my study to prepare myself for my sermon, and I took down a book that had blue strings, and looked in it, and ’twas sweet Saint Bernard. I chanced to read such a part of it, on such a subject, which has made me to choose this text....”
He concluded, says Aubrey:—
“‘But now I see it is time for me to shut up my book, for I see the doctors’ men come in wiping of their beards from the ale-house.’ He could from the pulpit plainly see them, and ’twas their custom in sermon to go there, and about the end of sermon to return to wait on their masters.”
Undergraduates who pleased him not were warned that he might “bring an hour-glass two hours long” into the hall. He was inexorable towards wearers of long hair, and would cut it off with “the knife that chips the bread on the buttery hatch.” It was his fashion to peep through key-holes in order to find out idlers. Says one: “He scolded the best in Latin of any one that ever he knew.” It seemed to him good discipline to keep at a high standard the beer of Trinity, because he observed that “the houses that had the smallest beer had most drunkards, for it forced them to go into the town to comfort their stomachs.” Yet in his exhortations to a temperate life, he admitted that the men of his college “ate good commons and drank good double beer, and that will get out.” And he was a man of tender and exquisite charity. When he saw that a diligent scholar was also poor, “he would many times put money in at his window,” and gave work in[Pg 246] transcription to servitors who wrote a good hand. His right foot dragged somewhat upon the ground, so that “he gave warning (like the rattlesnake) of his coming,” and an imitative wag of the college “would go so like him that sometimes he would make the whole chapel rise up, imagining he had been entering in.” The Civil War, thinks Aubrey, killed the old man, just before he would have been fifty years President. For it “much grieved him that was wont to be so absolute in the college to be affronted and disrespected by rude soldiers.” The cavaliers and their ladies invaded the college grove to the sound of lute or theorbo. Some of the gaudy women even came, “half dressed, like angels,” to morning chapel. A foot-soldier broke the President’s hour-glass. So he gathered his old russet cloth gown about him and closed his eyes upon the calamity and died, still a fresh and handsome old man.
III
John Earle, a notable scholar and divine of the seventeenth century, a fellow of Merton, and afterwards Bishop of Worcester and Bishop of Salisbury, has drawn the picture of “a downright scholar,” which I may not omit. Earle had the most concentrated style of any man of his time; each of his sentences is a document. His characters are as clear and firm as the brasses on Merton altar platform, and likely to endure as long.
“A downright scholar,” he writes, “is one that has[Pg 248][Pg 247]
