Anecdote of the Great Lord Burleigh and the Dissenters of His Day
He was once very much pressed by a body of Divines, says Collins, in his Life, to make some alteration in the Liturgy, upon which he desired them to go into the next room by themselves, and bring in their unanimous opinion on the disputed points. But they very soon returned without being able to agree. “Why, gentlemen,” said he, “how can you expect that I should alter my point in dispute, when you, who must be more competent to judge, from your situation, than I can possibly be, cannot agree among yourselves in what manner you would have me alter it.”
OTHER SAYINGS OF THIS GREAT MAN
Were, that he would “never truste anie man not of sounde religion; for he that is false to God, can never be true to man.”
Parents, he said, were to be blamed for “the unthrifty looseness of youth,” who made them men seven years too soon, and when they “had but children’s judgments.”
“Warre is the curse, and peace the blessinge of a countrie;” and “a realme,” he said, “gaineth more by one year’s peace, than by tenne years’ warre.”
“That nation,” he would observe, “was happye where the king would take counsell and follow it.” With such a sage minister, it is not surprising that Elizabeth was the greatest princess that ever lived, nor that she gave such wise laws to Cambridge, whose Chancellor he was.
PORSON’S PROGRESS IN KNOWLEDGE
“When I was seventeen,” Porson once observed, “I thought I knew every thing; as soon as I was twenty-four, and had read Bentley, I found I knew nothing. Now I have challenged the great scholars of the age to find five faults to their one, in any work, ancient or modern, they decline it.” On another occasion, he described himself as