Born at Salvington, Sussex, Dec. 16, 1584: died at London, Nov. 30, 1654. An English jurist, antiquary, Orientalist, and author. At about 16 years of age be entered Hart Hall, Oxford, and in 1603 Clifford’s Inn, London; in 1604 he migrated to the Inner Temple. He was intimately associated with Ben Jonson, Drayton, Edward Lyttleton. Henry Rolle, Edward Herbert, and Thomas Gardener. He was first employed by Sir Robert Cotton to copy and abridge parliamentary records in the Tower. He established a large and lucrative practice, but his chief reputation was made as a writer and scholar. In 1610 he published “England’s Epinomis” and “Janus Anglorum, Facies Altera,” which treated of English law down to Henry II. These were followed by “Titles of Honour” (1614), “Analecton Anglo-Britannicon” (1615), “De Diis Syriis” (1617). The “History of Tithes,” published in 1618, was suppressed. He was the instigator of the “protestation” of Dec. 18, 1621, and was committed to the Tower. In 1623 he entered Parliament as member for Lancaster, and in 1628 helped to draw up and carry the Petition of Right. In 1635 he dedicated his “Mare Clausum” to the king (Charles I.), and seems to have inclined to the court party. He was returned to the Long Parliament (1640) for the University of Oxford, and was a member of the committee which impeached Archbishop Laud. In 1646 he became master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Besides the works already mentioned, he was the author of “De Juri Naturali, etc.” (1640), “Privileges of the Baronage of England, etc.” (1642), and “Table-Talk,” his best-known work (1689).

Personal

  He never owned the mariage with the countesse of Kent till after her death, upon some lawe account. He never kept any servant peculiar, but my ladie’s were all at his command; he lived with her in Aedibus Carmeliticis (White Fryers), which was, before the conflagration, a noble dwelling…. He was temperate in eating and drinking. He had a slight stuffe, or silke, kind of false carpet to cast over the table where he read and his papers lay, when a stranger came-in, so that he needed not to displace his bookes or papers…. When he was neer death, the minister (Mr. [Richard] Johnson) was comeing to him to assoile him: Mr. Hobbes happened then to be there; sayd he, “What, will you that have wrote like a man, now dye like a woman?” So the minister was not let in…. He was very tall, I guesse about 6 foot high; sharp ovall face; head not very big; long nose inclining to one side; full popping eie (gray).

  Selden was a person whom no character can flatter, or transmit in any expressions equal to his merit and virtue. He was of so stupendous learning in all kinds and in all languages (as may appear in his excellent and transcendent writings) that a man would have thought he had been entirely conversant amongst books, and had never spent an hour but in reading and writing; yet his humanity, courtesy, and affability was such that he would have been thought to have been bred in the best courts but that his good nature, charity, and delight in doing good, and in communicating all he knew, exceeded that breeding. His style in all his writings seems harsh and sometimes obscure, which is not wholly to be imputed to the abstruse subjects of which he commonly treated out of the paths trod by other men, but to a little undervaluing the beauty of a style, and too much propensity to the language of antiquity; but in his conversation he was the most clear discourser, and had the best faculty in making hard things easy, and presenting them to the understanding of any man that hath been known. Mr. Hyde was wont to say that he valued himself upon nothing more than upon having had Mr. Selden’s acquaintance from the time he was very young, and held it with great delight as long as they were suffered to continue together in London; and he was very much troubled always when he heard him blamed, censured, and reproached for staying in London and in the parliament after they were in rebellion, and in the worst times, which his age obliged him to do; and how wicked soever the actions were which were every day done, he was confident he had not given his consent to them, but would have hindered them if he could with his own safety, to which he was always enough indulgent. If he had some infirmities with other men, they were weighed down with wonderful and prodigious abilities and excellencies in the other scale.

  I know you are acquainted, how greatly he (Sir M. Hale) valued Mr. Selden, being one of his Executors; his Books and Picture being still near him. I think it meet therefore to remember, that because many Hobbists do report, that Mr. Selden was at the heart an Infidel, and inclined to the Opinions of Hobbs, I desired him (Sir M. Hale) to tell me the truth herein; And he oft professed to me, that Mr. Selden was a resolved serious Christian; and that he was a great adversary to Hobbs his errors; and that he had seen him openly oppose him so earnestly, as either to depart from him, or drive him out of the Room.

