When we turn to the anti-Martinist pamphlets we find the same unfairness of spirit, with little and often none of the cleverness and the ingenious form. If Lyly wrote the _Pappe with a Hatchet_, he was in a better place when he was in Euphues his lonely cave in Silexedra. The elegance, real of its artificial kind, is gone, and in place of it we get a loud vaunting howl of abuse. One-half of the qualification of the “slating reviewer” was wanting to the anti-Martinists. They hated the man, but they did not know the subject. The Royalist general who answered Fairfax’s self-righteous boasting of the good discipline of the Parliamentary soldiers by telling him that the Puritan had the sins of the Devil, “which are spiritual pride and rebellion,” struck him harder, and showed a finer wit than all the pamphleteers whom it has been in my power to see. They miss his vulnerable points, they bellow bad language and accusations of the kind of misconduct from which the Puritan was as free as the universal passions of humanity permitted. The difference between the two may be quite fairly put this way. The worst calumny of the Martinists can be quoted, but the anti-Martinists are naught when they are not using language which is nearly as unquotable as any written by the worst scribblers of the Restoration. The least nauseous passages are those in which these defenders of the Church gloat over the whips, branding-irons, and mutilating knife of Ball the Hangman. Now Martin rarely goes beyond threatening the bishops with a _premunire_, and when he does he stops at a “hemp collar.” [SN: _Its place in literary history._] The Martin Marprelate men were fighting in a now obsolete cause, in a style which has manifest faults of taste and temper. But they were on the right path, they set the example of pamphlet controversy from which the press was to come in time, and they did it in a way which only needed amending. The author of the _Anatomy of an Equivalent_ had learnt that when you have proved your opponent to be “a sodden-headed ass,” it is superfluous to pelt him with the name. Yet he was truly the successor of Martin, while the line of the anti-Martinists ended in Ned Ward. [SN: _Hooker._]