nstantly
marred by the author's inability to fix on a single point, and to keep his
argumentation close to that. In another, the _Unum Necessarium_, or
Discourse on Repentance, his looseness of statement and want of care in
driving several horses at once, involved him in a charge of Pelagianism, or
something like it, which he wrote much to disprove, but which has so far
lasted as to justify modern theologians in regarding his ideas on this and
other theological points as, to say the least, confused. All over his work
inexact quotation from memory, illicit argumentation, and an abiding
inconsistency, mar the intellectual value, affecting not least his famous
_Liberty of Prophesying_, or plea for toleration against the new
Presbyterian uniformity,--the conformity of which treatise with modern
ideas has perhaps made some persons slow to recognise its faults. These
shortcomings, however, are not more constant in Taylor's work than his
genuine piety, his fervent charity, his freedom from personal arrogance and
pretentiousness, and his ardent love for souls; while neither shortcomings
nor virtues of this kind concern us here so much as the extraordinary
rhetorical merits which distinguish all his work more or less, and which
are chiefly noticeable in his Sermons, especially the Golden Grove course,
and the funeral sermon on Lady Carbery, in his _Contemplations of the State
of Man_, and in parts of his _Life of Christ_, and of the universally
popular and admirable tractates on _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_.

Jeremy Taylor's style is emphatically and before all things florid and
ornate. It is not so elaborately quaint as Browne's; it is not so stiffly
splendid as Milton's; it is distinguished from both by a much less
admixture of Latinisms; but it is impossible to call it either verbally
chastened or syntactically correct. Coleridge--an authority always to be
differed with cautiously and under protest--holds indeed a different
opinion. He will have it that Browne was the corruptor, though a corruptor
of the greatest genius, in point of vocabulary, and that, as far as syntax
is concerned, in Jeremy Taylor the sentences are often extremely long, and
yet are generally so perspicuous in consequence of their logical structure
that they require no reperusal to be understood. And he will have the same
to be true not only of Hooker (which may pass), but of Milton, in reference
to whom admirers not less strong than Coleridge hold that he