the party, though they durst not excuse this contempt and villifying of the government, yet were pleased, and grinned at it with a pious smile; and called it a judgment of GOD against the hierarchy. Thus sectaries, we may see, were born with teeth, foul-mouthed and scurrilous from their infancy; and if spiritual pride, venom, violence, contempt of superiours, and slander, had been the marks of orthodox belief, the presbytery, and the rest of our schismaticks, which are their spawn, were always the most visible church in the Christian world. It is true, the government was too strong at that time for a rebellion; but to shew what proficiency they had made in Calvin's school, even then their mouths watered at it: for two of their gifted brotherhood, Hacket and Coppinger,' as the story tells us, got up in a pease-cart, and harangued the people, to dispose them to an insurrection, and to establish their discipline by force so that however it comes about that now they celebrate Queen Elizabeth's birth-night, as that of their saint and patroness, yet then they were for doing the work of the LORD by arms against her; and, in all probability, they wanted but a fanatick Lord Mayor and two Sheriffs of their party, to have compassed it. 3 These two sectaries pretended to divine inspiration. Hacket was hanged at Tyburn in 1591, uttering to the last moment of his life the most horrid blasphemies; and Coppinger starved himself to death in prison. See Fuller's CHURCH HIST. b. ix. p. 204. The fanatick Lord Mayor was Sir Robert Clayton, here alluded / Our venerable Hooker, after many admonitions which he had given them, toward the end of his Preface, breaks out into this prophetick speech : "There is in every one of these considerations "most just cause to fear, lest our hastiness to "embrace a thing of so perilous consequence "(meaning the presbyterian discipline) should "cause posterity to feel those evils, which as yet " are more easy for us to prevent, than they would "be for them to remedy." How fatally this Cassandra has foretold, we know too well by sad experience. The seeds were sown in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the bloody harvest ripened in the reign of King Charles the Martyr; and because all the sheaves could not be carried off without shedding some of the loose grains, another crop is too like to follow; nay I fear it is unavoidable, if the conventiclers be permitted still to scatter. A man may be suffered to quote an adversary to our religion, when he speaks truth; and it is the observation of Maimbourg in his History of Calvinism, that wherever that discipline was planted and embraced, rebellion, civil war, and misery attended it. And how indeed should it happen otherwise? Reformation of church and state has always been the ground of our divisions in England. While who was Lord Mayor of London in 1680. The two Sheriffs were Slingsby Bethel, and Henry Cornish, who were Sheriffs in the same year. Bethel had been one of the Committee of Safety in the time of the Usurpation. we were papists, our Holy Father rid us, by pretending authority out of the scriptures to depose Princes; when we shook off his authority, the sectaries furnished themselves with the same weapons, and out of the same magazine, the Bible. So that the Scriptures, which are in themselves the greatest security of governors, as commanding express obedience to them, are now turned to their destruction; and never since the Reformation has there wanted a text of their interpreting to authorize a rebel. And it is to be noted by the way, that the doctrines of king-killing and deposing, which have been taken up only by the worst party of the papists, the most frontless flatterers of the Pope's authority, have been espoused, defended, and are still maintained, by the whole body of nonconformists and republicans. It is but dubbing themselves the People of God, which it is the interest of their preachers to tell them they are, and their own interest to believe, and after that, they cannot dip into the Bible, but one text or another will turn up for their purpose: if they are under persecution, (as they call it,) then that is a mark of their election; if they flourish, then God works miracles for their deliverance, and the saints are to possess the earth. They may think themselves to be too roughly handled in this paper; but I who know best how far I could have gone on this subject, must be bold to tell them they are spared; though at the same time I am not ignorant that they interpret the mildness of a writer to them, as they do the It remains that I acquaint the reader, that the 5 Derrick asserts that this person was John Hambden, the son of the celebrated John Hambden, but he means the grandson; for he describes him as the person concerned in the Rye-House Plot.-But he is undoubtedly mistaken; for it appears from a list of books published by our author's bookseller, Jacob Tonson, that Father Simon's "Critical History of the Old Testament," (which was published in 1682,) was translated by H. D. See also, in the Second Volume of Dryden's POETICAL MISCELLANIES, 8vo. 1684, p. 452, a poem " upon the late ingenious Translation of Pere Simons' Critical History, by H. D. Esque." Who this person was, I have not been able to discover. Perhaps Mr Dodswell, who translated the Life of Poplicola from Phatarch, or some one of the Digay family. These letters I here latelyfer letely learney were intended to dents. Honey Fickenson Logro If any one be so lamentable a critick as to require the smoothness, the numbers, and the turn of heroick poetry in this poem, I must tell him, that if he has not read Horace, I have studied him, and hope the style of his Epistles is not ill imitated here. The expressions of a poem, designed purely for instruction, ought to be plain and natural, and yet majestick; for here the poet is presumed to be a kind of law-giver, and those three qualities which I have named are proper to the legislative style. The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul by shewing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life, or less; but instruction is to be given by shewing them what they naturally are. A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.* * "The RELIGIO LAICI (says Dr. Johnson) - - is almost the only work of Dryden which can be considered as a voluntary effusion: in this, therefore, it might be hoped, that the full effulgence of his genius would be found. But unhappily the subject is rather argumentative than poetical; he intended only a specimen of metrical disputation : And this unpolish'd rugged verse I chose, As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose. This, however, is a composition of great excellence in its kind, in which the familiar is very properly diversified with the solemn, and the grave with the humorous; in |