a translation of the Eversley epitaph, which was, he states. copied from the London Magazine, April, 1751, p. 182. 'Stop stranger, view this dust, and taught, you'll see, They're Dust; are Dew, are Ashes, Shadows, naught.' Eachard, who is known from the use which Lord. Macaulay in his history has made of his book-Causes of the Contempt of the Clergy-says of Ross, he was a busy, various, and voluminous writer, who, by his pen and other ways, made a considerable noise and figure in these days, and who so managed his affairs that in the midst of these storms he died very rich, as appears from the several benefactions he made.' By his will, dated February 21, 1653, he bequeathed sums of money to the Senate of Aberdeen for the maintenance of two scholars, also to the town of Southampton for the better maintenance of the schoolmaster, and to the poor of All Saints parish in the same town, to the public libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. A certain sum was also left to the poor of Carisbrooke, the history of which gift will be found in the Report of the Charity Commissioners for the Isle of Wight, Newport, 1837. Andrew Henley, son of his generous friend and patron, was his executor, who had his library remaining in Bramshill, wherein mostly in the books he found, as I have been credibly informed, about a thousand pounds in gold.' Alexander Ross, though his countryman Mr. Thomas Carlyle would probably not have deigned to call him a 'hero as man of letters,' deserves to be called a 'representative man' of that class. The rugged Scotchman in his own stubborn self-helping way earned an independent livelihood by writing books. He pursued knowledge under difficulties. He does not seem to have had much sympathy with the ordinary business of men. In those eventful years when civil war was raging in England Ross was tranquilly preparing his materials for the bookseller. In that season of agony when Charles I was prisoner in Carisbrooke Castle Ross, the vicar of that parish, though indeed ejected from his pastoral cure in that village, was absorbed in his refutation of Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors. The king dies, the Protectorate succeeds, men are fighting upon paper the cause already decided on the battle-field, and Ross is, as a royal duke said to Gibbon, 'hard at work scribbling, scribbling.' He flew at high game, he was not content with attacking Sir T. Browne, the celebrated author of the Religio Medici. Striking right and left, he aimed a blow at Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, by writing his book Arcana Microcosmica against Harvey's treatise on generation, wherein he maintained that all animals, including man, are derived from an egg. Another of Ross's books, entitled Leviathan drawn out with a hook, was probably written in opposition to the work of Hobbes, the philosopher of Malmesbury, called Leviathan and published in 1651, not long before the death of Ross himself. This pugnacious Scot did not hesitate even to strike at the majestic front of that master of science, Bacon, and had the skill to direct his blows against what is the weakest part of the Baconian philosophy, The centuries of natural science.' Not contented with scientific and theological discussions, Ross made observations on Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World; after this he published a continuation of that history, which Granger calls his great work,' but afterwards adds that it is like a piece of bad Gothic tacked to a magnificent pile of Roman architecture, which serves to heighten the effect of it, while it exposes its own deficiency in strength and beauty.' Granger wrote in those dark ages when even such a man as Addison could talk of ' meanness of manner' as characteristic of our Gothic cathedrals, the noblest offspring of human art; but his criticism on Ross's share in Raleigh's masterpiece is in the main correct. Raleigh, who after having brought a new world to light wrote the history of the old in prison, was a man of genius, and wrote like a statesman and a soldier. Ross had the prolix style of a pedant. The work for which he is best known is the Pansebeia, or View of all Religions, which has passed through various editions, the last in 1683. This book of Ross is not to be compared with the more learned work of Gale, The Court of the Gentiles, which appeared in 1669, and still less with Cudworth's Intellectual System of the Universe, published in 1678, but it has the merit of being one of the first compilations of the kind in our language, and attained a great degree of popularity. A copy of this book is put down in the catalogue of the clerical library at Newport, but on inquiring for it some years ago the book could not be found. It still occasionally makes its appearance in the lists of second-hand booksellers. If Ross cannot take his stand among the giants of English literature, still that sometime Vicar of Carisbrooke is entitled to be reckoned among those men of note who have belonged to the Isle of Wight. It is probably for the welfare of the human race that so small a proportion of mankind should be disposed to undertake the labour of writing books. