full of wisdom, and who may be read with so much advantage. Of him I will venture to assert what Quintilian said of Cicero, that he who loves Sallust is no mean proficient in historical composition. That precept of Aristotle in the third book of his rhetoric, which you wish me to explain, relates to the morality of the reflections and the fidelity of the narrative. It appears to me to need little comment, except that it should be appropriated not to the compositions of rhetoric but of history. For the offices of a rhetorician and an historian are as different as the arts which they profess. Polybius, Halicarnassus, Diodorus, Cicero, Lucian, and many others, whose works are interspersed with precepts on the subject, will better teach what are the duties of an historian. I wish you every success in your travels and pursuits. Adieu. Westminster, Dec. 16, 1657.

you

XXVII.

To the accomplished PETER HEINBACH.

I RECEIVED your letter from the Hague the 18th December, which, as your convenience seems to require, I answer the same day on which it was received. In this letter, after returning me thanks for some favours which I am not conscious of having done, but which my regard for you makes me wish to have been real, you ask me to recommend you, through the medium of D. Lawrence, to him who is appointed our agent in Holland. This I grieve that I am not able to do, both on account of my little familiarity with those who have favours to bestow, since I have more pleasure in keeping myself at home, and because I believe that he is already on his voyage, and has in his company a person in the office of secretary, which you are anxious to obtain. But the bearer of this is on the eve of his departure. Adieu.

Westminster, Dec. 18, 1657.

XXVIII.

To JOHN BADIAUS, Minister of the Church of Orange. MOST excellent and reverend sir, I believe that our friend Durius will take upon himself the blame of my not writing to you sooner. After he had shewed me that paper which you

wished me to read concerning what I had done and suffered for the sake of the gospel, I wrote this letter as soon as possible, intending to send it by the first conveyance, since I was fearful that you might consider a longer silence as neglect. In the mean time I am under the greatest obligations to your friend Molin, for procuring me the esteem of the virtuous in those parts by the zeal of his friendship and the warmth of his praise; and though I am not ignorant that the contest in which I was engaged with so great an adversary, that the celebrity of the subject and the style of the composition had far and wide diffused my fame, yet I think that I can be famous only in proportion as I enjoy the approbation of the good. I clearly see that you are of the same opinion; so many are the toils you have endured, so many are the enemies whom you have provoked by your disinterested zeal in defence of the Christian doctrine; and you act with so much intrepidity as to shew, that instead of courting the applause of bad men, you do not fear to excite their most inveterate hate and their most bitter maledictions. Oh happy are you whom, out of so many thousands of the wise and learned, Providence has rescued from the very brink of destruction, and selected to bear a distinguished and intrepid testimony to the truth of the gospel. I have now reasons for thinking that it was a singular mercy that I did not write to you sooner; for when I understood by your letters that, threatened on all sides by the malice of your enemies, you were looking round for a place of refuge, to which you might fly in the last extremity of danger, and that you had fixed on England as the object of your wishes, I was considerably gratified, because it gave me the hope of enjoying your company, and because I was happy to find you think so favourably of my country; but I lamented that, particularly owing to your ignorance of our language, I did not see any chance of a decent provision being made for you among us. The death of an old French minister has since very opportunely occurred. The principal persons of his congregation (from whom I have received this communication) anxiously wish, or rather invite, you to be chosen in his place; they have determined to pay the expenses of your journey, to provide for you as large a salary as any of the French ministers receive, and to let you want nothing which can contribute to the cheerful discharge of your eccle

siastical function. Fly, I beseech you, as soon as possible, reverend sir, to those who are so desirous of seeing you, and where you will reap a harvest, not rich indeed in temporal delights, but in numerous opportunities to improve the hearts and to save the souls of men; and be assured that your arrival is warmly desired by all good men. Adieu.

Westminster, April 1, 1659.

XXIX.

To HENRY OLDENBURGH.

THE indulgence which you beg for yourself, you will rather have to bestow on me, whose turn, if I remember, it was to write. My regard for you has, believe me, suffered no diminution; but either my studies or my domestic cares, or perhaps my indolence in writing, have made me guilty of this omission of duty. I am, by God's help, as well as usual. I am not willing, as you wish me, to compile a history of our troubles; for they seem rather to require oblivion than commemoration; nor have we so much need of a person to compose a history of our troubles as happily to settle them. I fear with you lest our civil dissensions, or rather maniacal agitation, should expose us to the attack of the lately confederated enemies of religion and of liberty; but those enemies could not inflict a deeper wound upon religion than we ourselves have long since done by our follies and our crimes. But whatever disturbances kings and cardinals may meditate and contrive, I trust that God will not suffer the machinations and the violence of our enemies to succeed according to their expectations. I pray that the protestant synod, which you say is soon to meet at Leyden, may have a happy termination, which has never yet happened to any synod that has ever met before. But the termination of this might be called happy, if it decreed nothing else but the expulsion of More. As soon as my posthumous adversary shall make his appearance I request you to give me the earliest information. Adieu. Westminster, Dec. 20, 1659.

XXX.

To the noble Youth, RICHARD JONES.

You send me a most modest apology for not writing sooner, when you might more justly have accused me of the same offence; so that I hardly know whether I should choose that you had not committed the offence or not written the apology. Never for a moment believe that I measure your gratitude, if any gratitude be due to me, by the assiduity of your epistolary communications. I shall perceive all the ardour of your gratitude, since you will extol the merit of my services, not so much in the frequency of your letters as in the excellence of your habits, and the degree of your moral and intellectual proficiency. On the theatre of the world on which you have entered, you have rightly chosen the path of virtue; but know there is a path common to virtue and to vice; and that it behoves you to advance where the way divides. Leaving the common track of pleasure and amusement, you should cheerfully encounter the toils and the dangers of that steep and rugged way which leads to the pinnacle of virtue. This, believe me, you will accomplish with more facility, since you have got a guide of so much integrity and skill. Adieu. Westminster, Dec. 20, 1659.

XXXI.

To the accomplished PETER HEINBACH, Counsellor to the Elector of Brandenburgh.

It is not strange as you write that report should have induced you to believe, that I had perished among the numbers of my countrymen who fell in a year so fatally visited by the ravages of the plague. If that rumour sprung, as it seems, out of solicitude for my safety, I consider it as no unpleasing indication of the esteem in which I am held among you. But by the goodness of God, who provided for me a place of refuge in the country, I yet enjoy both life and health; which, as long as they continue, I shall be happy to employ in any useful undertaking. It gives me pleasure to think that, after so long an interval, I have again occurred to your remembrance; though, owing to the luxuriance of your praise, you seem almost to lead me to suspect that you had quite for

gotten one in whom you say that you admire the union of so many virtues; from such an union I might dread too numerous a progeny, if it were not evident that the virtues flourish most in penury and distress. But one of those virtues has made me but an ill return for her hospitable reception in my breast; for what you term policy, and which I wish that you had rather called patriotic piety, has, if I may so say, almost left me, who was charmed with so sweet a sound, without a country. The other virtues harmoniously agree. Our country is wherever we are well off. I will conclude after first begging you if there be any errors in the diction or the punctuation, to impute it to the boy who wrote this, who is quite ignorant of Latin, and to whom I was, with no little vexation, obliged to dictate not the words, but, one by one, the letters of which they were composed. I rejoice to find that your virtues and talents, of which I saw the fair promise in your youth, have raised you to so honourable a situation under the prince; and I wish you every good which you can enjoy. Adieu.

London, Aug. 15, 1666.

END OF VOL. III.

J. Rickerby, Printer, Sherbourn Lane, King William Street, City.