has is strongly indicative of both the piety and the learning of the author, At Oates he enjoyed the comforts of a home, and as much society as he could with safety indulge in. Lady Masham herself, the sister of Cudworth, was a woman of great acquirements and intelligence. Locke loved to converse with her on the topics which had so long engaged his attention, and to her solicitous care of his health and tranquillity he owed much of the comfort of his declining age. In the early part of the year 1704 he felt that he could last out but little longer. The return of spring and clear skies produced not its customary effect upon his feelings; and in a letter written to Mr King on the first of June, he plainly stated his conviction that death was near at hand. "This comfortable," says he," and usually restorative season of the year no effect upon me for the better; on the contrary, my shortness of breath and uneasiness every day increases. My stomach, without any visible cause, sensibly decays, so that all appearances concur to warn me that the dissolution of this cottage is not far off." He had calculated rightly. He became weaker and weaker every day, and was at length so reduced as to be incapable of supporting his sinking frame. He was still, however, in the custom of spending his days in the library, whither he was carried in an arm-chair; but on the 27th of October, Lady Masham missed him from his usual place, and on inquiring after him, found that he had declined to rise. To her questions respecting his health, he replied that he had fatigued himself too much the preceding day with rising, and that he did not know whether he should ever rise again. When some other of his friends visited him in the afternoon, he observed to them that his work was almost at an end, and he thanked God for it. He also desired that they would remember him in the evening prayer, and afterwards expressed his willingness to have the family assembled for their devotions in his chamber. On being asked whether he thought himself near death, he answered that he might perhaps die that night, but that he could not live above three or four days. At their request he then took some liquor called mum, which he considered refreshing and nourishing, and before sipping it, wished all of them happiness when he should be gone. The visitors soon after this left the chamber, Lady Masham alone remaining behind. While sitting by his bed-side he begged her "to look on this world only as a state of preparation for a better," adding as the result of his own experience, "that he had lived long enough, and that he thanked God he had enjoyed a happy life; but that, after all, he looked upon this life as nothing, to be nothing but vanity." The family, as it had been proposed, assembled in his chamber for prayer, and between eleven and twelve o'clock he was so far better as to resist the wish of Lady Masham to remain in his chamber during the night. On the following morning he desired to be carried into his study, and the intervals of sleep he enjoyed in his chair appeared to revive his strength and spirits. He even requested to be dressed, and expressed a wish for some table beer. But it was the last flitting of the breeze. Lady Masham, who was sitting near him reading the Psalms to herself, began at his desire to read aloud, and he for some time manifested great attention. At length he requested her to cease. The presence of death was visible in his frame, and in a few minutes he expired. This event took place on the twenty-eighth of October, 1704, and about three o'clock in the afternoon. Those who were most intimately acquainted with this great man, who had the opportunity of judging of him in many different circumstances, and saw his conduct in situations when both his patience and virtue were put to severe trials, agreed in representing his character as in every way worthy of esteem and admiration. Nor are the persons who have thus left their tribute of affection to the name of Locke of a character themselves to be doubted. The testimony of Le Clerc, and that of the friend whom he quotes, affords the most convincing proof of the philosopher's goodness of heart as well as ability. "He was," says the latter, "the faithful servant, nay, I may add, the devoted slave of truth, which he loved for itself, and which no consideration was ever able to make him desert." In respect to his manners, it is said "that he looked on civility to be not only something very agreeable and proper to win men, but also a duty of Christianity;" and among his most conspicuous characteristics are numbered charity, fidelity in his attachments, strict attention to his word, liberality in listening to the opinions of others, and charity to all who were in distress. Of his character as a scholar and philosopher it is not necessary to say more, than that he united the rare qualities of great strength and clearness of apprehension, with a not inferior degree of industry;—that he was as honest as he was acute,-as unfettered by private prejudices as by public,—and, above all, as well acquainted with business as with books, -as capable of establishing truth by experience as of searching for it in the bold spirit of a theorist. John Pomfret. BORN A. D. 1677.