the traveller gladly divests himself on finishing his journey and he could not disguise his own wish to be speedily unclothed, instead of lingering below till his garments were worn out and dropped off through age. In general, his temper was serene rather than gay; but his nephew states, that if ever it rose to an unusual pitch of vivacity, it was when some illness attacked him; -when, "from the shaking of the prison doors, he was led to hope, that some of those brisk blasts would throw them open, and give him the release he coveted." Then he seemed to stand tiptoe on the margin of eternity, in a delightful amazement of spirit, eagerly awaiting the summons to depart, and feeding his soul with the prospect of immortal life and glory. Sometimes, while contemplating his future resting-place, he would break out into that noble apostrophe of pious George Herbert;

O let me roost and nestle there;

Then of a sinner thou art rid,
And I of hope and fear.

"Hearing once of the death of a portly man; "How is it," he exclaimed, "that A has broke through those goodly brick walls, while I am kept in by a bit of flimsy deal?" He would say pleasantly, that he had his night-cap on, and rejoiced that it was so near bed-time, or, rather, so near the hour of rising to one who had long lain awake in the dark; and pointing to the children of the family, one evening, who were showing symptoms of weariness, and importuning to be undressed; "Shall 1," said he, "who am threescore and ten, be loth to go to bed?" This world he considered a state of nonage, and the land of mature men a land very far off. No apophthegm of uninspired wisdom pleased him more than that of Seneca: "Illa dies, quam ut supremam metuisses, æternitatis natalis est."* His alacrity to depart resulted from his earnest desire to "see and enjoy perfection in the perfect sense of it, which he could not do and live." "That consummation," he would say, "is truly a hope deferred; but, when it cometh, it will be a tree of life."

"An extract from a letter, supposed to have been written a short time before his death, may here be aptly inserted.

"I find daily more and more reason without me, and within me yet much more, to pant and long to be gone. I am grown exceeding uneasy in writing and speaking, yea almost in thinking, when I reflect how cloudy our clearest thoughts are: but, I think again what other can we do, till the day break and the shadows flee away, as one that lieth awake in the night must be

The day which you fear as your last, is the BIRTH DAY OF ETERNITY.

thinking; and one thought that will likely oftenest return, when by all other thoughts he finds little relief, is, when will it be day?"

"Yet Leighton, for the comfort of weak believers be it record ed, did not pretend to an absolute assurance of final salvation. Conversing, one day, in his wonted strain of holy animation, o the blessedness of being fixed as a pillar in the heavenly Jerusalem to go no more out,* he was interrupted by a near relation exclaiming, "Ah, but you have assurance!" "No, truly," he replied, "only a good hope, and a great desire to see what they are doing on the other side, for of this world I am heartily weary."

"Such was the holy man, of whom little now remains to be told, except his dismissal from this troublesome scene to that place among

-the sanctities of heaven,

which he had long preoccupied in affection and spirit."

In the year 1684, Leighton received an earnest request from Bishop Burnet, to visit Lord Perth, once apparently a good man, but now a very wicked one, who had begun to feel compunction for his crimes, and desired to see Leighton. "I hoped, says Burnet, that still some good impressions had been left in him: and now, when he came to London to be made lord chancellor, I had a very earnest message from him, desiring by my means to see Leighton. I thought that angelical man might have awakened in him some of those good principles, which he seemed once to have had, and which were now totally extinguished in him. I writ so earnestly to Leighton that he came to London." Though his appearance was healthy, yet his biographer says that he went with feelings of illness, which may account for his presentiment that his dissolution was at hand. "The worse I am," said he in the ardor of his benevolence "the more I choose to go, that I may give one pull at you poor brother, and snatch him if possible from the infectious air of the court." "Upon his coming to me," Burnet continues, "I was amazed to see him at above seventy look so fresh and well, that age as it were seemed to stand still with him; his hair was still black, and all his motions were lively. He had the same quickness of thought and strength of memory, but above all, the same heat and life of devotion, that I had ever seen in him. When I took notice to him, upon my first seeing him, how well he looked, he told me he was very near his end for all

* Rev. iii, 12.

that; and his work and journey both were now almost done. This at that time made no great impression on me."

“The very next day," says his biographer, "he was attacked with an oppression on the chest, and with cold and stitches, which proved to be the commencement of a pleurisy. He sunk rapidly, for on the following day both speech and sense had left him; and, after panting for about twelve hours, he expired without a struggle in the arms of Bishop Burnet, his intimate friend, his ardent and affectionate admirer. Nothing is recorded of his last hours: and indeed the disease that carried him off was such, by its nature and rapid progress, as to preclude much speaking. But no record is necessary of the dying moments of a man, who had served God from his infancy; and whose path had been a shining light up to the moment when the shades of death closed over it. God was, assuredly, the strength of his heart in the hour of his last agony, and is now his glorious portion, his exceeding and eternal great reward. It was needless for himself that he should have notice of the bridegroom's coming; for his lamp was always trimmed, his loins were always girded. To his surviving friends it could have afforded little additional satisfaction, to have heard him express, on his death-bed, that faith and holy hope, of which his life had been one unbroken example: neither could he have left, for the benefit of posterity, any sayings more suitable to a dying believer than those he daily uttered; living, as he had long lived, on the confines of the eternal world, and in the highest frame of spirituality that it seems possible for an imbodied soul to attain. He entered into his rest, on the 25th of June, A. D. 1684, in the seventy-fourth year of his age."

