duke of Newcastle, who played a prominent part in the great civil war, who bore himself gallantly till his withdrawal to the continent after Marston moor and who sacrificed a vast fortune for the king's cause, was a most honourable and accomplished', but far from extraordinary, man; in fact, he was manifestly born to be master of the horse, though Monck deprived him of that phase of greatness. In his life, as in that of his wife, there was much moral dignity, and in her personality, as it stands forth from her brief autobiography, there was something which, if less than heroic, is more than merely attractive. The fortunate conformity of tastes and dispositions between the pair, enabled them to weather bravely the protracted storm and, in the end, cheered the rural solitude to which they were relegated by a callous sovereign. The duchess, to alter slightly her own words, 'had been bred to elevated thoughts, not to a dejected spirit; her life was ruled with honesty, attended by modesty, and directed by truth.' These qualities give a charm to her portraiture of herself and her husband from which all her vanities and oddities of thought and style glance off harmlessly; and if literature, arduously as she pursued it, was to her only a noble diversion, it was, nevertheless, an organic part of a noble life.

Turning from military men to statesmen, we find an important contribution to history in Bulstrode Whitelocke's Memorials of the English Affairs from the accession of Charles I to the restoration, first published in 1682, with a somewhat pretentious preface (by the earl of Anglesea). Though in these Memorials the writer does not make any apparent attempt to disguise his opinions, he betrays no intention of colouring his statement of facts either to suit those opinions or to gratify any demand for literary display. By the Whig writers of the earlier part of the eighteenth century he was contrasted to his advantage with Clarendon2; but, in point of fact, there is no basis of comparison between them; for the substance of Whitelocke's Memorials was not put together till after the restoration, and their form admitted of their being extracted at secondhand from the most ordinary sources. At the same time, they are, to make debates more easily understood, interspersed with some more or less verbatim reports of speeches delivered by the writer, as well as with detailed accounts of transactions in which he was personally engaged (such as the Oxford peace negotiations in 1644), together with other fragments of his various

1 Though hardly, as his wife calls him (Life, ed. Firth, p. 201), 'the best lyric and dramatic poet of his age.'

2 See Oldmixon, Clarendon and Whitelocke compared (1729).

autobiographical productions. Thus, the spirit has not entirely gone out of the compilation, and these Memorials retain a value not only for lawyers and students of constitutional history, though their importance as an actual narrative of facts has probably, from more points of view than one, been greatly overrated. Whitelocke occasionally deviates into subjects of less severity-such as his long account of the Inns of court masque in October 16331, ending with the telling phrase: These dreams passed and these pomps vanished.' The Memorials, of course, increase in interest as the times become more and more critical; the account of the king's trial is full of sympathy, which may or may not have been ex post facto. Indeed, in general, Whitelocke showed throughout the civil troubles, the moderation which accorded with his training and his disposition; and this quality which, at the restoration, preserved to him the bulk of his fortune, is impressed upon the character and style of his Memorials at large.

Equally well known is Whitelocke's Journal of his Swedish Embassy in the years 1653 and 1654. Here, the narrative is carried on throughout in the third person, but is interspersed with a number of conversations with Oxenstjerna and others, given in direct dialogue form. The Journal is extremely interesting and entertaining, and offers a picture at firsthand of that most extraordinary woman, queen Christina. She received Whitelocke very politely and, according to English custom, was his valentine on 14 February, when he presented her with a very large lookingglass. Their conversation was at times varied by the offering of copies of Latin verse, which on one occasion the ambassador translated into indifferent English. In the course of his embassy, the queen's design of giving up her crown was communicated to Whitelocke, who witnessed the ceremony of her resignation and the coronation of her successor (30 May 1654) and departed 'rejoicing' on the following day. For his experiences had not been altogether agreeable, and, at night time, there had been occasional disturbances outside his house, and shouts of 'Come out, ye English dogs, ye king-killers, rogues.'

Whitelocke, who had tried to anticipate Monck's fateful march to London by inducing Lambert to attack him, did not attend the Long parliament on its reassembling, but, after sending the great seal to the Speaker, withdrew into the country, where he survived for many years. His Notes upon the King's Writt for choosing members of parliament (1662), which occupied him for some three or four years, and in which Scriptural arguments

1 Vol. 1, pp. 53–62.

hold a prominent place, form a most elaborate comment on the system of English constitutional government. To an earlier date belongs his share in the conference held by him and other heads of the law with the protector and a committee of parliament (April 1657), which ended with Cromwell's declining the title of king. The report of this was published in 1660 under the title Monarchy Asserted to be the best, most Ancient and legall form of Government. Whitelocke left behind him manuscripts, still unprinted and preserved in the British Museum, which are autobiographical in their contents and addressed to his children'.

In the period under notice, the number was necessarily large of narratives dealing with campaigns or other episodes of military and naval life. Several of these are noted elsewhere; but one of them may, in conclusion, find mention here, both because it typifies at once the military and the religious spirit of the age, and because the remembrance of it is evoked in one of the most famous of English books3.

