It was a mind which unfolded first under the plain, manly discipline of an old-fashioned English country parsonage, where the unshowy piety and strong morality and modest theology of the middle age of Anglicanism, the school of Pearson, Bull, and Wilson, were supreme.

In almost all English histories dealing with this period his steadiness and solid unshowy qualities are contrasted with Essex's flightiness and failure, to the natural disadvantage of the latter.