Preface

Summary

If they who have excelled in any one virtue, or in any one science, are objects worthy of publick notice and esteem, they must be still more worthy of both who have excelled in all the sciences and virtues together. And they are the most worthy of all, who raised by the excellency of their virtue and learning, to the first dignities in the Church and to the first seat in the temple of fame, owed their reputation, dignities and merit neither to the fortuitous advantages of high birth, nor to the recommendations of powerful friends, but to the sole power of their abilities, and to the superior lustre of their virtues, which forced the world to take notice of them, and to draw them out of their native obscurity, in order to place them on the seats of honour.

One of these extraordinary characters will be here laid before the Reader, in the person of the illustrious Robert Grossetete or Great-head Bishop of Lincoln in the Thirteenth Century, of whose life, a very knowing Protestant and one that has scarce had his fellow in English Ecclesiastical knowledge, assures us that were it drawn at full length, it would exhibit the picture of a perfect Christian Bishop; and we may add, if any thing can be added to so comprehensive a eulogium, that of a perfect scholar, Grossetete being at once an illustrious linguist, poet, orator, philosopher and mathematician, as well as a prime theologist, and eminent prelate. Nevertheless this eminent prelate and scholar, once so renowned in his generation, and so deserving of the remembrance of all generations to come, is fallen into such oblivion among his own countrymen, and the lame notion the few have of him, with whom he still retaineth some part of his fame, has been the occasion of the following compilation the design whereof is to inform the ignorance of the former and to rectify the imperfect notion of the latter. An English work destined to celebrate the worthies of antiquity, and to retrieve their memory from the shade of oblivion, hath no particular article on this most renowned English worthy, and only makes a transient, tho very honourable mention of him, in the life of Doctor Roger Bacon one of his scholars.