It is probable that luckless Morland "made shift" to get the money, and to waste it in fruitless attempts to get himself free, for the following, in six months after, shows the sport he made for the Philistines in carrying out his notable device for getting his "marriage annulled."

"MORLAND TO PEPYS.

66

"17 May, 1688.

SIR,-Being of late unable to goe abroad by reason of my lame hip, which gives me great pain, besides that it would not be safe for me at present by reason of that strumpet's debts, I take the boldness to entreat you, that according to your wonted favours of the same kind, you would be pleased at the next opportunity to give the King the following

account.

"A little before Christmas last, being informed that she was willing for a sum of money to confess a pre-contract with Mr. Cheek, and at the same time assured both by hers and my own lawyers that such a confession would be sufficient for a sentence of nullity, I did deposit the money, and accordingly a day of trial was appointed, but after the cause had been pleaded, I was privately assured that the judge was not at all satisfied with such a confession as hers, as to be a sufficient ground for him to null the marriage. So that the design came to nothing.

"Then I was advised to treat with her, and give her a present sum, and a future maintenance, she giving me sufficient security never to trouble me more; but her demands were so high! I could not consent to them.

"After this, she sent me a very submissive letter by her own advocate. I was advised, both by several private friends and some eminent divines! to take her home, and a day of treaty was appointed for an accommodation.

"In the interim, a certain gentleman came on purpose to my house, to assure me that "I was taking a snake into my bosom," forasmuch as she had for six months past, to his certain knowledge, been kept by, and cohabited with, Sir Gilbert Gerrard, as his wife.

"Upon which, making further inquiry, that gentleman furnished me with some witnesses, and I having found out others, I am this term endeavouring to prove adultery against her, and to obtain a divorce, which is the present condition of your most faithful and humble servant, "S. MORLAND."

Here it would appear as if the hapless Benedick "saw land" amidst the ocean of trouble around him. His adultery plea seemed to speed better than his other devices; in less than three months he had gotten sentence of divorce pronounced, after "many hott disputes between the doctors of the civil law," and "subject to appeal within 15 days!" Morland seemed quit of his Dalilah for life, with only the slight drawback of having to settle her "little bills!" contracted from the day of marriage to the day of sentence, "in which he saw a sufficiency of trouble." We have said that Morland seemed to be rid of his tormentor, but it was in seeming only; the "Ides of March were come," but not

past. Within the ominous "fifteen days" we have our luckless hero making fresh signals of distress to his old pupil Pepys, through whom he seems to have thought it his duty to make all his miseries and troubles periodically known to the King. But the king's own troubles were by this time thickening round him; he was at war with the Universities, the seven Bishops! the whole mind and energies of Protestant England, and we may easily conceive that neither Pepys nor Pepys's master had much attention or commiseration to spare for the following detail of the fresh sorrows of this "doited old man." James was, in fact, at this very moment at the turning-point of his destiny. Smarting under his defeat in the bishops' trial, just finished in Westminster Hall, he and his browbeating, blaspheming Chancellor Jeffreys were goading the "High Commission Court" to bring in the clergy of England, en masse, as culprits, for not reading the memorable dispensing "declaration." Little likelihood was there that, in such a crisis, Sir Samuel Morland could engage the thoughts of either of the three for a single instant. However, he does not fail to urge his suit as usual, in the following dolorous epistle :

SIR S. MORLAND TO MR. PEPYS.

"28 July, 1698. "SIR,-Presuming that your great affairs will oblige you to be with the king at Windsor, and that my Lord Chancellor (Jeffreys) will be there likewise, I beg leave acquaint you, that since the sentence of divorce was solemnly pronounced by the judge, upon as fair proof as ever was brought into Doctors' Commons, Sir Gilbert Gerrard, who has kept her ever since Christmas last, and still keeps her, and has hitherto fee'd lawyers to support her unjust cause against me, has proceeded to get a certain proctor to enter an appeal against the sentence, and this morning word is sent me, that they either have or will petition my Lord Chancellor to grant a commission of appeal, in pretending that the king's advocate and proctor have proceeded illegally in this tryal, &c. Now the very day the sentence was pronounced, by way of caution I put in a Caveat at my Lord Chancellor's office, to pray that my Lord would not grant a commission of appeal before he had sent for the counsel at both sides, and been informed howtmine had proceeded. And the favour I now beg of you is, that you will be so kind to move the king to speak one word* to my Lord Chancellor to that effect, so that I may have some

* Morland's incessant begging for "one word" from the king in his favour reminds me to append a well-known and characteristic "mot" of our "Iron Duke," in reply to an importunate but not approved relative.

