LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 239 



He allows himself to say, that, " after Southwell's death, 

 one of his sisters, a Catholic in heart, but timidly and 

 blamably simulating heresy, wrought, with some relics 

 of the martyr, several cures on persons afflicted with 

 desperate and deadly diseases, which had baffled the 

 skill of all physicians." Mr. Turnbull is, we suspect, a 

 recent convert, or it would occur to him that doctors 

 are still secure of a lucrative practice in countries full 

 of the relics of greater saints than even Southwell. 

 That father was hanged (according to Protestants) for 

 treason, and the relic which put the whole pharmaco- 

 poeia to shame was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief. 

 But whatever the merits of the Jesuit himself, and how- 

 ever it may gratify Mr. Turnbull's catechumenical en- 

 thusiasm to exalt the curative properties of this integu- 

 ment of his, even at the expense of Jesuits' bark, we 

 cannot but think that he has shown a credulity that 

 unfits him for writing a fair narrative of his hero's life, 

 or making a tolerably just estimate of his verses. It is 

 possible, however, that these last seem prosaic as a 

 necktie only to heretical readers. 



We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs. 

 Turnbull and Offor for special animadversion because 

 they are on the whole the worst, both of them being 

 offensively sectarian, while that of Mr. OfFor in particular 

 gives us almost no information whatever. Some of the 

 others are not without grave faults, chief among which 

 is a vague declamation, especially out of place in criti- 

 cal essays, where it serves only to weary the reader and 

 awaken his distrust. In his Introduction to Wither's 

 " Hallelujah," for instance, Mr. Fair informs us that 

 " nearly all the best poets of the latter half of the six- 

 teenth century for that was the period when the 

 Reformation was fully established and the whole of the 

 seventeenth century were sacred poets," and that " even 



