In Marsden's History of the Early Puritans (a work recently published, which will well repay perusal) there occurs (pp. 178, 179.) the following notice of Henry Smith:—

"Henry Smith was a person of good family, and well connected; but having some scruples, he declined preferment, and aspired to nothing higher than the weekly Lectureship of St. Clement Danes. On a complaint made by Bishop Aylmer, Whitgift suspended him, and silenced for a while probably the most eloquent preacher in Europe. His contemporaries named him the Chrysostom of England. His church was crowded to excess; and amongst his hearers, persons of the highest rank, and those of the most cultivated and fastidious judgment, were content to stand in the throng of citizens. His sermons and treatises were soon to be found in the hands of every person of taste and piety: they passed through numberless editions. Some of them were carried abroad, and translated into Latin. They were still admired and read at the close of nearly a century, when Fuller collected and republished them. Probably the prose writing of this, the richest period of genuine English literature, contains nothing finer than some of his sermons. They are free, to an astonishing degree, from the besetting vices of his age—vulgarity, and quaintness, and affected learning; and he was one of the first English preachers who, without submitting to the trammels of a pedantic logic, conveyed in language nervous, pure, and beautiful, the most convincing arguments in the most lucid order, and made them the ground-work of fervent and impassioned addresses to the conscience."

Would it not be desirable, as well in a literary as a theological point of view, that any extant sermons of so renowned a divine should be made accessible to general readers? At present they are too rare and expensive to be largely useful. A brief Narrative of the Life and Death of Mr. Henry Smith (as it is for substance related by Mr. Thomas Fuller in his Church History), which is prefixed to an old edition (1643) of his sermons in my possession, concludes in these words:—

"The wonder of this excellent man's worth is increased by the consideration of his tender age, he dying very young (of a consumption as it is conceived) above fifty years since, about Anno 1600."

Thos. M^cCalmont.

Highfield, Southampton.