Note 322 — The Drawing Room.

Like all men, who desert a religion which they once enthusiastically profess, Bale, after being zealous for the papal superstitions, holding up his hands to rotten posts, and calling them his "fathers in heaven," (according to his own confession) became a zealous Protestant, and abused the church of Rome with a virulence almost unknown in the writings of his predecessors. But in spite of his coarseness, positiveness, and severity, he merits the great praise of having done much in behalf of the cause of literature. His attachment to Leland is, unquestionably, highly to his honour; but his biographies, especially of the Romish prelates, are as monstrously extravagant as his plays are incorrigibly dull. He had a certain rough honesty and prompt benevolence of character, which may be thought to compensate for his grosser failings. His reputation as a bibliomaniac is fully recorded in the anecdote mentioned at p. 234, ante. His "magnum opus," the Scriptores Britanniæ, has already been noticed with sufficient minuteness; vide p. 31, ante. It has not escaped severe animadversion. Francis Thynne tells us that Bale has "mistaken infynyte thinges in that booke de Scriptoribus Anglie, being for the most part the collections of Lelande." Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer; p. 23. Picard, in his wretched edition of Gulielmus Neubrigensis (edit. 1610, p. 672), has brought a severe accusation against the author of having "burnt or torn all the copies of the works which he described, after he had taken the titles of them;" but see this charge successfully rebutted in Dr. Pegge's Anonymiana; p. 311. That Bale's library, especially in the department of manuscripts, was both rich and curious, is indisputable, from the following passage in Strype's Life of Archbishop Parker. "The archbishop laid out for Bale's rare collection of MSS. immediately upon his death, fearing that they might be gotten by somebody else. Therefore he took care to bespeak them before others, and was promised to have them for his money, as he told Cecil. And perhaps divers of those books that do now make proud the University Library, and that of Benet and some other colleges, in Cambridge, were Bale's," p. 539. It would seem, from the same authority, that our bibliomaniac "set himself to search the libraries in Oxford, Cambridge, London (wherein there was but one, and that a slender one), Norwich, and several others in Norfolk and Suffolk: whence he had collected enough for another volume De Scriptoribus Britannicis." Ibid. The following very beautiful wood-cut of Bale's portrait is taken from the original, of the same size, in the Acta Romanorum Pontificum; Basil, 1527, 8vo. A similar one, on a larger scale, will be found in the "Scriptores," &c., published at Basil, 1557, or 1559—folio. Mr. Price, the principal librarian of the Bodleian Library, shewed me a rare head of Bale, of a very different cast of features—in a small black-letter book, of which I have forgotten the name.