the general reader. "Carte's Life of the Duke of Ormond is considered a book of authority; but it is ill written. The matter is diffused in too many words; there is no animation, no compression, no vigor. Two good volumes in duodecimo might be made out of the two [three] in folio."- Dr. Johnson.

GEORGE SALE, 1680-1736, the distinguished orientalist, was by profession a lawyer. He contributed largely to Bower's Universal History, and to Birch's General Dictionary, but is chiefly known by one work, A Translation of the Koran. He was extremely poor, and "often wandered in the streets in search of some compassionate friend who would supply him with the meal of the day."— Disraeli.

EDWARD SPELMAN, 1767, great-grandson of the celebrated antiquary, Sir Henry Spelman, is chiefly known by his translations of Xenophon's Anabasis and Cyropædia (pronounced by Gibbon, and lately by Dr. Smith, to be the best English rendering), and of The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Spelman also translated a Fragment of the Sixth Book of Polybius, and wrote a History of the Civil Wars between York and Lancaster.

JOHN POTTER, D. D., 1674–17 47, Archbishop of Canterbury, was celebrated for his profound learning as a Greek scholar. His chief work, Archæologia Græca, or The Antiquities of Greece, in 2 vols., 8vo, was long the only standard text-book on this subject. Some of his other publications are Theological Works, 3 vols, 8vo, containing Charges, Sermons, Addresses, etc.; Critical Editions of Clemens Alexandrinus, Plutarch, and Lycophron.

ROBERT AINSWORTH, 1660-1743, has been well known to many successive generations of school-boys. For a full century, almost the only road to classical learning in England and America was by "Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary." This work, which cost the author twenty years of labor, was first published in 1737; it soon displaced those which had preceded it, and held undisputed sway among students of the Englishspeaking race until comparatively recent times.

Nathan Bailey,

1742, was author of the English Dictionary which was in current use previous to that of Dr. Johnson.

Bailey's Dictionary was published in folio and in various other forms, and was for a long time almost the only acknowledged standard of the language. Mr. Bailey was a good philologist for that day, and his work was a worthy contribution to the cause of letters.

Dr. Allibone records a curious anecdote in regard to Bailey's Dictionary. It was studied through twice, word by word, by Mr. Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, the import and mode of construction of each word being carefully examined, so that the strength, the significance, and the beauty of the English language might be properly understood, and enlisted in the service of oratory when required. "Probably no man, since the days of Cicero, has ever submitted to an equal amount of drudgery," A somewhat similar story is told of Dr. Archibald Alexander, of Princeton. When Webster's large Dictionary was first published, in 1827, in 2 vols., 4to, Dr. Alexander is said to have read it regularly through, from beginning to end. Such was the tra dition at the time among the college students.

LAWRENCE ECHARD, 1671-1730, was a clergyman of the English Church, and a writer of some note on history and geography.

Works.- Compend of Geography; The Gazetteer, a Geographical Index to Europe: Classical Geography; Roman History, 5 vols., 8vo; General Ecclesiastical History, 2 vols., 8vo; History of England, 3 vols., folio.

The work last named was for a time very popular, and bid fair to become a standard authority on the subject. But it was superseded by Napier and others. The contrast between Echard's history and that of Gilbert Burnet is thus sketched in a witty epigram of the day:

Gil's History appears to me

Political anatomy;

A case of skeletons well done,
And malefactors every one.

His sharp and strong incisive pen
Historically cuts up men,

And does with lucid skill impart
Their inward ails of head and heart.
Lawrence proceeds another way,
And well-dressed figures does display;
His characters are all in flesh,
Their hands are fair, their faces fresh,
And from his sweeting air derive

A better scent than when alive.

He wax-work made to please the sons
Whose fathers were Gil's skeletons.

JOSEPH AMES, 1689-1759, is the author of an antiquarian work of considerable celebrity, called Typographical Antiquities, being an historical account of printing in England, with some memoirs of ancient printers, and a register of the works printed by them from 1471 to 1600. Mr. Ames was an ironmonger of London, who took a fancy for occupying his leisure hours in this kind of literary employment, and who produced, after years of laborious research, a work of real excellence for the time, though it has since been superseded by later works based upon it.

