it is supposed to be on this account that he waited some ten years before he became a Master of Arts. He distinguished himself, at the University, as the author of certain clever Latin verses; but his "Ralph Roister Doister," the earliest known original comedy in the English language, was not written until he was Head Master of Eton, between the years 1534 and 1541.
Good Isaac Walton, in his "Lives," tells the story of Richard Hooker's troubles and trials at Corpus. In 1568 the boy Hooker, in the fifteenth year of his age, went up to receive a "clerk's place in the gift of the President of Corpus." He depended upon many gifts during his life of seventeen years at Corpus. When he was about twenty he was elected to a Scholarship, and later he passed to a Fellowship, gaining knowledge day by day; until, in 1581, he received the doubtful gift of a wife not doubtful because she was a wife, but doubtful because she was that particular kind of a wife; and he went" from that garden of purity, of pleasure, of peace and of sweet conversation, into the thorny wilderness of a busy world, into those corroding cares that attend the married priest and a country parsonage."
If you Clerks, and Scholars, and Fellows, wish to learn what befel Hooker, read Walton's "Life of Hooker." But remember that there are wives
