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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2011
Richard Baxter could never write for long without inserting some autobiographical reminiscence, some reference to his own experiences. The argument of his most serious works is relieved by such an illustration as ‘When I was young, I was wont to go up the Wrekin-Hill with great pleasure (being near my dwelling) and to look down on the country below me’; or ‘I cannot forget that in my youth…sometimes the morrice-dancers would come into the church in all their linen and scarfs, and antic-dresses, with morrice-bells jingling at their legs’; or ‘the case, as I remember, when I was a boy, our school was in, when we had barred out our master’; or ‘the raining of that grain about ten years ago in England…I tasted it, and kept some of it long, which fell on the leads of the church, and of the minister's house in Bridgnorth’; or ‘I never awaked since I had the use of memory, but I found myself coming out of a dream’. This autobiographic tendency Baxter himself might piously rationalise: ‘All these I mention as obliged to record the Mercies of my great Preserver to his Praise and Glory’; and ‘I find it convenient to remember what is past, and to insert the transcript of my own experiences, that I may fully try whether I have gone rationally and faithfully to work or not’. In fact, however, it is clear that he was fascinated by experience, and its strangeness, for its own sake; by life itself. In this, as in much else, he was a man of his age, which abounds in diaries, memoirs and autobiographies.
page 73 note 1 Obedient Patience (1683); The Divine Appointment of the Lords Day (1671); The Saints Everlasting Rest (1650); The Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667): as in Practical Works, London [1868], iii. 934, 904, 236; ii. 189.
page 73 note 2 Reliquiae Baxterianae, London 1696, ed. M. Sylvester, i. 133 (p. 82); The Reasons, as in Practical Works, ii. 79.
page 73 note 3 R.B., ii.445 (p. 448).
page 74 note 1 The arrangement of R.B. is confused. Book I has two parts, with separate numeration of sections but consecutive pagination. There is no Book II. What follows is called Part III, with no further reference to Books. Part III is like Book I in having two parts, with separate numeration of sections but consecutive pagination; but whereas the two parts of Book I are distinguished at the head of the pages, the two parts of Part III are headed Part III throughout. I have referred in this paper to i; ii; iii. i; and iii. ii; and to the numbers of the sections (with the page-numbers added in brackets).
page 74 note 2 R.B., iii. i. 328 (p. 176); for the date, and for Read, cf. Calamy Revised, Oxford 1934, ed. Matthews, A. G.Google Scholar, s.v.
page 74 note 3 R.B., iii. ii. 90 (p. 200); for Jenkyn, cf. Dict. Nat. Biog.; Cal. Rev.
page 74 note 4 D.W.L., Benefactors' Book, p. 54 (an entry made later, in c. 1745). For Sylvester, cf D.N.B.; Cal. Rev. The location of Baxter's papers at D. W.L. is mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. Libraries, at least as far back as the 9th (1875) edition.
page 74 note 5 For Black, cf.D.N.B.
page 75 note 1 Catalogue of the … Library of the late Rev. William Henry Black … which will be sold by auction ….on … 28th of July 1873 …, p. 19, no. 358.
page 75 note 2 Though finding themselves unable to return Egerton MS. 2570, the authorities of the British Museum have presented Dr. Williams's Library with a photostat of the MS.
page 75 note 3 A complete analysis, by the present writer, may be had from Dr. Williams's Library for the price of one shilling.
page 75 note 4 The figure 59 (or 61) is the Library's reference for the whole corpus of Baxter MSS.; 59, vols. 1–6, consists of letters; 59, vols. 7–13, of documents (with a few letters, misplaced).
page 76 note 1 R.B., i. 56 (p. 40). The word ‘passages’ is virtually a terminus technicus for early Quaker autobiographies, which are commonly entitled Sufferings and Passages.
page 76 note 2 D.N.B., s.v. Sylvester.
page 76 note 3 Calamy, E., Historical Account of My Own Life, London 1829, ed. Rutt, J. T., i. 359Google Scholar.
page 76 note 4 On this, cf. T. E. Harvey's intro. to N. Penney's edn. of Fox's Journal, Cambridge 1911, and my own intro. to J. L. Nickalls– edn., Cambridge 1952.
page 76 note 5 R.B., pref.
page 77 note 1 E. Calamy, op. cit., i. 378 f.
page 77 note 2 The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, London 1925.
page 77 note 3 R.B., i. 145 (p. 101).
page 78 note 1 R.B., pref.; for the exchanges which took place, cf. Orme, W., Memoirs of …John Owen, London 1820, 277Google Scholar f.
page 78 note 1 Egerton MS. 2570. 26.
page 78 note 3 Ibid., 27.
page 78 note 4 R.B., i. 147 (p. 103).
page 79 note 1 Ibid., i. 149 (p. 104).
page 79 note 2 Egerton MS. 2570. 27 verso.
