Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/104

 neighbourhood. The Anonymous Person, after some survey and communing, suggested to Nicholas Ferrar, ‘Perhaps he had but assumed all this ritual mummery, in order to get a devout life led peaceably in these bad times?’ Nicholas, a dark man, who had acquired something of the Jesuit in his Foreign travels, looked at him ambiguously, and said, ‘I perceive you are a person who know the world!’ They did not ask the Anonymous Person to stay dinner, which he considered would have been agreeable.— —

Note these other things, with which we are more immediately concerned. In this same year the Feoffees, with their Purchase of Advowsons, with their Lecturers and Running Lecturers, were fairly rooted out, and flung prostrate into total ruin; Laud having set Attorney-General Noy upon them, and brought them into the Starchamber. ‘God forgive them,’ writes Bishop Laud, ‘and grant me patience!’—on hearing that they spake harshly of him; not gratefully, but ungratefully, for all this trouble he took! In the same year, by procurement of the same zealous Bishop hounding-on the same invincible Attorney-General, William Prynne, our unreadable friend, Peter Heylin having read him, was brought to the Starchamber; to the Pillory, and had his ears cropt off, for the first time;—who also, strange as it may look, manifested no gratitude, but the contrary, for all that trouble!

In the end of this the third year of Oliver’s bode at St. Ives, came out the celebrated Writ of Shipmoney. It was the last feat of Attorney-General Noy: a morose, amorphous, cynical Law-Pedant, and invincible living heap of learned rubbish; once a Patriot in Parliament, till they made him Attorney-General, and enlightened his eyes: who had