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dwelt much on the glories of heaven, and he began to write what afterwards grew into his greatest work, The Saint's Everlasting Rest." His great desire in writing this book was to lead men to think more of their citizenship in heaven, and to be more careful about living a heavenly life of holiness and love on earth, than to defend each special opinion of their own. In a heavenly life Baxter saw the unity of the Church; and in his directions how to lead this heavenly life, he says, "Avoid frequent disputes about lesser truths, and a religion that lies only in opinions. They are usually least acquainted with a heavenly life who are violent disputers about the circumstantials of religion. He whose religion is in his opinions, will be most frequently and zealously speaking his opinions; and he whose religion lies in the knowledge and love of God and Christ, will be most delightfully speaking of that happy time when he shall enjoy them; he is a rare and precious Christian who is skilful to improve well-known truths." Besides exhorting men to avoid all that would lead to hard thoughts of others and destroy love towards their fellow-men, Baxter also urged them to beware of hard thoughts and false representations of God" Ever keep thy soul possessed with believing thoughts of the infinite love of God. Love is the attractive of love. Few so vile but will love those that love them. No doubt it is the death of our heavenly life to have hard thoughts of God. When our ignorance and unbelief have drawn the most deformed picture of God in our imagination, then we complain that we cannot love Him, nor delight in Him. Alas, that we should thus blaspheme God and blast our own joys. Oh, that we could always think of God as we do of a friend, as of one that unfeignedly loves us, even more than we do ourselves; whose very heart is set upon us to do us good, and hath therefore provided for us an everlasting dwelling with Himself; it would not then be so hard to have our hearts ever with Him."

Baxter thus sought, by raising men's thoughts to heaven, to win them to greater love, both towards God and their fellow-men.

He returned to Kidderminster and continued his work there during the Commonwealth, and a part of that work was the bringing together in associations, Christians of all parties who lived near to one another. After the Restoration Baxter was one of those twelve Puritans who met the twelve bishops at the Savoy Conference, and sought to find some way of bringing about outward unity in the English Church, or at least of so extending its limits as to include a larger number of the English people within its communion. But the separation and conflict of the last sixty years made this now impossible, and nothing was done. The next year another Act of Uniformity was passed which, as we have seen, could now only be maintained by persecution. It came into force on St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24th, and Baxter was one of those Puritan clergy who by it were shut out from the Church. He had to give up his people at Kidderminster, whose pastor he had been so long, and where he had done so much good. But he lived still in their hearts, and the good seed he had sown long bore fruit in that town. There was one also among them whom he specially loved, and who, in the same year that he lost his living, became his wife. She was a young lady named Margaret Charlton, and she shared with him the trials and hardships of his later years. They went to live at Acton, and Baxter, silenced as a preacher, wrote many religious books. On one occasion he was, like Bunyan, preaching or expounding the Bible to some friends in his own house. For this act he was put into Clerkenwell Prison, and his wife went to prison with him, and he says “she was never so cheerful a companion to me as in prison.” After his discharge he lived at Totteridge; but in the beginning of James II.'s reign he was again in prison for eighteen

months, for complaining in some of his writings of the wrongs the Puritans then suffered. The last years of his life were spent more peacefully. The Act of Toleration was passed on the accession of William III., and Baxter moved to London. He died in 1691, after lingering for some time in weak health, during which time Mr. Flavell, one of his friends, says of him-" Mr. Baxter is almost in heaven; living in the daily views and cheerful expectation of the saint's everlasting rest with God; and is left for a little while among us, as a great example of the life of faith.”

CHAPTER XV.

FRENCH INFLUENCE-DRYDEN.

WE have seen how the Italian style affected the form of English Literature during the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth centuries; we have now to find the same kind of influence exerted by French Literature through the latter half of the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth centuries. We may consider the French influence to have entered England with the Restoration, when Charles II. and many of his courtiers returned from their exile in France. To understand what this precise influence over English Literature was, we must go to France for a little while, and see what had been going on in the formation of the French language and growth of the literature. The French language up to 1600 had been very unsettled. Two distinct dialects were spoken which were almost as different as two languages. These had been formed in this way. Ancient Gaul had been much more thoroughly conquered and colonised by the Romans than Ancient Britain, and the Latin language had become the language of the country, excepting in such out-of-the-way parts as were still held by the Gauls, and where Keltic was spoken. After the breaking-up of the Roman Empire, the Teutonic tribes who passed into Gaul brought with them their language; and in the northern districts where they settled, the common speech became Teutonic with a mixture of Latin; in the south of France the language remained Latin with a slighter mixture of Teutonic. The

difficulty of writing any literature which could be understood and appreciated by the whole of France was a check upon its production, and consequently France has no really national literature before the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Meantime the revival of learning had spread into France, and produced a taste for literature and for the study of the ancient languages of Greece and Rome. There were persons about the Court who read Italian literature, and among these the Marquise de Rambouillet was especially distinguished. She held reunions at her house, where ladies and gentlemen discussed poetry and plays, and questions regarding the French language, grammatical rules, and the choice of words. They set themselves to refine the language, and to cultivate elegance of expression. The Latin element in the French language being the most associated with learning, and the ladies and gentlemen, having a fancy for the more high-sounding Latin words and terms, preferred always the Latin-French to the Teutonic. It was from these reunions, probably, that the idea of a French Academy took its rise, which should exercise authority over the language, fix its rules, and choose its words, and thus constitute that standard of appeal which we seek in our best literature.

The Academy consisted of forty members, and they compiled a Dictionary and drew up a Grammar. The preference was given in these works to the Latin element in the language, and the result was that it acquired a preponderance over the Teutonic in all speaking and writing which aimed to be elegant and refined.

The Academy next proceeded to lay down authoritative rules for literature, prescribing the precise form for poetry and plays, and every kind of literary composition. For these the Academy went to the classical literature, which, though not itself cramped by outside rules, had its natural

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