-DIED A. D. 1703. JOHN POMFRET was the son of the Rev. Mr Pomfret, rector of Luton in Bedfordshire, at which place probably our author was born. After having received his early education at a grammar-school in the country, he was sent to Cambridge, and entered at Queen's college, where he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1694, and that of Master of Arts in 1698. It was during his stay at the university that he wrote the greater part of his poetical compositions. He had not long quitted the university before he was presented to the rectory of Malden in Bedfordshire; and when about to receive higher preferment, the malice of some enemies was exerted with powerful vigour to disappoint his expectations. About the year 1703, he came to London, as his anonymous friend who published his 'Remains,' relates, "for institution and induction into a very considerable living; but was retarded for some time, by a disgust taken by Dr Henry Compton, then bishop of London, at these four lines in the close of his poem entitled The Choice :' 'And as I near approach the verge of life, "The parenthesis in these verses was so maliciously represented to the bishop, that his lordship was given to understand it could bear no other construction, than that Mr Pomfret preferred a mistress before a wife; though I think, the contrary is evident, the verses implying no more than the preference of a single life to marriage; unless his brethren of the gown will assert that an unmarried clergyman cannot live without a mistress. But the worthy prelate was soon convinced of the malice of Mr Pomfret's enemies towards him, he being at that time married. Yet their base opposition of his deserved merit had in some measure its effect; for, by the obstructions he met with, he sickened of the small-pox, then very rife in London, and died there, in the twenty-sixth year of his age." Dr Johnson remarks on the malicious interpretation of this passage. "This reproach was easily obliterated; for it had happened to Pomfret as to all other men who plan schemes of life: he had departed from his purpose, and was then married.” Dr Johnson states that Pomfret died at the age of thirty-six; but Hazlitt dates the birth of our author in 1677, and his death in 1703, making him only twenty-six. Pomfret published some of his poems in 1699. It has been observed that "he has always been the favourite of that class of readers, who, without vanity or criticism, seek only their own amusement. His Choice' exhibits a system of life adapted to common expectations; such a state as affords plenty and tranquillity, without the exclusion of intellectual pleasures: perhaps no composition in our language has been oftener perused than Pomfret's 'Choice.' Hazlitt says of it, "its attraction may be supposed to lie rather in the subject than in the peculiar merit of the execution." Our author's own edition of his poems included all but the last two pieces in this collection, which were published in the subsequent edition by his friend. Of the poem entitled 'Reason,' the following remarks were penned by the author's friend when he inserted it in his edition. It "was written by him in the year 1700, when the debates concerning the doctrine of the trinity were carried on with so much heat by the clergy, one against another, that King William was obliged to interpose his royal authority, by putting an end to that pernicious controversy, through an act of parliament, strictly forbidding any persons whatever to publish their notions on this subject. It is, indeed, a severe, though very just satire, upon the antagonists engaged in that dispute; and was published by Mr Pomfret at the time it was written. The not inserting it amongst his other poems, when he collected them into one volume, was on account of his having received very signal favours from some of the persons therein mentioned; but they, as well as he, being now dead, it is hoped that the revival of it at this juncture, will answer the same good purposes originally intended by the author." 'Dies Novissima' was printed from a manuscript under our author's own hand; it was probably his last production, and written by him at no very distant period before his decease. Dr Johnson having favourably noticed The Choice,' remarks: "In his other poems there is an easy volubility; the pleasure of smooth metre is afforded to the ear, and the mind is not oppressed with ponderous, or entangled with intricate, sentiment. He pleases many, and he who pleases many, must have some species of merit." John Evelyn. BORN A. D. 1620.-DIED A. D. 1706. JOHN, the son of Richard Evelyn of Wotton, in the county of Surrey, was born at Wotton, on the 31st of October, 1620. When he was eight years old, he began to learn Latin at Lewes, and was afterwards sent to the free school at Southover. In 1637, he was placed as a fellow commoner at Baliol college, Oxford, whither he went, he says, " rather out of shame of abiding longer at school than from any fitness, as by sad experience I found, which put me to relearn all that I had neglected, or but perfunctorily gained." The young Evelyn had, in truth, been a very idle fellow at school, having been entrusted to the charge of his maternal grandmother during this period, whose overfondness had nearly spoiled him. Yet with all his consciousness of deficiency, Evelyn continued to turn his attention to a variety of studies while at college, not neglecting those personal accomplishments which were deemed indispensable to ali gentlemen in these times. Soon after having removed to the Middle Temple, his father died; his mother had died when he was only fifteen years of age, so that he and his brothers were left alone at a very critical period of life. The