The Merry Puritans

“To [Cardinal Allen], as to all the Roman writers, Protestants were the very reverse of ‘puritans’: they were ‘soft physitions’ . . . against whom he must assert a doctrine admittedly sterner and darker, ‘the behoulding whereof must neades ingender som sorowe and sadnesse of minde’ and even (such is our ‘frailetie’) ‘a certaine bitter taediousnesse'” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 439).