Sloan, f. 68,') to which change we may owe, if it
be really Barclay's, "The life of St Thomas of Canterbury."

Autumn had now come to the poet, but fruit had failed him. The advance of
age and his failure to obtain a suitable position in the Church began
gradually to weigh upon his spirits. The bright hopes with which he had
started in the flush of youth, the position he was to obtain, the influence
he was to wield, and the work he was to do personally, and by his writings,
in the field of moral and social reformation were all in sad contrast with
the actualities around. He had never risen from the ranks, the army was in
a state of disorganisation, almost of mutiny, and the enemy was more bold,
unscrupulous, and numerous than ever. It is scarcely to be wondered at
that, though not past fifty, he felt prematurely aged, that his youthful
enthusiasm which had carried him on bravely in many an attempt to instruct
and benefit his fellows at length forsook him and left him a prey to that
weakness of body, and that hopelessness of spirit to which he so
pathetically alludes in the Prologue to the Mirror of good Manners. All his
best work, all the work which has survived to our day, was executed before
this date. But the pen was too familiar to his hand to be allowed to drop.
His biographers tell us "that when years came on he spent his time mostly
in pious matters, and in reading and writing histories of the Saints." A
goodly picture of a well-spent old age. The harness of youth he had no
longer the spirit and strength to don, the garments of age he gathered
resignedly and gracefully about him.

On the violent dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, when their inmates,
the good and bad, the men of wisdom and the "fools," were alike cast adrift
upon a rock-bound and stormy coast, the value of the patronage which his
literary and personal popularity had brought him, was put to the test, and
in the end successfully, though after considerable, but perhaps not to be
wondered at, delay. His great patrons, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of
Kent, Bishop Cornish, and probably also Sir Giles Alington, were all dead,
and he had to rely on newer and necessarily weaker ties. But after waiting,
till probably somewhat dispirited, fortune smiled at last. Two handsome
livings were presented to him in the same year, both of which he apparently
held at the same time, the vicarage of Much Badew in Essex, by the
presentation of Mr John Pascal, to wh