Archbishop (Whitgift) suspended Travers.  The position, however, had become intolerable for H. who respected his opponent in spite of their differences, and he petitioned Whitgift that he might retire to the country and find time and quiet to complete his great work, the Ecclesiastical Polity, on which he was engaged.  He was accordingly, in 1591, presented to the living of Boscombe near Amesbury, and made sub-Dean and a minor Prebendary of Salisbury.  Here he finished The Four Books of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, pub. in 1594.  The following year he was presented by Queen Elizabeth to the living of Bishopsbourne, Kent.  Here the fifth book was pub. (1597), and here he d. in 1600.  The sixth and eighth books were not pub. until 1648, and the seventh only appeared in 1662.  The Ecclesiastical Polity is one of the greatest achievements alike in English theology and English literature, a masterpiece of reasoning and eloquence, in a style stately and sonorous, though often laborious and involved.  Hallam considered that no English writer had better displayed the capacities of the language.  The argument is directed against the Romanists on the one hand and the Puritans on the other, and the fundamental idea is “the unity and all embracing character of law as the manifestation of the divine order of the universe.”  The distinguishing note of H.’s character was what Fuller calls his “dove-like simplicity.”  Izaak Walton, his biographer, describes him as “an obscure, harmless man, in poor clothes, of a mean stature and stooping ... his body worn out, not with age, but study, and holy mortification, his face full of heat-pimples ... and tho’ not purblind, yet short, or weak, sighted.”  In his calling as a parish priest he was faithful and diligent.  In preaching “his voice was low ... gesture none at all, standing stone-still in the pulpit.”  The sixth book of the Ecclesiastical Polity has been considered of doubtful authority, and to have no claim to its place, and the seventh and eighth are believed to have been put together from rough notes.  Some of his MSS. were destroyed after his death by his wife’s relatives.  The epithet “judicious” attached to his name first appears in the inscription on his monument at Bishopsbourne.

Works, ed. by Keble (1836); new ed. revised by Church, etc. (1888).  It includes the Life by I. Walton.

HOOLE, JOHN (1727-1803).—­Translator, s. of a watch-maker and inventor, was b. in London, and was in the India House, of which he rose to be principal auditor (1744-83).  He translated Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1763), and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1773-83), as well as other works from the Italian.  He was also the author of three dramas, which failed.  He is described by Scott as “a noble transmuter of gold into lead.”