HOLY LIVING AND HOLY DYING. 'The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living> and 'The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying,) com anion works by the celebrated Anglican divine, Jeremy Taylor, were published in 1650 and 1651 respectively. They are religious treatises de signed to give, in the one case, a rule for virtuous conduct in all the circumstances of life, and, in the other, 'the means and instru ments') of preparing for a blessed death. Be sides counsels, meditations and minute instruc tions, the author gives numerous prayers and devotions, some of them among the most beautiful in English. The practical character of these works, the wisdom, piety and spiritual beauty which inform• them, and the universality of their appeal to those who are striving after the Christian life, have 'even them a wide and permanent popularity. They have won, also, what'is denied to most purely devotional works, an assured place in English literature. For their beauty is not of content alone. In style Taylor is perhaps the noblest representative of the wonderful prose writing of the 17th cen tury and particularly of the great tradition of religious and ecclesiastical eloquence which coincided with the reign of Charles I. He em ploys the magnificent rhetoric of his age with out the obscurity and affectation of many of its writers. The sentences are very long, but they are less involved than those of Milton and Sir Thomas Browne, and their complexities are, as critics have pointed out, often a mere matter of punctuation. The vocabulary, too, is comparatively modern, though Taylor is not wholly without the fondness for strange phraseology which was the inheritance of 17th century stylists from the Renaissance. Mason called. Taylor the Shakespeare of English prose;' and the term is appropriate to his catho licity of taste, to his subtlety and variety, and above all to the imaginative qualities which make his prose pages glow with poetic beauty.
His is a style full of sensuous imagery, brilliant in metaphor, abounding in sonorous cadences. •Like the Eliaabethans he is delicately sensitive to the phenomena of nature and makes frequent use of similes and illustrations drawn from the world of eye and ear. "But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age: it bowed the head and broke its stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weed and outworn faces." Of the two works 'Holy Living' is on the whole less interesting from the literary point of view. Practical considerations were upper most in the author's mind. In 'Holy Taylor, stirred by the memory of a recent sorrow, throws all his powers into the theme and produces a work in which the eternal truisms about death are dignified and ennobled, and made to throb with personal emotion. His view of death is sane and temperate. Avoiding the tendency to dwell morbidly on the hideous images of the sepulchre, he comforts and forti fies the soul until sickness and misfortune and the inevitable end itself come to appear a blessing. The best complete edition of Tay lor's writings is that of Reginald Heber, re vised by C. P. Eden (1845-52). Reprints of 'Holy Living) and 'Holy Dying' are very common. Consult Edmund Gosse's 'Jeremy Taylor) (in the 'English Men of Letters Series,' 1904), and especially the remarks of Coleridge, 'Literary Remains' (Vol. III, 1836).