Front matter (continued 7)

4 Lewed Mr. Campbell interprets low, which is not quite correct. Hearne explains the term as signifying “the laity, laymen, and the illiterate.”—The layman was always considered to be illiterate, by the devices of the monks.

5 It is to be regretted that Mr. Jamieson, in his “Popular Ballads,” was unavoidably prevented enlarging this class of his songs. He has given the carols of the Boatmen, the Corn-grinders, and the Dairy-women.—Jamieson’s “Popular Ballads,” ii. 352. [See also “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. ii., p. 142, for an article on Songs of Trades, or Songs of the People. A volume of “Songs of the English Peasantry” was published by the Percy Society; and several others are given with the tunes in Chappell’s “Popular Music of the Olden Time.”]

6 Hearne’s “Preface to Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle,” xxxvii.

7 The curious researches of a French antiquary in this class of literature are given in the two octavo volumes entitled “Histoire des Livres Populaires, ou de la Littérature du Colportage,” (Paris, 1854,) by M. Chas. Nisard, who was appointed to the task by a Royal Commission.—Ed.

8 “Foreign Quarterly Review,” vol. 18. [It is reprinted in the first Volume of Thoms’ “Early English Prose Romances.”]

9 It has been frequently reprinted, and recently in Germany, as a livre de luxe, illustrated with admirable designs by Kaulbach.—Ed.

10 Weber. “Brit. Bib.,” vol. iv.—The German song of the Ladybird is beautifully versified in the preface to “German Popular Stories,” by the late Edgar Taylor.

11 A calamity to which wits are incident is that of having their names prefixed to collections to give them currency. I do not know whether this has not happened to our author. “The Merry Tales of the Madmen of Gotham” are no doubt of great antiquity; they are characterised by a peculiar simplicity of silliness. “Scogin’s Jests,” of the sixty which we have, a very few tradition may have preserved, but they must have received in the course of time the addition of pointless jests, tales marred in the telling, and some things neither jest nor tale; and it is remarkable that these are always accompanied by an inane moralisation, while the more tolerable appear to be preserved in their original condition. Some future researcher may be so fortunate as to compare them with the first editions if they exist.

John Scogin was a gentleman of good descent, who was invited to court by Edward the Fourth for the pleasantry of his wit; he was a caustic Democritus, and gave rise to a proverbial phrase, “What says Scogin?” If he usually said two-thirds of what is ascribed to him in this volume, he had never given rise to a proverb. “The Merry Tales of the Madmen of Gotham” have been recently reprinted by Mr. Halliwell.

12 Several of these pieces are preserved in Mr. Utterson’s “Select Pieces of Early Popular Poetry.” This attack on women proved not a theme less fertile among our neighbours; how briskly the skirmish was carried on the notice of a single writer will show:—“Alphabet de l’Imperfection et Malice des Femmes, par J. Olivier, licencier aux loix, et en droit-canon,” 1617; three editions of which appeared in the course of two years. This blow was repelled by “Defense des Femmes contre l’Alphabet de leur pretendue Malice,” by Vigoureux, 1617; the first author rejoined with a “Réponse aux Impertinences de l’Aposté Capitaine Vigoureux,” by Olivier, 1617. The fire was kept up by an ally of Olivier, in “Réplique à l’Anti-Malice du Sieur Vigoureux,” by De la Bruyere, 1617. At a period earlier than this conflict, the French had, as well as ourselves, many works on the subject.

THE DIFFICULTIES EXPERIENCED BY A PRIMITIVE AUTHOR.

Sir Thomas Elyot is the first English prose writer who avowedly attempted to cultivate the language of his country. We track the prints of the first weak footsteps in this new path; and we detect the aberrations of a mind intent on a great popular design, but still vague and uncertain, often opposed by contemporaries, yet cheered by the little world of his readers.

Elyot for us had been little more than a name, as have been many retired students, from the negligence of contemporaries, had he not been one of those interesting authors who have let us into the history of their own minds, and either prospectively have delighted to contemplate on their future enterprises, or retrospectively have exulted in their past labours.

This amiable scholar had been introduced at Court early in life; his “great friend and crony was Sir Thomas More;” so plain Anthony à Wood indicates the familiar intercourse of two great men. Elyot was a favourite with Henry the Eighth, and employed on various embassies, particularly on the confidential one to Rome to negotiate the divorce of Queen Katherine. To his public employments he alludes in his first work, “The Governor,” which “he had gathered as well of the sayings of most noble authors, Greek and Latin, as by his own experience, he being continually trained in some daily affairs of the public weal from his childhood.”

A passion for literature seems to have prevailed over the ambition of active life, and on his return from his last embassy he decided to write books “in our vulgar tongue,” on a great variety of topics, to instruct his countrymen. The diversity of his reading, and an unwearied pen, happily qualified, in this early age of the literature of a nation, a student who was impatient to diffuse that knowledge which he felt he only effectually possessed in the degree, and in the space, which he communicated it.

