guished a royalist removed from London, 'gave him a pass and protection for himself and his family under his sign manual and privy signet. The letter from which these expressions are taken is dated June 15, 1658, and Taylor had probably left London for Ireland a short time before.

He settled at Portmore, a place,' says Rust, made for study and contemplation,' where he may have seen the round towers of other days' shining in the wave beneath him as he strayed on the banks of Lough Neagh. He evidently enjoyed this 'most charming recess,'† and writes in a tone of great contentment to Lord Conway, to whom a son and heir had just been born: since my coming into Ireland, by God's blessing and your lordship's favour, I have had plenty and privacy, opportunities of studying much, and opportunities of doing some little good.' He is endeared with the neighbourhood,' he 'would count it next to a divorce to be drawn from it;' he 'would fain account himself fixed there during his life;' if his lordship will but come himself to reside on his Irish estates, he may bore Taylor's ear,‡ and make him his slave for ever.§ Yet he confesses, in the same letter, that, in the absence of Major Rawdon, Lord Conway's brother-in-law and agent, there was nothing around him but ingens solitudo,' and 'the country like the Nomades, without law and justice.' In truth, the troubles of the time penetrated into his pleasant recess. In June, 1659, he writes to Evelyn:-'a Presbyterian and a madman have informed against me as a dangerous man to their religion and for using the sign of the cross in baptism.' This information led to the issuing of a warrant by the Irish Privy Council, which brought him to Dublin early in 1659-60, in the worst of our winter weather,' to the serious detriment of his health. He seems, however, to have obtained an easy acquittal from the Anabaptist commissioners.' On April 9, 1659, he writes to Lord Conway ¶ that his opus magnum, his great book on cases of conscience, is finished, except two little chapters, and that he has sent a servant to London with the copy; he begs his lordship to forward to him the sheets of his work as they were printed, Lord Conway having no doubt frequent communications with friends who resided on his Irish property.

Meantime, Oliver Cromwell was dead, and the reins of government were slipping from the slack hands of his son Richard.

* Printed in Heber's Life,' p. cclxxxvi.

In

+ Taylor dates his epitaph on Dr. Stearne, 'ex amoenissimo recessu in Portmore;' Heber's 'Life,' p. lxxxvii.

Alluding to Exod. xxi. 6.

§ Letter of Feb. 26, 1658-9, in Mr. Murray's possession.

Life,' p. lxxxiv.

Autograph in Mr. Murray's possession.

the

6

the spring of the momentous year 1660 we find Taylor in London; on April 24 in that year he signed the famous Declaration' to General Monk; in May, Charles landed in England; and in June Taylor dedicated to his restored sovereign the work of many laborious years, his Ductor Dubitantium.' .

Charles probably did not bestow much attention on the learned work thus offered to him, for his was not a conscience troubled with doubts; but so eminent a royalist as Jeremy Taylor could not be passed over in the distribution of ecclesiastical preferment. In August, 1660, he was appointed to the see of Down and Connor, to which that of Dromore was afterwards added. Various conjectures have been offered to account for his not having been nominated for an English see; as, that the King wished his natural sister, Taylor's wife, to be removed to a distance from the court; a conjecture which seems in the highest degree improbable, even if we grant the fact, not too well attested, that Joanna Bridges was a daughter of Charles I. It is, of course, possible that Taylor was appointed to an Irish see, simply because he had eminent qualifications for it. If we look to the interests of the diocese, we shall hardly find another man so qualified to preside over it; at once learned, able, and conciliatory; already acquainted with the district, and skilled in the controversy both with Roman Catholics and Presbyterians. Lord Conway, too, seems to have used his influence to procure the appointment of his much-esteemed friend-whom he thought the choicest person in England appertaining to the conscience'-to the diocese in which he was himself most interested.* Yet we cannot help suspecting that Sheldon, the great manager of ecclesiastical patronage in those days, bore Taylor no good will. He had disliked his appointment at All Souls: he had been offended by what he thought his Pelagian theology, and there was perhaps some other cause of rancour in the background; for Taylor, in a piteous letter to Sheldon,† in which he begs to be translated to England if his Grace does not wish him to die immaturely,' says that he had been 'informed by a good hand,' that his Grace had said that he (Taylor) was himself the only hindrance to his being removed to an English bishopric. That which was the hindrance to his being translated to an English bishopric may have been the cause of his being removed from England in the first instance. Whatever the cause of the appointment, we cannot but fear that he left the pleasant society of London, then bubbling with excite