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness to the flesh,' was the plaintive cry of the preacher of old. But a scholar has his uses in this world. He helps others while securing himself from the miseries of a vacant life. Mark,' indeed, says Dr. Johnson, what ills the scholar's life assail, Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.' Ross escaped these ills, he lived a blameless life among his books, and died among them. A restless, energetic Scotchman, he was doomed from his birth to find excitement in honest work, or in some less profitable and more mischievous occupation. He found employment for his tireless energies in writing books. If only a very small number of people have ever heard of Ross, and a still smaller number have ever given a glance at one of the many productions of his busy brain and ready pen, he only shares the common lot of authors, with the exception of the very few whose writings have survived that oblivion in which time buries all the works of man. November 28, 1885. JEROME, SECOND EARL OF PORTLAND, CAPTAIN AND GOVERNOR OF THE ISLE OF WIGHT, 1634-1642. JEROME WESTON, second Earl of Portland, succeeded his father, the first Earl, as Captain and Governor of the Isle of Wight. This was the first and only instance of hereditary succession in that honourable office. The precedent was not, as will be seen, encouraging. His father, the Lord High Treasurer, a man,' as Clarendon says, 'of big looks and of a mean and abject spirit,' being anxious in every way to aggrandize himself and his family, had by the favour of the King obtained the hand of a young beautiful lady, nearly allied to His Majesty and the Crown of Scotland, in marriage for his eldest son.' This lady was Frances Stuart, daughter of Esmé, Duke of Lennox. Unfortunately Sir John Oglander has nothing to say about the reception of this new Governor by the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight. George Oglander, the eldest son of the gallant old cavalier of Nunwell, died while on his travels near the cradle of his race at Caen in Normandy in July, 1632, aged twenty-three years. Sir John seems never fully to have recovered the shock caused by the premature death of this promising young man, so pathetically bewailed by his affectionate father in several parts of his memoirs. Yet from the few glimpses which Oglander gives us of Jerome Weston, coupled with what Lord Clarendon has recorded, we have reason for thinking that the second Earl of Portland belonged to the looser, if not the baser sort, among the Cavalier party-a kind of Roger Wildrake, the dissipated royalist, as portrayed by Sir Walter Scott in Woodstock. For instance we learn from the Oglander Memoirs that on a Sunday in August, 1639, the quiet and church-going people in Newport were scandalized by a piece of buffoonery on the part of the Governor of the Island. Along with Hicks, Nicholas Weston, and the roystering Colonel Goring, Governor of Portsmouth, the Captain of Carisbrooke Castle, the Earl of Portland, was seen marching towards the town gallows. As each health was drunk they tore one another's bands and shirts, Goring making a last dying speech from the top of the ladder warning the bystanders to take warning by his sad end. Probably there is a reference to this scandal and other instances of tipsy revelry on the part of the Governor in what Clarendon says in his History as to Portland having given offence to the Long Parliament by his 'waste of wine and drinking of healths and other acts of jollity.' He was however able to obtain in the Island vouchers for his respectability, or rather for his orthodoxy, which was tainted with an inclination to Popery. Sir R. Worsley, in a note to his History of the Isle of Wight, p. 110, gives the text of a petition presented to the House of Commons from the Deputy Lieutenants, Justices of the Peace, the Mayors and Corporations of Newport, Newtown, and Yarmouth, with others, A. D. 1642, which disposes of this aspersion, among others, on the character of their beloved Captain and Governor,' in the following terms. For ourselves we have a pregnant testimony amongst us for his pious affection and love for the reformed religion by a constant weekly lecture at Newport to which his lordship is a principal benefactor.' It does not appear that Earl Jerome 'sat under' (to use a Puritan phrase) this painstaking and lengthy lecturer. His zeal for the reformed religion' may have only been on a par with that of a most reputable luminary of the law and peer of the realm of later times, of whom, on his being called by a warm partisan, when his merits were under discussion, one of the pillars of the church,' it was observed by a more discriminating friend, No, not one of the pillars, but a buttress if you will, for he is never found within the walls of the church.' The petition was not of much avail in rescuing the Earl of Portland from parliamentary censure, for it appears from Clarendon that on being threatened by the Parliament he with extraordinary vivacity crossed their expectations that they should remove him from his charge and government (which last they did de facto by committing him to prison without assigning a cause), and to that purpose objected all the acts of good fellowship, the waste of powder, the waste of wine in the drinking of |