Page:Books Condemned to be Burnt - James Anson Farrer.djvu/78

62 For such reasons the book was burnt by public edict, a censure which the writer took so mudi to heart that, as Fuller says, being "so much defeated in his expectation to find punishment where he looked for preferment, as if his life were bound up by sympathy in his book, he ended his days soon after." Poor Mocket was only forty when he died, succumbing, like Cowell, to the rough reception accorded to his book;

Mocket's book is less one to read than to treasure as a sort of lusus natures in the literary world; for it would certainly have seemed safe antecedently to wager a million to one that no Warden of All Souls* would ever write a book that would be subjected to the indignity of fire; and, in spite of his example, I would still wager a million to one that a similar fate will never befall any literary work of Mocket's successors. Mocket's book, therefore, has a certain distinction which is all its own; but those who do not love the Church of England without it will hardly be led to such love by reading Mocket. And Mocket himself, if we follow Fuller, seems to have wished to make his love for the Church a vehicle to his own preferment; but as, perhaps, in that respect he does not stand alone, I should be sorry that the implied