It is to be regretted that Ascham held but an indolent pen. Yet it were hard to censure the man for a cold neglect of his fame, who seems equally to have neglected his fortune. Ascham has written little; and all he left his family was "this little book" (The Schoolmaster), and which he bequeathed to them, as the right way to good learning, "which, if they follow, they shall very well come to sufficiency of living." This was an age when the ingenious clung to a patron; the widow and the son of Ascham found the benefits of this testamentary recommendation. It must, however, be confessed to have been but a capricious legacy, for no administrator might have been found to "the will." The age of patronage was never that of independence to an author. Johnson, in his admirable "Life of Ascham," observed, that "his disposition was kind and social; he delighted in the pleasure of conversation, and was probably not much inclined to business." It is certain that he preferred old books to pounds sterling, for once he requested to commute a part of his pension for a copy of the "Decem Rhetores Græci," which he could not purchase at Cambridge. His frequent allusions in his letters when abroad to "Mine Hostess Barnes," who kept a tavern at Cambridge in the reign of Edward the Sixth, with tender reminiscences of her "fat capons," and the "good-fellowship" there; and further, his sympathy at the deep potation, when standing hard by the emperor at his table, he tells us, "the emperor drank the best I ever saw,--he had his head in the glass five times as long as any of us, and never drank less than a good quart at once of Rhenish wine," and his determination of providing "every year a little vessel of Rhenish" for his cronies: and still further, his haunting the cockpit, and sometimes trusting fortune by her dice, notwithstanding that he describes "dicing" as "the green pathway of Hell;" all these _traits_ mark the boon companion loving his leisure and his lounge. When engaged in public life, a collegiate fellowship appeared to him to offer supreme felicity. He writes thus,--"Ascham to his friends: who is able to maintain his life at Cambridge, knows not what a felicity he hath." Such was the conviction of one who had long lived in courts. But when we consider that Ascham was Latin secretary to Edward the Sixth, to Mary, and to Elizabeth, and intimately acquainted with the transactions of these cabinets, with the sovereigns, and the ministers; and during three years held a personal intercourse with the highest foreign court;--we must regret, if we no not censure, the man who, possessing these rare advantages, with a vigorous intellect, and a felicitous genius, has left the world in silence. Assuredly, in Ascham, we have lost an English Comines, who would have rivalled our few memoir-writers, who, though with pens more industrious, had not eyes more observant, nor heads more penetrating, than this secretary of three sovereigns.