Wherefore did Thomas Warton (never to be named without respect and gratitude by all lovers of English literature,) say that when the Sermons of Hugh Latimer were in vogue at Court, the University might be justified in applauding Gammer Gurton's Needle? How could he who so justly appreciated the Comedy, disparage those sermons? He has spoken of the play as the first in our language in which a comic story is handled with some disposition of plot and some discrimination. “The writer,” he says, “has a degree of jocularity which sometimes rises above buffoonery, but is often disgraced by lowness of incident. Yet in a more polished age he would have chosen, nor would he perhaps have disgraced, a better subject. It has been thought surprizing that a learned audience could have endured some of these indelicate scenes. But the established festivities of scholars were gross, nor was learning in that age always accompanied by gentleness of manners.” Nor is it always now, nor has it ever been O Thomas Warton! if it had, you would not when you wore a great wig, had taken the degree of B.D., been Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, and was moreover Poet Laureate, most worthy of that office of all who have held it since Great Ben, you would not in your mellow old age, when your brother was Master of Winchester School, have delighted as you did in hunting rats with the Winchester Boys. O Thomas Warton! you had and could not but have a hearty liking for all that is properly comic in the pithy old episcopal comedy! but that you should even seem to disparage Latimer's Sermons is to me more than most strange. For Latimer would have gained for himself a great and enduring name in the pulpit, if he had not been called upon to bear the highest and holiest of all titles. The pithy comedy no doubt was written long before its author was consecrated Bishop of Bath and Wells, and we may be sure that Bishop Still never reckoned it among his sins. If its language were rendered every where intelligible and its dirtiness cleaned away, for there is nothing worse to be removed, Gammer Gurton's Needle might succeed in these days as a farce. Fuller says he had read in the Register of Trinity College, Cambridge, this commendation of Bishop Still that he was _αγαθος κουροτροφος_ _nec Collegio gravis aut onerosus_. Still was Master of that College, as he had been before of St. Johns.