Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

unreasonably timorous, who thinks his hopes at an end when he dwells in sickness. For men die without rule, and with and without occasions, and no man suspecting or foreseeing any of death's addresses; and no man in his whole condition is weaker than another. A man in a long consumption is fallen under one of the solemnities and preparations to death; but at the same instant the most healthful person is as near death, upon a more fatal and a more sudden but a less discerned cause. There are but few persons upon whose foreheads every man can read the sentence of death, written in the lines of a lingering sickness, but they sometimes hear the passing bell ring for stronger men, even long before their own knell calls at the house of their mother to open her womb and make a bed for them. No man is surer of to-morrow than the weakest of his brethren: and when Lepidus and Aufidius stumbled at the threshold of the senate, and fell down and died, the blow came from heaven in a cloud; but it struck more suddenly than upon the poor slave that made sport upon the theatre with a premeditated and foredescribed death: "Quod quisque vitet, nunquam homini satis Cautum est in horas." There are sicknesses that walk in darkness; and there are exterminating angels, that fly wrapt up in the curtains of immateriality and an uncommunicating nature; whom we cannot see, but we feel their force, and sink under their sword; and from heaven the veil descends that wraps our heads in the fatal sentence. There is no age of man but it hath proper to itself some posterns and outlets for death, besides those infinite and open ports out of which myriads of men and women every day pass into the dark, and the land of forgetfulness. Infancy hath life but in effigy, or like a spark dwelling in a pile of wood: the candle is so newly lighted, that every little shaking of the taper, and every ruder breath of air puts it out, and it dies. Childhood is so tender, and yet so unwary; so soft to all the impressions of chance, and yet so forward to run into them, that God knew there could be no security without the care and vigilance of an angel keeper: and the eyes of parents and the arms of nurses, the provisions of art, and all the effects of human love and providence are not sufficient to keep one child from horrid mischiefs, from strange and early

calamities and deaths, unless a messenger be sent from heaven to stand sentinel, and watch the very playings and sleepings, the eatings and drinkings of the children; and it is a long time before nature maketh them capable of help: for there are many deaths, and very many diseases to which poor babes are exposed; but they have but very few capacities of physic; to shew that infancy is as liable to death as old age, and equally exposed to danger, and equally incapable of a remedy; with this only difference, that old age hath diseases incurable by nature, ai.d the diseases of childhood are incurable by art; and both the states are the next heirs of death.

Funeral Sermon on the Countess of Carbery.

P. 69, 1. 3.

P. 69, 1. 5.

P. 69, l. 15.

[blocks in formation]

One suspects “he but approves it."

Received. A noteworthy instance of the disorderly syntax of the or "he received" are of course required. Similarly in the end

day. "Receive"

of the sentence the tenses are in complete confusion.

P. 71, 1. 6. Solemnities, in the strict sense of "usual formalities," "customary accompaniments."

P. 71, 1. 11. They, referring to the "few persons."

WE

HENRY MORE.

Henry More, one of the chiefs of the group callea the Cambridge Platonists, was born in 1614 at Grantham, and died in 1687. Almost the whole of his life was passed at Christ's College, Cambridge, of which he was fellow. His elaborate philosophical poetry is little more than a curiosity, but in prose he is a writer of importance both in matter and manner, being, as far as style goes, the superior of Cudworth.

THE WORKS OF THE DEVIL.

might abound in instances of this kind, I mean supernatural effects unattended with miraculous apparitions, if I would bring in all that I have myself been informed of by either eye-witnesses themselves, or by such as have had the narrations immediately from them. As for example, bricks being carried round about a room without any visible hand; multitudes of stones flung down at a certain time of the day from the roof of an house for many months together, to the amazement of the whole country; pots carried off from the fire, and set on again, no body meddling with them; the violent flapping of a chest-cover, no hand touching it; the carrying up linens that have been a-bleaching, so high into the air, that tablecloths and sheets looked but like napkins, and this when there was no wind, but all calm and clear; glass windows struck with that violence as if all had been broken to shivers, the glass jingling all over the floor, and this for some quarter of an hour together, when yet all has been found whole in the morning; boxes carefully locked, unlocking themselves, and flinging the flax out of them; bread tumbling off from a form of its own

accord; women's pattens rising up from the floor, and whirling against people; the breaking of a comb in two pieces of itself in the window, the pieces also flying in men's faces; the rising up of a knife also from the same place, being carried with its haft forwards; stones likewise flung about the house, but not hurting any man's person; with several things, which would be too voluminous to repeat with their due circumstances; and the less needful, there being already published to our hands such narrations as will store us with examples enough of this kind. An Antidote against Atheism.

ON DEATH.

I CANNOT but confess that the tragic pomp and preparation to dying, that lays waste the operations of the mind, putting her into fits of dotage or fury, making the very visage look ghastly and distracted, and at the best sadly pale and consumed, as if life and soul were even almost quite extinct, cannot but imprint strange impressions even upon the stoutest mind, and raise suspicions that all is lost in so great a change. But the knowing and benign spirit, though he may flow in tears at so dismal a spectacle, yet it does not at all suppress his hope and confidence of the soul's safe passage into the other world; and is no otherwise moved than the more passionate spectators of some cunningly-contrived tragedy, where persons, whose either virtues or misfortunes, or both, have won the affection of the beholders, are at last seen wallowing in their blood, and after some horrid groans and gasps, lie stretched stark dead upon the stage: but being once drawn off, find themselves well and alive, and are ready to taste a cup of wine with their friends in the attiring room, to solace themselves really, after their fictitious pangs of death, and leave the easy-natured multitude to indulge to their soft passions for an evil that never befel them.

The fear and abhorrency therefore we have of death, and the sorrow that accompanies it, is no argument but that we may live after it, and are but due affections for those that are to be spectators of the great tragic-comedy of the world; the whole

plot whereof being contrived by infinite wisdom and goodness, we cannot but surmise, that the most sad representations are but a shew, but the delight real to such as are not wicked and impious; and that what the ignorant call evil in this universe, is but as a shadowy stroke in a fair picture, or the mournful notes in music, by which the beauty of the one is more lively and express, and the melody of the other more pleasing and melting.

An Antidote against Atheism.

P. 74, 1. 19. Is instead of "he is"; l. 28, indulge to instead of “indulge"; II. 31, 32, is, are. All these are instances of constructions foreign to the genius of English, and defensible only on classical rules.

« AnteriorContinuar »