His first elaborate work is entitled, “The Boke of the Governor, devised by Sir Thomas Elyot,” 1531,—a work once so popular, that it passed through seven or eight editions, and is still valued by the collectors of our ancient literature.

“The Governor” is one of those treatises which, at an early period of civilization, when general education is imperfect, becomes useful to mould the manners and to inculcate the morals which should distinguish the courtier and the statesman. Elyot takes his future “Governor” in the arms of his nurse, and places the ideal being amid all the scenes which may exercise the virtues, or the studies which he developes. The work is dedicated to Henry the Eighth. The design, the imaginary personage, the author and the patron, are equally dignified. The style is grave; and it would not be candid in a modern critic to observe that, in the progress of time, the good sense has become too obvious, and the perpetual illustrations from ancient history too familiar. The erudition in philology of that day has become a schoolboy’s learning. They had then no other volumes to recur to of any authority, but what the ancients had left.

Elyot had a notion that, for the last thousand years, the world had deteriorated, and that the human mind had not expanded through the course of ages. When he compared the writers of this long series of centuries, the babbling, though the subtle, schoolmen, who had chained us down to their artificial forms, with the great authors of antiquity, there seemed an appearance of truth in his decision. Christianity had not yet exhibited to modern Europe the refined moralities of Seneca, and the curious knowledge of Plutarch, in the homilies of Saints and Fathers; nor had its histories of man, confined to our monkish annalists, emulated the narrative charms of Livy, nor the grandeur of Tacitus. Of the poets of antiquity, Elyot declared that the English language, at the time he wrote, could convey nothing equivalent, wanting even words to express the delicacies, “the turns,” and the euphony of the Latin verse.

A curious evidence of the jejune state of the public mind at this period appears in this volume. Here a learned and grave writer solemnly sets forth several chapters on “that honest pastime of dancing,” in which he discovers a series of modern allegories. The various figures and reciprocal movements between man and woman, “holding each other by the hand,” indicate the order, concord, prudence, and other virtues so necessary for the common weal. The singles and reprinses exhibit the virtue of circumspection, which excites the writer to a panegyric of the father of the reigning sovereign. These ethics of the dance contain some curious notices, and masters in the art might hence have embellished their treatises on the philosophy of dance; for “in its wonderful figures, which the Greeks do call idea, are comprehended so many virtues and noble qualities.” It is amusing to observe how men willingly become the dupes of their fancies, by affecting to discover motives and analogies, the most unconnected imaginable with the objects themselves. Long after our polished statesman wrote, the Puritan excommunicated the sinful dancer, and detected in the graceful evolutions of “the honour,” the “brawl,” and the “single,” with all their moral movements, the artifices of Satan, and the perdition of the souls of two partners, dancing too well. It was the mode of that age thus to moralise, or allegorise, on the common acts of life, and to sanction their idlest amusements by some religious motive. At this period, in France, we find a famous Veneur, Gaston Phebus, opening his treatise on “hunting” in the spirit that Elyot had opened to us the mysteries of dancing. “By hunting, we escape from the seven mortal sins, and therefore, the more we hunt, the salvation of our souls will be the more secure. Every good hunter in this world will have joyance, glee, and solace, (joyeuseté, liesse, et deduit,) and secure himself a place in Paradise, not perhaps in the midst, but in the suburbs, because he has shunned idleness, the root of all evil.”

“The Boke of the Governor” must now be condemned to the solitary imprisonment of the antiquary’s cell, who will pick up many curious circumstances relative to the manners of the age—always an amusing subject of speculation, when we contemplate on the gradations of social life. I suspect the world owed “The Governor” to a book more famous than itself—the Cortegiano of Castiglione, which appeared two years before the first edition of this work of Elyot, and to whose excellence Elyot could have been no stranger in his embassies to his holiness, and to the emperor. But of “The Governor,” and “The Cortegiano,” what can we now say, but that three centuries are fatal to the immortality of volumes, which, in the infancy of literature, seemed to have flattered themselves with a perpetuity of fame.

It was, however, a generous design, in an age of Latin, to attempt to delight our countrymen by “the vulgar tongue;” but these “first fruits,” as he calls them, gave their author a taste of the bitterness of “that tree of knowledge.”

In a subsequent work, “Of the Knowledge which maketh a Wise Man,” Elyot has recorded how he had laid himself open to “the vulgar.” In the circle of a Court there was equal peril in moralising, which was deemed to be a rebuke, as in applying rusty stories, which were considered as nothing less than disguised personalities. “The Boke” was not thankfully received. The persifleurs, those butterflies who carry waspish stings, accounted Sir Thomas to be of no little presumption, that “in noting other men’s vices he should correct magnificat.” This odd neologism of “magnificat” was a mystical coinage, which circulated among these aristocratic exclusives who, as Elyot describes them, “like a galled horse abiding no plaisters, be always knapping and kicking at such examples and sentences as they do feel sharp, or do bite them.” The chapters on “The Diversity of Flatterers,” and similar subjects, had made many “a galled jade wince;” and in applying the salve, he got a kick for the cure. They wondered why the knight wrote at all! “Other much wiser men, and better learned than he, do forbear to write anything.” They inscribed modern names to his ancient portraits. The worried author exclaims—“There be Gnathos in Spain as well as in Greece; Pasquils in England as well as in Rome, &c. If men will seek for them in England which I set in other places, I cannot let (hinder) them.” But in another work—“Image of Governance,” 1540—when he detailed “the monstrous living of the Emperor Heliogabalus,” and contrasted that gross epicurean with Severus, such a bold and open execration of the vices of a luxurious Court could not avoid being obvious to the royal sensualist and his companions, however the character and the tale were removed to a bygone age.