ominous appearance of public affairs determined young Evelyn, now in his twenty-first year, to pass some time abroad. Genappe was at this time besieged by the French and Dutch; thither Evelyn directed his steps, but did not reach it till four or five days after it had capitulated. He was, however, complimented by being received a volunteer in Captain Apsley's corps; but after trailing a pike for a week, he took his leave of foreign service, and returned to England, where he studied a little, but, to use his own words, "danced and fooled more." On the breaking out of the civil war, Evelyn offered his services to the king at Brentford, but soon afterwards retired to his brother's house at Wotton; and finally, when the covenant was pressed, finding it "impossible to evade the doing very unhandsome things," he obtained the king's permission to go abroad. Evelyn was a minute and delighted observer of every thing rare and curious in art and nature, and has inserted a journal of his continental tour in his auto-biography. The 'gallant citie' of Paris, the treasures at St Denis, the gardens of the Tuilleries and Luxembourg, Cardinal Richelieu's villa and painted arch, the galleys at Marseilles, Prince Doria's aviary at Genoa, and a hundred other objects besides, are all described by him with laboured minuteness of detail. In passing through Italy, his attention seems to have been chiefly attracted by palaces and pictures, gardens and museums, and other objects of art, to the exclusion of the more glorious charms with which nature has invested that 'sunny land.' At Naples he was seized with a fit of home-sickness; but hearing of an English ship bound for the Holy land, he determined to visit the East before resuming the life of a country-gentleman in England,-a determination which was, to his great mortification, frustrated, by his vessel being pressed for the service of the state to carry provisions to Candia, 6 then newly attacked by the Turks. At Padua he was elected Syndicus Artistarum, but declined the honour because it was chargeable' and would have interfered with his plans of travel. Whilst in that city, he embraced the opportunity of hearing the celebrated anatomy lectures in the university, and purchased from Leonænas a set of drawings of the veins and nerves of the human frame, which he presented, on his return home, to the Royal society. Previous to embarking for England, he married the daughter of Sir Richard Browne, the British resident at the court of France. This lady was only in the fourteenth year of her age at the time of her marriage, but she appears to have made a most affectionate and discreet wife, and, when in her will she desired to be buried by her husband's side, she speaks in the following terms of him: "his care of my education was such as might become a father, a lover, a friend, and husband, for instruction, tenderness, affection, and fidelity, to the last moment of his life." In the autumn of 1647, he arrived in England, and was presented at Hampton-court. After 'unkingship,' as he calls it, had been proclaimed, he applied for and obtained passports from Bradshaw for France; but in January, 1651, he returned to England, and settled himself on his estate of Sayes-court, near Deptford, to which he had succeeded in right of his wife. From this place he appears to have kept up a correspondence with the exiled king and his ministers, but the kindness of an old school-fellow, Colonel Morley, then one of the council of state, was successfully exerted to protect him from annoyance on account of the suspicions which he incurred. Evelyn's tastes, however, were fortunately for himself more strongly directed to other objects than those of politics. Sylvan employments, particularly gardening and ornamental planting formed his passion, and to these tranquil and delightful pursuits he devoted himself with a zeal, and industry, and genius, which few have brought to higher tasks. But artificial gardening was in Evelyn's eyes no mean mystery. His scheme of a royal garden comprehended knots, trayle-work, parterres, compartements, borders, banks and embossments, labyrinths, dedals, cabinets, cradles, close-walks, galleries, pavilions, porticos, lanterns, and other relievos of topiary and hortulan architecture, fountains, jettos, cascades, piscines, rocks, grotts, cryptæ, mounts, precipices and ventiducts, gazon-theatres, artificial echoes, automato and hydraulic music. No wonder then that with such an idea of what was necessary to constitute a complete garden, Evelyn should think that "it would still require the revolution of many ages, with deep and long experience, for any man to emerge a perfect and accomplished artist-gardener." Equally great was Evelyn's passion for the more practical science of horticulture. Quoting from Milton, the verses which describe "the first empress of the world regaling her celestial guest," he observes exultingly, "then the hortulan provision of the golden age fitted all places, times, and persons; and when man is restored to that state again, it will be as it was in the beginning." The reader will smile at our artist-gardener's' enthusiasm, but it was in such pursuits that Evelyn attracted the esteem and admiration of some of the most eminent men of his age, who bore willing testimony to the amiableness of his character, and commended the pursuits to which he had devoted himself. Jeremy Taylor declares, in a letter which he wrote to him after his first visit to Sayes-court, that |