In Marsden's _History of the Early Puritans_ (a work recently published,
which will well repay perusal) there occurs (pp. 178, 179.) the following
notice of Henry Smith:--
"Henry Smith was a person of good family, and well connected; but
having some scruples, he declined preferment, and aspired to nothing
higher than the weekly Lectureship of St. Clement Danes. On a complaint
made by Bishop Aylmer, Whitgift suspended him, and silenced for a while
probably the most eloquent preacher in Europe. His contemporaries named
him the Chrysostom of England. His church was crowded to excess; and
amongst his hearers, persons of the highest rank, and those of the most
cultivated and fastidious judgment, were content to stand in the throng
of citizens. His sermons and treatises were soon to be found in the
hands of every person of taste and piety: they passed through
numberless editions. Some of them were carried abroad, and translated
into Latin. They were still admired and read at the close of nearly a
century, when Fuller collected and republished them. Probably the prose
writing of this, the richest period of genuine English literature,
contains nothing finer than some of his sermons. They are free, to an
astonishing degree, from the besetting vices of his age--vulgarity, and
quaintness, and affected learning; and he was one of the first English
preachers who, without submitting to the trammels of a pedantic logic,
conveyed in language nervous, pure, and beautiful, the most convincing
arguments in the most lucid order, and made them the ground-work of
fervent and impassioned addresses to the conscience."
Would it not be desirable, as well in a literary as a theological point of
view, that any extant sermons of so renowned a divine should be made
accessible to general readers? At present they are too rare and expensive
to be largely useful. A brief _Narrative of the Life and Death of Mr. Henry
Smith_ (as it is for substance related by Mr. Thomas Fuller in his _Church
History_), which is prefixed to an old edition (1643) of his sermons in my
possession, concludes in these words:--
"The wonder of this excellent man's worth is increased by the
consideration of his tender age, he dying very young (of a consumption
as it is conceived) above fifty years since, about Anno 1600."