Such is our solution of the 'change' of Crashaw from Protestantism to Catholicism. It is sheer fanaticism to rave against the 'change,' and to burrow for ignoble motives. Gross ignorance of the facts of the period is betrayed by any one who harshly 'judges' that the humble 'ejected Fellow' made a worldly 'gain' by his 'change.' Nay verily, it was no 'gain,' in that paltry sense, for an Englishman then to become a Roman Catholic. It was to invite obloquy, misconstruction, 'evil-speaking.' In Crashaw's case he had wealthy uncles and aunts, and other relatives, who should have amply provided for him, and 'sheltered' him through the 'troublous times.' Prynne's 'Legenda Lignea, with an Answer to Mr. Birchley's Moderator (pleading for a Toleration of Popery) and a Character of some hopeful saints revolted to the Church of Rome' (1653), is brutal as it is inaccurate; but it must be adduced as an example of what 'Revolters' (so called) had to endure, albeit Crashaw was gone into the silences whither no clamour reaches, when the bitter book came forth. 'Master Richard Crashaw (son to the London divine, and sometime Fellow of St. Peterhouse in Cambridge) is another slip of the times that is transplanted to Rome. This peavish sillie seeker glided away from his principles in a poetical vein of fancy and impertinent curiosity, and finding that verses and measured flattery took and much pleased some female wits, Crashaw crept by degrees into favour and acquaintance with some court ladies, and with the gross commendations of their parts and beauties (burnished and varnished with some other agreeable adulations) he got first the estimation of an innocent, harmless convert; and a purse being made by some deluded, vain-glorious ladies and their friends, the poet was despatched on a pilgrimage to Rome, where, if he had found in the see Pope Urban the Eighth instead of Pope Innocent, he might possibly have received a greater quantity and a better number of benedictions; for Urban was as much a pretender to be prince and œcumenical patron of poets as head of the Church; but Innocent being more harsh and dry, the poor small poet Crashaw met with none of the generation and kindred of Mecænas, nor any great blessing from his Holiness; which misfortune puts the pitiful wier-drawer to a humour of admiring his own raptures; and in this fancy (like Narcissus) he is fallen in love with his own shadow, conversing with himself in verse, and admiring the birth of his own brains; he is only laughed at, or at most but pitied, by his few patrons, who, conceiving him unworthy of any preferment in their Church, have given him leave to live (like a lean swine almost ready to starve) in a poor mendicant quality; and that favour is granted only because Crashaw can rail as satirically and bitterly at true religion in verse as others of his grain and complexion can in prose and loose discourses: this fickle shuttlecock, so tost with