THOMAS BAKER, 1656-1740, was one of those learned and laborious antiquaries for which England has always been famous. The only work which he published was Reflections on Learning. It had great popularity and passed through eight editions. He occupied himself through his long life in collecting and transcribing documents in regard to the history and antiquities of the University of Cambridge. His MSS. on this subject amount to 39 vols., fol., and 3 vols., 4to, besides large collections relative to other portions of English history. If he had undertaken less, and had stopped to arrange and prepare for publication some portion of his accumulations, he would have done a greater service to letters.

"As the employment [of antiquaries] consists first in collecting, and afterwards in arranging, or abstracting, what libraries afford them, they ought to amass no more than they can digest; but when they have undertaken a work, they go on searching and transcribing, call for new supplies-when they are already overburdened, and at last leave their work unfinished. It is the business of a good antiquary, as of a good man, to have mortality always before him."— Hearne,

JOHN LEWIS, 1675–1746, a clergyman of the Church of England, a native of Bristol

and a graduate of Oxford, wrote several works on religious subjects, Baptism, The Litany, etc.; also several antiquarian works, History and Antiquities of the Isle of Thanet; History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of Feversham; Antiquity and Use of Seals, etc. But his chief claim to commemoration is his connection with the memory of Wyckliffe. He wrote A Life of John Wyckliffe, and be published an edition of Wyckliffe's New Testament, prefixing to it a History of the Translators of the Bible into English. Besides these valuable works, and in the same line with them, he wrote A Life of Master William Caxton. Lewis's style is disfigured by carelessness and want of order, but he has collected and transmitted, in these works, valuable materials.

SIR JOHN CHARDIN, 1643-1713, a celebrated traveller, a native of Paris, but a resident of England, and knighted by Charles II., wrote Travels into Persia and the East Indies.

Chardin was a jeweller by trade, and it was on this business partly that he went to Ispahan, where he remained for six years. He was employed by the King of Persia as an agent for the purchase of jewels. "The faculty of seizing, by a rapid and comprehensive glance, the character of a country and people, was possessed in the highest degree by Chardin, and secures him an undisputed supremacy in that department of literature."- Sir James Mackintosh.

JOHN WHITING, 1655-1722, is chiefly known by his descriptive "Catalogue of Friends' Books." He was a native of Somersetshire, resident in London. Besides his "Catalogue," Whiting published An Abstract of the Lives, Precepts, and Sayings of the Ancient Fathers; Judas and the Chief Priests Conspiring to Betray Christ, an answer to George Keith; The Admonishers Admonished; Truth and Innocence Defended, an answer to Cotton Mather's "lies and abuses of the people called Quakers," etc.

JOHN DUNTON, 1659-1733, was an eccentric man who turned his hand alternately to bookselling and bookmaking, and whose work of chief value is his own autobiography: Life and Errors of John Dunton, with Lives and Characters of more than a thousand contemporary divines. He published for twenty years The Athenian Mercury, somewhat on the plan of Notes and Queries; also, Religio Bibliopolæ, or Religion of a Bookseller, etc.

EDWARD CAVE, 1691-1754, an English printer, is honorably connected with English literature as the originator of The Gentleman's Magazine, begun by him in 1731, and still continued on the same spot. Dr. Johnson, at the beginning of his career, drew his first support from this magazine. Edmund Burke also contributed largely to it.

EDWARD MOORE, 1712-1757, an unsuccessful linen-draper, turned his attention to literature, and with considerable success. He wrote Fables for the Female Sex; The Foundling, and Gil Blas, Comedies; and The Gamester, a Tragedy. He also wrote a large number of the best papers in The World, a daily paper, of which he was for several years the editor.

William Wotton, D. D., 1666-1726, wrote several works. of value, but is chiefly noticeable for his extraordinary intellectual precocity.

There is not probably on record another authentic instance of such early intellectual development as that of Wotton. He translated chapters from the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin into English at the age of five. He was admitted to College, Catherine Hall, Cambridge, at the age of nine years and eight months, the record of him by the Head of the College being Gulielmus Wottonus, infra decem annos, nec Hammondo nec Grotio secundus, "William Wotton, less than ten years old, and not inferior to Hammond or to Grotius." When scarcely twelve, his skill in Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldee, Greek, and Latin, in arts, sciences, logic, philosophy, mathematics, and chronology, was celebrated by the learned Head of Magdalen College in a Latin poem, In Gulielmum Wottonum, stupendi ingenii et incomparabilis spei puerum, vixdum duodecim annorum, "On William Wotton, a boy of amazing genius and incomparable hope, not yet twelve years old." At the age of twelve years and five months he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts, being then acquainted with twelve languages. He took his Master's degree at seventeen, and was elected Fellow at nineteen. He did not die young, as is often the case with those of precocious genius, but lived to the age of sixty.

