me as many friends and readers, as there are beaux and ladies of pleasure in the town. But I will no more offend against good manners. I am sensible, as I ought to be, of the scandal I have given by my loose writings; and make what reparation I am able, by this public acknowledgment. If anything of this nature, or of profaneness, be crept into these poems, I am so far from defending it, that I disown it, totum hoc indictum volo. Chaucer makes another manner of apology for his broad speaking, and Boccace makes the like: but I will follow neither of them. Our countryman, in the end of his characters, before the Canterbury Tales, thus excuses the ribaldry, which is very gross in many of his novels:

"But firste, I praie you of your curtesie,

That ye ne arette it not my vilanie,

Though that I plainly speke in this matere,
To tellen you hir wordes, and hir chere:

Ne though I speke hir wordes proprely,

For this ye knowen al so well as I,
Who so shall telle a tale after a man,
He moste reherse as neighe as ever he can :
Everich word, if it be in his charge,

All speke he, never so rudely and so large:
Or elles he moste tellen his tale untrewe,
Or feignen thinges, or finden wordes newe :
He may not spare, although he were his brother,
He moste as wel sayn o word as an other.
Crist spake himself full brode in holy writ,

And wel ye wote no vilanie is it,

Eke Plato sayeth, who so can him rede,

The wordes moste ben cosin to the dede."

Yet if a man should have inquired of Boccace or of Chaucer, what need they had of introducing such characters, where obscene words were proper in their mouths, but very indecent to be heard, I know not what answer they could have made; for that reason, such tale shall be left untold by me.

(From Preface to the Fables.)

RELIGIO LAICI

A POEM with so bold a title, and a name prefixed from which the handling of so serious a subject would not be expected, may reasonably oblige the author to say somewhat in defence, both of

himself and of his undertaking. In the first place, if it be objected to me, that, being a layman, I ought not to have concerned myself with speculations, which belong to the profession of divinity; I could answer, that perhaps laymen, with equal advantages of parts and knowledge, are not the most incompetent judges of sacred things; but, in the due sense of my own weakness, and want of learning, I plead not this; I pretend not to make myself a judge of faith in others, but only to make a confession of my own. I lay no unhallowed hand upon the ark, but wait on it, with the reverence that becomes me, at a distance. In the next place, I will ingenuously confess, that the helps I have used in this small treatise, were, many of them, taken from the works of our own reverend divines of the Church of England; so that the weapons with which I combat irreligion, are already consecrated; though I suppose they may be taken down as lawfully as the sword of Goliath was by David, when they are to be employed for the common cause against the enemies of piety. I intend not by this to entitle them to any of my errors, which yet I hope are only those of charity to mankind; and such as my own charity has caused me to commit, that of others may more easily excuse. Being naturally inclined to scepticism in philosophy, I have no reason to impose my opinions in a subject which is above it; but whatever they are, I submit them with all reverence to my mother church, accounting them no further mine, than as they are authorised, or at least uncondemned, by her.

(From Preface to Religio Laici.)

HIS OLD AGE

WHAT Virgil wrote in the vigour of his age, in plenty and its ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write; and my judges, if they are not very equitable, already prejudiced against me by the lying character which has been given them of my morals. Yet, steady to my principles, and not dispirited with my afflictions, I have, by the blessing of God in my endeavours, overcome all difficulties, and in some measure acquitted myself of the debt which I owed the public when I undertook this work. In the

first place, therefore, I thankfully acknowledge to the Almighty Power the assistance he has given me in the beginning, the prosecution, and conclusion of my present studies, which are more happily performed than I could have promised to myself, when I laboured under such discouragements. For what I have done, imperfect as it is for want of health and leisure to correct it, will be judged in after ages, and possibly in the present, to be no dishonour to my native country, whose language and poetry would be more esteemed abroad, if they were better understood. Somewhat (give me leave to say) I have added to both of them in the choice of words and harmony of numbers, which were wanting (especially the last) in all our poets, even in those who, being endued with genius, yet have not cultivated their mother tongue with sufficient care; or, relying on the beauty of their thoughts, have judged the ornament of words, and sweetness of sound, unnecessary. One is for raking in Chaucer (our English Ennius) for antiquated words, which are never to be revived but when sound or significancy is wanting in the present language. But many of his crowds of men who daily die, or are slain for sixpence in a battle, merit to be restored to life if a wish could restore them. Others have no ear for verse, nor choice of words, nor distinction of thoughts; but mingle farthings with their gold to make up the sum. Here is a field of satire open to me; but since the Revolution I have wholly renounced that talent; for who would give physic to the great, when he is uncalled-to do his patient no good, and endanger himself for his prescription? Neither am I ignorant but I may justly be condemned for many of those faults, of which I have too liberally arraigned others.

It is enough for me, if the government will let me pass unquestioned. In the meantime I am obliged in gratitude to return my thanks to many of them, who have not only distinguished me from others of the same party by a particular exception of grace, but without considering the man, have been bountiful to the poet, have encouraged Virgil to speak such English as I could teach him, and rewarded his interpreter for the pains he has taken in bringing him over into Britain, by defraying the charges of his voyage. (From Postscript to the Æneis.)

ANTHONY WOOD

[Anthony Wood was born in December 1632, in a house opposite Merton College, Oxford. He matriculated in 1647, at Merton, and became B.A. in 1652. In 1648 he refused to submit to the Parliamentary "Visitation," and was expelled from the University, but restored. In 1669 he completed his History and Antiquities, and in 1670 translated it, on condition of its publication by the Delegates, into Latin. He next proceeded to expand the lives of writers appended to his Colleges and Halls of Oxford into the great Athenæ Oxonienses which appeared in 1691. He died in 1695, bequeathing his collections and books to the Ashmolean Museum; and was buried in Merton College ante-chapel.]

It has been observed by a French critic that while the men of the nineteenth century have added to literature much sentiment, and while the writers of the eighteenth century are full of facile intelligence, those of the seventeenth century are chiefly remarkable for will, or, as we say for "character." Now Anthony Wood's writings are of lasting value to the practical historian, and to the student of character. They possess this enduring value because they are the product of an incredible patience and consistency of character; but they are not monuments of literature, or of literary style.

He had the bodily equipment of the true student-robust, and hardy in the extreme, a great pedestrian, sparing no pains to verify his observations in person; temperate, able to rise at four, and study fasting till he supped; able to eat, drink, and sleep alone: to buffet down sedentary melancholy, to devour muniment-rooms night and day, and die stubbornly, knee-deep in manuscript. Not that he was inhuman. The antiquarian is but a grim voluptuary : the happiest, and least dreaded of enthusiasts, for his ideals, safe in the past, change not, and threaten no change. Antiquarianism is rare, because it requires the æsthetic temperament, at leisure, united to a tough will; and great learning together with a lack of education. Wide mental grasp, or the insight of a trained

mind, would rarely be content with the faculty of hiving the petty incoordinate masses of detail upon which the ultimate value of an antiquary's work depends.

The first influences awakening his mind were the architecture and beauty of the city in which he was both citizen and student, and where his steadfast ambition kept him all his life. Wood was born, lived, and died in the same street, and had thus continuous familiarity with his subject. Heraldic studies gave the next and kindred impulse. He always concludes any memorial sketch in his diary with some such note as: "Two barres or, a cross paté fitch and a cressant in chief with a difference or." The direction of his activity was finally decided by alighting on Burton's History of Leicestershire, Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, Leland's Collections, and the friendship of Elias Ashmole, which spurred him to pursue their achievement.

His mind is somewhat slow in movement and apprehension. He is cumbered by the range of his ambition, which was no less than to recreate the past both of that University and city, whence his foot so seldom departed. In the past he found that freedom which is of the imagination. He planned to write a narrative of her history from its cloudy source to his own day; to supply fasti, or lists of her magistrates, minute accounts of her ancient institutions, colleges, and public buildings: to build again the levelled walls, girdle her with the dried moat, retrace the silted trenches of old sieges, set up again her thousand vanished Halls, and fill the streets with snood and cowl,—black monks, white Carmelites, and students in their gay coloured gowns. But more also: to write besides Athena—particular lives of all her famous men; and to do all this not alone for the University, but also in turn for the City, her bodily and grosser part. Less marvel is it that the mind is cumbered with much serving than that this purpose was, as regards the University wholly, as to the City in part, fulfilled. Nor does he stop here—he carries the methods of research into those of observation. The world is for him a note-book matter. He has "an esurient genie for antiquities," but is nearly as diligent to set forth the fashion of his contemporaries. He drags their manners into his web, perhaps for the aid of antiquaries to come. It is the age of the great diarists-of Pepys and Evelyn-—and like them Wood satisfies himself, he knows not why, in noting the doings of himself and fellows, down to their dresses and pettiest foibles.