The saturnine Anthony Wood is amusingly illustrated in two passages from his notice of Earle. "John Earle received his first being in this vain and transitory world within the city of York.... His elegy on Beaumont was printed at the end of the quarto edition of Beaumont's poems--put out with a poetical epistle before them, subscribed by a _Presbyterian bookbinder_--afterwards an informer to the Court of Sequestration ... _and a beggar defunct in prison_"! In the notice of Morley he tells us that "his banishment was made less tedious to him by the company of Dr. Joh. Earle, his dearest friend." It is sad to find that the translation of Hooker which was "to make the learned of all nations happy" was "utterly destroyed"--the loose papers being taken by the servants after Earle's death "to light their fires or else to put under their bread and pies." This translation "was Earle's entertainment during a part of his exile at Cologne." See the Bodleian letters quoted in Arber's Reprint. To that Reprint I have been much indebted for help of various kinds. My warmest thanks are due to Professor Rowley, of University College, Bristol, whom I have constantly consulted while preparing this issue of Dr. Bliss's edition. If one may be allowed a slight twist of a Shakspearian phrase, I would say of such help as his--"Ripeness is all." It is this quality that makes one at least of Professor Rowley's friends so grateful and so importunate. S. T. I. Clifton, April, 1897. FOOTNOTES: [EI] In a later hand. [EJ] Arcana in margin. [EK] Th. in margin, _i.e._, Th[omas]. [EL] In a later hand. [EM] In the later hand. [EN] A fellow of Merton with Earle. His testimony to Earle is quoted by Bliss. Anthony Wood says of him, "that when he lost his most beloved Lord Falkland, at Newbury Fight, he travelled as a tutor, and upon a freight that the Church of England would terminate through the endeavours of the peevish and restless Presbyterians, began to think of settling himself in the Church of Rome." He recanted his errors publicly at Rome in 1646. [EO] Poetical? [EP] This epithet with Clarendon's "wary and cultivated" must be set against what Clarendon tells us of his "negligence in dress, habit and mien." Earle can never have been awkward. His courtesy was born with him, and he can never have needed (like "the downright scholar") "brushing over with good company." [EQ] Memoirs, vol. I, p. 81, ed. C. Firth. [ER] I ought to say that Mr. Madan, who was kind enough to look at my copy, does not think many of the notes are in Bliss's hand-writing. [ES] "More care, attention, accuracy and valuable enlargement from an inexhaustible stock of materials has rarely been witnessed than in the editorial labours of Dr. Bliss."--Dibdin, speaking of Bliss's edition of the Athenae Oxonienses. [ET] Cowper's Letters, June 12th, 1782. [EU] Some of the MS. notes in my copy are the same as those in the printed volume.