Yet have there been among them a few, as eminent for their
learning as for their piety, and, in justice to their memory, I
will mention two of this character: the one was
Gataker, well known for his excellent edition of the Meditations
of the emperor Marcus Antoninus, and his Commentary on the
prophecy of Jeremiah; the other, a somewhat earlier writer, old
Mr. Dod, surnamed the Decalogist, an exquisite Hebrew scholar, a
man of primitive sanctity, and a passive non-conforming
divine. His memory is not quite extinct among the
dissenters of the present age, for I remember, in my youth, to
have seen, in the window of an old bookseller of that
denomination, a printed broad sheet, with a wooden portrait at
the top thereof, intitled 'Mr. Dod's sayings,' being a string of
religious aphorisms, intended to be stuck up in the houses of
poor persons. In Fuller's Worthies, page 181, and also
in his Church history, book xi. page 219, are some particulars
that mark his character, and in the latter, page 220, the
following note of his simplicity. 'He was but coarsely
used by the cavaliers, and when the followers, who came to
plunder him, brought down the sheets out of his chamber, into the
room where he sat by the fire-side, he, in their absence to
search for more, took one pair, and clapped them under his
cushion whereon he sat, much pleasing himself, after their
departure, that he had, as he said, plundered the plunderers,
and, by a lawful felony, had saved so much of his own to
himself. He died the same year with archbishop Laud,
1646, and with him,' this author adds, 'the old puritan seemed to
expire.' (Hawkins)
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