Alexander Balloch Grosart

“ Perhaps "diverting" is a rather inadequate word, for there is depth of insight and weight of shrewd sense beneath the sparkle and the laughter of the New Bath Guide. The Election Ball, in Poetical Letters from Mr Inkle at Bath to his Wife at Gloucester, sustained the reputation won by the Guide. It seems to us even more brilliant in its wit, anc finely touched as verse. Other productions in verse anc prose have long passed into oblivion. The poetical works were collected in 1808 (2 vols.) by the author s son John himself author of The Pleader s Guide, in the same vein with the New Bath Guide. ”

“ Grasping his fecundity of publication with the engrossing ministry which occupied his chief energies, it must be manifest that Richard Baxter was an extraordinary man. In his physique naturally weak, and tainted from the outset with consumptive tendencies, and later worn and valetudinarian, he so conquered the body, that he did the work of a score of ordinary men as an author alone. Baxter had beyond all dispute a penetrative, almost morbidly acute brain. ”

“ Richard Wickstead, chaplain to the council at Ludlow, who was allowed by the king to have a single pupil. He assented, under the natural expectation that, as being his tutor's 'one scholar,' he should be thoroughly taught. The trust was falsified. Wickstead all but absolutely neglected his pupil. The only advantage gained in Ludlow Castle was that Baxter was left very much to himself in a great library. Whilst Wickstead was paying court to his superiors, and plotting for preferment, his one scholar was enriching his strenuous and agile intellect with all manner of miscellaneous reading. ”

“ It is as a letter-writer that Lady Bacon appears in her most attractive light. Most of her extant letters are addressed to her sons Anthony and Francis, and have been printed in Spedding's 'Life of Bacon.' Of her solicitude for the spiritual welfare of her sons, and of the jealousy with which she regarded her authority over them long after they had reached manhood, they all give ample proof. She is always fiercely rebuking them for disregard of her wishes, and seeking to keep herself informed of all the details of their daily life. ”

“ When the Bishop of London (Dr. King) learned that Bolton had been presented to Broughton, he thanked the patron, but added, 'Sir, you have deprived the university of its brightest ornament.' He was 'a comely and grave person,' says Bagshawe, and 'commanding in all companies . . . ever zealous in the cause of Christ, yet so prudent as to avoid being called in question for those things in which he was unconformable to the ecclesiastical establishment.' Bolton died, after a lingering sickness of a quartan ague, on Saturday, 17 Dec. ”

“ He was himself a subscriber to it, and by a wide correspondence; rallied others around the illustrious scholar. When he was about seventy he broke an arm by a fall from his horse. The next year he was taken with a quartan ague, which afflicted him seven years. He had an impression 'borne in upon him that, old and frail as he was, he should live to see a very great change.' He lived to welcome William and Mary, whose coming to the throne he regarded as the fulfilment of his impression. ”

“ Edward Bagshaw, minister of the Gospel, who received faith from God to embrace it, courage to defend it, and patience to suffer for it, which is by most despised and by many persecuted; esteeming the advantage of birth, education, and learning as things of worth to be accounted loss for the knowledge of Christ. ”

“ He is not so sustained as Jeremy Taylor, nor so continuously sparkling as Thomas Fuller, but he is surpassingly eloquent and brilliant, and much more thought-laden than either. He lays under contribution the spoils of an omnivorous learning and recondite reading ”

“ He married a daughter of the once famous Colonel Purefoy of Caldecote, Warwickshire: and as the inscription on his tomb—still extant there—tells us, he bravely held the manorhouse against the Princes Rupert and Maurice during the great civil war.
As a layman and nevertheless a theologian and scholar of original capacity and remarkable attainments, he holds a unique place in the literature of the period. ”

“ From contemporary references, it appears that those who had chosen Barbon assembled as a church in their pastor's own ‘great house,’ called the ‘Lock and Key,’ in Fleet Street, near Fetter Lane. As a preacher he speedily made his mark. The libellers of the puritans called his preaching ‘long harangues,’ but he held the allegiance of a large congregation. He combined his ‘trade’ of leather-seller with his preaching, and he must pretty early have joined to himself in his pastorate one Greene, a ‘felt-maker’—the two ‘trades’ exciting the sarcasms of adversaries of nonconformity. ”

