learning and knowledge; an affection which is last mortified' in a polite and a capacious mind, that now made the great world his other book. He took notes of all in short-hand, when he was by himself; though his memory was so tenacious and so strangely faithful, that many times he could recal the circumstances of time and place with the very words he had heard many years ago. At Leipzig the learned professors courted him to their worthy acquaintance; but his reputation drawing too many visitants, he retired to a neighbour village, where he spent his time in reading the choicest writers on the German affairs. All men concluded he designed greatness and rising in the state by the vast pains he took and by husbanding his time with so scrupulous a care of it. His father, overjoyed at his happy progress, writ him an assurance that he should neither want money or time to perfect his intentions, and therefore charged him not to destroy himself by too much diligence. After he had visited several courts of the lesser dukes and princes of the empire and carefully surveyed the imperial court and city, he bent his course from Vienna towards Italy. II. Many German towns being full of the plague at this time, when he came upon the fron 1 Doubtless an allusion to Tacitus's saying (H. iv. 6): Etiam sapientibus cupido gloriæ novissima exuitur; which Milton (Lycidas) has imitated: Fame, that last infirmity of noble minds. tiers of Italy, the Venetian territory, he was compelled at one passage to make his quarantine (as they call it), a custom on this occasion used to air the passengers for forty days. These fell out to be our forty-days fast of Lent, so that he was forced to do penance both under a restraint from company and from flesh, though neither of these was any great constraint upon one already so mortified. Here he had leisure enough to recollect his thoughts, to revise his notes', and to reduce his observations into method. He spent this time of fasting and sequestration from the world very agreeably. In the morning he went up into a neighbour mountain, where abundance of wild thyme and rosemary grew; there with a book or two and with his God, Whom he met in the closest walks of his mind, having spent the day in reading, meditation and prayer, he came down in the evening to an early supper (his only set meal) of oil and fish. He omitted not his offices and exercises of devotion morning and evening and at midnight in his travels, for to serve and please his Maker was the travail of his soul. He needed not many books, who was his own concordance, and had the New Testament in a manner without book?. And if the time and place would not serve him to kneel, yet then and there he made the lowest prostrations of his soul and spirit. 1 Taken in short-hand.-Peckard, 54. 12. I cannot omit one extraordinary deliverance among the many which the providence of God's goodness vouchsafed him in Italy. Riding one time over some dangerous and narrow passages of the Alps, his guide being but a little way before him, out comes an ass from the side of a hill between him and his guide, laden with a large piece of timber lying cross her back, running upon him down the hill, where the way was extremely strait and narrow and steep, as having a wall on the one side and a dreadful descent on the other. His guide not hearing the tread of his mule, looked behind him, and seeing the ass thus laden and now near him, he cried out, O Lord! O God! the man is lost if he had a hundred lives. Overhearing the guide's voice he was amazed, and looking up he saw the ass coming down hastily upon him, so that, the wood lying athwart her, he thought it must tumble him and his mule headlong into the dismal valley beneath him therefore he instantly called upon God to preserve him, and by His infinite mercy to find some means of delivering him. Just as the ass came upon him, she tripped, and with that bowing and sudden violent motion the timber swayed away from him and only gave him a brush on one side as the ass passed quietly by, whilst he and his mule stood still. Immediately alighting and falling flat on his face he made his most humble acknowledgements to Almighty God for his preservation, whilst the guide and the owner of the ass (who coming up told how she broke away as they ་ were lading her) stood crossing themselves and crying Miracolo! 13. At Padua the genius of the place presented him with a fair opportunity, and his own infirm constitution gave him occasion enough, to apply himself intensely to the study of physic, in which by a sudden proficiency he gained the friendship and assistance of the most excellent men in that university. He soon became too well known and oppressed with too many visits, by his own countrymen especially (for it is the Englishman's fault when he is abroad, to lose his time in quest of his mother tongue). To remove this evil he retired ten, twenty, thirty, or forty miles into the country, frequently changing his place of residence and then returning for three weeks or a month to Padua or Venice, where he was treated at a very obliging rate by the honourable sir Dudley Carleton the English ambassador. While he resided at Padua he was seized with a violent sickness'. His physicians 1 "I bless God for the confirmation which he [Thomas Jackson] hath given me in the christian religion against the Atheist, Jew, and Socinian, and in the protestant, against Rome. As also, by what I have seen in manuscript of Mr. Ferrar's, and heard by relation of his travels over the western parts of Christendom; in which his exquisite carriage, his rare parts and abilities of understanding and languages, his morals more perfect than the best, did tempt the adversaries to tempt him, and mark him for a prize, if they could compass him. And opportunity they had to do this, in a sickness that seized on him at Padua, where mighty care was had by physicians were his particular friends, and held a consultation about him in his chamber, and all dreadfully apprehended him to be in extreme danger. They determined to let him blood as the last remedy, to which he was ready to submit; though reasoning the case with them he declared his own sense that it would hasten his end. Then a very old physician, who came to him in pure kindness and had been silent before, protested that he was his own. best physician, and prevailed to defer his bleeding. Next morning there appeared some favourable signs of his recovery, and within three or four days they were perfectly of his opinion, that had they opened a vein, he had been lost. The good old man, transported with joy to have been the means under God of his preservation, came daily and sat whole hours with him while he kept his chamber, admiring the excellency of his parts as well intellectual as moral. and others to recover his bodily health, with design to infect his soul. But neither did their physic nor poison work any change in his religion, but rather inflamed him with a holy zeal to revenge their charity, by transplanting their waste and misplaced zeal (as they were all three admirable in separating from the vile what was precious in every sect or person under heaven) to adorn our protestant religion, by a right renouncing the world with all its profits and honours, in a true crucifying the flesh, with all its pleasures, by continued temperance, fasting, and watching unto prayers. In all which exercises, as he far outwent the choicest of their retired men, so did he far undervalue these deeds, rating them much below such prices as they set upon them."-Oley's Life of Herbert, xcviii, |