were men about whom we can never learn too much. In these notes we have glimpses of Sir Thomas More, of Bacon, Coke, Lord Keeper Egerton, of Judges Anderson, Manwood, and Catline, of the merry old Recorder Fleetwood, of his graver successor Croke, and of the beggar's friend, Sir Julius Cæsar. Among the younger men we may notice Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, the future Lord Chief Justice Bramston, and the man who in the coming stormy times was for a period more prominent than them all, the statesman Pym. It will be seen in a note at p. 104, that the publication of this volume has given an opportunity for the settlement of the question, whether Pym had what may be termed a regular legal education, which his biographers have left in doubt. The Middle Temple has clearly the high honour of reckoning him upon their roll.

Of non-legal persons who are here brought before us with more or less prominency, we need scarcely allude to the entries relating to Shakespeare and the performance of his Twelfth Night, which were first noticed by Mr. Collier, and have been used by every subsequent writer on dramatic subjects. The unfortunate Overbury comes before us several times, such as we should have expected to find him, inconsiderate and impetuous. Ben Jonson flits across the page. Of Marston there is a disagreeable anecdote which has not been left unnoticed by poetical antiquaries. Sir Thomas Bodley and Lord Deputy Mountjoy are alluded to. There is an excellent account of an interview with old Stowe the antiquary, a valuable glimpse of the Cromwell family during the boyhood of the Protector, and references, some of them of importance, to Sir Walter Raleigh, to his foolish friend Lord Cobham, to the wizard Earl of Northumberland, and of course many allusions to the Cecils, both to Sir William, and to that youngest son to whom, according to the joke which is here preserved, his father's wisdom descended as if it had been held by the tenure of Borough-English.

One peculiarity of this Diary is the very large proportion of it which is given up to notes of sermons. There is something in this which is characteristic of the time as well as of the writer. It was a sermon-loving age, and that to a degree which it is scarcely possible for us to understand in our degenerate days. Another thing which is equally at variance with modern notions is that, when reading the original manuscript, we pass at once from passages which we have been obliged to reject as unfit for publication to notes of pulpit addresses which inculcate a high-toned morality based upon those sound principles which apply even to the thoughts and feelings. It is clear that the incongruity in this contrast which is painful to us was not then perceived. The coarseness of the popular language on the one hand, and the affection for pulpit addresses, even among students of the Inns of Court, on the other, were both parts of what we are accustomed to term the manners of the age, and, like all things universally accepted, their rights and wrongs were never very minutely criticised. The language we have objected to is of course entirely indefensible. It was the slough of a coarser generation, which our ancestors had not then entirely cast off.

Of many of the sermons as represented in these notes we think highly, but we have printed the whole of them in smaller type, so that they may be distinguished at a glance, and if there be any of our readers to whom they are less acceptable, they may be easily passed over.

Among the preachers who are here commemorated will be found some of the most celebrated divines of the day;—Dr. Lancelot Andrewes, Dr. James Montague, Dr.

John Buckeridge, Dr. John King, Dr. Parry, and Dr. George Abbot, none of them yet Bishops; Andrew Downes the Grecian; Dr. Thomas Holland, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford; Dr. Giles Thompson, afterwards Dean of Windsor; with two fervid orators, frowned upon by many of their brethren, but most influential with the people,—one of them Mr. Egerton, whose congregation assembled "in a little church or chapel up stairs" in Blackfriars, and the other Mr. Clapham, who was the incumbent of a church at Paul's Wharf.

In notes, for the most part very skilfully taken,[14] of sermons of men so various in their acquirements, and many of them so eminently distinguished, we have examples of the pulpit oratory of the age, with evidences of the nature of the doctrines then generally prevalent in the Church of England, and of some of the qualities which tended to make the preaching of those doctrines popular.

Nor is the book devoid of notices of many other circumstances which were characteristical of the time. The following are examples. At p. 22 we find an account of the operation of lithotomy, stated to be then first brought into medical practice; at p. 46 we learn that "a certain kind of compound called Laudanum" had been recently introduced as the chloroform, and at p. 132 that the game of shuttlecock was the croquet, of the day. In another place (p. 110) the fantastical and affectedly humble salutation to the knee alluded to by dramatists of the period is said to have been one of the many changes in fashion attributed to English travellers returned from Italy. At p. 36 there is a notice of an article apparently of fashionable costume which we are unable to explain, "Kentish tails." It is said of these things, whatever they were, that they "are now turned to such spectacles, so that if a man put them on his nose he shall have all the land he can see." What connection, if any, there may be between the tails here mentioned and the old legend of Kentish tails, we are obliged to leave to the consideration of persons versed in the antiquities of that county.