OF SAMUEL HARTLIB. 47 



craft had scarcely begun to decline, he should so 

 manfully have carried out to the last an uniform, con- 

 sistent system of charitable and benevolent schemes, 

 looking, the while, far beyond any human reward. 



We are constrained to consider Samuel Hartlib's 

 prevailing pious disposition as governing, guiding, and 

 outweighing all other obligations. He advocated the 

 acquirement of knowledge, and the means of im- 

 proving its attainment, and strenuously laboured to 

 extend every useful art and trade favouring industry 

 and tending to strengthen the arms of the state ; but 

 these were accessories to brighter hopes, they were 

 to be employed but as the means to a far nobler end, 

 and were not esteemed by him as man's summum 

 honum in this life. That he was, therefore, rather out 

 of his sphere, while occupied in the mercenary opera- 

 tions of ordinary business, we may surmise from the 

 absence of all allusion to cgmmercial gains in his cor- 

 pondence ; while his letters, on the contrary, are replete 

 with learned allusions, theological matters, references 

 to men of letters, and to subjects of a literary or philo- 

 sophical bearing. That he was, from an early period, 

 premeditating a declaration of his own estimate of his 

 true mission, we gather from his ^^ Reformed Spiritual 

 Husbandman,'^ which work he professes was but a pre- 

 parative to other like productions. He likewise assures 

 the reader that, although he has hitherto occupied 

 himself on subjects, such as Husbandry, — *^^the study 



