masterpieces of Italian, Spanish, and French literature were gradually, in translations or in the originals, introduced to the notice of the general public. The triumphs of the Swiss infantry over the most vaunted chivalry of Europe, and the heroic deeds of the Dutch in the Netherlands in defence of their liberty and religion had awakened men to a consciousness that unity was strength, and that tyranny and oppression had no longer power to enchain the bodies and minds and souls of men. The entrance of the English tongue upon a new phase of existence in its passage from Middle English to Modern English, and the fresh power that it had acquired by the introduction into the language of what is known as blank verse, by the Earl of Surrey, had afforded a flexible and powerful organ suitable in every way for the expression of "words that breathe and thoughts that burn."

Such were some of the originating causes that produced the splendour of genius and the spirit of enterprise for which the years from 1550 to 1650 are remarkable. Then arose and came to perfection our drama; then philology and antiquarianism started into life; then philosophy replacing the bust of Aristotle on its pedestal by that of Plato, substituted instead of the unfruitful deductive syllogisms of scholasticism, the more useful inductive method of Bacon; then investigators began to aim, not at abstract generalization, but at minute particulars, and to be desirous after, not the construction of baseless hypotheses, but the observation of indubitable facts; then our colonial empire which has now attained to such dimensions, took its origin; then freedom to think and to act began in some degree to flourish; then social improvement, political life and religious intelligence may be said to have arisen; then literature, science and art flourished; then, in a word, England began to be truly great.

Amidst this brilliant age Cosin was born on November 30th, (S. Andrew's Day) 1594, at Norwich. In the same year, by the capture of Paris, Henry of Navarre, became Henry IV. of France. To the daughter of this king, Henrietta Maria, Cosin was in after times to be indebted for a shelter. In the same year also Hooker "the Judicious" published the first four volumes of his immortal work on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The father, Silas Cosin, was a substantial citizen of Norwich. His mother, whose name was Elizabeth, was the daughter of Remington of Remington Castle. At that time Norwich was commencing to rise into the importance that it afterwards attained as a great seat of the wool trade. Churches were nearly as abundant

as they are now, in that essentially ecclesiastical city, wherein religious edifices are so numerous, and wherein ecclesiological traditions are still so potent that the Bishop of the Diocese sits in the House of Lords, not as a spiritual peer, but as a mitred Abbot. The Grammar School, Norwich, founded by Bishop Salmon in 1547, was the place of his early education. At this school Samuel Clarke the opponent of Toland, Waterland, Collins, and Leibnitz, was once a pupil, and the learned Dr. Parr was at one time the headmaster. At seventeen years of age Cosin entered at Caius College, Cambridge, in the year 1610, in which the gallant Henri Quatre was assassinated by Ravaillac, and in which the bigoted Philip III. of Spain expelled the Moors from his dominions.

His college reputation must have been high, as soon after he had taken his degree he was offered a librarianship with a title to Orders, both by Dr. Andrewes, Bishop of Ely, and by Dr. Overall, Bishop of Lichfield. Both these prelates were remarkable men. Andrewes had been Vicar of S. Giles, Cripplegate, the parish in which Milton was born, afterwards he had been Master of Pembroke College, and chaplain successively to Queen Elizabeth and James I. When James's book "The Defence of the Rights of Kings" was bitterly attacked by Cardinal Bellarmine under the name of Matthew Tortus, Andrewes was employed by the king to write a reply, which being entitled "Tortura Torti" was published and attained to some success. For this service to royalty, Andrewes was made Almoner to the king, and was promoted to the Bishopric of Chichester. Soon after he was translated to the see of Ely, and was made a Privy Councillor. Finally he was promoted to the Bishopric of Winchester, and the Deanery of the Chapel Royal. Besides his Tortura Torti," a book now forgotten, he wrote a "Manual of private Devotions and Meditations for every day in the week," and a Manual of directions for the Visitation of the Sick." He also produced several sermons and tracts in English and Latin, and took an important part amongst the forty-seven divines in the translation of the authorised version of the Bible.

The latter prelate, Overall, was Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Master of Catharine Hall, Cambridge, Dean of S. Paul's, Prolocutor of the lower house of Convocation, and one of the first governors of the Charter House, which had just been founded by Sutton. In 1614, he was made Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and after four years was translated to Norwich. He was a man of vast erudition

especially in scholastic divinity. He took part in the translation of the authorised version of the Bible, but his most celebrated work was his Convocation Book, a treatise in which, in opposition to Parsons the Jesuit, who had published under the name of Dollman, an antimonarchial work, the divine institution of government was positively asserted. Archbishop Sancroft, the non-juror, in defence of the course of conduct that he adopted, had this book of Overall's republished in the first year of the reign of William III. Unfortunately in his hasty glance over it, Sancroft had omitted to notice that a qualifying clause was inserted, in which, it being desirable then to justify the conduct of the united provinces of the Netherlands who had thrown off the Spanish yoke, it was declared that when a change of government was brought to a thorough settlement, it was then to be owned and submitted to as a work of the Providence of GOD. The treatise of Overall therefore, that Sancroft had imagined would have won supporters for those loyal to James, the King in posse, went far as Burnet shows, to justify the advocates of William, the King in esse.

