1041 



BURNET, BISHOP. 



BURNET, JOHN. 



IMS 



bishoprics, alleging as his excuse that he was too young. In 1669 he 

 published his first work, entitled 'A modest and free Conference 

 between a Conformist and a Non-conformist.' In 1670 or 1671 he 

 strengthened his connection with the moderate party by his marriage 

 with Lady Margaret Kennedy, the daughter of John the sixth earl of 

 Cassilis, a lady considerably older than Burnet. 



In 1672 he published a work in spirit very like a defence of the 

 doctrine of passive obedience, under the title of ' A Vindication of the 

 Authority, Constitution, and Laws of the Church and State of Scot- 

 land,' but he resisted all the attempts that were made to engage him 

 in support of the oppressive measures of the court. In consequence 

 he drew upon himself the resentment of the Duke of Lauderdale, and 

 in 1674 he deemed it prudent to resign his professorship, and to remove 

 to London. Here, hi the same year, after having declined the living of 

 St Giles, Cripplegate, he was made preacher at the Rolls Chapel, by 

 Sir Harbottle Orimstono, then Master of the Rolls ; and soon after he 

 was elected lecturer at St. Clement's. He was at the same time 

 deprived of his honorary office of one of the chaplains royal, to which 

 he had been appointed some years before. In 1676 he published his 

 ' Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton,' which he had drawn up from 

 the archives of the family while he resided at (Glasgow. In 1679 

 appeared the first folio volume of his great work, ' The History of the 

 Reformation in England,' which was received with much favour by the 

 public, then in a very excited state on the subject of popery, and 

 which had besides the extraordinary honour of procuring for its 

 author the thanks of both houses of parliament In 1680 appeared 

 the most carefully prepared of all his writings, his tract entitled 

 ' Some passages in the Life and Death of the Earl of Rochester ; ' 

 being an account of hia conversation with that nobleman in his last 

 illness, the result of which was the conversion of the repentant pro- 

 fligate to a belief in Christianity. In 1631 he gave to the world the 

 second volume of his 'History of the Reformation.' In 1682 he 

 published his ' Life of Sir Matthew Hale.' Overtures were now again 

 made to him by the court, and he was offered the bishopric of 

 Chichester by the king, " if he would entirely come into his interests." 

 He still however remained steady to his principles. About this time 

 also he wrote a celebrated letter to Charles, reproving him in the severest 

 style both for his public misconduct and his private vices. His 

 majesty read it twice over, and then threw it into the fire. At the 

 execution of Lord Russell in 1633, Burnet attended him on the 

 scaffold, immediately after which he was dismissed both from his 

 proachership at the Rolls and his lecture at St. Clement's by order of 

 the king. In 1685 he published his 'Life of Dr. William Bedell, 

 Bishop of Kilmore in Ireland.' 



On the accession of James II., Burnet retired to the Continent, and 

 after viniting Paris, continued his travels throughout the South of 

 France, Italy, Switzerland, and the North of Germany, to Utrecht. 

 He afterwards published an account of this journey. Soon after his 

 arrival hi Holland he was introduced at the court of the prince of 

 Orange, with whom he became a great favourite. His active exertions 

 in preparing the way for the accession of the prince to the English 

 throne are matters of history. When William came over to this 

 country, Burnet accompanied him in the capacity of chaplain, and 

 immediately after the revolution he was made bishop of Salisbury. 



In 1 698 he was appointed preceptor to the Duke of Gloucester, the 

 son of the Princess Anne. While in Holland he had made a second 

 marriage with Mrs. Mary Scott, a la'ly of Scottish descent, but of 

 large fortune and high connection in that country. Upon tho death 

 of this lady by small-pox, he soon made a third marriage with Mrs. 

 Berkeley, a widow lady also of good fortune and great piety, the 

 authoress of a work once popular, entitled a ' Method of Devotion.' 

 The remainder of his life Bishop Buruet spent hi his episcopal duties, 

 his discharge of which was in every respect most meritorious and 

 honourable ; in attendance in parliament, in the business of which he 

 took a considerable share, and where he continued through all changes 

 a zealous partizan of the Whig interest ; and in addressing the public 

 with his indefatigable pen. In 1699 appeared another of his most 

 celebrated works, his ' Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles of the 

 Church of England.' It excited great controversy on its first appear- 

 ance, aud was even condemned as heterodox by the Lower House of 

 Convocation. In 1712 Burnet published separately his ' Introduction 

 to the third volume of his History of the Reformation," in which, 

 having indulged himself in some very strong observations on what he 

 considered the then alarming state of public affairs, he drew upon 

 himself the ridicule aud abuse of Swift, who retaliated for the govern- 

 ment in one of the sharpest satires ever written, under the form of 

 ' A Preface ' to the bishop's ' Introduction." In 1714 the third volume 

 of the ' History ' itself appeared. It is supplementary to the two 

 former. Having now lived to see the accession of the House of 

 Hanover, an event he had always looked forward to with anxious 

 expectation, as the consummation of the system of national policy 

 which ha had constantly supported, the bishop died at his house in 

 St. John's-court, Clerkenwell, London, on the 17th of March 1715. 



Th'e most remarkable of all his works appeared soon after his death, 

 in 2 vola. folio, under the title of ' Bishop Burnet's History of his 

 Own Time, from the restoration of King Charles II. to the Conclusion 

 of the Treaty of Peace at Utrecht in the Reign of Queen Anne.' It 

 wan published by hia son Thomas (afterwards one of the judges of 



Bioti. DIV. vor.. I. 



the Common Pleas), who prefixed to it au account of his father's life. 

