The little boat he speaks of was the obscure mountain home where he taught school, and where he received, some time, visits from the famous John Evelyn,[50] who wrote charming books in these days about woods and gardens, and who befriended the poor stranded chaplain. Here, too, he wrote that monument of toleration, The Liberty of Prophesying, a work which would be counted broad in its teachings even now, and which alienated a great many of his more starched fellows in the Church. A little fragment from the closing pages of this book will show at once his method of illustration and his extreme liberality:
“When Abraham sat at his tent door, waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old man stopping by the way, leaning on his staff, weary with much travel, and who was a hundred years of age.
“He received him kindly, provided supper, caused him to sit down; but observing that the old man ate, and prayed not, neither begged for a blessing on his meat, he asked him why he did not worship the God of Heaven?
“The old man told him he had been used to worship the sun only.
“Whereupon Abraham in anger thrust him from his tent. When he was gone into the evils of the night, God called to Abraham, and said, ‘I have suffered this man, whom thou hast cast out, these hundred years, and couldest thou not endure him one night, when he gave thee no trouble?’ Upon this Abraham fetched the man back and gave him entertainment: ‘Go thou and do likewise,’ said the preacher, ‘and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abraham.’”[51]
Jeremy Taylor did not learn this teaching from Archbishop Laud, but from the droiture of his own conscience, and the kindness of his own heart. He wrote much other and most delectable matter in his years of Welsh retirement, when a royal chaplain was a bugbear in England. He lost sons, too—who had gone to the bad under the influences of that young Duke of Buckingham I mentioned; but at last, when the restoration of Charles II. came, he was given a bishopric in the wilds of Ireland, in a sour, gloomy country, with sour and gloomy looks all around him, which together, broke him down at the age of fifty-five. I have spoken thus much of him, because he is a man to be remembered as the most eloquent, and the most kindly, and the most tolerant of all the Church of England people in that day; and because his treatises on Holy Living and Holy Dying will doubtless give consolation to thousands of desponding souls, in the years to come, as they have in the years that are past. He was saturated through and through with learning and with piety; and they gurgled from him together in a great tide of mellifluous language. The ardors and fervors of Elizabethan days seem to have lapped over upon him in that welter of the Commonwealth wars. He has been called the Shakespeare of the pulpit; I should rather say the Spenser—there is such unchecked, and uncheckable, affluence of language and illustration; thought and speech struggling together for precedence, and stretching on and on, in ever so sweet and harmonious jangle of silvery sounds.
A Royalist and a Puritan.
Another Royalist of these times, of a different temper, was Sir John Suckling:[52] a poet too, very rich, bred in luxury, a man of the world, who had seen every court in Europe worth seeing, who dashed off songlets and ballads between dinners and orgies; which songlets often hobbled on their feet by reason of those multiplied days of high living; but yet they had prettinesses in them which have kept them steadily alive all down to these prosaic times. I give a sample from his “Ballad upon a Wedding,” though it may be over-well known:
“Her cheeks so rare a white was on
No daisy makes comparison