original mind; his book is brisk and suggestive: but he did not explore; he is inaccurate and not well-proportioned. Dean Hook's is a good working biography, not original or high in tone, but a worthy portrait in a sound series. Professor Mozley's essay on Laud is perhaps the best known of his studies, and the liveliest life of the man. It is delightful reading; but the more one knows of Laud, the deeper is the distrust one feels of that brilliant paradoxical style. Mozley is too imaginative and enthusiastic; he builds too much on small things; there is too strong a personal factor throughout. Deep as is the debt which writers on Laud must owe to his book, much as I owe him in the way of kindled interest and sympathetic enlightenment, I cannot help recording the fact that it is a portrait reminding one every now and then, by a clever trick, by a sympathetic gesture, of the original, but a deceitful portrait after all. There is no book I would more confidently recommend to a would-be student of Laud and his life; there is no book I should be more surprised at a genuine student's accepting and retaining. Of incidental portraiture, Professor Gardiner's stands at the other end of the scale-Laud steps on to the scene at intervals in the whole drama of GARDINER-LAMBETH PAPERS. xiii the Rebellion: but Professor Gardiner's portraits, if the criticism is not presumptuous, are hardly lively enough; he is amazingly correct and cautious, and satisfies without pleasing. Charles, Strafford, Pym, -it is always the same-not one of them carries the reader away. I have also studied carefully such books as | Clarendon's History, the "Rushworth Papers," the "Eikon Basilike," Aubrey's Letters, and many other histories and collections, for contemporary portraits and records of contemporary affairs. And I have had free access to the Lambeth papers, which contain many curious points, many delightful confirmations, too minute to enter into larger histories, but which I have endeavoured to embody in this little study of a character and a life. Historians have been before me; the papers have been ransacked many times. But it is the privilege of the biographer, who works on a more microscopic scale, to emphasize and drag to light all kinds of tiny relics, little papers annotated by friendly hands, flotsam and jetsam of the ages that accumulated fortuitously in muniment cupboards and archive chambers. Whether or not such search and such treasure-trove can give satisfaction to others remains to be seen. I can genuinely say that to me it has been a labour of love—a labour in which my interest and delight have never flagged -a task to which I have returned in hour after hour of leisure, in a life full of little interruptions, and never found irksome, or dreary, or dull. I must, in conclusion, record my great obligation to my friend, Mr. W. H. D. Boyle, who has throughout corrected the following pages, and suggested many improvements. A. C. B.. ETON, July, 1887.. ARCHBISHOP LAUD. INTRODUCTORY. IT is impossible to pursue the history of a single life upon chronological lines, unless it is made a mere chronology. A single trait has sometimes to be pursued into remote events, and then to be recalled into stricter temporal sequence. I think, therefore, it will be as well first to tabulate several historical events, in themselves not unfamiliar, but whose exact relative position is perhaps undecided, except in the minds of specialists; so that if I have to treat historical events unchronologically, it may be clear that I do so, not because they are not chronologically related, but because some events have a more direct connection with primary causes than other events which preceded them in point of actual occurrence. A knowledge of dates is not a knowledge of history. B Murder of Buckingham; Laud Bishop of London Strafford Lord Deputy of Ireland Laud Archbishop of Canterbury 1603 1611 ... : ... : 1615 ... 1621 ... 1624 ... ... 1625 1628 ... To the amateur historian the period of the Stuarts is wonderfully attractive: it is so accessible. In any old-fashioned library he can find contemporary literature in abundance; he may skim through pamphlets, sermons, letters, tractates, in their antique brown type, on stiff wrinkled papersermons that seem formal and affected now, but that made ears tingle then; letters that kindled rebellion, and tractates that fanned it into flame. He can get somewhat of what these people thought themselves; he need not take it second-hand: or if he prefers to do so-if he mistrusts his own judgment-he has several competent historians, working from adequate material, from whom he may select |