GOSSE undertook a difficult, and perhaps, on the whole, an
ungrateful, task when he decided to write for this useful series a Life and appreciation of the great Jeremy Taylor. The Shakespeare of English prose and of English theology, as he has been indifferently called—" the more than Chrysostom of England," as Willmott, his best biographer, finely calls him—is to the general reader both a great and an in- determinate figure alike in literature and theology. To others than the elect his greatness is taken rather as a matter of faith than of experience. His extraordinary fecundity and astounding erudition stand as a barrier between him and an educated public who still admire "the incom- parable Mr. Hooker," and are never weary of the inimitable Sir Thomas Browne. Taylor belongs to a different, and perhaps a greater, department of literature, but his life and works are so indissolubly associated with the spiritual and political struggles of the Commonwealth and the Restoration that it is a work of very great difficulty to portray the man of letters unobscured by the mist and turmoil of his time.
Mr. Gosse in this appreciative and informing study—a study distinguished by the delicate quietude of its prose and by sound critical force—has in a great measure solved the difficulty. Indeed, the fact that Mr. Gosse is not a theologian has enhanced the value of the work, and has enabled him to detach Taylor from the miserable controversies of his age. There is, however, some loss in the detachment, for the man of letters, from the point of view of history, is perhaps less important than Taylor the controversialist, or even Taylor the theologian. A Laudian like Mr. W. H. Hutton could have developed these aspects of Jeremy Taylor in a way that was not open to a purely literary historian.
From whatever stock Jeremy Taylor sprang, and it may have been both noble and distinguished, we may be content to believe that be belonged to "a respectable Cambridge family of the lower middle class." His father Nathaniel was a barber in the University town, where Jeremy was christened on August 15th, 1613. He was probably born in the same year. At the age of six he was sent to the newly founded Perse school, and thence, already a prodigy of scholarship, to Gon- ville and Caius College in 1626. His University career ful- filled the promise of a boyhood and adolescence entirely spent in the somewhat depressing shadow of the tree of knowledge. He probably knew nothing of the lights of his own time,— Milton, Herbert, Fuller, Crashaw, and Henry More. He was brought by a seeming accident at the end of 1634 into touch with the outer world. He was asked to preach as a sub- stitute at St. Paul's, London, and the result was an instant reputation for almost supernatural learning and eloquence, and —the friendship of Laud, with whose policy he was at one by training, and perhaps by conviction. The Archbishop within a year had settled Taylor at Oxford as a Fellow of All Souls, where the companionship and influence of Davenport (the Father Sancta Clara whom Lord Acton revered), Chilling. worth, and Sheldon inspired him with the casuistry of the schools and the Erastian tendencies of the time. In 1638 Laud made Taylor vicar of Uppingham, where he bad four years' experience of parochial life and the conduct of souls. On May 27th 1639, he married Phcebe Langsdale, the "dear wife" whose death in 1651 inspired the deathless Holy Dying.
The fall of Laud in 1641 and the outbreak of the Civil War a year later wrought many changes in the life of this would-be physician of souls. He left Uppingham to cast in his fortunes as an unpaid chaplain with the King's, and in the Court circle he found a new patron in Sir Christopher Hatton. The fortunes of Taylor and Charles drifted apart towards the end of 1644, when the former was captured by the Parliamentary forces in South Wales. It is probable that he was released through the influence of Lord Carbery, to whose seat, Golden Grove, the great scholar and preacher retired and lived, as chaplain, in happy obscurity for many years. It was here that he began in earnest the pursuit of letters.
