church in Aldermanbury. On one occasion the preacher, who ought to have been there, not appearing, the congregation became urgent for Mr Calamy to take possession of the pulpit. After some entreaty, and to prevent a disappointinent, he yielded, and preached from 1 Sam. iv. 13, “Lo, Eli sat upon a seat by the way-side watching, for his heart trembled for the ark of God,' &c. The consequence of his temerity was a warrant from the lord-mayor for his apprehension, upon which he was committed to Newgate. This act of severity called around him such a concourse of persons of all ranks, and excited so much dissatisfaction and resentment among the people, that in a few days he was discharged by an express order from the king.

He lived to witness the desolations of the city of London, both by plague and by fire. Being driven in a coach through the ruins, he is said by Mr Baxter to have taken it so much to heart, that when he returned home, he shut himself up in his chamber, and died within a month.

He left in print several sermons preached before both houses of parliament, and funeral sermons for Dr S. Bolton, the earl of Warwick, and Mr Simeon Ash. The sermon which caused his imprisonment, with his farewell sermon, may be seen in the London collection. He published also, The Godly Man's Ark,' and a vindication of himself against Mr Burton. He took part, as before stated, in the publications by Smectymnuus, and in the Vindication of the Presbyterian Government and Ministry,' 1650, as well as in the 'Jus. Div. Minist. Evang. et Anglicani,' 1654. A Treatise of Meditation,' taken by a hearer of his sermons, was printed clandestinely after his death, which occurred on the 26th of October, 1666. Mr Calamy had several children. The eldest, who was named Edmund, was minister of Moreton, in Essex. A second son was Dr Benjamin Calamy, a zealous conformist. The third son, named James, became a conformist, and possessed the living of Cheriton-bishops, Devonshire.

Jeremy Taylor.

BORN A. D. 1613.-died A. D. 1667.

THE seventeenth century was the heroic age of English theology. The divines of that period,-those at least whom we must regard as the fit exponents of the moral and intellectual character of the class of men to which they belonged,-were a Titanic race; they had a giant energy of conception and strength of purpose about them; they exhibited a higher order of feeling,—a sublimer range, and withal a more settled dignity of thought,-than is witnessed in the ordinary sons of men; their enterprises were the conceptions of mighty minds, fully conscious of inward power, and dauntless in every purpose.

Prominent amongst these master-spirits stands the subject of our present memoir. Jeremy Taylor was born at Cambridge in the month of August, 1613. His father pursued in that place the then respectable calling of a barber. Amongst his paternal ancestors was the celebrated Christian martyr, Dr Rowland Taylor of Hadleigh, whose life and deatn are so beautifully pourtrayed by Fox, the martyrologist. At three years

of age, Jeremy was sent to the free grammar school in Cambridge, which had just been founded by Dr Perse. At the age of thirteen, he entered as a sizar at Caius college, on one of Dr Perse's foundations.

Little is known of Taylor's university life. The Baconian philosophy was about this time beginning to shed its revivifying rays on the university of Cambridge, but it does not appear from any thing in Taylor's writings that he was greatly smitten with the new inductive philosophy. His works, however, exhibit abundant proof of his intimate acquaintance with the old Aristotelian logic. In 1630-1, he took his first academical degree, and was immediately chosen fellow of his college. Before he had completed his twenty-first year, he was admitted into holy orders; about the same time (1633), he took the degree of M. A. Having gone up to London to assist for a time as lecturer in St Paul's, the young preacher made a deep impression on his metropolitan audience: "by his florid and youthful beauty, his sweet and pleasant air, his sublime and raised discourses, he made his hearers take him for some young angel descended from the visions of glory!" Laud sent for him to preach before him at Lambeth, and was so much pleased with him that he determined to procure for the young divine a fellowship on the munificent foundation of All Souls, Oxford, rightly judging, perhaps, that a longer course of academical study was necessary to the full development of Taylor's genius. Wood says that Taylor profited greatly by the leisure of his learned retirement, and adds, that he occasionally gratified the university by his excellent casuistical discourses. What these were, is not very well known now, for there is but one of his discourses extant in print that seems entitled to such an epithet, namely, his celebrated sermon delivered in St Mary's, Oxford, on the 5th of November, 1638. While enjoying his fellowship at Oxford, Taylor contracted an intimacy with a Franciscan friar, known by the assumed title of Francis a Sancta Clara, but whose real name was Davenport. This gave rise to a rumour that Taylor was secretly inclined to Romanism; but as we find him, at this very period of his life, preaching a powerful argumentative discourse against Popish tenets, we are bound to regard the insinuation just noticed as having been utterly groundless.

