Ken left Winchester a superannuate, in 1655-6, and subsequently became a probationer-fellow of Merton College, Oxford; during his residence in which University he contracted that friendship with Lord Weymouth, which led, in the reverses of his lot, when the loyal clergy had "fallen upon evil tongues and evil days," and when he had no home upon earth, to the asylum in that noble friend's mansion, where he closed his eyes.

In perusing the history of a period so inauspicious to the Episcopal Church of England, we feel ourselves irresistibly impelled to institute an inquiry into the relation it bears to our own days. a reference may safely be made to Mr. Bowles :

On this head,

Formerly petitions were sent to both Houses of Parliament, "that it would please them to promote true godliness, and take their estates from obese Bishops, oscitant Deans, and unworking Clergy." A cry was raised throughout the land in favour of the painstaking Clergy, that is, Calvinistic Puritans! And do we not hear the same cry revived? A distinction is made between the Rector, with tithes, and the working Curate, with a miserable stipend. The stipend at present is such as to induce a thousand uneducated and illiterate men to press into the Church for one substantial reason-the stipend! Such illustrious workers have often shewn much zeal-less knowledge and not unfrequently with as little character as judgment! The stipend, which was forty pounds per annum forty years ago, is now 150l.”—P. 201.

In his days of health and strength, and residing necessarily on his living, where is there a Clergyman who is not working, unless exempted by ill health from residence; or, as in some cases, holding two livings? He, besides his weekly duties, instructs the children, visits the poor, prays over the sick in the parish where he has been long resident, as much, and with as warm, why not warmer interest, than any Curate? When a Curate is resident in a parish in which the Rector or Vicar cannot reside, having another living, and being exempted by act of Parliament or license-most active, and laborious, and anxious, is generally the life of the working Curate, but not more than a conscientious Rector or Vicar; though, among ten thousand persons, there must of course be many individual exceptions. But, let us see who, in a higher sense, are the working Clergy? Not merely the Curate, or Rector, who does his duty in his parish. In a much higher and more appropriate sense, the Horsleys, the Paleys, the Fabers, the Magees, the Lawrences; the thousand eloquent defenders of Christianity against assailants; the ten thousand vindicators of truth; the host of learned elucidators of the Scriptures, from those who translated the Bible to the present day. These are the working Clergy; and these, almost without exception, are from the higher stations or orders of the Clergy. But I as warmly say, whenever such working Clergymen are found among those whom the sunshine of preferment has not visited, they have a claim, a paramount claim, on their more prosperous brethren. Many such examples I do know; many of the greatest talents and of the purest lives are found scattered through our Sion, yet are their grey hairs unremembered. As to sinecures, those who are called to reside at their cathedrals attend the service of the cathedral every day; for three months they cannot go beyond the sound of the bells; they preach in their turns; and, when the term of residence is expired, they go back again to their village duties, as parochial Clergymen. Besides this, I affirm, and the proof is easy, that the most learned, the most eloquent works, that throw a radiance on our intellectual and Christian country, are not from the lower Clergy. Jewel, Butler, Bull, Sherlock, Pearson (Creed), Douglas, Tillotson, Taylor, Lowth, &c., are from the highest orders; and those of the working Clergy, are the noblest and most useful. Pp. 202-204.

We wish that my Lord Mountcashel, and his synod of Church reformers, would peruse this passage, and indeed the whole work before us; but we much fear, from the measures of which his lordship and his colleagues have professed themselves advocates, that the real good of the Church, and the propagation of Christian knowledge, means, in their vocabulary, the adoption of certain tenets, and that peculiar kind of piety, which brought Laud to the block, and, for a season, banished Episcopacy from Great Britain. We doubt not, my lords Mountcashel and King, if a court of "Tryers" were again to be established, would, like their prototypes, dismiss thousands of pious and deserving men to seek their bread, because they would not satisfactorily answer upon questions of experiences and grace. But we would recommend these solifidians to reform themselves before they attack others;-not to "strain at gnats and swallow camels,"—not to boast of conscience and piety, and forget that the English language contains such a word as CHARITY. If the crimes imputed to the Church are, in some rare instances, discoverable, they exist not amongst the old, plain, pious, unostentatious Clergy, but amongst the disciples of the Genevan school, who, with a nobleman at their head, substitute cant for Christianity, and who, under pretence of being dutiful sons of the Church, are her most insidious and most fearful enemies. Were we disposed to imitate our calumniators, we could point out a peer, who is well calculated to tread in the footsteps of the notorious Earl of Pembroke; a degenerate Clergyman, whose principles are those of the blaspheming Cheynell; and others of the clique, who might find types in Prynne and Hugh Peters. But let us pursue the career of Ken to the termination of the first volume of his life, a subject at once more profitable and pleasing; in the examination of which, however, it is much to be feared, we may again be called upon to compare

eras.

