BOOKS.

• Letters of flumphrey Prideaux, sometime Dean of Norwich. to Jolts Ellis, sotruttinu Under-Secretory of State, 1674-1722. Edited by Edward Maunde Thompson. Printed for the Camden Society. THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HUMPHREY PRIDEAUX.* THESE letters, by the erudite author of the Life of Mahomet and the Connection of the History of the Old and New Testament, are a valuable contribution to the social history of the post-Restoration era. The writer has no literary affinity to his contemporaries, Madame de S6vignd and Pepys, and his letters have no polish of style or grace of expression ; but his shrewd observation, his solid learning, his estimable, if not peculiarly attractive, qualities are conspicuous at every page. The correspondence preserved in the British Museum, and now edited by Mr. Maunde Thompson for the Camden Society, falls naturally into two divisions, the first consisting of letters written from Oxford while Prideaux took an active part in University affairs as a senior student of Christ Church ; and the second, which is more meagre and dis- jointed, containing his letters from Norwich, where he had various preferments, and was finally appointed to the Deanery. The former constitutes by far the more complete and interesting portion of the book, but the latter contains materials of peculiar value for the county historian.

Prideaux's picture of Oxford between 1672 and 1685 is not an attractive one. Fellowships are disposed of for money at All Souls and Magdalen, or awarded by the Bishop at his own caprice; occasionally a mandamus from the King compels the electors to accept some illiterate cadet of a noble family, or, it is once rumoured, the son of a cook. Competent persons can hardly be found to fill the various professorships, and religion, learning, and research appear to be all equally at a discount. There is an abundant crop of slanders, and no lack of material. " The librarian of the Bodleian had married scandalously, and his wife beat him so basely," we are told, "that he Lath kept his chamber these two months." One candidate for a college living had been married several years to an alewife's daughter at Islip ; another "bath marryed the most scandalously bad that any Fellow bath done for these many years, his wife beeing one Mother Yalden, an old ale- wife, with an house full of children." A Professor of Divinity is drawn into a very scandalous match with " the daughter of one Coll. Venner, son to the famous Venner that was the head of ye Fifth-Monarchy men." There are many miaalliane,ee in the University world of an equally disreputable character. Hard drinking, again, was the order of the day. "There was over against Baliol College a dingy, horrid, scandalous alehouse, fit for none but draymen and tinkers Here the Baliol men con- tinually ly, and by perpetually bubbeing, ad art to their natural stupidity to make them selles perfect sots." The favourite haunt

for Trinity men is the Split Crow. In 1680, the squire beadle, _ " haveing made himselfe top heavy by drinking too much last Tuesday night, fell of his horse and broke his neck." A fellow- student of Prideaux's is alleged to have spent nine pounds in ale in the last ten days of his life. The account of Van Tromp's visit in 1675 is worth quoting, and will interest all who have seen Rembrandt's portrait of the Dutch Admiral at the late Exhibition of Old Masters :-

" Van Trump came hither on Tuesday night, and immediately waited on our Doan, by whom he was treated at dinner the next day; he desired he might have salt meat, he never useing to eat any other, which put Mr. Dean much to it to find that which [would] please his pallet. He had much respects shown him here, and the University presented him with a Doctor's degree, but the seaman thinking that title out of his element, would have nothing to doe with it. He was much gazed at by the boys, who perchance wondred to find him, whom they had found so famous in Gazets, to be at last but a drunkeing, greazy Dutchman. Speed stayd in town on purpose to drinke with him, which is the only thing he is good for ; and for fear ho should lose so commend- able a quality, he dayly exereiseth it, for want of better company, with Price our butler and Rawlins the plumber, with whom he spendeth all the time he is here either in the brandy shop or tavern."

Here is the sequel of his visit :— "We got a greater victory over Van Tramp hero then all your sea captaines in London, he confesseing that he was more drunke here than anywhere else since he came into England, which I thinke very little to the honour of our University. Dr. Speed was the chief° man that en- countred him, who, mustering up about five or six more as able men as himself° at wine and brandy, got the Dotzhman to the Crown Tavern, and there so plyed him with both that at 12 at night they were fain to carry him to his lodgeings."

