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On this strong excitement of suspicion, reference was made to Dr. Walker, a clergyman of Essex, between whom and Dr. Gauden, asserted by the royal brothers to be the writer of the Icon and at this time deceased, a confidential intimacy was known to have subsisted; and the testimony of this respectable divine was so circumstantial and conclusive as apparently to leave no wreck of a doubt floating upon the subject.

Dr. Gauden, as his friend declared, had communicated to him the first seminal idea of the Icon Basilikè and the succeeding growth of the work, as it branched into chapters and assumed the proportions of its form. Dr. Walker stated the disapprobation, which he had intimated, of the intended imposition on the public, with the apology advanced in reply by his friend; and then related the circumstance of his having accompanied Dr. Gauden to the bishop of Salisbury, (Dr. Duppa,) who was an accomplice in the plan, and who, at that meeting, agreed to contribute two chapters on subjects which he recommended as necessary to the completion of the work. Dr. Walker proceeded to affirm that he had been made acquainted by Dr. Gauden with the fact of his having transmitted, by the marquis of Hert

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ford, a copy of this production to the King during his confinement in the Isle of Wight; and that Dr. Walker himself had been intrusted with a part of the manuscript for the purpose of delivering it, under certain precautions, to Royston the printer through the intervention of Dr. Gauden's steward. Walker further reported that his friend, after the Restoration, had informed him of the transaction's having been made known to the duke of York, who in acknowledgment of the service had promised the bishoprick of Winchester to this efficient promoter of the royal cause: a promise which was afterwards ill performed by his translation to the see of Worcester. In addition to all this mass of proof, Dr. Walker lastly asserted that many of the expressions in the devotional parts of the Icon were known to be peculiar to Dr. Gauden, by whom they had been frequently used in his religious exercises, both in private and in public.

To Dr. Walker's account, which it confirms in every essential particular, the written narrative left by Mrs. Gauden, the bishop's widow, adds many circumstances which complete, if any thing were before wanted to complete, the integrity and roundness of the evidence. In this narrative, which is un

questionably authentic, Mrs. Gauden states the original intention of her husband when he planned the work; the title of Suspiria Regalia, or the Royal Sighs, which he first affixed to it and which he subsequently changed to that of Icon Basilikè; the conversation, reported by the marquis of Hertford to have passed between bishop Duppa and the King, when the manuscript with the name and the design of the author was communicated to his Majesty; the person, (a royalist divine of the name of Symmonds,) by whose means her husband had obtained the printing of a part of the work at Royston's press, where it had been received as the immediate production of the King's; the discovery and the interruption of the printing with the danger which had compelled her husband to abscond, in consequence of the arrest of Symmonds whose opportune death, immediately after his apprehension,

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This Mr. Symmonds, of Rayne in Essex, was ejected from his benefice by the Parliament in 1642, for preaching the doc trines of passive obedience and the divine right of kings. He avowed and justified in a pamphlet called "The loyal Subject's Belief, the offensive doctrines which had been imputed to him. His royalist spirit is fierce against the Parliament. "If David's heart smote him," he says, " for cutting off Saul's garment, what would it have done if he had kept him from his castles, towns, and ships?" Neale's Hist. of the Puritans, v. iii. c. 1.

had relieved the fears of his employer; the discourse of Dr. Morley, after the Restoration, with her husband, in which that prelate had talked of the service rendered by Dr. Gauden to the royal cause, both at home and abroad, by writing the king's book, and had mentioned that he had communicated the whole business to Sir Edward Hyde, who had discovered much approbation of Dr. Gauden's work and conduct. Mrs. Gauden concludes her narrative by assigning an illness, which threatened his life, as the immediate cause of her husband's making the important disclosure to the King, (Charles II;) who was much pleased with it, and confessed "that he did often wonder that his father should have gotten time and privacy enough in his troubles to compose so excellent a piece, and written with so much learning."

After this minute and satisfactory relation, which certainly does not require and indeed will scarcely admit of any corroboration, it may be superfluous to notice two letters written by Dr. Gauden, one to the duke of York and the other to the lord chancellor, Hyde, urging the writer's services with reference to the Icon; or an answer from the

• Consecrated bishop of Worcester on the 28th of Oct. 1660.

lord chancellor, in which he says to Dr. Gauden," the particular, you mention, has indeed been imparted to me as a secret: I am sorry that I ever knew it; and when it ceases to be a secret it will please none but Mr. Milton."

To this power of testimony, sufficient as one would imagine to force the most impregnable infidelity, the unyielding spirit of party prejudice has attempted an opposition. Against the assertion of the two sons of Charles, against the letters of the lord chancellor, Hyde and of Dr. Gauden, against the explicit and specific depositions of the confidential friend and of the widow of Dr. Gauden have been thrown into the scale the inconsistent or the inconclusive testimonies of persons, who have affirmed either that the manuscript in dispute was found among the King's papers at Naseby and had been restored to him by Fairfax; or that it had been seen, and even partly read in the King's own hand upon his table in the Isle of Wight; or that it had been quoted by the King, or that it contained things similar to what the King had been heard to say.

My readers probably would not thank me if I were to lengthen this digression, al. ready too far extended, by entering fully

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