it did not receive any corrections from him. Though of course containing an immense amount of information, these volumes are not based upon any scientific arrangement, as the author contents himself with referring plants to genera and species already known, and makes no attempt to improve the defective classification of that day.

But Sir Hans Sloane is better known as the patron and promoter of natural science. His immense museum was offered to the nation for £20,000, which he tells us (in a codicil to his will, dated July 20th, 1740)' did not amount to a fourth part of its value. This famous collection formed the basis of the British Museum, and at the time of Sir Hans' death, his cabinet contained 200 volumes of dried plants, and 20,000 other objects of natural history; besides a library of 50,000 volumes and 3,566 manuscripts. He is said to have given the duplicates in his library either to the College of Physicians or to the Bodleian Library. Sloane's correspondence with Ray extends from 1684 to that great man's death, his last letter being dated January 7, 1704, and thus he survived his illustrious friend for nearly fifty years. It may be interesting to record that Sloane was the first English physician on whom an hereditary title of honour was conferred. He left two daughters, his heiresses, who conveyed the wealth so honourably acquired to the noble families of Stanley and Cadogan.

LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY.

By O. S. T. DRAKE.

Two men, in their several paths more distinguished or more dissimilar, have seldom been the sons of one mother than the two brothers Herbert; George, of Bemerton, one of the sweetest singers of our Israel, and his all-accomplished brother, Edward, Lord Herbert, the subject of the present sketch, noted for his bold attacks upon that religion, which, before him, says Granger, "none had ever had the hardihood to call in question." Leland, in his "View of the Deistical Writers," considers him as the "most eminent among them." He combined, moreover, in a curious manner, this pale and frigid system of philosophical incredulity with a hot-blooded love of adventure, fighting, and duelling, which to modern notions sits strangely upon the accredited ambassador of the British crown to a foreign potentate.

An interesting fragment of his autobiography remains to us, written with the naïve and remorseless candour peculiar to his time. This was printed in 1764 by Horace Walpole, at the Strawberry Hill press, for private circulation only. In 1770, Dodsley was permitted to reprint the same for general reading and a later popular edition exists1 in the "Universal Library." Edward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was the son of Richard Herbert, of Montgomery Castle, and Magdalen Newport, his wife. He was born at Eyton, in Shropshire, in 1581, and descended from an ancient and famous house, through the great Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert, of the time of Edward IV. Magdalen Herbert, says Walton, was "the happy mother of seven sons and three daughters." She was that honoured friend of Dr. Donne, sometime dean of St. Paul's, who has left us her character in his poem of the "Autumnal Beauty":

"No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace

As I have seen in an autumnal face."

He lived to preach her funeral sermon and to bury her in the 1 Published by Ingram, Cooke & Co., London.

parish church of Chelsea Briefly," says Lord Herbert, who does not, however, seem to have been greatly attached to her, "she was that woman Dr. Donne hath described in his funeral semon of her."

One of her sayings is preserved to us by Izaak Walton, viz., * That ignorance of vice was the best preservation of virtue; the very knowledge of wickedness being as tinder to inflame and kinde sin, and to keep it burning."

Two other of her sons served with distinction in the Low Country wars; one died fellow of New College, Oxford; another was in the navy, and a fifth held the post of Master of the Revels at court for half a century or more.

Lord Herbert was a remarkable instance of precocious youth. At twelve we find him entered at University College (Walton says Queen's), and at fifteen married to his cousin, Mary Herbert, she being twenty-one years of age, and estated" with large land and territory" in Wales and Ireland-on condition of her marrying one of the name of Herbert. He remained on at Oxford after his marriage completing his studies, his wife and mother living there till he was eighteen, and became the father, as he quaintly expresses it, of "divers children." He applied himself also to the French, Spanish, and Italian languages, with the intention of becoming “a citizen of the world." Nor did he neglect the lighter accomplishments of music, singing, fencing, and "riding the great horse." And all this completed at an age when our degenerate youth are entering Alma Mater's walls for the first time! Racing, he tells us, he disapproves, "there being much cheating in this kind;" dicing and carding also, for the same excellent reason.

In the year 1600 we find him in London presenting himself before the great queen Elizabeth, who characteristically observed, "Pity 'twas he had married so young."

On the accession of King James our hero was made Knight of the Bath. Next he devoted some time to travel, with the unwilling consent of his wife, to whom he seems to have been but moderately attached.

