Notes of Me: The Autobiography of Roger North 0802044719, 9780802044716

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Plates
Abbreviations
North Studies
Introduction
Roger North’s Table of Contents
Notes on Me
Conduct in Childhood
To the University
A Few Transient Observations of My Self
Practicall Diversions
The Burning of the Temple
Architecture, Perspective, Mathematics, and Light
As to Musick
Entrance to Law
Steward to the See of Canterbury
Maturity in the Profession of Law
Corporall Afflictions and Paines
The Plott
High upon the Rising Ground
Member for Dunwich
Executership of Sir Peter Lely
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

NOTES OF ME The Autobiography of Roger North

The Hon. Roger North, a portrait by Sir Peter Lely. Reproduced by kind permission of Dr Thomas North.

NOTES OF ME The Autobiography of Roger North

Edited by Peter Millard

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2OOO Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4471-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data North, Roger, 1653-1734 Notes of me : the autobiography of Roger North Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4471-9 l. North, Roger, 1653-1734. 2. Lawyers - England - Biography. 3. Scholars — England — Biography. 4. Great Britain - Politics and government - 1660-1714. I. Title. DA437.N87A3 2000

94i.o6'og2

099-932557-4

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PLATES

vii

ix

ABBREVIATIONS

xi

NORTH STUDIES

XV

INTRODUCTION

3

Notes of Me Conduct in Childhood 79 To the University 91 A Few Transient Observations of My Self 94 Practicall Diversions 99 The Burning of the Temple 110 Architecture, Perspective, Mathematics, and Light 129 As to Musick 142 Entrance to Law 160 Steward to the See of Canterbury 175 Maturity in the Profession of Law 186 Corporall Afflictions and Paines 201 ThePlott 211 High upon the Rising Ground 218 Member for Dunwich 230 Executership of Sir Peter Lely 237 NOTES TO THE EDITION 255 BIBLIOGRAPHY 327 INDEX 343

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am most grateful to the following individuals for answering inquiries and for help of various other kinds: M. Barber, D. Brown, M. Chan, P. Day, D. Dethloff, J. Friesen, P.R. Gla/ebrook, J. Henderson, F. Maddison, E. McNeill, T. North, }. Roche, D. Seymour, L. Stewart, P. Turner. A.E. Shapiro's clarification of several scientific questions was of special value, and the criticisms of two anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press were most helpful. The late Andrew Mitchell gave substantial help in transcribing and typing the manuscript of Noles of Me, and I would like to think of this book as, in part, a memorial to him. The staffs of the Bodleian and British Libraries were, as always, unfailingly helpful and patient, and I am indebted to the Trustees of the British Library for permission to reproduce the manuscript of Notes of Me. The usual formulae for acknowledging help seem quite inadequate in the case of someone like Jamie C. Kassler. Throughout this edition of Notes of Me I acknowledge my debt to her at many specific points, particularly in matters relating to music and science; many useful comments, however, that she made on the Introduction have been incorporated without direct acknowledgment. Here, I thank her for that help as well as for her all-pervading influence in my North studies. Dr Kassler and others have saved me from many errors, but even with such expert help the edition is, no doubt, far from perfect. For all such imperfections I alone, of course, am responsible. Finally, I am most grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous grants towards the cost of research.

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PLATES

FRONTISPIECE

The Hon. Roger North, a portrait by Sir Peter Lely.

1 Chart of the Thames estuary from Captain Greenville Collins, Great Britain's Coasting Pilot... (1693) 104 2 Map of the Temple, London, before the fire, by John Ogilby and William Morgan (1677) 109 3 Roger North's mathematical instruments at Jesus College, Cambridge 130-1 4 An illustration from North's essay on perspective, 'Speculum Opticum' (fig. 22), BL Add. MS 32,539, f. iO7v

137

5 A page from the manuscript of Notes of Me (f. 76v), showing North's diagrammatic illustration of the trill 150

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ABBREVIATIONS

Works by Roger North Chan, Lord Keeper

CNM Examen Jessopp, Francis Dudley John Auto Jessopp, Auto (1887) MG

Millard,/o/m Of Building

The Life of the Lord Keeper North, by Roger North. Ed. Mary Chan. Studies in British History, vol. 41. Lewiston, 1995. Roger North's Cursory Notes ofMusicke (c.iOgSC.I7O3) ... Ed. Mary Chan and Jamie C. Kassler. Kensington, NSW, 1986. Examen: Or an Enquiry into the Credit and. Veracity of a Pretended. Complete History ... by the Honourable Roger North Esq. London, 1740. The Lives of the Right Hon. Francis North, Baron Guilford; the Hon. Sir Dudley North; and the Hon. and Rev. Dr. John North, together with the Autobiography of the Author ... 3 vols. Bohn's Standard Library. London, 1890. The Autobiography of the Hon. Roger North. Ed. Augustus Jessopp. London, 1887. Roger North's The Musicall Grammarian 1728. Ed. Mary Chan and Jamie C. Kassler. Cambridge, 1990. Roger North: General Preface and Life of Dr. John North. Ed. Peter Millard. Toronto, 1984. Of Building: Roger North's Writings on Architecture. Ed. Howard Colvin and John Newman. Oxford, 1981.

Xll

ABBREVIATIONS

Other Works Alum. Cant.

Alum. Oxon.

BL Bodl. Gal. S.P. Dom.

Checklist

CJ CP

DNB Foss, Judges Grassby, Dudley

Holdsworth, English Law Korsten NGD

Alumni Cantabrigienses. A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge ... Compiled by John Venn andJ.A. Venn. Pt. I, from the Earliest Times to 1751. Cambridge, 1922-7. Alumni Oxonienses: Members of the University of Oxford 1500-1714 ... Ed. J. Foster. London, 1891-2. British Library, London. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series ... Preserved in the Public Record Office. Various dates. Mary Chan and Jamie C. Kassler. Roger North: Materials for a Chronology of His Writings. Checklist No. I, North Papers vol. 4. Kensington, NSW, 1989. Journals of the House of Commons 1547-1714. London, 1742G.E. C[okayne]. The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom ... New Edition ... the Hon. Vicary Gibbs et al. 13 vols. London, 1910-40. Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols. London, 1885-1900. E. Foss. The Judges of England, with Sketches of their Lives ... 9 vols. London, 1848-64. Richard Grassby. The English Gentleman in Trade: The Life and Works of Sir Dudley North, 1641-1691. Oxford^ 1994. W.S. Holdsworth. A History of English Law, 17 vols. London, 1903F.J.M. Korsten. Roger North (1651-1734), Virtuoso and Essayist... Amsterdam, 1981. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vols. London, 1980-

ABBREVIATIONS

Xlll

OED

The Oxford English Dictionary ... Corrected Reissue ... of a New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford, 1933; repr. 1971. State Trials A Complete Collection of State Trials ... Ed. W. Cobbett et al. Compiled by T.B. Howell. 34 vols. London, 1809-28. Williamson, Bench Book J.B.Williamson. The Middle Temple Bench Book: Being a Register of the Benchers of the Middle Temple from the Earliest Records to the Present Time... London, 1937. Williamson, Temple History J.B.Williamson. The History of the Temple, London ... London, 1924. Wilson, Music Roger North on Music, Being a Selection from his Essays Written During the Years 0.1695-1728. Ed. J. Wilson. London, 1959. Standard reference works and legal dictionaries consulted but not always cited in the notes include the following: Black's Law Dictionary. 4th ed. rev. St Paul, Minn., 1968. Bouvier's Law Dictionary: A Concise Encyclopedia of the Law, by John Bouvier. 8th ed. Kansas City, 1914. Complete Baronetage., by G.E. C[okayne]. 5 vols. Exeter, 1900-6. The Dictionary of English Laiu, by Earljowitt. Ed. C. Walsh. London, 1959. Dictionary of the History of Science. Ed. W.F. Bynum et al. Princeton, 1981. Dictionary of National Biography. 63 vols. 1885-1900. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Ed. Charles C. Gillispie. New York, 197080. Encyclopaedia Britannica. nth ed. New York, 1911. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 14th ed. Chicago, etc., 1973. A Neiu Law Dictionary ... by Giles Jacob. London, 1729, The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Ed. N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1970. The Oxford Companion to Art. Ed. Harold Osborne. Oxford, 1970. The Oxford Companion to Law. David M. Walker. Oxford, 1980. The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London ... Ed. W. Munk. Vol. i. 2nd ed. London, 1878. When/ton's Law Lexicon ... 14th ed. London, 1938.

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NORTH STUDIES

Roger North had a particular method of working. When tackling a subject, he would produce one version of his ideas on it, leave it, then come back later and attempt the subject again, usually repeating the process several times.1 The result is that there might be a mass of manuscripts relating to any one enterprise. The various treatises on music, for instance, occupy more than two thousand pages, and the final version of the biography of his brother Francis occupies as many as ten volumes, yet this is only one of six related versions of the life - and music and biography are merely two in a wide range of interests treated by North. When North died, in 1734, his heirs were left with what must have seemed formidable piles of paper, not hundreds but many thousands of pages of writing - all of it, except one or two works transcribed by an amanuensis or his son Montagu, in North's somewhat inelegant but quite legible hand. What remains of the original collection ow rests, separated out and still often only partially sorted, in various locations, the bulk being found in the British Library.12 Until recent times, those few of North's works that had been published were cut, altered, and presented with little understanding of their progress through several manuscript versions. Given such circumstances, aggravated by the range of subjects treated, it is not surprising that in the past the view of North has not been a very clear one. It has been incomplete and inaccurate, and above all, it has been fragmented.^ If North's achievement is to be properly appreciated, a necessary first task, obviously, is to present his individual works as accurately and as fully as possible. Happily, much progress has been achieved in recent years in this respect. What might be called the new wave of North stud-

XVI

NORTH STUDIES

ies received its earliest impetus from James Clifford. In his Biography as an Art (1962), Clifford drew attention for the first time to North's unpublished 'General Preface,' an extended and thoughtful discussion of the theory of biography. The 'Preface' was published in its entirety in 1984, with the biography of John North, by the present editor, who also attempted to show how North's theories related to his biographies. Another aid to understanding North's intentions as a biographer was provided with the publication of Mary Chan's edition of North's longest and most ambitious biography, The Life of Lord Keeper North (1995). For the first time, it is possible to see this biography as North finally intended it, quite different from the drastically cut and collaged version published by Montagu North in 1742 and followed by all editors after him. Other publications include F.J.M. Korsten's 1981 study of North (with a selection of his essays), which aimed at 'presenting an overall view of the man and his ideas'; an edition of North's architectural writings, entitled Of Building (1981), edited by Howard Colvin and John Newman; and, of particular importance, two of North's works on music: Cursory Notes ofMusicke (1986) and The Musicall Grammarian (1990), both edited by Jamie C. Kassler and Mary Chan. These latter two works, it is to be hoped, will largely replace John Wilson's useful, but fragmented, gathering of North's writings on music in his 1959 book Roger North on Music. It is clear from studying these newly published works that the more we know about Roger North the more remarkable his achievement seems to be. His position as a pioneering theorist of musical cognition, for instance, is now well documented.4 The editors of North's Of Building declare it to be not only 'probably the most detailed account of the planning and building of a seventeenth-century house in English architectural literature,' but also 'the most entertaining treatise on its subject in the English language.'5 Certainly, the 'General Preface' is the earliest extended discussion of the theory of biography in English, anticipating by many years most of the points to be made by Samuel Johnson in his Rambler and Idler essays.6 In addition to the scholarly editions of North's texts, there have been signs of growing interest in his ideas in articles and books. Following on her exhaustive work on North's musical writings, for instance, Jamie C. Kassler published a beautifully modulated study of how, in North's thought (and in that of other seventeenth-century writers), musical instruments could serve as a model for aspects of internal character (Inner Music, 1995). An illuminating examination of North's historiogra-

NORTH STUDIES

XV11

phy by Roger Schmidt is a welcome (and overdue) sign of interest in North as a historian, particularly since it addresses the Whig bias in the histories of the period ('Roger North's Examen'). In the history of science, also, North's anti-Newtonianism and High Church affiliation is proving of interest as a counterbalance to the Whig hegemony largely prevalent in this subject.7 (An unexpected bonus, and an indication of what treasures perhaps remain to be discovered in the vast resources of the North papers, is the fascinating and historically valuable record of a plot concerning North's rich sister Elizabeth Wiseman.8 The papers that make up the record of this affair are not, admittedly, 'literary' in the same sense as other North writings, yet they are an important part of the Roger North story, throwing light not only on his day-to-day life, but also on his character.) To say that Roger North is a polymath is to put it mildly. His range of interests is vast, and would be formidable enough to approach even if the manuscripts had not come down to us in so disorganized a way. However, disorder is not ,the same as disunity. In preparation for their researches into North's treatment of music, Jamie C. Kassler and Mary Chan carried out an examination of North's entire writings in manuscript.9 As the two scholars made their way through the thousands of pages and dozens of essays, and as for the first time since North's death the papers were placed into some kind of sequential order, Kassler grasped an important fact. She saw that North's writings were not disorganized jottings on a bewildering array of topics, but, if read accurately and in proper sequence, were part of a constantly developing attempt to construct a system of natural and moral philosophy and, indeed, a general epistemology.10 Kassler's observations about the totality of North's vision deserve more investigation, the result of which would probably be to reveal much not only about an intelligent individual's search for enlightenment, but also about intellectual trends during an important transitional period in the history of ideas. Such a study, aided by the current reassessment of 'Tory history' and the evolving appreciation of how innovative was North's thought in many areas, would make it difficult to sustain the traditional view of Roger North as a sort of antiquarian curiosity, or, as one scholar has described him, one of 'yesterday's men.'11 North is revealed vividly in all his writings: they are the man. At the same time, the autobiography holds a special place, for it shows us, directly and intimately, just how his interests were part of his life, how they sprang from his particular character, circumstances, and experi-

XV111

NORTH STUDIES

ences, and he even provides a theory of cognition and thought-process by which, we may infer, he believed his world-view was constructed. Consequently, it is particularly useful to read his works in the light of his autobiography, and vice versa. At the same time, Notes of Me is, in its own right, an important and entertaining document in the history of selfpresentation. It offers both pleasure and enlightenment as the account of an alert, complex, and engaging man, very much alive during one of the most interesting periods in English history. Notes 1 See CNM, [i7]-[22], where Jamie C. Kassler gives an interesting discussion of North's method of working through various versions. 2 For an account of the history of the MSS, see Millard, 'The Chronology of Roger North's Main Works.' 3 See CNM, [2.]-[3]. North's habit of writing down facts that it would never have occurred to his contemporaries to record makes him particularly vulnerable to piecemeal quotation, and he is a brief guest, consequently, in a wide range of seventeenth-century studies, the writers of which are more likely to mine North for useful pieces of information than to submit him to close study. A notable example is W.S. Holdsworth's A History of English Law, which frequently cites North. Citations of North appear frequently, also, in histories of music, beginning with Charles Burney in his A General History of Music (1776-89), and he appears over and over again in general histories of the period for the account of his scientific studies at Cambridge, for instance, or because of his political experiences, or his accounts of various figures at the head of affairs in Restoration England. 4 See particularly the preface to CNM, and the introduction to MG, by Jamie C. Kassler. 5 Of Building, xv, xvi. 6 Rambler no. 60 (Oct. 1750) and Idlerno. 84 (Nov. 1759). See Millard, 'The Chronology of Roger North's Main Works,' 291-4. 7 This aspect of North's thought is explored mainly by Larry Stewart, as discussed later in the Introduction to the present edition. 8 Mary Chan has organized these papers into a narrative: Life into Story: The Courtship of Elizabeth Wiseman. 9 See Hine, Roger North's Writings on Music to c.l/'O^; Checklist. 10 An example of this interconnectedness as perceived by Kassler: 'As a theorist of musical cognition, North is concerned with the twofold problem of how

NORTH STUDIES

XIX

we acquire knowledge and act on it. To solve this problem, North had to develop a philosophy of physical and human nature. This philosophy cannot be extracted from any single text, because it was worked out over a period of some forty years' (MG, 3-4). ll P. Rogers, 'One of the Remarkables' [review], Times Literary Supplement, 19 Oct. 1984, 1196. Kassler makes a similar point about the need to reassess North, in CNM, [3].

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INTRODUCTION

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INTRODUCTION

'It is not uneasy but a pleasure,' declared Roger North towards the conclusion of Notes of Me, 'to sit as I now doe, passing the pen from side to side of the paper' (243). When he wrote these words, probably in the mid-iGgos, he had reached roughly the halfway point of his long life. There were still about forty years left to him to indulge his pleasure in writing and to add to the store of manuscripts he was now beginning to accumulate. The range of subjects treated by North is wide. There are his writings in natural philosophy that explore such matters as motion, the movement of ships and windmills, the nature of smoke, the working of the barometer, and particularly problems arising from the work of Descartes and Newton. There are several tracts on perspective, notes on architecture, a guide to practical bookkeeping for country gentlemen, a 'discourse' on fish and fishponds, and, as a major preoccupation, long explorations into the theory of sound and musical cognition. Then there is his anti-Whig account of events in the late seventeenth century, the bulky Examen, as well as essays and notes on various political and legal matters, together with a translation from the French of moral essays by Pierre de Villiers. Finally, there are his biographical writings: an essay on the theory of biography, the lives of his brothers Francis, Dudley, and John, and his autobiography, Notes of Me. In Notes of Me North has left a fascinating record of his actions and of the development of his thinking, so that, apart from its intrinsic interest, it could serve as an introduction to the rest of his work. The autobiography, however, leaves much out, and what follows is a sketch of North's life, supplying some details not covered in the autobiography, and

4

INTRODUCTION

attempting to place him within the political and intellectual framework of his day. Roger North was born at Tostock, Suffolk, 3 September 1651,l the last of fourteen children, four of whom died young. His father, Sir Dudley North, later fourth baron North (c. 1602-77), seems to have been a man of integrity who patiently endured the maddening behaviour of his father, the 'retired, old fantastick courtier,' as Roger North describes him in Notes of Me, who had been driven by 'vanities, and attendant wants' into the country (143) after many expensive and unsuccessful attempts to gain favour at court. The founder of the family was Edward North (c. 1496-1564).2 He must have been a man of great ability and not a little cunning because, beginning with Henry VIII, he managed to stay in favour with four successive monarchs (five if Jane Grey is included). A testimony to his skill at survival is the fact that he was created baron by Mary Tudor and went on to serve Elizabeth Tudor. The basis of Edward North's fortune was probably laid while he was chancellor of the Court of Augmentations (1544), and it was greatly supplemented by grants of seized church property. His most important estates were Kirtling (or Catlidge) in Cambridgeshire - the first of his major acquisitions, which became the family seat Charterhouse, the Carthusian monastery that had been surrendered in 1537, and the great manor at Harrow on the Hill. It was to Kirtling that Edward North's grandson, third baron North (1582-1667), retired with a sadly diminished fortune and in an unhappy frame of mind. Roger does not present his grandfather in a very favourable light. He knew him only in old age - Lord North was sixty-nin when Roger was born - and he would have no means of knowing the bright and lively courtier who spent his youth and much of his fortune at the court of James. Roger was probably influenced, too, by old Lord North's treatment of his son and daughter-in-law, Roger's parents. In 1632 Dudley had married Anne Montagu (d.i68i), the second daughter and co-heiress of Sir Charles Montagu of Cranbrook Hall, Essex. Anne North soon began to resent the impositions of her father-in-law, who 'obliged us to live in the country with him, & to pay £200 a year for our board, which wee did, tho' sometimes wee were not there above 7 months of the yeare.' Later, at Lord North's suggestion, she reports, they bought a coach of their own, and he promptly increased their board to £3.3 When, in the seventh year of their marriage, Lord North increased the board by another £100, Dudley decided he had had

INTRODUCTION

5

enough. He bought the estate of Tostock, in Suffolk, not far from Bury St Edmunds, and moved his family there. However, this did not entirely solve the problem because Lord North still insisted that they spend time with him. By 1649 they were back at Kirtling, returning to Tostock in 1650, '& after that time,' Anne recorded with some bitterness, 'wee ... were never more in a settled way, but a year or two in one place & then in the other, which was both trouble & charge to us.'4 Roger North always refers to his mother with great tenderness and respect. She was a lively woman, judging from her letters, and certainly she was indefatigable in her care for her large family, which at times caused her great stress. In a letter to his sister Anne Foley, dated i April 1689, North recalls her courage: I thinck ther never was such an example in the world as our mother, who was no Hector, but never appeared disturbed, during all her painefull nursings which she had with many of us, and more with my father, so that altho she was as tender as was possible, one would have thought she had an heart of brass. I have heard that upon terrible wounds made up, after the work done she would swoon, but rubb'd thro the work like a lyon.5 As more and more children were born to Anne and Dudley, their finances became more and more straitened, and old Lord North's temper did not improve. Life must have been vexing with this man who, 'as his humour was to be very tyrannical and vindictive, so he had taken a resolution never to be in the wrong.'6 Even so, he was a cultivated aristocrat, travelled, and with experience at a great court. He also enjoyed his library, and, above all, he loved music. Musicians frequently visited the house, and his grandchildren were conscripted into a sort of family orchestra. Roger North's father, also, was devoted to music, and when he at last inherited the tide, in 1667, and moved to Kirtling, he made sure that the great house was a familiar resort for musicians, especially masters from Cambridge. He had perforce over the years become something of an expert in managing a large family and estate on limited means, and he offered the benefit of his experience to the world at large in a practical little book entitled Observations and Advices Oeconomical (1669). Under the strict, but judicious and loving care of Anne and Dudley North, life at Kirtling for Roger must have been pleasant enough. With so many brothers and sisters and the small army of servants who made up Lord North's 'family,' there would have been enough vari-

6

INTRODUCTION

ety to prevent the boredom so often associated with country life at this period. It is as if with the third lord North, and his son Dudley, the North family had lain fallow for a generation or so in order to gather nourishment for the plentiful and rich crop of talent represented by Roger and his siblings. 'Yet really the case is memorable,' Roger North noted, 'for the happy circumstance of a flock so numerous and diffused as this of the last Dudley, Lord North's was, and no one scabby sheep in it.' 7 Actually, Roger is not being entirely honest here because it is clear from his writings elsewhere that in his view one of the offspring was, in fact, a little scabby. He had no love for his eldest brother, Charles (1635-91). Charles was not particularly distinguished, and he alienated himself from his brothers by malicious personal behaviour, and by his consorting with Shaftesbury, whose politics and policies Roger abhorred. 8 At one point Charles North even tried to force his rich widowed sister, Elizabeth Wiseman, into a match with a man she despised.9 Fourteen years after Charles's death, the memory of his brother's behaviour still rankled with Roger. In a letter to his niece, Anne Foley, advising her to use moderation with her difficult brother, he recalls his own experience: 'tho we could not bragg of much kindness from an elder brother yet wee kept fair with him, till he himself made it impossible to convers."" The other brothers and sisters, however, more than made up for Charles's failings. Among the female members, Mary (b.iGgS) was particularly interesting, although unfortunately she died in childbirth in 1662, when Roger would have been only eleven. He was careful to preserve her memory, though: She was a lady of great witt and politeness, and incomparable memory; I can remember to have heard her, often repeat romances by heart ... and so exact as pretending to rehears the very speeches and letters in the story ... Having a correspondence with divers of the lady witts, she promoted an order, and comunicated the embleme of her owne invention, which was of a gold sun with rays touching an azure circle, on which was wrote Aiitarchees, in Greek caracters, which signifyed self sufficient. Abundance came into this order, and the emblemes were made some in enamel, but most in embroidery, and the ladys publiquely wore them. But when the foundress marryed, the order all at once melted to nothing."