Wotton wrote several important works, but his achievements were not in proportion to the prodigious promise of his boyhood. The following are the chief: Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, occasioned by Sir William Temple's essay on that subject; A History of Rome; Discourse on the Confusion of Language at Babel; Miscellaneous Discourses on the Traditions and Usages of the Scribes and Pharisees in the Time of Our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ.

THOMAS WILSON, D. D., LL.D., 1663–1755, was for fifty-seven years Bishop of Sodor and Man. On account of his extraordinary merits, he received from the King frequent offers of promotion to other dioceses, generally considered more desirable, but he uniformly declined, and remained in his original Episcopal charge, fulfilling its duties, to the ninety-third year of his life.

Bishop Wilson's publications are held in great respect: The Principles and Duties of Christianity; Short and Plain Instructions for the Better Understanding of the Lord's Supper; The Knowledge and Practice of Christianity made easy to the Meanest Capacities; Observations on Reading the Historical Parts of the Old Testament; Parochialia, instructions to the clergy in the discharge of their parochial duty; Maxims of Piety and Christianity; Plain Sermons on the Sacraments; Private Meditations. "During the fifty-eight years that he had the bishopric, he never failed, unless on occasion of sickness, to expound the Scriptures, to preach, or to administer the sacrament, every Sunday, at one or other of the churches in his diocese; and if absent from the island, he always preached at the church where he resided for the day." — Life. "His style and language are adapted to the understanding and capacity of all orders

and degrees of men: at the same time, he delivered his sentiments with all the dignity and anthority of an inspired apostle."— Rev. P. Moore.

THOMAS RYMER, 1638-1714, a scholar of Cambridge, was appointed in 1692 historiographer to William III. In this capacity he published the collection of documents relating to the transactions between England and foreign powers, in twenty volumes folio, commonly known as Rymer's Foedera. The last five volumes, it must be observed, were published by Sanderson after Rymer's death. The treaties in this work extend from 1101 to 1654. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that Rymer's Foedera is indispensable in the historian's library, Clark's attempt to amend and enlarge it having failed. It is, as yet, the only collection that gives, in an accessible and continuous form, the documents relating to England's foreign policy. Besides his labors as an editor, Rymer made some pretensions to being a critic, publishing a few essays on the English dramatists of the sixteenth century, which earned from Macaulay the epithet, "the worst critic that ever lived." Rymer made also a few translations from the Greek, Latin, and Italian.

JOHN HARRIS, D. D., 1667–1719, was the earliest English encyclopedist. He published in 1704 Lexicon Techuicum, or a Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vols., fol. He made also a valuable collection of Voyages and Travels, 2 vols., fol., and some other antiquarian works.

Ephraim Chambers, bers's Cyclopædia.

1740, was the author of Cham

Chambers began as an apprentice with Mr. Senex, a globemaker in London. Acquiring, while in this business, a strong taste for scientific pursuits, he withdrew from the work of globemaking, and gave himself up entirely to the preparation of his Cyclopædia. It was published by subscription, in 2 vols., fol., and had a large sale, bringing the author both money and fame. The work was enlarged from time to time, and finally led to, or was merged in, Rees's Cyclopædia, 45 vols., 4to.

"While the second edition of Chambers's Cyclopædia, the pride of booksellers and the honor of the English nation, was in the press, I went to the author, and begged leave to add a single syllable to his magnificent work; and that, for Cyclopædia, he would write Encyclopædia. I told him that the addition of the preposition en made the meaning of the word more precise; but Cyclopædia might mean the instruction of a circle, as Cyropædia is the instruction of Cyrus; but that if he wrote Encyclopædia, it determined it to be from the dative of cyclus, - instruction in a circle."— W. Bowyer.

IV. THEOLOGICAL WRITERS.

Butler.

Joseph Butler, D. D., 1692-1752, a learned Bishop of the English Church, wrote several important works, but the others are thrown into the shade by that one with which the world is familiar, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature.