would probably have added its author to the catalogue of his own martyrs, should excite no small stir among the Catholics, and so it came to pass. But they weakened the force of their attack by betraying prematurely the spirit which animated them, sarcastically inquiring, even before its publication, when the “Golden Legend” was to appear, and denouncing the “Calendar of Saints,” which they had heard was to be prefixed to it, as blasphemy against their own. But Fox went on, as he says, without fear and without favour; and no sooner was Elizabeth to whom he dedicated, out of the way, than an examination of the book appeared, by Parsons the Jesuit, in his “Three Conversions of England,” which has furnished more modern objectors with most of the weapons of their warfare. But Parsons writes in a temper which defeats itself. He deals in vague vituperation rather than in specific accusations of error; or where he ventures upon the latter, he often either wilfully or ignorantly misreads Fox, as in the vapid pleasantry wasted upon Joan Lashford, a married maid, as he is pleased to call her;[437] or he triumphs over him by exposing a flaw in the character of a martyr with an _eureka_, which the honest martyrologist himself did not affect to conceal, and for the knowledge indeed of which Parsons is altogether indebted to him, as where he makes himself merry with the discordant sentiments of nine martyrs executed together, though their want of uniformity is a fact which he learns from Fox himself, who at the same time asserts that their disagreement was in smaller things only;[438] or he prefers charges against him at random without troubling himself to ascertain whether there is a foundation for them or not, as where he accuses him of defacing or destroying the records of cathedrals, which he had been permitted to use, lest they should convict him of negligence or fraud, and this not upon investigation of the fact, but simply, “he presuming it,” as though a charge so serious was to be an affair of presumption only;[439] or lastly, he comments upon his author in so fiendish a temper of mind, as would be in itself enough to satisfy every calm and dispassionate judge that he spoke not of truth or a love for it, but of mere malice; as where, after debasing the circumstances of Rowland Taylor’s story throughout, he concludes with a repetition of his joke about the worms in Hadley church-yard, as given in Fox, and subjoins, “this noteth Fox in the margin for a goodly apophthegm of Dr. Taylor, martyr; and with this, he saith he went to the fire; _where we must leave him eternally, as I fear_;”[440] and in a similar vein he has the heart to write of Latimer and Ridley, “they were burned together, each of them taking gunpowder to despatch himself quickly, as by Fox is seen, which yet is not read to have been practised by old martyrs, and it seemeth that these men would have the fame of martyrdom without the pain, and _now they have incurred