It is to be regretted that nothing more seems to be known of this 'order,' which, given its motto and the North family penchant for break-

INTRODUCTION

7

ing new ground, might have constituted an interesting episode in the history of feminism. Roger was much closer to his sister Anne (1642-1717), only nine years older than he. She married Robert Foley of Stourbridge, Worcester, whose father was a contract ironmonger to the Royal Navy, and in later years Roger kept up a warm, personal correspondence with her as well as with her children.12 Two other sisters made good marriages, despite Lord North's difficulty in providing suitable dowries. Elizabeth (1647-1730) married Sir Robert Wiseman, 'an old man but very rich,' and after he died, leaving her a fortune of £20,000,1>H she married the earl of Yarmouth, having survived Charles North's machinations. Lely painted a portrait of the countess, 'an half length sitting in a bold fore-right posture."4 Little is known of the other sister, Christian (1648-1708), except that she married Sir George Wenyeve of Brettenham, in Suffolk. The affection which Roger held for his brothers (with the exception of Charles) is clear from the biographies and the autobiography, although understandably the degree of intimacy was not the same with all of them. Montagu (1649-1710) was the closest in age, only two years older, and the boys attended school at Thetford together. Montagu joined his brother Dudley in the Levant as a Turkey merchant, but had nothing like Dudley's financial brilliance. Nor his luck: returning to Turkey in July 1689, after a visit to England, Montagu was arrested in Marseilles on suspicion of being a spy, and spent the next three years or so imprisoned in Toulon castle.15 Later, back in England, he joined Roger at Rougham, and gave useful help in the multitudinous and intricate affairs of the various estates for which he and Roger had become executors. John North (1645-83) is the subject of one of North's biographies, the briefest of the three because Roger knew him the least, and also because John North made his executor promise to burn 'every writing of his own hand left behind him.' After his death, consequently, his critical notes, lectures, sermons, treatises, etc., 'went altogether in lumps as innocent martyrs to the fire.'16 John North is vividly presented in Roger's biography. He ruined his health, according to Roger, by his relentless studying and refusal to take recreation, although he 'had found out one petit entertainent in his study besides books, and that was keeping of great house spiders in wide-mouthed glasses, such as men keep tobacco in.' He fed these pets with live flies.17 In 1677, John became master of Trinity College, Cambridge, probably through the

8

INTRODUCTION

influence of Francis North, but the post brought him no joy. His wrongheaded authoritarianism caused him (and the fellows) great stress, and eventually he suffered a 'desperate apoplexy' while admonishing two students.l8 John North emerges from the pages of the biography as a man of lively intellect and absolute integrity, but his own worst enemy. Much closer in Roger's affections was Dudley (1641-91), the subject of another of the biographies.19 Dudley was unusual amongst the brothers for being fun-loving, not very bookish, and totally without fear. He was also a superb manager with a first-class financial mind, and his Discourses upon Trade, published by Roger in 1691, is an important document in the history of English economic theory. Having made his fortune in the Levant, no easy feat, Dudley returned to England and became commissioner of customs and, amongst much controversy, sheriff of London. In 1683 he married Anne Goning (or Gunning), the widow of Sir Robert Goning, and in doing so greatly increased both his fortune and his happiness: 'It was almost impossible but this match must prove happy; for here were two persons to be joined that were wise and sincere and who meant the same thing, that is, to make each other happy.'20 Roger was more relaxed with Dudley than with anyone. He recounts with delight their activities at Wroxton, Francis's Oxfordshire estate, where, as executors, they resided for a time to wind up Francis's affairs. They set up a 'laboratory' in an old building, and improvised a forge: 'He delighted most in hewing,' reported Roger. 'He allowed me, being a lawyer as he said, to be the best forger.' They made a 'way-wiser,' which Dudley dubbed Sir Theophilus Gimcrack, and hitched it on to a chaise 'to prove the distances of places.' And then, 'at the lighter works in the afternoon, he hath sat, perhaps scraping a stick or turning a piece of wood ... all the while singing like a cobler, incomparably better pleased than he had been in all the stages of his life before.'al Dudley was obviously a source of great comfort to Roger. Of all Roger North's siblings, however, Francis was by far the most important to him. Francis North (1637-85) was not merely his 'best brother,' but a friend, patron, mentor, and almost a father. Roger was the faithful companion as Francis rose rapidly through the ranks of the legal profession: king's counsel 1668, solicitor-general (and knighted) 1671, attorney-general 1673, chief justice of the Common Pleas 1675, ending 1682 as lord keeper of the Great Seal. He was created first baron Guilford 1683. After the Revolution, Francis's actions came in for their share of criti-

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cism, both by official committees and in various publications. In his writings about Francis, consequently, Roger is on the defensive, and he so emphasizes his brother's dignity and probity that Francis emerges there as rather dry and humourless. But there was another side to him. For one thing, he had a sharp sense of the ridiculous. It came into play, for instance, at St John's College in Cambridge, where a gift for mimicry made him popular: The best of the society of fellows in the colledg, were fond of him, and exceedingly affected his company, which was more then ordinary agreeable, and facetious ... for he with his litle eyes observed every one's behaviour, and used to gather, and mark for his owne all the vain, and rediculous actions of such as fell obnoxious to him, and then made the fellows merry with his facetious way of relating them and they for their diversion encouraged him and he never failed to seise upon every foolish behaviour, and described it, not sat[i]rically, but veritably, as if the thing it self had bin there seen or heard ..."

Although Roger's loyalty to his brother, and his gratitude, never wavered, the relationship did have its strains. The sharp tongue that so amused the fellows at St John's sometimes made Roger smart too, and in Notes of Me, he relates how he. 'could scarce brook the many mortifications, by litle contempts my brother, sometimes in jest, and often in earnest would put upon me. He had some what of humour that way, of raising his owne, by depressing other's caracters' (160). An example of this trait appears in an anecdote which Roger relates with perhaps more edge than appears on the surface. After a dispute about the barometer, Roger and Francis sent their differing theories to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, for publication, 'and he returned them all which made my brother Francis laugh, and say his fared ill for being in such company' (201). A similar interpretation might be placed on a remark Roger makes during an account of his endeavours as a musical composer: 'and I thought I succeded well; my brother gave me the encouragement to ask where I stole severall passages' (155). Such resentments, however, could not alter the deep attachment Roger felt for his brother. They shared many interests. Music, for instance, was a particular source of mutual enjoyment, for they both were passionately fond of it and played and sang together. Roger also shared with his brother a fascination with natural philosophy, mathematics, and art:

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INTRODUCTION

And most of the conversation we had was familiar and easy, rather about arts and sciences than court brigues [i.e., intrigues, quarrels], and at times when we were retired, and cared not for repetitions of such uneasy matters, oh! how pleasant and agreeable were those days, when in the midst of storms we lay safe and fearless in retired harbour, and never so well pleased as when we were escaped from the billows, if I may term crowds such.23

As Notes of Me testifies, Roger benefited directly and richly from Francis North's generosity and patronage, but he was not the only one to receive help. The Life of the Lord Keeper North details similar kindnesses to many people, and Roger goes so far as to declare Francis to be, in effect, the rescuer and stay of the family: I have here shewed how an half decayed family, with a numerous brood, and worne out estate of the North by the auspicious caracter of one child of ten, living together, was reedifyed, and all the rest lifted into the world, with wonderfull success ... most of all these felicitys were derived upon the patronage of his Lordship, who may justly be styled the columen familiae, et fastigium domus.24

Roger North's education was somewhat sporadic. It included residence with a country minister, some time at the free schools of Bury St Edmunds and of Thetford, and a certain amount of tuition at home. When it was time for him to continue his education it was only natural that he would attend the university at Cambridge. Cambridge was close to Kirtling, generations of his family had studied there, and John North was a fellow at Jesus College. Roger joined him at Jesus in October 1667. He arrived at Cambridge at an interesting time. Fascinating new ideas were challenging the Aristotelianism that had for so long been the basis of the university's approach to natural philosophy, and, above all, Descartes's startling new approach and theories were causing a stir. It is now that North's aptitude for mechanical matters, already hinted at in an account of his 'manufactures' at school, blossomed into a serious interest in mathematics and 'mechanical philosophy.' His admiration for Descartes, begun at Cambridge, never left him, and the Discourse on Method and the Meditations'were seminal in his use of methodic doubt. Roger did not stay long at Cambridge. In November 1669 he was admitted to chambers in the Middle Temple, ill supplied with cash, but with the far more valuable advantage of being related to Francis North, whose spectacularly successful career was by now well launched. It was of

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the greatest consequence for Roger that by the time he entered law Francis was already firmly established in it: I am inclined to thinck that this profession not good for brothers bredd together [as, for instance, were Roger and Montagu], becaus one will certeinly over top, and like overibreward plants dripp and mortifie the other ... But one much above the other helps him, by steering his underbuissness thro his hand and so leads him forewards without any damage to him self. (91)

Francis led his younger brother forward at all stages of his career, and Roger freely acknowledged him as the cause of his success and the foundation of his fortune. It was quite natural, when seeking to place one of its younger sons, that the North family should have turned to the law. There was a wellestablished tradition for the sons of the nobility to attend one of the Inns, either to train seriously for the law, or simply to enjoy it as a sort of finishing school, although this latter function was in decline by Roger's time.25 The founder of the North dynasty had been a lawyer, and now Francis North also seemed well on the way to success in that profession. Having determined on law as a career, Roger had to decide which branch to enter. As he tells us in Notes of Me, Francis North advised him to choose common law rather than civil law. Civil lawyers, or 'civilians,' specialized in Roman and maritime law; they managed cases before the High Courts of Admiralty and Chivalry, and before the five central ecclesiastical courts.26 But the seventeenth century saw a steady decline in the importance of civil lawyers and such an eroding of their privileges that, by 1750, according to Wilfrid Prest, 'The canon lawyers had long disappeared altogether as a separate class, and the civilians are now little more than a dying race.'27 Apparently, the decay was already apparent by the i66os when the Norths decided that civil law 'was not so flourishing to invite' (91). A student could read civil law at Oxford or Cambridge, but common law was not taught, which was probably one reason why Roger left the university after so brief a stay. It was not taught in any systematic fashion at the Middle Temple either. In earlier days, with a smaller student population and very few books, the older members offered an effective training in pleading and advocacy, together with some theory of the law. During the Commonwealth, the system largely collapsed, and after the Restoration the barristers and benchers seemed disinclined to revive the

12

INTRODUCTION

old system, possibly because of the proliferation of printed texts, as well as their growing prosperity, which made their time more valuable.28 When he took up residence at the Middle Temple, therefore, Roger was left to shift for himself as best he could, so that later when he wrote his practical little treatise, A Discourse on the Study of the Law, he remarked: 'of all the professions in the world, that pretend to book learning, none is so destitute of institution as that of the common law.'29 A young student may well have been confused. The profession of law was huge and amorphous, made up of a bewildering array of activities carried out by a horde of men: Gregory King estimated that in 1688 there were something like ten thousand 'persons in the law.'30 For the sake of simplification, their functions may be divided into three categories: judging or pleading in the courts; taking care of the 'mechanics' of the law (such as drawing up pleas and briefs or executing deeds and conveyances); carrying out clerical and other duties in the courts.31 When North began his studies, the broad range of functions in the second category was by no means clearly divided up amongst the different professional groups. As he himself points out in Notes of Me, much of that work at one time was done by lawyers, but gradually it was taken over by the attorneys and solicitors, 'the gentlemen of the law having left the mechanic part of their practise' (198) in order to concentrate on the more exalted work of judging and pleading. The barristers thus became distinguished in function and status from the attorneys and solicitors, while there remained a host of lesser mortals to carry out the third group of tasks mentioned above. Roger never shunned the lowlier legal functions. As a young lawyer, he conscientiously attended humble manorial courts, and he always insisted on the dangers of book-learning not grounded on a knowledge of forms. What is more, it seems evident that he never abandoned altogether the more 'mechanic' tasks of drawing up wills, deeds, and contracts. His surviving correspondence, and to some extent Notes of Me, contain plenty of evidence of such activity, at least on behalf of friends and kinsfolk.32 At the peak of his career, however, North must have been far too busy to deal with such matters himself. As a barrister he would, of course, advise clients, prepare briefs, and represent clients in court, and there is no reason to doubt his own declaration that he was always well prepared. His appointment as king's counsel in 1682 brought increased business (and fees) but also increased responsibility. He was now expected to give assistance and advice to the law officers of the crown,

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and was consulted in capital cases and in cases of state - as he discovered to his acute discomfort when he was 'closeted' by Jeffreys and pressed to give his views on the king's dispensing power. He was also expected, we can presume, to enter Parliament in order to support the king, which he did in 1685. Notes of Me contains detailed examples of the kind of work he was required to do as steward to the See of Canterbury, not only in the administration of the ecclesiastical courts, but in such complicated and troublesome matters as the Shirley case and the visitations to All Souls College and Dulwich College. Stressful in a far more severe way must have been North's responsibility to advise the archbishop on such matters as praemunire and one's duty under usurpers - questions that were not only grave in their own right, but accompanied by a deeply worrying political situation. North, however, was to be extremely well rewarded for his efforts. In the relatively few years he was active in the London legal scene he accumulated enough money to buy Rougham and rebuild the mansion there. He himself seemed somewhat stunned at the flood of money, and relates with awe how he took in an astounding £4000 in 1683, and almost as much the following year (221). Roger owed his success, of course, mainly to the influence of his brother, but he was also fortunate enough to have entered his profession at the right time. According to Geoffrey Holmes, 'It is safe to say ... that in no other profession in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century England did so many men make so much money, or make it so quickly, as in the law.'33 Roger North was not a gregarious person; he was most happy when alone or in the company of just one or two of his brothers, and he was never entirely at ease in London. Nevertheless, as a successful lawyer, an aristocrat, a member of Parliament, brother of the man who rose to be lord keeper, a virtuoso and music-lover, Roger North must have had a wide acquaintance. He moved in the highest circles, including that of the court: he was known to both Charles II and the duke of York, later James II, and as her solicitor and then attorney-general he knew Mary of Modena, James's second wife. His attendance at hearings of the Privy Council, and at meetings in the lord keeper's house, means he became acquainted with the country's most prominent statesmen, many of whom, of course, were also lawyers. Sunderland, Halifax, Rochester, Scrogs, Shaftesbury, Vaughan, Jenkins, Jeffreys, and others all make appearances, sometimes brief, sometimes lengthy, throughout the

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INTRODUCTION

pages of Examen and the Lives. North, keeping himself in the background, observed them all shrewdly. He had a keen ear; the Examen contains an amusing account of what might be the origin of the English upper-class drawl: And then the Lord Sunderland ... in his Court Tune (for which he was very particular, and, in speaking, had made it almost a Fashion to distend the vocal Letters) Whaat, said he, if his Maajesty taarn out faarty of us, may not he have faarty athors to saarve him as well? and whaat maaters who saarves his Maajesty, so lang as his Maajesty is saarved? 34

He also had a sharp eye and did not hold back when he disliked someone. Here is his description of Titus Gates: He was a low Man, of an ill Cut, very short Neck; and his Visage and Features were most particular. His Mouth was the Center of his Face, and a Compass there would sweep his Nose, Forehead and Chin within the Perimeter ... In a Word, he was a most consummate Cheat, Blasphemer, vicious, perjured, impudent and sawcy foul-mouth'd Wretch.35

North kept his closest scrutiny for the outstanding jurists of his time, such as Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Sir John Maynard, Edmund Saunders, and, in particular, the great Sir Matthew Hale. All were apparently known to North, and to these must be added the judges he met with daily in the various courts he attended, as well as those he accompanied on the circuits. The circuits, in fact, increased his circle of acquaintance enormously, for there he met many country gentlemen, royalists almost exclusively, who were anxious to entertain Francis North and his brother as they made their way through the west, or through Norfolk, and the northern counties. To these may be added the members of Parliament whom Roger came to know when he served in the House of Commons - men usually more interested in their personal profit, it seemed to North, than in the good of the nation. For anyone interested in the new philosophy, as was North, late seventeenth-century London was an exciting place. He was aware of most of the prominent men involved in natural philosophy, and was personally acquainted with some of them. F.J.M. Korsten points out that Francis North personally knew Sir John Hoskins, John Werden, John Aubrey, Sir Jonas Moor, John Evelyn, and John Flamsteed, and that conse-

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quently Roger may well have come into contact with them.36 Dr Henry Paman, too, professor of physics at Gresham College, was a friend of the Norths - it was he, Roger thought, who had recommended him to Archbishop Sancroft for the position of legal steward. In the biography of Dudley, Roger recalls the Saturday chats with Sir Christopher Wren at the site of St Paul's,37 and he became more closely acquainted with Wren over the rebuilding of the Middle Temple. He met widi the great architect again, in 1688, together with Dudley North and Robert Hooke, at Child's coffee-house.38 Such acquaintances must have stimulated North in his own speculations in natural philosophy, a subject on which, judging from his writings, he spent an enormous amount of time. Intellectual histories of the period take it for granted that issues of natural philosophy were inextricably mingled with religion and politics - which were, in turn, more or less inseparable - and it is certainly the case that North's intellectual position, his ontology and his epistemology, were to become part and parcel of his being as a High Churchman and a Tory. It was a position, however, which seems to have developed over the years, as North read more and more, observed the changing scene, and, probably, as he corresponded with like-minded, disaffected non^urors, among whom George Hickes was pre-eminent. A recent scholar has described North's science as 'a curious combination of Cartesian rationalism and English empiricism,'39 while Jamie C. Kassler describes North's scientific method, at least in his musical researches, as 'a combination of hypothetico-deductive and inductive procedures,' and suggests that his conception of demonstration derives from his experience of courtroom procedures.40 North's first encounter with Cartesian method and science as a youth at Cambridge, described so vividly in Notes of Me, made a lasting impression. He believed in a plenum, he equated extension with matter, he insisted that motion, space, and time were relative, and that all the phenomena of nature could be explained mechanically in terms of bodies acting upon one another. He was by no means as thoroughgoing an experimentalist as Boyle, with his system of carefully limited and repeated experiments, yet North accepted the role of experiment, sometimes with enthusiasm: 'I would goe 500 miles,' he declares in Notes of Me, 'for a new discovery of nature, such as the Torricellian' (246). Like Descartes, he believed in the reliability of sensory experience under proper circumstances - as a means of arriving at correct knowledge, and he appears to have made careful observations concerning, for instance, barometric pressure, smoke, and ship-sailing. He was also pre-

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INTRODUCTION

pared to get his hands dirty with practical work in the 'laboratory' and 'forge' which he and Dudley constructed at Wroxton.4' He deplored what he saw as the tendency to exalt mathematics over 'phisicks,' for while mathematics could claim total certainty, it was but an abstract achievement, whereas the pursuit of physical knowledge, despite all its errors and uncertainties and its having to rely on probabilities, 'is certeinly the greatest effort of humane power.'42 As North tells us in Notes of Me, he had large ambitions in natural philosophy. He aimed at nothing less than an entire 'systeme of nature, upon the Cartesian or rather mechanicall principles' (96). An idea of the scale of this project can be gained from a summary that he lays out in the manuscript 'Method Regulated' (from which, incidentally, his debt to Descartes is clear) ,43 He will begin, North tells us in the summary, by describing his method for the investigation of nature. He will then discuss the physical principles governing single bodies, and after that will take 'the whole world in view, and argue for the Copernican systeme improved by Descartes.' Next, he will 'undertake the contemplation of animal life in generall, dilating upon the great mistery of sence,' and finally, he will 'discours philosofically upon, policy devine and humane[,] religion, and governement.' He made many attempts at this comprehensive work, but the result of all his efforts was the sobering realization that 'I did not understand so much, as I thought I did' (96). The summary in 'Method Regulated' gives a good overview of North's position regarding the practical concerns of natural philosophy. An indication of his attitude to the ethical concerns as they existed at about the time he was writing Notes of Me is found in his interesting essay 'Mechanick Notes.'44 In the introduction to this essay he takes up the cudgels against corruption in the search for knowledge. As North sees it, the whole enterprise has become a sort of Vanity Fair, or Ship of Fools, where people trade in 'subtiletys and curiositys,' or 'jargon of principles,' and where they 'delight in a fantasticall hypothesis,' all served up 'for title-tatle, and to answer every inquisitive fool.' Such chimeras, North declares sarcastically, are 'much better then truth, for that is limited by the imperfect information wee have of naturall things.' The debasement of the discipline is particularly offensive when one considers its noble potential. Human beings, North points out, are unique among living creatures in possessing a faculty for 'improved science': Therefore wee have no reason to quarrell with our owne prerogative; but to love a[nd] cherish it. And to vise all the means wee can, to advance and

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polish it; to weed out error, delusion and prejudice from the roots, which destroy it. And by so doing wee see many advance themselves in humanity above other men, as much as human nature is above beasts ... such a process of disquisition in the life of any one, persued with a sinceer and honest intention of adjusting his mind to truth, and not of making a trade and profit of his attainements, shall purifie his soul so as his life will be easy, the troubles of the world his scorn, and death it self his indifference.45

