"_Theophilus._ You wente to diner betyme I perceave. _Eusebius._ Even as I doe commonly, when I have no busynes, betwene nyne and ten; me thinkes it is a good houre: for by that meanes I save a breakfast, whyche for such idlers as I am, is most fittest." _Dialogue between Eusebius and Theophilus._ Signat. B 4. A. D. 1556. _W._
[183] Dr. Brian Higden at that time bore the office.
[184] The Cardinal perhaps remembered the credit which was gained by his successful rival Cardinal Adrian, who being elected to the papacy by the Conclave, through the influence of the emperor Charles V. "before his entry into the cittie of Rome (as we are told by one of Sir Thomas More's biographers), putting off his hose and shoes, and as I have credibly heard it reported, bare-footed and bare-legged, passed through the streets towards his Palace, with such humbleness, that all the people had him in great reverence." Harpsfield's _Life of Sir Thomas More_. Lambeth MSS. No. 827, fol. 12. _W._
[185] Storer, in his Poetical Life of Wolsey, 1599, has availed himself of this declaration of the cardinal, in a passage justly celebrated for its eminent beauty. The image in the second stanza is worthy of a cotemporary of Shakspeare:
I did not mean with predecessors pride, To walk on cloth as custom did require; More fit that cloth were hung on either side In mourning wise, or make the poor attire; More fit the dirige of a mournful quire In dull sad notes all sorrows to exceed, For him in whom the prince's love is dead.
I am the tombe where that affection lies, That was the closet where it living kept; Yet wise men say, Affection never dies;-- No, but it turns; and when it long hath slept, Looks heavy, like the eye that long hath wept. O could it die, that were a restfull state; But living, it converts to deadly hate.
[186] Dr. Percy, in the notes to the Northumberland Household Book, has adduced a very curious extract from one of the letters of this Earl of Northumberland, which he thinks affords a "full vindication of the earl from the charge of ingratitude in being the person employed to arrest the cardinal." However this may be, the earl appears to have felt the embarrassment of his situation; he trembled, and with a faltering voice could hardly utter the ungracious purport of his mission. To a mind of any delicacy the office must have been peculiarly distressing, and even supposing the earl to have been formerly treated in an arbitrary and imperious manner by the cardinal, it is one which he should have avoided. As the letter gives a very curious picture of the manners as well as the literature of our first nobility at that time, I shall place it in my appendix; the very curious volume in which it is to be found being of great rarity and value.