the prince of the twelve sea-apostles, which was right glad when she was shifted off from the Revenge.

"This brave ship the Revenge, being manned only with two hundred, soldiers and mariners, whereof eighty lay sick; yet nevertheless after a fight maintained, as was said, of fifteen hours, and two ships of the enemy sunk by her side, besides many more torn and battered, and great slaughter of men, never came to be entered, but was taken by composition; the enemies themselves having in admiration the virtue of the commander, and the whole tragedy of that ship."

And there is a little passage in praise of the great Elizabeth in which he is surprised into a sanguine enthusiasm:

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See her sitting as it were within the compass of her sands.

Scotland that doth as it were eclipse her island; the United Provinces of the Low Countries, which for wealth, commodity of traffic, affection to our nation, were most meet to be annexed to this crown; she left the possession of the one, and refused the sovereignty of the other; so that notwithstanding the greatness of her means, the justness of her pretences, and the rareness of her opportunity; she hath continued her first mind, she hath made the possessions which she received the limits of her dominions, and the world the limit of her name, by a peace that has stained all victories."

Bacon was of opinion that a man's letters were often of more worth than any other of his forms of expression, for he says:

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Such letters as are written from wise men, are of all the words of men in my judgement, the best; for they are more natural than orations, public speeches, and more advanced than conference or present speech."

But he lived before the days of post-cards and in an age when letters were carried by favour, or as occasion of conveyance offered, and therefore their

despatch and receipt were matters of some moment, and their writing was undertaken with careful attention and without haste. A few still write such letters as were writ of old, but the penny post has, for the most part, destroyed the art.

CHAPTER IX

RICHARD HOOKER

RICHARD HOOKER did great service to his country, at a time when it was rent with fierce rancorous controversies between the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians, by introducing a quiet, reasonable, and peaceful tone into the heated atmosphere.

He expressed himself as filled with an earnest longing desire to see things brought to a peaceable end," and earned for himself the title by which he has come down to us as The Judicious Hooker."

When thirty-one years old he was appointed Master of the Temple, where he was expected to uphold the Episcopacy. But a fierce and turbulent Presbyterian named Travers used to endeavour by preaching in the precincts of the Temple in the afternoon to destroy what Hooker had built up in the pulpit in the morning, and Fuller, commenting on the situation, said that the Temple rang with Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon!

Hooker soon grew weary of such an unedifying contest, and desiring to find some haven of quiet where he could write his great work, Ecclesiastical Polity, he wrote to Archbishop Whitgift, begging to be allowed to retire to a peaceful country parsonage.

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My lord," he wrote, “I shall never be able to finish what I have begun, unless I be removed into some quiet parsonage, where I may see God's blessings spring out of my mother earth, and eat mine own bread in peace and privacy."

His wish was granted, and his great book was the result of his removal first to Boscombe in Wiltshire, and then to Bishopsborne in Kent.

He had not gone very far into the first part of his book when he penned his famous passage on Law:

Of Law, there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage; the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power.

Both angels and men, and creatures of what condition so ever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy."

And in another place he, with stately eloquence, enforces the obedience to law of the whole universe :

"If the celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of heaven which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should as it were, through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and to rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture, the winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the earth be defeated of heavenly influence, the fruits of the earth pine away as children at the withered breasts of their mother no longer able to yield them relief;—what would become of man himself, whom these things now do all serve.

Hooker could see law governed the sun and moon in their apparent motions, and he observed the ordered processes of the universe, and could he have known the true majesty of the real motions of the earth and moon and sun his wonder and reverence would have been even greater.

Pope Clement VIII., having had the first book of

Ecclesiastical Polity translated to him in Latin, exclaimed:

"There is no learning that this man hath not searched into, nothing too hard for his understanding; this man indeed deserves the name of author: his books will get reverence by age; for there is in them such seeds of eternity, that if the rest be like this they shall last till the last fire shall consume all learning."

A short passage in the Ecclesiastical Polity gives a beautiful sense of Hooker's humble reverence, which indeed is the necessary product of real wisdom:

"Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the doings of the Most High; whom to know be life, and joy to make mention of this name; yet our soundest knowledge is to know that we know Him not as indeed He is, neither can know Him; and our safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we confess without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His greatness above our capacity to reach.

"He is above and we upon earth, therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few."

None have lived," says Isaak Walton, "since Mr Hooker died, whom God hath blessed with more innocent wisdom, more sanctified learning, or a more pious, peaceable, primitive temper."

Reason and conscience were his guides in life, and in his writings he maintained that they could not be displaced by authority unillumined by them.

He sought and obtained peace in a turbulent world, and the light of his serene and quiet mind shines down to us over the stormy waters of long-vanished controversies.