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Hence into Pant's Churchyard and bought Barkley's Argenis in Latin, and so home and to bed. I found at home that Captain Burr had sent me 4 dozen bottles of wine today. The King came back to Whitehall to-night. 25th. This morning Mr. Walker for the papers I did give him the other day, which he had perused and found that the Duke's counsel had abated something of the former draught which Dr.
In his Argenis Barclay reminds his reader of the children who for so many centuries had shunned the cup of physic until the bitter taste had been removed by sweet syrop. Thus also, says he, is it with the moral value of poetry disguised with sweet music.
In the motion of the stars Barclay sees the proof of the existence of God, and requires no other. The Argenis, unfortunately for English literature, was written at a time when men still wavered between the vernacular and Latin as a medium of expression.
His domestics having often observed him studying in that reclining posture for days together, it was long before they discovered that the poet was no more. The fate of LEIBNITZ was similar: he was found dead with the "Argenis" of Barclay in his hand; he had been studying the style of that political romance as a model for his intended history of the House of Brunswick.
We find the same pre-occupation with some wider conception of justice, empire, and freedom in the younger Barclay, the author of Argenis, written in Latin but read in many languages, studied by Richelieu and moulding his later, wiser policy towards the Huguenots, read, above all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write Télémaque.
The Argenis was published in 1621; but amongst the ideas on religion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which throng its pages, we find curious anticipations of the position of Locke and even of Hume, just as in politics, in the remarks on elective monarchy put in the lips of the Cardinal Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice and law, Barclay reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to Algernon Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria.
Then there are Barclay's Argenis, and Raynal's Philosophical History of the East and West Indies, without which no book-stall is to be considered complete, and which seem to be possessed of a supernatural power of resistance to the elements, since, month after month, in fair weather or foul, they are to be seen at their posts dry or dripping.
Again in the seventeenth century, in the Irene of Drummond, and in the remarkable work of Barclay, the Argenis, in its whole conception of the religious life, of monasticism, as in its idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics. We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke.
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