 " Those facts," says the writer, " for which no vouchers are alleged, 

 are taken from the bishop's manuscript notes of his own life, and can 

 be supported further by other testimonies if occasion should require." 

 At the end of subsequent editions there is given 'A Chronological 

 and Particular Account of the Works of the Right Reverend and 

 Learned Dr. Gilbert Buruet, late Lord Bishop of Salisbury, corrected 

 and disposed under proper heads, interspersed with some critical and 

 historical observations, by R. F.' (that is, the Rev. Roger Flexman). 

 This list contains the titles of 58 published sermons, 13 discourses 

 and tracts in divinity, 18 tracts against popery, 26 tracts polemical, 

 political, and miscellaneous, and 25 historical works aud tracts. 



Bishop Burnet's ' History of his owu Time ' was received with a 

 cry of derision by the Tory wits. Swift wrote ' Short Remarks ' on 

 the book ; Arbuthnot parodied it in ' Notes aud Memorandums of tho 



Six Days preceding the Death of the late Right Rev. ; ' and Pope 



in his ' Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of this Parish,' turned the garrulous 

 and self-important manner of the writer still more successfully into 

 ridicule. In the remarkable one-sideduess of his party zeal, his 

 credulousness and general want of judgment, the looseness of his 

 style, and, as it has been observed, the still greater looseness of his 

 facts, as well as iu the too great transparency throughout the whole of 

 " the importance of a man to himself," the bishop undoubtedly gave 

 considerable provocation to these strictures ; but still, after all deduc- 

 tions that can fairly be made, the 'History' is a highly-interesting 

 and valuable performance, and has preserved accounts of many curious 

 transactions which otherwise would have remained concealed from 

 posterity. Like everything else also that is known of the author, 

 although it shows him to have been possessed of a considerable share 

 of vanity aud bustling officiousuess, aud not to have been a person of 

 the most capacious judgment, its testimony is very favourable to the 

 excellenc3 of his heart and moral nature, to his disinterestedness, his 

 courage, his public spirit, and even to his ability and talent within 

 the proper range of his powers. Even many of his prejudices in 

 some degree did him honour. He certainly was not iu general a good 

 writer; but besides his want of taste, he rarely allowed himself 

 sufficient time either for the collection and examination of his mate- 

 rials, or for their effective arrangement and exposition. Yet, with 

 rarely anything like elegance, there is a fluency and sometimes a rude 

 strength in his style which make his works upon the whole readable 

 enough. 



Dryden has introduced Burnet in the third part of his ' Hind and 

 Panther,' in the character of King Buzzard, and sketched him per- 

 sonally, morally, and intellectually in some strong lines. Tho delinea- 

 tion however is that of a personal as well as a political enemy ; for 

 the bishop, who had little respect for poets, and who for his con- 

 temptuous mention of 'one Prior' has not unjustly been pilloried in 

 a well-known epigram as ' one Burnet,' after the fashion of his own 

 phraseology had chosen in one of his pamphlets, with great reck- 

 lessness of assertion, to speak of Dryden as a monster of profligacy. 



The best editions of Bishop Burnet's great work, his ' History of 

 the Reformation," are those published at Oxford, in 7 vols. 8vo (the 

 index forming the last) in 1829, with a valuable preface by Dr. E. 

 Nares, and again with additional matter under the editorial care of 

 Dr. Routh in 1852. 



*BUUNET, JOHN, engraver and writer on art, was born at Fisher- 

 row, near Edinburgh, in March 1784. He studied engraving under 

 Robert Scott of Edinburgh, and was a student in the Trustees' 

 Academy in that city, along with Wilkie, by engravings from whose 

 pictures he subsequently became known to the public. When he first 

 came to London to pursue his art, Mr. Burnet was for some time 

 employed on book-plates; but Wilkie having given him his 'Jew's 

 Harp ' to engrave, he produced a print which was so much admired 

 that the more important picture of the 'Blind Fiddler' was at once 

 entrusted to him. This engraving of the ' Blind Fiddler ' increased 

 the good opinion his first print had won. He afterwards engraved 

 from Wilkie's pictures, the ' Rent Day,' which had a remarkable 

 success ; the ' Rabbit on the Wall ; ' the ' Chelsea Pensioners reading 

 the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo,' his largest and most elaborate 

 production ; the ' Letter of Introduction ; ' the ' Village School," and 

 two or tLree others. Mr. Burnet, though best known by his engravings 

 from Wilkie, has engraved several plates from other recent painters, 

 for Forster"s 'British Gallery,' four or five after the pictures by 

 Rembrandt in the National Gallery, for the work published by the 

 Associated Engravers, &c. He has also produced engravings from 

 several of his own paintings, the most important being ' Greenwich 

 Pensioners receiving News of the Battle of Trafalgar,' intended as a 

 companion to Wilkie's ' Chelsea Pensioners,' and engraved on the 

 same scale. Some years back Mr. Burnet devoted considerable atten- 

 tion to the application of mechanical appliances to engraving, and 

 produced some copies from the cartoons of Raffaelle iu a kind of 

 mezzotint, as the results of his experiment ; but though they were 

 produced at a comparatively low price, they were too deficient in 

 brilliancy to attract popular attention. Mr. Burnet has moreover 

 been a diligent writer on the theory of art. His chief work is his 

 'Practical Treatise on Painting,' 4to, 1822-27, published first iu sepa- 

 rate divisions, entitled ' Hints on Composition," ' On Light and Shade," 

 and 'On Colour." Although wanting in a clue recognition of the higher 



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