THOUGH a familiarity of more than forty years’1 continuance, and the constant experience of your love, even in the worst of the late sad times, be sufficient to endear our friendship; yet I must confess my affection much improved, not only by evidences of private respect to those very many that know and love you, but by your new demonstration of a public spirit, testified in a diligent, true, and useful collection, of so many material passages as you have now afforded me in the Life of venerable Mr. Hooker; of which, since desired by such a friend as yourself, I shall not deny to give the testimony of what I know concerning him and his learned Books; but shall first here take a fair occasion to tell you, that you have been happy in choosing to write the lives of three such persons, as posterity hath just cause to honour; which they will do the more for the true relation of them by your happy pen; of all which I shall give you my unfeigned censure.
I shall begin with my most dear and incomparable friend, Dr. Donne, late dean of St. Paul’s church, who not only trusted me as his executor, but three days before his death delivered into my hands those excellent sermons of his now made public; professing before Dr. Winniff2, Dr. Monford3, and, I think, yourself, then present at his bed-side, that it was by my restless importunity that he had prepared them for the press; together with which (as his best legacy) he gave me all his sermon-notes, and his other papers, containing an extract of near fifteen hundred authors. How these were got out of my hands, you, who were the messenger for them4, and how lost both to me and yourself, is not now seasonable to complain; but, since they did miscarry, I am glad that the general demonstration of his worth was so fairly preserved, and represented to the world by your pen in the history of his life; indeed so well, that, beside others, the best critic of our later time (Mr. John Hales, of Eton college) affirmed to me, “he had not seen a life written with more advantage to the subject, or more reputation to the writer, than that of Dr. Donne’s.”
After the performance of this task for Dr. Donne, you undertook the like office for our friend Sir Henry Wotton, betwixt which two there was a friendship begun in Oxford, continued in their various travels, and more confirmed in the religious friendship of age, and doubtless this excellent person had writ the life of Dr. Donne, if death had not prevented him: by which means, his and your precollections for that work fell to the happy menage of your pen: a work, which you would have declined, if imperious persuasions had not been stronger than your modest resolutions against it. And I am thus far glad, that the first life was so imposed upon you, because it gave an unavoidable cause of writing the second: if not, it is too probable we had wanted both, which had been a prejudice to all lovers of honour and ingenious learning. And let me not leave my friend Sir Henry without this testimony added to yours, that he was a man of as florid a wit, and as elegant a pen, as any former (or ours which in that kind is a most excellent) age, hath ever produced.
And now having made this voluntary observation of our two deceased friends, I proceed to satisfy your desire concerning what I know and believe of the ever-memorable Mr. Hooker, who was schismaticorum malleus5, so great a champion for the church of England’s rights, against the factious torrent of Separatists that then ran high against Church Discipline, and in his unanswerable Books continues still to be so against the unquiet disciples of their schism, which now under other names still carry on their design; and who (as the proper heirs of their irrational zeal) would again rake into the scarce-closed wounds of a newly bleeding state and church.
And first, though I dare not say that I knew Mr. Hooker, yet, as our6 ecclesiastical history reports to the honour of S. Ignatius, that he lived in the time of St. John, and had seen him in his childhood7; so, I also joy that in my minority I have often seen Mr. Hooker, with my father, who was after Lord Bishop of London8; from whom, and others, at that time, I have heard most of the material passages which you relate in the history of his life; and from my father received such a character of his learning, humility, and other virtues, that, like jewels of unvaluable price, they still cast such a lustre as envy or the rust of time shall never darken.