her's horse, in all the town,
Amongst all hackneys, purchased this renown?

But see the luck; John Fletcher's horse, one night,
By rain was wash'd again almost to white.
His first right owner, seeing such a change,
Thought he should know him, but his hue was strange!

But eyeing him, and spying out his steed,
By flea-bit spots of his now washed weed,
Seizes the horse; so Fletcher was attainted,
And did confess the horse--he stole and painted.

To close with honour to Brooke; in his graver moments he warmly repels
the accusation Camden raised against him, as an enemy to learning, and
appeals to many learned scholars, who had tasted of his liberality at
the Universities, towards their maintenance; but, in an elevated tone,
he asserts his right to deliver his animadversions as York Herald.

"I know (says Brooke) the great advantage my adversary has over me, in
the received opinion of the world. If some will blame me for that my
writings carry some characters of spleen against him, men of pure
affections, and not partial, will think reason that he should, by ill
hearing, lose the pleasure he conceived by ill speaking. But since I
presume not to understand above that which is meet for me to know, I
must not be discouraged, nor fret myself, because of the malicious;
for I find myself seated upon a rock, that is sure from tempest and
waves, from whence I have a prospect into his errors and waverings. I
do confess his great worth and merit, and that we Britons are in some
sort beholding to him; and might have been much more, if God had lent
him the grace to have played the faithful steward, in the talent
committed to his trust and charge."

Such was the dignified and the intrepid reply of Ralph Brooke, a man
whose name is never mentioned without an epithet of reproach; and who,
in his own day, was hunted down, and not suffered, vindictive as he
was no doubt, to relieve his bitter and angry spirit, by pouring it
forth to the public eye.[399]

But the story is not yet closed. Camden, who wanted the magnanimity to
endure with patient dignity the corrections of an inferior genius, had
the wisdom, with the meanness, silently to adopt his useful
corrections, but would never confess the hand which had brought
them.[400]

Thus hath Ralph Brooke told his own tale undisturbed, and, after the
lapse of more than a century, the press has been opened to him.
Whenever a great author is suffered to gag the mouth of