Item, Four Labourers 2 8

_Charges for burning Cranmer._

_s._ _d._
For an 100 of wood fagots, 06 0
For an 100 and half of furs fagots 03 4
For the carriage of them 0 8
To two labourers 1 4

I will draw the curtain upon this dismal picture, by a short
extract from one of Cranmer's letters, in which this great
and good man thus ingeniously urges the necessity of the
Scriptures being translated into the English language; a
point, by the bye, upon which neither he, nor Cromwell, nor
Latimer, I believe, were at first decided; "God's will and
commandment is, (says Cranmer) that when the people be
gathered together, the minister should use such language as
the people may understand, and take profit thereby; or else
hold their peace. For as an harp or lute, if it give no
certain sound that men may know what is stricken, who can
dance after it--for all the sound is vain; so is it vain and
profiteth nothing, sayeth Almighty God, by the mouth of St.
Paul, if the priest speak to the people in a language which
they know not." _Certain most godly, fruitful, and
comfortable letters of Saintes and holy Martyrs, &c._, 1564;
4to., fol. 8.]

All hail to the sovereign who, bred up in severe habits of reading and
meditation, loved books and scholars to the very bottom of her heart!
I consider ELIZABETH as a royal bibliomaniac of transcendent fame!--I
see her, in imagination, wearing her favourite little _Volume of
Prayers_,[325] the composition of Queen Catherine Parr, and Lady
Tirwit, "bound in solid gold, and hanging by a gold chain at her
side," at her morning and evening devotions--afterwards, as she became
firmly seated upon her throne, taking an interest in the
embellishments of the _Prayer Book_,[326] which goes under her own
name; and then indulging her strong bibliomaniacal appetites in
fostering the institution "for the erecting of _a Library and an
Academy for the study of Antiquities and History_."[327]
Notwithstanding her earnestness to root out all relics of the Roman
Catholic religion (to which, as the best excuse, we must, perhaps,
attribute the sad cruelty of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots), I
c