This grand old man, the illustrious pioneer of reform in England, and indeed on the Continent, did not live to threescore years and ten, but, being worn out with his exhaustive labors, he died peaceably and unmolested in his retired parish.  Not much is known of the details of his personal history, any more than of Shakspeare’s.  We know nothing of his loves and hatreds, of his habits and tastes, of his temper and person, of his friends and enemies.  He stands out to the eye of posterity in solitary and mysterious loneliness.  Tradition speaks of him as a successful, benignant, and charitable parish priest, giving consolation to the afflicted and to the sick.  He lived in honor,—­professor of theology at Oxford, holding a prebendal stall amid a parochial rectory, perhaps a seat in Parliament, and was employed by the Crown as an ambassador to Bruges.  He was statesman as well as theologian, and lived among the great,—­more as a learned doctor than as a saint, which he was not from the Catholic standpoint.  “He was the scourge of imposture, the ponderous hammer which smote the brazen idolatry of his age.”  He labored to expose the vices that had taken shelter in the sanctuary of the Church,—­a reformer of ecclesiastical abuses rather than of the lax morals of the laity, and hence did different work from that of Savonarola, whose life was spent in a crusade against sin, wherever it was to be found.  His labors were great, and his attainments remarkable for his age.  He is accused of being coarse in his invectives; but that charge can also be laid to Luther and other reformers in rough and outspoken times.  Considering the power of the Pope in the fourteenth century, Wyclif was as bold and courageous as Luther.  The weakness of the papacy had not been exposed by the Councils of Pisa, of Constance, and of Basil; nor was popular indignation in view of the sale of indulgences as great in England as when the Dominican Tetzel peddled the papal pardons in Germany.  In combating the received ideas of the age, Wyclif was even more remarkable than the Saxon reformer, who was never fully emancipated from the Mediaeval doctrine of transubstantiation; although Luther went beyond Wyclif in the completeness of his reform.  Wyclif was beyond his age; Luther was the impersonation of its passions.  Wyclif represented universities and learned men; Luther was the oracle of the people.  The former was the Mediaeval doctor; the latter was the popular orator and preacher.  The one was mild and moderate in his spirit and manners; the other was vehement, dogmatic, and often offensive, not only from his more violent and passionate nature, but for his bitter and ironical sallies.  It is the manner more than the matter which offends.  Had Wyclif been as satirical and boisterous as Luther was, he would not probably have ended his days in peace, and would not have accomplished so much as a preparation for reforms.