In this early attempt to cultivate “the vulgar tongue,” some cavilled at his strange terms. It is a striking instance of the simplicity of the critics at that early period of our language, that our author formally explains the word maturity—“a Latin word, which I am constrained to usurp, lacking a name in English, and which, though it be strange and dark, yet may be understood as other words late comen out of Italy and France, and made denizens among us.” Augustus Cæsar, it seems, had frequently in his mouth this word matura—do maturely! as “if he should have said, Do neither too much nor too little—too swiftly nor too slowly.” Elyot would confine the figurative Latin term to a metaphysical designation of the acts of men in their most perfect state, “reserving,” as he says, “the word ripeness to fruit and other things, separate from affairs, as we have now in usage.” Elyot exults in having augmented the English language by the introduction of this Latin term, now made English for the first time! It has flourished as well as this other, “the redolent savours of sweet herbs and flowers.” But his ear was not always musical, and some of his neologisms are less graceful—“an alective,” to wit; “fatigate,” to fatigue; “ostent,” to show, and to “sufficate some disputation.” Such were the first weak steps of the fathers of our language, who, however, culled for us many a flower among their cockle.

But a murmur more prejudicial arose than the idle cavil of new and hard words; for some asserted that “the Boke seemed to be overlong.” Our primeval author considered that “knowledge of wisdom cannot be shortly declared.” Elyot had not yet attained, by sufficient practice in authorship, the secret, that the volume which he had so much pleasure in writing could be over tedious in reading. “For those,” he observes sarcastically, “who be well willing, it is soon learned—in good faith sooner than primero or gleek.” The nation must have then consisted of young readers, when a diminutive volume in twelves was deemed to be “overlong.” In this apology for his writings, he threw out an undaunted declaration of his resolution to proceed with future volumes.—“If the readers of my works, by the noble example of our most dear sovereign lord, do justly and lovingly interpret my labours, I, during the residue of my life, will now and then set forth such fruits of my study, profitable, as I trust, unto this my country, leaving malicious readers with their incurable fury.” Such was the innocent criticism of our earliest writer—his pen was hardly tipped with gall.

As all subjects were equally seductive to the artless pen of a primitive author, who had yet no rivals to encounter in public, Elyot turned his useful studies to a topic very opposite to that of political ethics. He put forth “The Castle of Health,” a medical treatise, which passed through nearly as many honourable editions as “The Governor.” It did not, however, abate the number, though it changed the character of his cavillers, who were now the whole corporate body of the physicians!

The author has told his amusing story in the preface to a third edition, in 1541.

“Why should I be grieved with reproaches wherewith some of my country do recompense me for my labours, taken without hope of temporal reward, only for the fervent affection which I have ever borne toward the public weal of my country? ‘A worthy matter!’ saith one; ‘Sir Thomas Elyot has become a physician, and writeth on physic, which beseemeth not a knight; he might have been much better occupied.’ Truly, if they will call him a physician who is studious of the weal of his country, let men so name me.”

But there was no shame in studying this science, or setting forth any book, being—

“Thereto provoked by the noble example of my noble master King Henry VIII.; for his Highness hath not disdained to be the chief author of an introduction to grammar for the children of his subjects.

“If physicians be angry that I have written physic in English, let them remember that Greeks wrote in Greek, the Romans in Latin, and Avicenna in Arabic, which were their own proper and maternal tongues. These were paynims and Jews, but in this part of charity they far surmounted us Christians.”

Several years after, when our author reverted to his “Castle of Health,” the Castle was brightened by the beams of public favour. Its author now exulted that “It shall long preserve men, be some physicians never so angry.” The work had not been intended to depreciate medical professors, but “for their commodity, by instructing the sick, and observing a good order in diet, preventing the great causes of sickness, or by which they could the sooner be cured.” Our philosopher had attempted to draw aside that mystifying veil with which some affected to envelope the arcana of medicine, as if they were desirous “of writing in cypher that none but themselves could read.” Our author had anticipated that revolution in medical science which afterwards, at a distant period, has been productive of some of the ablest treatises in the vernacular languages of Europe.

The patriotic studies of Elyot did not terminate in these ethical and popular volumes, for he had taxed his daily diligence for his country’s weal. This appeared in “The Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, 1535,” a folio, which laid the foundation of our future lexicons, “declaring Latin by English,” as Elyot describes his own labour.

