10 LIVES OF THE PURITANS. Bacon and Mr. Joseph Mede; and when they found that he had no higher preferment, they said that Englishmen did riot deserve such great scholars, since they made so little of them. " Though they have wronged his memory,* says Fuller, " who have represented him as an anabaptist; yet he was disaffected to the discipline and ceremonies of the church; "* on which account he is, withjustice, classed among the puritans. Mr. Lydiat, though opposed to the ecclesiastical dis- cipline and ceremonies, was a man of loyal principles, and discovered his zeal in the royal cause ; for which, upon the commencement of the civil war, he was a considerable sufferer from the parliament's army. His own statement to Sir William Compton, governor of Banbury castle, affirms that his rectory was four times pillaged, and himself reduced to so great a want of common necessaries, that he could not change his linen for a quarter of a year, without borrowing a shirt. He was also twice carried away to prison, and was cruelly used by the soldiers for refusing their demands of money, for defending his books and papers, and for his bold speeches in favour of the royal cause. From this and other circumstances, it appears that his manners were not con- ciliating, and that, to a scholar's ignorance of the world, he joined the bluntness of an independent character. Of his confident and sanguine disposition, a judgment may be formed from a passage in one of his letters to Usher. After expressing a hope that his learned friend would in 'the end assent to the truth of what he had delivered concerning the beginning and conclusion of Daniel's seventy weeks, and all the dependencies thereon, he says, " For certainly, how weak soever I, the restorer and publisher thereof, am, yet it is strong and will prevail; and, notwithstanding mink obscure estate, in due time the clouds and mists of errors being dis- persed and vanished, it will shine forth as bright as the clear sun at noon-tide. "+ This learned man finished his painful life, and died ill indigence and obscurity at Okerton, April 3, 1646, aged seventy-four years.t. Though he obtained considerable repu- tation among learned men at home and abroad ; yet his fame is so far obliterated, even in his own country, that it is probable few ,English readers have known to whom Dr. Johnson refers in his " Vanity of Human Wishes," * Fuller's Worthies, part ii. p. 138. Aikin's Lives of Selden and Usher, p. 401. Wood's Athena; Oxon. vol. ii. p. 40-48.
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