Lancelot Andrewes and His Private Devotions

LANCELOT ANDREWES was born the son of a sea- Andrewes. faring man at Allhallows Barking, London, in 1555, and he died Bishop of Winchester at Southwark in 1626. Andrewes was born one year after Hooker, four years before Isaac Casaubon His and Robert Bruce, six years before Bacon, nine years before Shakespeare, eleven years before James the First, and eighteen years before Laud and Donne. Lancelot Andrewes lives to us and shines to us to this day in his Private Devotions. All our interest in Andrewes is centred The Devoin his Private Devotions. Andrewes was a great wn5’ scholar and a great patron of poor scholars, he was the most popular preacher of his day, in his hospitality he was the pattern of an apostolic bishop, and he was a great favourite with his king; but all that would have been forgotten by us long ago had it not been for his one incomparable and immortal book, the Private Devotions. We carry Andrewes’ s Private Devotions in our mind as we read of his birth, of his education, of his talents, of his industry, of his rise in life, and of all his after-career. Our interest in Andrewes’s scholarship and wide reading, in his churchmanship and in his statesmanship, in his single life, in his friends and in his opponents, in his great opportunities and in his great temptations, both as a minister of Jesus Christ and as a privy councillor of King James, — our interest in all that is awakened and is intensely quickened as we A study, and much more as we ourselves employ, his Private Devotions. With that entrancing book open before us we search the histories and the biographies of his time; the home and the foreign politics of his time; the State papers, the Church controversies, and not least the Court scandals and the criminal reports of his time, with the keenest interest and the most solicitous anxiety. ‘I am wonderful curious, says Montaigne, ‘to discover and know the mind, the soul, the genuine disposition, and the natural judgment of my authors; but much more what they do in their chambers and in their closets than what they are in the senate and in the market-place.’ And that is just what we discover and know of our author in his Private Devotions. We have preserved to us in that priceless book what Andrewes was in his chamber and in his closet as we have no other author preserved to us in any other book that I know. To Andrewes more than to any other man that I know has this assurance of our Saviour been to the letter fulfilled, — But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. For, what Andrewes prayed for in his closet, and how he prayed for it, all the world now openly knows and openly has the reward of.

At School As soon as young Andrewes had a book put into fege h*s nands he began to show a quite extraordinary

aptitude for the acquisition of languages. All his days Andrewes never could write the English language with any beauty or purity or good taste, but there seems to have been no language under heaven that he could not read. Andrewes proved himself a perfect genius and paragon as often as he had another grammar and another dictionary put into his hands, but when he took up a pen to compose in his own language all his talent would seem to have forsaken him and fled. There is scholarship, and there is the sense of beauty and the taste for letters that should surely come from all sound scholarship, and some men have the excellent taste without the scholarship, while other men have all the scholarship with nothing whatever of the fine taste or the sweet sensibility for good writing. Shakespeare in that day had little Latin and less Greek, but what English Shakespeare wrote! While Andrewes had all the Latin and all the Greek and everything else that his great contemporary had so little of, and yet what poor work he made in the noble tongue of Cranmer and North and Shakespeare and Hooker and Bacon. But what we have to do with at his present stage is Andrewes’s wonderful facility in mastering the ancient languages as well as the foreign languages of his own day. From his tender years, Isaacson, his secretary and biographer, tells us, Andrewes was totally addicted to the study of languages; and in his youth there appeared in him such aptness to learn, answerable to his endeavours, that his first two schoolmasters contended who should have the honour of his breeding. By his extraordinary industry and admirable capacity he soon outstripped all his school-fellows, having become an excellent Grecian and Hebrician. When he came home to London from Cambridge for the Easter holiday, he was wont to bespeak a tutor for those vacant weeks till he went back to his college after a month’s absence a much better scholar than he had been when he left it. Isaacson had often heard the reverend and worthy prelate say that when he was a young scholar at the University, and so all his time onwards, he never loved or used any games or ordinary recreation, either within doors, as cards, dice, tables, chess, or the like: or abroad, as butts, quoits, bowls, or any such; but his ordinary exercise and recreation was walking either alone by himself, or with some selected companion, with whom he might confer, argue, and recount their studies. He would often profess that to observe the grass, herbs, corn, trees, cattle, earth, waters, heavens, any of the creatures, and to contemplate their natures, orders, qualities, virtues, uses, and such like, was ever to him the greatest mirth, content, and recreation that could be: and this he held to his dying day. ‘He accounted all that time lost that he spent not in his studie, says Bishop Buckeridge, ‘wherein in learning he outstript all his equals, and his indefatigable industry had almost outstript himself: he studied so hard when others played, that if his parents and masters had not forced him to play with them also, all the play had been marred.’ And then Fuller follows Isaacson and Buckeridge with this, — that ’ the world wanted learning to know how learned this man was; so skilled in all (especially Oriental) languages, that some conceive he might, if then living, almost have served as an interpreter-general at the confusion of tongues.” His admirable knowledge in the learned tongues, adds Buckeridge, ‘Latine, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriack, Arabick, besides other modern tongues to the number of fifteen, as I am informed, was such, and so rare, that he may well be ranked to be in the first place, to be one of the rarest linguists in Christendom.’

No young man of that day ran a more brilliant In Holy career than that career was which Andrewes ran, and his Christian character kept full pace with all his attainments and all his promotions. Scholar and Fellow of Pembroke, Vicar of St Giles’, Cripplegate, Prebendary, first of Southwell and then of St Paul’s, Master of his College, Chaplain to Whitgift and to Queen Elizabeth, and Dean of Westminster: through all these upward steps Andrewes rapidly rose, leaving behind him on each successive stage a record of most excellent work accomplished, and carrying with him a most honourable and a much-beloved name. ‘The course of his studies,’ says Sir John Harrington, ‘was not, as most men’s are in these times, to get a little superficial divinity by reading two or three of the new writers, and straight take orders and up into the pulpit. Dr Andrewes gathered before he spent, reading both new writers and old writers, and not as tasting them, but as digesting them.’ Out of that great storehouse of that time, Hacket’s Life of Archbishop Williams, we gather abundant proof that as Dean of Westminster and superintendent of its famous school Andrewes was still the same scholar, and the same lover of scholarship, he had been when he was at school himself. Hacket, happily, was himself at Westminster at that time, and this is the fine tribute that he pays to the learned dean’s great industry and great care over his young scholars: ‘How strict that excellent man was to charge our masters,’ says Hacket, ‘that they should give us lessons out of none but the most classical authors; he did often supply the place both of head schoolmaster and usher for the space of a whole week together, and gave us not an hour of loitering time from morning to night: he caused our exercises in prose and verse to be brought to him, to examine our style and proficiency; he never walked to Chiswick for his recreation without a brace of this young fry; and in that wayfaring leisure had a singular dexterity to fill those narrow vessels with a funnel. And sometimes thrice a week, sometimes oftener, he sent for the uppermost scholars to his lodging at night, and kept them with him from eight till eleven, unfolding to them the best rudiments of the Greek tongue, and the elements of the Hebrew Grammar; and all this he did to us boys without any compulsion of correction, nay, I never heard him utter so much as a word of austerity among us. This great and good prelate,’ Racket gratefully adds, ‘was the first that planted me in my tender studies, and watered them continually with his great bounty.’

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