At this point in his life, North's view of the philosophical pursuit is secular; he apparently sees no directly religious implications in it, but, interestingly, considers it mainly in terms of his personal Stoic struggle for spiritual peace. The reference to 'principles' in the essay might be intended as a dig at Newton and the Principia, but at this stage, North is not particularly anti-Newtonian. Indeed, he seems to have been impressed by certain aspects of Newton's work: 'As to the reason of light,' he says in Notes of Me, 'I have ever admired Mr Newton's hypothesis as new, and most exquisitely thought' (141). Also, in an essay dating probably from about the same period, he refers glowingly to 'Mr. Newton, then whome the nation hath not a finer soul,'46 Even so, North's scientific views were fundamentally at odds with important elements in Newtonianism, and the potential for serious disagreement existed from the beginning. A change did take place, and by 1706, North's opposition to Newton becomes evident. This was the year North corresponded with Newton's enthusiastic supporter, Samuel Clarke. The correspondence revealed a concern that was to occupy North more and more: Newton's speculations about attractive forces in nature.47 It may well be, as John Friesen has suggested, that North became particularly alarmed by the implications of Newton's ideas after reading the 1706 edition of the Opticks, and especially queries 29 and 31 of the English edition, with their speculations about particles possessing 'an attractive Force,' or 'certain Powers, Virtues, or Forces, by which they act at a Distance.'48 Like Leibniz, North became increasingly concerned that by postulating an attractive power to explain gravity Newton was regressing to Aristotelianism and occult powers. But a far more serious objection to Newtonian philosophy was to emerge over the religious implications of certain aspects of his ideas. In particular, Newton's concepts of absolute and relative space and time implied a self-existent and indivisible God, with disturbing implications for a central doctrine of Christianity: the Trinity. The worst fears of High Church and orthodox Christians were con-

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INTRODUCTION

firmed by the publication of Clarke's daring pamphlet, The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), with its analysis of New Testament texts in what seemed a definite gesture towards Arianism. Clarke invited North to comment on the tract - an indication, incidentally, that North's opinion was regarded with respect in ecclesiastical and philosophical circles. In his answer, dated 10 February 1712/13, North in effect accused Clarke of setting up reason against revelation: 'I cannot but think it strang,' he wrote, that any person should interpose his litigating talent in refining and cavilling about formes and expressions concerning the devine Nature, as have bin used of ancient time in the Christian church, under pretence of modifying religious misterys to square them to our groveling capacities, or experiences of materiality: and especially that of the Holy Trinity, a subject that is extra, or rather supra to all humane thought or tryall.49 North sent a copy of his letter to his mentor, George Hickes, the virtual leader of the non-juring community. Hickes's reply to North is instructive, for it reveals the fear among many High Church adherents of the dangerous new ideas circulating abroad: 'He hath bin early perverted by Locks notions,' Hickes declared, 'and particularly by this, that wee are not to beleev any thing of which we have not clear Idea.' Locke was bad enough, but it was Newtonianism that was most toxic: 'It is their Newtonian philosofy which hath made not onely so many Arians but Theists [i.e., Deists], and that not onely among the laity but I fear among our devines,'50 Hickes continued. North shared such fears. The gathering of natural knowledge by means of clear and distinct impressions, operated on by a reasoning mind, was one thing. But there was an unbridgeable gap between such knowledge and the ineffable mysteries of the Faith, a quite different kind of knowledge, and one that could be obtained only through revelation. North made his position clear in his letter to Clarke: My sentiment therefore upon the point [i.e., the Holy Trinity] is, that wee have no power or possibility of reasoning at all about that matter, but must take the doctrine upon pure faith, grounded on the authority of the sacred text, as it stands there declared, that is revealed to us, being in all other respects incomprehensible.51 It was not simply the doctrine of the Trinity that was at risk. North had

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already expressed his general concern over Newton's theory of attraction (in his 1706 correspondence with Clarke). Now it seemed particularly clear that the Newtonian cosmos, with its complicated system of matter attracting matter over vast voids, and which required the occasional correction of irregularities, tended to diminish God. In a treatise dated 1728, North vents his disgust at the Newtonian model: Now is not this a spruce contrivance of which an ingeniere or clockmaker would have bin proud. But to charge such a whim peice of machinery as here is paumed upon the almighty creator of all things whose works are incomplex and direct, is plusquam unreasonable.5*

His own idea of a universe full of matter, capable of motion, possessed the majestic simplicity one would expect from the Almighty: What a transcendency is there in the establishment of one single principle, call it body, •>- space, or (with the philosofer,) extension, to be capable of parts, motion and impuls, and which with the adjunct of one other principle animall sence, produceth all the glorious phenomena of the univers? The infinite wisdome of which single institution of matter ... argues against atheists an almighty power, and providence ...-^

Cartesian materialism was often regarded with suspicion in the seventeenth century as conducing to atheism, but here we see the conservative North employing it, modified somewhat by the addition of the mysterious 'animall sence,'54 to defend an orthodox religious position against the Newtonian threat. Almost always in North's writings we find that when he is particularly antagonistic towards a person a political element is present. His attitude to Newton is no exception. It seems clear that he associated Newtonians with the Whig party, with popularism, and with factions. Such is the argument put forward by Larry Stewart, who claims that North blamed the Newtonians for introducing sects in philosophy, in which Descartes was attacked by 'proletarian scriblasters,' and in which any follower of Descartes was made to appear 'wretched and ignorant,' and a 'sectator.' In North's mind, Stewart suggests, 'sects in philosophy, faction, and rabble were merely differing shades of disorder and republicanism.'55 Such a fear would be strengthened by the growing popularity of mathematical and scientific demonstrations in public lecture rooms and in coffee-houses - the latter long despised, and feared, by North as seed-

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INTRODUCTION

beds of revolt and misinformation.56 There is more than a hint of disgust at the popularization of science as early as the essay 'Mechanick Notes,' mentioned above.57 North's objections to Newtonianism, Stewart claims, 'rested simultaneously at two levels, a philosophical as well as a social criticism.'58 Stewart is almost certainly right. North, the aristocrat, the immovable supporter of established order, political and religious, would naturally fear both a scientific mode that diminished the power and the mystery of God, and a discourse which left the closet and the milieu of gentlemanly privilege to wander through the mobthreatened streets. Natural philosophy was one of North's abiding passions, and so was music. He had the good fortune, he declares in Notes of Me, 'to be descended of a family, where it was native' (142-3). As a lad at Kirtling, North had lessons on the viol with John Jenkins, who also introduced him to the principles of music. Later he received instruction on the theorbo from John Lilly, and possibly lessons on the violin from Nicola Matteis.59 He also played the harpsichord and the organ.60 In London he became familiar with an extensive circle of music lovers. He seemed to be well acquainted with virtuoso performers such as Nicola Matteis and Captain Prencourt, and gifted amateurs such as William Waldegrave ('a prodigy of an archlutinist'), Sir Roger L'Estrange ('an expert violist'), and William Bridgeman, the under-secretary ('a thro base man upon the harpsicord').61 He had a discussion with Thomas Betterton about musical drama,62 but the high point of North's musical experience was when he joined with Francis North in entertaining the 'devine Purcell,' playing with the master some of his 'Itallian manner'd compositions.'63 Such 'conversation with the best masters of the time,' said North, 'made me a professor; and from a medler with most sorts of instruments (not excluding the voice,) a buisy body in transcribing, transposing, and composing .i.'64 North had an intimate knowledge of music in London, as both observer, and participant. He has left not only a record of the musical social scene, but also some fascinating observations on the history of musical taste in England, and, as we see from Notes of Me, some very interesting thoughts on the teaching of music. As a result, historians of the music of this period have found him a valuable source. Charles Burney was the first; he borrowed heavily from North, using the manuscript of Memoires ofMusicke, 'to which I was allowed access by his descendant the late Dr Montagu North, canon of Windsor.'65 The process has con-

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tinued into modern times. As an example, Peter Holman's Henry Purcell (1994) contains twenty citations from North. Even more impressive is North's contribution to the Blackwell History of Music in Britain volume, The Seventeenth Century, edited by Ian Spink (1992). There, the contributors borrow from North no fewer than twenty-eight times, in order to throw light on just about every aspect of musical life covered in this authoritative history. Holman, in the Purcell biography, describes North as 'an active and accomplished amateur musician, and one of the most informed and perceptive writers on music of his time.'66 Rosamond McGuinness bestows even greater praise. She credits North (together with Anthony Wood) with beginning musical biography and historiography in England. In her view, North 'is an admirable critic, enquiring and open-minded, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, humane, and sympathetic to the music of the past as well as the present, though he does seem to favour the idea of perfectability [sic] in musical history.'67 North must, of course, have spent many hours alone practising on his various instruments. For him, however, music was not a solitary pleasure but most enjoyable when shared. He loved attending public concerts, and he seemed richly contented when helping Francis to unwind by accompanying him on the harpsichord in a song before bed, or playing his viol quietly at gatherings at Francis's house, providing a sort of soothing musical background to the onerous discussions on state affairs. What is more, in Roger's view, music could be a powerful social force. In his nostalgic memories of the North family's music-making in the country it seems to act as a powerful uniting agent, and indeed he connects the decline of a wholesome country life with the growth of musicmaking in the city. It is interesting that North described sailing as 'another of my mathematicall enterteinements' (101), suggesting that for him there was little distinction between his aesthetic and his philosophical engagement. The same seems to be true of his attitude to music. Not only did he enjoy it passionately as a performer and hearer, but he spent many hours in technical analysis of it - particularly the nature of our cognition of music. This aspect of North's interest in music remained virtually unknown until the recent researches of Jamie C. Kassler and Mary Chan; otherwise, he might well have influenced subsequent researches into the nature of music and its physical/aesthetic reception. Clearly, music was of enormous importance to North. He came from a family, however, that was suspicious of extremes, and he declares himself grateful to Francis for occasionally giving him 'a gentle check for

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hunting of musick, as he called it'; otherwise he might have 'run too much into the sottish resignation that some shew to this slight enterteinement, musik' (159). Although of all the arts music was North's greatest love, he also had a keen interest in painting. His most famous acquaintance was Sir Peter Lely, but he also knew Ferreris, a Dutch painter and friend of Lely,68 Henry Wilson the portraitist, and Robert Wright the engraver. For familiar and intimate friendship, North appeared to rely on his brothers and one or two other members of his family. His warm reference in Notes of Me to John Windham, however, gives us a hint of close friendships outside the family (101), and Anthony Keck seems to have been held in particular regard.69 The autobiography records only one friendship with a woman outside of the family, and that was with Anne Barrett-Lennard (102-5). Friendship between a woman and a man, however, at this time was complicated by the question of expectations relating to marriage. Francis North died in September 1685. His death left Roger not only without his brother's powerful support and protection, but also without a home. He had been living, cheaply, as a member of Francis's household, but now he had 'no hous to repair to to eat and drink, and with freinds to be free and merry as formerly.' He decided to move into Sir Peter Lely's house in Covent Garden, and stayed there from 1685 to about 1690. Probably it was now, in relative and cherished isolation, that he began serious work on his various writing projects. Although Roger was only thirty-four years old at the time of Francis's death, he nevertheless held important positions as a lawyer, and had managed to accumulate a competent fortune. He was by no means contented, however, because his position within the political life of the nation was becoming intensely uncomfortable. As far as his political beliefs are concerned, North tells us in Notes of Me that he 'took very early to the loyall side' (95), although it is interesting that he considered it almost accidental, as if he could quite as easily have been anti-royalist. He soon, however, became 'confirmed into an inexpugnable fidelity to the crowne' (95) through conversation with his brother Francis and others. Significantly, in the same passage Roger mentions the fact that Francis's support of the crown was 'the true caus and means of all his preferments' (95), but there is no reason to doubt that the two brothers were as disinterested as one could expect, and that their success was a happy by-product of their loyalty. Roger's early commitment to the crown became more and more

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deeply confirmed as he grew older and read more, and the main reason for this is simple: the law. North's political position, and indeed much else in his philosophy of life, can be understood only when one fundamental principle is grasped: his deep and unshakeable faith in the law of England. The significance of the law in the consciousness of many seventeenth-century Englishmen is now perhaps difficult to understand, but is well explained by Alan Cromartie at the beginning of his book on a character who features importantly in Notes of Me, Sir Matthew Hale. So apt is this passage to North's position that it is worth quoting at some length: The culture to which he [Hale] belonged was deeply constitutionalist in feeling: participants assumed, that is to say, that the purpose of debate was always to establish what the law of England was, not what it ought to be. In itself, this was hardly a matter for surprise; there was a sense, in late Renaissance Europe, in which every political argument was legal. The law, as Justinian's Institutes had put it, was 'the knowledge of things human and divine'; it included every principle that was relevant to administering a state. Particxilar local arrangements (ius civile} were open to supplementation and correction with reference to rules (described as the 'laws' of nature and of nations) that were binding on all humanity in every place and time. By the outbreak of the English civil wars, most of Male's countrymen had come to a very- much odder belief: that the repository of all this wisdom was their esoteric and unwritten system, the unapologetically provincial common law. (Emphasis added)70

For North, the laws of England were the basis of order, the only hope for stability, and the only true protection for honest men. His belief is memorably stated in a passage in Notes of Me where law appears as a rock in a sea of corruption: I could see the rottenness of men. Those against the government, were mad, and those for it generally fals[e]. That neither one sort with their impetuosity and threats, nor the other with their authority and flattery, ought to prevaile over men to leav the law, and strickt justice of life. That no safety ly[e]s in the contrary, and an English man, hath nothing to lean on in publik buissness but the law, which onely can or will bear him out... (223)

Law was the principal idea behind North's paternalistic vision of soci-

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ety. In his architectural treatise, Of Building, he describes the hall of the royal palace of Westminster (now the site of the common law courts) as it was in ancient times: Wee have a tradition, and credible, that the order of the king's family, was to dine and sup all in the great hall; and that the Courts of Justice, were but the tables, where the folk eat, which all stood in a row on the west side of the hall, except the king's tables raised up at the south end; and there the king sat to doe justice, and had his secretary's office, intra cancellas, by where his dispatches were made, now the Chancery. The Court of Crowne Causes was the uppermost below, where the king also came when he thought fitt to see justice done upon traytors ... Thus was the king's justice administred, and the justices sat in the morning, till the officers came to prepare for dinner, and then the records and papers must be pack't up to make way for the butler.71 This double function, domestic and judicial, of the king's palace was imitated in the houses of peers: 'As the king did justice in the hall, so the lords had their courts baron, each 3 weeks, and generall courts of the tenants.'72 The law inhered, then, in the very structure of the physical house of the extended 'family' that was the principal unit of traditional society, and it is a model which North attempted to apply at Rougham: ... the seat of a country gentleman, who lives as the policy of this nation, and the interest of his estate requires, with full managery in husbandry, grazing or both, cannot be easy, unless it be a sort of a village or rather citty, with monarchick governement limited by law. That is, many sorts of persons, imployed in severall kinds of affairs, disposed and directed all to one end, the good of the master, and themselves. And that these may be all well acomodated, is the result of the master's care.73 A similar concept had been expressed by Roger's father, Dudley, fourth baron North. In his practical treatise, Observations and Advices Oeconomical (1669), Lord North also suggests that a large household and a monarchy have much in common, and neither, he declares, 'can well subsist without due subordinations, and good order.'74 North no doubt remembered his father's words, and he had been deeply impressed, also, by the duke of Beaufort's orderly management of his self-sufficient estate at Badminton.75

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The idea of the household (or the family) not merely as a metaphor for, but as the putative origin of, magisterial authority in the state is, of course, not original to the Norths. It was a truism in seventeenth-century political dialectic, and Roger could have become acquainted with the principle not only in his father's book but in a number of political writers, including Plato, Aristotle, Bodin, Hooker, and Filmer.76 What is different in North's version, and what is so typical of him, is that he arrives at the metaphor via the courtroom as much as via the family. We shall see, too, that the phrase 'monarchick governement limited by law' is of central significance in North's politics. 'Law and order' was more than a cliche for North: the two were mutually dependent, and this belief supported two constants in his political life: a detestation and fear of 'factions,' and an unswerving loyalty to the monarch who occupied his throne by proper succession. North's view of what constituted 'factions' was hardly sophisticated. He applied the term to just about any group that, as he saw it, attempted to subvert a strong monarchial government; certainly the Whigs came under this rubric. He tended, also, to make little distinction between political factions and the 'mob,' or 'rabble,' and for these his hatred was intense, obviously leavened with a genuine fear. There is a revealing passage in his biography of his brother Dr John North: As to the public, which in his time began to be muddled with faction that through the supinity of our government had got ground, and the artificial cry against popery and arbitrary power sounded loud in all corners, he showed an utter detestation of the faction and their rabble, and could not but be angry when he heard what troubles they created to the state at that time. He was well apprised of the history of the (then) late troubles, and thought the like in danger to be reiterated. He declaimed against all the proceedings (however popular) tending that way, as no less mad than the actions of stolid brutes, void of thought and foresight of consequences, that hurry hurry themselves into perdition and ruin. Brute beast indeed, meaning the populace, but it hath horns and houghs [hocks], therefore stand clear, but neither eyes nor ears to any purpose but finding the shortest cut to confusion and destruction of itself and everything else that stands in its way.77

These sentiments are here applied to John North, but Roger obviously shared them, as passages throughout his writings testify, including this one from Notes of Me:

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For the people left to themselves, never did right, and never failed to destroy each other. Nor is it any sort of reason takes place with them, but they are a meer mechanick engin, wrought by pestilent knaves within, who actuate it, alltho not seen. (176)

The passage from the Life of John North provides a strong clue as to the probable root cause of North's fear, and indeed of that of most other Tories in his day: it was the memory of the '(then) late troubles' (i.e., the Civil War and its aftermath), brought back to tremulous life by what seemed a real threat of chaos during the hysteria of the Popish Plot, confirmed by the Exclusion Crisis, and then by the Glorious Revolution. Francis North and his ever-present younger brother must have made something of an odd couple in the higher circles of political affairs of late Stuart England, for they were hardly typical of the politicians that Charles, and later James, gathered around them. The earl of Clarendon declared that he knew only two honest lawyers of his acquaintance, and Francis North was one of them. And a recent historian, recording Francis's appointment as lord keeper, describes him as 'a judge not associated with any faction and respected by all.'78 It is not surprising, therefore, that in the twists and turns of Charles's convoluted affairs, and jostled by men of formidable power who were masters in the art of political deviousness and the pursuit of personal ambition, they would be ill at ease. Francis North (or Lord Guilford as he became) seemed to have neither the knack nor the inclination for making the kind of alliances that some other members of Charles's cabinet excelled at, and just about die only colleague he could rely on with any confidence was the 'faithful drudge of a secretary,' Sir Leoline Jenkins.79 After Jenkins was replaced by Godolphin (1684) > Francis felt exposed and vulnerable, and at that point, 'the king's affaires went backward, wheels within wheels began to take place. The ministers turned formalists, and the court misterious.'80 At one point in Notes of Me, Roger claims, modestly, that the talk of Francis and his colleagues that he overheard was 'too wise for me' (157), but at another he makes it clear that he was let in on 'the greatest secrets of state, as soon as it was lawfull to be acquainted with them' (222). His biography of Francis North, and his Examen, reveal a headcrackingly detailed knowledge of affairs of the time (he had the benefit of Francis's notes), and there is no doubt that he remained very closely associated with his brother in the politics of the day. Certainly, his political stance was identical to that of Francis.