  That he was regarded with extraordinary veneration and esteem by his contemporaries of different parties, we have the fullest evidence: indeed, the man who reckoned among his friends and admirers Whitelock and Clarendon, Usher and Hale, must have possessed no ordinary share of moral, as well as intellectual, excellence.

  Mr. Selden was certainly the most learned, and perhaps the most honest Englishman of his time. He was actually a patriot, for his continued efforts to serve his country, however frequently he might have mistaken the means, seem never for a moment to have incurred even a suspicion of selfishness. Wealth, power, and dignities, had been laid at his feet, and refused by him. Firm in his occasional resistance to that royal prerogative, the limits of which no man could so well define as himself; incapable of private resentment for public causes; indifferent to popularity, and despising the hypocritical fanaticism by which it was then the fashion to court it; he stood almost alone, a perfect example of public integrity. His patriotism extended to, and guided even his literary studies. The final object of all his works was to improve the history of the religion, the laws, the government, or the liberties, of his country. In the prosecution of his profound inquiries he disdained conjecture, and avoided argument. Devoted by his nature to the love of truth, he could not rest on his way till he had arrived at facts; and influenced by the habit of his profession, he considered those only as facts which he could prove by the most rigid evidence.

  No reputation stood higher than that of Selden. He was respected on all sides as an honest man, and as a constitutional lawyer to whom there was no rival. He had little mind to be a martyr, but he had still less a mind to be a knave.

  He was the first and greatest of the “Trimmers” who enlisted during this stormy century so large a contingent of our nation’s strength. As long as personal sovereignty menaced the traditional privileges of Englishmen he was distinctly popular in sympathy, and even stood a certain amount of persecution in the popular cause. When that cause had got the upper hand and began to presume, Selden drew back. He was an Oxford man; but the greatest Cambridge poet of our time has exactly summarised Selden’s idea, without probably thinking of Selden, in the well-known lines about

	Freedom slowly broadening down
	From precedent to precedent.

He was thus very horrible to “high-fliers” and men in a hurry on either side; and indeed to the present day there is a certain cold-bloodedness about him. He had the lawyer’s—especially the English lawyer’s—dislike of ecclesiasticism; he had the scholar’s dislike of democracy. He was almost a great man; but he was not in the least a hero.

  In politics, if Selden did not exhibit the character of a hero, a martyr, or a saint, he played the part of an honest man. The fact that he was consulted alike by the commons on their rights and by the lords on their privileges is a remarkable testimony not only to his learning, but to his freedom from party bias. He seems in all cases to have maintained what he believed to be the right, and to have been diverted from this course neither by the hope of popular applause nor by the favour of the court, nor by resentment for wrongs by which many men would have been soured. His desire was for an ordered liberty, and that he thought was to be found in the ancient constitution of the country. He had no democratic feeling, and no admiration for the great mass of mankind.

Titles of Honour, 1614

  J. Selden liveth on his owne, is the Law book of the Judges of England, the bravest man in all languages; his booke “Titles of Honour,” written to his chamber-fellow Heyward.

  As to what concerns our nobility and gentry, all that come within either of those lists, will allow that Mr. Selden’s “Titles of Honour” ought first to be well perused, for the gaining of a general notion of the distinction of degrees, from an emperor, down to a country gentleman.

  Selden’s “Titles of Honour” a gentleman should not be without.

De Diis Syriis, 1617

  For the enumeration of the Syrian and Arabian deities, it may be observed that Milton has comprised in one hundred and thirty very beautiful lines the two large and learned syntagmas which Selden had composed on that abstruse subject.

  This was Selden’s celebrated work, which placed him at once in the rank of the first scholars of the age. The primary purpose was to treat on the false gods mentioned in the Old Testament, but with which he joined an inquiry into the Syrian idolatry in general, and an occasional illustration of the ancient Theology of the other Heathen nations.

