nd gripe their waist within a narrow span,
Fond Caenis that wouldst wish to be a man!"

The most severe is against the Pope:--

"To see an old shorn lozel perched high
Crossing beneath a golden canopy;
The whiles a thousand hairless crowns crouch low
To kiss the precious case of his proud toe;
And for the lordly fasces borne of old
To see two quiet crossed keys of gold;
But that he most would gaze and wonder at
To the horned mitre and the bloody hat,
The crooked staff, the cowl's strange form and store
Save that he saw the same in hell before;
To see the broken nuns, with new shorn heads
In a blind cloister toss their idle heads."

Although Bishop Hall wrote learnedly and voluminously on theological
subjects, this light medley is now more esteemed than his graver works.
He claimed upon the strength of it to be the earliest English satirist,
and perhaps none of our writings of this kind had as yet been of equal
importance. The work was one of those condemned to the flames by
Whitgift and Bancroft.

Fuller was born in Northamptonshire, in 1608. He became a distinguished
man at Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship at Sidney Sussex
College. He was also an eminent preacher in London, and a prebendary of
Salisbury. In the Civil War, being a stanch Royalist, he was driven from
place to place, and held at one time the interesting post of "Infant
Lady's Chaplain" to the Princess Henrietta. In his "Worthies of
England," Fuller not only enumerates the eminent men for which each
country is distinguished, but gives an account of its products and
proverbs. "A Proverb is much matter decocted into few words. Six
essentials are wanting to it--that it be short, plain, common,
figurative, ancient, true." The most ordinary subject is enlivened by
his learned and humorous mind. Thus, in Bedfordshire, under the head of
"Larks," he tells us, "The most and best of these are caught and
well-dressed about Dunstable in this shire. A harmless bird while
living, not trespassing on grain, and wholesome when dead, then filling
the stomach with meat, as formerly the ear with music. In winter they
fly in flocks, probably the reason why _Alauda_ signifieth in Latin both
a lark and a legion of soldiers; except any will say a legion is so
called because helmeted on their heads and crested like a lark,
therefore also called in Latin _Galerita_. If men would imitate the
early rising of this bird, it would c