"The Hon. and Rev. to the Duke of Wellington. "One word' from you and I am a Bishop.

"Dear Duke,

THE REPLY.

"Dear

"Not one word' from

"Yours, &c.,

"Yours, &c.,

"WELLINGTON."

end of all my troubles and vexations, which have almost utterly ruined me already, assuring you that this is only a project of the adverse party to weary out by a continual expense, as "gutta cavat lapidem," and at last to insult me. humble and faithful servant, "S. MORLAND.

66 Your very

Here our luckless fortune-hunting promovent, who "went out for wool, and came home shorn to the quick," disappears from the record. The lawyers' "long vacation" hung up his divorce suit, appeal and all, and when November term came, a greater divorce case-even the divorce of Dynasty from a Throne!-engrossed the attention of all men. Jeffreys, instead of issuing commissions of appeal, was himself in the guise of a coal-bargeman, with his fierce brows shaved off, appealing piteously to his guards "for God's sake to lodge him in the Tower," and to "keep off the raging mob howling for his blood!" Of Morland's divorce bill we hear no more, but it is probable that with the Stuart régime fell their pensions and charges on the revenue, and that Morland's wife and her paramour, finding him no longer worth plundering, ceased to annoy him. We can trace him as living on, feeble and blind, to the year 1696; one more glimpse we catch of him, as an author, so late as the year before his death. There is a very small and curious volume, entitled the "URIM OF CONSCIENCE," by "Sir Samuel Morland, Knight and Baronet: London, 1695,"—in which the author, adverting to his having been blind for the previous three years, puts forth many original and curious speculations on the state and prospects of human beings. He also takes occasion to criticise "Milton's Paradise Lost," and "Hobbes's Leviathan," with equal severity; and three quaint but well-composed prayers at the end would seem to indicate as if the aged man had found it "good for him to have been afflicted."

I looked in vain through this little volume for any reference to any of the former phases of his varied and eventful life, but could find nothing more definite than the following apologetic confession, p. 38:

66

Though I had frequent calls to labour in God's vineyard, yet nevertheless I chose rather to gratify my own roving fancy, and satisfy my vain curiosity, in ranging abroad and making inquiry into the manners and customs of foraigne countries, and then to enter into the secret intreagues and mysterious transactions of my own, where I had opportunity to hear, see, and observe many things which must be buried in oblivion!”

The next year saw poor old Sir Samuel Morland consigned to the oblivion of the grave, little thinking, doubtless, how in another generation he was to be disentombed from oblivion, first in the diary of his friend and patron; and again, by a Paul Pry" in this excursus down one of the "By-ways of History."

66

R.

ARCHBISHOP WHATELY: "THOUGHTS AND

APOPHTHEGMS."*

His Eminence is not a title admissible in the hierarchy of our Church; else were it due, in no mere titular sense, to Archbishop Whately, who stands out in high relief, pre-Eminently, the man of letters, a power in literature, from among his right reverend brethren. We may severally sympathise more with the "views" of other of the literary bishops; with the high-and-dry tone of much-baited Bangor, or the stringent sacerdotalism of undaunted Exeter, or the doughty Protestantism of bellicose Cashel, or the seemingly high-and-low eclecticism of Samuel Oxon; but whatever our private leanings, in this direction or in that, we can hardly dispute the claim of the Archbishop of Dublin, as an author of influence, to be esteemed facile princeps on the episcopal bench.

In certain leading features of composition and habit of thought, there is a pretty near affinity between this illustrious prelate and Archdeacon Paley. Both writers are distinguished by remarkable clearness of mental vision, by a peculiarly English sagacity of judgment, by an exceptional degree of liberality-some will say sheer latitudinarianism-and by a felicitous mode of expression, enviably direct and lucid, and rich in illustrations of a sometimes racy and an always aidful sort.