Elyot had suffered some disappointments as a courtier in the days of Wolsey, who lavished the royal favours on churchmen. In a letter to Lord Cromwell, he describes himself with a very narrow income, supporting his establishment, “equal to any knight in the country where I dwell who have much more to live on;” but a new office, involving considerable expense in its maintenance, to which he had been just appointed, he declares would be his ruin, having already discharged “five honest and tall personages.”—“I wot not by what malice of fortune I am constrained to be in that office, whereunto is, as it were, appendent loss of money and good name, all sharpness and diligence in justice now-a-days being everywhere odious.” And this was at a time when “I trusted to live quietly, and by little and little to repay my creditors, and to reconcile myself to mine old studies.”

This letter conveys a favourable impression of the real character of this learned man; but Elyot had condescended abjectly to join with the herd in the general scramble for the monastic lands; and if he feigned poverty, the degradation is not less. There are cruel epochs in a great revolution; moments of trial which too often exhibit the lofty philosopher shrinking into one of the people. It is probable that he succeeded in his petition, for I find his name among the commissioners appointed to make a general inquiry after lands belonging to the Church, as also to the colleges of the universities, in 1534.

But in this day of weakness Elyot sunk far lower than petitioning for suppressed lands. Elyot was suspected of inclining to Popery, and being adverse to the new order of affairs. His former close intimacy with Sir Thomas More contributed to this suspicion, and now, it is sad to relate, he renounces this ancient and honourable friendship! Peter denied his Master. “I beseech your good lordship now to lay apart the remembrance of the amity betwixt me and Sir Thomas More, which was but usque ad aras, as is the proverb, considering that I was never so much addicted unto him as I was unto truth and fidelity towards my sovereign lord.” Was the influence of such illustrious friendships to be confined to chimney-corners? Had Elyot not listened to the wisdom, and revered the immutable fortitude, of “his great friend and crony?”—he, the stern moralist, who, in his “Governor,” had written a remarkable chapter on “the constancy of friends,” and had illustrated that passion by the romantic tale of Titus and Gesippus, where the personal trials of both parties far exceed those of the Damon and Pythias of antiquity, and are so eloquently developed and so exquisitely narrated by the great Italian novelist.

The literary history of Sir Thomas Elyot exhibits the difficulties experienced by a primitive author in the earliest attempts to open a new path to the cultivation of a vernacular literature; and it seems to have required all the magnanimity of our author to sustain his superiority among his own circle, by disdaining their petulant criticism, and by the honest confidence he gathered as he proceeded, in the successive editions of his writings.

SKELTON.

At a period when satire had not yet assumed any legitimate form, a singular genius appeared in Skelton. His satire is peculiar, but it is stamped by vigorous originality. The fertility of his conceptions in his satirical or his humorous vein is thrown out in a style created by himself. The Skeltonical short verse, contracted into five or six, and even four syllables, is wild and airy. In the quick-returning rhymes, the playfulness of the diction, and the pungency of new words, usually ludicrous, often expressive, and sometimes felicitous, there is a stirring spirit which will be best felt in an audible reading. The velocity of his verse has a carol of its own. The chimes ring in the ear, and the thoughts are flung about like coruscations. But the magic of the poet is confined to his spell; at his first step out of it he falls to the earth never to recover himself. Skelton is a great creator only when he writes what baffles imitation, for it is his fate, when touching more solemn strains, to betray no quality of a poet—inert in imagination and naked in diction. Whenever his muse plunges into the long measure of heroic verse, she is drowned in no Heliconian stream. Skelton seems himself aware of his miserable fate, and repeatedly, with great truth, if not with some modesty, complains of

Mine homely rudeness and dryness.

But when he returns to his own manner and his own rhyme, when he riots in the wantonness of his prodigal genius, irresistible and daring, the poet was not unconscious of his faculty; and truly he tells,—

Though my rime be ragged, Tattered and jagged, Rudely rain-beaten, Rusty, moth-eaten, If ye take well therewith, It hath in it some pith.

Whether Skelton really adopted the measures of the old tavern-minstrelsy used by harpers, who gave “a fit of mirth for a groat,” or “carols for Christmas,” or “lascivious poems for bride-ales,” as Puttenham, the arch-critic of Elizabeth’s reign, supposes; or whether in Skelton’s introduction of alternate Latin lines among his verses he caught the Macaronic caprice of the Italians, as Warton suggests; the Skeltonical style remains his own undisputed possession. He is a poet who has left his name to his own verse—a verse, airy but pungent, so admirably adapted for the popular ear that it has been frequently copied,1 and has led some eminent critics into singular misconceptions. The minstrel tune of the Skeltonical rhyme is easily caught, but the invention of style and “the pith” mock these imitators. The facility of doggrel merely of itself could not have yielded the exuberance of his humour and the mordacity of his satire.