"I was by him," writes Bishop Burnet," all the while. Thus I lost him, who had been the chief guide of my whole life. He had lived ten years in Sussex, in great privacy, dividing his time wholly between study and retirement, and the doing of good': for in the parish where he lived, and in the parishes round about, he was always employed in preaching and reading prayers. He distributed all he had in charities, choosing rather to have it go through other people's hands than his own: for I was his almoner in London. He had gathered a well chosen library of curious as well as useful books; which he left to the diocese of Dunblane, for the use of the clergy there, that country being ill provided with books.

"There were two remarkable circumstances in his death. He used often to say, that if he were to choose a place to die in it should be an inn, it looking like a pilgrim's going home, to

whom this world was all as an inn, and who was weary of the noise and confusion in it. He added, that the officious tenderness and care of friends was an entanglement to a dying man; and that the unconcerned attendance of those that could be procured in such a place would give less disturbance. And he obtained what he desired; for he died at the Bell inn, in Warwick Lane. Another circumstance was, that while he was bishop in Scotland, he took what his tenants were pleased to pay him so that there was a great arrear due, which was raised slowly by one whom he left in trust with his affairs there and the last payment that he could expect from thence was returned up to him about six weeks before his death: so that his provision and his journey failed both at once."

In addition to what has already been selected from Burnet's history of his own times, the following passages are full of in

terest.

"I bear still the greatest veneration for the memory of that man that I do for any person; and reckon my early knowledge of him, and my long and intimate conversation with him, that continued to his death for twenty-three years, among the greatest blessings of my life; and for which I know I must give account to God, in the great day, in a most particular manner."

"He was accounted a saint from his youth up. He had great quickness of parts, a lively apprehension, with a charming vivacity of thought and expression. He had the greatest command of the purest Latin that ever I knew in any man. He was a mas

ter both of Greek and Hebrew, and of the whole compass of theological learning, chiefly in the study of the scriptures. But that which excelled all the rest was, he was possessed with the highest and noblest sense of divine things that I ever saw in any man. He had no regard to his person, unless it was to mortify it by a constant low diet, that was like a perpetual fast. He had a contempt both of wealth and reputation. He seemed to have the lowest thoughts of himself possible, and to desire that all other persons should think as meanly of him as he did of himself: he bore all sorts of ill usage and reproach like a man that took pleasure in it. He had so subdued the natural heat of his temper, that in a great variety of accidents, and in a course of twenty-two years' intimate conversation with him, I never observed the least sign of passion, but upon one single occasion. He brought himself into so composed a gravity, that I never saw him laugh, and but seldom smile. And he kept himself in such a constant recollection, that I do not remember that ever I heard

him say one idle word. There was a visible tendency in all he said, to raise his own mind, and those he conversed with, to serious reflections. He seemed to be in a perpetual meditation And though the whole course of his life was strict and ascetical, yet he had nothing of the sourness of temper that generally possesses men of that sort. He was the freest from superstition, from censuring others, or imposing his own methods on them, possible. So that he did not so much as recommend them to others. He said there was a diversity of tempers, and every man was to watch over his own, and to turn it in the best manner he could. His thoughts were lively, oft out of the way and surprising, yet just and genuine. And he had laid together in his memory the greatest treasure of the best and wisest of all the ancient sayings of the heathens as well as Christians, that I have ever known any man master of: and he used them in the aptest manner possible."

Speaking of the bishops of Scotland, and referring particularly to Archbishop Leighton, Burnet says in the preface to his life of Bedell, "I have observed among the few of them to whom I had the honor to be known particularly, as great and exemplary things as ever I met with in all ecclesiastical history; not only the practice of the strictest of all the ancient canons, but a pitch of virtue and piety, beyond what can fall under common imitation, or be made the measure of even the most angelical rank of inen; and saw things in them that look more like fair ideas, than what men clothed with flesh and blood could grow up to." In his treatise on the duties of the Pastoral care, "I was formed to them," he says, "by a bishop that had the greatest elevation of soul, the largest compass of knowledge, the most mortified and most heavenly disposition, that I ever yet saw in mortal; that had the greatest parts, as well as virtues, with the perfectest humility, that I ever saw in man; and had a sublime strain in preaching, with so grave a gesture, and such a majesty, both of thought, of language, and of pronunciation, that I never once saw a wandering eye where he preached; and have seen whole assemblies often melt in tears before him; and of whom I can say with great truth, that in a free and frequent conversation. with him, for above two-and-twenty years, I never knew him say an idle word, that had not a direct tendency to edification: and I never once saw him in any other temper, but that which I wished to be in, in the last moments of my life. For that pattern, which I saw in him, and for that conversation, which I had with him, I know how much I have to answer to God: and though my re