Colonel Robert Munro's-Robertus robore Munro-narrative of his Expedition with the worthy Scots Regiment called M'Keyes Regiment levied in August 1626 was published four years after his death, in 1637, with a dedication to Charles Lewis elector Palatine, 'as it was through the line of his mother that Munro's comrades went out to war.' The regiment served under Christian IV of Denmark in the Lower Saxon war, and then under Gustavus Adolphus, and, after his death, under Oxenstjerna and his generals. After the unfortunate battle of Nördlingen the regiment, as the title-page proceeds to say, was reduced to a single company. Colonel Munro, like the great king whom he served, was as pious as he was brave; and the appendixes to his celebrated book comprise together with an 'Abridgment of Exercises, and divers practical observations, for the younger Officer his Consideration,' 'the Souldiers meditations going on service.' The narrative itself is characteristically divided into sections called 'Duties discharged (for instance, "The twenty-fourth Duty discharged of our March to Mentz, etc.") and Observations thereon'-the soldier's life being thus treated as a sort of pilgrim's progress.

2 See ibid.

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1 See bibliography. In Waverley, vol. 11, chap. XXXVI, where the baron of Bradwardine excuses the devastation of the house of his ancestors by the reflection that doubtless officers cannot always keep the soldier's hand from depredation and spuilzie; and Gustavus Adolphus himself, as ye may read in Colonel Munro his Expedition with the worthy Scotch regiment called Mackay's regiment, did often permit it.' 'Tavie' (Gustavus) is, or was recently, still a familiar name in Sutherlandshire.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

CHAPTER X

ANTIQUARIES

THOMAS FULLER. IZAAK WALTON. SIR THOMAS URQUHART

THE three writers to whom it is proposed to devote the bulk of the present chapter, more particularly Sir Thomas Browne and Fuller, agree in being men who, while showing a lively interest in the present, devoted especial attention to the past; they agree still more-and here without any qualification-in being, though in ways distinctly different, exponents of that extraordinary gift of prosewriting which distinguished the mid-seventeenth century in English literature. The fourth, Sir Thomas Urquhart, had great schemes for the improvement, as he thought it, of the future; but he, also, 'catched the opportunity to write of old things'; and, with a special Scottish differentia, represented the learned and intensely anti-'modern' quaintness of the time in thought and style.

The first and greatest of them-who has been held by certain good wits to have hardly a superior in one kind of English prose, and whose matter, as is not always the case, fully matches his manner—was of a good Cheshire family; but his father had gone into trade as a mercer, and Thomas Browne was born in London on 19 October 1605, in the parish of St Michael-le-Quern, Cheapside. His mother was Anne Garraway, of a Sussex family. There were three other children, but the father died early, and the mother married again, her second husband being Sir Thomas Dutton, apparently the opponent and slayer of Sir Hatton Cheke in a fierce, and rather famous, duel on Calais sands. It is said that the youthful Thomas was defrauded by his guardian; but his stepfather seems to have been guiltless in the matter, and there are not at any time in Browne's life any signs of straitened means, though, towards the close, he complains, like other rich fellows

enough, of losses. He was admitted to a scholarship at Winchester on 20 August 1616; and, in 1623, being then eighteen, went, not to New college, but to Broadgates hall, Oxford, which, during his own residence, was erected into Pembroke college. Here, he graduated B.A. on 30 June 1626, and M.A. on 11 June 1629. Somewhere about this time, he seems to have accompanied his stepfather to Ireland, where Dutton held a post as inspector of fortresses.

The future author of Religio Medici began his professional studies at Oxford, and is said to have actually practised in the county; but this must have been later. Then, and for long afterwards, it was customary to supplement home training in physic by visits to famous foreign schools; and to the two most famous of these, Montpellier and Padua, Browne proceeded—as well as later to the younger school of Leyden, where he took his first doctor's degree. He was abroad three years in all, spending, probably, a year at each place; and he returned home in 1633. After an unknown interval-which may have been occupied by the Oxfordshire practice above referred to-he established himself in a dale south-east of Halifax in Yorkshire, in a house, no longer in existence, named Upper Shebden hall. Here he is supposed to have written or finished Religio Medici; but the circumstances of his books will be dealt with later. On 10 July 1637 he took his M.D. degree at Oxford; and, in the same year (apparently at the suggestion of some old Oxford friends), he moved to Norwich, where he passed the rest of his life. Two years earlier, while at Halifax, he had become a member of the college of physicians; and, four years later, in 1641, he married Dorothy Mileham, daughter of a Norfolk gentleman, with whom he lived for more than forty years and who survived him. Of their numerous children-ten, or eleven, or, according to the best authorities, twelve-only one son, Edward Browne, himself a man of distinction, and three daughters, survived their father. Few details of his life are known, though we have a relatively large number of letters from and to him; but the chief biographical points may be conveniently separated from the story of his books. The civil war broke out shortly after his marriage; Browne was a royalist, and a sincere one, refusing subscriptions for parliamentary purposes at the beginning, and rejoicing heartily in the restoration at the end. But a man of his temperament could hardly have been a violent partisan, or an extravagant selfsacrificer; and it was, perhaps, lucky for him that the district