sides taking his rotation with his brethren in preaching on the Lord's day, and corresponding with his friends, he wrote his work entitled, "The Free Prisoner." On his release, he instantly repaired to Norwich, the seat of his new bishopric, and was received with more respect than he anticipated from the temper of the times. He preached on the Sabbath following his arrival to a crowded audience, and continued his services unmolested till the month of March following (1643). The ordinance of sequestration was then issued, and the commissioners of Parliament came to inform the Bishop that he must abandon his palace, and that they were required to seize on all his estate, real and personal. They went to the extent of their warrant, not leaving so much as a dozen of trenchers, or his children's pictures, out of their curious inventory." But before the time fixed for the public sale of his goods arrived, a pious lady, unknown to the Bishop, redeemed his furniture, until he should be able to repurchase it; and a benevolent divine of his diocese rendered an additional service, by paying the estimated value of his library. Being now deprived of every source of income, he applied to the committee on sequestrations for the annuity granted by Parliament; but he was told that an order had come down inhibiting any such allowance. In answer, however, to a petition from his wife, a smaller yearly payment was assigned to her; though, by a most unrighteous exaction, out of this scanty fund the Bishop had to defray assessments and monthly payments for lands which were no longer his. At last, after his endurance had been sorely tried, by witnessing the defacing of his cathedral, and the demolition of its splendid organ, he was ejected from the palace, which his straitened means rendered no longer a suitable habitation. A generous neighbour relinquished his house for the accommodation of the Bishop and his family, where he only remained till he procured the lease of a small property at Higham, in the neighbourhood of Norwich.

Of his subsequent life, spent in retirement and without molestation, we know little; but that little is enough to prove that its latter end was worthy of its beginning. He continued to preach until his infirmities and legal prohibitions had disabled him. Then "as oft and long as he was able, this learned Gamaliel was not only content, but very diligent to sit at the feet of the youngest of his disciples, as diligent a hearer as he had been a preacher." After the death of Charles I. he continued to observe with his family a weekly fast because of it. Though his fortune was so greatly reduced, a number of poor widows were his weekly pensioners. In 1652 he lost his wife, and then he wrote a tract, almost his last, entitled, “ Songs in the Night." From this interesting memorial we see how this grey-headed saint went down to his grave sorrowing yet rejoicing.” "Have I lost my goods and foregone a fair estate? Had all the earth been mine, what is it to heaven? Had I been the lord of all the world, what were this to a kingdom of glory?

"Have I parted with a dear consort; the sweet companion of my youth; the tender nurse of my age; the partner of my sorrows for these forty-eight years? She is but stept a little before me to that happy rest, which I am panting towards, and wherein I shall speedily overtake her. In the meantime and ever, my soul is espoused to that glorious and immortal Husband from whom it shall never be parted.

"Am I bereaved of some of my dear children, the sweet pledges of our matrimonial love; whose parts and hopes promised me comfort in my declined age? Why am I not rather thankful it hath pleased my God, out of my loins, to furnish heaven with some happy guests? Why do I not, instead of mourning for their loss, sing praises to God for preferring them to that eternal blessedness?

"Am I afflicted with bodily pains and sickness, which banishes all sleep from my eyes, and exercises me with a lingering torture? Ere long this momentary distemper shall end in an everlasting rest.”

And so it was; for though his painful malady was prolonged for four years more, they will appear but a "moment" now. The grace which enabled him to overcome at last,

strengthened tam to bear throughout. One who saw has recorded, that "thoug sorely afflicted with bodily diseases, he bore them all with as much patience as hath been seen in any flesh, except that of the Saviour." And when his time drew near, many of the noble, and learned, and pious, gathered to his chamber to implore his dying prayers, and bear away his dying benediction. After much time spent in devotion, and many words of gracious exhortation, he summoned the expiring energies of nature to make the last confession of his faith; and when so engaged, his strength departed, the agonies of death came over him, and then he fell asleep. He died on the 8th of September 1656, when he had reached his 82d year. "I do

His will assigned the churchyard as his burying place; adding as his reason, not hold God's house a meet repository for the dead bodies of the greatest saints." He bequeathed £30 to each widow in the village where he was born, and in that where he died.

Here our sketch should have ended. But on looking back, we feel conscious of an involuntary injury to the memory of this great man, in having presented, even with his own assistance, a view of his character so exclusively external. We are aware that publications, parochial and diocesan cares, the business of the nation, the defence of orthodoxy, journeys of observation or of diplomacy — in short, that the whole busy work of existence formed but in part the life of Bishop Hall. His was eminently a LIFE

OF CONTEMPLATION.

