XXX INTRODUCTORY ESSAS. of youth gave place to the more serious encounters of mind with mind; the vivaciousness of the lad became courage in the man; and early combativeness found a higher sphere in the field of religious controversy. Two instances of his personal courage are generally recorded of him. The first occurred during his travels, when the ship in which he sailed for Constantinople was attacked by pirates; andBarrow, disdaining the shelter of the hold, manfully fought at the guns on deck. The other was an encounter with a furious mastiff, which, having rushed upon him in the dark, he seized bythe throat, and, rather than kill the animal, held it fast to the ground till he was released. True to the paternal creed, Barrow, on entering the university, refused to take the covenant; but this refusal, though at that time regarded as the mark of a " Malignant," or one who had espoused the principles of Laudean prelacy in the churchand arbitrary power in the state, was kindly connived at by the heads of the university. One day, Dr Hill, Master of TrinityCollege, laying his hand on his head, said, " Thou art a good lad; 'tis pity thou art a Cavalier." On an- other occasion, when Barrow had displeased the rest by giving too free scope to his predilections, their objections were overruled by the same good man, who observed, "Barrow is a better man than any of us." The occasion of this offence, it is said, was his Latin Oration on the Gunpowder Plot, which is now inserted in his works. There is nothing in this performance (which is written in a youthful, decla- matory style) that could justly have given umbrage, unless we sup- pose that his description of the state of the church during the reign of James VI. was too highly coloured for the taste of the Presby- terians, and that, in adverting to the design of the conspirators to cut off the royal family, he expressed himself in terms too applicable to Cromwell to be relished by the Independents. Speaking of the episcopal church in those times, he says, "There was hardly any thing in her that pride could despise, that calumny could accuse, or thatwell-regulated minds could find wanting. She admitted neither old corruptions nor new-fangled fancies. Simple she was indeed, and yet not destitute of those ornaments with which ancient piety and well - consulted prudence had furnished her." If we may judge from another oration, pronounced in April 1651, inwhich he severely inveighs against the immoderate love of fun, wit, and ribaldry, which then prevailed among his fellow-collegians (giving us, by the way, a very different idea of the Puritans of that period from that con- veyed by the morose pictures drawn of them by their opponents), it would appear that our author, even at the early age of twenty-one,
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=