admired by ordinary people. Such were distortions of the countenance and strange gestures, a violent and unnatural way of speaking, and affected words and phrases, which, being out of the ordinary way, were therefore supposed to express somewhat very mysterious, and in a high degree spiritual." But he was too plain and too practical for his own popularity. Some of his hearers complained of him as "a malignant, and popishly inclined;" and, passing through Childrey, one of his Oxford friends asked some of the parishioners, "Who is your minister? and how do you like him?" and received for answer, "Our parson is one Mr Pocock, a plain, honest man; but, master, he is no Latiner."

In 1648 he had the good fortune to be appointed professor of Hebrew and a canon of Christ Church, both by Charles I. and the Committee of Parliament; but this and all his preferment were soon afterwards endangered by his refusing to take "the engagement." As he wrote to his learned correspondent, Hornius of Harderwyk, "My affairs are reduced to such a crisis, that unless I meddle in things wherein I am resolved never to intermeddle, I shall be turned out of all professorships in the University. I have learned, and made it an unalterable principle, to keep peace, as far as in me lies, with all men—to pay due reverence and obedience to the higher powers, and to avoid all things that are foreign to my profession or studies; but to do anything that may ever so little molest the quiet of my conscience, would be more grievous than the loss not only of my fortunes, but of my life. But please, sir, to be assured that I never followed these studies with mercenary views; and, therefore, when it shall please God to grant me a safe and obscure retirement, I will, with greater alacrity than ever, apply myself to these researches, and promote them with my best endeavours." It is pleasing to add that, as on a former occasion he had been protected by the intervention of Selden, so now the remonstrances of Drs Wallis, Wilkins, and others,

saved the Commonwealth from the scandal of deposing the greatest Orientalist in Europe, and preserved to the University one of the brightest of its ornaments.

The Restoration brought no promotion to Dr Pocock, and no encouragement to Oriental literature; but the amiable student pursued his chosen path quietly and cheerfully in the congenial seclusion of Christ Church till within ten months of completing his eighty-seventh year. He died Sept. 10, 1691. It was a green old age. Even his memory shewed little failure, and, like the palm-tree, his mind was fruitful to the last. He had reached his eightieth year before he published his ponderous and profoundly learned commentary on Hosea, and in the year in which he died he followed it up with a companion work on Joel. These, with his expositions of Micah and Malachi, his translations into Arabic of the Liturgy, and of his friend Grotius's work on the Truth of Christianity, and many other laborious undertakings, are amongst the monuments of an Eastern erudition which few Englishmen have ever equalled, and which hardly any German scholar has excelled.

Coeval with Pocock, and adorning the sister University of Cambridge, was Dr JOHN LIGHTFOOT. The son of the vicar of Uttoxeter, in Staffordshire, he had passed through the University a good scholar, but without any particular zeal for Biblical learning, when it was his good fortune to become private chaplain to Sir Rowland Cotton, at Bellaport, in Shropshire. In his patron he found not only an accomplished Christian gentleman, but a first-rate Hebraist. His father's house in London had been often the home of the fantastic but learned Hugh Broughton, and from this half-Jewish tutor, young Cotton had learned his lesson so well, that at eight years of age he not only could read any chapter in the Hebrew Bible, but could speak the language. The enthusiasm of the learned knight infected the young divine, who

became so devoted to these new studies, that when Sir Rowland left Shropshire, Mr Lightfoot removed to Hornsey, near London, that he might have constant access to the stores of Hebrew literature accumulated in Sion College Library. In 1630, and when he had only completed his twenty-eighth year, his kind friend presented him to the rectory of Ashley, in the county of Stafford. Here he did not neglect the duties of the pastorate, but at the same time he gave himself to his chosen pursuit with the ardour of a devotee. In order to command uninvaded leisure, he bought a garden not far from the parsonage, and in the midst of it built a small house, with a study below and a bed-room above; and here, away from the racket created by Anastasius and Cottonus, and the other juvenile Lightfoots, he pored over the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds for days and nights together. It was a much more agreeable hermitage than the cell of St Jerome at Bethlehem; and as his admirable constitution and great abilities enabled him to discharge with unusual efficiency his parochial duties, none but his gentle and affectionate Joyce had reason to complain of his devotion to the muse of Solyma. He had already set his heart on a work new to English literature-a Harmony of the Four Gospels; and, in order to execute this to his own satisfaction, he resolved not only to arrange the verses in their true historical sequence, but he determined to master the chronology of Scripture, along with the topography of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and to gain all the knowledge of the state and customs of the Jews at the period of the Advent, which could be derived from their own and other writers. Like every "magnum opus," it was a boundless undertaking, and for long and happy years he went on filling up one folio after another with quotations from Josephus and Philo, Maimonides and Kimchi, the Fathers of the Church, and his much-loved Talmuds, by way of apparatus for his arduous work.