  Remark Milton’s wonderful sublimity, not merely in his central figure of him who had not “lost his original brightness,” who was “not less than archangel ruined;” but in his creation, it may almost be said, out of Selden’s book and the few allusions in the Old Testament, of a new Demonology…. I owe the germ of this observation, perhaps more than the germ, to my friend Mr. Macaulay.

History of Tithes, 1618

  Mr. Selden’s “History of Tithes,” was what, most of all his works, blasted his credit, and exposed him to penance, as well as censure.

  Though often attacked, and the author compelled to make an apology for writing it, it has never been answered. His doctrines on the subject are now, I believe, very generally received.

  His work “De Decimis,” in which he tried to prove that the giving of tithes was not ordered by any Divine command, excited much contention, and aroused the animosity of the clergy. In consequence of this in 1621 he was imprisoned, and remained in custody for five years. On the dissolution of Parliament in 1629, being obnoxious to the royal party, he was sent to the Tower, and then confined in a house of correction for pirates. But as a compensation for his injuries in 1647 he received £5,000 from the public purse and became a member of the Long Parliament.

  When published the book aroused a fierce storm. The author was summoned to answer for his opinions before some of the lords of the court of high commission and some of the privy council, and he acknowledged his error in a few lines in writing. The submission contained, as Selden contended, no confession of mistakes in the book, and expressed no change of opinion, but merely regret at the publication of the work. The form of the submission was probably a matter of arrangement between himself and those of his judges who seemed to favour him. The book itself was suppressed by public authority, and by some command, probably of the king, he was forbidden to print any reply to his numerous antagonists, a restraint of which he bitterly complained to the Marquis of Buckingham in May 1620.

De Juri Naturali, etc., 1640

  Let him hasten to be acquainted with that noble volume written by our learned Selden, “Of the Law of Nature and of Nations,” a work more useful and more worthy to be perused by whoever studies to be a great man in wisdom, equity, and justice, than all those “decretals and sumless sums” which the pontifical clerks have doted on, ever since that unfortunate mother famously sinned thrice, and died impenitent of her bringing into the world those two mis-begotten infants, Lombard and Gratian.

  The whole work belongs far more to theological than to philosophical investigation; and I have placed it here chiefly out of conformity to usage: for undoubtedly Selden, though a man of very strong reasoning faculties, had not greatly turned them to the principles of natural law. His reliance on the testimony of Jewish writers, many of them by no means ancient, for those primeval traditions as to the sons of Noah, was in the character of his times; but it will scarcely suit the more rigid criticism of our own. His book, however, is excellent for its proper purpose, that of representing Jewish opinion; and is among the greatest achievements in erudition that any English writer has performed.

Table Talk, 1689

  Table-Talk: | Being the | DISCOURSES | of | John Selden, Esq. | Being His Sense of various Matters of | Weight and high Consequence; | relating especially to | RELIGION and STATE. | Distingue Tempora. | LONDON: | Printed for E. Smith, in the Year | M DC LXXXIX.

  Were you not Executors to that Person, who (while he liv’d) was the Glory of the Nation, yet I am Confident anything of his would find Acceptance with you; and truly the Sense and Notion here is wholly his, and most of the Words. I had the opportunity to hear his Discourse twenty Years together; and lest all those Excellent things that usually fell from him might be lost, some of them from time to time I faithfully committed to Writing, which here digested into this Method, I humbly present to your Hands. You will quickly perceive them to be his by the familiar Illustrations wherewith they are set off, and in which way you know he was so happy, that, with a marvellous delight to those that heard him, he would presently convey the highest Points of Religion, and the most important Affairs of State, to an ordinary apprehension. In reading be pleased to distinguish Times, and in your Fancy carry along with you, the When and the Why many of these things were spoken; this will give them the more Life, and the smarter Relish.