This singular writer has suffered the mischance of being too original for some of his critics; they looked on the surface, and did not always suspect the depths they glided over: the legitimate taste of others has revolted against the mixture of the ludicrous and the invective. A taste for humour is a rarer faculty than most persons imagine; where it is not indigenous, no art of man can plant it. There is no substitute for such a volatile existence, and where even it exists in a limited degree, we cannot enlarge its capacity for reception. A great master of humour, who observed from his experience, has solemnly told us that “it is not in the power of every one to taste humour, however he may wish it—it is the gift of God; and a true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him.”2

Puttenham was the first critic who prized Skelton cheaply; the artificial and courtly critic of Elizabeth’s reign could not rightly estimate such a wild and irregular genius. The critic’s fastidious ear listens to nothing but the jar of rude rhymes, while the courtier’s delicacy shrinks from the nerve of appalling satire. “Such,” says this critic, “are the rhymes of Skelton, usurping the name of a Poet Laureat, being indeed but a rude rayling rhimer, and all his doings ridiculous—pleasing only the popular ear.” This affected critic never suspected “the pith” of “the ridiculous;” the grotesque humour covering the dread invective which shook a Wolsey under his canopy. Another Elizabethan critic, the obsequious Meres, re-echoes the dictum. These opinions perhaps prejudiced the historian of our poetry, who seems to have appreciated them as the echoes of the poet’s contemporaries. Yet we know how highly his contemporaries prized him, notwithstanding the host whom he provoked. One poetical brother3 distinguishes him as “the Inventive Skelton,” and we find the following full-length portrait of him by another:—4

A poet for his art, Whose judgment sure was high, And had great practise of the pen, His works they will not lie; His termes to taunts did leane, His talk was as he wrate, Full quick of wit, right sharpe of wordes, And skilful of the state; ***** And to the hateful minde, That did disdaine his doings still, A scorner of his kinde.

When Dr. Johnson observed that “Skelton cannot be said to have attained great elegance of language,” he tried Skelton by a test of criticism at which Skelton would have laughed, and “jangled and wrangled.” Warton has also censured him for adopting “the familiar phraseology of the common people.” The learned editor of Johnson’s “Dictionary” corrects both our critics. “If Skelton did not attain great elegance of language, he however possessed great knowledge of it.” From his works may be drawn an abundance of terms which were then in use among the vulgar as well as the learned, and which no other writer of his time so obviously (and often so wittily) illustrated. Skelton seems to have been fully aware of the condition of our vernacular idiom when he wrote, for he has thus described it:—

Our natural tongue is rude, And hard to be enneude With polished termes lusty; Our language is so rusty, So cankered, and so full Of frowards, and so dull, That if I would apply To write ordinately, I wot not where to find Terms to serve my mind.

It was obviously his design to be as great a creator of words as he was of ideas. Many of his mintage would have given strength to our idiom. Caxton, as a contemporary, is some authority that Skelton improved the language.

Let not the reader imagine that Skelton was only “a rude rayling rhimer.” Skelton was the tutor of Henry the Eighth; and one who knew him well describes him as—

Seldom out of prince’s grace.

Erasmus distinguished him “as the light and ornament of British letters;” and one, he addresses the royal pupil, “who can not only excite your studies, but complete them.” Warton attests his classical attainments—“Had not his propensity to the ridiculous induced him to follow the whimsies of Walter Mapes, Skelton would have appeared among the first writers of Latin poetry in England.” Skelton chose to be himself; and this is what the generality of his critics have not taken in their view.

Skelton was an ecclesiastic who was evidently among those who had adopted the principles of reformation before the Reformation. With equal levity and scorn he struck at the friars from his pulpit or in his ballad, he ridiculed the Romish ritual, and he took unto himself that wife who was to be called a concubine. To the same feelings we may also ascribe the declamatory invective against Cardinal Wolsey, from whose terrible arm he flew into the sanctuary of Westminster, where he remained protected by Abbot Islip until his death, which took place in 1529, but a few short months before the fall of Wolsey. It is supposed that the king did not wholly dislike the levelling of the greatness of his overgrown minister; and it is remarkable that one of the charges subsequently brought by the council in 1529 against Wolsey—his imperious carriage at the council-board—is precisely one of the accusations of our poet, only divested of rhyme; whence perhaps we may infer that Skelton was an organ of the rising party.

“Why Come you not to Court?”—that daring state-picture of an omnipotent minister—and “The Boke of Colin Clout,” where the poet pretends only to relate what the people talk about the luxurious clergy, and seems to be half the reformer, are the most original satires in the language. In the days when Skelton wrote these satires there appeared a poem known by the title of “Reade me and be not Wrothe,” a voluminous invective against the Cardinal and the Romish superstitions, which has been ascribed by some to Skelton. The writer was William Roy, a friar; the genius, though not the zeal, of Roy and Skelton are far apart—as far as the buoyancy of racy originality is removed from the downright earnestness of grave mediocrity. Roy had been the learned assistant of Tyndale in the first edition of the translation of the New Testament, and it was the public conflagration at London of that whole edition which aroused his indignant spirit. The satire, which had been printed abroad, was diligently suppressed by an emissary of the Cardinal purchasing up all the copies; and few were saved from the ravage;5 the author, however, escaped out of the country.

