At Salisbury, in the Palace, there is no portrait of him, but there is
one at Westminster; and in a Wiltshire farmhouse, not far from Sarum,
there are portraits, rude and ill-drawn, of himself and his wife. This
lady is buried in a little churchyard, Stratford-sub-Castle, that lies
below the huge embanked mound of Old Sarum, overshadowed by a pleasant
avenue of limes. It was still rather an unpopular thing for a bishop to
marry. Hardly more than half a century before, Abbot, a predecessor of
Earles at Sarum, had been soundly scolded and threatened by his actual
as well as spiritual brother, the Primate for marrying when in Episcopal
Orders. Earles was not so severely handled: we hear little of the
marriage, except that he was happy in it. His wife lived and died
unnoticed: in those days bishops' wives were made even less of than they
are now. He himself took no prominent place; it is probable that he was
unconsciously drawn into the tide of practical affairs. At any rate for
some reason he left next to nothing behind him besides the little book
aforesaid; he wrote a few epitaphs and dedications, translated the _Icon
Basilike_ into Latin, and had nearly finished translating Hooker's
_Polity_ into the same language, when he died. The latter was lost
through the carelessness of servants, who threw it into a waste-paper
bin, and used it to wrap up butter and cheese. And perhaps one may be
excused for saying that it was not a very inappropriate ending for it;
why a man of brisk and original mind should ever have engaged in this
dismal hack-work is the real problem. His contemporaries echo the loss
with a howl of dismay that could hardly have been greater had Hooker's
original manuscript itself been lost. Perhaps the Bishop wished to
correct the impression he had created by his earlier book,--as Maurice
used to buy up copies of _Eustace Conway_,--and so engaged in a graver
and more appropriate work; he could hardly have selected one which could
have been at once so decorous and so dull. Anyhow, the destruction of
this document will be received by the modern student with, to say the
least, equanimity.
We may now turn to a closer study of the book by which he still deserves
to be well known, _The Microcosmography_, or, to give a free rendering,
"Jottings from the Note-book of a Minute Philosopher."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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