died in 1600. The first four books of the
_Ecclesiastical Polity_ were published in 1594, the fifth in 1597. The last
three books, published after his death, lie under grave suspicion of having
been tampered with. This, however, as the unquestionably genuine portion
is considerable in bulk, is a matter rather of historical and theological
than of purely literary interest. Hooker himself appears to have been
something like the popular ideal of a student: never so happy as when pen
in hand, and by no means fitted for the rougher kind of converse with his
fellow-men, still less for the life of what is commonly called a man of the
world.

But in the world of literature he is a very great man indeed. Very few
theological books have made themselves a place in the first rank of the
literature of their country, and if the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ has done
so, it has certainly not done so without cause. If there has been a certain
tendency on the part of strong partisans of the Anglican Church to
overestimate the literary and philosophical merit of this book, which may
be called the first vernacular defence of the position of the English
Church, that has been at least compensated by partisan criticism on the
other side. Nor is there the least fear that the judgment of impartial
critics will ever deprive Hooker of the high rank generally accorded to
him. He is, of course, far from being faultless. In his longer sentences
(though long sentences are by no means the rule with him) he often falls
into that abuse of the classical style which the comparatively jejune
writers who had preceded him avoided, but which constantly manifested
itself in the richer manner of his own contemporaries--the abuse of
treating the uninflected English language as if it were an inflected
language, in which variations and distinctions of case and gender and
number help to connect adjective with substantive, and relative with
antecedent. Sometimes, though less often, he distorts the natural order of
the English in order to secure the Latin desideratum of finishing with the
most emphatic and important words of the clause. His subject leads and
almost forces him to an occasional pedantry of vocabulary, and in the
region which is not quite that of form nor quite that of matter, he
sometimes fails in co-ordinating his arguments, his facts, and his
citations, and in directing the whole with crushing force at his enemy. His
argument occasionally degenerates into