After twelve years he was torn away from this charming retreat, and in 1643 we find him a member of the Assembly of Divines meeting at Westminster. In its deliberations he took

an active and useful part, and to his pen we are indebted for a detailed and lively account of its proceedings. In the same year he was made Master of Catharine Hall, Cambridge, and Vicar of Much Munden, Hertfordshire-preferments which the Restoration did not disturb, and which he held till his death, December 6, 1675. He had reached his seventy-fourth year. Like his contemporary, Dr Pocock, he enjoyed good health and a cheerful spirit. For this he was no doubt in some degree indebted to his habitual temperance. Even small beer he seldom tasted, and his last illness was ascribed by his physicians to a very slight deviation from his habitual abstinence. In a journey from Cambridge to Ely he caught a cold, and, in order to cure it, his friends persuaded him to eat a red herring and drink a few glasses of claret. The wine gave a stimulus to the fever, and brought on congestion of the brain, and after a fortnight, for the most part spent in unconsciousness, the venerable scholar expired.

The recent labours of Robinson and Greswell have gone far to antiquate Lightfoot's "Harmony," and in his "Hore Talmudicæ," along with much that is curious and suggestive, there is a good deal of rabbinical rubbish; but many a text received a new elucidation from his learned labours, and we cannot feel sufficiently grateful for that ardour which kept this student, for nearly fifty years, working a mine which yields its golden grains so slowly, and which, if important, is also to most men uninviting.

Of the Biblical zeal of that generation, the monument most magnificent is the "London Polyglott." Its projector and editor, Dr BRIAN WALTON, was a native of Seymour, in Yorkshire, where he was born in 1600, so that he was two years older than Lightfoot, and four years older than Pocock. For some

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years he had been rector of St Margaret's Orgar, a prebendary of St Paul's, and chaplain to the king, when the confusions of the kingdom stripped him of all his preferment, and compelled him to seek an asylum in the house of his father-in-law, Dr Thomas Fuller, in Cripplegate, London. He there devoted his "unwilling leisure" to the carrying out of his noble project-an edition of the Scriptures in the original tongues, with all the earlier versions in parallel columns, and each accompanied by a Latin translation so literal as to convey its import to the less learned reader. Works of a similar character had already appeared in other countries. The Complutensian, published in Spain in 1520, at the cost of Cardinal Ximenes; the Antwerp Polyglott in 1572, under the auspices of Philip II.; and the Paris Polyglott, 1645, edited by Le Jay and others, under the patronage of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarine. But Dr Walton's plan included a variety of ancient versions omitted by his predecessors, and in the use of "various readings" it not only advanced on all previous Polyglotts, but it introduced a new era in the criticism of the sacred text.* In setting about his great undertaking, he was fortunate in securing firstrate coadjutors. Archbishop Ussher supplied his collation of sixteen manuscripts of the Septuagint, Dr Pocock contributed the Psalms in Ethiopic, the Syriac Old Testament, and the Gospels in Persian, which last had never before been published. Besides Syriac manuscripts, Dr Lightfoot furnished an elaborate dissertation on Scriptural topography; and scholars like Pierce, Clarke, and Selden, vied with one another in communicating their literary treasures, with their remarks and various readings, and in revising the sheets as they passed through the press. Subscriptions to the amount of at least nine thousand pounds were obtained; Cromwell remitted the duty on the paper which should be required for the work, and in 1657, four years after the first sheet went to press, the whole six volumes were com

* See Dr Tregelles in the tenth edition of Horne's "Introduction," vol. iv. p. 124.