The year after Ken's admission to New College, Oliver Cromwell died; and, thereupon, an entire revolution took place in the habits. and discipline of the University of Oxford. "Square caps" were again resumed. Again, at St. Mary's,—

"The pealing anthem swell'd the note of praise."

Again the chant, as Prynne termed it, "was tossed from side to side;" in reality, heard responsive; and the country revived from the delirium of Puritanism, and true Christian charity flourished under the benign influence of the sons of the Protestant Church. In 1661, Ken proceeded Bachelor of Arts; and, in all probability, shortly after took orders. In 1666, he was unanimously elected a Fellow of Winchester College; and we find him, the same year, in daily communion with his brother-in-law, honest Izaak Walton, who resided with

his friend Morley, Bishop of Winchester. The fortunes of these most interesting characters are so interwoven with the thread of Ken's history at this point, that we feel it our duty to say a few words respecting them. And this we do with greater satisfaction, because the episode of Walton's Prayer-Book, and the Colloquy at his Cottage, are amongst the most beautiful features of the whole book, and will give us an occasion of offering a few observations on the proscription of the Book of "Common Prayer."

Morley was son of Francis Morley, by Sarah, sister to Sir John Denham, the poet. He was born in 1597, and educated at Westminster School, whence he was elected Student of Christ Church, Oxford, and was afterwards domiciliated as Chaplain and friend in the household of Robert, Earl of Carnarvon, where he resided till 1640, being, at that period, appointed Chaplain to Charles I. At this time he held the rectory of Hartfield, in Sussex, which he shortly after exchanged for that of Mildenhall, in Wiltshire. The following year he was appointed Deacon of Christ Church, by the King himself; but notwithstanding, from being considered a rigid Calvinist, he was selected to preach before the Parliament, in 1643. He does not appear, however, to have satisfied his audience of "Purists," as his sermon alone, of all those preached by the select, was not ordered to be published by that august and pious house. That this was no subject of mortification to him will be readily conceived, after the perusal of two short extracts from the " 'truly godly" and charitable discourses of the approved, which, for gratuitous blasphemy, challenge all we ever met with.

Case, in his Sermon before the Commons, 1644, proclaims "God is angry;" and then makes the God of mercy thus expostulate: "Will you not strike? Will you execute judgment, or will you not? Tell me for if you will not, I WILL! [God will strike, unless the Parliament take it out of his hands!] I will have the enemies' blood!

But this blasphemous fiend in the pulpit falls short of the pious Stephen Marshall, in 1641 :-" What soldier's heart would not start deliberately to come into a subdued city, and take the little ones on a spear's point, to take them by the heels, and beat out their brains against the wall! Yet, if this work be to revenge God's Church (the Presbyterian!) against Babylon (the Church of England), he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little ones against a stone-P. 118.

If it is asked, Why we select such passages? we reply, with our author, that otherwise their existence would be disbelieved, and we might be accused of speaking of fanatical preachers without proof. After the death of his early patron, Lord Carnarvon, and his accomplished friend, Lord Falkland, on the field of battle,—after the days of Chillingworth and Hall had been shortened by persecution and contumely, and the martyred Laud had been sentenced to be "hanged, drawn, and quartered,"-Morley himself became the object of puritanic hatred, and was deprived of all he had. Whilst the

king was permitted to have his Chaplains with him, Morley was constantly in attendance, and remained stedfast in his duty till the Presbyterians sternly forbade any spiritual attendance, but that of their own priesthood; on which occasion, that affecting prayer in the Εἰκὼν Βασιλικὴ “ On Parting with his Chaplains,” was composed by the royal sufferer. Morley's last interview with his master was at the period of his being summoned to assist at the treaty in the Isle of Wight; when, as Sir Philip Warwick observes, he was "baited by his cold and astute enemies." Who, indeed, can read the following affecting detail of this honest and faithful servant, without feeling the highest indignation at his fanatical persecutors, and sympathizing on all the sufferings of the martyred Charles? "I never saw him," says Sir Philip, "shed tears but once; and he turned presently his head away, for he was then dictating to me somewhat in a window, and he was loth to be discerned; and the lords and gentlemen were then in the room, and his back was towards them; but I can hereof take my oath, that they were the biggest drops that I ever saw fall from an eye, but he recollected himself, and soon stifled them.”

