267 



TWO CHAPTERS, ILLUSTRATIVE OF 

 THE CHARACTER AND CONDUCT OF JAMES I. 



" It is scarce hyperbolical to say, that this prince has been the original 

 cause of a series of misfortunes to this nation, as deplorable as a lasting infec- 

 tion in our air, our water, or our earth would have been." — Bolingbroke's 

 Dissert, upon Parties. 



" Maximus in folio, minimus in solio." 



" The reading of histories may dispose a man to satire ; but the science of 

 history studied in the light of philosophy, as the great drama of an ever un- 

 folding Providence, has a very different effect." — Coleridge, On the Church 

 and State. 



On a fly-leaf in the octavo edition of Bevil Higgons's works, de- 

 posited in the British Museum, a late distinguished president of the 

 Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, has thus expressed himself: — 

 " In contemplating his character, which seems eccentric, his style 

 is, in my opinion, though unequal, the most distinct and easy to 

 comprehend in his best passages that I recollect ever to have met 

 with."* That this author should have been so praised by any mo- 

 derately competent appreciator of a felicitous selection of expres- 

 sions — by any one who pretends to have paid the least critical atten- 

 tion to those qualities of style which put the reader at once into 

 possession of the whole sense, is to us as startling a thing as if 

 we had found a defence of popery among the writings of John 

 Knox, or from the pen of John Wesley a eulogy of Calvinism : 

 for he who will be at the trouble of comparing a few pages of Hig- 

 gons with our writers admired for perspicuity of style, must pre- 

 sently discover that a most undeserved compliment has been paid 

 to him, since " he draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer 

 than the staple of his argument." At first sight, it would seem to 

 be a paradox that the fame of Higgons should stand so high among 

 our foreign literati, that translations, we are told, of his Historical 

 and Critical Remarks on Bishop Burnett's^ " History of his own 



• This note is addressed to Sir William Musgi-ave. 



f Of this fierce opponent of the bishop, who so perseveringly flourishes 

 his metaphorical sword the pen against him, we know but little, and that little 

 is not calculated to excite the reader's respect. In the Biographie Universelle, 



VOL. VII., NO. XXII. MM 



