scientific papers and monographs, and his larger books include, in addition to those already mentioned, a standard Student’s Flora of the British Isles and a monumental work, the Genera plantarum, based on the collections at Kew, in which he had the assistance of Bentham. On the publication of the last part of his Flora of British India in 1897 he was created G.C.S.I., of which order he had been made a knight commander twenty years before; and twenty years later, on attaining the age of ninety, he was awarded the Order of Merit.
HOOKER, RICHARD (1553–1600), English writer, author of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, son of Richard Vowell or Hooker,
was born at Heavitree, near the city of Exeter, about the end of
1553 or beginning of 1554. Vowell was the original name of
the family, but was gradually dropped, and in the 15th century
its members were known as Vowell alias Hooker. At school,
not only his facility in mastering his tasks, but his intellectual
inquisitiveness and his fine moral qualities, attracted the special
notice of his teacher, who strongly recommended his parents
to educate him for the church. Though well connected, they
were, however, somewhat straitened in their worldly circumstances,
and Hooker was indebted for admission to the university
to his uncle, John Hooker alias Vowell, chamberlain of Exeter,
and in his day a man of some literary repute, who induced
Bishop Jewel to become his patron and to bestow on him a
clerk’s place in Corpus Christi College, Oxford. To this Hooker
was admitted in 1568. Bishop Jewel died in September 1571,
but Dr William Cole, president of the college, from the strong
interest he felt in the young man, on account at once of his
character and his abilities, spontaneously offered to take the
bishop’s place as his patron; and shortly afterwards Hooker,
by his own labours as a tutor, became independent of gratuitous
aid. Two of his pupils, and these his favourite ones, were Edwin
Sandys, afterwards author of Europae speculum, and George
Cranmer, grand-nephew of the archbishop. Hooker’s reputation
as a tutor soon became very high, for he had employed his
five years at the university to such good purpose as not only to
have acquired great proficiency in the learned languages, but
to have joined to this a wide and varied culture which had
delivered him from the bondage of learned pedantry; in addition
to which he is said to have possessed a remarkable talent for
communicating knowledge in a clear and interesting manner,
and to have exercised a special influence over his pupils’ intellectual
and moral tendencies. In December 1573 he was
elected scholar of his college; in July 1577 he proceeded to M.A.,
and in September of the same year he was admitted a fellow.
In 1579 he was appointed by the chancellor of the university
to read the public Hebrew lecture, a duty which he continued
to discharge till he left Oxford. Not long after his admission
into holy orders, about 1581, he was appointed to preach at
St Paul’s Cross; and, according to Walton, he was so kindly
entertained by Mrs Churchman, who kept the Shunamite’s
house where the preachers were boarded, that he permitted
her to choose him a wife, “promising upon a fair summons to
return to London and accept of her choice.” The lady selected
by her was “her daughter Joan,” who, says the same authority,
“found him neither beauty nor portion; and for her conditions
they were too like that wife’s which is by Solomon compared to
a dripping house.” It is probable that Walton has exaggerated
the simplicity and passiveness of Hooker in the matter, but
though, as Keble observes with justice, his writings betray
uncommon shrewdness and quickness of observation, as well as
a vein of keenest humour, it would appear that either gratitude
or some other impulse had on this occasion led his judgment
astray. After his marriage he was, about the end of 1584, presented
to the living of Drayton Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire.
In the following year he received a visit from his two pupils,
Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, who found him with the
Odes of Horace in his hand, tending the sheep while the 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 circumstances 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 gain a better country living,” having agreed after some hesitation to become a candidate, the patent conferring upon him the mastership was granted on the 17th of March 1584/5. The rival candidate was 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 “the 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 presented a petition to the council to have the prohibition recalled. Hooker published an Answer to the Petition of Mr Travers, and also printed several sermons bearing on special points of the controversy; but, feeling strongly the unsatisfactory nature of such an isolated and fragmentary discussion of separate points, he resolved to compose an elaborate and exhaustive treatise, exhibiting the fundamental principles by which the question in dispute must be decided. It is probable that the work was begun in the latter half of 1586, and he had made considerable progress with it before, 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 Eight Books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. It was entered at Stationers’ Hall on the 9th of March 1592, but was not published till 1593 or 1594. In July 1595 he 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 caught a severe cold from which he 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 on the 2nd of November of the same year. A volume professing to contain 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 subject 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 the work by Gauden in 1662, and the eighth book, may be regarded 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 work. 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