He fell upon a time when the Church of England contained many men whose genius and piety would have immortalized and sainted them in an earlier age. With a theology less accurate and a devotion less enlightened than signalized their puritan successors, and with a piety less strenuous and sanguine than that which poured in animation through the stern and athletic orthodoxy of our covenanting fathers, a jealous sincerity, a serene quietism, and an unflinching self-denial, were the commanding characteristics of their religion, which made it awful and interesting to others, and safe for themselves. It wanted in the activity of life and the diffusiveness of Christianity. It was introverted, not aggressive. It mused and soliloquized. It was monastic, and dwelt alone. It was more amiable in its forbearance, than meritorious for its services. In its narrow channel it flowed deep, but it seldom overflowed.

The idolatry of one party has injured them with another; but the day is coming that will restore to each his own. In its first outburst, the noise of faction will overwhelm the voice of piety, still and small, but it cannot last so long. And now that the rancour of raging polemics is settling down into forgetfulness, the memorial and the works of these excellent of the earth are reviving, and posterity, more just to them than they were to themselves, is admitting the claims of either party to attributes of worth which they could not discern in one another.

own.

For ourselves, with leanings all away from prelacy, we would commemorate with as much alacrity as we have felt delight in contemplating the singular devotion and exalted genius which distinguished many a high churchman of the first Charles's reign-the exemplars of an age only moving regret by the contrasted littleness of our To specify all the instances would not be easy; and it is hard to select a few. But there was George Herbert, the gentle, the elegant-majestically humble, gravely gay-as antithetic in his character as in his own quaint poesy-passing no week without music, and no day without showing mercy-converting life into one Sabbath, and fulfilling his invocation to that sacred day, when it and he "flew hand in hand to heaven." Jeremy Taylor, too, soaring in ether with a load of learning which would have kept another grovelling. now casting a look of hope to the ancient models, anon dashed by the contemplation of his own ideal — beside the waters of Lough Neagh, musing on the mysterious tower of its romantic island, and its more mysterious antiquity, till his “ thoughts wandered through eternity;" or amid the ruins of its monastery listening for the reviving echoes of its wonted orisons, until his dreaming

fancy beheld in the evening light of autumn its tapers rekindled, and in the falling shadows marshalled anew the sacerdotal procession—an imagination revelling in all the picturesque and sublime of religion, and a heart responding with harmonious impulse to its loftiest requirements. There was Nicholas Ferrar the Church-of-England man-closing his eyes on propitious fortune and radiant beauty, and that nothing earthly might distract his gaze, and no rest short of heaven allure his sense, immured in a protestant convent-meting to himself scanty slumbers on the hard pillow of an anchoret - with his goods feeding all the needy except himself, and indulging no luxury save the midnight music of the choristers whom he retained to "praise God nightly" in the oratory of Little Gidding. And Henry Hammond, economizing his time by the abundance of his prayers, and increasing his wealth by the wise munificence of his charities-living for his friends, reducing kindness to a law, and welcoming the interruption which called for its exercise - amidst bodily sufferings, producing works of research and judgment, demanding but sufficient to destroy the most vigorous health-"omne jam tulerat punctum, cùm Mors, quasi suum adjiciens calculum, terris abstulit." Among these and many more,* almost as ascetic in his life, but above them all in the largeness of his views and the soundness of his creed, we recognise the gifted author of the following "Contemplations."

The "art of heavenly meditation," was that which he had chiefly studied. Even among his contemporaries, there were few who combined such density of expression with such amplitude of thought — few who had studied the Fathers so diligently, and who could command them so readily-few who had drunk so deeply the classic inspiration-few who had entered into the meaning of Scripture, with the same spirit of quick apprehension and thorough appreciation—and fewer still who had learned to dwell so much on high. The spirit that taught the prophets to speak, taught him to understand. In his company we feel that we are not attended by a perfunctory and hireling guide- but by one whose profession is his passion, whose familiarity with sacred things is reverential — whose insight is the result of love and long acquaintance.