A Principal and Professor falls mad,—through gluttony, says Prideaux, " he being ye greatest eater that ever I knew;" and the Mermaid breaks, through the " ticks " of the Christ Churchmen, amounting to £1,500. What must have been the state of the lesser morals, when " Tony Wood, our antiquary," and his Latin translator fought with their fists at a cook-shop, "a printing- house, and several other places ? " After the latter was made pro-proctor, Wood never dared to be out after nine at night; but his adversary, "by reason of his former drubbing," was only too anxious to keep the peace. Among grave offences, simony is common, and the head of a college is found to have tampered with the college registers.

Such intellectual activity as there was in Oxford appears to have found an outlet almost solely in the University Press, which was at this time seriously imperilled by the hostility of the London publishers. Among the books issued during Prideaux's residence, some, as those of Prideaux himself, Burnet, Dugdale, and Wood, were of more or less permanent value ; but the majority related to the most barren theological controversies or to purely ephemeral topics, which are, to use Mr. Carlyle's phrase, " mere torpor " to nineteenth-century readers. Occasionally a work found its way into the Press of a nature scarcely contemplated by Dean Fell, its chief supporter and superintendent, who once caught some gentle- men of All Souls working off a surreptitious edition of certain too notorious engravings. Prideaux complains bitterly of his hard lot in being commissioned to edit John of Antioch, and wishes that John were "condemned back again to the rubbish from whence he was taken, there to lie till moths and rata have rid the world of such horrid and insufferable nonsense." Nor was he much better pleased with his more valuable, but not very con- genial work on the Arundel Marbles. It is curious to note that Prideaux himself, though a favourable specimen of the scholar- ship of his day, was utterly destitute of culture in the modern sense, and of the spirit of criticism ; witness his tirade against Sir Philip Sidney, whose writings he tersely characterises as "foolish trash." What a contrast is all this to that refined society which a generation before was wont to meet at Lord Falkland's house at Burford, and which still charms the reader in the stately record of Clarendon.

To save Oxford from utter stagnation, party spirit ran high. The King had not yet laid sacrilegious hands (at least, in a very ostentatious manner) on the revenues of the Church, and Prideaux, like most of his fellow-dons, was a faithful Tory. The reckless and illegal proceedings of Charles II., the iniquities of -the "Popish Plot," and all the shifting politics of the time, are more or less distinctly mirrored for us in these letters. But the notices of John Locke, of whom the Oxford of his day was not worthy, are perhaps their most interesting and characteristic feature. He is first mentioned in 1675, when he "hath wriggled into Ireland's faculty place, and intendeth this Act to proceed Dr. in physick."

In 1681 the authorship of a pamphlet entitled Noe Protestant Plot

is attributed to him, and he is reported as "living a very cunning, unintelligible life, being 2 days in town and 3 out, and noe one knows where he goes, or when he goes, or when he returns ":—

"Where J[obn] L[ocke] goes," writes Prideaux, a little later, "I cannot by any moans learn, all his voyages being so cunninly con- trived; sometimes he will goo to some acquaintances of his near ye

town, and then he will let anybody know where he is ; but other times, when I am assured he goes elsewhere, noe one knows where he goes,. and therefore the other is made use of only for a blind. He bath in his last sally been absent at least 10 days, where I cannot learn. Last night he returned; and sometimes he himself° goes out and leaves his man behind, who shall then to be often seen in the quadrangle to make. people beleive his master is at home, for he will lot noe one come to his chamber, and therefore it is not certain when he is there or when he ia absent. I fancy there are projects afoot."

A few months after, Prideaux, whom his editor accuses of acting as a spy, pronounces him a man of very good converse, but complains that "not a word ever drops from his mouth that dis- covers anything of his heart within." In November, 1684, his flight to Holland is mentioned, and he is summoned by the Bishop to present himself and give an account of his absence, but failing

to appear, he is expelled from the University by the King's special. command. Of his flight we read :— " It seems he transacted `all affairs with West, and therefore as soon. as he was secured, he thought it time to shift for himself for fear West should tell all he knew. When West was first taken he was very solicitous• to know of us at the table who this West was, at which one made an unlucky reply, that it was ye very same person whom he treated at his chambers and caressed at soe great a rate when College was tried here at Oxford, which put ye gentleman into a profound silence ; and the next thing we heard of him was that he was fled for the same."

We have one more incidental mention of him after his return to Oxford in 1696. On almost every page of this Oxford portion of the volume we find some curious trait illustrative of the manners

of the place and times. The undergraduate who is " sturdyly belaboured by five or six carmen with whips and prong-staves for provoking them with some of his extravagant froliques ;" the pulpit. eccentricities of Woodruffe, and his absurd conduct in college and in

hall; Dean Fell's liberal interpretation of his rights and duties as edi- tor ; the proceedings of the Duchess of Cleveland and Nell Gwyn ;,

Lilly's prophecy that on the 10th of March one part of the town should be burned, and the other swallowed up by an earthquake ;

the ravages of the small-pox; the public subscription toward the rebuilding of the " phanatical " town of Northampton, destroyed- by fire in 1675; the works at St. Mary's, "to make it looks some-

what more like the Church of soe famous a University,"—"you will find it quite transmogtifyed," writes Prideaux—" the old men, who are always against innovation or alterations, let it be ever soe mach for the better, exceedingly exclaim against it ;" how Glo- cester Hall was like to be demolished, " the charge of Chimney- money being soe great that Byram Eaton will scarce live there any longer ;" the roguery of the Exchequer officers ; Prideaux's dealings with the Papists ; the trial of College ; the intrigues among the Town Councillors for the election of Mayor and the preserva- tion of their charter ; how the Town Council took a petition to the King at Newmarket rather than at Windsor, because most.

that went had business at Sturbridge Fair, and how they were fleeced by the Cambridge inn-keeper ; the suicide of Cardonnell,— all these are but a few of the topics of interest that suggest them- selves to the memory after a perusal of the book. Among scores of persons of note of whom details are to be found are Clarendon,, Hobbes, Busby, Shaftesbury, Williamson, Pococke, and the Tre- lawney of Dr. Hawker's ballad.

In 1686 Prideaux removed to Norwich, " the most delightful town of any I have seen in England for a man to live in," and married. His announcement of his engagement is characteristic of the age and the man :—

" I have now been long enough here to begin to be weary of a places where now almost every one is my junior, and therefore have resolved to retire to my liveing, and fix for good and all there ; and in order thereto, I have hearkued to proposals that have been made to me of marriage, and because they are such as are very advantagions. I have already got soe far as ye sealing of articles, whereby I have secured to myselfe £8,000; but after ye death of ye ffather and mother, whose only child ye gentlewoman is, I beleive there will be at least £1,500 more. I little thought I should ever come to this ; but abundance of motives have overpowrod me, and therefore I have yielded to the cir- cumstances of my present condition, wch would neither be convenient nor comfortable to me without this resolution."

He was sick of Christ Church and Oriental studies, and a few years later (1691) refused the Professorship of Hebrew, in suc- cession to Pococke, his main argument being that he has an "unconquerable aversion to the place, and will never live more among such people who now have the prevailing power there.' Since the Revolution, all parties had, to use a favourite phrase of Horace Walpole, "crossed over and figured in," and Prideaux probably found himself no longer in perfect sympathy with any one of them. The Whigs had become the Conservative party, and the Roman Catholics and many of the Dissenters, bound together by the tie of gratitude for the Declaration of Indulgence to the exiled King, were equally staunch Jacobites. In Prideanx's archdeaconry, none of the " Conventicle preachers" took the oaths to King William, and "abundance of those that seemed fierce Republicarians were, on the dontrary, fierce Jacobites." The Protestant Jacobites he pronounces the most dangerous of any. Yet he does not " wish the Whig interest carried too high, for that is best when well balanced." The ever-fluctuating hopes and fears of the Jacobites, who, according to their own account, were always within six months of final success, are duly chronicled in his letters, but it is much to be regretted that there are so many gaps in those relating to this eventful period.

