inality of method, owing at
most something to the popular "gags" of the actor Richard Tarleton, then
recently dead. This is quite uncritical. An exceedingly free treatment of
sacred and serious affairs had been characteristic of the Reformers from
Luther downward, and the new Martin only introduced the variety of style
which any writer of considerable talents is sure to show. His method, at
any rate for a time, is no doubt sufficiently amusing, though it is hardly
effective. Serious arguments are mixed up with the wildest buffoonery, and
unconscious absurdities (such as a solemn charge against the unlucky Bishop
Aylmer because he used the phrase "by my faith," and enjoyed a game at
bowls) with the most venomous assertion or insinuation of really odious
offences. The official answer to the _Epistle_ and the _Epitome_ has been
praised by no less a person than Bacon[47] for its gravity of tone.
Unluckily Dr. Cooper was entirely destitute of the faculty of relieving
argument with humour. He attacks the theology of the Martinists with
learning and logic that leave nothing to desire; but unluckily he proceeds
in precisely the same style to deal laboriously with the quips assigned by
Martin to Mistress Margaret Lawson (a noted Puritan shrew of the day), and
with mere idle things like the assertion that Whitgift "carried Dr. Perne's
cloakbag." The result is that, as has been said, the rejoinder _Hay any
Work for Cooper_ shows Martin, at least at the beginning, at his very best.
The artificial simplicity of his distortions of Cooper's really simple
statements is not unworthy of Swift, or of the best of the more recent
practitioners of the grave and polite kind of political irony. But this is
at the beginning, and soon afterwards Martin relapses for the most part
into the alternation between serious argument which will not hold water and
grotesque buffoonery which has little to do with the matter. A passage from
the _Epistle_ lampooning Aylmer, Bishop of London, and a sample each of
_Pap with a Hatchet_ and the _Almond_, will show the general style. But the
most characteristic pieces of all are generally too coarse and too
irreverent to be quotable:--

[47] In his _Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of
England_ (Works. Folio, 1753, ii. p. 375).

[Sidenote: _I'll make you weary of it dumb John, except you leave
persecuting._]

"Well now to mine eloquence, for I can do it I tell you. Who made