Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/235

Rh spirit, was attracted to a young Cambridge Fellow, who had taken the place of a friend in the pulpit of St Paul's and amazed his hearers by the luxuriant beauty of his eloquence. Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), as a pure orator, a master of clear, flowing, picturesque, and poetic language, has perhaps no rival except Ruskin. He was only twenty-one when, as Perse Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, he was taken up by Laud and sent to Oxford to study divinity and casuistry. He was made a Fellow of All Souls (1636) and rector of Uppingham (1638), and took part in the controversies of the day, attacking the Roman Catholics in the Sermon on Gunpowder Treason (1638), and replying to the Puritans in Of the Sacred Order of Episcopacy (1642). In sermons preached at Uppingham, and apparently in conversations with Spencer Compton, Earl of Northampton, he had formed the conception and laid the foundation of his first work of edification. The Great Exemplar—a life of Christ arranged and commented on—which was not published till 1649. During the Civil Wars and the first years of the Commonwealth Taylor found a haven in Wales, where he taught in a school, and acted as chaplain to Lord and Lady Carbery, residing in their house, Golden Grove. Here he wrote and published his Liberty of Prophesying (1647). Here he delivered the golden and