Towards the end of the sixteenth century the now feeble old tailor, but cheerful scholar, produced his ‘Annals of England,’ the dedication of which had been accepted by Archbishop Whitgift. He had asked the City, proud to call him her “Chronicler,” to help him in his heavy charges, by bestowing on him two freedoms. I do not remember that the application was successful, but I do retain in my memory how truth-loving John was treated by the Vintners’ Company. The modest author, to support his petition for some slight favour prayed of them, read to those jolly fellows in court assembled some sheets of his great work. They were bored to death, and treated him like a beggar. They would neither help him, nor let him help himself by examining the records in their possession. He kept a cheerful heart through it all. He winced indeed under the ignorant additions made to his works by other editors, but he not the less cordially aided them in perfecting their own contributions to antiquarian history; and when he met with crosses in either his literary or his sartorial aspect, the old man calmed his irritation by reading and by annotating ‘Chaucer.’ But he was growing old and helpless. Although he was called the City’s fee’d Chronicler, it is not certain whether this was or was not a mere “façon de parler.” Of one thing there is no doubt whatever. That ill-dressed king, James I., contemplating Stow rather as a tailor than an author, granted him a license whereby he was empowered to go about and collect charity,—gather benevolences, a chartered Bedesman. But as he happened to be so afflicted with gout in the feet that he could not perambulate with his petition, the license was next to useless. Stow looked at his willing but helpless legs, and said with a melancholy smile that he was maimed in the members wherewith he had most offended; for that no man had walked as many miles as he had in search of material for his books. Nevertheless, strengthened by the royal license, he set up for a weary day or two as a beggar; and all that he gained was seven and sixpence from St. Mary’s Wolnoth. Magnificent alms for a veteran antiquary! And yet the fourscore years which had just passed from the day of his birth, when he was finally deposited in the consecrated ground of St. Andrew Undershaft, were not unhappy years. Under trial, next to trust in God, I do not know of any better anodyne, more potent balm, than literary occupation; and of that, Stow, that tall, thin, cheerful, pleasant, bright-eyed, strong-memoried, sober, mild, courteous, truth-loving tailor and antiquary, had his fill.