officers would have joined him. But he took no part, as it chanced, in the mutiny which broke out in the corps on its being ordered off to Holland, after the revolution, and the command of it given to old Schomberg; and he was permitted, on that account, by favour of General Ginkle, to exchange into Talmash's Grenadiers, two companies of whom were, at that moment, on their march to Liverpool, there to embark for Ireland. The war in that country being brought to a conclusion, by the treaty of Limerick, his regiment was sent to Flanders, whither he accompanied it, and served through all King William's campaigns-none of them too honourable-up to the peace of Ryswick. He joined the army again at Nymveguen, on the breaking out of the war afresh in 1702; but was, as I have already mentioned, forced to quit it, for good, by the wound which he had got at Ramilies. He had been at that time upwards of nine-and-twenty years a soldier, and present in forty-and-odd battles; and, what was a very singular thing, for a most bold and hazarding man, had escaped thitherto without a scratch.

What with prize-money, picked up in Flanders, and a small succession, which fell to him at my grandfather's death,* my father had scraped together nearly fourteen hundred guineas, when he returned to England in 1706. This sum, or almost all of it, he laid out in the purchase of some land and an old fashioned manor-house upon it, called the Grange, at MNapier.

in Northamptonshire, that had once belonged to the family of

Of his brothers, one had long been dead, unmarried, and the other had gone to settle in Penn's colony, and was never heard of afterwards; and my father did not, why I cannot tell, seek to renew the old intimacy with the elder branch of the family in Staffordshire. Perhaps he expected advances to be made to him, which being neglected, or his return to England unknown, he was too proud a man to seek for. Be this as it might, there were no family obstacles in the way, upon any side, when he fell in love with and married my mother, the daughter of a small Farmer in the village; though he would not, I dare say, very much have minded them had such existed, for he was, as I have always heard, both a wise and resolved man, who troubled himself very little indeed with the opinions of other people, but sought for happiness in his own way, and was wont to stop, as impertinent meddlers, those that were about to tell him what the world thought of his actions.

* He died in 1694 poor, but of excellent repute-"Laissant pour Tout son partage

Beaucoup d'honneur, peu d' heritage."-J. W.

Judging from the way in which my mother used to speak of him, and the deep and unforgetting sorrow with which she lamented his loss, they must have been a very happy couple. Indeed, with a temper and disposition like hers, it could not easily have been otherwise. But their happiness did not last long; for my father's Ramilies wound, which had never been thoroughly healed, broke out afresh, and after several months cruel sufferings he died, just as he had entered on the third year of his marriage. I was not christened, though nearly a year old, until a few days before my father's death. He could not, I believe, make up his mind whether to call me James, after Monmouth and the last of the Stuart kings, or John, after Marlbro' and Dundee; but the pusillanimity of the two former, added to its being an old family name, decided him, at length, in this important matter, in favour of the latter appellation. My mother, most likely, had it been left to her, would have chosen differently -for Monmouth was her favourite hero; and she maintained, womanlike, that it was only his love for the Lady Henrietta that had made him demean himself, so pitifully, in the presence of his uncle, King James. She had an aunt at Todington, in Bedfordshire, that had been waitingwoman, many years before, to the Lady Wentworth, and had lived with her and the Duke, at Bruxelles and other foreign places; and this good woman had filled her mind with a sort of idolatry for Monmouth, never .wearied with telling her how handsome and graceful he was, of what gay yet gentle manners, and of how tender and affectionate a heart.

I loved my mother very dearly, and well indeed did she deserve it; for a kinder creature, or a more beautiful one, has rarely walked upon the face of the earth. Nature had given her good parts, and they were not without cultivation. She could read and write excellently; but she was of so soft and confiding a disposition, that anybody might cheat her who chose, and had the heart to do it. She and I were everything to each other, and she would consult me, young as I was, upon all matters, small and great. I don't think she ever ordered our dinner, without first asking me what I would like to have. I am carried back, when I think of her, to those old times when I used to stand by her knee, as she sate at work, in the great cheerful parlour-window at M, telling me stories of my father's battles and what an ancient house he came of. Then she would put by her work, take me by the hand, and we would walk down together to the churchyard, where his remains rested, and stand and talk about him over his grave. She never missed going there herself for one single day, be the weather what it might, from the time of his burial until she herself was laid beside him. I would have chopped off my right hand rather than have done anything to pain or offend her, though it were ever so little. This seems childish enough now; but who

is not a child through life, or ought not to be one in his feelings, where his mother is concerned?*

*[The following note I have cut out of the context. If the reader is unwilling to pardon it on account of its singularity, it is likely, I fear, to find little grace in his eyes.-J. B.]

