Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charter House, is the reverse of Boyle in most respects; a visionary as natural theologian and natural philosopher, but the only writer of his day, the great preachers excepted, who attained to sublimity in prose. A Cambridge man and a pupil of Tillotson, Burnet was elected Master of the Charter House in 1685, and signalized himself by his courage in resisting James II.'s attempted intrusion of Roman Catholics into the foundation. He became Clerk of the Closet to William III., which post he was obliged to resign from the freedom of his criticism of the Mosaic narrative, but retained his mastership unmolested to his death. He left behind him two theological works in Latin, privately printed, but soon afterwards published, _De Fide et officiis Christianorum_ and _De Statu mortuorum et resurgentium_, in which he carried the liberty of speculation very far. The book on which his fame rests, _The Sacred Theory of the Earth_, was also originally composed in Latin, to which circumstance it is probably indebted for much of its exceptional dignity of style. It was intended by the author as sober natural philosophy, but to a scientific age appears a poetical vision of the former immersion and future conflagration of the earth, justly compared by Mr. Gosse to the gorgeous apocalyptic imaginings of Danby and Martin. According to Burnet the earth was originally an egg both in shape and smoothness, enclosing the waters in an 'antediluvian abyss.' At the universal deluge the earth sank into this internal cavity. Upon the subsidence of the waters the land partly emerged in the confused shapes into which it had been tumbled by the crash, partly remained beneath the sea. The argument is very ingenious and entertaining, and instructive also, for it exhibits to perfection two of the most ordinary causes of fallacy, the assuming imaginary data as unquestionable premises and the enthusiast's adoption of sublimity as the standard of truth. Burnet's mind was the mind of a poet; he had just enough science to misguide him, and more than enough learning to gloss over the vagaries of his science. He is quite as much at home in expounding the catastrophe of the future, the final conflagration, as the watery catastrophe of which he believes the traces to be visible everywhere around him. At the same time he has a strong affinity to the rationalizing divines, even more visible in his strictly theological writings, and would not for the world propound anything of whose reasonableness he has not first convinced himself. As a writer he stands high, combining the splendour and melody of a former age with the ease and lucidity of his own. The following is a fair average specimen of his picturesque imagination and impassioned diction: