Matthew Sylvester

He was too poor to stay long at college, but as he kept up his studies while supporting himself in various places, probably by teaching, he became a good linguist and well read in philosophy.

In 1667 he was living at Mansfield with Joseph Truman, but in that year he came to London, and became pastor of a congregation at Rutland House, Charterhouse Yard.

Richard Baxter, who remained to the last in communion with the Church of England, and declined to be pastor of any separated congregation, nevertheless became, from 1687, Sylvester's unpaid assistant.

Baxter's eloquence as a preacher supplied what was lacking to Sylvester, whose delivery was poor, though in prayer he had a remarkable gift, as Oliver Heywood notes.

Edmund Calamy, who was Sylvester's assistant from 1692 to 1695, describes him as ‘a very meek spirited, silent, and inactive man,’ in straitened circumstances.

Sylvester, an unmethodical man, had to deal with ‘a great quantity of loose papers,’ needing to be sorted.

In addition to a fatal lack of arrangement, the folio abounds in misprints, as Sylvester ‘could not attend the press and prevent the errata.’ The ‘contents’ and index are by Calamy, who subsequently issued an octavo Abridgment (1702, 1714), much handier but very inferior in interest to the Reliquiæ.