*Taylor says (letter to Lord Conway of March 2, 1660-1, in Mr. Murray's possession) that I am here I owe to my relations to your Lordship.'

† 'Life,' p. cxix,

ment,

ment, for his disturbed diocese, with somewhat the same feelings with which Gregory Nazianzen sought his see in dull and remote Sasima. He was consecrated, with eleven other bishops, in the cathedral church of St. Patrick, Jan. 27, 1660-1, and himself preached the sermon. He had previously, on Ormond's recommendation, been chosen Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dublin, where he found all things in a perfect disorder;' and in February he was made a member of the Irish Privy Council;* neither of these offices was a sinecure.

The state of his diocese may well have filled with dismay a man who loved study and quiet, and shrank from heat and violence. In no part of Ireland had the clearance of the clergy of the Reformed Irish Church been more effectual. The new bishop found himself in the midst of a body of Presbyterians, led by Scotchmen of the school of Cameron, with their original fanaticism exasperated to the utmost by contact with the votaries of Popery and Prelacy. He was received with a storm of denunciation when he visited his diocese before his consecration; the Scotch ministers were implacable; they had agreed among themselves to preach vigorously and constantly against episcopacy and liturgy; they talked of resisting unto blood, and stirred up the people to sedition. The bishop-designate preached every Sunday among them, he invited them to a conference, he courted them with most friendly offers; but they would not even speak with him they had newly covenanted to endure neither the person nor the office of a bishop. They bought his books, and appointed a 'committee of Scotch spiders to see if they could gather or make poison out of them;' they drew up a statement against him, and intended to petition the King against his appointment. Nay, his very life was not safe; not only did they try by every means to take the people's hearts from him, but they threatened to murder him outright. No wonder that he says in despair, 'It were better for me to be a poor curate in a village church than a bishop over such intolerable persons;' no wonder that he begs the Duke of Ormond to give him some parsonage in Munster, where he may end his days in peace.† He had probably but little peace for the remainder of his days; for though many of the laity in his dioceses were well disposed, the opposition of the Presbyterian ministers, who were generally as disloyal to the Government as unfriendly to the bishop, never ceased. In the summer of 1663, we find him again complaining

* He begs Lord Conway's interest to get him placed on the Privy Council, because it would add so much reputation to him among the Scots, and be useful for settling the diocese.' (Letter of Jan. 2, 1660-1, in Mr. Murray's possession). † Letter of Dec. 19, 1660, to the Duke of Ormond, in 'Life,' p. ci.

of

of the meetings of the 'pretended ministers,' of the refractoriness of the people and their mutinous talkings; and a few months before his death he tells Ormond of the advance of the former mischiefs, and believes that the Scotch rebellion of 1655 'was either born in Ireland or put to nurse there.'* The North of Ireland immediately after the Restoration was certainly no place for a bishop who loved peace.

