sturdy independent character and kind heart, a good scholar with a genuine love of learning, a zealous preacher, holding preaching indeed as the main part of pastoral office; but of the spirituality of a George Herbert or a Nicholas Ferrar there is not a trace.

CHAPTER XV

TYPES OF PIETY

NOT only in quiet country parsonages nor in homes set apart for the practice of religion was a high ideal of saintliness to be found, but also in lives lived in the great world. There is a very remarkable and quaint little book, rather rare inasmuch as it has not been republished in recent days, and indeed has very little literary attraction about it, which shows how the wife of an eminent statesman, the mother of a family, and mistress of a household noted for its hospitality, spent her days and ordered her home. It is especially curious as showing how the Protestantism of that day-for its subject was a thoroughgoing Protestant-entered into a wholesome rivalry with Rome in works,' fasting and almsgiving as well as prayer. The book is somewhat overweighted with title for its size, a small duodecimo, being called The Returnes of Spiritual Comfort and Grief in a Devout Soul Represented (by 'entercourse of Letters) to the Right Honourable the Lady 'Letice Vi-Countess Falkland in her Life time and exemplified in the holy Life and Death of the said Honourable Lady. Published for the benefit and ease of all who labour 'under spiritual affliction.

The letters are those which passed between her and her chaplain who edits them, and they are followed by a brief memoir addressed to her mother, which probably served as model to the somewhat similar account of a court lady of a later day, which John Evelyn wrote in a

epistolary form addressed to a relative of his subject Margaret Godolphin. There is much that is akin in the two lives, though led in such different surroundings, Lettice Cary's in a Court so religious that her greatest regret in being away from it was the loss of daily service and weekly communion; Margaret Godolphin's in the midst of the frivolity of the Restoration, so that her religious observances had to be all her own. If Margaret Blagge, as she was in her Court days, was tested by prosperity, Lettice was tried in the furnace of affliction, enduring the extreme of anxiety all through the early years of the war while her husband was continually at the King's side, then seeing him fall in the prime of his years, and soon after losing her 'youngest and most dear son Lorenzo,' and through all her desolation obliged to exert herself to manage her estate for her remaining son, to care for her household and for the poor, to resist the extortions of the Parliament, for she risked confiscation sooner than pay contribution money against the King; and she had to struggle through all these difficulties with failing health, for she died of consumption at the age of thirty-five.

The story of her early years and careful education has already been quoted in the volume on Home Life. Very soon she learnt to work for the poor. Her biographer writes, addressing her mother, 'You remember wel, I presume, the Purse her young fingers wrought for her own alms, and how importunately she would beg your single ' money to fill it; and as greedy she was of imploying 'it too; the poor seldome went from the house without 'the alms of the young daughter as wel as of the parents.' She was most regular, too, in the observance of hours of prayer, not only morning and evening but throughout the day. Living at a distance from the church, she does not seem at this time to have been able to attend daily service, but 'Every Lord's Day constantly forenoon and ' afternoon she would be with the earliest at them:

'somewhile (when she wanted convenience of riding) she 'walked cheerfully three or four miles a day, as young ' and weak as she was, to them.' As often happens with such religious souls the fault of her character was a tendency to morbidness, which at thirteen years old 'tempted her to despair of God's mercy.' Not improbably she may have come across some of the Puritan preachers whose ideas of the capricious mercies of God were beginning to make themselves heard to the disturbance of the quiet faith of timid introspective souls. During the years of her happy married life, under the bright and wholesome influence of Lucius we hear of no such access of religious melancholy, but when he was gone, in her loneliness and weak health she often mistook her desolateness and lowered spirit for a sign that God's favour was withdrawn, as we gather from her letters.

Yet through the days of her prosperity, whether abroad with her husband or at the Court, or during the halcyon time, as Clarendon calls it, when she dispensed the easy pleasant hospitalities of Great Tew and entertained her husband's friends, she kept always the same seriousness of disposition and the and the same regularity of religious observance. 'Some years passed in which she was 'constant at Praiers and Sermons, and frequently received 'the Blessed Sacrament.' She spent every day some hours in private prayer; then she would have her maids to her chamber for an hour's prayer and catechising, and if any missed attending she would devote an hour to her later in the day. There was public morning and evening prayer in the church before dinner and supper, and family prayer with reading the Bible and singing Psalms before bedtime. Every Saturday she fasted and sequestered herself from company and from worldly employment. She also observed the fasts of the Church the second Friday in every month, and wished the last Wednesday kept as well. Keeping only the second Friday seems a new and laxer rule; George Herbert in his Country

Parson implies that every Friday is to be observed. By what authority could this custom have been introduced? She also kept the holy days, and after church gave them as holidays to her servants.

Her charity was constant, and she was especially good to her own relations and her husband's, nursing her husband's mother with great devotion. It must have been good for these two women, the one a devout Catholic, the other an uncompromising Protestant, to have been brought so closely together as to see the true piety of each other's lives. There was considerable wisdom in the way she apportioned her alms, maintaining aged people or young children, but setting others to labour, and establishing schools. She would harbour strangers, clothe and feed beggars, answering to those that reproached her for their unworthiness: 'I know not their hearts; I had rather relieve unworthy vagrants than that one member of Christ should go empty away.' She visited the sick, provided physic and cordials for them and hired nurses to attend on them, though whenever able she would go to them herself.' Like Margaret Godolphin of whom Evelyn says, 'Often would she 'herself walk out alone and on foote and fasting, and in the midst of winter, (when it was hardly fit to send a 'servant out) to minister to some poore creatures she 'had found out, and perhaps whom nobody knew of 'besides, soe far had her love to God and duty to others · overcome nature and the delicate tenderness of her sex ' and constitution.'

Lady Falkland was a peacemaker among her neighbours, and herself most gentle and meek, though perhaps rather by grace than by nature, for she found it needful to make and renew resolutions against anger and evilspeaking; and her Director in one place remarks that she could 'reprove when needful with a good deal of power.' He also observes of her that she was 'after 'the manner of woemen too much governed by the