merry with the discordant sentiments of nine martyrs executed
together, though their want of uniformity is a fact which he learns from
Fox himself, who at the same time asserts that their disagreement was in
smaller things only;[21] or he prefers charges against him at random
without troubling himself to ascertain whether there is foundation for
them or not, as where he accuses him of defacing or destroying the
records of cathedrals, which he had been permitted to use, lest
they should convict him of negligence or fraud; and this not upon
investigation of the fact, but simply, "he presuming it," as though
a charge so serious was to be an affair of presumption only;[22] or,
lastly, he comments upon his author in so fiendish a temper of mind, as
would be in itself enough to satisfy every calm and dispassionate judge
that he spoke not of truth or a love for it, but of mere malice; as
where, after debasing the circumstances of Rowland Taylor's story
throughout, he concludes with a repetition of his joke about the worms
in Hadley churchyard, as given in Fox, and subjoins "this noteth Fox in
the margin for a goodly apophthegm of Dr. Taylor, martyr; and with this,
he saith, he went to the fire; _where we must leave him eternally as
I fear_;"[23] and in a similar vein he has the heart to write of
Latimer and Ridley, "they were burned together, each of them taking
gunpowder to despatch himself quickly, as by Fox is seen, which yet is
not read to have been practised by old martyrs, and it seemeth that
these men would have the fame of martyrdom without the pain; and _now
they have incurred the everlasting pain_, if by their end we may
judge."[24] The man who could write thus can scarcely lay claim to our
credence; for his prejudice has evidently stifled in him every sense by
which a regard for truth can be guaranteed.

It is not thought out of place to introduce here this brief vindication
of a book, which, so far as it is a contemporary history, has been,
both of old, and of late, an object of unfair depreciation, but from
which no right-hearted Protestant can rise, without being at once a
sadder and a better man;--a book out of which we shall now fearlessly
draw our information, whilst we offer to our readers a few examples of
those terrible sufferings which it is at once humiliating to think that
man could inflict, and animating to think that man could so nobly
bear.--_Family Library_, vol. xxvi.

[15] Strype's Annals, p