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The brothers supported the king vigorously. They fought the Whigs tooth and nail and carried out the king's specific wishes whenever possible. Francis was instrumental, for instance, in the application of quo warrantos in the largely successful purge of corporations, and the family supplied another brother to the royal cause when, in 1682, Dudley North was elected, through a rather dubious process, as sheriff of London - part of another purge of Whigs. Francis, with Roger's impassioned approval, supported the suppression of coffee-houses as centres of sedition, and successfully opposed petitions critical of the court, while his judgments in capital cases of treason were always what the king wanted - the trial of College at Oxford being an egregious example. Francis and Roger rallied their kinsfolk to support James's determined efforts to bring in a mainly Tory Parliament in 1685, and while serving there, Roger always did his best to support the royal demands for money. It seems that both men were more or less willing participants in what Geoffrey Holmes terms 'the political pliancy of too many leading members of the legal hierarchy,'81 although of course neither would have seen it in those terms, and certainly they displayed much greater integrity than many self-servers around the king. Indeed, there were limits, and here again the Tory legal constitutionality guiding Roger and his brother becomes critical. In the late Stuart struggle between king and Parliament, they ultimately placed all questions against the framework of the law. As far as Roger was concerned, the ancient constitution of England favoured the king. Justice Hale, he declared in Notes of Me, although no monarchist, because of his great knowledge of the law, did 'more right in point of prerogative, than the most willing and obsequious judges' because 'president was much for the advantage of the prerogative' (170). Roger would have agreed entirely with Francis's remark: 'that a man could not be a good lawyer and honest but he must be a prerogative man.'82 The king, therefore, had everything to gain from observing the law: 'let a Prince therefore stick to his antient Laws,' declared Roger L'Estrange, 'and he may be sure his People will stick to him.'83 Francis North's views were known at court: He urged continually the same doctrine, that, holding to the law (wherein I always include the established Church of England) his majesty was not only safe but growing in power and credit; which, if he forsook the law, would all fall retrograde and scarce ever be recovered.84

Charles was able, more or less, to accommodate himself to this situa-

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tion, but James was not, and he began his ill-fated campaign to undermine those laws that stood in the way of his dream of bringing England into the Roman fold. Roger viewed the changes with alarm, as 'the times began to grow sour' and 'Wee who were steddy to the laws and the church, were worst lookt on' (230). At this point, his feelings must have been very similar to those of his friend George Hickes. When James attempted to appoint the Catholic Anthony Farmer as president of Magdalen College (the last straw for many loyal Anglicans), Hickes was prompted to this comment: I was not surprized at the news about Magd. but much troubled at it, so much the more as a man loves, and honors, and prayes for any person, so much the more he is troubled, and greived at his aberrations, and the concern that generally appears on good mens faces, is as far, as I can guesse, the effect of pure greif, without any mixture of discontent.85 It was in Parliament that North had to face the crucial question: whether to support the king or the law. The law won. In the Parliament of 1685, he tells us in Notes of Me, 'as much as a courtier as I was, I joyned with the Church of England party to maintaine the laws and religion establish!' (230). The acid test came in the form of the question of the king's dispensing power. When James demanded toleration for Roman Catholic officers in the militia, thereby in effect overturning an established law, North was unable to agree, and 'I voted with those who were against the court in the article of the dispensing power' (although, as if to make up for it, he went on to fight 'tooth and nail' for the king's money supply) (230). In case James was in any doubt about Roger's unreliability, it was removed later (1687) when Roger, 'closeted' by Jeffreys, and pressed by the king, declined to commit his support to a repeal of the Test Act, or to defend the king's prerogative. North's position in London became more and more untenable, and he was effectively frozen out by James and those near him. It is ironic that North's respect for the law, making him so firm in his adherence to the Stuarts, was what made him suspect in James's eyes. It is doubly ironic that after the Revolution it led him to decline the Oath of Allegiance, refusing to sanction what he saw as an illegal succession. It must have been with relief that he turned his back on all the arguments and intrigues of London, to retire to Rougham. In 1690 North bought the estate of Yelverton Peyton at Rougham, Nor-

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folk (although for many years after he kept his chambers in the Temple) .86 The next few years were spent in building, and he later used the experience as the basis of his treatise on architecture: Cursory Notes of Building Occasioned by the Repair, or Rather Metamorfosis, of an Old House in the Country. As the title of his treatise suggests, North decided to remodel the existing house, rather than build new, even though it was, 'as ancient manner houses usually are, of severall sorts of building, and done in different ages, and for different ends.'87 On this disorder, he planned to impose a rational scheme within, and a rather severe Palladian symmetry without. He thought everything through carefully: 'entering at lady day 1691, did nothing that year but thinck,'88 and he enjoyed the process more than the result: But now I must remember what a world of deliberation I had about farther proceeding ... [after the first important modification], but after all determined in a porpose of doing somewhat about my house as long as I lived, proving the truth of a trite observation, that doing injoys more than done."9 Slowly, the house took shape. Large, disproportionate spaces were regularized and converted into convenient rooms, and a bedchamber was designed in such a way that the bed might be placed 'free from any course, or current of air in the room, farr from the windoes, and the chimny by the side, and not too near.'9" There was a gallery over sixty feet long, in which an organ would eventually be installed,91 and everything so arranged that all elements of the 'family' would be 'not so neer as to be offensive, yet within call.'92 Located in a front corner of the house was a closet which North used for his 'papers and domestique concernes.' Apparently this room was dedicated to the business of the estate, because it was close to the bailiffs closet, 'so that I could have recourse at all times to his books and papers, etct.'9S On the first floor, he formed 'a good room with 2 windoes backwards, which I made my library,' and immediately below that on the ground floor was a room 'which I intended for my owne absolute retirement.'94 Presumably it was in one or both of these rooms that North spent hours reading and 'passing the pen from side to side of the paper,' as he tells us in Notes of Me (243)North's plan for his house at Rougham, judging from a drawing that has survived,95 was entirely consonant with his aesthetic principles. We

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learn of these from certain remarks made during the section on music in Notes of Me, and also from some interesting passages in his treatise Of Building. In the latter work, North recalls a discussion he had with Sir Christopher Wren on the nature of beauty.06 Wren, 'for argument sake,' maintained the position that the distinction of handsome and ugly was inherent in nature. North, on the other hand, insisted that the distinction 'arose by the use and the reason of things.' North presents the basis of his position in a paragraph that recalls his concept of the pleasure/ pain imperative in human comprehension (see 45, below): That which is most understood, or brings more to our knowledge, and comprehension, is pleasing, and things not understood nor comprehended are painefull, that is ugly and offensive. Againe things understood, or appearing to be just and fitt for the use intended are handsome, and others unfitt or unequall for the occasion, are blameable, and therefore ugly. These 2 rules, will determine all questions of beauty and ornament. From this given, North derives three qualities in architecture: order, uniformity, strength. By order he means regularity: 'equall spaces, and strait ranges. For the mind instantly takes the designe, and is satisfied.' Uniformity is a sort of harmony: 'meer variety is offensive, because every instance is a new work for the understanding and memory. But a regular mixture of severall things, which comprehends uniformity, is artfull, and a grace.' The third quality in North's list, strength, involves the concept of a relationship between design and purpose. This last principle North considers the most important element of 'beauty in uniformity.' He shares the neoclassical disdain for Gothic ecclesiastical building, for instance, where we see 'a world of contrivance in leading the ribbs of a massy roof into one threadd, and so in vast length, and strange smallness downe to the bottom; as if the whole should seem to stand upon knitting pins.' The implication here is that the informed spectator derives pleasure when the equivalence between a support and its weight-bearing task is apparent. In Notes of Me, North provides a table for deriving the proportions of a classical column, its girth and height (134); in Of Building, he sets out the rationale behind the scale: it is the sense we have of the relationship between the strength of the support and the weight it has to bear. As we might expect, North was suspicious of ornament. In architecture, he tells us, ornament must always be subordinated to the overall

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design, and must itself perform a function. It seems that he had architecture in mind when he was writing the section on music in Notes of Me, because he several times uses an architectural metaphor. For instance, graces in music, like ornaments in architecture, 'are good in their time, but the fabrick must be raised, before the carving, such as that is [is] put on' (149)-97 Despite his caution in the matter of 'graces' in music, it seems that North thought of them as vitally important: ... a life and warmth in the colouring of a picture, is well resembled to graces in musick, that are not the body but the soul that enlivens it, or as the animall spirits that cannot be seen or felt, but yet make that grand difference between a living and a dead corps. (158)

It may be that in his thoughts on graces in music, North was nudging towards a concept of the Sublime, an idea that was in the air. Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism, written not so long (1711) after Notes of Me, contains the famous couplet: 'Music resembles poetry, in each / Are nameless graces which no methods teach' (lines 143-4). The phrase 'nameless graces' alludes to the expression je ne sais quoi,' which had become current through French criticism. North, who was familiar with Rapin and Boileau,98 uses the term in Cursory Notes of Music, where he refers to 'the inexpressible, the poets'je ne scay quoi,'99 and he was well aware of that element in music that is inexpressible. For North, we can assume, the musician with a true understanding of graces is like Pope's 'master hand' who can 'From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part,' and can (literally) 'snatch a grace beyond the reach of art' (lines 152—3). That North was not immune to the effects of the Sublime - that quality that inspires awe, and raises a particular work above the reach of mere analysis - is further suggested by his description in the biography of John North of the effect created by Wren's library at Trinity College: 'And the admirable disposition and proportion on the inside is such as touches the soul of anyone who first sees it."00 Although North's aesthetics contains some interesting personal speculations, on the whole his outlook was typically Augustan: the regularity of neoclassicism founded in common sense, but illuminated with a possibility of sublimity. As a postscript to this discussion of North's taste, we might add a revealing passage from an unexpected source: an order for hardware. Robert Foley, North's brother-in-law, was a supplier of ironmongery to the navy, and Roger bought many items from him during

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the construction of Rougham. On 28 October 1691, North wrote to Foley from Rougham ordering locks and keys. North knows exactly what he wants: 'And the keys I would have without any finery of inward filing, but onely an handsome turne or shape, and clean filed, otherwise plain as pike-staff."01 At some point, presumably when the rebuilding was well advanced, North brought most of his paintings from London, although some stayed at his chambers at the Middle Temple and, for a time, at Lely's house in Covent Garden. North's delight and pride in his collection of paintings is clear from the list he made of them: 'A Register of Pictures Belonging to Roger North, Together with the Materiall Circumstances Relating to Them."02 In Notes of Me, North is amused by the 'confidence of the masters in christening drawings,' and when he comes to describe his own paintings he employs a certain amount of caution. There is, for instance, 'A flagellation,' about which 'there is great latitude of guess for the master.'10''5 Similarly, there is 'A landscape, after the manner of Glaud-Lorrain [sic], and good of the sort, but not his.' In Covent Garden (i.e., Lely's house) he kept 'A carpet and fruit,' which is 'of a true and masterly Italian hand ... and has put some in mind of M. Angelo, but no assurance.' In the other cases, however, he records more hopeful attributions: 'A portrait of a Venetian lady and a dog. This is concluded to be of Titian'; 'A Madonna, a majestick peice ... The Italian masters who have seen it, pronounce it to be of Rafael'; 'A man blowing a coal... beleevd to be of M. Angelo di Carravagio.' One painting, a 'Holben portrait of Sir Thomas Moor,' had a particularly interesting provenance. According to North, the painting was in Whithall when news was brought to H[enry] 8 that Sir Thomas M[ore] was beheaded. And the King fell into a passion upon the news, and running to the picture, tore it ddwne and threw it out of the windowe. And the picture in the fall, broke in 3 peices. But Pomerantius then coming by, took it carried it home, and so put it together, and mended the colours that, it is not to be discerned that it was ever broke. North seemed especially pleased with the various Lely portraits that came into his possession, such as that of 'the Lord Keeper North, done ... when he was of councell to King Charles 2, and came to me as executor to Lady North.' There was also Sir Peter Lely's portrait, 'by himself done at Hame for the Duchess of Lauderdale, and by her sent to me as a present; and is the prime picture extant of him. 3/4.' He must, however,

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have had mixed feelings about several portraits of the 'Prince of Aurange' included amongst a group of paintings given to him by Lely's son, John. Reversing what appears to have been the usual procedure, North finished the house before planting the grounds.104 But when the time came he took to planting with enthusiasm. As one might expect from such a meticulous man, he kept records: the kinds of trees, the dates of planting, and their early progress.105 In November 1690, for instance, he sowed 'the south plantations in the night close' with oaks, and the next year he planted acorns 'for raising a grove of oaks next the lane.' Fruit trees were particularly plentiful. In November of 1699, he planted 'A Newington Peach, An Apricock, a Newington Nectareen, A Grape,' among others. There were many apple trees, including 'Golden Pippens, English Peppen, Great Russettings, Heresfordshire Parmains, French Parmains.' He seemed to be aiming for an almost completely self-supporting estate, with its own produce, a laundry house, dovehouse, barns, stables, and a rather formidable brewhouse: 'I made an house 24 foot by 20, which brued 12 hogsheads.'lof) There were also fishponds both for pleasure and to supply fresh fish to the house. North used his experience in this particular enterprise to write a little treatise entitled A Discourse of Fish and Fishponds, which he published as an act of essentially Augustan benevolence: I wish any Gentleman, who hath employed his Money and Pains in cultivating Waters in Countries that are blessed with Springs and Rivers, would, for the Benefit of his Posterity and Neighbours, as I have done, set down his Experience, and communicate it to such as have a Mind to divert themselves with the most reasonable Employment of beautifying and improving their own Estates.107

Another useful book, designed for gentlemen who wished to keep an ordered estate, was North's Gentleman Accomptant ... 1714. It explained the mechanics and the virtues of double-entry bookkeeping. It is quite likely that, in his desire to make Rougham self-supporting, North was inspired by the example of the duke of Beaufort's princely estate at Badminton, which he had visited while on the western circuit about 1680. He describes it at some length in his biography of Francis, and seems particularly impressed by the ability of the estate to produce almost everything it needed.108 With his estate of Rougham in hand, North was in a position to marry,

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and on 26 May 1696 he became the husband of Mary Gayer, the daughter of Sir Robert Gayer, a staunch Jacobite, a friend of William Sancroft,1^1 and a collector of paintings. Mary North arrived at a halffinished house: I brought my wife downe while the workmen were pulling downe and wee stay'd, till it was raised, and the roof sett. And I had the advantage of her inspection of what was designed for her owne use, as fast as it was capable of being shewed. But I cannot say that she suggested any alteration but liked it as it was layed out, which I had the good fortune to doe to her intire content.110

A surprising silence surrounds this apparently compliant woman. The above reference to her is the only one that I know of in North's writings, outside of his correspondence, and even there very little by her or about her survives. There is a glimpse of her in one letter (undated) from Rougham to Anne Foley, Roger North's niece in London. Mary North passes on snippets of family and local news, and asks: 'pray send us what news the towne affords for this is a dull place as you know and your uncle loves going a broad no better than usual..'111 When Roger does mention her in his correspondence, it is always briefly, and usually in a postscript, as if she were an afterthought. His main interest seems to be jn her pregnancies. In one letter, for instance, dated 14 June 1697, he tells his nephew Robert Foley that Mary 'expects continually,' and three weeks later reports that his wife 'is one yet.'1112 Several years later, in a letter to his niece Anne Foley, he passes on greetings from 'My wife, who is at her old trade of grunting and groaning." '-H Not even the date of Mary's death seems to have been recorded. It must have been after 1725 and probably before 1734, because North refers to her in a letter dated 21 July 1725,114 and there is no mention of her in his will in 1734. Together they produced seven children. There were two sons (Roger and Montagu) and five daughters (Elizabeth, Mary, Ann, Christian, and Katherine), so that there may well have been occasions, as the family grew, when Roger was glad that he had set aside his place of 'absolute retirement.' He had been brought up in a household where strict economy was the law, and his own fortune he describes as only 'competent' (99). Life at Rougham, consequently, was not luxurious. When his niece Anne Foley contemplated a visit, North felt it necessary to warn , her:

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It is but justice to acquaint you, that our way of living is very plaine; and as near as maybe with what wee scrape up at home; for the state of affaires doe not allow us to send abroad for wine or other curiositys, such as are allwais in your way. And I fear you will make hard shift without 'em."r>

In Notes of Me North writes eloquently on the value of music in a country family, and there is evidence that music was of great importance at Rougham. There was the organ that North had had built. The maker was 'Father' Bernard Smith, whom North knew from his London days, when Smith and a rival organ-builder, Renatus Harris, were involved in the famous 'battle of the organs,' based on who was to provide an organ for the Temple.'1(l On one occasion at least (1709), the family was visited by an accomplished musician, a 'rare harpsi[c]ordiere,' generally assumed to be Captain Prencourt.117 Like the generation before them, at Tostock and Kirtling, the children of Roger and Mary appear to have been taught music, which they probably performed together. North's will gave 'the great harpsicord and frame' to Elizabeth, 'the lesser harpsicord and frame, with the second violin' to Katherine, and 'the first base violl' to Christian. Montagu received 'My first violin and case' and, as a mark of special favour, 'my second base violl given me by the most reverend father in God William late Archbishop of Canterbury deceast (having bin used by him in his life time).' 1 ' 8 There were also books. Over the years, North added books both to his own library1'9 and to the parochial library at Rougham - according to a catalogue that survives, in 1714 the latter comprised 1150 volumes.120 North's reading was wide. Korsten has listed, for instance, these dramatists referred to in North's writings: Jonson, Shakespeare, Davenant, Howard, Sedley, Settle, Etherege, Wycherley, and Dryden (to these he might have added Buckingham). Other authors noted by Korsten are Ariosto, Tasso, Erasmus, Cervantes, Sir Thomas More, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, Pascal, Rabelais, Rapin, and Boileau.121 This list is by no means exhaustive. In the 'General Preface' alone, North mentions something like seven historians, fourteen biographers, three writers of fiction, and ten other authors, all additional to Korsten's gathering. Not only that, North must have been familiar with authors of numerous works on natural philosophy, architecture, music, and law, all of which subjects he investigated eagerly. The importance of reading for North can hardly be overstressed. He needed it as a hungry man needs food. His intellect seems to have been of the kind that operates best in response to the ideas of others, ideas which he could dispute or agree

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INTRODUCTION

with, and which would spur him on to thoughts of his own. Many of his writings, indeed, can be seen as commentaries on something he has read (often without identifying it), or as extensions or modifications of other people's ideas. He seemed to have a special penchant for French writers. North must have been extremely busy at Rougham. Not only were there the affairs of a growing family to attend to, but the improvements to the estate were numerous and continuous - apparently Roger himself supervised the setting of gardens, building of dykes, breeding of horses, and the other projects of a new estate. So successful were North's efforts, according to Korsten, that the annual rental of the estate rose from roughly £400 at the time of purchase to about £3500 at his death.122 In addition, North took on the executorship, jointly or singly, for many people, including Dr Henry Paman, Sir Robert Gayer, Sir George Wenyeve, Montagu North, Dudleya North, Anne Foley, and Sir Nicholas L'Estrange.I2H Bitter experience with the Lely estate had taught North that executorship was a thankless task: 'it is a piety as well as mortification to an honest man to medle with them' (240). He discovered this truth again in the matter of his father-in-law's estate when he became involved in a protracted dispute with Sir Robert Gayer's eldest son.124 But, as North also remarked, 'Wee must as detters to humanity pay to allyed freinds in the persons of their orfans and widdows, this duty' (240). The surviving correspondence provides ample evidence of North's patient and meticulous attention to the affairs of the various estates.125 It was not only as an executor that North was called on for help. He was asked for advice in all kinds of affairs, personal and legal, by both his kinsfolk and his landed neighbours. We can thank Korsten, once again, for gathering details of North's activities in this area. In 1705, for instance, North interceded on behalf of his nephew William Lord North and Grey in matters concerning the match with Maria Margaretha, daughter of the treasurer of Holland. He also assisted his neighbour, Mrs Walpole, after the death of her husband in 1700, and was recommended by Sir Nicholas L'Estrange to arbitrate a dispute between Mrs Walpole and her son, Robert, the future prime minister.126 There were many other instances of North giving advice, measured and sensible, and always with a moral tone. A good example of North's resolution in such matters appears in one of the many letters occasioned by the refusal of his nephew, North Foley, to pay his sister Anne under the terms of their father's will. Roger North was caught in the middle, as he somewhat wearily pointed out:

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It seems I have an hard case amongst you that am applyd too on all sides, and have no temptation to say any thing but what I think critically just and true for I am utterly disinterested, except onely in your living in peace together ... I am now of an age unfitt for brigues, and have lived to affect the utmost openness, which if it pleaseth, I rejoyce and if not, I rest contented, wishing well to everybody, especially relations ...'"7

North was capable of sharpness, also. The case of one of Sir Dudley's sons, Roger, was particularly troublesome. Given to wine, women, and general wildness, he caused nothing but problems for his relatives. Eventually, as Montagu sadly relates in a letter (12 February 1705/6) to his sister Ann Foley, Roger, now all of twenty years old, gott a very bad clap with some of his London whores, which in compassion of him we had a good surgeon to cure and take care of him, butt in the midst of the operation, he went outt 4 dayes since and is not yet returned and we hear is married to a pox't whore, of whom I have so often given him warning. So there is the end of him ...'"8

It is this lad, presumably, who is the subject of Roger North's letter, also to his sister Ann Foley, dated 19 January of the following year: And seriously I never saw such a creature since I was borne so devoid of capacity, and devious to vice, and yet he hath two leggs, two eyes, ears, a mouth and nose as other humane kind, and an audacity of look and speech for which I envy him; but knows nothing but the way to his mouth...1-9

North never abandoned his Stuart loyalty. He kept up friendships with families and individuals, like himself, who were non-jurors, and he helped clergy (and their widows) who were deprived and thereby impoverished because of their refusal to take the oath of allegiance.'30 He had earlier given legal advice to George Hickes, the deprived dean of Worcester, concerning the claim of right against all intruders that Hickes nailed to the cathedral door,'31 and in his retirement he carried on an important correspondence with Hickes. (Hickes helped spark North's interest in etymology,'32 and also urged him to write the Examen.)133 North's loyalty to the Stuart cause made him suspect during the new regime. As Notes of Me makes clear, he considered his old appointments not to have been abrogated, and until about 1700 he kept in

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INTRODUCTION

touch with the court in exile in France in his capacity as attorneygeneral to Queen Mary of Modena.'34 The militia searched his house for weapons in 1696, again in 1715 during the Jacobite rebellion, and once more at the time of the Atterbury plot in 1722. North's name also appeared in a list of disaffected and supposedly dangerous Tories prepared by Christopher Layer.'35 Such suspicions were almost certainly unfounded in North's case, for it is extremely difficult to believe that he would ever join in violence for political ends. In addition to all this, there was the writing. At Rougham, North continued work on projects begun in London, and started new ones. In 1691, around the time of the purchase of Rougham, he published Dudley North's Discourses upon Trade, for which he provided a preface.136 In 1698 he published the pamphlet Arguments and Materials for a Register of Estates, and by the same year he had begun Cursory Notes ofMusicke, and had probably completed Notes of Me as well as the most important of his early essays on natural philosophy, 'Mechanick Notes.'137 Over the next decade or so he completed Cursory Notes ofMusicke, began his Musicall Recollections, rewrote the life of Francis, completed a draft of the life of Dudley, and, in 1711, published another pamphlet, Reflections upon Some Passages in Mr. Le Clerc's Life of Mr. John Locke. He continued in the polemic vein with his refutation of Samuel Clarke's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity, 1713, which is also the date of the preface to his Discourse of Fish and Fishponds. The next year saw the completion ofExamen as well as the publication of The Gentleman Accomptant. About 1720, North finished writing his Musicall Recollections, began the essay 'Physica,' his Theory of Sounds and The Musicall Grammarian (which, although dated 1728, was perhaps in process as late as 1733).I38 At about the same time he began revision of the 'General Preface' and lives of Francis, Dudley, and John. It is probably safe to say that just about all of North's major works of his last period were in a final state by 1728, although, given his habit of constantly returning to a subject, 'final' is perhaps not the appropriate word for anything written by him. What is rather surprising is that in all North's voluminous writings on a wide range of subjects, there is a virtual absence of a concern with religious matters. He was a faithful supporter of the Church of England, it is true, unquestionably High Church and not even vaguely swayed towards Latitudinarianism despite his thorough grounding in natural philosophy. He idolized the saintly Archbishop Sancroft, he spent money rebuilding the church at Rougham, and his defence of the doc-

