_Laudis amore tumes? Sunt certa piacula quæ te_
_Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello_.
So healing a book 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 thy 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 religion as thine was not, so to say, a mere innocence
of evil in the things of our Belief, but a reasonable and grounded faith,
strong in despite of oppositions. Happy was the man in whom temper, and
religion, and the love of the sweet country and an angler’s pastime so
conveniently combined; happy the long life which held in its hand that
threefold clue through the labyrinth of human fortunes! Around thee
Church and State might fall in ruins, and might be rebuilded, and thy
tears would not be bitter, nor thy triumph cruel.