Yet his misery was not without alleviations; the great Ormond supported and encouraged him, and Lord Conway was a steady and sympathising friend. He hoped in the first instance to live at Lisnegarvy [Lisburn], and got a very pretty design for his house' from a gentleman in Dublin that had very good skill in architecture.' Probably, this design was found for the time impracticable, for he continued to reside at Portmore, where he had a house and farm, as we learn from a curious story preserved in Glanvil's 'Sadducismus triumphatus,'‡ of the ghost seen by David Hunter, 'neatherd at the bishop's house at Portmore.' Still, however, he does not seem to have abandoned the hope of having a cathedral and a palace at Lisburn. The church of that place was made a cathedral for the united sees of Down and Connor by letters patent October 22, 1662, the old cathedral of Down having been burnt by Lord-Deputy Gray in 1538, and still lying waste in 1637, when it was the subject of a correspondence between Laud and Strafford,§ which had no result in consequence of the troubles soon following. In 1665, we find him urging upon Lord Conway the care of their 'great concern, the cathedral of Lisburn,' and proposing to his Lordship to give lands in Lisburn in exchange for Church lands, that the bishops may have a 'convenient seat' there. It was important for them to have a strong, as well as a convenient house, for it was not improbable that they might have to maintain themselves in it by force against a rebellion. Again, in a later letter (probably of 1666) he hopes that by this time his Lordship hath some account of the King's letter for their cathedral. He rebuilt the choir of the ruined cathedral of Dromore at his own expense, and the 'handmaid of the Lord,' Joanna Taylor, the bishop's wife, presented the chalice and paten. Nor was this the only form in which his liberality showed itself; all accounts agree, that now that he was able, for the first time in his life, to dispense instead of receiving bounty, he fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and

*See the Letters in Life,' p. ciii.

Letter of March 2, 1660-1, in Mr. Murray's possession.
Reprinted in 'Life,' p. ccxciv.

S Mant's Hist. of the Ch. of Ireland,' p. 512.

Letter of Jan. 28, 1664-5, in Mr. Murray's possession.

¶Life,' cix. cexci.

provided

provided for the fatherless. 'He was,' says Sir James Ware,* 'so charitable to the poor, that, except moderate portions to his daughters, he spent all his income on alms and public works.'

All this time his health appears to have been delicate. We find constantly in his letters that he is suffering from a 'great cold,' with pain and feverishness; more than once he complains, as in the letter to Sheldon above referred to, that the climate in which he lived was unsuitable for him. And he was not without heavy domestic affliction. Of the sons of his second marriage, only one survived the sickness which attacked the household in Wales, and him he buried at Lisburn. Two sons of the first marriage grew up to manhood, both of whom seemed to have shared in the wild follies of the Restoration period. The eldest, a captain of horse, fell in a duel with a brother officer named Vane, who also died of his wounds; † and the good bishop almost sank under the blow. The second became secretary to Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and died at his house in Baynard's Castle a few days before his father, who was probably spared the pain of hearing of his death. The bishop himself was attacked by fever at Lisburn, on the 3rd of August, 1667, and died after ten days' illness, in the seventh year of his episcopate. He was fifty-four years of age, if we suppose him to have been born in 1613, or fifty-six, if, as the records of Caius College seem to indicate, he was born in 1611. Whatever his age, his fancy had not grown dim, nor the natural force of his intellect abated.

Probably no English divine, even in those days when so many were cast out of their stalls or their parsonages, led a more chequered life than Jeremy Taylor. Cambridge, London, Oxford, Uppingham, the royal army, the retreat in Wales, the lectureship and the bishopric in Ireland, all pass before us in a life not prolonged much beyond middle age. No doubt these many changes, with their attendant miseries, and the feeling of being constantly under suspicion, must have been very grievous to the soul of one who loved study and evidently enjoyed the refinements of courtly society. In fact, a tone of querulousness does appear here and there in his letters; yet on the whole we believe that Taylor, in the midst of his distresses and wanderings, was a happy man; he had the disposition which instinctively withdraws itself from the contact of the petty roughnesses of life and seizes such enjoyments as are attainable. He would walk in the sunshine while sunshine was to be found, and not

'Hist. of Ireland,' Ed. Harris, ii. 210.

This rests on the authority of Lady Wray, Taylor's granddaughter, who, making her statement at an advanced age, has probably confused some of the details. See 'Life,' pp. cxx. ccxcviii.

voluntarily