taken notice of, that he affected more the exterior shew of a lord, than the humility of a priest, keeping as grand an equipage, as money could then furnish him with.  Dr. Fuller says, that our author was executed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; but Sir Richard Baker tells us, that he was one of the chief of those 70 priests that were taken in the year 1585; and when some of them were condemned, and the rest in danger of the law, her Majesty caused them all to be shipp’d away, and sent out of England.  Upon Heywood’s being taken and committed to prison, and the earl of Warwick thereupon ready to relieve his necessity, he made a copy of verses, mentioned by Sir John Harrington, concluding with these two;

  ——­Thanks to that lord, that wills me good;
  For I want all things, saving hay and wood.

He afterwards went to Rome, and at last settled in the city of Naples, where he became familiarly known to that zealous Roman Catholick, John Pitceus, who speaks of him with great respect.

It is unknown what he wrote or published after he became a Jesuit.  It is said that he was a great critic in the Hebrew language, and that he digested an easy and short method, (reduced into tables) for novices to learn that language, which Wood supposes was a compendium of a Hebrew grammar.  Our author paid the common debt of nature at Naples, 1598, and was buried in the college of Jesuits there.

[Footnote 1:  Langb.  Lives of the Poets, p. 249.]

[Footnote 2:  Langb. ubi supra.]

[Footnote 3:  Athen.  Oxon.]

* * * * *

JOHN LILLY,

A writer who flourished in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; he was a Kentish man, and in his younger years educated at St. Mary Magdalen College in Oxon, where in the year 1575 he took his degree of Master of Arts.  He was, says Langbaine, a very close student, and much addicted to poetry; a proof of which he has given to the world, in those plays which he has bequeathed to posterity, and which in that age were well esteemed, both by the court, and by the university.  He was one of the first writers, continues Langbain, who in those days attempted to reform the language, and purge it from obsolete expressions.  Mr. Blount, a gentleman who has made himself known to the world, by several pieces of his own writing (as Horae Subsecivae, his Microcosmography, &c.) and who published six of these plays, in his title page stiles him, the only rare poet of that time, the witty, comical, facetiously quick, and unparallell’d John Lilly.  Mr. Blount further says, ’That he sat ’at Apollo’s table; that Apollo gave him a wreath of his own bays without snatching; and that the Lyre he played on, had no borrowed strings:’  He mentions a romance of our author’s writing, called Euphues; our nation, says he, are in his debt, for a new English which he taught them; Euphues, and his England began first that language, and all our