Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/657

Rh S E L S E L 631 hall in Wiltshire, and had a large and important share in drawing up and carrying the Petition of Right. In the session of 1629 he was one of the members mainly respon- sible for the tumultuous passage in the House of Commons of the resolution against the illegal levy of tonnage and poundage, and, along with Eliot, Holies, Long, Valentine, Strode, and the rest, he was sent once more to the Tower. There he remained for eight months, deprived for a part of the time of the use of books and writing materials. He was then removed, under less rigorous conditions, to the Marshalsea, until not long afterwards owing to the good offices of Archbishop Laud he was liberated. Some years before he had been appointed steward to the earl of Kent, to whose seat, Wrest in Bedfordshire, he now retired. In 1623 at the suggestion of Sir Robert Cotton he had compiled, -with the assistance of two learned coadjutors, Patrick Young and Richard James, a catalogue of the Arundel marbles. He employed his leisure at Wrest in writing De Successionibus in Bona Defuncti secundum Leges Ebrxorum and De Successione in Pontificatum Ebrxorum, published in 1631. About this period he seems to have inclined towards the court rather than the popular party, and even to have secured the personal favour of the king. To him in 1635 he dedicated his Mare Clausum, and under the royal patronage it was put forth as a kind of state paper. It had been written sixteen or seventeen years before ; but James I. had prohibited its publication for political reasons ; hence it appeared a quarter of a century after Grotius's Mare Liberum, to which it was intended to be a rejoinder, and the pretensions advanced in which on behalf of the Dutch fishermen to poach in the waters off the British coasts it was its purpose to explode. The fact that Selden was not retained in the great case of ship money in 1637 by John Hampden, the cousin of his former client, may be accepted as additional evidence that his zeal in the popular cause was not so warm and unsuspected as it had once been. During the progress of this moment- ous constitutional conflict, indeed, he seems to have been absorbed in his Oriental researches, publishing De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebrxorum in 1640. He was not elected to the Short Parliament of 1640; but to the Long Parliament, summoned in the autumn, he was returned without opposition for the uni- versity of Oxford. Immediately after the opening of the session he was nominated a member of the committee of twenty-four appointed to draw up a remonstrance on the state of the nation. He was also a member of the com- mittees entrusted with the preliminary arrangements for the impeachment of Strafford. But he was not one of the managers at the trial, and he voted against the Bill for his attainder. He was, moreover, a member of the com- mittees nominated to search for precedents and frame the articles of impeachment against Archbishop Laud, although it does not appear that he was implicated in the later stages of the prosecution against him. He opposed the resolution against Episcopacy which led to the exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords, and printed an answer to the arguments used by Sir Harbottle Grimston on that occasion. He joined in the protestation of the Commons for the maintenance of the Protestant religion according to the doctrines of the Church of England, the authority of the crown, and the liberty of the subject. He was equally opposed to the court on the question of the commissions of lieutenancy of array and to the parlia- ment on the question of the militia ordinance. In 1643, however, he became a member and participated in the dis- cussions of the assembly of divines at Westminster, and was appointed shortly afterwards keeper of the rolls and records in the Tower. In 1645 he was named one of the parliamentary commissioners of the admiralty, and was elected master of Trinity Hall in Cambridge, an office he declined to accept. In 1646 he subscribed the Solemn League and Covenant, and in 1647 was voted 5000 by the parliament as compensation for his sufferings in the evil days of the monarchy. He had not, however, relaxed his literary exertions during these years. He published in 1642 Privileges of the Baronage of England when they sit in Parliament and Discourse concerning the Rights and Privileges of the Subject', in 1644 Dissertatio de Anno Civili et Calendario Reipublicae, Judaicse ; in 1646 his treatise on marriage and divorce among the Jews entitled Uxor Ebraica; and in 1647 the earliest printed edition of the old and curious English law-book Fleta. What course he adopted with regard to the trial and execution of the king is unknown ; but it is said that he refused to answer the Eikon Basilike, although Cromwell was anxious he should do so, the task which he declined being after- wards performed by Milton in his Iconoclastes. In 1650 Selden passed the first part of De Synedriis et Prefecturis Juridicis Veterum Ebrseorum through the press, the second and third parts being severally published in 1653 and 1655, and in 1652 he wrote a preface and collated some of the manuscripts for Sir Roger Twysden's Historic Anglicx Scriptores Decem. His last publication was a vindication of himself from certain charges advanced against him and his Mare Clausum in 1653 by Theodore Graswinckel, a Dutch jurist. After the death of the earl of Kent in 1639 Selden lived permanently under the same roof with his widow. It is believed that he was married to her, although their marriage does not seem to have ever been publicly acknow- ledged. He died at Friary House in Whitefriars on 30th November 1654, and was buried in the Temple Church, London. Within the last few years a brass tablet has been erected to his memory by the benchers of the Inner Temple in the parish church of West Tarring. Several of Selden's minor productions were printed for the first time after his death, and a collective edition of his writings was published by Archdeacon Wilkins in 3 vols. folio in 1725, and again in 1726. His Table Talk, by which he is perhaps best known, did not appear until 1689. It was edited by his amanuensis, Kichard Milward, who affirms that " the sense and notion is wholly Selden's," and that " most of the words " are his also. Its genuineness has sometimes been questioned, although on insufficient grounds. In Hallam's opinion it "gives perhaps a more exalted notion of Sel- den's natural talents than any of his learned writings," and in Coleridge's it contains " more weighty bullion sense " than he had " ever found in the same mimber of pages of any uninspired writer." See Bliss, Wood's Athense Oxonienses (London, 181", vol. iv.) ; Aikin, Lives of John Selden and Archbishop Usher (London, 1812) ; Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, &c. (London, 1835) ; Singer, Table Talk of John Selden (London, 1847) ; and Wilkins, Johannis Seldeni Opera Omnia, &c. (London, 1725). (F. DR.) SELECTION AND VARIATION. See VARIATION AND SELECTION. SELENIUM AND TELLURIUM * are two rather rare chemical elements discovered, the latter by Miiller von Reichenstein in 1782, the former by Berzelius in 1817. Both occur only in the mineral kingdom as components of very rare minerals, most of which are compounds of one or the other or of both and sulphur with silver, lead, bismuth, antimony, gold, and other metals. Elementary Selenium. This, like elementary sulphur, exists in a variety of forms, which are conveniently con- sidered as modifications of the two genera now to be described. (1 ) Non-metallic selenium includes the flocculent scarlet precipitate produced by the reduction of solution of selenium by sulphurous acid in the cold. The scarlet flocks when dried without the aid of heat assume the form of a brown-red powder of sp. gr. 4'26, which dissolves in 1000 times its weight of boiling bisulphide of carbon (at 46 '6 C.). The solution on cooling deposits most of its selenium in the form of minute monoclinic crystals of sp. 1 Comp. CHEMISTRY, vol. v. pp. 498, 499, 501-503, 506, 508.