keen insight, and his well-tempered wisdom, the "Old Humphrey" of the seventeenth century, he often exhibits an ethical profundity and a sententious eloquence well entitling him to the name which Sir Henry Wotton gave him, and with which he himself, judging from his admiration of his Roman paragon, would no doubt be greatly pleased-" the English Seneca."

JOSEPH HALL was born in the parish of Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire, July 1, 1574. He was one of the twelve children of a worthy yeoman who acted as borough-reeve of Ashby, under the Earl of Huntingdon. His mother, a feeble, sickly woman, and long exercised with the sorer affliction of a wounded spirit, lived mainly for a better world, and, as her son records, "it was hard for any friend to come from her discourse no whit holier. How often have I blessed the memory of those divine passages of experimental divinity which I have heard from her mouth! What day did she pass without a large task of private devotion? whence she would still come forth with a countenance of undissembled mortification. Never any lips have read to me such feeling lectures of piety, neither have I known any soul that more accurately practised them than her own. Temptations, desertions, and spiritual comforts, were her usual theme. Shortly-for I can hardly take off my pen from so exemplary a subject-her life and death were saint-like."

At a very early age he was sent to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he pursued his studies with great ardour, and was successively elected scholar, fellow, and professor of rhetoric. His pious mother's instructions were not lost; for not only was the ministry the destination to which he all along aspired, but he seems to have passed through the perils of a university career unspotted from the world. With characteristic modesty he states-"I was called to public disputations

often, with no ill success; for never durst I appear in any of those exercises of scholarship till I had from my knees looked up to Heaven for a blessing, and renewed my actual dependence upon that Divine Hand.” Of these disputations one was very famous. The theme was, "Mundus senescit;" but, as Fuller cannot help remarking, his argument confuted his position," the wit and quickness whereof did argue an increase rather than a decay of parts in this latter age."

But although himself so correct and inoffensive, he must have been a shrewd observer of other people's foibles; for at the age of twenty-three he published a volume of satires so wonderful that their appearance forms a marked incident in the history of English literature. In reading them we have always felt it difficult to comprehend how a youth, transferred from a provincial grammar-school to the cloisters of Cambridge, could have seen the world as he describes it; and it moves no less amazement that, without any other models than Juvenal, Persius, and Ariosto, he should have started into instantaneous existence, not only the founder of a new school of vernacular poetry, but such a master in that style, that followers like Dryden and Pope have hardly excelled him in the harmony of their numbers, and have frequently been constrained to use the poison of envenomed personalities in order to produce the effect for which Hall trusted to the sharpness of his arrows, the precision of his aim, and the strength of his arm.

Of "the volubility and vigour," "the harmony and picturesqueness," of Hall's couplets, so justly extolled in the "Specimens of the British Poets," Mr Campbell has given as an example the following description of a magnificent mansion deserted by its inhospitable owner :—

"Beat the broad gates; a goodly hollow sound,
With double echoes, doth again rebound!
But not a dog doth bark to welcome thee,
Nor churlish porter canst thou chafing see.

All dumb and silent, like the dead of night,
Or dwelling of some sleeping Sybarite;
The marble pavement hid with desert weed,
With house-leck, thistle, dock, and hemlock seed.

Look to the tow'red chimneys, which should be
The wind-pipes of good hospitality,

Through which it breatheth to the open air,
Betokening life and liberal welfare;

Lo, there th' unthankful swallow takes her rest,
And fills the tunnel with her circled nest."

