MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF DR. ROBERT SOUTH, LATE PREBENDARY OF WESTMINSTER, CANON OF CHRIST THEN men crowned with age and honour, and worn. out with the exercise of the most adorable virtues, go down to the grave; when learning, piety, sincerity, and courage, with them, seem to be gathered to their fathers, and almost every one of them, without a due recognition of their bright examples who gave us their survey, must cease to be any more; it would be an act of the highest injustice not to set them in their fairest light, that posterity may look upon them with the same eyes of admiration which the present age has paid their regards with; and that it may not be in the power of the teeth of time to wear out the impressions that shall pass undefaced from one generation to another. It is with this view, and only with this, that the author of these memoirs, who has long known the value of the subject he is writing upon, and from thence must be apprised of the difficulty of doing it as he ought, takes them in hand; SOUTH, VOL. 1. b being not without hopes, that he may in some measure prevent the many common biographers, who gather about a dead corpse, like ravens about their prey, and croak out insults against their memory, whilst they either praise them for actions they have not done, or load them with disgrace and infamy for what they never committed: insomuch that, in Procopius of Cæsarea's words, "their relations are no"thing else but their interests, delivering down, not what "they know, but what they are inclined to." The same author likewise very justly observes, "that as eloquence becomes an orator, and fables are proper for "poets, so truth is that which an historian ought chiefly to "follow, and have in regard;" therefore my readers are neither to expect embellishments of art, nor flourishes of rhetoric. Non tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis Tempus eget There is no need of such assistances to support me, while I go through with the character of a man that was arrived at the highest pitch of knowledge in the studies of all manner of divine and human literature: a man who, in the words of the Son of Sirach, gave his mind to the law of the most High, and was occupied in the meditation thereof: who sought out the wisdom of all the ancients, and who kept the sayings of the renowned men, and where subtle parables were, there was he also. A man, A man, who sought out the secrets of grave sentences, who served among great men, and appeared before princes : who travelled throughout strange countries, for he had tried the good and the evil among men. In a word, a man that gave his heart to resort early to the Lord that made him, and prayed before the most High. Who was filled with the spirit of understanding, and poured out wise sentences: so that many shall commend his understanding: and so long as the world endureth, it shall not be blotted out. May it suffice then that I account for the birth of this great man in the year 1633, when the artifices of wicked and designing sectarists against the established government in church and state, that broke out at last into the grand rebellion, made it necessary that so bright an assertor of both, as he proved afterwards, should arise. He was the son of Mr. South, an eminent merchant in London, and born at Hackney, of a mother whose maiden name was Berry, descended from the family of the Berrys in Kent: so that by his extraction on the one side, which we trace down from the Souths of Kelstone, and Keilby in Lincolnshire, (whereof we find one sir Francis of that name to be the head,) and his origin on the other, much celebrated for the productions of many eminent men, (among whom sir John Berry, the late admiral in king Charles the IId's reign, that commanded the Gloucester, wherein king James the IId, then duke of York, had like to have been shipwrecked, deserves a place,) he was sufficiently entitled to the name and quality of a gentleman. In the year 1647, after he had gone through the first rudiments of learning previous thereunto with uncommon success, we find him entered one of the king's scholars in the college at Westminster, where he made himself remarkable the following year, by reading the Latin prayers in the school, on the day of king Charles the first's martyrdom, and praying for his majesty by name: so that he was under the care of Dr. Richard Busby, who cultivated and improved so promising a genius with such industry and encouragement for four years, that, after the expiration of that time, he was admitted, an. 1651, student of Christ Church in Oxford. He was elected with the great Mr. John Locke, an equal ornament of polite and abstruse learning. His studentship, with an allowance of 307. per ann. from his mother, and the countenance of his relation, Dr. John South, of New college, regius professor of the Greek tongue, chanter of Salisbury, and vicar of Writtle in Essex, enabled him to obtain those acquirements that made him the admiration and esteem of the whole university, and drew upon him the eyes of the best masters of humanity and other studies, by the quick progress he made through them. He took the degree of bachelor of arts, which he completed by his determination, in Lent 1654-5. The same year he wrote a Latin copy of verses, published in the university book, set forth to congratulate the protector Oliver Cromwell upon the peace then concluded with the Dutch; upon which some people have made invidious reflections, as if contrary to the sentiments he afterwards espoused; but these are to be told, that such exercises are usually imposed by the governors of colleges upon bachelors of arts and undergraduates: I shall forbear to be particular in his, as being a forced compliment to the usurper. Not but even those discover a certain unwillingness to act in favour of that monster, whom even the inimitable earl of Clarendon, in his History of the grand Rebellion, distinguishes by the name and title of a GLORIOUS VILLAIN. After he had thus gained the applause of all his superiors, and by many lengths outstripped most of his contemporaries, by his well digested and well approved exercises preparatory thereunto, he proceeded to the degree of master of arts in June 1657, not without some opposition from Dr. John Owen, who supplied the place of dean of Christ Church, and officiated as head of that royal foundation, with other sectaries called canons, during the deprivation and ejection of the legal and orthodox members of the said chapter. This man (if he deserves the name of one, that was guilty of a voluntary defection from the church established, after he had regularly received ordination at the hands of a protestant bishop, contrary to the oaths he had taken to his rightful and lawful prince, and his obedience that was due to the canons of the church) was one of the earliest of the clergy who joined with the rebels in parliament assembled, that dethroned their natural liege lord and king, and altered the form of government in matters ecclesiastical and civil, and in recompense of his zeal for that end, after the martyr |