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trine of the Trinity was spirited enough. Yet nowhere in his writings do we find an expression of a personal, meditative Christian spirituality such as was fairly common in his age, and which his father, for instance, presented in his little book Light in the Way to Paradise and in some of his other occasional verse. This absence might be partly explained by the pre-eminence of law in North's consciousness, as discussed earlier. For even in his choice of faith, North seems to have been guided not by, for instance, a careful examination of the various biblical exegeses offered by the different sects, let alone by personal divine guidance, but by the constitutionality of the Anglican church. Thus, he begins his letter to Samuel Clarke on the question of the Trinity with the declaration 'My faith is of the church of England as establish! by law,'139 which, I suggest, is intended not so much for simple clarification as for a warning shot across the bows of unorthodoxy - Clarke (and the Newtonians) are somehow bringing law itself into question. Given North's horror of factions, which he associated with dissenters and 'enthusiasm,' we should not expect much religious fervour from him, yet we might reasonably expect religion to play a more significant part in Notes of Me than it does. It is possible that a discussion of his personal religion had been left to another part of the autobiography, a part North intended to write, or possibly did write, but which is now lost. On the other hand, the general tone and content of Notes of Me do not suggest much interest in spiritual or eschatological issues, whereas the historical digression, insisting that most religious movements are politically motivated, suggests a disillusioned, even cynical, view of religion. There is a strong ethical concern, certainly, in Notes of Me, but North is very much interested in the doings of this world rather than the next, and his morality usually has a pragmatic justification. If he finds peace and self-acceptance, as he claims he does, it is as a Stoic rather than as a Christian. North's Stoicism is hinted at in a reflective passage in Notes of Me in which he sums up what he had learnt 'by living so high upon the rising ground, in a generall prospect of human action' (222). The result was a disdain for public life, an acknowledgment of the 'rottenness of men' (223), and resignation: T can take wrong with patience' (222). A similar resignation is seen in his attitude to his health (which was more or less to ignore it). If we are to believe North, his philosophy worked. He successfully conquered the habit of 'fretting,' and, he says, T beleev I have brought my self to as much apathy, as to good or ill successes as any have' (206). He is finally able to declare trium-

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INTRODUCTION

phantly: 'No, lett my retreat be secure, death in due time, and I defy the world' (207). Possibly the most surprising section in the whole of Notes of Me, and the clearest indication of North's Stoicism, is his defence of suicide, which suggests that he would like to decide for himself what 'due time' of death should be. North was not unique in holding such views. There were precedents that he was probably aware of: most notably Montaigne, who in Persian Letters had seemed sympathic to suicide; also, Donne's Biathanatos argued that suicide was not always contrary to divine, natural, or civil law; and nearer to North's own time (1695) Charles Gildon defended the suicide of his friend Charles Blount on more or less Stoic and Epicurean principles.'40 Thus, North's apologia for suicide should be seen against a background of growing tolerance of suicide and challenges to religious dogma, although it would still be rather shocking to the average orthodox Christian. North is perhaps best described as a Christian Stoic, with emphasis on the second element rather than the first. Certainly we must modify any view of him as a thoroughgoing orthodox High Church man. It is to be hoped that in the relative peace of his estate in Norfolk, North found the inward calm that his Stoic philosophy directed him to. He died i March 1734, and was interred in Rougham church. Unfortunately, the house North built did not last the century. It is said that his grandson, Fountain, endured such a miserable childhood at the hands of his father, Roger's son and heir, that he ran away to sea. When later he inherited the estate, Fountain ordered the house destroyed.14' The present Rougham Hall, although still sizeable, occupies what was once the estate's laundry, and the only things that now remain of Roger North's works are a dovecote, stables, and the capital and base of a portico pillar converted into a sundial. But there remain, even now, a long avenue of lime trees and many sweet chestnut trees in the park, planted by him. Notes of Me

Critical evaluation of any autobiography is now problematic. Until recently the genre seemed to offer few theoretical difficulties; indeed, it attracted very little critical writing at all. That situation began to change about forty years ago, and autobiography is now an active, and troubled, site of critical inquiry:'42 A recent scholar has summed up the situation thus:

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... autobiography is a battlefield on which competing ideas about literature (and for that matter history) are fought out. It is a highly problematic form (some would say genre) that encourages the asking of questions about fact and fiction, about the relations of reality and the text, about, origins. Is autobiography to be found in referentiality, textuality, or social construction? Is there a self in this text? The subject is radically in question.'43

How then to approach Notes of Me? Probably the best plan is to steer a middle course between two extremes: on the one hand that of the radical deconstruction offered by linguistic and poststructuralist theory, which destabilizes the very notions of author and genre and, in effect, denies the possibility of autobiography, and on the other, that of the traditional positivist approach that sees an autobiography as a coherent and objective history with more or less reliable referentiality to external facts. One specific approach is to treat Notes of Me as micro-history. Such a treatment would fit well with recent trends in historiography that discourage generalizations and large ideas, preferring a sociological approach and the study of individuals. North would suit very well, for instance, the kind of method advocated by Michael Hunter, which examines intellectual life in the seventeenth century mainly via studies of individuals. Hunter summarizes his approach thus: ... accounts of the ideas of the period which emphasize polarizations while neglecting the complexities which mitigated them do not help us to comprehend how intellectual change actually occurred at the time. Indeed, I would argue that only through a full understanding of individual cases which does not preclude alertness to the broader factors underlying them - will we grasp the true nature of the intellectual life of this (or any other) period.'44

No one would deny that Notes of Me presents material for an illuminating account of the intellectual development of an individual during a particularly interesting time in England's history. And almost any generalization we could legitimately make about North (that he was aristocratic, High Church, Tory, anti-Newtonian, Cartesian) will be modified to some extent by a closer reading of his life: an experience that should raise a caveat every time we apply similar terms to other individuals in that period. But that is not the only way to think about the work. Another approach is suggested by the work's title. It was Philippe

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INTRODUCTION

Lejeune who called attention to the importance of the title-page in identifying autobiography as a genre, separate from other contaminating modes; in his view the title became a sign of intention.145 North's own tide for his memoir is Notes of Me, an unusual description that raises questions about the nature of the work as North saw it. Several of his writings at or near the period of the autobiography carry the word 'notes' in their tide - Cursory Notes of Musicke, 'Mechanick Notes,' Cursory Notes of Building - and this could be considered as a defensive gesture, perhaps, warning the reader not to expect too polished or finished a work, especially when 'notes' is used in conjunction with 'cursory.' On the other hand, in the case of Notes of Me, it could be a signal of something essential to North's purpose, a purpose that can be understood from passages in other works by him. In one of the unpublished manuscript versions of the life of Francis, for instance, where North attempts to justify some domestic anecdotes he has just related, he makes this revealing statement: 'these may seem triviall passages, not worth remembering, but being exactly true, are part of the natural history of mankind, which is everyone's interest to know."4(' On another occasion he suggests that one of the purposes of biography is to 'assist the theory of human nature."47 Phrases like 'the natural history of mankind' and 'the theory of human nature' suggest that, at least to some extent, North thought of life-writing as one more element in the investigation of nature. In this view, the record of a human life was, as in any other branch of knowledge, a process whereby one observed the phenomena, and from them deduced principles - in this case, inner truths, as well as practical and ethical rules for living. In such a reading, therefore, the 'notes' in Notes of Me are data of a kind or at least they are the recollections of an alert man, which will form the basis of discoveries concerning principles for living. During the seventeenth century, man was becoming increasingly a site for scientific investigation. The idea of assembling data to form, in North's words, 'a natural history of mankind' is probably Baconian in inspiration, and there was always the example of Descartes and his interest in human cognition. North could also have learned from Hobbes and Locke, both of whom tended to regard man as an object in nature, susceptible to study by methods that could be called scientific. The awareness of this process was to find its clearest expression in Hume, who, in A Treatise of Human Nature-wrote approvingly of 'my Lord Bacon and some late philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing.' Moral philosophy, Hume points out, by

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its very nature, cannot proceed on a basis of premeditated and controlled experiment as in other branches of natural philosophy: We must, therefore, glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men's behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures.148

North, writing roughly forty years earlier than Hume, is clearly in the tradition the philosopher mentions. North's views on the early upbringing of children, for instance,'49 his speculations on the origin of his and his brother's royalism, his assumptions about the psychological roots of Matthew Hale's populism, and the theory of human character that underpins the entire autobiography, all reveal his interest in cause and effect in human behaviour. Notes of Me, therefore, from one point of view, can be thought of as a document in the attempt to form a science of psychology. It is also related to the process that Graham Richards traces in his brilliant study of the origin of psychological concepts in the seventeenth century. Richards claims that the nature of the new ideas in natural philosophy led to a movement from ontological issues to those of epistemology. He goes on to explore what he terms The Invention of Privacy,' which was not only a physical development, but 'a new mode of consciousness' arising during the Renaissance. Montaigne is a prime example, alone in his library, in a tower, as in 'a theatre of self-exploration.' From these private retreats came a series of what Richards terms 'counter-texts' independent of current and expected modes of thought. According to Richards, 'the significance of privacy for Psychology is that its invention was a necessary step on the road to creating the "psychological subject" as an object of enquiry."50 North deliberately sought solitude in Lely's house in Covent Garden to write, and then in the room at Rougham designed for 'my owne absolute retirement."51 These surely were, for him, 'theatres of self-exploration,' and Notes of Me is of interest both in the general shift from ontological to epistemological concerns noted by Richards and in the creation of the 'psychological subject.' This is not to say, of course, that Notes of Me is a dedicated or formal treatise on human nature, but what is particularly unusual, and interesting, about North is that he linked psychological theories to an actual autobiography. In his influential social-historical study, A Social History of Truth, Steven Shapin posits a contingent, culturally determined dynamic of identity:

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INTRODUCTION

My subject is the achievement of identity and the cultural work done by and through .that identity. Identity at once belongs to an individual and to the collectivities of which that individual is a part... a personal identity has to be continually made, and is continually revised and remade, throughout an individual career in contingent social and cultural settings.'52

In the same work he presents a remarkably functionalist account of Robert Boyle and the construction of his identity. Boyle's basic identity was established by his birth as an aristocrat, Shapin believes, but after that he was able to choose various roles to assume, almost as if he were a sort of naked entity, rummaging through a second-hand clothing store for suitable garments to try on: 'a serial typology of existing roles that were available to someone like Boyle in seventeenth-century England: philosopher, Christian, Gentleman' (emphasis in the original).153 Roger North, too, must have been affected in his behaviours and in his concept of himself by identities already established. Like Boyle, he was born an aristocrat, and that brought it with a whole set of expectations and assumptions. North was certainly aware of his position, even at an early age. When he ran up a debt at school, he tells us in Notes of Me, it became 'a burthen so heavy to a litle man of honour, that he declined ever after to be in like circumstances' (90). (Here, the word 'honour' carries both its chivalric sense and its literal designation of rank as the son of a baron - although to be precise, Roger's father had not yet inherited the title.) And throughout Notes of Me and North's other writings there is a sense of his awareness of his privileged position, although it manifests itself in ways different from what we see in Boyle, mainly because the North family was, relatively speaking, poor, which forced Roger to exigencies, with corresponding attitudes of mind, quite foreign to Boyle. It is true, also, that most of the attributes associated with 'gentleman' that, according to Shapin, made a man suitable as a philosopher (free action, virtue, and truth-telling)154 applied to Roger North, whose highminded regard for truth in philosophical enquiry has already been noted. (In his philosophical dialectic, however, North was not always as polite as Boyle might wish, particularly when he suspected his opponent of populism or religious unorthodoxy. He was not particularly careful to observe Hooke's caution: 'parcere nominibus.')155 Similarly, North knew what was expected of him as a High Church Tory, and as a lawyer of standing. Even so, the autobiography itself presents nothing like so typological

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a view of human identity as Shapin posits. North begins it with an account of his parentage, a traditional enough opening, and one which normally in biographies and autobiographies serves to establish who the subject is and what is his position in society. We find, however, that North's main interest in discussing his parentage is to introduce speculations on such basic questions as how a human being learns and how character is formed, and he goes on to give us his ideas in what he calls 'a digression to consider the force, of instinct and habits' (82) (Jessopp omitted the digression). A human being learns, North believes, like Locke, through experience, and the process begins well before birth, as the foetus responds to touch, and experiences ease or otherwise. The accumulated knowledge from experience, before birth and afterwards (for instance, in play as an infant), results in movements and modes of behaviour to which North gives the general name 'habit.' However, we are also affected by traits transmitted from parents - North's 'instinct.' Education (or 'breeding' in North's terminology) becomes of enormous importance in suppressing bad traits and encouraging good ones. North's ideas in the digression can be profitably read in conjunction with a work which seems to date from roughly the same period: his essay 'Of Humane Capacity.'15*' In this essay North considers an element not included in the digression but important in understanding it: the pleasure/pain principle. The motivating force for all learning lies in this principle. The part played by it is clearly expressed in a summary at the conclusion of the essay and is so central to North's epistemology at this time that it is worth quoting in full: To conclude then with an epitome of all, all sensations are pleasant, becaus by them wee know our being. Consequently the more of that knowledge wee have, the more are wee pleased. And it is an advantage that the knowledge be clear, and not confused, therefore doubt is a pain, and learning, or discoverys pleasant; so also regularitys rather then disorder, and all thing[s] which profit, or relate to use, or engage the passions when for our good pleasant, when otherwise the contrary[,] so eas of paine goes for pleasure, and this knowledge condiscends to minuteness, past scrutiny of sence as mixture of lights and sounds. In short, all pleasure ly[e]s in knowledg first, that wee are, sdly that wee are well.

Such a theory - instinct/habit, and pleasure/pain - presents life as something open-ended, determined to some extent by inherited charac-

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INTRODUCTION

teristics, but modifiable through choices based on experience, and at the same time, surely, subject to accident. It does not, of course, preclude the taking-on of existing roles, but it does allow for greater freedom of action, for a greater operation of chance, for greater individual variation, than might be allowed in a strict functionalist concept of rolechoice. Individualistic as North's concept of the formation of human character might be, it did not, of course, preclude a firmly held belief in a universalized system of values. Evidence of this is seen in the strongly didactic element in Notes of Me: North's analysis of himself and others was intended to result in lessons for good living. Didacticism we should expect, for it was thoroughly in accord with the expectations of his day concerning life-writing. It was a commonplace repeated over and over again in the prefaces to seventeenth-century biographies that a life should be an example of what to avoid and what to follow, and a central feature of North's own 'General Preface' is a plea for lives of ordinary people because, suitably 'moralized,' they would be more effective in imparting good lessons than the lives of the great. However, the whole process of instruction in Notes of Me is rendered much more complex than in the usual seventeenth-century exemplary life, or indeed in his own biographies, because of the special dynamics of character-forming that the book suggests, and because the interaction with events as related by North is rather more complicated than one finds in most other contemporary works. If, as the preceding discussion suggests, North's own title for the autobiography signifies its 'scientific' and didactic purposes, it might also be seen to imply its incompleteness, that Notes of Me is a work in progress quite apart from the one obvious sense in which all autobiographies are incomplete. We get a sense, when reading it, that we are taking part not so much in a history as in a process of self-discovery. James Olney, grappling with what he terms the ontology of autobiography, comes to the conclusion that 'we might conceive of autobiographical writing as an endless prelude: a beginning without middle (the realm of fiction) or without end (the realm of history); a purely fragmentary, incomplete literary project."57 Olney no doubt intends that description to apply to all autobiography, including sophisticated modern examples where the author may well attempt a structure of beginning, middle, and end, on the model of other literary types - an attempt that will inevitably be defeated by the nature of autobiography. It applies, however, with special appropriateness to North, not only because of the particular form

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he has chosen for his autobiographical endeavour, but also because of his concept of life-writing. Roger North thought of biography as a form virtually without limits. This is implied in his theory as expressed in the 'General Preface,' and is exemplified by his practice in the biographies of his brothers. He began the life of Francis, for instance, with these words: 'My designe is to leav behind me, all that I can remember, or warrantably collect, concerning the life of the Lord Keeper North.'158 The result was ten manuscript volumes, some containing a chronological account of Francis's life - a biography in the usual sense - and the larger number filled with material concerning Francis or written by him. For North, a man's life was everything known about him or by him. A similar principle seems to be at work in Notes of Me, although, since North's life is still continuing, he does not have a pile of completed works to present as a record of it. Jamie C. Kassler has observed, 'there is a reflective aim in North's writings, an aim that coexists with his more overtly stated aim of constructing a mechanistic system of nature. Because of the reflective aim almost all North's writings, even his systematic treatises, may be regarded as extensions of Notes o/M&'159 Mary Chan makes a similar point when she suggests that North may have found that what was really important to him was what was in his thoughts and arguments rather than in his actions, 'and so, in a sense, Notes of Me was expanded (when he stopped writing it specifically) to include all his writings, contemporary with it and after."60 If this interpretation is correct, then Notes of Me cannot be read separately from the rest of his works, or the rest of the works separately from it. North entitled his memoir Notes of Me; the title-page of this edition, however, has two elements: Notes of Me: The Autobiography of Roger North. The term 'autobiography' was not available to North,161 and it is anachronistic to apply it to a text written in the late seventeenth century. Its use can be justified in that it does signal an actual practice, which is that despite all the theoretical difficulties, modern readers persist in reading certain texts as 'autobiography' more or less separate from other types of writing, and we continue to accept doing so as a valid intellectual experience. Roger North's Notes of Me is an attempted portrayal of an individual in time by himself, and can usefully be considered on those terms, although we must, of course, not forget that it is a construct arising from within a time-specific social context, and that there are certain difficulties involved in interpreting any self-portrayal. North was writing Notes of Meat a time when, all the evidence suggests,

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there was a greatly increased sense of self-awareness, accompanied by changes in how the self was perceived. Perhaps the most dramatic sign of change is the simple fact of the extraordinary increase in the number of biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries during the seventeenth century. In his pioneering survey of English biography, D.A. Stauffer provides a chronological table of important biographies from earliest times to 170O.1('2 For the entire sixteenth century he lists only forty-one works, while the period 1600-50 has sixty-seven, and 1650-90 has sixty. What is true for biography almost certainly applies equally to autobiography. Another shift in the awareness of self is that for the first time in England writers grapple with the concept of autobiography and biography as a genre separate in itself. The terms 'biography' and 'biographer' apparently did not exist before the middle of the century. Citing occurrences in the works of Bishop Gauden and Thomas Fuller, Stauffer concludes that 'shortly after 1660 the word biography and its allies appeared suddenly.'163 The discussion in England of life-writing as a separate kind of literature is generally agreed to have begun with Dryden's essay accompanying his life of Plutarch (1683) > and in the late seventeenth century, the prefaces to lives, while predictable in their repetition of cliches about biography, at least indicate that there was generally an awareness of lifewriting as a separate branch of literature, or at least of history. The clearest evidence of a new interest in the genre, however, comes from Roger North himself. His 'General Preface,' intended to precede the lives of his brothers, is a remarkable document. It is the earliest extended discussion in English focusing on biography, and goes far beyond Dryden's brief, if trenchant, essay.164 (North, by the way, uses the term 'biography' frequently in this essay, together with 'life history' and 'life writing.') The 'General Preface,' probably begun about the first decade of the eighteenth century, was in a final state by about 1722,165 but we can be sure that North was thinking about the subject a long time before that. There is enormous variety in the biographies and autobiographies of this period. Aristocrats, tradesmen, soldiers, churchmen, rogues, statesmen, dissenters, poets, widows - individuals from all these groups either wrote the story of their own life or were the subject of a life by others. So varied are the lives in form, tone, and motive that it is not easy to generalize about them without oversimplification. Even so, it is possible to discern, over the seventeenth century, a shift in how the self is perceived

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and presented. It is a shift from what might be termed the rhetorical to the experimental (paralleling Richards's concept of the shift from the ontological to the epistemological), and it is in keeping with a general trend towards a more accurate empiricism, and improved rules of evidence, that are seen as typical of the century.'66 An example of the earlier rhetorical form is found in George Cavendish's Life of Cardinal Wolsey, written about the middle of the sixteenth century, but not published until 1641. In this account of the dramatic rise and fall of Wolsey, Cavendish draws on the medieval concept of the wheel of fortune, combining the classical goddess Fortuna and the Christian Providence. It is more than a convenient image for Cavendish; it gives his biography both its structure and its meaning. It embodies a law governing the outcome when human nature of a certain kind interacts with a supernatural and absolute order. The end of the life is never in doubt, closure is foreknown. During the seventeenth century, such rigidity tended to give way to a greater interest in the individuality of experience. Some of the Puritan biographies, for instance, while naturally assuming a preordained pattern - the process by which the human soul moves towards salvation according to God's holy plan - nevertheless reveal an interest in how a universal process works itself out in an individual case. The autobiographies of Vavasour Powell, George Trosse, and John Bunyan are impressive for their factual accuracy, expressed in clear, straightforward prose. In works like these, as Michael Mascuch puts it, 'we hear the stirrings of a personal voice and an individual self-identity, structured in written narrative discourse ... a tendency to place the person before piety had begun to emerge."67 It seems odd that in his study of the emergence of the individualist self throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mascuch makes no mention of North - yet in no other autobiographical work of the period is there such a sustained interest in the formation of character, which, obviously, subsumes the creation of identity. North was well acquainted with the biography and autobiography of his time, and before. The 'General Preface' reveals his wide reading not only of English works in this genre, but also of those from the continent, such as Jerome Cardan's De vitapropria (1643), an excellent example of the new clarity and factual accuracy, and Gassendi's intimately detailed Vita Peireskii (1641, translated 1657).l68 These latter works may have served North as models for factual reporting, but nowhere do they go so far as he does in objectivity in Notes of Me.

