When John Knox visited Calvin at Geneva one Sunday, it is said that he discovered him engaged in a game; and John Aylmer (1521-1594), though bishop of London, enjoyed a game of a Sunday afternoon, but used such language "as justly exposed his character to reproach."
He now put the Arthurian legends aside fiat a time, and devoted himself to the composition, in 1862, of "Enoch Arden," which, however, did not appear until 1864, and then in a volume which also contained "Sea Dreams," "Aylmer's Field" and, above all, "The Northern Farmer," the first and finest of Tennyson's remarkable studies in dialect_ In April of this year Garibaldi visited Farringford; in February 1865 Tennyson's mother died at Hampstead in her eighty-fifth year; in the ensuing summer he travelled in Germany.
He had assistance from two clerics of widely differing opinions - from Edmund Grindal, who was later, as archbishop of Canterbury, to maintain his Puritan convictions in opposition to Elizabeth; and from John Aylmer, afterwards one of the bitterest opponents of the Puritan party.
Aylmer Papillon was the title of it, Dr Smiles informs us; and he prints a letter from Disraeli to the John Murray of that day, which indicates its character pretty clearly.
Murray could not publish Aylmer Papillon, but he had great hopes of its boyish writer (Isaac D'Israeli was an old friend of his), "took him into his confidence, and related to him his experiences of men and affairs."