The Retrospective Review, and Historical and Antiquarian Magazine (Volume 12) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: worked a complete reformation in public manners. It is to these causes, strengthened by the circumstance of our not knowing any play dated after the year 1641, that we say, with the civil war, the public performance of Latin and English plays ceased in the University of Cambridge. Art. II.?Two Choiceand Useful Treatises: the one, Lux Orientalis; or, an Inquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages, concerning the Pre-existence of Souls, being a Key to Unlock the Grand Mysteries of Providence, in relation to Man's Sin and Misery. The other, a Discourse of Truth, by the late Reverend Dr. Rush, Lord Bishop of Dromore, in Ireland: with Annotations Oh them both. London, 1682. In the common Biographical Dictionary, to which alone we have present reference, the first of these works is not enumerated among the writings of its author, the well known Sa- ducismus Triumphatus Glanvill. It is not, indeed, deserving of particular notice for any extraordinary merit of its own; but, in connection with his other works, becomes curious, as a further evidence of the excursive imagination of the writer, whom not even orthodoxy, and preferment, could keep altogether quiet and confiding. Glanvill was a clergyman of the church by law established; that is to say, a rigid calvinist and zealous republican, proud of being chaplain to old Francis Rouse, one of Cromwell's Lords, until the Restoration satisfied him of his error, when he was re-ordained, got a vicarage and a rectory, and the appointment of chaplain to the king. In the opinions of a church so established, and backing its other influential reasons by such seZ/-evident merits, we have no doubt he had a most relying faith; he was assuredly an obedient servant, bowing to all its decisions, and conforming to all its directions; but the delig...