ewhat reddish,
with large face and breast; and yellow eyen and a dim voice;
and fleshy of body; and took but scarcely of meat and drink:
and for to _alledge_ the fatness, he travailed his body with
business; with hunting, with standing, with wandering: he
was of mean stature, renable of speech, and well y lettered;
noble and _orped_ in knighthood; and wise in counsel and in
battle; and dread and doubtfull destiny; more manly and
courteous to a Knight when he was dead than when he was
alive!" _Polychronicon_, Caxton's edit., fol. cccliij.,
rev.]

LIS. At your peril omit him! I think (although my black-letter reading
be very limited) that Bale, in his _English Votaries_, has a curious
description of this renowned archbishop; whose attachment to books, in
his boyish years, must on all sides be admitted.

LYSAND. You are right. Bale has some extraordinary strokes of
description in his account of this canonized character: but if I can
trust to my memory (which the juice of Lorenzo's nectar, here before
us, may have somewhat impaired), Tyndale[253] has also an equally
animated account of the same--who deserves, notwithstanding his pomp
and haughtiness, to be numbered among the most notorious bibliomaniacs
of his age.

[Footnote 253: We will first amuse ourselves with Bale's
curious account of

"_The fresh and lusty beginnings of_ THOMAS BECKET."

As those authors report, which chiefly wrote Thomas Becket's
life--whose names are Herbert Boseham, John Salisbury,
William of Canterbury, Alen of Tewkesbury, Benet of
Peterborough, Stephen Langton, and Richard Croyland--he
bestoyed his youth in all kinds of lascivious lightness, and
lecherous wantonness. After certain robberies, rapes, and
murders, committed in the king's wars at the siege of
Toulouse in Languedoc, and in other places else, as he was
come home again into England, he gave himself to great
study, not of the holy scriptures, but of the bishop of
Rome's lousy laws, whereby he first of all obtained to be
archdeacon of Canterbury, under Theobald the archbishop;
then high chancellor of England; metropolitan, archbishop,
primate; pope of England, and great legate from antichrist's
own right side. In the time of his high-chancellorship,
being but an ale-brewer's son of London, John Capgrave saith
that he took upon him