12 DR. BENJAMIN ALLEN, OF BRAINTREE.
Coll., in Cambridge.21 Bp. Wilkin,22 with whom Mr. Ray lived 7 years,
together with Dr. Tillotson23 examined it and found them to be his Sunday
readings to his pupils exactly, by notes which he saw in some special
pupil's hand. Mr. Ray told me [also] that the other works, sayd to be
by the same hand, were wrote by the Bishop of York (Sterry)24 who sent
the 'Whole Duty of Man' to the press, and were known by his servant
and his hand, but this was done by him to make the first seem his own—"
Here the statement breaks off abruptly, owing to a leaf
having been torn from the book—perhaps by some person who
disapproved of some religious view which Ray had gone on to
express.
The closing paragraph is of interest in connection with the
much-debated question as to the authorship of The Whole Duty
of Man, which was first published in 1658 and ran through
innumerable editions. In Evelyn's Diary, there is a passage so
closely similar that one cannot doubt that one was derived
from the other or both from some common original. Under date
16 July 1692, Evelyn says25:—
" I went to visit the Bishop of Lincoln [Thomas Tenison (1636-1715),
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury], when, amongst other things,
he told me that one Dr. Chaplin, of University College, in Oxford, was the
person who wrote the 'Whole Duty of Man'; that he used to read it
to his pupils and communicated it to Dr. Stern, afterwards Archbishop of
York, but would never suffer any of his pupils to have a copy of it."
Nevertheless, the general opinion now is that the work was
written by Richard Allestree (1619-1681), a Royalist divine,
though edited by Dr. John Fell (1625-1686), Bishop of Oxford.
Elsewhere (p. 47), Allen returns to the discussion as to the
identity of the plant, called "Star of the Earth," which was
supposed to cure rabies in dogs26:—
" Mr. Ray told me [he says, that] King James the 2nd sent a plant to
the Royal Socyety with which his dogs had been cured. It was sent [by
the Society] to Mr. Ray [for him to identify the species], who found it to
be the Otis or Sesamoides Salamanticum magnum. It came by [i.e.,
under] the name of the "Starr of the Earth," and (as he heard) the receipt
21 Possibly the Rev. William Chappel (1582-1649), a scholar and long a Fellow of
Christ's College, in Cambridge, also for a time (1638-1641) Bishop of Cork, may have been the
man Ray referred to. At all events, others have ascribed to him the authorship of the book.
22 John Wilkins (1614-1672), Bishop of Chester (1668-1672) and one of the Founders of
the Royal Society, was a friend of Evelyn, Boyle, and Ray, but it is difficult to see in what
period of seven years the latter can have "lived with" him.
23 John Tillotson (1630-1694). a great preacher and theological writer, Dean of St. Paul's
(1689-1691) and Archbishop of Canterbury (1691-1694), was a friend and disciple of Wilkins.
24 Without doubt, Allen caught the name wrongly and Ray really spoke of Richard
Sterne (1596-1683), who was successively Bishop of Carlisle and Archbishop (1664-1683) of
York. He has been regarded by some as the author of the book.
25 Diary, Bray's ed., ii., p. 321 (1850).
26 See ante, xvi., p. 152.