and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

“We should be wary, therefore, what persecutions we raise against the living labours of public men; how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and, if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life.”

This is a fine defence of the inviolability of a good and proper book.

A bad book will generally die of itself, but there is something horribly malignant about a wicked book, as it must always be worse than a wicked man, for a man can repent, but a book cannot.

It is the men of letters who keep alive the books of the great from generation to generation, and they are never likely to preserve a wicked book from oblivion.  Ultimately such go to light fires and encompass groceries.

Your loving old
G.P.

8

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Milton, of whom I wrote in my last letter, was five years older than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I am going to write to-day.  The latter’s writings differ very much from Milton’s, although they were contemporaries for the whole of the former’s life.

From the grave and august periods of Milton to the sweet beauty of Jeremy Taylor is as the passing from out the austere halls of Justice to lovely fields full of flowers.

Your and my great kinsman, Coleridge, pronounced Jeremy Taylor to be the most eloquent of all divines; and Coleridge was a great critic.

Indeed, there seems to dwell permanently in Jeremy Taylor’s mind a compelling sweetness and serenity.

His parables, though sometimes perhaps almost of set purpose fanciful, are always full of beauty.

How can anyone withhold sympathy and affection from the writer of such a passage as this:—­

“But as, when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly, so is a man’s reason and his life.”

Again:—­