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The question now arises, how does North present himself, given his own formula for character formation? To begin with, he claims he was given a good start in life by parents who instilled in him qualities of religion, sobriety, wisdom, and good health - qualities that were produced by their training of him when young, and also derived from them 'extraduce' (what we might now term genetic transference). With some reservations, we might say that this is how he appears throughout Notes of Me. A major characteristic of the Roger North presented in the autobiography is a lack of self-confidence, accompanied, usually, by anxiety. He seems to view his life as a series of 'epochs,' each introduced by a crisis. There is the time, for instance, when he arrives in London and realizes that he must make his way in the world: 'a dangerous crisis of life' (94); another comes at the death of Francis. Upon his arrival in London, he has serious doubts about his adequacy, is terrified by the thought of poverty, and becomes acutely depressed: 'Sure I felt in my self defects to caus this despondence ... which diffidence, even to despair satt on me' (160). The fear of not making his way seems central to North, and possibly stems from his parents' warning to their sons in his youth: 'And wee were given to understand early, that there was no other means of living to be expected, then what came out of our industry' (85). In his interesting analysis of Sir Matthew Hale, North sees 'fear, or pusillanimity' as the source of Hale's courting the popular cause (164). It seems clear from other accounts that Hale was nothing like so avidly anti-monarchist as North alleges,169 and it might be that North's animus, and exaggeration, are the result of a sort of transference, brought on by his bitterness at realizing how much he has lost by his loyalty, and how much others have gained by courting the crowd. It is also possible that North is projecting his own fear of the 'populace' onto Hale. Stress and lack of self-confidence are always present in North's account of himself, and the higher he rises (following Francis) in state affairs, the more treacherous are the people and the more slippery the path. After the death of Francis, Roger feels particularly vulnerable. Yet his brother's departure also means a sort of release for Roger, not unlike the freedom a son might feel at the death of his father. During Francis's life, Roger tells us: I lookt upon my self to be in my minority having scarce a caracter in the world of my owne, but supposed to act wholly in my brother's measures; I might bear the censure of my failings, but I had little credit by my regular courses, becaus ascribed to him, and not to me, but after his death, I was

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turned up to shift in the world, as well as I could; and this I make another great crysis of my life, for from henceforeward all my actions were both really, and in appearance my owne. (240)

As it turned out, Roger tells us, 'I found my practise much better then I expected, which continued tollerably well, for divers years' (241). Here we have one of several hints in Notes of Me of North presenting a double view of himself. He is nothing without Francis, yet when Francis does go, he manages well enough. At school, he tells us, he first began 'to be sensible of some tollerable capacity' (88). In the matter of natural philosophy he seems confident in having refuted an important theory of Descartes (140-1), and his ambitions in this subject are lofty enough. When it comes to music, he tells us he 'might have succeeded reasonably well' as a composer (159). All this seems to contradict the picture of the insecure younger brother, the stumbling young lawyer, and the thinker cursed by muddled thinking that he presents elsewhere. Possibly the self-denigration is a sort of false modesty, a way to avoid the stigma of appearing to praise oneself. On the other hand the contradictions could be a sign of a deeper kind of irony which he may have noted, no doubt subconsciously, in Montaigne. In his Essais Montaigne also subverts his own testimony (in a much more complex and subtle way than North, admittedly), deconstructing the very notion of autobiographical truth. Like Montaigne, North constructs himself as the Sceptic/Stoic, undermining notions of human excellence and suggesting the impossibility of final self-knowledge.'7° It remains to be considered to what extent Notes of Me can be thought of as a literary artefact, whether it contains elements of style, structure, and symbolism that shift it from the realm of the simply notational. In an age that saw the development of various new discourses, it is not surprizing that the mode of expression, or style, suitable to these discourses should be an issue. The most famous example is found in Thomas Sprat's A History of the Royal Society (1667) where he describes the strictly utilitarian, object-centred language required of members of the Society in their scientific communications. Another example is John Bunyan, who consciously sought a mode appropriate to his urgent purposes in the relatively new genre of Puritan autobiography: 'I could also have stept into a stile much higher then this in which I have here discoursed ...,' he says at the beginning of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 'and could have adorned all things more then here I have seemed

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to do, but I dare not.' Bunyan therefore sought to be 'plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was.' Similarly, style was an issue for North. In the foreword to a manuscript collection of essays, for instance, written about the same time as Notes of Me, he lists 'courting a style' as one of the motives for writing.171 The clearest indication of Roger North's interest in style, however, appears in his life of John North. In writing the life, he tells us, I chose to proceed in a style of familiar conversation, and as one engaged to answer such questions concerning our doctor as may be obviously demanded ... And as to the style aimed at here, I intend it not polite, and if it be significant it is well, but I can make sure it shall be English and that of the most vulgar usage ...1?2

When a writer so deliberately chooses a particular mode of expression, it must mean that he has definite ideas about the content of the work, its purpose and its intended audience. What these ideas are, as far as North's biographies are concerned, is clear from a reading of his 'General Preface,' which was written to introduce the lives of his three brothers. The first section begins: The history of private lives adapted to the perusal of common men is more beneficial (generally) than the most solemn registers of ages and nations, or the acts and monuments of famed governors, statesmen, prelates, or generals of armies. The gross reason is because the latter contain little if anything comparate or applicable to instruct a private economy, or tending to make a man either wiser or more cautelous [cautious] in his own proper concerns ...173

North is turning his back, then, on the traditional, 'solemn,' and monumental histories of the great, to plead for accounts of ordinary people, written in ordinary language, for ordinary people. His audience, by implication, is much wider than the traditional historian could hope for, and his purpose is a sort of domestic didacticism. The style of Notes of Me is very similar to that of the Life of John North, and obviously his aim of a popular didacticism applies to both works. In the case of Notes of Me, the colloquial style allows him to speak personally to the reader, and seems a particularly happy choice for North's process of presenting a personality, and lessons learned, through recollections. There may be another factor at work, influencing North in his choice

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of a 'vulgar' style. In an interesting article on North's historical work, Examen, Roger Schmidt claims that North's style there was the result of a deliberate rejection of a certain type of Whig history. The kind of histories written by White Kennett and Laurence Eachard (whom North was attempting to refute), Schmidt suggests, 'create a shadowless past' in order to present an understandable, streamlined, drama of events. For North, however, 'a knowledge of character equals historical understanding.' Consequently, 'the unpolished quality of his prose should be viewed as a statement against the rhetorization of historical discourse being carried out in the name of polite learning.'174 The histories of Kennett and Eachard, indisputable proofs of Whig perfidy as far as North was concerned, appeared after the date proposed for the composition of Notes of Me.l7b Even so, by the mid-iGQOs, when North was probably working on Notes of Me, he may well have been dismayed at what must have seemed an alarming increase in Whig hegemony - in natural philosophy, religion, and above all politics, with the Whigs' increasing control over the version of events to be promulgated. A ruling party turns naturally to rhetoric, and rhetoric depends on generalities - particularities tend to be troublesome because specific facts are potentially refutable. The answer, therefore, for North was in details: 'this is what it was really like,' he seems to be saying, in all his life-writing, biographical and autobiographical, 'this is what really happened.' He may also have been influenced in his choice of style by the familiar essay, examples of which he would have known in Montaigne and Bacon, to mention only the two best known. He wrote essays himself,1?f> and indeed several sections of Notes of Me read like essays. The sections on instinct and habit, for instance, or on musical education, on the political underpinnings of religion, or on suicide, could easily be separated from the autobiography and included with North's other essays. That is not to say, however, that these passages are extraneous to the autobiography; each one picks up, or illustrates, themes that are essential to the work's overall effect. Neither do they seriously affect the structural flow of the work, which is loose enough. Every historian and every biographer is faced with the same technical problem: if the narrative follows a year-by-year sequence there will be a fragmentation of theme or subject, but if the material is organized by subject, there is a danger of losing chronological clarity. North considered the question when he came to compose his Examen, for although this work was a commentary

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on another book, White Kennett's History of England, the issue was the same. In the case ofExamen, North decided to avoid a strictly chronological organization: 'I shall follow him not by Years ... but by Subjects, which may assist Unity, and prevent the often taking up and laying down, as may happen in Years.'177 In Notes of Me he solved the problem by employing a method similar to that which would be used later by Boswell in his Life of Johnson: he would give a more or less chronological account of the subject's life, but interrupt the temporal sequence in order to group related material in one place. Within these thematic clusters North might range over a considerable period. An example is the account of his 'practicall diversions.' It is introduced early in the narrative of the autobiography, just after his arriving at the Middle Temple (1669), but it leads him in the same section to refer to an event as late as 1685-8, when Dudley was commissioner of customs. Another example is his appointment as steward to the See of Canterbury, which was in 1680. North introduces it into his narrative at roughly the correct chronological point. It then seemed convenient to insert all of the events related to this position: 'And considering I am not restreined to any order of time in these discourses,' North declares somewhat disingenuously, 'I may now relate what happened with respect to me upon the deprivation of my noble lord and patron' (177). The deprivation was in 1690. The structure North arrived at is appropriate for his purpose because his intention is not to give a straightforward history of the external events in his life so much as to reveal an internal development. In this aim he is successful. The autobiography is a remarkable record of a process by which a young man moves from the ignorance of youth to an understanding of the world, facing his own inadequacies and fears, and finally discovering the means to achieve peace of mind. The autobiography, then, has a double structure. There is the chronological sequence, North's 'thredd of time' (142), and there is the internal movement of a developing sense of self and a progress towards Stoic resoluteness and acceptance. That is not all. Perceptible below the surface of the narrative is one more force within the work lending it form and unity, It is the sense of a dichotomized world, in which two value systems oppose each other, and this opposition operates as a metaphor for North's own dilemma. The model for the conflict is the ancient one of the urban versus the pastoral. We glimpse an idealized pastoral world, for instance, in North's account of his boyhood stay with the country parson. His memory of the experience glows with nostalgia

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for a wholesome, innocent life, garlanded with harvests, happy lads and girls, and charity towards all. The yacht trip, too, is a sort of voyage into a simpler world (paralleling the schoolboys' naked frolic in the river), as are the sojourns at Wroxton, and the dream of music in the country. Each location in the territory of North's idealization - Badminton (as described in the life of Francis), the parson's village, the musical family on its estate, the river - is its own centre. The urban counterpart, on the other hand, is more like a force than a place: it is full of danger from factions, the treachery of politicians, and the potentially ruinous temptations of a large city. The problem is that all young men are forced to go to London if, like North, they need to make their own way. The monetary rewards in the city can be huge, but failure is always nerve-rackingly possible, and even if the adventurers in the city do succeed they may well, like Francis, have to pay a disastrous price - health and peace of mind, for instance. Roger North, fortunately, was not overcome by the city, but he longed always for the happier place, Belmont as an escape from the perils of Venice, an earthly location half way to paradise. He found refuge of a sort in the evenings with Francis playing music and arguing about natural philosophy, then in his solitariness at Lely's house, and he sought it later at Rougham. But it is a fugitive dream, and North found it necessary to fortify himself in various other ways in order to achieve self-sufficiency, and to survive with honour. Notes of Me, ultimately, is about human growth, about the dynamic of human character in its dangerous passage from infancy to full maturity in an environment that can either promote or distort that growth. This concern is revealed most tellingly in North's unconscious use of a certain kind of imagery. Images are scarce in Notes of Me, but those that do occur are likely to be based on breeding and plant cultivation. The proper disciplining of children, for instance, 'breeds an habit of order in them' (80), whereas parental indulgence 'breeds ... a willfullness' (81). For children with a bad propensity, 'there is need of planting and cultivating in them, the opposite habits' (85). Brothers 'bredd together' should not enter the same profession, 'because one will certeinly over top, and like overforeward plants dripp and mortifie the other' (91). The images continue. North considered himself to be 'a plant of a slow grouth, and when mature, but slight wood, and of a flashy fruit' (171). Finally, there is the end of life, when 'by the rotting of the plant the fruit falls' (186). The persistence of such metaphors throughout Notes of Me suggests that North's mind was indeed engaged with the concept of the

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nurturing and cultivation of human character - a central but not always overt element in Notes of Me. The Text Description of the Copy text

The autobiography is somewhat unusual among North's works in that it survives in one manuscript version only.'78 It is in the British Library Add. MS 32,506 - and is the copytext for the present edition. The manuscript is in a nineteenth-century binding of light red mottled paperboard, with dark green leather at the spine and corners. The flyleaf is stamped 32,506 and bears the notation: Turchd. at Sotheby's (Crossley sale) 20 June 1885.' The manuscript is in Roger North's hand, and can be considered a fair copy, although North has made some emendations throughout. At f. giv the word 'hemiplagia' in the text is underlined, and 'read Hemiplegia' appears opposite in the margin; similarly, at f. 92 the word 'cotemporary' is underlined, with a marginal note 'read Contemporary.' Both annotations are in the same (nineteenth-century?) hand, possibly Augustus Jessopp's. Occupying ff. l-iv is a note by James Crossley describing how he acquired the manuscript of Notes of Me. North's index runs ff. 2-2v and the main text occupies ff. 3-193. From the beginning of the text to f. i2v North heads each page 'Notes of Me'; thereafter the heading is reduced to 'Of Me.' The manuscript is made up of paper of two sizes - the leaves comprising ff. 180-93 being slightly smaller than the 20.5 x 15.75 cm of those of the first part. What might be called section I ends at f. I79v; section II, made up of the smaller pages, continues from f. 180 to the end of the manuscript. In addition to the foliation applied by the British Museum staff, the manuscript is paginated throughout. For about 140 pages the numbers are clearly in North's hand, but then they seem to change, becoming neater. The manuscript has also been marked with signatures, apparently in North's hand, to indicate thirteen gatherings: one of eight leaves, two of twelve, and ten of sixteen. The last leaf of section I (f. 179) is marked M, but this letter appears also on the first leaf of section II (f. 180). Bound with the volume at the end (ff. 23i-76v) is a series of letters between two nineteenth-century collectors of North manuscripts, Dawson Turner and James Crossley covering a period from August 1838, to June 1842.

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Dating the Manuscript The dating of Notes of Me is not a straightforward matter. There is plenty of internal evidence to suggest that the manuscript was written before 1697. J. Wilson has pointed out, for instance, the evidence suggesting that it was written before North left London (he purchased Rougham in 1690) and when the 1688 revolution was still a recent event: Typical references by North,' states Wilson, 'are to "this towne of London" (f. 21); "the celebrated [musical] enterteinements that have of late bin set up in this towne" (f. 71) ... Also to "this Revolution" (f. I22v) and (ironically) "this wonderfull Revolution" (f. i84v).' Wilson has also drawn attention to North's mention of the retaining fee paid to him by King's College, Cambridge, and to his remark that 'they continue it to me, tho' the time be expired.' Wilson has established from college records that the last payment was made in 1696.179 A similar piece of evidence is found at f. 131 where North refers to his fee as counsel for Exeter, 'which is still paid.' The staff of the Devon Record Office have kindly searched their archives and inform me that the last payment was for 1696/7.lHn But masters are to be first had, who can reasonably answer for what they undertake, and of those I recomend, the elder, rather then the yonger. Altho the latter may be more aggreable for novelty, and briskness, which is so in most things especially musick. My reason is, that the elder, are better artists in teaching the principles of musick, having more experience, and that is the main designe at first. Elegance of performance, is the finishing, which will be lookt after in time. First get a teacher, who understands, and hath experience in teaching, which is a distinct art, from playing, and few, or scarce any yong men have it. When they teach it is meerly by imitation, and know not the true reason, of the excellencys they have, nor can obviate the devious errors of scollars, nor so well judg of the beauty or deformity of habits, but will lett them run on till past cure. I might add other reasons, such as seducing yong people and betraying them to ruin, which they are too apt to doe, but of that I suppose parents are apt enough to take thought for [.] If not their children, being fortunes especially daughters, are in much danger from such gamesters. But the ancienter men who have familys of their owne, are safe and will be prudent. Their dullness, and perhaps humours, must be borne with, for they trade in air alltogether, which is a light buissness. I spoke of teaching by imitation, as the worst way especially at first, so

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need say no more of that. But I would advise that beginners should be trained as in manufacture trades, first taug[h]t to provide the materiall and then to put it to-gether and lastly to finish it. In musick the materiall is sound, which may be made well, or ill, and that difference in the first formation of it, is of the greatest importance. Good druggs are not more considerable in medecin, then, the producing a good sound, in musick. It is the substance and foundation, which failing all falls, and all this I declare abstracted from graces, or any other accomplishment whatever, and farther that all thought of grace confounds it, so that whoever is to begin and learne to draw a sound, is not to be putt out, with any sort of gracing, but to be kept from it, untill they attain a fittness for it. It is rarely observed, but lett it pass for a truth upon my word, that the greatest elegance, of the finest voices is the prolation of a clear plain sound. And I may add, that in voice or instrument (where the hand draws the sound) it is the most difficult part to performe. But our devious inclinations lead as well masters to teach, as scollars to press the learning of tricks, such as the trill,174 slide,175 etc. All which are good in their time, but the fabrick must be raised, before the carving, such as that is [is] putt on.176 Therefore as to the pratique, I would have a voice or hand taught, first to prolate a long, true, steddy and strong sound, the louder and harsher the better; for that will obtein an habit, of filling, and giving a body to the sound, which els will be faint and weak, as in those who come to sing at maturity of years, when the organs of voice are stiff and intractable. And so for a bow hand, to spend the whole bow, at every stroke, long or short. These lay a good foundation, the roughness and harshness of which will soften in time. The loud may abate, but soft voices cannot be made loud at pleasure. Those must be formed early, as the limbs, to arts, by much striving and continuall exersise, so as to grow, and setle into a forme, to fitt the use and practise of them; then next I would have them learne to fill, and soften a sound, as shades in needlework, insensatim,177 so as to be like also a gust of wind, which begins with a soft air, and fills by degrees to a strength, as makes all bend, and then softens away againe into a temper, and so vanish. And after this to superinduce a gentle and slow wavering,178 not into a trill, upon the swelling the note. Such as trumpetts use, as if the instrument were a litle shaken with the wind of its owne sound, but not so as to vary the tone, which must be religiously held to its place, like a pillar on its base, without the least loss of the accord. This waving of a note, is not to be described, but by example. But as wee often use odd similes to

Plate 5. A page from the manuscript of Notes of Me (f. 76v), showing North's diagrammatic illustration of the trill. By permission of The British Library.

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express our meaning and help the imagination, take these images of sound by lines; which represent the humour of sound judiciously mannaged. [North's diagrammatic illustration of the trill, showing a 'plaine note,' a 'waived note,' and a 'trillo note,' is reproduced on p. 150.] The latter is the trill, which, as you see, breaking the tone, and mixing with another, is dangerous for a scollar to medle with, till he hath the mastery of the sound, els it will make him apt to loos the principall tone; and that spoiles all. The next thing to be taught is the transition of the voice, or hand from one tone to another, or the practise of the gamut. And under this, the first care is to secure the true sound of the note passed into, whither flatt or sharp, viz. semitone, or tone, and with a full prolation of each, and the managery of it, swelling and waiving as I have described. Then next the grace of passing from one to another, which in some sort connects them, tho severall. As if they were links in a chaine, very distinct, yet connected all together. For if there be any paus, between note and note, it is amiss. But with the same breath as one note ends, the next begins. And if you would take a distinct breath to each note, it must not begin with the entrance of the next, but with the expiring of the last, otherwise there will be a stopp more sensible upon the taking breath. This is that is called a slide, and in hand instruments is done with the finger, mixing the neighbour notes a litle in the transition. Even the organ and harpiscord will doe the same thing, as may be observed upon any ones playing, for nature it self almost leads to it. Then lastly, the art of mixing 2 sounds with the same prolation of breath should be learnt which brings the trill, and being rightly used is a great beauty, but otherwise rediculous in musick. And this ought to be strictly observed, that the trill give way to harmony. Therefore, either in sounding an instrument to a voice, or in consort of many parts, or any full and loud musick, the trill is nonsence or wors, bad-sence, and the best Italians decline it. But single parts to a ground, for delicacy, where it can be perceived, the harmony being maintained by the base, it is an excellent grace, when well performed, otherwise better altogether left out, or at least with a faint offer at it, in proper place, where custome, as in cadence, hath made it expected. But for an accompaning part, which is to maintaine the harmony, to trill, and upon the low notes, whereon it most leans, unless it be upon a litle ritornell or solo, is senceless and destructive to the musick. But that is the fault of our English masters who accompaning a voice, will clatter trills at bottome to make one wild. And it is the constant custome of ignorance, to affect supperficiall ornaments, and neglect the substance, which I have noted in other places.179

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But wise masters are to be aware of this and lead their scollars by fitt paths and stepps, whereby they may attaine a just perfection. But it will be sayd this is a tedious process, and will not be persued by them who seek pleasure, and not a trade. I must confess that is true; none will so addict themselves to learne any thing in fitt manner, if left to themselves. But parents have authority, and doe exert it in these cases, to oblidg their children to endure the fatigue of learning many things, which they would altogether decline, if left to themselves. Therefore if there be not either compulsion, or an extraordinary inclination, and perseverance, it is in vaine, for a master to persue teaching. And one supposed, the other must be granted. But there may be mixtures, to enterteine a litle the scholarr, and to make him sensible he advances; as composed songs, and lessons that have an inviting air, and formed to exercise what has bin taught, as well as to delight the learner. And in these there will be a great delight, especially if brought into harmony or consort, which is the greatest perfection and pleasure, musick can afford to performers. And in this a master may shew his discretion, and conduct, for he may engage his scollars in a deep concerne for the buissness in hand if he will, which brings me to[:] The next and last thing I shall observe in teaching, is to lett the scollars early into a sence of harmony. Some have not a nature capable of it, which is soon discerned, and I have knowne them, who could neither understand a perspective draught to represent any thing, nor mixture of sounds to contein any thing more then ajarr, or confusion of noises. These are to be oblegated to other buissness, they are not cutt out for arts. But to returne to harmony, which is that that governes all. A single part must suppose it, and have a relation accordingly or it will not be well. As the draught of a head and shoulders onely, must suppose a whole posture, the action, place, and the position of objects about it, according to perspective els it will not be right and moving in imitation of the life. So sounds must be such as fitt a compleat accord, in case it were layd to it, otherwise it is not aiery, and pleasing. For this reason it is, that no person can performe a single part, either with voice or hand, well; unless he understand the harmony, and force of it. So that the skill of harmony, which wee call composition, is no less necessary to all musicall performance, then understanding, and experience is to the practice of any art whatsover. Therefore I recomend, the precepts of composition, together with the solution or rationale of them to be comunicated to the scollars together with the other stepps in teaching. It may be sayd all this is not to be had, so in vaine to attempt any

