Now honest John was of a Romish family, albeit the _gaillardise_ of the Chantry priests had helped to make a convert of him. But he had a respect for the antiquity of things, if not of facts, connected with the old faith; and when mention was made of a tailor who worked little, but who studied much, who professed a reverence for truth, and yet who spoke almost lovingly of antiquated ceremonies, he was at once suspected of being suspicious. The suspicion was heightened by the false accusations of a younger brother; and down came Ecclesiastical Commissioners upon his little library, to see if out of it they could not prove him a Papist and rebel, worthy the scourge and the stake. They made sad havoc among his dearly-beloved books; and were more than once on the point of committing him to prison, when a volume with an incomprehensible title came under their thumb. But John answered so wisely and so well, that they could find no guile in him; and they left him in some little peace, and up to his ears in papers. He was thus visited more than once, and always at the instigation of his vagabond brother. It was after one of these harassing, and to him perilous perquisitions, that he happened to be reading an account of some sorry knave who was hanged at the Elms in Smithfield; the comment which he himself hung upon the text was significant, and to this effect:—“God amend, or send like end to, all such false brothers!” But he was rewarded for many of his vexations by the honour which he reaped out of the harvest of criticism which sprang out of the publication of his first great work, the ‘Chronicles’ of England from the coming of that uncertain gentleman Brute, to the accession of his certain descendant, bluff Harry the Eighth. John did not hurry over this work; he took his time; thought over it when making liveries for the corporation, walked miles for it, read libraries for it, and spent all the cash thereon which he possessed, could beg, or could borrow. O ye gentlemen literateurs, who turn out successive volumes of history faster than John Stow could make jerkins, think of a plodding forty years spent in perfecting this one work! The author was poorer when he completed his novel, painfully elaborate, yet clear and useful book, than he was when he commenced it. He was not a better tailor than before; and altogether his prospects were not brilliant. But he wore a stout heart, lived upon hope, and fondly thought, good old man! (I trust that no “d—d good-natured friend” disturbed that thought), that every phrase he wrote was rich in truth. Now some of it is as true as Robinson Crusoe, and yet quite as veracious as much with which we trouble ourselves under the venerated name of “history.”