"either alone or in company they sit still without doing of anything, I like it worse. For surely all disposition to idleness and vacancie, even before they grow habits, are dangerous; and there is commonly but little distance in time between doing of nothing and doing of ill." There is a peculiar charm in Wotton's character and writings, which has made me extend this memoir to unusual length. My last quotation shall be a passage, preserved by Walton, in which Sir Henry truly and beautifully describes the reflections that are produced in the mind of him who, after long absence, revisits the place of his early education. A visit to Winchester was the immediate cause of Sir Henry's remarks; but they will come home to the feelings of many an old Etonian : "He yearly went also to Oxford; but, the summer before his death, he changed that for a journey to Winchester Colledge, to which school he was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from that towards Eton College, he said to a friend, his companion in that journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk, who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those thoughts which possessed us at our last being there. And I find it thus experimentally true, that at my now being at that school, the seeing that very place where I sate when a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth, which then possessed me; sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures without mixture of cares, and those to be enjoyed when time (which I therefore thought slow-paced) had changed my youth into manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but empty hopes. And though my days have been many, and those mixed with more pleasures than the sons of men do usually enjoy, yet I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Nevertheless I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations, and questionless possessed with the same thoughts. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and deaths." Sir Henry Wotton died on the fifth of December, 1639. He was never married. Beside the works alluded to in this memoir, he was the author of a treatise on architecture, justly celebrated for the soundness of its principles and the grace of its style. He also wrote a view of the state of Christendom [about the year 1600]; a biography of the Duke of Buckingham, and several other small tracts. He composed a few short pieces of poetry, and, though brief and rare, they entitle him to a high rank among our "Poetæ Minores." His fame, indeed, would be sufficiently established if it rested only on the following stanzas, which were written by him in praise of the Queen of Bohemia : "You meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes More by your number than your light; You common people of the skies, "Ye violets, that first appear, By your pure purple mantles known, "You curious chanters of the wood That warble forth dame Nature's praise, By your weak accents, where's your praise "So when my mistress shall be seen The eclipse and glory of her kind?" Of a still higher order is the following beautiful hymn, which was composed by Sir Henry during his last illness : "Oh thou, Great Power, in whom I move, For whom I live, to whom I die, "No hallowed oils, no grains I need, No rays of Saints, no purging fire; Was worlds of seas to quench thine ire. "And said by Him that said no more, But sealed it with his dying breath. Thou then that hast dispunged my score, My life, my strength, my joy, my all." Sir Henry was buried, according to his desire, in the chapel of the College; and the following inscription, also by his own direction, was placed over his tomb : "Hic jacet hujus sententiæ primus Auctor, Disputandi pruritus Ecclesiarum Scabies.' They who read this, and remember the kindly tolerant character of Wotton while living, may well apply to him the beautiful line in which Sophocles after his death was described by Aristophanes. “ Ὁ δ' εὔκολος μὲν ἐνθάδ ̓ ἔυκολος δ' κε τ. (Life of Walton.—Reliquiæ Wottonianæ.) We approach now the troubled times of the Civil War between Charles and his Parliament; and the earliest, in point of date, of the Etonians, who figured prominently in this unhappy period, is one who was the first Generalissimo of the Parliamentarian forces. EARL OF ESSEX. A melancholy memoir must be that of ROBERT DEVEREUX, third Earl of Essex, whether it narrate the passages of his private or those of his public life. And yet he had every advantage of person, rank, wealth, and station; and not even his bitterest adversaries ever denied the goodness of his heart, his courage, or his integrity of purpose. He was the only child of Queen Elizabeth's chivalrous but unhappy favourite, the second Earl of Essex. When the father was beheaded in 1601, the son was only nine years old. The little orphan was placed at Eton by his grandmother, in whose care he was left; and at Eton he received the rudiments of a learned education. His stay there, however, was a short one, as before the end of 1602, he