possessing the faculties and opportunities necessary to make both would have been the most extraordinary thing of all’ (see Spedding’s Essays and Discussions, 1879, pp. 371, 372).

’Great writers, especially being contemporary, have many features in common, but if they are really great writers they write naturally, and nature is always individual.  I doubt whether there are five lines together to be found in Bacon which could be mistaken for Shakespeare, or five lines in Shakespeare which could be mistaken for Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several styles and practised in such observations’ (Ibid., p. 373).

THE NON-JURORS

To anyone blessed or cursed with an ironical humour the troublesome history of the Church of England since the Reformation cannot fail to be an endless source of delight.  It really is exciting.  Just a little more of Calvin and of Beza, half a dozen words here, or Cranmer’s pencil through a single phrase elsewhere; a ‘quantum suff.’ of the men ‘that allowed no Eucharistic sacrifice,’ and away must have gone beyond recall the possibility of the Laudian revival and all that still appertains thereunto.  We must have lost the ‘primitive’ men, the Kens, the Wilsons, the Knoxes, the Kebles, the Puseys.  On the other hand, but for the unfaltering language of the Articles, the hearty tone of the Homilies, and the agreeable readiness of both sides to curse the Italian impudence of the Bishop of Rome and all his ‘detestable enormities,’ our Anglican Church history could never have been enriched with the names or sweetened by the memories of the Romaines, the Flavels, the Venns, the Simeons, and of many thousand unnamed saints who finished their course in the fervent faith of Evangelicalism.  But on what a thread it has always hung!  An ill-considered Act of Parliament, an amendment hastily accepted by a pestered layman at midnight, a decision in a court of law, a Jerusalem Bishoprick, a passage in an early Father, an ancient heresy restudied, and off to Rome goes a Newman or a Manning, whilst a Baptist Noel finds his less romantic refuge in Protestant Dissent.  Schism is for ever in the air.  Disruption a lively possibility.  It has always been a ticklish business belonging to the Church of England, unless you can muster up enough courage to be a frank Erastian, and on the rare occasions when you attend your parish church handle the Book of Common Prayer with all the reverence due to a schedule to an Act of Parliament.

Among the many noticeable humours of the present situation is the tone adopted by an average Churchman like Canon Overton to the Non-Jurors.  When the late Mr. Lathbury published his admirable History of the Non-Jurors,[A] he had to prepare himself for a very different public of Churchmen and Churchwomen than will turn over Canon Overton’s agreeable pages.[B] In 1845 the average Churchman, after he had