he body accounted for the mind, and that matter
was the deepest thing in the universe, while to Berkeley the only true
reality consists in what is spiritual and eternal.

'The great idealist,' says an able writer, 'certainly never denied the
existence of matter in the sense in which Johnson understood it. As the
touched, the seen, the heard, the smelled, the tasted, he admitted and
maintained its existence as readily and completely as the most
illiterate and unsophisticated of mankind,' and he adds that the
peculiar endowment for which Berkeley was distinguished 'far beyond his
predecessors and contemporaries, and far beyond almost every philosopher
who has succeeded him, was the eye he had _for facts_, and the singular
pertinacity with which he refused to be dislodged from his hold upon
them.'[62]

Pope's age produced a few great masters of style, and among them
Berkeley holds an undisputed place. He succeeded, too, in the most
difficult department of intellectual labour, since to express abstruse
thought in language as beautiful as it is clear is the rarest of gifts.

'His works are beyond dispute the finest models of philosophic style
since Cicero. Perhaps they surpass those of the orator, in the wonderful
art by which the fullest light is thrown on the most minute and
evanescent parts of the most subtle of human conceptions.'[63]

[Sidenote: William Law (1686-1761).]

William Law was born in 1686 at King's Cliffe in Northamptonshire, and
entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a Sizar in 1705. He obtained a
Fellowship, and received holy orders in 1711, but having made a speech
offensive to the heads of houses, he was degraded. Law believed in the
divine right of kings, and on the death of Queen Anne, declared his
principles as a non-juror. In 1717 he published his first controversial
work, _Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor_; Hoadly, the famous
bishop, having, in his opponent's judgment, uttered lax and
latitudinarian views with regard to the Church of which he was one of
the chief pastors. These _Letters_ have been highly praised for wit as
well as for argument, and Dean Hook, writing of the Bangorian
Controversy in his _Church Dictionary_, states that 'Law's _Letters_
have never been answered and may, indeed, be regarded as unanswerable.'
Law was also the most powerful assailant of Warburton's _Divine
Legation_, which he opposed with a burning zeal that was not always
wise. But as a controversialist he wa