“When comely striplings wish it were their chance
   For Caenis’ distaff to exchange their lance,
   And wear curled periwigs, and chalk their face
   And still are poring on their pocket-glass;
   Tired with pinned ruffs and fans and partlet strips
   And busks and verdingales about their hips;
   And tread on corked stilts, a prisoner’s pace,
   And make their napkin for a spitting place,
   And gripe their waist within a narrow span,
   Fond Caenis that wouldst wish to be a man!”

The most severe is against the Pope:—­

  “To see an old shorn lozel perched high
   Crossing beneath a golden canopy;
   The whiles a thousand hairless crowns crouch low
   To kiss the precious case of his proud toe;
   And for the lordly fasces borne of old
   To see two quiet crossed keys of gold;
   But that he most would gaze and wonder at
   To the horned mitre and the bloody hat,
   The crooked staff, the cowl’s strange form and store
   Save that he saw the same in hell before;
   To see the broken nuns, with new shorn heads
   In a blind cloister toss their idle heads.”

Although Bishop Hall wrote learnedly and voluminously on theological subjects, this light medley is now more esteemed than his graver works.  He claimed upon the strength of it to be the earliest English satirist, and perhaps none of our writings of this kind had as yet been of equal importance.  The work was one of those condemned to the flames by Whitgift and Bancroft.

Fuller was born in Northamptonshire, in 1608.  He became a distinguished man at Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship at Sidney Sussex College.  He was also an eminent preacher in London, and a prebendary of Salisbury.  In the Civil War, being a stanch Royalist, he was driven from place to place, and held at one time the interesting post of “Infant Lady’s Chaplain” to the Princess Henrietta.  In his “Worthies of England,” Fuller not only enumerates the eminent men for which each country is distinguished, but gives an account of its products and proverbs.  “A Proverb is much matter decocted into few words.  Six essentials are wanting to it—­that it be short, plain, common, figurative, ancient, true.”  The most ordinary subject is enlivened by his learned and humorous mind.  Thus, in Bedfordshire, under the head of “Larks,” he tells us, “The most and best of these are caught and well-dressed about Dunstable in this shire.  A harmless bird while living, not trespassing on grain, and wholesome when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly the ear with music.  In winter they fly in flocks, probably the reason why Alauda signifieth in Latin both a lark and a legion of soldiers; except any will say a legion is so called because helmeted on their heads and crested like a lark, therefore also called in Latin Galerita.  If men would imitate the early rising of this bird, it would conduce much unto their healthfulness.”