HOOKER 151 servant was at dinner, after which, when they on the return of the servant accompanied him to his house, " Richard was called to rock the cradle." Finding him so engrossed ] by worldly and domestic cares, " they stayed but till the ! next morning," and, greatly grieved at his narrow circum stances and unhappy domestic condition, "left him to the company of his wife Joan." The visit had, however, results of the highest moment, not only in regard to the career of Hooker, but in regard to English literature and English philosophical thought. Sandys prevailed on his father, the archbishop of York, to recommend Hooker for presentation to the mastership of the Temple, and Hooker, though his " wish was rather to giin a better CDuntry living," having agreed after some hesitation to bscome a candidate, the patent conferring upon him the mastership was granted 17th March 1585. The rival candidate svas Walter Travers, a Presbyterian ; and evening lecturer in the same church. Being continued in the lectureship after the appointment of Hooker, | Travers was in the habit of attempting a refutation in the evening of what Hooker had spoken in the morning, . Hooker again replying on the following Sunday ; so it was said " th3 forenoon sermon spake Canterbury, the afternoon Geneva." On account of the keen feeling displayed by the partisans of both, Archbishop Whitgift deemed it prudent to prohibit the preaching of Travers, whereupon he pre sented a petition to the council to have the prohibition recalled. Hooker published an Ansiver to the Petition of Mr Travers, and also printed several sermons bearing on special points of the controversy - } but, feeling strongly the unsatis factory nature of such an isolated and fragmentary discus sion of separate points, he resolved to compose an elaborate and exhaustive treatise, exhibiting the fundamental prin ciples by which the question in dispute must be decided. It is prc^ble that the work was begun in the latter half of 1586, and he had made considerable progress with it bsfore, with a view to its completion, he petitioned Whitgift to be removed to a country parsonage, in order that, as he said, "I may keep myself in peace and privacy, and behold God s blessing spring out of my mother earth, and eat my own bread without oppositions." His desire was granted in 1591 by a presentation to the rectory of Boscombe near Salisbury. There he completed the volume containing the first four of the proposed Eiyht Books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. It was entered at Stationers Hall, 9th March 1592, but was not published till 1593 or 1594. In July 1595 ha was promoted by the crown to the rectory of Bishopsbourne near Canterbury, where he lived to see the completion of the fifth book in 1597. In the passage from London to Gravesend some time in 1600 he plight a severe cold from which lie never recovered, but, notwithstanding great weakness and constant suffering, he " was solicitous in his study," his one desire being "to live to finish the three remaining books of Polity." His. death took place about November of the same year. A volume professing to con tain the sixth and eighth books of the Polity was published at London in 1648, but the bulk of the sixth book, as has been shown by Keble, is an entire deviation from the sub ject on which Hooker proposed to treat, and doubtless the genuine copy, known to have been completed, has been lost. The seventh book, which was published in a new edition of ths work by Gauden in 1662, and the eighth book, may be regirded as in substance the composition of Hooker: but, as, in addition to wanting his final revision, they have been very unskilfully edited, if they have not been manipulated for theological purposes, their statements in regard to doubtful matters must be received with due reserve, and no reliance can be placed on their testimony where their meaning contradicts that of other portions of the Polity. The conception of Hooker in his later years which we form from the various accessible sources is that of a person of low stature and not immediately impressive appearance, much bent by the influence of sedentary and meditative habits, of quiet and retiring manners, and discoloured in complexion and worn and marked in feature from the hard mental toil which he had expended on his great ork. There seems, however, exaggeration in Walton s statement as to the meanness of his dress ; and Walton certainly misreads his character when he portrays him as a kind of ascetic mystic. Though he was unworldly and simple in his desires, and engrossed in the purpose to which he had devoted his life, the "completion of the Polity," his writings indicate that he possessed a cheerful and healthy disposition, and that he was capable of discovering enjoy ment in everyday pleasures, and of appreciating human life and character in a wide variety of aspects. He seems to have had a special delight in outward nature as he expressed it, he loved "to see God s blessing spring out of his mother earth ; " and he spent much of his spare time in visiting his parishioners, his deference towards them, if excessive, being yet mingled with a grave dignity which ren dered unwarrantable liberties impossible. As a preacher, though singularly devoid of the qualities which win the applause of the multitude, he always excited the interest of the more intelligent, the breadth and finely balanced wisdom of his thoughts and the fascination of his composi tion greatly modifying the impression produced by his weak voice and ineffective manner. Partly, doubtless, on account of his dimsightedness, he never removed his eye from his manuscript, and, according to Fuller, "he maybe said to have made good music with his fiddle and stick alone, having neither pronunciation nor gesture to grace his matter." To accede without explanation to the claim put forth for the Ecclesiastical Polity of Hooker, that it marks an epoch in English prose literature and English thought, would both be to do some- injustice to writers previous to him, and, if not to overestimate his influence, to misinterpret its character. By no means can his ex cursions in English prose be regarded as chiefly those of a pioneer ; and not only is his intellectual position inferior to that of Shake speare, Spenser, and Bacon, 1 who alone can be properly reckoned as the master spirits of the age, but in reality what effect he may have had upon the thought of his contemporaries was soon dis regarded and swept out of sight in the hand-to-hand struggle with Puritanism, and his influence, so far from being immediate and confined to one particular era, lias since the reaction against Puri tanism been slowly and imperceptibly permeating and colouring English thought down to the present time. His work is, however, the earliest in English prose with enough of the preserving salt of excellence to adapt it to the mental palate of modern readers. Attempts more elaborate than those of the old chroniclers had been made two centuries previously to employ English prose both for narrative and for discussion ; and, a few years before him, Roger Ascliam, Sir Thomas More, Latimer, Sir Philip Sidney, the com pilers of the prayer book, and various translators of the Bible had in widely difl erent departments of literature brought to light many samples of the rich wealth of expression that was latent in the language; but Hooker s is the first independent work in English pro.se of notable power and genius, and the vigour and grasp of its thought are not more remarkable than the felicity of its literary style. Its more usual and obvious excellences are clearness of expression, notwithstanding occasionally complicated methods ; i great aptness and conciseness in the formation of individual clauses, and such a fine sense of proportion and rhythm in their arrange- ! rnent as almost conceals the difficulties of syntax by which he was hampered; finished simplicity, notwithstanding a stateliness too uniform and unbroken ; a nice discrimination in the choice of words and phrases, so as both to port! ay the exact shade of his meaning, and to express each of his thoughts with that degree of emphasis appropriate to its place in his composition. In regard to qualities more relating to the matter than the manner we may note the 1 subtle and partly hidden humour ; the strong enthusiasm under- i lying that seemingly calm and passionless exposition of principles 1 ]f Baeon was the author of The Christian Paradoxes, his philoso phical standpoint in reference to religion was not only less advanced
j than that of Hooker, but in a sense directly opposed to it.