There is certainly a Providence that shapes the ends of men of letters. The storms of the great Revolution had by a special intervention deprived the scholar of his books, and therefore compelled him to rely on his own powers, and made • Jeremy Taylor. By Edmund Gosse. "English Men of Letters." London: Macmillan and Co. [2a. net]
him "a free writer and a great master of English." His first work produced at Golden Grove was An Apology for Liturgy,
-dedicated with characteristic courage "to his most sacred
Majesty." This was followed in June, 1647, by the inspiring Liberty of Prophesying,—a noble work full of sound liberal thought that foreshadowed an " inclusive " and inspired Church of England which "is not a chimera, or a shadow, but a company of men believing in Jesus Christ." Such large- ness of view was destined to disappear under the stress of later and bitter years. In 1649 appeared The Great Exemplar, originally inspired as far back as 1642, but a work that probably includes the substance and some of the text of his lost early sermons. The writer in this work deliberately dis- cards the robe of learning, and appeals, through the life of Christ, to the hearts of his readers. This "sequence of pearls" was followed in 1650, alter the death of the King, by the well-known Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, a book which, despite its fame and its devotional value, "cannot be regarded as one of its author's principal contributions to literature." A greater work by far is the Holy Dying, written as the result of the emotions produced by the deaths of Lady Carbery and Mrs. Taylor. The influence of Browne, of Norwich, upon this book is certainly very noticeable, as noticeable as the influence of Taylor upon Ruskin. Between this publication of 1651 and that of the wonderful sermons of 1653 (some of which—the Twenty-eight Sermons Preached at Golden Grove—had also been first issued in 1651) is a gap which Mr. Gosse for some reason has not thought fit to fill. Yet Taylor produced in 1652 a brief but very remarkable work,—A Discourse of Baptism, its Institution and Efficacy upon AU Believers, published, as usual, by "R. Royston at the Angel in Ivy Lane." The preface contains an interesting, if unhappy, autobiographical touch that this detailed biography should have recorded, especially as from 1651-54 "what we know of Taylor is almost exclusively confined to a record of his publications." In this preface Taylor tells us that he "is thrust into a Retirement in Wales." The book is learned in the extreme, and shows that Taylor at this time must have had access to a good patristic library.
The sword part of the sermons published in 1653 Mr. Gosse regards as, "from the purely literary point of view," Taylor's most important work. In these twenty-five sermons all "diffi- dence" is gone, and in places the preacher "touches the very highest level of human oratory," and in the series "sounds the whole diapason of majestic eloquence." These sermons, in Mr. Gosse's opinion, prove that in Jeremy Taylor "a phase of the pure Renaissance reaches its highest point."
The years 1654-58 were destined to be "years of affliction." From 1654 he was frequently passing between Wales and London on literary business, and it was at this time that he met John Evelyn, who in 1653 bad settled at Sayes Court. On the way to Wales he was arrested, probably for debt, and imprisoned in Chepstow Castle. The publication of Unum Necessarium in October, 1655, aroused by its dedication to Duppa and Warner a host of enemies. Other griefs crowded upon the preacher. In July, 1656, while Taylor was in prison, he lost his dearly loved youngest son. On his release from prison in November, 1656, he went to reside at Man-dinam, at the house of the lady who eventually became his second wife. Here in the following year two more sons died of small-pox. Only one son was left, and he was destined to die before his father.
Certainly the last years of the Commonwealth were full of pain and grief to this wanderer. In 1657 Taylor returned to London to minister to a private congregation of loyalists, and he was guaranteed, through the influence of Evelyn, a sufficient income. From this time matters improved. His acquaintance- ship with Mrs. Katharine Philips—Orinda--led to his exquisite work, the Discourse of Friendship. In the same year the Works were collected, and the mighty Dv-dor Dubitantium made progress.
The remaining ten years were spent in Ireland, whither Taylor went in 1658 as chaplain to Lord Conway. Space will not let us trace this last phase in any detail. He suffered persecution in 1659, and he was sent in custody to Dublin.
In 1660 the Ductor appeared, and though it is no longer a ruler of conscience or a solver of doubts, it has, in respect to the oases in its desert, to receive respectful treatment at the bands of literary persons. It is full of examples of magnificent if interminable prose. We cannot speak here of Taylor in that "place of torment," the bishopric of Down and Connor, crawling with "Scotch spiders." The cruelty with which he was treated seems to have turned the author of The Liberty of Prophesying into an Erastian prelate. Yet neither his art nor his Christianity left him, for his funeral sermon (1663) on Archbishop Bramhall is a masterpiece, and he died on August 13th, 1667, of a fever contracted in visiting the sick. Jeremy Taylor was at his death comparatively young, yet few literary men of equal years—none, perhaps, except Shakespeare —have produced so much and of equal quality. He is indeed among the lonely ones of literature.
A word must be added as to an interesting point raised by Mr. Gosse. He seems to think that Lady Wray (who is the authority for the statement that Taylor's second wife was a. daughter of King Charles I.) was not only an "egregious" writer of " apocryphal " reminiscences, but was probably no relation of the Bishop. The facts, however, appear to be as follows. Joanna, a daughter by the Bishop's second marriage, married Edward Harrison, of Morely, in the county of Antrim. Their daughter Mary married Sir Cecil Wray, of Glentwort12, who died in 1736 without issue. This Mary is the Lady Wray in question. She probably knew her grandmother, and her evidence can scarcely be dismissed with scorn. There is, however, some confusion as to Lady Wray's personality, for another amount states that Edward Harrison was her first husband, and not her father, and that her daughter by this first marriage married in 1736 Sir Christopher Hales, of Coventry.
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