him, with pitiless plainness and unfaltering constancy, and he had almost to starve for his pains. Yet he had proved himself a notable man in his day; as a schoolmaster he did much to soften the rigours of discipline, which were the discredit of his contemporary pedagogues, and as an author he has left behind him treasures of compacted wit and wisdom, with snatches of sweet woodland song, which do not deserve the hard fate of "dull forgetfulness." As a man who proved himself a finished gentleman, and who contrived to make some others gentlemen too, he merits grateful recognition. But, above all, he has fairly earned the honour of posterity, as one who could bear the heavy burden of a wintry old age with a sunny spirit and an indomitable courage. "In a word," he says finally, "for a conclusion, let every one be careful to get and keep money. Know the worth of a penny; there is no companion like the penny; be a good husband, and thou wilt soon get a penny to spend, a penny to lend, and a penny for thy friend; and since we are born, we must live. Vivions-nous, let us live as well, as merrily as we can in these hardest times; and say every one of us, as Sir Roger Williams, that brave soldier, said to Queen Elizabeth, when he wanted pay for himself and his soldiers: Madame, I tell you true, we will be without money for no man's pleasure." 1 So Henry Peacham passed away, setting his face against the tyranny of fortune almost to the last; and it remains for those who are born in a happier age, to pay his cheerful spirit the meed of honour so long withheld and which he has so richly earned. The Worth of a Peny, p. 33. THE PHYSICIAN ANDREW BOORDE "Ei derepenti tantus morbus incidit. Eibo atque arcessam medicum iam quantum potest." Tcharm, and the investigation of the ultimate source HE history of origins always involves its own peculiar of familiar expressions is of especial interest to the more commonplace inquirer as well as to the student of folklore. Many of the curious customs and no less curious personages of antiquity are thereby traced home, and the men of long ago are found to bear a close resemblance to their later successors. Civilization has softened some of the acerbities which our forefathers were content to endure; but the men themselves and their habits have suffered less change than might have been expected. They had similar troubles to endure with their more favoured descendants, and they endured them much in the same manner. They laughed when they were pleased, and they grumbled, as only an Englishman can do, when they met with unpleasant occurrences. They drank more certainly, and they ate perfect prodigies of cookery, such as the weaker digestions of a later age could not have masticated. They were less cleanly in their habits, and as a natural consequence they were afflicted with more numerous and more serious diseases; the great problems of sewage concerned them little, and their nostrils were far less sensitive than ours. They deluged themselves with perfumes, in order to counteract odours of more pungency, such as ordinary cleanliness might easily have avoided. But they lived, and ate, and drank, and laughed, and grumbled, and swore, much as the men of to-day are doing now. They had less light, and it may be less enlightenment, than fall to our portion; but in their own CThe treatyle antwe- Compyled by Tollyn clowte, dedy, From the reprint of the Early English Text Society, by kind permission of Dr. Furnival, who notes that the central figure is not a portrait of Boorde, but a stock engraving. fashion they lived happily, with some mirth and no little grumbling. They were Englishmen in all essentials, and it is to their sturdy strength and hardy constancy that we owe most of our present-day comforts. But the subject of the following pages is not so much the habits of the men of long ago as an account of the life and writings of a man of no mean renown in his day and for long afterwards. Nor can an introduction to the old original Merry Andrew, the patriarch of the tribe, fail to be welcome to his modern and less learned representatives and their dupes. Authorities differ widely as to the private character and personal attainments of Andrew Boorde, who has lent what the immortal Doctor Pangloss would call his "sponsorial appellation," though not his "patronymic designation," to his more or less faithful imitators. John Bale, the Protestant Bishop of Ossory, has few good words to say about this eminent Romanist; nor does he appear to have been consciously endowed with a sufficiently keen sense of humour to fairly appreciate so whimsical a personage. Besides, the Protestants and Catholics of an earlier time are seldom to be trusted, when they talk scandal of one another; nay, even in our own scrupulously impartial era a prudent historian would not willingly commit a panegyric of the Pope to the tender mercies and the plain-dealing of an Ulster Orangeman. Where evidence is conflicting, the impartial inquirer will do well to exercise the subtlest powers of his discrimination before uttering a definite pronouncement; nor will he find many past worthies in whose careful portraiture wise discrimination is more necessary than in the case of Boorde. Prejudice is only too apt to usurp the legitimate place of truth from its forceful dogmatism and its passionate plausibility; and prejudice has been the dominant inspiration of theological controversialists from the beginning. It remains, therefore, for the wary critic to endeavour to arrive at a sound estimation of a much maligned personage from a painstaking study of the few facts and scanty indications which are left to faintly illustrate his charaeter and the course of his life. Andrew Boorde was born in or about the year 1489, in the reign of the prudent monarch Henry VII. He himself tells his readers, in his now excessively rare Peregrination, that his birthplace was Boorde's Hill, in Holms |