  There can scarcely be a less disputable mark of integrity and worthiness in an individual than his succeeding in securing the “golden opinions” of parties opposed to each other in contending for the same object, and concerning which object that individual is known by them to differ from them both. Now of all contentions, history affords uniform testimony that none are so jealous and implacable as those in which are involved the religious opinions and the temporal pre-eminence of the disputants. Mingling in such contentions, Selden passed his life a prominent actor in them all, and yet so moderate, consistent, and talented was his course, that although occasionally supporting and opposing each, the extremes of the conflicting parties looked up to him and sought the aid of his abilities.

  There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer…. O! to have been with Selden over his glass of wine, making every accident an outlet and a vehicle of wisdom.

  This very short and small volume which gives, perhaps, a more exalted notion of Selden’s natural talents than any of his learned writings…. Full of vigor, raciness, and a kind of scorn of the half-learned, far less rude, but more cutting, than that of Scaliger. It has been said that the “Table-Talk” of Selden is worth all the Ana of the Continent. In this I should be disposed to concur; but they are not exactly works of the same class.

  He died in 1654, and his “Table-Talk” was published by his amanuensis Richard Milward in 1689. Lucky the scholar who can talk and who has a discriminating “Richard Milward;” for, otherwise, how many readers would John Selden now boast in England? Most men of letters, indeed, have had occasion to make some acquaintance with his writings—let us say with the “Titles of Honour” for instance—and have bowed reverently to the immensely learned man, of whom Ben Jonson said “he was the law book of the Judges.” But is the Selden of the “Titles of Honour” the same person as the Selden of the “Table-Talk”? One scarcely believes it. Dry, grave, and almost crabbed in his writings—his conversation is homely, humorous, shrewd, vivid, even delightful! He is still the great scholar and the tough parliamentarian, but merry, playful, and witty. The ὰνήριθμον γεηασμα is on the sea of his vast intellect. He writes like the opponent of Grotius; he talks like the friend of Ben Jonson.

  These Discourses show somewhat of the mind, but not the whole mind of Selden, even in the subjects treated of. What must have been the fulness of information, the aptness of illustration, the love of truth, the justness of reasoning, when such fragments as these could be picked up by a casual bearer? Bacon’s “Essays” are most carefully finished compositions: Selden’s “Table-Talk” is the spontaneous incidental outpouring of an overflowing mind; and yet it may not unworthily compare with the former.

  His homely, familiar manner, has its attractions as well for the scholar as for the common reader; pregnant as are his sentences with his great good sense, rare learning, bringing abstruse subjects home to the affairs of life in a style at once perspicuous and agreeable.

  Selden’s style is crabbed and sometimes obscure, while most of his treatises are overweighted with the ponderous learning of their author. Clarendon, while admitting the harshness and obscurity of his writings, records that “in his conversation he was a most clear discourser.” His “Table Talk” bears out this description. It is full of quaint humour and pleasant satire, combined with much admirable common sense. Many of the sententious remarks in the volume indicate Selden’s strong resentment against religious bigotry and intolerance, but there is no malice in the whimsical anecdotes and allusions in which the book abounds. Altogether, the “Table Talk” shows Selden as a genial, shrewd, and sensible observer of men and things, whose mind had neither been soured by theological controversies, nor warped by legal studies.

General

	You that have been
	Ever at home, yet have all countries seen;
	And like a compass, keeping one foot still
	Upon your centre, do your circle fill
	Of general knowledge; watch’d men, manners too,
	Heard what times past have said, seen what ours do!
	Which grace shall I make love to first? your skill
	Or faith in things? or is’t your wealth and will
	T’ inform and teach? or your unwearied pain
	Of gathering? bounty in pouring out again?
	What fables have you vex’d, what truth redeem’d,
	Antiquities search’d, opinions disesteem’d,
	Impostures branded, and authorities urg’d!
	What blots and errors have you watched and purg’d
	Records and authors of! how rectified
	Times, manners, customs! innovations spied!
	Sought out the fountains, sources, creeks, paths, ways,
	And noted the beginnings and decays!
	Where is that nominal mark, or real rite,
	Form, act, or ensign, that hath ’scaped your sight?

  The chief of learned men reputed in this land.

	Lo! such was Selden, and his learned fame
	All polish’d nations would be proud to claim.
	The gods, nay, e’en the stones, their voice would raise,
	Should men by silence dare withhold their praise.