After the Calvinists had filled the cup of their iniquity by the cold-blooded assassination of their anointed sovereign, Morley, though himself calvinistically inclined, led a life of peculiar sorrow. In March, 1648, he was expelled from his canonry with personal violence, and also deprived of his living of Mildenhall. These misfortunes were, in all probability, the groundwork of Ken's connexion with him, and undoubtedly led to that intimacy which causes both himself and " Piscator" to occupy so conspicuous a place in the volume before us. But this part of the history is so admirably drawn by Mr. Bowles, that we must depute to him the task of introducing these amiable characters to our readers, in a style we can never aspire to imitate:

He was now without house and home in the world, but he remembered the delightful days, when in youth he had been the associate of Lord Falkland; of Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon; of Ben Jonson; of Chillingworth, now left also bereaved by the storm which scattered the best and wisest of their day; of Charles Cotton, the adopted son of Izaak Walton, as he himself had been, in younger days, the adopted son of Ben Jonson. He remembered those times and those men, and having no refuge,- -as some were killed, like the brave and accomplished Falkland, and some struggling themselves, or pursuing, like Hyde, a studious and laborious profession,-he thought of the quiet and contented heart of Cotton's adopted father, Walton, of their early acquaintance, when both were hearers of Donne, of Walton's piety and apostolical simplicity, of his warm but unostentatious attachment to the Church, of his cheerful but humble situation, remote from the storms of public life, when he lived retired, with his beloved Kenna and only one infant, in Staffordshire. Perhaps he had been invited to partake there, when the world frowned, his lonely but pious meal: he knew he should find welcome; and therefore hastened, in the day of adversity, to find peace and protection in the cottage of honest Izaak Walton.-P. 98.

Here, for above a year, with the word of God, and the proscribed "Prayer-Book," they took "sweet counsel together." Here was the stigmatized service of the Church of England performed daily, in secrecy, by the faithful minister of Christ. And we can scarcely imagine a more affecting group, than the simple, placid, apostolic Walton, his dutiful, pious, amiable, and beloved wife, the sister of Ken, the infant child,-and the faithful minister of the Church, dispossessed of all worldly wealth, and here finding shelter, peace, and prayer. We wish our limits would allow us to extract the beautiful imaginary colloquy between these personages: as it is, we can merely offer our faint praise ;-it rivals Southey!

The "PRAYER-BOOK" here read is still in existence; still in the possession of the last descendants of Walton; and is highly interesting and valuable as containing memoranda of the family, and having been the "solamen mali" of Morley and his hosts when all earthly friends were wanting. We can easily conceive how dear that proscribed volume must have been to their hearts; against which this ordinance had been fulminated in 1645, by the intolerant Puritans: "If any person or persons shall use, or cause to be used, the COMMON PRAYER-BOOK, they, and every person so offending therein, shall for the first offence forfeit and pay the sum of five pounds (a large sum in those days); for the second offence the sum of ten pounds; and for the third offence, shall suffer one whole year's imprisonment without bail or mainprize."

On leaving Staffordshire, Morley joined the court of Charles II., when he was about to leave the Hague; and followed him to Jersey. But upon the expedition to Scotland, to take "the solemn league and covenant," he retired to Antwerp, and resided as tutor in the family of Lady Hyde, till the restoration. Upon his return to England, at this glorious event, he preached the thanksgiving-sermon, and shortly after was nominated Dean of Christ Church, and within two months Bishop of Worcester. From Worcester he was translated, in 1663, to Winchester, where he died, aged eighty-seven, surrounded by those who revered him—having but a single year survived his friend Walton, who, after his elevation, lived a beloved and honoured guest within the palace of Winchester, till he closed his eyes on all the "changes and chances" of his mortal life, at the patriarchal age of ninety. We have before observed, that Morley has been accused of Calvinism: to us he appears, not only in the volumes before us, but in the records of impartial history, a sincere and unostentatious Christian. It is easy to use harsh words, and to traduce the character of the departed great, but not so easy to substantiate accusations by proof. Let those who cast the first stone, take heed lest their charity savour somewhat strongly of the Geneva school.