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illustration of the extent and variety of the subjects on which Mr. Law was consulted and is therefore worth quoting in part. I had written,' says the Doctor, 'in much the same strain with mine to you, to one I think the most solid judge in these sublime and abstracted matters known to me, whose first answer I found grounded on a mistake of the character and writings of Mr. Marsay, author of the Témoignage d'Enfant," &c.; I therefore sent him all the history of the person, adventures, and methods of proficiency I had learned of this wonderful author, with the number of his books, which I suspected by his first answer he had not thoroughly known. But Mr. Law, being a man who never judges, nor gives characters rashly without entering deeply into the spirit of his author, in more than two months has never given me an answer to this my second letter, and I hope by his delay he is reading and pondering Mr. Marsay's "Témoignage," which, consisting of eight or ten octavo volumes, must require time under his hands. I have waited hitherto for this answer, whereon to form a small judgment of the author and his works. It would be the greatest mortification to me to give up a line or thought, or even a whim (if any such there be), of his. . . . . But, if a person whom I admire so much as I do Mr. Law rejects his accessories . . . . I will so far give them up as not to propagate them with that blind zeal I might do otherwise.' If Mr. Law was often expected to read 'eight or ten octavo volumes' on such profound subjects as 'new scriptural manifestations and discoveries about the states and glory of the invisible world, and the future purification of lapsed intelligences, human and angelical' (these being the 'accessories' to which Dr. Cheyne refers), and to read them so carefully that on his opinion their publication or non-publication was to depend, he certainly had his work cut out for him. But Byrom's Journal, vol. ii. part iii. p. 331.

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Dr. Johnson on Law.

alas! Dr. Cheyne's assumption that the delay was caused by Mr. Law's 'reading and pondering' the formidable volumes does not appear to have been correct; for some little time after, Law' mentioned' to Byrom, Dr. Cheyne and his not writing to him upon some matters, because his letters would fall into the hands of his executors; that the Doctor was always talking in coffee-houses about naked faith, pure love, &c.'

This rather contemptuous opinion of Dr. Cheyne's incontinency seems hardly consistent with the flattering comparison of him with Bramhall noticed above.

Perhaps this is as fitting an occasion as may be found for suggesting a caution as to the value which should be attached to the conversational remarks of Law and other great men. As illustrations of character they are, if faithfully reported, invaluable; but surely it is unfair to the speakers, no less than to the subjects, to take random utterances, made in all the freedom from responsibility and 'abandon' of a convivial meeting of friends, as necessarily expressing final and deliberate convictions. We have a very notable instance of the erroneousness of such a plan in connection with Law himself. Everybody knows Dr. Johnson's famous remark, reported by Boswell, that 'William Law was no reasoner.' That the Doctor made the remark I have no manner of doubt; but I have also no manner of doubt that it was not the expression of his deliberate conviction, but simply a chance utterance, made, partly in the spirit of pure contradiction, and partly in maintenance of his dignity. He had just made the sweeping assertion that 'no nonjuror could reason,' and being reminded of Charles Leslie, he yielded so far as to allow very properly that he was an exception. But it would have compromised his dignity to yield farther; and therefore he preferred doggedly to maintain that though

Dr. Cheyne's Mysticism.

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William Law had written 'the finest piece of paraenetic divinity in the language' he was no reasoner. But what was this piece of paraenetic divinity but reasoning from beginning to end? and when the Doctor owned on another occasion that 'William Law was quite an overmatch for him,' in what was he an overmatch except in reasoning?

But to return to Dr. Cheyne. Regarded from one point of view, he would have seemed to be about the last man in the world one would have expected to be a primum mobile of English mysticism. For he was a kind of eighteenth century Banting. Being afflicted with corpulency, he adopted and recommended in print a milk diet; and, to his great annoyance, was made a butt for the wits of the day in consequence. He also wrote a treatise on the gout, and another on the spleen and the vapours, which he termed 'the English malady.' But though one side of his mind was engrossed with these very material topics, there was another side of it which was filled with the most transcendental speculations. He was, in fact, not only the recommender of German mysticism to William Law, but himself a mystic of a very marked type. This tendency is traceable in almost all his works, but most of all in his 'Philosophical Principles of Religion Natural and Revealed.' This work, which is oddly enough based upon mathematics, touches upon most of the points on which mystics love to dwell. It shows us how 'there is a perpetual analogy (physical, not mathematical) running on in a chain through the whole system of creatures up to their Creator,' how 'the visible are the images of the invisible, the ectypical of the archetypical, the creatures of the Creator, at an absolutely infinite distance,' how 'if gravitation be the principle of the activity of bodies, that of reunion with their origin. must by analogical necessity be the principle of action in

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spirits,' how 'material substances are the same with spiritual substances of the higher order at an infinite distance,' how the pure and disinterested love of God and of all His images in a proper subordination is the consummate perfection of Christianity.' The fall of man is described, the philosophy of Locke argued against, and, in fact, most of the topics dwelt upon which are discussed, only with infinitely greater power, in Law's later works.

It will appear in the sequel that this combination of mysticism with the more mundane subjects on which Dr. Cheyne wrote was not so unusual as one might have expected. Dr. Cheyne is perhaps best known at the present day as a correspondent of David Hume. It is difficult to conceive a more complete contrast than between the Doctor's two friends, William Law and David Hume-that is, so far as religious questions were concerned. Intellectually, however, there were some points of resemblance between them. The same clearness of thought, the same luminous and pure style, the same strong logical power is seen in both; but to what widely different conclusions did they lead the two men!

Upon the rest of Law's friends and disciples at Putney it is not necessary to dwell at length. Among them may be noticed the daughter of the house, Miss Hester Gibbon, who was a far more docile pupil of Mr. Law's, at least in spiritual matters, than her brother or her more worldly sister Katherine, and of whom Byrom 'heard it said that she was a very good lady, though some people said she was mad;' Miss Dodwell (daughter of the famous nonjuror), to whom (probably) Law wrote three long and interesting letters which will be noticed among his writings during this period; Mr. Archibald Hutcheson, M.P. for Hastings, who had so high an opinion of Mr. Law that on his death-bed

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Byrom's Journal, vol. ii. part i. p. 124.

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he recommended him to his wife as her spiritual director; and Mr. Archibald Campbell, a relation of the above; Dr. Stonehouse, who, however, on the rupture between Law and Wesley wavered between the two mentors, and finally seems to have sided with the latter; and others whom it is needless to specify.

H