for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.  He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.  “Sufflaminandus erat,” as Augustus said of Haterius.  His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so, too!  Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, “Caesar, thou dost me wrong.”  He replied, “Caesar did never wrong but with just cause”; and such-like, which were ridiculous.  But he redeemed his vices with his virtues.  There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.

[Sidenote:  Ben Johnson]

Wisdom without honesty is mere craft and cozenage.  And therefore the reputation of honesty must first be gotten; which cannot be but by living well.  A good life is a main argument.

MOTHERHOOD
[Sidenote:  Calverley]

      She laid it where the sunbeams fall
  Unscann’d upon the broken wall,
  Without a tear, without a groan,
  She laid it near a mighty stone
  Which some rude swain had haply cast
  Thither in sport, long ages past,
  And Time with mosses had o’erlaid,
  And fenced with many a tall grass-blade,
  And all about bid roses bloom
  And violets shed their soft perfume. 
  There, in its cool and quiet bed,
  She set her burden down and fled: 
  Nor flung, all eager to escape,
  One glance upon the perfect shape
  That lay, still warm and fresh and fair,
  But motionless and soundless there.

      No human eye had mark’d her pass
  Across the linden-shadow’d grass
  Ere yet the minster clock chimed seven: 
  Only the innocent birds of heaven—­
  The magpie, and the rook whose nest
  Swings as the elm-tree waves his crest—­
  And the lithe cricket, and the hoar
  And huge-limb’d hound that guards the door,
  Look’d on when, as a summer wind
  That, passing, leaves no trace behind,
  All unapparell’d, barefoot all,
  She ran to that old ruin’d wall,
  To leave upon the chill dank earth
  (For ah! she never knew its worth)
  ’Mid hemlock rank, and fern, and ling,
  And dews of night, that precious thing!

      And there it might have lain forlorn
  From morn till eve, from eve to morn: 
  But that, by some wild impulse led,
  The mother, ere she turn’d and fled,
  One moment stood erect and high;
  Then pour’d into the silent sky
  A cry so jubilant, so strange,
  That Alice—­as she strove to range
  Her rebel ringlets at her glass—­
  Sprang up and gazed across the grass;
  Shook back those curls so fair to see,
  Clapp’d her soft hands in childish glee;
  And shriek’d—­her sweet face all aglow,
    Her very limbs with rapture shaking—­
  “My hen has laid an egg, I know;
  And only hear the noise she’s making!”