We have seen Wolsey in his garniture of gold, going from court to school; and Sir Thomas More, stern, strong, and unyielding; and Archbishop Cranmer, disposed to think rightly, but without the courage to back up his thought; and associated with these, it were well to keep in mind the other figures of the great religious processional. There was William Tyndale, native of Gloucestershire, a slight, thin figure of a man; honest to the core; well-taught; getting dignities he never sought ; wearied in his heart of hearts by the flattering coquetries of the King; perfecting the work of Wyclif in making the old home Bible readable by all the world. His translation was first printed in Wittenberg about 1530:* I give the Lord's Prayer as it appeared in the original edition :

"Oure Father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name. Let thy kingdom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as hit ys in heven. breade. And forgeve vs them which treespas vs. delyvre vs from yvell.

Geve vs this daye oure dayly oure trespases, even as we forgeve Leade vs not into temptacion but Amen."

* William Tyndale, b. about 1480; d. (burned at the stake) 1536. G. P. Marsh (Eng. Language and Early Lit.) says "Tyndale's translation of the New Testament has exerted a

But Tyndale was not safe in England; nor yet in the Low Countries whither he went, and where the long reach of religious hate and jealousy put its hand upon him and brought him to a death whose fiery ignominies are put out of sight by the lustrous quality of his deservings.

I see too amongst those great, dim figures, that speak in Scriptural tones, the form of Hugh Latimer, as he stands to-day on the Memorial Cross in Oxford. I think of him too - in humbler dress than that which the sculptor has put on him even the yeoman's clothes, which he wore upon his father's farm, in the Valley of the Soar, when he wrought there in the meadows, and drank in humility of thought, and manly independence under the skies of Leicestershire where (as he says), "My father had walk for an hundred sheep, and my mother

more marked influence upon English philology than any other native work between the ages of Chaucer and of Shakespeare."

*Latimer (Hugh) b. 1491; d. (at the stake) 1555. He was educated at Cambridge-- came to be Bishop of Worceswrote much, wittily and strongly. A collection of his Sermons was published in 1570-71; and there have been many later issues.

ter

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 tor

till his breath came, and the psalm and

rents 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.

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