In March, 1637-8, Taylor was presented to the rectory of Uppingham, in Rutlandshire, by Bishop Juxon. The duties of the charge, added to those of his chaplainry to the archbishop and to the king, withdrew him from academic retirement. "Moreover," says a recent biographer' of his, "among the ascetic notions of moral discipline which in some measure distinguished him, that of celibacy was not one; nor was he insensible to that passion which refines all the rest, and cheers the spirit of man as he toils over the arduous steeps of life." As soon, then, as preferment enabled him to support a family, he entered into the blessed state of matrimony. His first wife was a Miss Phoebe Langsdale, by whom he had three sons, two of whom grew up to manhood. He was twice married, and must have been happy in both matrimonial connexions, if we may suppose the picture of conjugal happiness which he has drawn in his two sermons on "the Marriage ring" to have been borrowed from his own actual experience.

The Rev. T. S. Hughes.

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When public affairs began to draw towards a crisis, and Laud had fallen a victim to his own pride and insatiable ambition, Taylor and others, alarmed for the safety of the church, buckled on their armour and presented themselves in the yawning breach left by the death of the primate. Soon after Bishop Hall had published his Humble Remonstrance,' (to which several of the most eminent non-conformist ministers replied under the well-known signature of Smectymnuus,) Taylor produced a tract, entitled Episcopacy asserted against the Erians and Acephali, new and old,' in which we are assured by Mr Hughes, he defended with great learning and acumen, the divine institution of bishops, as being the immediate successors of the apostles, commissioned by them, and intrusted with the exercise of the highest apostolic functions." But neither the polemical acumen of these disputants, nor the royal sanction under which they fought, could stem the torrent to which they now opposed themselves. When the misguided and infatuated monarch had appealed to arms, and been driven from his capital by his indignant subjects, Taylor, with a fidelity for which we must admire him, attached himself to the person, and resolved to share the declining fortunes of his sovereign. During several years he continued to accompany the movements of the king's army in the quality of chaplain; and at this period of his history, though he had not the command of time and books, he laid the foundation of many of his subsequent publications.

The utter failure of the royal cause compelled him at last to seek an asylum in Wales. In this situation he composed many of his best practical works, and received much attention even from some of the most distinguished republicans. In reference to this part of his personal history, he writes thus characteristically in the epistle dedicatory to his Liberty of Prophesying "In the great storm which had dashed the vessel of the church in pieces, he had been cast upon the coast of Wales, and in a little boat thought to have enjoyed that rest and quietness which, in England in a greater, he could not hope for. There he cast anchor, and thinking to ride safely, the storm followed him with such impetuous violence, that it broke a cable, and he lost his anchor; and here again he was exposed to the mercy of the seas, and the gentleness of an element that could neither distinguish persons nor things. And, but that He who stilleth the raging of the sea, and the noise of his waves, and the madness of the people, had provided a plank for him, he had been lost to all the opportunities of content or study. But he knew not whether he had been more preserved by the courtesies of his friends, or the gentleness and mercies of a noble enemy." Bishop Heber is inclined to suspect, that the cause which first drew Taylor away from the scenes of war was a tender one: that he had formed his attachment to the lady, who afterwards became his second wife, during the first visit of King Charles to Wales. The name of the lady was Bridges, and she was generally believed to be a natural daughter of Charles I. Among other means of support to which he was compelled to have recourse during his exile in Wales, was that of keeping a school or academy in partnership with William Nicholson, afterwards bishop of Gloucester, and William Wyatt, who subsequently became prebendary of Lincoln. In conjunction with Wyatt, he published A New and Easy Institution of Grammar,' in