once tempted to break the commandments,
because I love plain speaking, plain writing, and plain dealing, which
he does not: I hate the word _excerpted_, and the action imported in it.
However, he is a fanciful man, and thinks there is no elegancy nor wit
but in his own way of talking. I must say as Tully did, _Malim equidem
indisertam prudentiam quam stultam loquacitatem_."

In his turn he accuses Vernon of being a perpetual transcriber, and for
the Malone minuteness of his history.

"But how have I excerpted _his_ matter? Then I am sure to rob the
spittle-house; for he is so poor and put to hard shifts, that he has
much ado to compose a tolerable story, which he hath been hammering and
conceiving in his mind for four years together, before he could bring
forth his _foetus_ of intolerable transcriptions to molest the reader's
patience and memory. How doth he run himself out of breath, sometimes
for twenty pages and more, at other times fifteen, ordinarily nine and
ten, collected out of Dr. Heylin's old books, before he can take his
wind again to return to his story! I never met with such a transcriber
in all my days; for want of matter to fill up a _vacuum_, of which his
book was in much danger, he hath set down the story of Westminster, as
long as the Ploughman's Tale in Chaucer, which to the reader would have
been more pertinent and pleasant. I wonder he did not transcribe bills
of Chancery, especially about a tedious suit my father had for several
years about a lease at Norton."

In his raillery of Vernon's affected metaphors and comparisons, "his
similitudes and dissimilitudes strangely hooked in, and fetched as far
as the Antipodes," Barnard observes, "The man hath also a strange
opinion of himself that he is Dr. Heylin; and because he writes his
Life, that he hath his natural parts, if not acquired. The soul of St.
Augustin (say the schools) was Pythagorically transfused into the corpse
of Aquinas; so the soul of Dr. Heylin into a narrow soul. I know there
is a question in philosophy, _An animae sint oequales?_--whether souls
be alike? But there's a difference between the spirits of Elijah and
Elisha: so small a prophet with so great a one!"

Dr. Barnard concludes by regretting that good counsel came now
unseasonably, else he would have advised the writer to have transmitted
his task to one who had been an ancient friend of Dr. Heylin, rather
than ambitiously have assumed it, who was a professed stranger to hi