Not less vivid and musical is his description of the Golden Age:

"Time was, and that was term'd the time of gold,

When world and time were young that now are old,
(When quiet Saturn sway'd the mace of lead,
And pride was yet unborn and yet unbred.)
Time was, that while the autumn fall did last,
Our hungry sires gaped for the falling mast:
Could no unhusked acorn leave the tree,
But there was challenge made whose it might be.
But if some nice and licorous appetite
Desired more dainty dish of rare delight,
They scaled the stored crab with bended knee,
Till they had sated their delicious eye:
Or search'd the hopeful thicks of hedgy rows,
For briery berries, or haws, or sourer sloes:
Or when they meant to fare the finest of all,
They lick'd oak leaves besprent with honey fall.
As for the thrice three-angled beech nut-shell,
Or chestnut's armed husk and hid kernel,
No squire durst touch, the law would not afford,
Kept for the court, and for the king's own board.
Their royal plate was clay, or wood, or stone,
The vulgar, save his hand, else he had none.
Their only cellar was the neighbouring brook :
None did for better care, for better look."

Nor could Miss Edgeworth herself have sketched an Irish cabin better than Hall hits off the cottage, with an old barrel for

the chimney, for which the poor occupant has to pay a heavy tribute to my lord of Castle Rackrent.

"Of one bay's breadth, God wot! a silly cot,

Whose thatched spars are furred with sluttish soot
A whole inch thick, shining like blackmoor's brows,
Through smoke that down the headless barrel blows.
At his bed's feet feeden his stalled team,

His swine beneath, his poultry o'er the beam:
A starved tenement, such as I guess

Stands straggling in the wastes of Holderness;
Or such as shiver on a Peak hill-side,

When March's lungs beat on their turf-clad hide;
Such as nice Lipsius would grudge to see

Above his lodging in wild Westphalie ;
Or as the Saxon king his court might make,
When his sides plained of the neat-herd's cake.
Yet must he haunt his greedy landlord's hall
With often presents at each festival;
With crammed capons every New-Year's morn,
Or with green cheeses when his sheep are shorn,
Or many maunds-full of his mellow fruit,

To make some way to win his weighty suit.”

In the first book of these Satires, he pours well-merited ridicule on the poetical affectations of some of his contemporaries: first, on those "pot-furies" who select heroic themes, and work themselves into tipsy excitement over them :

"As frozen dunghills in a winter's morn,

That void of vapours seemed all beforne,
Soon as the sun sends out his piercing beams,
Exhale out filthy smoke and stinking steams:
So doth the base and the 'fore-barren brain,
Soon as the raging wine begins to reign."

A translator of Virgil into English hexameters is quizzed in terms too applicable to some of his modern followers:—

"The nimble dactyles, striving to outgo

The drawling spondees, pacing it below:
The ling'ring spondees labouring to delay
The breathless dactyles with a sudden stay.

Who ever saw a colt, wanton and wild,
Yoked with a slow-foot ox on fallow field,
Can right aread how handsomely besets

Dull spondees with the English dactilets.”

However, there is no indiscriminate mischief in his play. After jeering at the bombastical knight-errantry of certain allegorising bards, with the reverence of genius for genius he pays this graceful tribute to Spenser:

"But let no rebel satyr dare traduce

Th' eternal legends of thy Faery Musc,
Renowned Spenser, whom no earthly wight
Dares once to emulate, much less despite.
Sallust of France,* and Tuscan Ariost,
Yield up the laurel garland ye have lost ;
And let all others willow wear with me,

Or let their undeserving temples bared be."

From the poets the censor passes to the learned professions of his time. Here we have the portrait of the anxious client, "fleeced" by the rapacious lawyer:

"The crouching client, with low-bended knee,

And many worships, and fair flattery,
Tells on his tale as smoothly as him list,
But still the lawyer's eye squints on his fist:
If that seem lined with a larger fee,
Doubt not the suit, the law is plain for thee.
Then must he buy his vainer hope with price,
Disclout his crowns, and thank him for advice.
So have I seen in a tempestuous stowre,
Some brier-bush shewing shelter from the show'r
Unto the hopeful sheep, that fain would hide
His fleecy coat from that same angry tide.
The ruthless brier, regardless of his plight,
Lays hold upon the fleece he should acquite,§
And takes advantage of the careless prey,
That thought she in securer shelter lay.

"Guillaume Salluste, Seigneur du Bartas. See ante, p. 205.

+ Disburse.

Storm, shock.

§ Let go, extricate.