"It puts me out of patience with our playwrights, and still more with the French ones, when I think of the tender and pure affection which subsisted between my mother and myself. One would really imagine, from any tragedy that has been written for the last sixty years, that men were sent into the world for no other purpose than to become the willing slaves and fools of some imperious, ranting, stage heroine-' terror Virgo Virorum,' as was monkishly said of Elfleda—or some pretty piece of imbecility, a Portia or Marcia, that being any man's infatuator, for more than a fit of time, might move one's scorn or wonder. If literature owed no other debt to the great name of Shakespeare, she were unspeakably obliged to him for that he hath shewed what noble dramas may be written that either touch not at all upon that passion or incidentally only, as it occurs in the world and men's lives; or when 't is made their subject 't is only in a few of them, which being compared with the number that he wrote might serve to shew its measure and proportion in relation to the other passions of the soul; nor are such by any means his best dramas, or comparable with "Lear,' or 'Macbeth,' or 'Hamlet.'

"When Lee makes temperate Scipio rant and rave,

And Hannibal a whining am'rous slave,

I laugh; and wish the hair-brain'd fustian fool

In Busby's hands, to be well whipp'd at school.'

"I never read a tragedy of that writer—or of Mr. Dryden, or, with the honourable exception of Mr. Southerne, of any of our living dramatists-but I heartily agree with my Lord Rochester, and would consign them all to Orpilius. We buy dearly, to my thinking, the magnanimous, the almost divine character of Cato, in Mr. Addison's great play, by the folly and impertinence of the love scenes; and these, 't is commonly believed, were added on the advice of his friends, after it had first been written without 'em, to gratify the tastes of the town.

"But 't is the mode, and to rail or to reason against that, is as useless as to bid the sea-waves stand still and come no farther. The days of miracles are gone by, and no man, of his natural power, can make the sun to halt in the mid heavens. Till evening comes it holds on its course: and posterity and later judgments are the evening of tastes and opinions. 'Tis but by that light we see things clearly, stripped of their short-lived blaze and glitter now our eyes wink and are dazzled.

"If, in the words of Montaigne, we were to look upon love-books 'apart and more materially,' and spend an hour or two in the reading of that most excellent chapter of his, entitled 'the verses of Virgil;' or, what the late admirable Bishop Huct, sæclo mortuus Superis superstes,' wrote about it, who recommends its treatment 'methodiquement et par les règles de la medicine,' and likens it jocularly, elsewhere, to 'the measles and small-pox, which most people suffer from, some time or other, and the more dangerous the later they are contracted;' or what we find in Cælius Aurelianus, who compares the fruition of it to the lesser Epilepsy, 'siquidem similem faciat, &c.;' or what Brown says, in the Religio Medici,' ''tis an odd unworthy piece of folly

When a husband loses his wife, early in life, he sheds floods of bitter tears, tosses sorrowfully about in the bed she once shared with him, swears that he shall never be comforted, and commonly ends, in a year or so, by going into the world and looking out for a successor to her. Widowers at thirty, for the most part, marry again; and some, upon second bereavements, take to themselves third helpmates. Such men's love for their wives cannot, surely, be of a much higher order than their affection for a horse or a dog. 'Tis a reparable loss, and being filled up again, is looked upon with tenderness indeed and kindly expression, but hardly with affliction. But the loss of a mother, what can supply?

that our cooled imaginations revolt at, &c.;' or the learned licentious Middleburger, Adrian Beverland, in his strange book, 'de fornicatione cavendâ ' — ' nihil magis ridiculum est quam Eterozugon, &c.;' or one or two of Doctor Swift's poems;-I think we should have, for a while to come, but small stomachs for a love-play.

"It's a saying of a cucumber, to be found in Sir James Turner's 'Pallas Armata,' that when scraped and sliced, peppered and vinegared, it is only fit to be thrown away. So 'tis, to my mind, with our triumphs over the other sex. For the pleasure of them is chiefly in the chase, and our own hot exaggerating thoughts; and the bright colours fray from the butterfly's wings, when they are grasped by the possessing hand.

"Where there is passion there must needs be satiety, and disgust follows on the heels of desire-like a shadow and a retribution. 'Drinking,' says Congreve, 'is very pleasant; but, unluckily, it quenches a man's thirst;' and we hate, after dinner, the continuing odour of meat.

