“MY VERY GOOD LORD,—­Now your Lordship hath been so long in the church and the palace disputing between kings and popes, methinks you should take pleasure to look into the field, and refresh your mind with some matter of philosophy, though that science be now through age waxed a child again, and left to boys and young men; and because you were wont to make me believe you took liking to my writings, I send you some of this vacation’s fruits, and thus much more of my mind and purpose.  I hasten not to publish; perishing I would prevent.  And I am forced to respect as well my times as the matter.  For with me it is thus, and I think with all men in my case, if I bind myself to an argument, it loadeth my mind; but if I rid my mind of the present cogitation, it is rather a recreation.  This hath put me into these miscellanies, which I purpose to suppress, if God give me leave to write a just and perfect volume of philosophy, which I go on with, though slowly.  I send not your Lordship too much, lest it may glut you.  Now let me tell you what my desire is.  If your Lordship be so good now as when you were the good Dean of Westminster, my request to you is, that not by pricks, but by notes, you would mark unto me whatsoever shall seem unto you either not current in the style, or harsh to credit and opinion, or inconvenient for the person of the writer; for no man can be judge and party, and when our minds judge by reflection of ourselves, they are more subject to error.  And though for the matter itself my judgement be in some things fixed, and not accessible by any man’s judgement that goeth not my way, yet even in those things the admonition of a friend may make me express myself diversly.  I would have come to your Lordship, but that I am hastening to my house in the country.  And so I commend your Lordship to God’s goodness.”

There was yet another production of this time, of which we have a notice from himself in a letter to Toby Matthews, the curious and ingenious little treatise on the Wisdom of the Ancients, “one of the most popular of his works,” says Mr. Spedding, “in his own and in the next generation,” but of value to us mainly for its quaint poetical colour, and the unexpected turns, like answers to a riddle, given to the ancient fables.  When this work was published, it was the third time that he had appeared as an author in print.  He thus writes about it and himself: 

“MR. MATTHEWS,—­I do heartily thank you for your letter of the 24th of August from Salamanca; and in recompense thereof I send you a little work of mine that hath begun to pass the world.  They tell me my Latin is turned into silver, and become current.  Had you been here, you should have been my inquisitor before it came forth; but I think the greatest inquisitor in Spain will allow it....  My great work goeth forward, and, after my manner, I alter ever when I add.  So that nothing is finished till all be finished.

     “From Gray’s Inn, the 17th of February, 1610.”