"Ne spareth he most learned wits to rate,

Ne spareth he the gentle Poet's rime;
But rends without regard of person or of time."

And Spenser adds—

"Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest,
Hope to escape his venemous despite
More than my former writs, all were they cleanest
From blamefull blot, and free from all that wite
With which some wicked tongues did it backbite
And bring into a mighty Pere's displeasure,
That never so deservéd to endite.

Therefore do you, my rimes, keep better measure,
And seek to please; that now is counted wise men's
threasure."

RICHARD HOOKER was born at Heavitree, now a suburb of Exeter, in March, 1554. Like Spenser, from whom he differed in views of Church polity, he was wholly

Hooker.

an Elizabethan writer; each came as a young Richard child into the reign, and they died, before Elizabeth, within a year of each other. In literature Spenser is the greatest representative of Elizabethan Puritanism, and Hooker wrote the wisest and best argument against it. Both were true men who sought to serve God faithfully with all their powers, and they agreed more than they differed. Spenser, indeed, differed so much from the narrower Puritanism of his time, and was so fully in accord with Hooker's religious spirit, that we cannot think of them as in opposite camps. When different tendencies of thought lead men to seek one great end by different ways, and great parties are formed, it is between the lesser combatantswho confound accident with substance, and give themselves up to fierce contention about phrases, words, and outward shows that the jar is dissonant. Between the best and purest upon each side, who are one in aim, and who both look to essentials, the accord is really greater than the discord.

Richard Hooker's parents were poor, but his uncle John was a man of mark.* Richard's great-grandfather and

* "E. W." ix. 101.

his grandfather had in their turn been mayors of the city; and the boy's schoolmaster, who found in him an actively inquiring mind, and, under a slow manner, a quiet eagerness for knowledge, urged upon his richer uncle that there ought to be found for such a nephew, in some way, at least a year's maintenance at one of the universities. John Jewel, who was also a Devonshire man, had been sent into his own county and the West of England as a visitor of churches, upon his return to England after the death of Queen Mary. Thus he had established friendly acquaintance with John Hooker, and presently afterwards he was made Bishop of Salisbury. John Hooker then visited the bishop in Salisbury, and talked about his nephew. Jewel said he would judge for himself, and offered to see the boy and his schoolmaster. When he saw them he gave a reward to the schoolmaster, and a small pension to Richard's parents, in aid of the education of their son. In 1567, when Richard Hooker was a boy of fifteen, Bishop Jewel sent him to Oxford, placing him by special recommendation under the oversight of Dr. Cole, then President of Corpus Christi College. Dr. Cole provided Hooker with a tutor, and gave him a clerk's place in the college, which yielded something in aid of his uncle's contribution and the pension from the bishop. In this way Richard Hooker's education was continued for about three years, and then, when he was eighteen, he had a dangerous illness which lasted for two months. His mother prayed continually for the life of her promising son, who used afterwards to pray in his turn "that he might never live to occasion any sorrow to so good a mother; of whom he would often say, he loved her so dearly, that he would endeavour to be good even as much for hers as for his own sake."* Being recovered at Oxford, Richard Hooker went home to Exeter on foot, with another student from Devon

*Izaak Walton's Life of Hooker is the source of these and other details.

shire, and took Salisbury upon his way, that he might pay his respects to Bishop Jewel. The bishop invited Richard and his companion to dinner, and after dinner sent them away with good advice and benediction. Remembering after they left that he had omitted the help of a little money, the good bishop sent a servant to bring Hooker back, and when he returned said, "Richard, I sent for you back to lend you a horse which hath carried me many a mile, and, I thank God, with much ease." The horse was a walkingstick that Jewel had brought from Germany, "And, Richard, I do not give, but lend my horse: be sure you be honest and bring my horse back to me at your return this way to Oxford. And I now give you ten groats to bear your charges to Exeter; and here is ten groats more, which I charge you to deliver to your mother, and tell her I send her a bishop's benediction with it, and beg the continuance of her prayers for me. And if you bring my horse back to me, I will give you ten groats more to carry you on foot to the college; and so God help you, good Richard." Thus the loan of the walking-stick pledged Richard to call on his way back. He did call, and then saw for the last time his kindly patron. John Jewel died in September of the same year, 1571, and Hooker would have been unable to remain at Oxford if the president of his college, Dr. Cole, had not at once bidden him go on with his studies, and undertaken to see that he did not want. After about nine months, also, Hooker was aided by a legacy from the bishop-a legacy of love, not of money.

Not long before his death Jewel had been talking to his friend Edwin Sandys, who had newly succeeded Edmund Grindal in the bishopric of London. In his talk he had said much of the pure nature and fine intellect and studious life of young Richard Hooker. The Bishop of London resolved, as he heard this, that when he should send Edwin, his son, to college, though he was himself a Cambridge man,

B B-VOL. IX.

he would choose Oxford, and send him to Corpus Christi that he might have Hooker for a tutor. This he did about nine months after Bishop Jewel's death. Hooker was then nineteen, and his pupil-afterwards Sir Edwin Sandys, author of the "Speculum Europa "-not very much younger; but the bishop wisely sought for his boy a tutor and friend who, as he said, "shall teach him learning by instruction and virtue by example: and my greatest care shall be of the last." George Cranmer (nephew's son to the archbishop) and other pupils soon joined Sandys, and found in Hooker a tutor with a rare power of communicating what he knew, and a life unostentatiously devout that stirred their affections. His health was not vigorous, and weakened by a sedentary life of study. He was short, stooping, very short-sighted, and subject to pimples: so shy and gentle that any pupil could look him out of countenance. He could look no man hard in the face, but had the habitual down look that Chaucer's host in the "Canterbury Tales " is made to ascribe to the poet. When Hooker was a rector, he and his clerk never talked but with both their hats off together. He was never known to be angry, never heard to repine, could be witty without use of an ill word, and by his presence restrained what was unfit, without abating what was innocent, in the mirth of others. In December of the year 1573, in which the Bishop of London's son became his pupil, Hooker became one of the twenty foundation scholars of his college, who were, by the founder's statutes, to be natives of Devonshire or Hampshire. Hooker became Master of Arts in 1577, and in the same year Fellow of his College. His first pupils, Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, remained the attached friends of Richard Hooker, who worked on at Oxford, devoting himself much to study of the Bible, which was written, he said, "not to beget disputations, and pride, and opposition to government; but charity and humility, moderation,