Yea,

He was a man of peace, and delighted in the retirement without which it is seldom enjoyed. "The court is for honour, the city for gain, the country for quietness; a blessing that need not, in the judgment of the wisest, yield to the other two. how many have we known that having nothing but a coat of thatch to hide them from heaven, yet have pitied the careful pomp of the mighty? How much more may they who have full hands and quiet hearts pity them both?"" What a heaven," as he elsewhere exclaims, "lives a scholar in, that at once in one close room can daily converse with all the glorious martyrs and fathers! - that can single out at pleasure, either sententious Tertullian, or grave Cyprian, or learned Jerome, or flowing Chrysostom, or divine Ambrose, or devout Bernard, —or who alone is all these-heavenly Augustin, and talk with them, and hear their wise and holy counsels, verdicts, resolutions: yea, to rise higher, with courtly Isaiah, with learned Paul, with all their fellow-prophets, apostles: yet more, like another Moses, with God himself!" In such retirement passed the chosen hours of our author, and refreshed by such converse he penned his Contemplations.

More sweet than odours caught by him who sails

Near spicy shores of Araby the blest,

A thousand times more exquisitely sweet,

The freight of holy feeling which we meet,

In thoughtful moments, wafted by the gale

From fields where good men walk, or bowers wherein they rest."+

See Walton's Life of Herbert-Heber's Life of Taylor- Peckard's Life of Ferrar-and Fell's Life of Hammond. For others of the same period, the reader is referred to Lloyd's Memoirs, Walton's Lives, and Dr. C. Wordsworth's interesting collection of "Ecclesiastical Biography."

+ Wordsworth.

The Work now laid before him, the reader will find richly freighted with this “hoły feeling." Its value does not consist alone nor chiefly in the acute expositions of Scripture incidentally introduced-in the descriptive vivacity which paints the Bible scenes to the eye of fancy, or enacts its history anew-in the apothegmatical naïvetè, which deals out so calmly yet so pointedly the eager observations of a penetrating eye, on the various wisdom and folly, virtues and vices, with which a long life had made him familiar. Nor is it only in the ardent enforcement of Christian duty, and eloquent statement of Christian privilege, that this book bespeaks the attention of the serious reader. It presents in one view the Bible, and a mind rich in feeling and accomplishments, lovingly exploring and reverently interpreting the Bible; nay, as it were, fraternizing and amalgamating with it. These Contemplations will not be read with advantage by one who peruses them as a common book, as hastily and as unconcerned; nor will they be read aright without adverting continually to the peculiar mode of their execution, to their author and their end. In the former particular, they closely resemble the Confessions of his favourite Augustin, consisting of reflections and ejaculations, so mingled as to blend devotion with instruction. The author, whom we have already attempted to pourtray, recurs to our imagination as the gentle, self-denied, and benignant parish priest, whom his neighbours met and eyed reverentially as he took his stated evening walk, cheerful at times, but oftener pensive, in the fields near Waltham parsonage - - a man of that calm resolution and ardent faith, which could at any warning have followed the Saviour whom he loved to prison and to death, and whose aspirations often soared so high as to forget the Meshech where he sojourned. And the end will be answered, if we who read them, learn for ourselves to live the same divine life, and acquire the same skill in heavenly meditation - an art little esteemed and less practised in an age which would not be too busy if it thought as much as it toils; and an art concerning which a great proficient* has left a testimony which may compensate for our omissions, and form the appropriate introduction to the work that follows.

"Be acquainted with this heavenly work, and thou wilt in some degree be acquainted with God; thy joys will be spiritual, prevalent, and lasting, according to the nature of their blessed object; thou wilt have comfort in life and death: when thou hast neither wealth, nor health, nor the pleasure of this world, yet wilt thou have comfort without the presence or help of any friend, without a minister, without a book, when all means are denied thee, or taken from thee, yet mayest thou have vigorous, real comfort. Thy graces will be mighty, active, and victorious; and daily joy, which is thus fetched from heaven, will be thy strength. Thou wilt be as one that stands on the top of an exceeding high mountain; he looks down on the world as if it were quite below him — fields and woods, cities and towns, seem to him but little spots. Thus despicably wilt thou look on all things here below. The greatest princes will seem but as grasshoppers; the busy, contentious, covetous world, but as a heap of ants. Men's threatenings will be no terror to thee, nor the honours of this world any strong enticement: temptations will be more harmless, as having lost their strength; and afflictions less grievous as having lost their sting; and every mercy will be better known, and better relished."

* Baxter.

CONTEMPLATIONS.

Thou mightest have made all the world perfect in an instant, but thou wouldst not. But whence, O God, was that first light? That will, which caused thee to create, is The sun was not made till the fourth day reason enough why thou didst thus create.-light the first. If man had been, he How should we deliberate in our actions, might have seen all lightsome; but, whence