“ His ‘Glory of Christ set forth, with the Necessity of Faith,’ furnishes an excellent example of the average sermons of the ‘ejected’—strong, clear English, and full of ‘the Gospel’ as a honeycomb of honey. ”

“ I doubt not but the headiness and rashness of the younger inexperienced sort of religious people made many parliament men and ministers overgo themselves to keep pace with these Hotspurs. No doubt but much indiscretion appeared, and worse than indiscretion in the tumultuous petitioners, and much sin was committed in the dishonouring of the king, and in the uncivil language against the bishops and liturgy of the church. ”

“ He remained in Scotland about two years, and ‘after an accurate parallel of Protestancy and Popery, and a scrupulous scrutiny of the most material grounds they both stood on,’ he renounced the latter, and ‘came to London as to a safe sanctuary’ where he might ‘serve God in all freedom and security’ (p. 11) . He protests: ‘They [his Roman catholic friends and relatives] cannot say that any other motive but that of saving my soul in the securest way caus'd me to withdraw from them and side with Protestants. ”

“ For twenty years Alleine remained at Batcombe, and was idolised by his parishioners. At the Restoration he showed a willingness to acquiesce in the government, being of the old-fashioned type of believer in monarchy, if not in any and every monarch; but the Act of Uniformity came, and he felt compelled by loyalty to conscience to cast in his lot with the ‘ejected.’ Because of the Five Mile Act, which hindered him opening his mouth at Batcombe, he removed to Frome Selwood, and preached there and in the neighbourhood semi-privately until his death on 22 Dec. ”

“ The minister of Antrim promulgated his new opinions in an association of like-minded presbyterians, called The Belfast Society. The issue was a division of the one camp of Presbyterianism into two, known historically as subscribers and non-subscribers. Abernethy was at the head of the latter.
In 1719 Abernethy's opinions and sentiments found memorable expression in a sermon on the text (Romans xiv. 5) : ‘Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind,’ in which he nobly vindicated private judgment and christian liberty; but it was as fuel added to fire. ”

“ The work done by Richard Baxter in Kidderminster has passed into history. Whereas in the beginning the moral (not to speak of the godly) were to be counted on the ten fingers, ere very long a passing traveller along the streets at a given hour heard the sounds of praise and prayer in every household. For the evidences of his power in his preaching, 'Reliquiæ Baxterianæ' and Calamy's 'Account,' and other easily accessible authorities may be consulted. Baxter had only been two years at his post in Kidderminster when the civil war burst out. ”

“ John Owen, writing to a friend in Scotland before his death, said of him : 'You have truly men of great spirit among you; there is, for a gentleman, Mr. Baillie of Jerviswood, a person of the greatest abilities I ever almost met with.' '
The Jerviswood family was ruined by the execution and consequent forfeiture of their head. ”

“ Like Sydney Smith of our own generation, Alsop's natural wit and fun and swift spontaneity in seeing and hitting off the absurd and ridiculous were irrepressible. Even Dr. Robert South—no friend to nonconformists—publicly avowed that he had the advantage of Sherlock every way. ”

“ About the time he was ’Master’ [of Arts] in 1586, he entered holy orders, and became a frequent and zealous preacher in the university, particularly in the church of St. Peter-in-the-East, joining to the Queen’s College. His ’Lectures on Philippians’is a spirited example of his preaching in the church, of his fiery denunciation of popery, and of his unmistakable enunciation of that evangelical Calvinism which Oxford, in common with all England, then prized. ”

“ BALFOUR, ALEXANDER (1767–1829) , novelist, was born in the parish of Monikie, Forfarshire, Scotland, on 1 March 1767. His parents were both of the humblest peasantry. Being a twin, he was from his birth under the care of a relative. He was physically weak. His education was of the scantiest. When a mere lad he was apprenticed to a weaver. Later he taught in a school in his native parish, and many lived to remember him gratefully for his rough and ready but successful teaching of them. In his twenty-sixth year (1793) he became one of the clerks of a merchant manufacturer in Arbroath. ”

“ There are many kindred pathetic notices of these humble martyrs of the Scottish persecution. Helen Alexander was born at Linton in 1654, and from her youth up was an earnest Christian. She resolutely avowed her adherence to presbyterianism and ‘the covenant’ before the lordliest of the land. She ‘ministered’ dauntlessly to the fugitives. She stood by the friendless at the bars. She spent days and nights in prison with ‘the suffering remnant.’ She died in March 1729, aged 75. ”

