milked thirty kine." He kept his head upon his shoulders through Henry's time-his amazing wit and humor helping him to security;- was in fair favor with Edward; but under Mary, walked coolly with Ridley to the stake, where the fires were set, to burn them both in Oxford.

Foxe too is to be remembered for his Stories of the Martyrs of these, and other times, which have formed the nightmare reading for so many school-boys.

I see, too, another figure that will not down in this coterie of Reformers, and that makes itself heard from beyond the Tweed. This is John Knox,† a near contemporary though something younger than most I have named, and not ripening to his

* John Foxe, b. 1517; d. 1587. He was a native of Boston, Lincolnshire; was educated at Oxford; his History of the Acts and Monuments of the Church was first published in England in 1563. There was an earlier edition published at Strasbourg in 1554.

† Born near Haddington, Scotland, in 1505 (d. 1572); bred a friar; was prisoner in France in 1547; resided long time at Geneva; returned to Scotland in 1559. Life by Laing (1847) and by Brandes (1863); Swinburne's Bothwell, Act iv., gives dramatic rendering of a sermon by John Knox. See also Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-worship, Lecture IV.

greatest power till Henry VIII. had gone. Born of humble parentage in Scotland in the early quarter of the century, he was a rigid Papist in his young days, but a more rigid Reformer afterward; much time a prisoner; passing years at Geneva; not altogether a "gloomy, shrinking, fanatic," but keeping, says Carlyle, "a pipe of Bordeaux in that old Edinboro house of his;" getting to know Cranmer, and the rest in England; discussing with these, changes of Church Service; counselling austerities, where Cranmer admitted laxities; afraid of no man, neither woman;-publishing in exile in Mary's dayThe first Blaste of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regiment of Women, and repenting this- quietly no doubt - when Elizabeth came to power. A thin, frail man; strong no ways, but in courage, and in brain; with broad brows - black cap-locks floating gray from under it, in careless whirls that shook as he talked; an eye like a falcon's that flashed the light of twenty years, when sixty were on his shoulders; in after years, writhing with rheumatic pains-crawling upon his stick and a servant's arm into his Church of St. Andrews; lifted into his pulpit by the clerk and his attendant-leaning there on the

desk, a wilted heap of humanity-panting, shaking,

quivering the lifted prayer gave courage; then-fierce torrents of speech (and a pounding of the pulpit till it seemed that it would fly in shivers), with a sharp, swift, piercing utterance that pricked ears as it pricked consciences, and made the roof-timbers clang with echoes.

till his breath came, and the psalm and

Of all these men there are no books that take high rank in Literature proper unless we except the Utopia of More, and the New Testament of Tyndale but their lives and thought were welded by stout blows into the intellectual texture of the century and are not to be forgotten.

Verse- Writing and Psalmodies.

And now, was there really no dalliance with the Muses in times that brought to the front such fighting Gospellers as we have talked of?

Yes, even Thomas More did write poems - having humor in them and grammatic proprieties, and his Latin prosody is admired of Classicists: then there were the versifiers of the Psalms, Sternhold and Hopkins, and the Whittingham who succeeded

John Knox at Geneva - sharing that Scotchman's distaste for beautiful rubrics, and we suspect beau

tiful verses also if we may judge by his version of

the Creed. This is a sample:

"The Father, God is; God, the Son;

God Holy Ghost also;

-

Yet are not three gods in all

But one God and no mo."

From the Apostles' Creed again, we excerpt this:

"From thence, shall he come for to judge

All men both dead and quick.

I, in the Holy Ghost believe

And Church thats Catholick."

*

Hopkins, who was a schoolmaster of Suffolk, and the more immediate associate of Sternhold, thus expostulates with the Deity:

"Why doost withdraw thy hand aback

And hide it in thy lappe?

Oh, plucke it out, and be not slacke
To give thy foes a rap!"

As something worthier from these old psalmists' versing, I give this of Sternhold's :

*In the issue of Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalmody of 1549 (one year after Sternhold's death) there were 37 psalms by

"The earth did shake, for feare did quake,

The hills their bases shook

Removed they were, in place most fayre

At God's right fearful looks.
He rode on hye and did so flye

Upon the Cherubins,

He came in sight, and made his flight
Upon the wings of winds," etc.

It may well be that bluff King Harry relished more the homely Saxonism of such psalms than the Stabat Maters and Te Deums and Jubilates, which assuredly would have better pleased the Princess Katharine of Aragon. Yet even at a time when the writers of such psalmodies received small crumbs of favor from the Court, the English Bible was by no means a free-goer into all companies.

"A nobleman or gentleman may read it"-(I quote from a Statute of Henry VIII.'s time)—“ in his house, or in his garden, or orchard, yet quietly and without disturbance of order. A merchant may read it to himself privately: But the common people, women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen and servingmen, are to be punished with one month's imprisonment, as often as they are detected in reading the Bible, either privately or openly."

Sternhold, and 7 by Hopkins. In subsequent editions more of Hopkins' work was added.

*34 and 35 Henry VIII.: A.D. 1542-43. The full text