  His style in all his writings seems harsh, and sometimes obscure; which is not wholly to be imputed to the abstract subjects of which he commonly treated, out of the paths trod by other men, but to a little undervaluing the beauty of a style, and too much propensity to the language of antiquity: but in his conversation he was the most clear discourser, and had the best faculty in making hard things and present to the understanding, of any man that hath been known.

  The most learned Mr. Selden, one of the greatest men that any age has produced.

  The famous Dr. Pocock assisted Mr. Selden very much, as Selden himself is pleased to acknowledge in several places, particularly in his edition of Eutychius’ “Origines Ecclesiæ Alexandrinæ,” which Origines is only a small inconsiderable fragment of Eutychius’ “Annales” that Pocock himself afterwards published in Arabic and Latin. Indeed Selden, notwithstanding his great pretences, had but little skill in Arabic, and he made use of others’ help in that, as in many other things. His design of printing these Annals was purely out of his hatred to episcopacy. His Commentary upon them, which is large, is a mere rhapsody, learned indeed and full of reading, but generally like his other performances injudicious. His efforts against episcopacy are but weak, and yet he did what he was able.

  John Selden, sometimes styled “The great dictator of learning of the English nation,” and pronounced by Grotius, his antagonist, to be the glory of it, was a man of as extensive and profound knowledge as any of his age. He was thoroughly skilled in every thing that related to his own profession; but the general bent of his studies was to sacred and profane antiquity. The greater part of his works are on uncommon subjects. Like a man of genius, he was not content with walking in the beaten track of learning, but was for striking out new paths, and enlarging the territories of science.

  Certainly the most philosophical as well as learned inquirer into antiquity who had yet appeared in the country.

  His literary merit was liberally acknowledged by those continental scholars best able to appreciate it; Grotius, Salmasius Bochart, G. Vossius, Gronovius and Daniel Heinsius are a few among the distinguished list of his encomiasts, and though his works are probably little read at the present day, because the additions he made to the stock of learning have been made available by modern writers and compilers, he must ever be accounted one of the chief literary ornaments of this country, nor has perhaps Europe produced a scholar of more profound and varied erudition.

  The only man in the British Islands who was allowed to be more than a match for Usher in miscellaneous erudition was his friend and correspondent, the English lawyer, Selden. No man in that age is more worthy of note than this superb scholar. His life, though simple in its tenor, had already been full of important incidents…. After some minor exhibitions of his learning in legal tracts and in notes to a portion of Drayton’s “Polyolbion,” he had published, in 1614, when in his thirtieth year, his work on “Titles of Honor,” still one of our great authorities in all matters of heraldry…. A memorable singularity about Selden is that, while perhaps the greatest scholar of his day in England, he was yet one of its freest and most conspicuously skeptical thinkers. With a memory full of all that had happened since the Flood, he reasoned on current questions as if, the pressure of his recollections on all sides being equal, the result, for his judgment, was absolute equilibrium.

  John Selden, unsurpassed for learning and ability in the whole splendid history of the English bar, on every book of whose library was written, “Before every thing, Liberty!”

  Selden’s learning, prudence, and polite affable manner, made him perhaps the most generally respected man of his time—respected alike by Royalist and by Puritan. As a writer of English, he is known by his “History of Tithes” (1618), which offended the clergy by denying their divine right to such revenue; but chiefly by his “Table-Talk,” published after his death. The style of his writings is harsh, obscure, and antiquated; in conversation he seems to have been more felicitous, dealing in pointed sententious aphorisms and witty turns. The “Table-Talk” is full of worldly wisdom and sarcasms against clerical bigotry.

  Selden has the limitations of one whose feet are always planted firmly on solid earth. He is a guide, a critic; not a leader, an inspirer. As he is untouched by the fanaticisms, he is incapable of the fine enthusiasms of his days…. In his writings his sentences are usually ponderous, and often involved—a striking contrast to the homeliness and lucidity of his conversations, which, however, show also carelessness as to form. Yet in both there is an entire absence of pedantry.