JOHN DIIRIE.
[To rife EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.")
Sul,—Your remarks upon the artiCle "John Durie " will do good -service if they should provoke any young scholar to devote.several years of his life to the writing of an adequate
Life of Durie. Ten or twelve years ago, I was busying myself in making collections for a biography of Durk, a writer strangely neglected by the English and Scotch (his fellow- countrymen), who must be surprised at the honour which he has received in Germany. For the best accounts of Durk, we are obliged even now to turn to German sources. I have read everything which Durk himself published; but his own writings• need to be supplemented by research in German and Swiss archives. There are useful monographs of his negotiations with some of the foreign divines, such as Pfarrer Sal. Hubler's (of Saanen) "Unions Bestrebungen des John Durk," 1884. I entrusted a mass of MSS. on Durie to a Scotch publisher some nine or ten years ago, but they were unfortunately lost. Durie's life, it is worth noting, brought him into personal con- tact with almost every great leader in politics and theology in Scotland, England, Sweden, Germany, and other countries, from early to late in the most stirring century of modern history. He interviewed the old Elizabethan statesman Sir T. Roe, Gustavus Adolphus, Archbishop Laud, Cromwell, Oxienstierna, William Penn. To write his Life would con- sequently demand an encyclopmdical study of its historical background on the Continent and also at home.—I am, Sir, &c.„
Previous page
