“Through shadow dimly seen
    Rose Clid’row’s castle grey;"[23]

when, to use his own expressions, he lived a “solitary and sedentary life, mihi et musis, having more converse with the dead than the living, that is, more with books than with men.”  The facts for his biography are scanty and meagre, and are rather collected by inference from his works, than from any other source.  He was born at Thornton on the 3rd of February, 1610.  From a passing notice of A. a Wood, and an incidental allusion in his own works, he may be presumed to have passed some time at Cambridge, though with what views, or at what period of his life, is uncertain.  He was ordained Presbyter by Dr. Morton, when Bishop of Durham, who was, it will be recollected, the sagacious prelate by whom the frauds of the boy of Bilson were detected.  In the year 1634, Webster was curate of Kildwick in Craven, and while in that cure the scene occurred which he has so vividly sketched in the passage after quoted, and which supplied the hint, and laid the foundation, for the work which has perpetuated his fame.  How long he continued in this cure we know not:  but, if one authority may be relied on, he was Master of the Free Grammar School at Clitheroe in 1643.  To this foundation he may be considered as a great benefactor, for, from information supplied from a manuscript source, I find that he recovered for its use, with considerable trouble and no small personal charge, an income of about L60. per annum, which had been given to the school, but was illegally diverted and withheld.  From this period there is a blank in his biography for about ten years.  Most probably his life was rambling and desultory.  He speaks of himself as having been about that time a chaplain in the army.  His first two works, published in 1653 and 1654, “The Saints’ Guide,” and “The Judgment Set and the Books Opened,"[24] show that in the interval he had deserted the Established Church, and, probably, after some of those restless fluctuations of belief to which men of his ardent temperament are subject, settled at last in a wilder sort of Independency, which he eulogizes as “unmanacling the simple and pure light of the Gospel from the chains and fetters of cold and dead formality, and of restrictive and compulsory power.”  His language in these two works is more assimilated to that of the Seekers or Quakers, which it resembles in the cloudy mysteriousness of its phraseology, than that of the more rational and sober writers of the Independent school.  Amongst the dregs of fanaticism of which they consist, the reader will look in vain for any germ or promise of future excellence or distinction as an author.  It would seem that he preached the sermons contained in “The Judgment Set and Books Opened” at the church of All-Hallows, Lombard-street, at which he must have been for some time the officiating minister, and where the amusing incident, in which Webster was concerned, narrated by Wood, which had