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thing. I answer, in giving advice, it must be for the best, perhapps, it cannot be so executed, but so farr as it may, it is usefull. And a bad dinner is better, then fasting. Lett us make the best of what wee have, push at the head, imploy our time and industry in vertuous exercises, and arts; if wee get not perfection, wee shall be very well pleased and, never repent. How litle these methods are persued is rather a subject to lament, then of hope to reforme. Ladys hear a new song, and are impatient to learne it. A master is sent for, and sings it as to a parrot, till at last with infinite difficulty, the tune is gott. But with such infantine imperfect, nay broken abominable, graces in imitation of the good, that one would splitt to hear it. Yet this is fine, and the ladys goe to teaching one and other, especially if a litle naturall lusciousness be coucht in the words; and none thinck that before they learne the practis, they must learne the principle, and be made capable, that done, the song is learnt by note as a book is read, which is an infinite eas and satisfaction. But enough of errors, there are so much in the world, not onely in these circumstantialls or, as they are called, trifles, but in the body and soul of humanity as would make one sick to thinck, and spew to repeat. Now to resume the relation of my owne proceedings, I was initiated by that eminent master of his time Mr Jenkins. He was a person of a much easyer temper, then any of his faculty. He was neither conceited, nor morose, but much a gentleman, and had a very good sort of witt, which served him in his address, and conversation, wherein he did not pleas less then in his compositions. He was welcome to the houses of all lovers, and particularly with us, being resident in the hous, for divers years, and at last parted, and dyed at Sir P[hilip] Woodhous seat in Norfolk.180 He was an innovator in the days of Alphonso, Lupo, Mico, Coperario, Laws, etc. who were musitfons of fame under King Charles I,181 and superinduct a more aiery sort of composition, wherein he had a fluent, and happy fancy. And his way took with the age he lived in, which was a great happyness to him. But he lived so long, that he saw himself outrun, and antiquated. He was a great freind to Stefkins the famous violist,l8ia and held a constant correspondence with him, and would often send him presents of his compositions, whereof I had the honour, to be the bearer. He much admired the books of Sigr. Nicola Matteis,183 which I brought from London and shewed him, and by that declared a candor seldome found in masters, who offhand despise all but themselves. I began in that intervall of time, as past between scool and Cambridg,184 and being at first backward, and avers to the paines of a new jargon, as the elements of musick were to me, and to be learnt

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and applyd I knew not how, nor why, I fell lasy, and it was thought unaptness, which made my father, and his freind Mr Jenkins almost give me over. But my mother, being for pushing me on, took opportunity to lett me know that my father took notice of my neglect of musick, and I should hear of it; this made me buckle a litle closer, till I had gott so farr into the buissness, as enabled me to practice alone; and then I had the cord by the end, and left not to pull till I had-ye comand of my litle instrument the treble viol. After this when I went to Cambridg, being very yong, and also by reason of my caracter, very recluse which two agree not together, I was glad to get what time I could to practice, which farther engaged me; and in process of time, I became as fond of musick, as yong folks are of any thing they take too, and was never so well pleased as when I was playing, or wrighting. This gives me occasion to observe that the wrighting of musick, conduced as much to my learning, as any thing could have done. For I was very sedulous, and industrious at it, and began very early. I designed to write over all Mr Jenkin's compositions, and did execute my porpose upon a great many, but for want of good paper, and good directions in making the caracter black, and regular, my first labours came to litle. From the treble viol I past to the base viol, where I stuck a considerable time. And the cheif remora to my entrance into consort, which I was ambitious of was, the want of the knack of keeping time. I knew the devisions and subdevisions well enough and could measure the short notes, as crotchetts etc. but long notes I could not measure, and began to thinck it impossible for me ever to attain it, for how could I by my mind make the measure of a breif?185 At last making my greif knowne to my brother Francis who was then a master, he shewed me the method of doing it, which I took and was perfect at it imediately. It v?as but this; play crotchets which every one can doe, in even time by an even pass of the hand, as striking on a table or drum, then play with the same bow, but distinguishing the notes, as in the Italians tremolo,186 which is easy too, in such short notes. Lastly play without such tremolous distinction, but make the distinction in the mind, which when one attempts is as easy as the rest, so by counting in the mind even measures, that may be judged so, I found I could governe the time of the longest notes. For it is imppossible to guess the time of slow notes, there must be some measure of them. Alone it is in the mind, but in consort it is done by the other parts; for observing others play gives you a measure for your owne. This notion with a litle practice brought me into the consort, and then I thought I was preferrd enough. Thus from a litle shewing at first, together with

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my owne application, and industry, I attained the use of the treble, and base viol. But I was not to stop here, but having wrote over much musick, and some in the score, I observed a litle of the composition, and offered at a litle of that kind, which Mr Jenkins seeing was so kind to correct it, and shew me the faults; then it was playd, which was no small pride. But afterwards I gatt books, Mr Sympsons Devision Violist, and his Compendium.187 Mr Jenkins lent me Butler, with a comendation of it that it was the best in the kind. I studyed that but not without difficulty, becaus he had a different caracter, as 5e, for die, and 5at for that, and some others.188 I also procured Morley's Introduction.189 Which books together with constant playing, and wrighting, and in London in very edifiing consorts, I became as I thought a master of composition, which was great pleasure; and I essayed some compositions of 3 parts, which I cannot commend[.] Some of 2 I made aiery enough, which my brother the cheif justice, would be content to play. I was not out at song neither, for my father translated, that Italian old song which his daughters had learnt, Una volta finira, etc., time at last will set me free, etc., and gave it me to sett, which I did in 3 parts, imitating somewhat I had heard of Italian; it was in f, fa, ut, 3b, a solemne key,190 and I thought succeded well; my brother gave me the encouragement to ask where I stole severall passages. Here I cannot decline to recommend to all learners, the art of composition, I might call it rather the science, becaus it is for the judgment, to know, tho the execution and invention be an art; it may not seem so essentiall to the playing well, on a single instrument, that one whose designe goes no farther, need trouble himself with it. But I found otherwise, and that in any part I undertook, I was very much assisted by my knowledg of and acquaintance with the air. It gave me courrage as well as skill to fill and swell where the harmony required an emfasis. So also to know how to give the right favour to the notes, whereby some are made a litle sharper, others a litle more flatt, is a matter of skill, and depends on the composition. But nothing is more accomplisht by it then a voice. It gives a judgment to the owner of it, which doth almost reconcile a bad voice to good ear and if an ear be deficient, it makes it tollerable, for such a one, will not be in the least out of tune, nor wanting to give a proper force at every turne. And it certeinly confirmes performance at sight, as understanding is a help to the reading any language, which whatever the carracter be, is difficult if the tongue is unknowne. It takes the burthen from the eye for a litle cast informes the

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understanding that is acquainted with it, and the memory will carry you on many a note, without a look on the paper, as the sence guides in reading. And as it makes the performance easy and true, it also gives an imployment to the judgment, in the apprehension of the conduct of the air, and taking notice, when it is well or otherwise, and noting all extraordinary passages; in short it is necessary to the accomplishment of all sorts of musicall performance, to have a thro and clever notion of the composing part. And from my owne experience I can assure, none will repent the paines bestowed upon it, who resolves to make musick a pleasure either to himself or others. And I thinck this will appear by my giving an account, of the rest of my progress in musick. I used constant and weekly meetings in London,19' which made me ready at hand, and sight playing, and shewed me much variety of compositions. And it was my fortune to be in that company which introduct the Itallian composed enterteinements of musick which they call sonnatas, and in old time more imitated by our masters, in what they called fancys. The court about this time, enterteined onely the theatricall musick and French air in song, but that somewhat softened, and variegated; so also was the instrumentall, more vague, and with a mixture of caprice, or Scottish way, then was used by the French. But the Italian had no sort of relish. But wee found most satisfaction in the Italian, for their measures were just, and quick, set off with wonderfull solemne graves,'92 and full of variety.'93 The old English fancys, were in imitation of an elder Italian sort of sonnata, but fell from the sprightlyness and variety they had even in those times, into a perpetuall grave cours of fuge. And if the fuge quickened into a litle devision, or an air of tripla194 was prickt in, it was extraordinary. For this reason the old English musick hath past for dull enterteinement, and I must agree it is so to impatient hearers; but I ever was pleasd with it, and esteemed the best of them, as Coperario, Alfonso Ferabosco; as agreeable as I desire. And cheifly for the facility and sedateness of the musick; it is not like an hurry of action, as looking on a battell, where the concerne for one side or other makes a pleasure, but like sitting in a pleasant cool air, in a temperate summer evening, when one may thinck, or look or not, and still be pleasd. At length the towne came off the French way, and fell in with the Italian, and now that holds the ear. But still the English singularity will come in, and have a share; it's enough that of all forrein stiles the Italian most prevailes. This lett[s] me in to observe the elegance of the ordinary cours of discords, which with the Italians perpetually occur.195 But that which throly filled me

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with the riches of air, and composition was the constant touching a viol to my brother's voice. He loved the Italian songs and recitativos, to fondness; and would compass sea and land to obtain any thing new. He had his first goust that way from some books Mr Willis lent him, which came from Rome, and were of Bicilli'96 and others. And ever after his acquaintance with them, he delighted in such air. He had no voice, but exquisite skill. I had neither voice, nor skill when he first put me upon singing litle bases to notes he would sound. I took the encouragement, and improved my self onely with him, to a base part and found I had a capacity of a tollerable low voice. Then wee went about getting duos, English, Italian and Latin, with which wee exercised plentifully. And it being necessary to the sound of a voice, whatever it is to have an instrument to accompany, and I being well habituated to the viol, and the fingering, I used to touch the principall notes as well as I could, and by degrees to putt in cords, and at last to full harmony, as the instrument would afford. The continuall use of this, together with a solitary practice, which my brother, allowed me even in company (that I avoided to sitt with, for the wine sake) which he had some times at his hous'97 their talk, (too wise for me), and my viol which did not (being soft) offend them, made an enterteinement to us all, and me a compleat, ready, and dexterous thro base man. And nothing less then being so hackneyd to it could have given me that readyness and fullness of parts, which I acquired, and which is die greatest delight to practise. In so much, that it incouraged me to finger the harpsicord and organ, whereby notwithstanding I am, (from age), incapable of hand, I can yet touch a ready thro base of plaine notes, true[,] full and classick harmony to voices, or consort; and I have added to my pleasures of this kind the use of my owne voice, to almost any instrument, which, not from nature or teaching, is tollerable, but onely from the knowledg of musick it self. And it is not a litle diverting to observe that altho, I have no grace of a voice, and no hand upon an harpsicord, yet from the true sound, and easy transitions from note to note, joyned with a proper and full, tho plaine harmony, I am thought both to sing and play well, by such as are not masters, which confirmes what I sayd that gracing is like lace on a garment, which doth not give a beauty, without an handsome contour of the whole. And such effect is there from the true, tho the plainest musick, which may be wholly spoyled, by offering at graces, which loos the sound, without giving any compensation for it, but is not much mended by the best gracing, becaus the delicacy ly[e]s in the true harmony of sound, which is

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the substance[.] The rest is pretty, but trifling, and of litle weight. To close this, I add onely, that in the buissness of gracing, judgment of harmony still governes. For it is in truth but mixing those elegancys in the performance, which the master might set downe in the composition, but in comon cadencys, and passages, it is left to the performer who is supposed to understand so much. And most of our ordinary graces, are but the interspersing of discords in proper places. The trill, is the sound of 2 notes seconds together, the beat,'98 the same, onely that mixes the lower, as the trill the upper note, as the accessary. For the principall note that bears the weight, must have its cheif emphasis, the other is but accessionall. So the falling upon a 2d, or hanging upon a 7th [,] which is the way of sliding grace, is the same which the rule of discords prescribes.1" And there is no greater grace then breaking the time,200 in the minutes, and still holding it punctually upon the maine, to conserve the grand beat or measure. For this sprinkling of discord or error, is like damask, grotesque, or any unaccountable variegation of colours, that renders a thing agreeable, and yet wee discerne not the distinction of parts, but onely a pretty sparkling, such as the painters observe nature hath, which art cannot altogether imitate. And a plaine sound not thus set off, is like a dull plaine colour, or as a bad copy of a good picture, that wants the spirit and life, which a sparkling touch gives it. Thus a life and warmth in the colouring of a picture, is well resembled to graces in musick, that are not the body but the soul that enlivens it, or as the animall spirits that cannot be seen or felt, but yet make that grand difference between a living and a dead corps. Now to look a litle back, I cannot but wonder at the accidents of life; considring how very desirous, and at what charg some are, and withall of a good capacity, to learne musick, and cannot attain it. And without much formal teaching and that onely of the viol, it is my lot to master the art in such a degree as I have here discovered. I neither esteem my self more capable, industrious, inclined, or ingenious, but on the contrary much less then others. But ascribe it wholly to the accident of family, and company. My quality and relation, gave me respect and admittance, where others could not so well have come; and not onely so but a foreward place in performance, which joyned with a genious and inclination, was my advantage. But before I leav this subject I must apologise for the long discours I have made upon it, which seems as if I valued my self upon what, collated with buisness and profit, is esteemed triviall and mean. As I am discoursing of my owne life, I cannot but dwell long on those things which have had a great share of my time; but

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I never made musick a minion to hinder buissness, it was a diversion, which I ever left for profit. And layd it downe, and resumd it, as time inlargd, or straitned with me. If I had built any vain glory upon it, I should have bin more an author in the way of composition, and have valued my self upon it, and had a name in print, perhaps, at the foot of some foolish song, as others with as litle title have don. I ever declined this vanity, tho perhaps if seriously attempted, I might have succeeded reasonably well. I considered that it is not versifiing makes a poet, and mediocrity is as contemptible in musick; I left that to the professors. Perhaps one in my station might have mett with a reward of flattery for vulgar composition, but my aspiring was above that. I must confess that I was allwais a freind to the publishing of compositions, becaus it ledd to prepare company, (for all are not perfect sights men) to performe, who could not without possession of the copys and practice well doe it. And I hated the humour of ingrossing and secrecy, which most affect. Masters for profit, wherein they are excusable, others, for vanity, to enjoy a sole possession of a jewel in their opinion then which, no vanity is more childish[.] This made me invite the masters to print and allwais encouraged it by subscription and buying, for it is mony make[s] all things move. And farther I attempted to shew them that without the charg of a graver or composing caracters, they might print, by buying copper plates grounded and etching them selves, their musick upon them. And a litle habit would perfect them in the revers wrighting which seemed the hardest part. The copper so prepared, that is polisht, and grounded, might be bought for i.6d. per Ib. and sold againe after it was done with for l.2d. which was but a small charg. And to give a demonstration of this, I bought a plate, etcht a sonata a 2 upon it in score, and intituled it tentamen calcograficum;201 this miscarr[i]ed a litle by the fury of the aqua fortis, that made the caracter to[o] cours, but might have bin prevented by tempring it with water. But this I thought might shew how practicable the thing was. And I gave the plate to Carr,20a but found none to follow the industry of my example. It may be I might have run too much into the sottish resignation that some shew to this slight enterteinement, musik, if my brother, with whome I was used to convers, and very much revered his authority, had not sometimes given me a gentle check for hunting of musick, as he called it. Which made me a litle ashamed of owning too much of it. Whatever may be thought of it, as ordinarily used, wee had a title to a better caracter then fidlers, for wee had the philosophy as well as the practise of it among us, and used to dispute, as of other ingenious sub-

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jects, very earnestly of the reason of harmony. And my brother who rode admirall in all things, thought it worth his time to putt his sentiments in wrighting, which were printed, and titled A Philosoficall Essay of Musick.203 I intend to inlarg a litle upon these matters in some notes upon that treatise, if it be printed againe, so pass 'em by here.2"4 And resume the thread of relation, broke off at the building of the Temple, which was one considerable epocha of my life. [Entrance to Law] About the time of this fire I had bin and was a practiser at the comon law. My first entrance to which I will speak off. I had studyed about 5 years, whilst my brother, was king's councell, sollicitor, and attorney general. And altho I was not a regular student, to proceed in order, and take in all the year books,2"5 but read the more moderne reports, I digested them well by comon place. Which was a good foundation and preparative for me to build upon, what I afterwards learnt in practice. And I must owne to that, more of my skill in the law, then from hard reading. But without a competency of the latter, the other would not have done, no more then bare reading without practice, which pedantiseth a student, but never makes him a clever lawyer. During my time of study, I was not without my excursions, but a short purs, and regard to my brother, kept me from fatall extravagances. I was all that while under great diffidence of my success in the profession and lookt on my fortune to depend on my brother's life, and that if he should dy[e], I were lost. Sure I felt in my self defects to caus this despondence, and I could not work my mind to a better courage, which diffidence, even to despair satt on me, even within my practice, and after I had gat a sume of mony. My brother observing it, to keep up my spirits sold me an anuity of 200 li. for 1600 li., for life, with a claus of repurchas. And when I had mastered about 5000 li. he executed that power, and took in his grant.2"6 I feared nothing so much, as being precarious and servile, for necessity. And to say truth, I had allwais an ambition to honourable freedome. And could scarce brook the many mortifications, by lide contempts my brother, sometimes in jest, and often in earnest would put upon me. He had some what of humour that way, of raising his owne, by depressing other's caracters. But I am satisfied it did me good, and workt off much vanity and self conceipt, I should otherwise have had. But I at length broke out in resentments of it to him, after he had the Seall, and I remember I sayd I had endured patiendy for 10 years. He wondred at

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the expression, which was more passionate then prudent, but ever after he was tender of my countenance. When Lord Cheif Justice Vaughan dyed, my brother was advanct to the Comon Pleas in his place of cheif justice, which was a most happy preferment, and what his heart wished.207 It was no less a preferment to me, for the favorites place, as they terme it in Westminster Hall, was considerable. I was immediately called to the barr, ex gratia, not having standing, altho I had performed such exercises as the hous requires, save a few; my first flight in practice, was the opening a declaration, at nisi prius2"8 in Guildhall, under my brother. Which was a crisis like the loss of a maidenhead, but with blushing and blundering I gat thro and afterwards grew bold and ready at such a formall performance, but it was long ere I adventured to ask a wittness a question. The next engagement was the circuit, which proved very comodious to me becaus I was hardy and painefull, and never was absent from my opportunitys. One Mr Henry Mountague, an acquaintance and companion, as well as a relation of my brother,209 thought to profit by going but my name and relation so much neerer carryed all from him, besides he was idle, and I was dilligent, and never absent from my brother, in his retiredments. And I kept so close to him, that I can safely say, I saw him abed every night without intermission for divers years together. Which enables me to contradict the malitious report a relation raised of him, that he kept a mistress, as the mode of that time was.210 But at length Mr Mountague disisting, I had the sole advantage of the respect usually paid the judges freind. My brother used to say, he supposed none thought him partiall, on any such account[,] his justice was knowne to be above it, but it was a comon civility, and respect, both councell and attorneys use to pay to the judg, by reteining his freind, tho clyents were so weak to thinck more. At London I constantly attended the Kings Bench, where motions were short,2" and matter of practise, which was easy, and very often onely of cours. I endured crowding, and wrighting at the barr for divers years, which is a fatigue unknowne to all that have not bin practisers there, for such is the heat, sweat, and paine of standing, especially with fulsom persons such as Sanders, afterwards lord cheif justice, that I am sure the gallys for a time is not greater paine. Now I have mentioned Saunders, give me leav to add for his honnour what I know of him. 212 He was cordate213 in his practise, and I beleev never in all his life betrayd a clyent to court a judg as most eminent men doe. If he had any fault, it was pla[y]ing tricks to serve them, and rather expose himself, then his

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clients interest. He had no regard to fees but did all the service he could, whither feed double or single. And tho his parts were clear, his witt, quaint, and judgment profound, yet he was debonaire and easy to mean capacitys, and so much a well wilier to his profession, and the youth of it, that in his greatest credit, would entertein the time at the barr before the court sate, with putting cases, and mooting with the students that sate on, and before the cricketts,214 and that with such complaisance to their capacitys, and aim to instruct them, that I admired his humanity, more then his skill, and that was greater worth then the other. He raised himself from a very low estate being a poor boy in the Inns of Chancery who by service to clercks there, was allowed a hole upon an upper stair, where he sat and taught himself to write, and by that means gat hackney imployment and so lived; but passing on in the same way of industry, he went from wrighting to drawing of pleadings. And mixt reading with his work, which at length made him an exquisite pleader, and that was his intromission to the King's Bench practice, untill he was one of the prime. He was borne but not bred a gentleman, for his mind had an extraordinary candor, but his low and precarious beginnings ledd him into a sordid way of living; for he fell into the conversation of a tradesman's wife, which was great scandall upon him. And it was beleevd he had children by her[.] But notwithstanding all he might be innocent, and she onely his nurs. For either by constitution, or using a sedentary life, drinking much ale, without exercise, he was extreamly corpolent, and diseased. He would say, that he was sure of issue of his body for he had 9 in his back. It's certein he lived in that family, maintained them out of his plenty, and all in peace and freindship with husband as well as wife, so that if homes were in the case, they were well guilded. He addicted himself to litle ingenuitys, as playing on the virginalls, planting, and knick-knacks in his chamber. He took an hous at Parson's Green, where he bestowd much on the gardens, and fruits. He would stamp the name of every plant in lead, and make it fast to the stem. And in short he had as active a soul, in as unactive a body as ever mett. He would cover his infirmitys with jesting, and never expostulate with those he offended in anger, but allwais droll. And how touchy soever wee were that stood in the very great stench of his carcass at the barr, wee could not be heartily angry becaus he would so ply the jests and droll upon us and himself, that reconciled us to patience. His first imployment from the court was the drawing pleadings upon quo warrantos against corporations,215 which was his originall study and practise. This he performed with so much zeal (for he was ever very

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earnest for his client) and slight of reward, that King Charles 2 was much pleased with him, and often sent him good round fees out of his owne cabinett, and those he accepted with so much modest gratitude in the manner as oblidgd as much as was possible, at length upon .2l6 he was made cheif justice of the King's Bench. But the preferment was an honour fatall to him, for from great labour, sweat, toil, and vulgar diet, he came to eas, plenty, and of the best, which he could not forbear, being luxurious in eating and drinking. So in a short time for want of his ordinary exercises, and evacuations, he fell into a sort of apoplexy, which ceast with an hemiplagia, and in a short time after he dyed. But he acted as cheif justice during that weakness on one side. And it was pitty to see a mind conscious of its owne strength, labour under the load of a diseas, and strive with an unapt instrument, a broken body, to act its part, with but sorry success compard with former passages of his life. Quantum mutatus ab illo? 2 ' 7 Thus much I thought fitt to say of him, becaus being of no knowne family or kindred, there is now already no more mention of him, then if he had livd in the day of Fortescue.2'8 And he was a person of an extraordinary caracter, and in the maine worthy of his honour. His vices at worst, were but sensuall; his soul or better part were candid and free from malice, ambition, and backbiting inclinations; he supplanted none, and carryed no offence about him but what he could not shake off. He did good to all where he might, and himself cheifly, as he thought; he hated faction and turbulent persons, and sincerely wrought to enervate their practisesf.] He was rather a Baccus, then a Momus,2'9 peace and the butt were his delight, and so wee leav him, subjoyning onely this apothegme of Jeffres who was his cotemporary and fellow practiser.220 At the great tryall touching spirits perfectly made, whither brandy were excisable as such or not[,] specimens of the severall sorts of spirits were brought, some by the comissioners of the excise, and others by the distillers. When the act was made spirits were not potable without drawing them over221 a 2d time, which they called dulcifiing. And these they sayd were perfectly made. But spirits at one operation, were fiery, and would not last, therefore such had a lower excise. And brandy of late came to be made all at one distilling fitt for use, and so were of the latter sort.222 The specimens were handed about, and the judges tasted, the jury tasted, and Sanders seeing the violls223 moving took one, and sett it to his mouth, and drank it all off. The court observing a paus, and some merriment at the barr, about Mr Sanders called to Jeffress, to goe on with his evidence. My lord, sayd he, wee are at a full stopp, I can goe no farther. What's the

