manner of that cold and wordy versifier. Lydgate and Hawes may stand together as perhaps the two writers who, in the century and a half that followed the death of Chaucer, contributed most to carry forward the regulation and modernisation of the language which he began ; their mere poetical merits are not worth contending about. Barklay, who did not die till 1552, when he had attained a great age, employed his pen principally in translations, in which line his most celebrated performance is his 'Ship of Fools,' from the German of Sebastian Brandt, which was printed in 1508. Barklay, however, besides consulting both a French and a Latin version of Brandt's poem, has enlarged his original with the enumeration and description of a considerable variety of follies which he found flourishing among his own countrymen. This gives the work some value as a record of the English manners of the time; but both its poetical and its satirical pretensions are of the very humblest order. At this date most of our writers of what was called poetry seem to have been occupied with the words in which they were to clothe their ideas, almost to the exclusion of all the higher objects of the poetic art. And that, perhaps, is what of necessity happens at a particular stage in the progress of a nation's literature-at the stage corresponding to the transition state in the growth of the human being between the termination of free, rejoicing boyhood and the full assurance of manhood begun; which is peculiarly the season not of achievement but of preparation, not of accomplishing ends but of acquiring the use of means and instruments, and also, it may be added, of the aptitude to mistake the one of these things for the other.

VOL. II.

M

SKELTON.

But the poetry with the truest life in it, produced in the reign of Henry the Seventh and the earlier part of that of his son, is undoubtedly that of Skelton. John Skelton may have been born about or soon after 1460; he studied at Cambridge, if not at both universities; began to write and publish compositions in verse between 1480 and 1490; was graduated as poet laureat (a degree in grammar, including versification and rhetoric) at Oxford before 1490; was admitted ad eundem at Cambridge in 1493; in 1498 took holy orders; was probably about the same time appointed tutor to the young prince Henry, afterwards Henry the Eighth; was eventually promoted to be rector of Diss in Norfolk; and died in 1529 in the sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, where he had taken refuge to escape the vengeance of cardinal Wolsey, originally his patron, but latterly the chief butt at which he had been wont to shoot his satiric shafts. As a scholar Skelton had a European reputation in his own day; and the great Erasmus has styled him Britannicarum literarum decus et lumen (the light and ornament of English letters). His Latin verses are distinguished by their purity and classical spirit. As for his English poetry, it is generally more of a mingled yarn, and of a much coarser fabric. In many of his effusions indeed, poured forth in sympathy with or aid of some popular cry of the day, he is little better than a rhyming buffoon; much of his ribaldry is now nearly unintelligible; and it may be doubted if a considerable portion of his grotesque and apparently incoherent jingle even had much more than the sort of half meaning with which a tipsy writer may sa

tisfy readers as far gone as himself. Even in the most reckless of these compositions, however, he rattles along, through sense and nonsense, with a vivacity that had been a stranger to our poetry for many a weary day; and his freedom and spirit, even where most unrefined, must have been exhilarating after the long fit of somnolency in which the English muse had dozed away the last hundred years. But much even of Skelton's satiric verse is instinct with genuine poetical vigour, and a fancy alert, sparkling, and various, to a wonderful degree. It is impossible, where the style and manner are, if not so diffuse, at least so rushing and river-like, to give any complete idea of the effect by extracts; but we will transcribe a small portion of the bitterest of his attacks upon Wolsey, his satire, or "little book," as he designates it, entitled Why come ye not to court?' extending in all to nearly 1300 lines :

Our barons be so bold
Into a mouse-hole they wold
Rin away and creep,

Like a meiny of sheep;

Dare not look out at dur

For dread of the mastiff cur,
For dread of the butcher's dog
Wold wirry them like an hog.
For an this cur do gnar
They must stand all afar,
To hold up their hand at the bar.
For all their noble blood,
He plucks them by the hood,
And shakes them by the ear,
And brings them in such fear;
He baiteth them like a bear,
Like an ox or a bull:
Their wits, he saith are dull;

In the chancery where he sits,
But such as he admits
None so hardy as to speak:
He saith, Thou huddypeke,
Thy learning is too lewd,
Thy tongue is not well thewd,a
To seek before our grace;
And openly in that place

He rages and he raves,

And calls them cankered knaves.

Thus royally doth he deal

Under the king's broad seal;

And in the Checker he them checks;
In the Star Chamber he nods and becks,
And beareth him there so stout
That no man dare rowt,c

Duke, earl, baron, nor lord,
But to his sentence must accord:
Whether he be knight or squire,
All men must follow his desire.

*

He would dry up the streams

Of nine kings' reams, i
All rivers and wells,
All water that swells;

For with us he so mells
That within England dwells,
I wold he were somewhere else;
For else by and by

He will drink us so dry,
And suck us so nigh,
That men shall scantly
Have penny or halfpenny.
God save his noble grace,
And grant him a place
Endless to dwell

With the devil of hell!
For, an he were there,
We need never fear
Of the feindes blake;
For I undertake

He wold so brag and crake,
That he wold than make
The devils to quake,
To shudder and to shake,
Like a fire-drake,*
And with a coal rake

Bruise them on a brake,1
And bind them to a stake,