Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

65

Ibid.

66

Rye House Papers. Examination of Josiah Keeling and Robert West.

67

Ibid.

68

Rye House Papers. Examination of Josiah Keeling and Robert West.

69

Ibid. Examination of Thomas Shepherd.

70

Rye House Papers. Examination of Robert West and Josiah Keeling.

71

Rye House Papers. Examination of Robert West and Zachary Bourn.

72

Rye House Papers. Examination of Lord Howard, Alexander Gordon, and Robert West.

73

Rye House Papers. Examination of Col. Romsey and Robert West.

74

He was in fact a “recluse” in the ancient and proper sense of the term. For in the Bishop’s time it still remained customary, after an imposing ceremony, literally to seal and shut up by the hands of a bishop those – men or women – who elected to be recluses, in a small chamber built for the purpose close to the wall of some church with an opening inwards that the immured tenant might hear the service and receive necessary subsistence. We are told, for example, by St. Foix that Agnes de Rochier, the beautiful daughter of a rich tradesman, commenced such a life at the church of St. Opportune, in Paris, on the 5th of October, 1403, and though then of only eighteen years, lived in this hermetic state till the ripe enough age of eighty.

75

It was observed by Scott of Amwell, a critic of the verbal school, but not without his soundness, and junior to Collins by nine years, that the Oriental Eclogues, which appeared in 1742, were “always possessed of considerable reputation,” till Johnson “having hinted that Collins, once in conversation with a friend, happened to term them his Irish Eclogues, those who form opinions not from their own reason or their own feelings, but from the hints of others,” caught the hint and circulated it. “That Collins,” he adds, “ever supposed his eclogues destitute of merit there is no reason to believe; but it is very probable, when his judgment was improved by experience, he might discover and be hurt by their faults, among which may possibly be found some few instances of inconsistence or absurdity.”