50.

Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 57; Life, ed. 1759, pp. 26-7.

Izaak Walton included a short character of Earle in his Life of Hooker, published in the year of Earle’s death:  ’Dr. Earle, now Lord Bishop of Salisbury, of whom I may justly say, (and let it not offend him, because it is such a trifle as ought not to be concealed from posterity, or those that now live, and yet know him not,) that since Mr. Hooker died, none have lived whom God hath blessed with more innocent wisdom, more sanctified learning, or a more pious, peaceable, primitive temper:  so that this excellent person seems to be only like himself, and our venerable Richard Hooker.’

See also Athenae Oxonienses, ed.  Bliss, vol. iii, cols. 716-9.

Page 168, l. 25. Earle of Pembroke, the fourth Earl, Lord
Chamberlain 1626-1641:  see p. 4, l. 30, note.

Page 169, l. 3. Proctour, in 1631.  The ’very witty and sharpe discourses’ are his Micro-cosmographie, first published anonymously in 1628.

l. 23.  Compare p. 72, ll. 29 ff., and p. 90, ll. 21 ff.

l. 28.  He was made chaplain and tutor to Prince Charles in 1641.  His ‘lodginge in the court’ as chaplain to the Lord Chamberlain had made him known to the king.

51.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 57-8; Life, ed. 1759, pp. 27-8.

‘The Ever Memorable Mr. John Hales, of Eaton-Colledge’, as he is called on the title-page of his Golden Remains, published in 1659 (second impression, 1673), is probably best known now by his remark ’That there was no subject of which any Poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better treated of in Shakespeare’.  This remark was first given in print in Dryden’s essay Of Dramatick Poesie, 1668, and was repeated in varying forms in Nahum Tate’s Dedication to the Loyal General, 1680, Charles Gildon’s Reflections on Mr. Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy, 1694, and Nicholas Rowe’s Account of the Life of Shakespear, 1709.  But it had apparently been made somewhere between 1633 and 1637 in the company of Lord Falkland.  It is the one gem that survives of this retired student’s ’very open and pleasant conversation’.

Clarendon’s portrait explains the honour and affection in which the ‘ever memorable’ but now little known scholar was held by all his friends.  The best companion to it is the life by Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed.  Bliss, vol. iv, cols. 409-15.  See also John Pearson’s preface to Golden Remains.

Page 170, ll. 10 ff.  Hales was elected Fellow of Merton College in 1605, and Regius Professor of Greek in 1615.  His thirty-two letters to Sir Dudley Carlton (cf. p. 58, l. 20) reporting the proceedings of the Synod of Dort, run from November 24, 1618, to February 7, 1619, and are included in his Golden Remains.  On his return to England in 1619 he withdrew to his fellowship at Eton.