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matter said the cheif? Jefres replyd[,] Mr Sanders hath drunk up all our evidence. Which jest made no litle diversion at that time. I had an advantage of improving myself at the King's Bench, for Hales was cheif justice there, when I attended the court as a student, and after when I practist.224 He was a very able lawyer, and in indifferent cases, an exquisite judg. But as all mortalls have their infirmitys he had great ones, which centerd in popularity. Whither the source of his biais that way was fear, or affection I cannot determine, but am inclind to thinck it was fear, or pusillanimity. This censure of him is different from the comon opinion, for he was lookt upon as an extraordinary stout man, in resisting the monarchy. But he was so wise to know the monarchy could hurt him no farther, then by taking away his preferments, and his philosophy was such to resolve him that more or less mony was not the measure of happyness, but sufficient with security, and that he could not want, if confined to his chamber practise. But the people are violent, and know no moderation in mischeif when they undertake it. He beleevd the monarchy was declining and that the people would pluck it up by the roots. And that no man could be safe that was considerable in the interests of it. And perhaps was of a plebeian spirit, and inclined rather to advance a sour popular governement, then an illustrious monarchy, which comonly was vicious and disorderly in morralls, and protected such from the cours of law and justice. Its most certein he was so prejudict that way, that the very aspect of a person corrupted him. A greasy capp, had allwais the better of a modish perruque, and he could scarce beleev the latter honest and the other a knave; and a precise pretension to religion frequently caught him, as I shall shew, in a relation I am about to give of the caus between Cutts and Pikering.225 It is sayd, that one doubdting that he had a prejudice to his caus, becaus he belongd to the court, the day before his tryall, gat one to goe from the king to speak for his adversary, and so gained his point. I make this distinction between Sanders and him. The former was of a clear and good natured spirit, and encouragd easyness[,] pleasure and debonairtee, but Hales was sour, magisteriall, precise, and advers to all the delights that youth is apt to persue. Then all the vices of Saunders were in the way of sensuall luxury as eating, drinking, and as most thought leachery. But Hales profest the contrary of that, hated a feast, affected to eat upon a stool, and never came to an excess of either eating or drinking. The one had no vice in his mind, but all of his sence and appetite, the other had (as seemed) a very sour disposition, and no indulgence in his mind, but otherwise extraordinarily vertuous. Hales

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had his inclination to weomen, but gave no scandal! by it, unless by his 2d match which was with his servant maid, but that was no breach of vertue or morality, and evil oriely, from the arbitrary injunctions of custome, and vulgar expectation.22'1 That which I liked worst in Hales, was an insuperable pride, and vanity. This in great measure proceeded from the retiredness of his life. For every man is partiall to himself, and if he dwells too much upon that subject, shall create impressions, and babbits of valuing himself, that shall expose him to great censure abroad. His abilitys were extraordinary, being of an indefatigable industry, ready apprehension, and wonderfull memory; and having bent all his force to the study of the law, English history, and records, was arrived to the highest degree of learning that any age hath knowne in that profession. And towards his latter time, when he had spent all his materiall of study in the way he protest and had nothing but incident practice, and when advanct to the bench, causes depending to imploy his thoughts[,] his readyness was such, that this did not fill his time, which in his retired way of living was plentifull to him[.] This made him deviate to other studys, for the activity of his mind would not let him be at eas without being supplyd with subjects to work upon. And hence sprang another misfortune to his reputation. If he had held himself to the law, and not discovered his popular disposition, he had bin cheif in fame and honour as he was in station of preferment. But warping to plebeianisme, and valuing himself in other learning in which he was not adept, stained the purity of his fame. The first of these I have toucht. I will give the most genuine account I can of the other. This good man, by a long transcendence in practice, and judgment upon the bench, had found a true scale of his owne capacity, and the defects of those that negotiated with or under him. And must needs observe the advanct degree of his owne above theirs. For I am of opinion, that if a man can judg truely of any thing it is of himself. And wee are not to wonder, if under this cours, he contracted an opinion of himself accordingly, and that by time, grew up into an habit, and under age, (when the mind, as well as the body is less plyant and flexible to object occasions) extended itself not onely in the law, where there was reason, but all other matters he undertook, where the like reason was absent. As from this maxime premised, my understanding is above other's, it easily follows, by way of inference or conclusion that it is so in any particular matter, to which self flattery (naturall to mankind) will apply it. If the principle be denyd, the law proves it. If in

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that, then in all; this is a fals reasoning, but such as willing humane nature will easily swallow. I grant this infirmity may receiv a check, from the opposition of more learned men; for contradiction, and opposition onely regulates men's understandings; and makes them hunt for objections, put themselves in the places of opponents, and so at length determine, and in such manner as may be defended if opposition should come. But without such regard to opposition, we are captivated with the seeming justness of our thoughts, and prosecute consequences upon them into a miz-mase227 of error. There is another use of opposition, or rather the history of any subject a man bends his thoughts too, which is had from books but better by conversation with the prime professors. And this is the driving a man out of beaten trite paths, and preventing his arrogating to himself inventions, which he was not author of, but have bin common before. Nothing is more redicolous then for an author to send forth a bundle of discoverys, with the ostentation which usually attends the publication of new inventions, when the whole matter was vulgar before. And this is usually the failing of illiterate men, who without much aid of books, or conversation, undertake sciences, upon the force of their naturall abilitys. And those may be very good, but uncultivated, are little to be esteemed, and stalking abroad without the breeding of books and men, are but fantosmes to be laught at. The person I am discoursing of wanted this sort of check, to regulate his active mind. The company which came to him, were either his inferiours, or flatterers; inferiors were of cours so. And one gentleman in particular I well knew yong, applyd himself to him in such a manner as would have tryed the spirit of the most stout champion against flattery. It was Mr Thomas Read a twin-brother of Sir Charles Read of Suffolk.228 He was designed for the law, and obteined to be brought to Chief Justice Hales. Where he protest to adore him, and begd he might have leav to write, when he was in his company. This the old man gave way too, for it is a paines to resist the propensitys of nature and many will surrender to indecences rather then doe it. He incouraged, and gratified the yong man in his way, but he dyed immaturely, so the fruit of this advantage never appeard, but this shews how exposed the good man was to flattery. Then he was used to dictate upon the bench, and most men defered to him there, and in his chamber as to an oracle, especially lawyers and attorneys, and students, whose behaviour was all adoration. And in all state and popular matters, his opinion had the common voice as from a tripos.

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Those who came to him on account of conversation, or consultations relating to the publik, which were either clergy men, or the factious drivers against the governement, all agreed in one harmonious voice to perswade him he was the most learned man in the world. And I have knowne him caught into a good opinion of the worst of men by meer flattery. None ever gained so much upon him as Jeffress, and had his ear so much as he had in Guildhall at nisi prius, altho he was the most rude, indecent, and impetuous practiser, that ever was; and all by litle accomodations administred to him in his owne hous, after his owne humour; as a small dinner, it may be a partridg or two upon a plate, and a pipe after, and in the mean time diverting him with satiricall tales and reflections upon those who bore a name and figure about towne. And he hated a truely learned man, that did not subscribe to or concurr with him, in his tendency to popular authority. A monarchist he hated as a villaine, and parricide. I remember a remarkable tryall upon Sir John Cutts' will. An estate was given to Mrs Dofrothy] Weld, then married to Pickering for, 80 years if she lived so long. It was thought Pickering rased out that limitation to get the estate to himself absolutely for 80 years. It's certein there was such rasure. And an eminent councel, but a monarchist found it out, and by his skill, and speedy directions about collecting the evidence, made it very clear, the rasure was since the death. aa9 An issue was directed out of Chancery to try that matter, and it came to the King's Bench-barr before him to be tryed. I never saw ajudg so prejudict against an allegation as he was. Pickering was a formall2'*1 man, and used to pretend piety, and write sermons at the Rolls,*-111 in his halt, as not to be seen. The discoverer, main councell, cheif witness, and cheif of the jury were of the church and crowne party. And he did beleev that the godly man was innocent, and these men sought to impose a fals charg upon him. So the tryall went on wonderfull hard upon them, 'till by a foolish slipp of a wittness for Pickering the matter was cleard. Then he knockt his staff and said; well, gentlemen of the jury, you hear the case, find as you thinck upon the evidence; which I will not repeat. And in this manner delivered up a caus, he had bin supporting thro the whole tryall, knowing ther was no need of his harrangue to the jury on that side. I mention this onely as an instance of his frailty in the way of prejudice and flattery, but there were many others which some know, to their cost. He being thus beseiged with a great opinion of his understanding, thought it worth his while, to correct the common opinions that went abroad, tho in trifling matters such as naturall philosophy. And the first

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peice he put out, was a small essay, to prove the non gravitation of fluids upon immerst bodys. Which was against manifest truth.232 The next he called Deficiles Nugae, and it was to oppose the then cleared solution of the Torricellian experiment, or baroscope, by the spring of the air, made or bent by the weight of it, and to give his owne solution, or that which of all the severall opinions he liked best.233 It is strang to observe, with what exact method, and expression, and with how much spirit those two peices were wrote to maintain childish errors, and prejudices. For first fluids weygh, but the force is disperst on all parts of the body immerst, which makes it not perceived as a solid weight incumbent on one part onely. andly the mercury in the baroscope is by the air pump demonstrated to be crouded and up held by the air without pressing on the stagnum.234 But he thought otherwise, and as many lines as he wrought, so many errors appear. But in his Difficiles Nugae, he had very ill luck, for of all the accounts that had bin given to solve that experiment, he patronised the worst, which is that of Linus. Who supposeth a cord extracted from the quicksilver by the weight descending to a certein degree, which tyed it up to the topp. Now this is not onely the sillyest of all, but a meer banter of Mr Hobbs. For he publisht that notion under the name of Linus, as lawyer's latine for a line, which afterwards he called funiculus or cord, not as his opinion, but to shew what silly things might be imposed upon the world in the way of naturall philosophy.235 He was a great, and as I verily beleev a true professor of piety; and according to the precise23'1 way, he sequestred Sunday to pious meditation and wrighting. And there is a volume or two publisht of his meditations, which are very good in their kind, for a man of witt and style, as he was, well inclined, and in earnest, cannot but performe considerable things in the devotionary way, which requires perfection of fancy and words, as well as sound reason, but the former cheifly, becaus the subject is above reason. He added to many of them verses and pious himnes, which had better bin left out, for he had not a poetique style, which is artificiall, and to be made by practice upon the models of antiquity, with a naturall propensity attending. All which were wanting to him, so that his verses were but as prose, with sillables told out, and without feet to run smooth upon.237 His onely finisht work, was that called the Origination of Mankind.238 In that he seemd to collect all humane learning into one heap, and digest it. But the matter is very short of the designe, for he spinns fine, and dwells upon subjects that had bin worne thredbare by the learned

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before, and reduct by dispute to agreed notions, that ly[e] in few words. But he spreads all againe out into larg refinements, as for instance, the notion of infinity, which is reduct to this, that it is onely ignorance of limitts, or as Mr D[es]Cartes expresseth it, indefinite.*39 But Hales hath so many nice cases put upon it, as adding, subtracting, multiplying, and deviding of infinites, that one is tyred, and would not be bound to goe thro, but as a lawyer studdys a case for his fee, when an important tryall is to follow.*4" And the rest is of the same kind, so that altho the work be pompous, well-digested, and pend, yet for the exility1141 of the matter, few have bought, and much fewer read it.*4* This good man had much the same exit as the other, whome I collated with him; for after a great sickness, he was extreamly changed, from a mild, patient, and for the most part very indifferent judg, to a touchy, passionate, and prejudict one; which was to be ascribed to his diseas, and the weakness of his body, and not to himself, who in all his life, which ended (in truth) at this sickness, had, and well deserved a better caracter. He was a knowne contemner of mony and I beleev, out of a right understanding and principle, for he could not but know, mony is the snare of life. He was sure of enough, and courting great acquests would expose him to danger and infamy. Both which he declined, and with all the passion that stirrd in him. He had a timorousness, which is naturall, and incident to some, as forme and colour is, and therefore is not imputable as vice; but on the contrary excuseth many failings derived from it. This made him take the rabbles part against the crowne, and he beleeved the violence and impetuosity of the latter*4^ would prevaile. A beast that hath bin tamed, may be reconciled by courtship, but a wild one, will not so yeild, but beat all downe before it. The Hous of Comons he knew would be obeyed right or wrong, and the crowne must truckle to it, for sake of the purs, therefore that side was safest. And further, glory lay among the people also, which ledd him farther into that engagement. It is an hard case upon poor weak mortall understanding, to be attaqt by fear and pride continually. There is no need of covetousness to assist. He had studyed to avoid that. But at length it gained ground upon him, and in his old age he was sharper upon profits and readyer to accept presents then in his youth, and midle-age. And that chang is to be ascribed to his remitting the reines of reason, for his eas, and so letting inclination or rather, the product of his naturall infirmity, fear, get ground upon him. But in the main he was a most excellent person and in the way of English justice an incomparable magistrate. In so much as I have heard the greatest of his

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observers say, that in the Exchequer, where he was cheif baron for divers years,a44 his learning and knowledg of the records and proceedings of that court, oblidged him, tho against his byais and inclination to doe the crowne, as he did, more right in point of prerogative, than the most willing and obsequious judges that ever sat there, becaus they, out of ignorance, dare not doe what was right, and justifiable by the laws of that court. And he never would judg against the crowne against his knowledg, and president was much for the advantage of the prerogative. It is a strang infelicity to the world, that men should value their judgment in things less knowne, then where they are truely criticall. The reason is in the latter, they see their danger of erring, but in the other where they see litle, they thinck they know all. This good man's wrightings relating to the law were all admirable in their kind, wittness the litle table to the crowne law, which to one read, is a memoriall he need not goe from in his whole life. For it comprehends all that is to be found in all the printed books and more, of his owne besides.*4'' Then he hath some small tracts about the poor, registers[,] sherriffs accounts, and some arguments which goe about in manuscript, all exceeding good[.]24fl But what is beyond all, is his discours of the crowne law at larg, and his comon places, and other tracts, which in the abundance of his diffidence he would not trust the world with but packt them up in Lincolnes Inn library, with an injunction not to be made publik in 15 years.*47 He publish! an abridgment or comon place of Rolls, with a preface too it. Which preface is most worth reading, becaus it gives an history of the changes of the law.*48 And that is a subject that startles all men that thinck. For say they, does the law chang? Then it is arbitrary; but the world is variable and laws have not their patent of exemption. They belong to men, and their ways, which allwais are innovating, and fashion will take place with the one as well as with the other. So I leav the discours of this great man, wishing I may be so happy to live to see such another, with all his faults. It now occurs to me, that he was a great admirer of Pomponius Atticus, and aimed to be like him. That is esteemed of all partys, bountyfull to all, and engaged upon hazard with none, but to lead a philosophicall life, quiet in the most turbulent of times. He wrote and publisht a treatise, being observations of his life. Wherein he hath translated the short account of Cor [nelius] Nepos. But failes in the criticall sence of classick Latin, he was better at construing old records then the Roman authors. For elatus in lecticula, which is, carried out upon a bier, he renders lifted up in his bed. Et sic globus iste consensionis dissentione unius hominis

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disjectus est, which is, and so this confederate knott, by the dissent of one person, was dissolved. But he renders it, and thus this ball of contention, by the dissent, of on[e] man was lett fall.249 Gilbert B[urnet] hath pretended to write his life[,] but wanted both information, and understanding for such an undertaking. Nay that which he intended cheifly, to touch the people with a panegerick, he was not fitt for, becaus he knew not the vertues he had, fitt to be praised.250 And I should recommend to him the lives of Jack Cade, Watt Tyler, or Cromewell, as carracters fitter for his learning and pen to work upon, then him. 25 ' During my practise under Hales at the King's Bench, I was raw, and not att all quaint and foreward, as some are, so that I did but learne, experience, and discover my owne defects which were very great. I was a plant of a slow grouth, and when mature, but slight wood, and of a flashy fruit. But my profession oblidged me to goe on, which I resolved to doe against all my private discouragements, and whatever absurditys and errors I comitted in publik I would not desist but forget them as fast as I could, and take more care another time. My comfort was, if some, all did not see my failings. And those upon whome I depended the attorneys and suitors, might thinck the pert and confident forewardness I putt on, might produce somewhat of use to them. And I durst not under-take a solemne argument in the King's Bench, which is the way for yong men to get credit, becaus they have time to study and compose it, and if they have matter in them, on such occasion they may shew it. I went often to the Chancery,252 where in small motions, I past well enough, but I could scarce master, to open a long bill, or answer, to my content. And I took litle comfort, besides the fees, in all my buissness of this kind. I went often to the Exchequer too,2™ and in all places, I had great countenance and was readily, and well heard, and not onely so but with extraordinary respect and civility. For my brother was all that while a rising man, and in growing credit, not onely in Westminster Hall,254 and the court, but all over the nation, where he was exceeding popular, with the best of the people. This gave me great advantage of practice in all courts, for my quality was one thing made me respected, and I was sober, and seemed dilligent and wholly resigned to practise, and the buissness of my proffession, being indefatigable, and running up and down in every corner, where profit called, affable and easy to all, rather impertinent by overmuch talk, then otherwise, which in youth is dispenct with, as an excess which time and experience will reduce in to the compass of discretion, and substance. But as I sayd my cheif appuy255 was my brother's caracter, fame, and interest. Which made me the most

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generall favourite that ever dealt in Westminster Hall. All this while I had not the advantage of some, becaus the Court of Common Pleas was not accessible but to the Serjeants.25'' And I had a place onely at nisi prius, and in the circuits, on account of favour; but the judges meeting in the Treasury, before the court, sate[,] where they used to hear attorneys or clients upon ordinary matters of practise, I sometimes came and made a small motion for my fee, which I am perswaded, was not above twice or thrice in a terme. But the Serjeants, who are an order of persons full of avarice, and deal in small profits, all which depend on their monopoly of the Common Pleas barr, took offence at these small essays of mine in the Treasury, where other barristers as well as my self often came, and one day agreed together not to move, as children, who for want of their wills, will not eat. It was a strang scene, when the court was sate, the cheif, as the use is, spoke to a Serjeant, move brother. A reverend bow, he moved nothing, so 7 or 8 more, and tho some attornys stept forewards, and called on them to move the buissnes, reteined and instructed for, not a word could the whole barr afford. The judges thought the whole order bewitcht, and rose, not imagining the caus. But coming out of the court, some told the judges, that it was a discontent becaus they heard motions in the Treasury. My brother said if he had knowne it in court, they would have heard attorneys, partys, or any councell who had offered themselves, and resolved so to doe the next day, which had dissolved the priveledg of the Serjeants. This exploit of the coif was knowne abroad, and began to be laught at universally, and at dinner they understood the judges thought themselves affronted, and had resolved to lett in the barristers upon them the next day. The serjeants were sensible of their folly in the afternoon, and went in a body to my brother, to owne their error and beg pardon. But he would not receiv their recantation and humiliation there, for the affront was not to him alone but to the court, and lett them there set themselves right if they could. A publick affront must have a publik satisfaction. So when the court was sate, and a great crowd of laughers gatt together, one of them begins the recantation, owning the fault, and begging the court's pardon, and then my brother took up the matter, and made a short discours in the way of sharp reprehension of them, for carrying themselves so, having had the civility of the court shewd to them as they had, which done, he sayd to the senior, (whose head with the rest was hung downe,) move brother, then he raisd it up a litle, and began his motion in a crying tone, which made a sort of a generall laugh or smile. And so ended the adventure called among the attorneys the Dumb Day.

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This being an odd passage happining in Westminster Hall, putts me in mind of another but of a different nature, which fell out when I was a student. It was when Bridgman sat in the Chancery, and Hales in the King's Bench.257 I sate (by priveledg) next Livesay the secondary in the king's reporting.258 And on a suddaine, a strang nois was made in the hall (which was very full). I start up upon the table, and saw the folk devide, as if the whole croud had bin splitt, in strang hast to either side of the hall, leaving the midle void, and then scouring up the stairs, as if the whole roof were seen to be manifestly falling. This hubbub, not in the least understood where wee were, ceast a while, and the folk were gathered promiscously againe, and in an instant left again to either side. I never saw an odder object in my life. Upon the appeasing of this second disorder, it began to be knowne what was the caus. And it appeared to be onely a steer incenst by the blood of the slaughter hous broke loos in King's Street, and being neer, or just within the pallace gate, chast by butchers, the rab[b]le in the yard took fright, and running towards the hall, and frighted them in good earnest; this verifies an old observation, that a multitude is sooner frighted then a single person, for they fright one and other, and when some discover fear, others, ignorant of the caus, fancy it more then it is, and run still propagating the fear, which is ever greatest, when none knows why. And the judges, who are generally old and timorous, were under as badd fears as any, and testified it by the pallor of their countenances, tho they were not so nimble to take their heels. Yet it was said some Serjeants were so active to curvett over the barr in to the court, which after all, was more honourable, then to be made to curvett over the barr out of it.259 During the latter time of my being a student, and the beginning of my practise I apply'd my self to court keeping.2'"' This imploy was recomended to me as a very proper introduction to buissness. For the gaines tho small, gave a tast of the fruits of diligence. He2