Note 89 — DIALOGUE IV. ON THE AGE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.

One of these ties was the prejudice of education; and some uncommon methods used to bind it fast on the minds of the people.—A book, called ΕΙΡΗΝΑΡΧΙΑ, sive Elizabeth, was written in Latin verse by one Ockland, containing the highest panegyrics on the queen’s character and government, and setting forth the transcendant virtues of her ministers. This book was enjoined by authority to be taught, as a classic author, in Grammar-schools, and was of course to be gotten by heart by the young scholars throughout the kingdom.

This was a matchless contrivance to imprint a sense of loyalty on the minds of the people. And, though it flowed, as we are to suppose, from a tender regard, in the advisers of it, for the interests of Protestantism in that reign; yet its uses are so apparent in any reign, and under any administration, that nothing but the moderation of her successors, and the reasonable assurance of their ministers that their own acknowledged virtues were a sufficient support to them, could have hindered the expedient from being followed.

But, though the stamp of public authority was wanting, private men have attempted, in several ways, to supply this defect. To instance only in one. The Protestant queen was to pass for a mirror of good government: hence the Εἰρηνάρχια. Her successor would needs be thought a mirror of eloquence: and hence the noble enterprise I am about to celebrate. “Mr. George Herbert (I give it in the grave historian’s own words) being prelector in the rhetorique school in Cambridge, in 1618, passed by those fluent orators, that domineered in the pulpits of Athens and Rome, and insisted to read upon an oration of K. James, which he analysed; shewed the concinnity of the parts; the propriety of the phrase; the height and power of it to move the affections; the style, UTTERLY UNKNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS, who could not conceive what kingly eloquence was, in respect of which those noted demigogi were but hirelings and tribolary rhetoricians.” Bishop Hacket’s Life of Archbishop Williams, p. 175.