"Qui satur est pleno laudat jejunia ventre,'

is a true verse of the Mantuan's, and hateful 'tis that it should be true. Love is painted blind; but the bandage speedily drops off, to be picked up again and replaced for a time or two, afterwards altogether. If Mr. Hobbes' definition of happiness, 'that 't is a constant succession of gratified desires,' were in a sensual way to be carried out, the most to be envied, of all human beings, were those legendary queens and princesses that had a fresh paramour every night, whom they turned into a beast the next morning.

"Omnia nocte vident, nil cras meminêre lucernæ."

"Tis a strong thing on the side of authority what Milton and Sir Thomas Brown, the foremost poet of any country and the third or second prose writer of our own, have wrote of Polygamy and Divorce. Milton, 't is well known, was as ardent and unabashed an advocate of the liberty of unlicensed divorce as of the liberty of unlicensed printing:

""For fierce and froward Miltonist

The nuptial knot would aye untwist.'

Matrimony, he seems to have thought, should be circumscribed by that Cæsarean law that placed it on the same footing as friendship (‘adeo ut pactum matrimoniale huic non aliud haberetur quam sociorum contractus qui èo usque stabilis manet dum in eodem consensu utrinque perseveratur et renunciante societati alterutro solvitur.'—Selden, in his book-de Jure Nat. et Gent., lib. 5., chap. vii.). And with what violent asperity

Many years have passed since mine died-years so crowded with adventures, and dangers, and crimes, of most descriptions, save mean ones, that I scarce retain, like the Argonautic ship, a piece of the being I then was, yet my heart for her is as tender as ever. Scores of times, God is my witness, I have been stopped from the perpetrating of some savage deed, by the thought of her, gliding like a ghost between me and the object of my rage.

I was thirteen years old when she died. She had no illness. She came into my room, the night before, picked up and folded my clothes, which I had thrown about the floor, and after promising to go down

and contempt he treated those that differed from him, in that way of thinking, we see in that Seventh Sonnet of his, against the impugners of his Tetrachordon.

"Brown, who appears to have looked upon Polygamy pretty much in the light of a second marriage, thought of one and the other as Donne did of suicide, 'that they were not so necessarily sins as that they could not possibly be otherwise for neither,' says he, do I altogether disallow Polygamy, which, considering some times and the unequal number of the sexes, may also be necessary.' Two years after his death a bolder defender of it sprang up in the person of the Protestant minister Lyserus, in that famous and learned book of his 'Polygamia Triumphatrix,' wherein he argues for the allowableness, among other strange grounds, for that God hath sometimes permitted, nowhere denounced it: 'et cui Deus revelat ea quæ ad ipsum propriè non spectant certè non abscondet ea quæ ad salutem ipsius æternam referunt '-if the Deity condescends to tell a man many things that don't at all concern him, He would never have left him in the dark about matters touching his eternal salvation-Thesis 45., pag. 258; which, truly, is what Campeggio thought, as I read in 'David Ancillon,' but had not the courage to assert.

"Ochinus and Martin Bucer, of Divorce, have both of them been Englished, the latter by Milton himself; and the other great reformer, that wrote approbatively both of that and Polygamy, was Theodore Beza, no incompetent judge, unquestionably, for he had three wives of his own and ran away with his tailor's, and was indeed inordinately fond of descanting on such sort of subjects, as we may see by those Treatises of his 'De fide Meretricum,' et cetera, which he published under the name of Passavant. Others that have writ as freely on them, and those men of the first rank both for learning and morals, were the Jesuits Sanchez and Raynaudus—the former in that extraordinary folio of his 'De Matrimonio,' of which the tenth book is devoted to Divorce, and the latter in his twentieth and unacknowledged volume, 'Apopompous,' as he calls it, the scapegoat of his writings-both of them authors of the loosest language and the chastest and most saintly lives, 'pagina prava, proba vita,' so that it was not inaptly said of them 'that they, like the three Hebrews of old, had passed through the burning fiery furnace without scorching a hair of their head;' and of Sanchez, in particular, I find, in that account of his life wrote by Combecius a year or two after his death, that it had been vouchsafed to him, when young, to be made the subject of a miracle-for having been born dumb, and so continued until his fifteenth year, he burst his tongue in an effort of prayer, as Croesus' son at his father's danger, and Peirescus in his palsy."

EE