In “The Crown of Lawrell” Skelton has himself furnished a catalogue of his numerous writings, the greater number of which have not come down to us. Literary productions were at that day printed on loose sheets, or in small pamphlets, which the winds seem to have scattered. We learn there of his graver labours. He composed the “Speculum Principis” for his royal pupil—

To bear in hand, therein to read,

and he translated Diodorus Siculus—

Six volumes engrossed, it doth contain.

To have composed a manual for the education of a prince, and to have persevered through a laborious version, are sufficient evidence that the learned Skelton had his studious days as well as his hours of caustic jocularity. He appears to have written various pieces for the court entertainment; but for us exists only an account of the interlude of the “Nigramansir,” in the pages of Warton, and a single copy of the goodly interlude of “Magnificence,”6 in the Garrick collection. If we accept his abstract personations merely as the names, and not the qualities of the dramatic personages, “Magnificence” approaches to the true vein of comedy.

Skelton was, however, probably more gratified by his own Skeltonical style, moulding it with the wantonness of power on whatever theme, comic or serious. In a poem remarkable for its elegant playfulness, a very graceful maiden, whose loveliness the poet has touched with the most vivid colouring, grieving over the fate of her sparrow from its feline foe, chants a dirige, a paternoster, and an Ave Maria for its soul, and the souls of all sparrows. In this discursive poem, which glides from object to object, in the vast abundance of fancy, a general mourning of all the birds in the air, and many allusions to the old romances, “Philip Sparrow,” for its elegance, may be placed by the side of Lesbia’s Bird, and, for its playfulness, by the Vert Vert of Gresset.

But Skelton was never more vivid than in his Ale-wife, and all

The mad mummyng Of Elynour Rummyng,—

a piece which has been more frequently reprinted than any of his works. It remains a morsel of poignant relish for the antiquary, still enamoured of the portrait of this grisly dame of Leatherhead, where her name and her domicile still exist. Such is the immortality a poet can bestow.7 “The Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng” is a remarkable production of the Grotesque, or the low burlesque; the humour as low as you please, but as strong as you can imagine. Cleland is reported, in Spence’s Anecdotes of Pope, to have said, that this “Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng” was taken from a poem of Lorenzo de’ Medici. There is indeed a jocose satire by that noble bard, entitled “I Beoni,” the Topers; an elegant piece of playful humour, where the characters are a company of thirsty souls hastening out of the gates of Florence to a treat of excellent wine. It was printed by the Giunti, in 1568,8 and therefore this burlesque piece could never have been known to Skelton. The manners of our Alewife and her gossips are purely English, and their contrivances to obtain their potations such as the village of Leatherhead would afford.

The latest edition of Skelton was published in the days of Pope, which occasioned some strictures in conversation from the great poet. The laureated poet of Henry the Eighth is styled “beastly;” probably Pope alluded to this minute portrait of “Elynoure Rummynge” and her crowd of customers. Beastliness should have been a delicate subject for censure from Pope. But surely Pope had never read Skelton; for could that great poet have passed by the playful graces of “Philip Sparrow” only to remember the broad gossips of “Elynoure Rummyng?”

The amazing contrast of these two poems is the most certain evidence of the extent of the genius of the poet; he who with copious fondness dwelt on a picture which rivals the gracefulness of Albano, could with equal completeness give us the drunken gossipers of an Ostade. It is true that in the one we are more than delighted, and in the other we are more than disgusted; but in the impartiality of philosophical criticism, we must award that none but the most original genius could produce both. It is this which entitles our bard to be styled the “Inventive Skelton.”

But are personal satires and libels of the day deserving the attention of posterity? I answer, that for posterity there are no satires nor libels. We are concerned only with human nature. When the satirical is placed by the side of the historical character, they reflect a mutual light. We become more intimately acquainted with the great Cardinal, by laying together the satire of the mendacious Skelton with the domestic eulogy of the gentle Cavendish. The interest which posterity takes is different from that of contemporaries; our vision is more complete; they witnessed the beginnings, but we behold the ends. We are no longer deceived by hyperbolical exaggeration, or inflamed by unsparing invective; the ideal personage of the satirist is compared with the real one of the historian, and we touch only delicate truths. What Wolsey was we know, but how he was known to his own times, and to the people, we can only gather from the private satirist; corrected by the passionless arbiter of another age, the satirist becomes the useful historian of the man.

The extraordinary combination in the genius of Skelton was that of two most opposite and potent faculties—the hyperbolical ludicrous masking the invective. He acts the character of a buffoon; he talks the language of drollery; he even mints a coinage of his own, to deepen the colours of his extravagance—and all this was for the people! But his hand conceals a poniard; his rapid gestures only strike the deeper into his victim, and we find that the Tragedy of the State has been acted while we were only lookers-on before a stage erected for the popular gaze.9

1 George Ellis, although an elegant critic, could not relish “the Skeltonical minstrelsy.” In an extract from a manuscript poem ascribed to Skelton, “The Image of Hypocrisy,” and truly Skeltonical in every sense, he condemned it as “a piece of obscure and unintelligible ribaldry;” and so, no doubt, it has been accepted. But the truth is, the morsel is of exquisite poignancy, pointed at Sir Thomas More’s controversial writings, to which the allusions in every line might be pointed out. As these works were written after the death of Skelton, the merit entirely remains with this fortunate imitator.

