Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/416

 parochial priest with Wyclyff for two years up to the day of Wyclyff's death, told me this, and confirmed it with an oath, saying: 'As I must answer before God, I know these statements to be true, and, as I witnessed, so have I given my evidence.'

"The said John Horn related this, in the year of our Lord 1441, to me Doctor Gascoigne."

It seems to be a pious act, even if it be no more than that, to accept the statement of the old Lollard priest, which Netter of Walden—who might have seen both Horn and Gascoigne—included in his Fasciculi Zizaniorum. The picture that rises before us as we read these simple words may appropriately close the record of this half-obliterated, never-to-be forgotten life. Let us leave him so, the protagonist of the English Reformation, dying almost alone and forsaken, who had been the friend of princes and the withstander of popes; passing mutely from a world in which his voice had re-asserted the highest of human philosophies, and glowing like a star in the darkness with the fire of a yet unrisen sun.