Norwich, like Oxford, swarms with disreputable ale-houses, and a conscientious Mayor who attempts to lessen their number is reported by the Commissioners of the Excise to the King in Council. In a Cathedral city the Dean is necessarily a prominent personage. Prideaux's Dean is a horridsot, whose whole trade is drink (but it should be remembered that Dean Fairfax, who bad taken a prominent part in opposing James II. in the affair of the election of the President of Magdalen, was now apparently a Jacobite) :— "His whole life is ye pot and ye pipe, and, goe to him when you will, you will find him walkeing about his roome with a pipe in his mouth and a bottle of claret and a bottle of old, strong beer (which in this countrey they call nog) upon ye table, and every other turn he takes a glass of one or ye other of them. If Hodges [a prebendary of Norwich] comes to him (for scarce any other doth), then he reads Don Quixot, while yo other walkes about with his pipe as before, and this is noble

entertainment between them Once in a year [Hodges] will offer to preach, but his sermons being most on end ye translation of his morall philosophy lectures at Oxford, as soon as ye people see him in ye pulpit they all get out of ehurch."

Norwich at this time, "on ye decay of the weaveing trade, sinks apace." The weavers form a separate corporation, and curry favour with the Government in order " to carry their Bill for ye prohibiting Indian silks and Bengalls." The spiritual welfare of the diocese is sacrificed to the Bishop's secular interest, who pre- fers London to his Cathedral city. There is a general laxity of morals, owing in some measure to the unsettled state of the political world. The administration of justice is corrupt. In 1696 the Whigs not only carried all the elections in the county of Suffolk against their opponents, but

"Have alsoe made them criminal's for opposeing them, haveing brought indictment of riot against them at ye last assizes on this account, and by a paekd jury (five of which were ye members chosen, who came down from the Parliament of purpose for this job), caused ye bills to be found against them."

At Thetford "all is sound" : -

"Ye election there is among the magistracy, and 60 guineas for a vote is their price. One Mr. Baylis, a stranger, was their last chapman, to whom they say they have sould themselves much dearer; • for it bath cost him £3,000 to get a return from thence for the next Parliament, and that is but a litigious one, for Sir John Woodhouse will be a peti- tioner against him."

Finally, here is a ghastly picture of an execution, April 17, 1696:

"This day ye sentence was executed upon those desperate villains who were condemned at ye last assizes ; and their last effort had something [in] it more than ordinary. Those that brought them their coffins con- veyed to them therein arms, provisions and other things, in order to an escape; which having got, they knockd of their irons and made an attempt to breake out, but not being able to succeed, they tooke pos- session of ye dungeon, into which there was only one narrow passage, and there stood severall days upon their guard. But this morneing, by help of ye soldiers that quarter here, they forced ye place and tooke ye malefactors, whereon one of them immediately tooke poison, to prevent ye execution, but by poureing oyle into his mouth, they made him cast it up again, soe he lived long enough to be hanged with the rest. They were seven desperate sturdy villains, and we are well rid of them. When they came to ye gallows, they did lament that they had been de- ceived by some at London, who fed them with promises of pardon, and soe dyed in a manner by surprise, without making any use of the time which they had between sentence and execution."

We have here only indicated a few of the points of interest to be found in this volume, the desultory character of which invites gossip rather than criticism, and we have as far as possible allowed the writer to speak for himself. The letters are of great value to whoever wishes to reconstruct social England under the latest Stuarts, and they enable us in many places to test the accuracy of Macaulay's brilliant sketch. Editor and reader alike are to be warmly congratulated on the way in which the former has done his work.