Barnett lecture - In My Library

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if his essay on Reynard the Fox (a far jump certainly) ranks next. Of Reynard, I may incidentally say, that this Library has a copy of every English version of that widely known European folk tale that I have yet seen, including the Arber reprint of Caxtons own quaint translation, one of the very earliest books printed in English on english soil. Froude notes the strange popularity this antique legend has had with men for 400 or 500 years, yet women do not like it, and never read it a second time.

An early german copy in quarto with the original Kaulbach illustrations, shows the highest attainment of the gravers art, in the attempt to put the whole scale of human expression and emotion in to the faces of animals and birds.

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24.A

Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity comes next, Printed 1638 - written 1594. - A monumental anti-puritan work, praised not only by Bishops, but by men as far apart as Pope Clement 8th, and Kings James 1st & 2nd. Hallam compares it - with advantage - to Cicero's De Legibus, and the divinity men of today in Trinity College and elsewhere I understand, use it as a textbook.

Bishop Hooker the ecclesiastic for Bacon the public Lawyer and Wm Shkr., the jovial actor dramatist cotemporaries although in such different walks in life, developed, fused, and made plastic our mother tongue, which at their death was for us crystalized and made classic in King James (the authorized) version of the Bible.

One is tempted to

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enlarge on Hookers "thorn in the flesh" - his sharp tongued & scatter brained wife, who did the good bishop the compliment of remarrying, within 3 months of his death - but I am warned that moralizing on such a subject is safe, even for one whose preaching and whose practice is fairly consistant.

Hooker's shelf neighbour is St Augustine's - "the City of God", englished by J. H. - 1610. his chief work, a labour of 13 years. Millman says "it is at once the funeral oration of the ancient society, and the gratulatory panegyric on the birth of the new" Augustine recognizes the nobleness and greatness of old Rome while

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having a Patmos like vision of a virtuous future for the world, which while although we move towards it, we have not yet in the 19th century yet attained to.

Intermission

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Perhaps you are now ready aye, more than ready to dismiss the theology? - If so we will hark back to 1580 the year that saw the printing of a neat specimen of Black letter, whose title runs "The Boke - named the Governor, - devised by Sir Thomas Elyot, Knight". Elyot was an M. P., a servant of Henry 8ths., a protage of Wolseys, and a friend of Sir T. Mores. He gives us his opinions, in elaborate detail, as to the whole nurture and bringing up of a youth who is to have authority as magistrate or ruler in the "publyke weale"; including the value, (to that end) of music, poetry, hunting, dancing - and the drawing of the long bow. Evidently, he was not in the college slang now current

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