“ On returning from abroad, the tutor was introduced by the Earl of Argyle to court, and he was appointed tutor to young Prince Henry, son of James VI, at Holyrood. ‘The most learned fool in Europe’ had shrewd if narrow insight into character and capacity and scholarship. He must have been specially pleased by Alexander, who to the latest had no common influence with him.
When James VI of Scotland, in 1603, succeeded Elizabeth, Alexander, though he did not accompany him at the outset, formed one of the invading host of Scots. ”

“ Whilst in Kidderminster Richard Baxter was a prominent political leader as well as a minister of the gospel. He still stood for the nation and the people's rights, yet looked back to the ancient monarchy of England. He opposed the Solemn League and Covenant none the less intrepidly that he had himself rashly signed it at Coventry; and thus incurred the dislike of his co-presbyterians. He opposed the Engagement, and similarly offended the independents. He opposed root-and-branch extirpation of episcopacy, and thus exasperated the Scots. ”

“ On leaving Ludlow Castle in 1633, his tutor urged him to give up any intention he might have had of studying for the ministry. Wickstead painted to his vivid imagination the gay life of the court, and argued that there was nothing to hinder Baxter's rising there. He allowed himself to be over-persuaded–his parents unfortunately having seconded the tutor in this instance–and went up to the court, with a letter of introduction to Sir Henry Herbert, then master of the revels. ”

“ He never received any school education. He was taught to read by his mother, and writing and arithmetic by his brother Alexander. The two lads, from the thirteenth year of the elder, earned their living by breaking stones on the road between Lindores and Newburgh. John, having been apprenticed to weaving in the village of Collessie, became so expert in the craft that in 1825 he set up looms for himself in a house immediately adjoining his father's, and with Alexander for apprentice. The failure of the trade all over Scotland in this year ruined them all. ”

“ Appointed later to Donyatt, also in Somersetshire, the Act of Uniformity found him again ready to be ejected and to share the witness and the sufferings of the two thousand. On his second ejection he retired to his native place, where he lived unobtrusively till his death. He held, as all the nonconformist ministers did, that his orders were of divine sanction, and could not be annulled by any bishop or other dignitary unless for proved fault. Accordingly he went about as an evangelist and preacher. His most successful ministry was in the ‘church in the house’ of separate families. ”

“ In 1726 the ‘non-subscribers’ were ‘cut off’ from the ministry and membership of the Irish presbyterian church, and formed themselves into a separate presbytery. Sorrowful heart-burnings and feuds followed. There can be no question that, consciously or unconsciously, Abernethy now sowed the seed whose blissful or baleful harvest (according to opinion) had to be cut down by the illustrious Dr. Henry Cooke fully a century later. But the ‘non-subscribing’ presbyterians still exist as unitarians.
In 1730 he accepted a call to Wood Street congregation in Dublin, on the death of Mr. Boyse. ”

“ He was the creator of our popular Christian literature. Regarded intrinsically and as literature, his books need fear no comparison with contemporaries. Archbishop Trench of Dublin has judicially described the literary merit of Baxter in speaking of the 'Saint's Everlasting Rest:' 'Let me mention here, before entering into deeper matters, one formal merit which the Saint's "Everlasting Rest" eminently possesses. I refer to that without which, I suppose, no book ever won a permanent place in the literature of a nation, and which I have no scruple in ascribing to it–I mean its style. ”

“ He went with the Earl of Argyle into Scotland, where he was taken, and made an attempt to destroy himself by inflicting a terrible wound in his belly. At his execution it came out that he was of the Temple: had been a 'clubber at the King's Head Tavern,' and 'a green-ribbon man.' 'Marvell's Ghost' is as burning and passionate in its invective as any of Marvell's own. ”

“ When James VI of Scotland devised his scheme of re-establishing 'the bishops' in Scotland, he found Balcanquhall, along with James Lawson, Robert Pont, and Andrew Melville, and their like-minded brethren, in active opposition. On the calling together of the estates of the realm in 1584, the king sent an imperative message to the magistrates of Edinburgh 'to seize and imprison any of the ministers who should venture to speak against the proceedings of the parliament.' But Balcanquhall (along with James Lawson) preached fearlessly against the proposals ”