for the frenzy of fame is thy discourse on meadows,
and pure streams, and the country life. How peaceful, men say, and
blessed must have been the life of this old man, how lapped in content,
and hedged about by his own humility from the world! They forget, who
speak thus, that thy years, which were many, were also evil, or would
have seemed evil to divers that had tasted of thy fortunes. Thou wert
poor, but that, to thee, was no sorrow, for greed of money was thy
detestation. Thou wert of lowly rank, in an age when gentle blood was
alone held in regard; yet tiny virtues made thee hosts of friends, and
chiefly among religious men, bishops, and doctors of the Church. Thy
private life was not unacquainted with sorrow; thy first wife and all
her fair children were taken from thee like flowers in spring, though,
in thine age, new love and new offspring comforted thee like 'the
primrose of the later year.' Thy private griefs might have made thee
bitter, or melancholy, so might the sorrows of the State and of the
Church, which were deprived of their heads by cruel men, despoiled
of their wealth, the pious driven, like thee, from their homes; fear
everywhere, everywhere robbery and confusion: all this ruin might have
angered another temper. But thou, Father, didst bear all with so much
sweetness as perhaps neither natural temperament, nor a firm faith, nor
the love of angling could alone have displayed. For we see many anglers
(as witness Richard Franck aforesaid) who are angry men, and myself,
when I get my hooks entangled at every cast in a tree, have come nigh to
swear prophane.

Also we see religious men that are sour and fanatical, no rare thing
in the party that professes godliness. But neither private sorrow nor
public grief could abate thy natural kindliness, nor shake a religion
which was not untried, but had, indeed, passed through the furnace like
fine gold. For if we find not Faith at all times easy, because of the
oppositions of Science, and the searching curiosity of men's minds,
neither was Faith a matter of course in thy day. For the learned and
pious were greatly tossed about, like worthy Mr. Chillingworth, by
doubts wavering between the Church of Rome and the Reformed Church of
England. The humbler folk, also, were invited, now here, now there, by
the clamours of fanatical Nonconformists, who gave themselves out to be
somebody, while Atheism itself was not without many to witness to it.
Therefore, such a relig