Nevertheless, he was, like most lenient judges of the faith of others, a staunch adherent to his own. “Where was your religion to be found before Luther?” wrote a jocose Priest at Rome, seeing Sir Henry in an obscure corner of a church, listening to the beautiful service of the Vespers, and enjoying the exquisite music of a faith which appeals so much to the senses. “Where yours is not to be found--in the written Word of God,” was the answer, scribbled on a piece of paper underneath the interrogation. Another evening Sir Henry sent one of the choir boys to his priestly friend with this question:--“Do you believe those many thousands of poor Austrians damned who were excommunicated because the Pope and the Duke of Venice could not agree about their temporalities?” To which inquiry the priest wrote in French underneath--"_Excusez moi, Monsieur._" Such was the man whom Buckingham favoured; and who afterwards repaid the obligation by a beautiful, somewhat florid, but authentic biographical account of the Duke’s origin, his rise, his dangers, his services, and his death. Quaint but expressive language, genuine enthusiasm, and personal acquaintance, render this sketch one of the most delightful compositions of Sir Henry’s pen. In comparing him, in prosperity and in adversity, to Essex, the master whom he loved, Wotton pays the Duke of Buckingham what he conceived to be the highest compliment. He was commencing a life of Martin Luther, and intending to interweave in it a history of the Reformation in Germany, when Charles I. prevailed on him to lay it aside, and to begin a history of England. That undertaking has something unfortunate associated with it. Rapin and Hume never lived to complete their works. Mackintosh died after leaving a noble fragment to increase our sorrow for his loss. Macaulay has expired before half his glorious task has been given to the world. Sir Henry Wotton had sketched out some short characters as materials, when his intentions and Charles’s commands were frustrated by death. His “Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, or a collection of Lives, Letters, and Poems, with characters of sundry personages, and other incomparable pieces of Language and Art, by the ever-memorable Sir Henry Wotton,”[242] is a small octavo volume; yet large enough to create regret that one of such rare powers and opportunities had not written, with the candour of his nature, a history of the times in which he flourished. His “State of Christendom, or a most exact and curious discovery of many secret passages and hidden mysteries of the times,” supplies in some measure that deficiency. Footnote 242: Collected and edited by Izaak Walton, in 1672. Successful in life, Wotton was, in his death, fortunate in being the subject of an elegy from the pen of Cowley, then a young man of twenty-one, at Trinity College, Cambridge.[243] Footnote 243: Cowley was born in 1618.