onceiving a
prejudice against a man whose appearance shocks them, and were he to
preach with the tongue of an angel, that prejudice could never be
surmounted; besides the danger of women with child fixing their eyes
on him in the pulpit, and as the imagination of pregnant women has
strange influence on the unborn infants, it is somewhat cruel to
expose them to that danger, and by these means do them great injury,
as ones fortune in some measure depends upon exterior comeliness[1].
But Shirley, who was resolute to be in orders, left that university
soon after, went to Cambridge, there took the degrees in arts, and
became a minister near St. Alban's in Hertfordshire; but never having
examined the authority, and purity of the Protestant Church, and being
deluded by the sophistry of some Romish priests, he changed his
religion for theirs[2], quitted his living, and taught a grammar
school in the town of St. Alban's; which employment he finding an
intolerable drudgery, and being of a fickle unsteady temper, he
relinquished it, came up to London, and took lodgings in Gray's Inn,
where he commenced a writer for the stage with tolerable success. He
had the good fortune to gain several wealthy and beneficent patrons,
especially Henrietta Maria the Queen Consort, who made him her
servant.

When the civil war broke out, he was driven from London, and attended
upon his Royal Mistress, while his wife and family were left in a
deplorable condition behind him. Some time after that, when the Queen
of England was forced, by the fury of opposition, to sollicit succours
from France, in order to reinstate her husband; our author could no
longer wait upon her, and was received into the service of William
Cavendish, marquis of Newcastle, to take his fortune with him in the
wars. That noble spirited patron had given him such distinguishing
marks of his liberality, as Shirley thought himself happy in his
service, especially as by these means he could at the same time serve
the King.

Having mentioned Henrietta Maria, Shirley's Royal Mistress, the reader
will pardon a digression, which flows from tenderness, and is no more
than an expression of humanity. Her life-time in England was
embittered with a continued persecution; she lived to see the unhappy
death of her Lord; she witnessed her exiled sons, not only oppressed
with want, but obliged to quit France, at the remonstrance of
Cromwel's ambassador; she herself was loaded with poverty, and