To have been selected for preferment by two such men as Andrewes and Overall, both now Bishops, and both formerly the heads of houses at the Universities, proves that the collegiate reputation of Cosin must have been very high, and that he must have been considered a youth of great ability and promise. Of these two offers Cosin chose that of Overall, the Bishop of Lichfield, a prelate who fortunately for himself did not survive to witness the partial ruin brought during the Civil War upon the noble Cathedral over which he presided, when its Close was turned into a garrison keep, first by the royalists and then by the parliamentary forces, and its lofty spire formed an object for cannon to be levelled at.

In 1619, Bishop Overall died, but the youth Cosin soon met with another influential patron in the person of Neile, Bishop of Durham. He appointed him his domestic chaplain, and conferred upon him the tenth prebend in the cathedral church of Durham. In 1624, Cosin married the daughter of Marmaduke Blakeston, Archdeacon of the East Riding of Yorkshire, and in the following year, that of the accession of Charles I., he was appointed to the archdeaconry of the East Riding, which his father-in-law resigned in his favour.

In the succeeding year, that in which the Parliament attempted to impeach the king's favourite, Buckingham, Bishop Neile collated him to the valuable rectory of Brancepeth, Durham, where at his own ex

pense he beautified the church in a very great degree. At this time the Puritans began to grow formidable in the state. Suppressed during the reign of Elizabeth, and in a somewhat less degree during the reign of James I., they increased in number and in boldness under the uncertain rule of Charles I. The religion and the manners of Charles's French consort, Henrietta Maria, were alike objectionable in their eyes. While many of the Puritans were doubtless sincere and earnest, if somewhat ascetic and unamiable men, many more of them were either ignorant fanatics, or arrant hypocrites. Into the hands of these last after a time all power fell, and they used the earnestness and the ignorance of their fellow-sectarians to advance their own purposes. Oftentimes a Puritan may have begun, like Cromwell, his political agitations in all sincerity and disinterestedness, and been eventually hurried by the intoxication of unexpected success into a course of hypocrisy, knavery, and unprincipled intrigue. To men in an humble rank of life of severe character, of ambitious views, or of marked religious excitability, Puritanism afforded a congenial refuge. To such characters all pleasure was sin, all beauty was satanic, all culture was worldly-mindedness, all the sweet courtesies of life were abhorrent. If the gay queen Henrietta Maria took part in a court masque or a court ball it was sufficient to stamp her in the language of a scurrilous Puritan, like Prynne, as a fit associate for the daughter of Herodias. If Cosin published for the use of the ladies of the court, as he did in 1627, "A Collection of Private Devotions in the Hours of Prayer," in which prayers to be privately used at each of the canonical hours of the day are to be found, it was enough to stamp him in the opinion of the fiery Puritan, Smart, as an idolatrous and lost papist. Many persons, moreover, who were not Puritans, objected to the arbitrary power which the kings of England had now for some generations assumed, and which was exercised by Charles in a fitful and irregular manner. Altogether, as Guizot says, there seem, beside the ardent supporters of the king such as Strafford and Laud, to have been three parties in the state. These were (1) the party of loyal reform represented by Clarendon, Colepepper, Capel, and Falkland; (2) the party of political revolution represented by Hampden and Holles; and (3) the party of the republicans represented by Ludlow, Harrington, author of "Oceanica," Milton, Cromwell, Ireton, Lambert, St. John, and Pym. In this book of Cosin's there were certainly some things which it would have been well in that era of suspicion to have omitted,

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but the Anglicanism of Cosin, and the sincerity of his objections to Roman Catholicism cannot be doubted; to represent as a Jesuit and a Papist in disguise, a man who like Cosin refused in the days of his exile, as we shall find in our sketch of his life that he did, all the allurements of the Court of Rome, and who, as Cosin did, disinherited a son because that son had embraced the Roman Catholic faith, is a strange perversion of judgment. This book of Cosin's was attacked by Burton, Prynne, and Smart. Burton entitled his attack, "An Examination of Private Devotion." Prynne with that thirst for punning and word-quibbling which degraded the literature of the age, called his work, "A Brief Survey and Censure of Mr. Cozen's Cozenising Devotions:" and Smart, some years later, grounded on this book and on certain alleged actions of Cosin as Prebendary of Durham, a charge of teaching superstitious doctrines which he brought against him before the House of Commons. This Smart, the Master of the Cathedral School, Durham, was, to use the language of the day, smarting under a sentence that Cosin had been the means to a certain extent of having had passed upon him. Smart was a Prebendary of Durham, but had been most negligent in the performance of his duties, preaching rarely more than once a year, and generally signalizing his advent to the pulpit by some ill-mannered attack upon the Cathedral Chapter. On July 7th, 1628, the year of the famous Petition of Rights, he however out-heroded Herod, for having chosen Psalm xxxi. 7, "I hate them that hold of superstitious vanities," for his text, he inveighed in such coarse and scurrilous language against the authorities of the Cathedral, and the ceremonials adopted by them in the performance of divine worship therein, that the sermon could not possibly be passed over in silence, and Cosin and others of the Chapter having cited Smart before the High Commission, he was, on refusing to recant his abusive statements, deprived of all his Church preferments. A subscription organized by the Puritans, however, more than compensated him for the loss, as it realized such a sum as brought him in four hundred a year. Against Cosin, however, who was only one out of the several clergy who thought it fitting that the insubordination and the scurrility of Smart should be restrained, he was particularly bitter, and the intimacy of Cosin with Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, White, Bishop of Carlisle, and Mountain, Bishop of London, all known to be high Anglicans, rendered the Rector of Brancepeth more liable to be suspected and disliked by the Puritan