In the public rejoicings at the defeat of the Armada, in 1589, a ludicrous bard poured forth his patriotic effusions in what he called “A Skeltonical Salutation, or Condign Gratulation,” of the Spaniard, who, he says,—

——In a bravado, Spent many a crusado.

In a reprint of the poem of “Elynoure Rummynge,” in 1624, which may be found in the “Harl. Miscellany,” vol. i., there is a poem prefixed which ridicules the lovers of tobacco; this anachronism betrays the imitator. At the close there are some verses from the Ghost of Skelton; but we believe it is a real ghost.

2 Sterne.

3 Henry Bradshaw. “Warton,” iii. 13.

4 Thomas Churchyard.

5 After the death of the Cardinal it was reprinted, in 1546; but the satire was weakened, being transferred from Wolsey and wholly laid on the clergy. The very rare first edition is reprinted in the “Harleian Miscellany,” by Parke, vol. ix. Tyndale has reproached his colleague with being somewhat artful and mutable in his friendships; but the wandering man proved the constancy of his principles, for as a heretic he perished at the stake in Portugal.

6 It has passed through a reprint by the Roxburgh Club.

7 A noble amateur laid on the shrine of this antiquated beauty 20l. to possess her rare portrait; and, on the republication of this portrait, Steevens wrote some sarcastic verses on the print-collectors in the “European Mag.” 1794; they show this famous commentator to have been a polished wit, though he pronounced the Sonnets of Shakspeare unreadable. These verses have been reprinted in “Dibdin’s Bibliomania.”

8 Roscoe’s “Lorenzo de’ Medici,” i. 290.

9 The first collection of some of the works of Skelton was made by Thomas Marshe, in 1568. Another edition, by an unknown editor, was in 1736; the text of which is, as Gifford justly observed, execrable. Many of his writings still remain in their manuscript state—see Harleian MSS., 367, 2252; and many printed ones have not been collected. There is no task in our literature so desperately difficult as that of offering a correct text of this anomalous poet; but we may hope to receive it from the diligent labours of Mr. Dyce, so long promised; it would form one of the richest volumes of the Camden publications. [Since this note was written, the poetical works of Skelton have been published by the Rev. A. Dyce, (2 vols. 8vo, T. Rodd, 1843,) with an abundance of elucidatory notes and bibliographical information; so that this difficult task has been performed with great success; and the volumes are among the most valuable of the many works of that conscientious editor.]

THE SHIP OF FOOLS.

The Stultifera Navis, or Ship of Fools, composed in verse by Sebastian Brandt, a learned German civilian, is a general satire on society. It has been translated into verse, or turned into prose, in almost every European language; and no work of such dimensions has been made so familiar to general readers.

There are works whose design displays the most striking originality; but, alas! there are so many infelicitous modes of execution! To freight a ship with fools, collected from all the classes and professions of society, would have been a creative idea in the brain of Lucian, or another pilgrimage for the personages of Chaucer; and natural or grotesque incidents would have started from the invention of Rabelais. These men of genius would have sportively navigated their “Ship,” and not have driven aboard fool after fool, an undistinguishable shoal, by the mere brutal force of the pen, only to sermonise with a tedious homily or a critical declamation. Erasmus playfully threw out a small sparkling volume on folly, which we still open; Brandt furnishes a massive tome, with fools huddled together; and while we lose our own, we are astonished at his patience.

The severity of this decision, we own, is that of a critic of the nineteenth century on an author of the sixteenth.

It is amusing to observe the perplexities of an eminent French critic, Monsieur Guizot, in his endeavour to decide on the “Stultifera Navis.” A critic of his school could not rightly comprehend how it happened that so dull a book had been a popular one, multiplied by editions in all the languages of Europe. “It is,” says M. Guizot, “a collection of extravagant or of gross plaisanteries—which may have been poignant at their time, but which at this day have no other merit than that of having had great success three hundred years ago.” The salt of plaisanteries cannot be damped by three centuries, provided they were such; but our author is by no means facetious: he is much too downright; the tone is invariably condemnatory or exhortative; and the Proverbs, the Psalms, and Jeremiah, are more frequently appealed to than Cicero, Horace, and Ovid, who occasionally show their heads in his margin.

We must look somewhat deeper would we learn why a book which now tries our patience was not undeserving of those multiplied editions which have ascertained its popularity.