was removed to Merton College, Oxford, where he was brought up under the immediate care of Mr. Savile, then warden of that college, and afterwards Sir Henry Savile, Provost of Eton. Savile had been an intimate friend of the late Earl's, and for his sake, "was exccedingly careful in seeing that the son was learnedly and religiously educated." When the somewhat austere character of Savile is remembered, we can well understand that Essex acquired under his training much of that sombre conscientious strictness which marked him in after life, and which, without doubt, much influenced his choice of parties during the civil troubles in which in his manhood he was called on to take so prominent a part. The young Earl was restored by King James to his hereditary honours, and the estates which had been forfeited by his father's attainder. He became, for a time, the favourite companion of Prince Henry, James's eldest son; and a story is related of a boyish quarrel between them, which is worth relating, as it shows the young Earl naturally to have had the "Atrocem animum Catonis," who made himself similarly conspicuous in boyhood by a blow which he dealt to the son of the Dictator Sylla. Essex's chaplain, Mr. Codrington, in his memoir of his patron, thus narrates this anecdote :— : "Prince Henry and the young Earl, delighting themselves one morning with the exercise and the pleasure of the tennis-court, after that a set or two where played, there did arise some difference upon a mistake: from bandying of the ball, the Prince being raised with a choler, did begin to bandy words, and was so transported with his passion, that he told the Earl of Essex that he was the son of a traitor. The Earl of Essex was then in the flourish of his youth, and full of fire and courage, and being not able to contain himself, he did strike the Prince with his racket on the head, and that so shrewdly, that (as it is said) some drops of blood did trickle down. The news of this was presently brought to the King's ear, who having examined the business, and fully understood the manner and occasion of it, did dismiss the Earl without any great check, and being a true peacemaker, he told his son, that he who did strike him then, would be sure with more violent blows to strike his enemy in times to come." The well-meant but fatal policy of the Earl of Salisbury caused Essex to be married to the Lady Frances Howard, one of the most beautiful, but also one of the most abandoned women of the age. Her insane passion for Carr, King James's worthless favourite, her s Winstanley's English Worthies, Biog. Brit. suing to be divorced from Earl Essex, and the scenes of vice and crime with which her name is associated, are too shameful and repulsive to be more than glanced at here. After the divorce, which took place in 1613, Essex, "to whom the disgrace from the thing itself was doubled by the circumstances that attended it, endeavoured to hide himself in the country from the observance of the world, and the reproach to which he was exposed from the bad conduct of an unhappy woman, born to be undone by that beauty for which she was so much admired.”—Wilson. Essex remained seven years in seclusion, nourishing probably bitter thoughts against the Court and King James, for the scandalous zeal which that sovereign and his favourites had shown in favour of the Countess and Carr. At length, in the spring of 1620, Essex was roused from inaction by his friend the Earl of Oxford, who persuaded him to join him in equipping two regiments, and leading them to Germany to fight for the Protestant cause, in the war which was then raging in the Palatinate. Essex and Oxford met with little but fatigue and disappointment in this first expedition; yet in the next year they again served on the Continent, in the Lutheran armies, acting as volunteers under Prince Maurice of Nassau, and acquiring great credit. The two Earls returned to England in the winter of that year; and Essex now came forward in public life, acting in concert with his friend in Parliament, where they were usually found in opposition to James's ministers. Essex came seldom to Court, where he perceived that he was no favourite; and he soon made himself the object of the King's marked dislike, by taking active part in a remonstrance, which the old English peers addressed to King James, against the profusion of new peerages, with which James vulgarised the nobility; and against his habit of granting Scotch and Irish earldoms to new men, by virtue of which they claimed precedence of the ancient English barons. On this occasion James told Essex, among other angry words, "I fear thee not, Essex, though thou wast as well beloved as thy father, and had forty thousand men at thy heels." Essex now again sought the scene of war on the Continent, and for some years commanded one of the auxiliary English regiments in the Low Countries. On King James's death he returned to England for a short time, and was appointed Vice-Admiral in the expedition that was sent against Cadiz, in 1625. The expedition |