Not without a curious personal vanity was our doughty knight, at this time in the flower of youth; for he mentions with cautious pride how a "great personage," whom he will not name (the queen indeed of James I.), has hung a portrait of him in her cabinet, and a certain Lady Ayres, for whom he has no sort of affection, wears it ever concealed about her person. Sir John

Ayres made several attempts to assassinate him on this account. He cared nothing for her, however, he says, because of “one the fairest of her time," with whom, forgetful of his marriage vow and his "divers children," he has fallen deeply into love. So that our cautious deist appears, in spite of his abstract esteem for virtue and piety, to have lived according to the common morals of the time. In 1614 we find him fighting the Spaniards, under the Prince of Orange; after which he extended his travels, and went to Rome, where he was hospitably received by the rector of the English University; and here Lord Herbert, who had a holy horror of Papistry, yet finds it in his heart to say that the points of difference between them are less than the points more important on which they agree, which should therefore be bonds of amity and friendly good will. On returning home he was nominated ambassador to the French king, Louis XIII., whom he informs us was gifted with a double row of teeth and a fearful stutter, and was, besides, wholly under the government of the Duke de Luynes, with whom our hero found himself entirely unable to agree For the Duke, in opposition to the more moderate counsels of Chancellor Sillery and others, was ever urging on the king to extirpate his Protestant subjects as the Spaniards had the Moors. The wise and careful advice given by Herbert on this occasion deeply embroiled him with the haughty favourite. He was recalled, says Howell in his "Familiar Letters," for having had some clashings and counterbuffs with the favourite Luynes, wherein he comported himself gallantly. The arguments used by Herbert to the king are worthy of observation, and not indeed without a special interest at the present day.

"I was often told," he observes, "that if the Reformation in France had been like that in England, where (as they said) we retained the hierarchy together with decent rites and ceremonies in the Church-as also holy days in the memory of saints, music in churches, and divers other testimonies both of glorifying God and giving honour and reward to learning-they could better have tolerated it; but such a rash and violent reformation as theirs was ought by no means to be approved; whereunto I answered that though the causes of departing from the Church of Rome were taught and delivered by many modest and sober persons, yet that the Reformation in great part was acted by the common people, whereas ours began at the prince of state, and therefore was more moderate." But all this and much more, he

says, failed to divert the duke or his master from their resolution: that Herbert should on his recall challenge the Duke de Luynes to mortal combat was probably a matter of surprise to no one, though after much disputation the adversaries were not allowed to fight, and shortly after De Luynes died. On his return he was created (1625) a baron of Ireland, by the title of Castle Island; and later (1631) a peer of England, under the style of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, co. Salop. He now withdrew in great measure from public life, and applied himself to the completion of his great work "De Veritate."

In the disputes between the king and the Parliament, Lord Herbert, in spite of his peerage, sided with the latter.

In 1648 he died at his house in Queen Street, London, and was buried at St. Giles in the Field's: a Latin epitaph on his tomb ascribes to him as his chief title to distinction, "Auctoris libri cui titulus est 'De Veritate."

He was succeeded in his honours by his son Richard, and he by his son Edward, who dying in 1691, was buried likewise at St. Giles's beside his grandfather.

But it is mainly in his literary character that Lord Herbert occupies a distinguished place in English history, as the leader of the modern school of philosophic rationalism, as we find it exemplified in Toland, Tindal, Hume, and Bolingbroke. He appears to have elaborated a scheme of natural religion, as sufficient without the aid of revelation to guide the soul of But just as in Herbert himself, his love of duelling did not extinguish a kindly generosity of spirit, so in his treatise "De Religione Gentilium," he says, it is far from his intention to do harm to the "best religion, i. e., Christianity, or the true faith,

man.

but to establish both."

Granger, in his Biographical History of England, places him in the first rank of the public ministers, historians, or philosophers of his time; "the fair, the learned, and the brave," he adds, “held him in equal estimation." But the width of the interval that separated him from the modern disciple of materialism is curiously exemplified in the accounts he gives of his doubts as to whether he should publish the book in which his views were expressed. "Being thus doubtful," he writes, "in my chamber one fair day in the summer, the sun shining clear and no wind stirring, I took my book De Veritate in my hand, and kneeling on my knees devoutly said these words,-'0 thou eternal God, Author of the light which now shines upon