Had he been all that his detractors call him, that would not have unstoicised him, since, as already said, the system admits that ‘no mere man is able to keep the commandments, but doth daily break them,’ as the Shorter Catechism puts it in questionable grammar. But his censors have not sufficiently observed that if he displayed faults of passion, eagerness, temper, impatience, it was when he was young; and the fair inference is that if he overcame those tendencies as life proceeded, it was by a persistent effort of ‘will,’ repelling the invading influence of the ‘outward.’ By all accounts his age was not a ‘crabbed age.’ Though plain, and even rustic, in appearance--in the matter of dress he seems to have carried his superiority to the ‘outward’ to a really unstoical extreme--when he opened his mouth he was a different being, courtly in manner, refined and elegant in expression, humorous and entertaining, as well as instructive even to the verge of ‘edifying,’ in every way a polite and variously pleasant companion--‘with nothing of the pedagogue about him but the gown,’ said a keen and competent observer, who knew him well. ‘Plaisant in company,’ says the slightly garrulous Sir James, ‘rehersing at all occasions moralities short and fecfull, whereof he had aboundance, and invented wher he wanted’--a combination, in short, of wit, wisdom, resource, and pith, anything but a picture of the snappish old curmudgeon, soured and made ill-natured by disappointments which he had not wisely overcome. His letters, too, of which unfortunately we possess only a few, reveal the same well-ordered and placid moral interior: full of the purest friendly devotion, ready always to do a good turn, especially to merit in obscurity, not insensible to the difficulties and distresses of life, but rising above them, and achieving in spite of them not only contentment, but a degree of light-heartedness. He was long a martyr to gout--a sore affliction, if sufferers from it may be trusted. But he took it with a smile. Writing (1577) at seventy-one to his old friend and pupil Randolph, by that time Postmaster-General to Queen Elizabeth, he tells him that he is hard at work on his _History_, and adds: ‘The rest of my occupation is wyth the gout, quhilk holdis me besy both day and nyt. And quhair ye say ye haif not lang to lyif [live], I traist [trust] to God to go before you, albeit I be on fut, and ye ryd the _post_.... And thus I tak my leif [leave] shortly at you now, and my lang leif quhen God pleasis.’ The fun may not be of a side-splitting character, nor the seriousness very unctuous, but the man who could encounter the gout keeping at him night and day in this fashion, must have practised keeping the ‘outward’ at bay in a considerable variety of situations, and for a considerable time, and with considerable success. _Alleged Vindictiveness_