holar, was famous through all
the provinces of Christendom." "So that (adds Brooke) now I learnt,
that before him, when we speak in commendation of any other, to say, I
must always except Plato." Camden would allow of no private
communication between them; and in _Sermonibus Convivalibus_, in his
table-talk, "the heat and height of his spirit" often scorched the
contemned Yorkist, whose rejected "Discovery of Errors" had no doubt
been too frequently enlarged, after such rough convivialities. Brooke
now resolved to print; but, in printing the work, the press was
disturbed, and his house was entered by "this learned man, his
friends, and the stationers." The latter were alarmed for the sale of
the "Britannia," which might have been injured by this rude attack.
The work was therefore printed in an unfinished state: part was
intercepted; and the author stopped, by authority, from proceeding any
further. Some imperfect copies got abroad.

The treatment the exasperated Brooke now incurred was more provoking
than Camden's refusal of his notes, and the haughtiness of his
"Sermonibus Convivalibus." The imperfect work was, however, laid
before the public, so that Camden could not refuse to notice its
grievous charges. He composed an angry reply in Latin, addressed _ad
Lectorem_! and never mentioning Brooke by name, contemptuously alludes
to him only by a _Quidam_ and _Iste_ (a certain person, and He!)--"He
considers me (cries the mortified Brooke, in his second suppressed
work) as an _Individuum vagum_, and makes me but a _Quidam_ in his
pamphlet, standing before him as a schoolboy, while he whips me. Why
does he reply in Latin to an English accusation? He would disguise
himself in his school-rhetoric; wherein, like the cuttle-fish, being
stricken, he thinks to hide and shift himself away in the ink of his
rhetoric. I will clear the waters again."

He fastens on Camden's former occupation, virulently accusing him of
the manners of a pedagogue:--"A man may perceive an immoderate and
eager desire of vainglory growing in hand, ever since he used to
teach and correct children for these things, according to the opinion
of some, _in mores et naturam abeunt_." He complains of "the
school-hyperboles" which Camden exhausts on him, among which Brooke
is compared to "the strumpet Leontion," who wrote against "the divine
Theophrastus." To this Brooke keenly replies:

"Surely, had Theophrastus dealt with women's matters, a woman, though
m