It is sometimes said that the Martinists were routed by Lyly and Nash, which is certainly unfair to the Earl of Derby, and not quite just to Ball the Hangman. As far as they were routed by literary weapons, the honour of defeating them is due to a very different hand. The doctrine of the Puritans was confuted in the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ of Richard Hooker--the greatest masterpiece of Elizabethan prose.[88] Hooker was born at Heavitree, near Exeter, in 1553. His family was poor, and, like many of his contemporaries, he was educated by the kindness of patrons. Dr Jewel, the Bishop of Salisbury, and Edwin Sandys, then Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of York, successively protected him at Oxford. He was tutor to Sandys’ sons. If Isaac Walton was correctly informed, he was somewhat tamely annexed by a scheming landlady as husband for her daughter. He had to resign his fellowship upon his marriage in 1584, and was appointed to the living of Drayton Beauchamp, in Buckinghamshire. In the following year he was appointed Master of the Temple. Here he became widely known by a controversy with the Puritan Walter Travers, conducted on both sides with more moderation than was usual in those times. After holding the Mastership for seven years, he resigned it for a living in Wiltshire. He died at Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, in 1600. [SN: _The_ Ecclesiastical Polity.] In the chapter of his _Constitutional History_ which deals with Elizabeth’s laws against the Non-Conformists, Mr Hallam has written: “But while these scenes of pride and persecution on one hand, and of sectarian insolence on the other, were deforming the bosom of the English Church, she found a defender of her institutions in one who mingled in these vulgar controversies like a knight of romance among caitiff brawlers, with arms of finer temper and worthy to be proved in a nobler field.” If this sentence is to be understood to mean--as from the context it perhaps must--that Hooker mingled in the Martin Marprelate conflict, it is inaccurate. He answered Cartwright and Travers, as Dr Bridges had done, and whatever may be said of these men it would be silly to call them caitiff brawlers, while it would be difficult to say what nobler field Hooker could have found for his arms than that in which he justified the faith and religious practices of Englishmen. Yet Mr Hallam has fairly singled out the predominant characteristic of Hooker. There is something knightly about him, something of the chivalry of Sir Galahad. He could strike with telling force, as he does in the one passage of fine scorn devoted to the jeering Puritan pamphlets--beside which all the scolding of their proper opponents is mere brutal noise. Yet what prevails with him so completely that the exceptions are hardly noticeable is the moderation which has earned him his name of “Judicious.” It is not the easy moderation of one who does not care much, but of a man who was