There is a verse, it is true, in the
second of the two detached cantos of "Mutability,"
"Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace,"
which is supposed to glance at the straiter religionists, and from which
it has been inferred that he drew away from them as he grew older. It is
very likely that years and widened experience of men may have produced in
him their natural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty
destructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more generous side of
Puritanism I think he sympathized to the last. His rebukes of clerical
worldliness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in
"Mother Hubberd's Tale," published in 1591.[291] There is an iconoclastic
relish in his account of Sir Guyon's demolishing the Bower of Bliss that
makes us think he would not have regretted the plundered abbeys as
perhaps Shakespeare did when he speaks of the winter woods as "bare
ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang";--
"But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave
Guyon broke down with rigor pitiless,
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save
Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness,
But that their bliss he turned to balefulness;
Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface,
Their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress,
Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase,
And of the fairest late now made the foulest place.
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