But if Dr. Whately challenges notice on the score of what is welcomed in him as "practical shrewdness" and "sound common sense," he is yet none of your merely practical and common-sense models. If he is liberal to a rich and rare degree, he is not the latitudinarian that latitude-men would have him to be. Consult him, for instance, on the subject of "common sense," and he will warn you, that, while the pedantry of learning and science has often been dwelt upon, and deservedly ridiculed, there is another danger on the opposite side, which is seldom, if ever, mentioned, though it is a folly quite as great as the other, of a yet more intolerable character, and still more hopeless-" the pedantry of common sense and experience." He will tell you that for one person who is overbearing you on account of his knowledge of technical terms, there are five or six still more provokingly impertinent with their common sense and experience. "Their common sense will be found nothing more than common prejudice; and their experience will be found to consist in the fact that they have done a thing wrong very often, and fancy they have done it right. In former times, men knew by experience that the earth stands still, and the sun rises and sets. Common sense taught them that there could be no Antipodes; since men could not stand with their heads downwards, like flies. Experience taught the King of Bantum that water could not become solid. And the experience and common sense of one of the most observant and intelligent of historians, Tacitus, convinced him that for a mixed government to be so framed as to combine the elements of royalty, aristocracy, and democracy, must be next to im

* Selections from the Writings of Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, with his Grace's Permission. Bentley. 1856.

626 ARCHBISHOP WHATELY: "THOUGHTS AND APOPHTHEGMS."

possible, and that if such a one could be framed, it must inevitably be very speedily dissolved."-Or, again, consult the Archbishop on the rights and duties of free thought. No one more noted for strenuous opposition to every tendency to cramp, confine, or hoodwink the mind of man; yet, is he latitudinarian in any lax sense, at the cost of Christian principle, to the disparagement of its doctrinal standards? Hardly so, since he is urgent to enforce such monitions as the following: "Any Christian minister who should confine himself to what are sometimes (erroneously) called 'practical sermons'-i.e. mere moral essays, without any mention of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity-is in the same condition with the heathen philosophers, with this difference, that what was their misfortune is his fault." Or this caveat against a "parlous want" in Miss Edgeworth's fictions: "Those works of fiction are worse than unprofitable that inculcate morality, with an exclusion of all reference to religious principle. This is obviously and notoriously the character of Miss Edgeworth's moral tales. And so entire and resolute is this exclusion, that it is maintained at the expense of what may be called poetical truth: it destroys, in many instances, the probability of the tale, and the naturalness of the characters." That Christianity does exist, he goes on to say, every one must believe as an incontrovertible truth; nor can any one deny that, whether true or false, it does exercise, at least is supposed to exercise, an influence on the feelings and conduct of some of the believers in it. Hence he maintains, that to represent persons of various ages, sex, country, and station in life, as practising, on the most trying occasions, every kind of duty, and encountering every kind of danger, difficulty, and hardship, while none of them ever makes the least reference to a religious motive, is as decidedly at variance with reality-what is called in works of fiction unnatural-as it would be to represent Mahomet's enthusiastic followers as rushing into battle without any thought of his promised paradise. So much on the mere charge of a blemish in art,. perceivable by every reader, whatever may be his religious or non-religious persuasion. But a higher question than that of taste is involved-the studious suppression of reference to the motive power of religion. "This vital defect in such works should be constantly pointed out to the young reader; and he should be warned that, to realise the picture of noble, disinterested, thorough-going virtue, presented in such and such an instance, it is absolutely necessary to resort to those principles which in these fictions are unnoticed. He should, in short, be reminded that all those things that are lovely and of good report,' which have been placed before him, are the genuine fruits of the Holy Land; though the spies who have brought them bring also an evil report of that land, and would persuade us to remain wandering in the wilderness." The greater stress is to be laid on passages to this effect, in the writings of Archbishop Whately, because it is not unusual to hear him spoken of as a type of indifferentism in such matters- -as though it were not possible to qualify an ardent zeal for the free course of thought, and a decided stand against the extravagances of dogma, by an enlightened jealousy of excesses in the opposite direction, and a vigilant repression of reactionary licence.

The biblical illustration at the close of the passage just quoted, exemplifies the happy manner of the Archbishop in introducing a simile. Similes grave and gay, imaginative and homely, might be cited in utmost