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His conscience, once, surveying his jade's stable,
Prick'd him, for keeping horses so unable.

"Oh why should I," saith John, "by scholars thrive,
For jades that will not carry, lead, nor drive?"

To mend the matter, out he starts, one night,
And having spied a palfrey somewhat white,
He takes him up, and up he mounts his back,
Rides to his house, and there he turns him black;

Marks him in forehead, feet, in rump, and crest,
As coursers mark those horses which are best.
So neatly John had coloured every spot,
That the right owner sees him, knows him not.

Had he but feather'd his new-painted breast,
He would have seemèd Pegasus at least.
Who but John Fletcher's horse, in all the town,
Amongst all hackneys, purchased this renown?

But see the luck; John Fletcher's horse, one night,

By rain was wash'd again almost to white.

His first right owner, seeing such a change,

Thought he should know him, but his hue was strange!

But eyeing him, and spying out his steed,
By flea-bit spots of his now washed weed,
Seizes the horse; so Fletcher was attainted,

And did confess the horse-he stole and painted.

To close with honour to Brooke; in his graver moments he warmly repels the accusation Camden raised against him, as an enemy to learning, and appeals to many learned scholars, who had tasted of his liberality at the Universities, towards their maintenance; but, in an elevated tone, he asserts his right to deliver his animadversions as York Herald.

"I know (says Brooke) the great advantage my adversary has over me, in the received opinion of the world. If some will blame me for that my writings carry some characters of spleen against him, men of pure affections, and not partial, will think reason that he should, by ill hearing, lose the pleasure he conceived by ill speaking. But since I presume not to understand above that which is meet for me to know, I must not be discouraged, nor fret myself, because of the malicious; for I find myself seated upon a rock, that is sure from tempest and waves, from whence I have a prospect into his errors and waverings. I do confess his great worth and merit, and that we Britons are in some sort beholding to him; and might have been much more, if God had lent him

the grace to have played the faithful steward, in the talent committed to his trust and charge."

Such was the dignified and the intrepid reply of Ralph Brooke, a man whose name is never mentioned without an epithet of reproach; and who, in his own day, was hunted down, and not suffered, vindictive as he was no doubt, to relieve his bitter and angry spirit, by pouring it forth to the public eye.*

But the story is not yet closed. Camden, who wanted the magnanimity to endure with patient dignity the corrections of an inferior genius, had the wisdom, with the meanness, silently to adopt his useful corrections, but would never confess the hand which had brought them.†

Thus hath Ralph Brooke told his own tale undisturbed, and, after the lapse of more than a century, the press has been opened to him. Whenever a great author is suffered to gag the mouth of his adversary, Truth receives the insult. But there is another point more essential to inculcate in literary controversy. Ought we to look too scrupulously into the motives which may induce an inferior author to detect the errors of a greater? A man from no amiable motive may perform a proper action: Ritson was useful after Warton; nor have we a right to ascribe it to any concealed motives, which, after all, may be doubtful. In the present instance, our muchabused Ralph Brooke first appears to have composed his ela

* Brooke died at the old mansion opposite the Roman town of Reculver in Kent. The house is still known as Brooke-farm; and the original gateway of decorative brick work still exists. He was buried in Reculver Church, now destroyed, where a mural monument was erected to his memory, having a rhyming inscription, which told the reader :

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Brooke was originally a painter-stainer. His enmity to Camden appears to have originated in the appointment of the latter to the office of Clarencieux on the death of Richard Lee; he believing himself to be qualified for the place by greater knowledge, and by his long connexion with the College of Arms. His mode of righting himself lacked judgment, and he was twice suspended from his office, and was even attempted to be expelled therefrom.-ED.

+ In Anstis's edition of "A Second Discoverie of Errors in the Muchcommended Britannia,' &c.," 1724, the reader will find all the passages in the "Britannia" of the edition of 1594 to which Brooke made exceptions, placed column-wise with the following edition of it in 1600. It is, as Anstis observes, a debt to truth, without making any reflections.

borate work from the most honourable motives: the offer he made of his Notes to Camden seems a sufficient evidence. The pride of a great man first led Camden into an error, and that error plunged him into all the barbarity of persecution; thus, by force, covering his folly. Brooke over-valued his studies it is the nature of those peculiar minds adapted to excel in such contracted pursuits. He undertook an ungracious office, and he has suffered by being placed by the side of the illustrious genius with whom he has so skilfully combated in his own province; and thus he has endured contempt, without being contemptible. The public are not less the debtors to such unfortunate, yet intrepid authors.*

* There is a sensible observation in the old "Biographia Britannica" on Brooke. "From the splenetic attack originally made by Rafe Brooke upon the "Britannia" arose very great advantages to the public, by the shifting and bringing to light as good, perhaps a better and more authentic account of our nobility, than had been given at that time of those in any other country of Europe."-p. 1135.

MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.

Of the two prevalent factions in the reign of Elizabeth, the Catholics and the Puritans-Elizabeth's philosophical indifference offends both-Maunsell's Catalogue omits the books of both parties of the Puritans, "the mild and moderate, with the fierce and fiery," a great religious body covering a political one-Thomas Cartwright, the chief of the Puritans, and his rival Whitgift-attempts to make the Ecclesiastical paramount to the Civil Power-his plan in dividing the country into comitial, provincial, and national assemblies, to be concentrated under the secret head at Warwick, where Cartwright was elected "perpetual Moderator !”— after the most bitter controversies, Cartwright became very compliant to his old rival Whitgift, when Archbishop of Canterbury-of MARTIN MAR-PRELATE―his sons-specimens of their popular ridicule and invective-Cartwright approves of this mode of controversy-better counteracted by the wits than by the grave admonishers-specimens of the ANTI-MARTIN MAR-PRELATES-of the authors of these surreptitious publications.

THE Reformation, or the new Religion, as it was then called, under Elizabeth, was the most philosophical she could form, and therefore the most hateful to the zealots of all parties. It was worthy of her genius, and of a better age! Her sole object was, a deliverance from the Papal usurpation. Her own supremacy maintained, she designed to be the great sovereign of a great people; and the Catholic, for some time, was called to her council-board, and entered with the Reformer into the same church. But wisdom itself is too weak to regulate human affairs, when the passions of men rise up in obstinate insurrection. Elizabeth neither won over the Reformers nor the Catholics. An excommunicating bull, precipitated by Papal Machiavelism, driving on the brutalised obedience of its slaves, separated the friends. This was a political error arising from a misconception of the weakness of our government; and when discovered as such, a tolerating dispensation was granted "till better times ;" an unhealing expedient, to join again a dismembered nation! It would surprise many, were they aware how numerous were our ancient families and our eminent characters who still remained

Catholics. The country was then divided, and Englishmen who were heroic Romanists fell the terrible victims.

On the other side, the national evil took a new form. It is probable that the Queen, regarding the mere ceremonies of religion, now venerable with age, as matters of indifference, and her fine taste perhaps still lingering amid the solemn gorgeousness of the Roman service, and her senses and her emotions excited by the religious scenery, did not share in that abhorrence of the paintings and the images, the chant and the music, the censer and the altar, and the pomp of the prelatical habits, which was prompting many well-intentioned Reformers to reduce the ecclesiastical state into apostolical nakedness and primitive rudeness. She was slow to meet this austerity of feeling, which in this country at length extirpated those arts which exalt our nature, and for this these pious Vandals nicknamed the Queen "the untamed heifer;" and the fierce Knox expressly wrote his " First Blast Against the Monstrous Government of Women." Of these Reformers, many had imbibed the republican notions of Calvin. In their hatred of Popery, they imagined that they had not gone far enough in their wild notions of reform, for they viewed it, still shadowed out in the new hierarchy of the bishops. The fierce Calvin, in his little church at Geneva, presumed to rule a great nation on the scale of a parish institution; copying the apostolical equality at a time when the Church (say the Episcopalians) had all the weakness of infancy, and could live together in a community of all things, from a sense of their common poverty. Be this as it may, the dignified ecclesiastical order was a vulnerable institution, which could do no greater injury, and might effect as much public good as any other order in the state. My business

* The Church History by Dodd, a Catholic, fills three vols. folio: it is very rare and curious. Much of our own domestic history is interwoven in that of the fugitive papists, and the materials of this work are frequently drawn from their own archives, preserved in their seminaries at Douay, Valladolid, &c., which have not been accessible to Protestant writers. Here I discovered a copious nomenclature of eminent persons, and many literary men, with many unknown facts, both of a private and public nature. It is useful, at times, to know whether an English author was a Catholic.

+ I refer the reader to Selden's "Table Talk" for many admirable ideas on "Bishops." That enlightened genius, who was no friend to the ecclesiastical temporal power, acknowledges the absolute necessity of this order in a great government. The preservers of our literature and our morals they ought to be, and many have been. When the political reformers

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