At the period when this volume appeared, we in the north were far removed from the urbanity and the elevated ethics of lettered Italy. Brandt took this general view of society at the time when the illustrious Castiglione was an ambassador to our Henry the Seventh, and was meditating to model the manners of his countrymen by his Libro dell’ Cortigiano; and La Casa, by his Galateo, was founding a code of minute politeness. But neither France, nor Germany, nor England, had yet greatly advanced in the civil intercourse of life, and could not appreciate such exility of elegance, and such sublimated refinement. With us, the staple of our moral philosophy was of a homespun but firm texture, and had in it more of yarn than of silk. Men had little to read; they were not weary of that eternal iteration of admonition on whatever was most painful or most despicable in their conduct; their ideas were uncertain, and their minds remained to be developed; nothing was trite or trivial. In his wide survey of human life, the author addressed the mundane fools of his age in the manner level to their comprehension; the ethical character of the volume was such, that the Abbot Trithemus designated it as a divine book; and in this volume, which read like a homily, while every man beheld the reflection of his own habits and thoughts, he chuckled over the sayings and doings of his neighbours. If any one quipped the profession of another, the sufferer had only to turn the leaf to find ample revenge; and these were the causes of the uninterrupted popularity of this ethical work.

“The Ship of Fools” is, indeed, cumbrous, rude, and inartificial, and was not constructed on the principles which regulate our fast-sailing vessels; yet it may be prized for something more than its curiosity. It is an ancient satire, of that age of simplicity which must precede an age of refinement.

If man in society changes his manners, he cannot vary his species; man remains nothing but man; for, however disguised by new modes of acting, the same principles of our actions are always at work. The same follies and the same vices in their result actuate the human being in all ages; and he who turns over the volume of the learned civilian of Germany will find detailed those great moral effects in life which, if the modern moralist may invest with more dignity, he could not have discovered with more truth. We have outgrown his counsels, but we never shall elude the vexatious consequences of his experience; and many a chapter in the “Ship of Fools” will point many an argument ad hominum, and awaken in the secret hours of our reminiscences the pang of contrite sorrows, or tingle our cheek with a blush for our weaknesses. The truths of human nature are ever echoing in our breasts.

“The Ship of Fools,” by Alexander Barclay—a volume of renown among literary antiquaries, and of rarity and price—is at once a translation and an original. In octave stanza, flowing in the ballad measure, Barclay has a natural construction of style still retaining a vernacular vigour. He is noticed by Warton for having contributed his share in the improvement of English phraseology; and, indeed, we are often surprised to discover many felicities of our native idiom; and the work, though it should be repulsive to some for its black-letter, is perfectly intelligible to a modern reader. The verse being prosaic, preserves its colloquial ease, though with more gravity than suits sportive subjects; we sometimes feel the tediousness of the good sense of the Priest of St. Mary Ottery.

The edition of 1570 of the “Ship of Fooles”1 contains other productions of Barclay. In his “Eclogues,”2 our good priest, who did not write, as he says, “for the laud of man,” indulged his ethical and theological vein in pastoral poetry; and the interlocutors are citizens disputing with men of the country, and poets with their patrons. To have converted shepherds into scholastic disputants or town-satirists was an unnatural change; but this whimsical taste had been introduced by Petrarch and Mantuan; and the first eclogues in the English language, which Warton tells us are those of Barclay, took this strange form—an incongruity our Spenser had not the skill to avoid, and for which Milton has been censured. The less fortunate anomalies of genius are often perpetuated by the inconsiderate imitation of those who should be most sensible of their deformity.

In the eclogues of Barclay, the country is ever represented in an impoverished, depressed state; and the splendour of the city, and the luxurious indulgence of the citizen and the courtier, offer a singular contrast to the extreme misery of the agriculturist. We may infer that the country had been deplorably ravaged or neglected in the civil wars, which, half a century afterwards, was to be covered by the fat beeves of the graziers of Elizabeth.

1 The woodcuts in this edition are wretched; though in part they are copied from the fine specimens of the art which embellish the Latin version of Locherus.

2 One of these, a “Dialogue between a Citizen and Uplandishman,” has been reprinted by the Percy Society, under the editorship of Mr. Fairholt, who has given a digest of the other Eclogues in a Preface.—Ed.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF SIR THOMAS MORE.

If the art of biography be the development of “the ruling passion,” it is in strong characters that we must seek for the single feature. Learned and meditative as was Sir Thomas More, a jesting humour, a philosophical jocundity, indulged on important as well as on ordinary occasions, served his wise purpose. He seems to have taken refuge from the follies of other men by retreating to the pleasantry of his own. Grave men censured him for the absence of all gravity; and some imagined that the singularity of his facetious disposition, which sometimes seemed even ludicrous, was carried on to affectation. It was certainly inherent,—it was a constitutional temper—it twined itself in his fibres,—it betrayed itself on his countenance. We detect it from the comic vein of his boyhood when among the players; we pursue it through the numerous transactions of his life; and we leave him at its last solemn close, when life and death were within a second of each other, uttering three jests upon the scaffold. Even when he seemed to have quitted the world, and had laid his head on the block, he bade the executioner stay his hand till he had removed his beard, observing, “that that had never committed any treason.”

This mirthful mind had, indeed, settled on his features. Erasmus, who has furnished us with an enamelled portrait of More, among its minuter touches reluctantly confessed that “the countenance of Sir Thomas More was a transcript of his mind, inclining to an habitual smile;” and he adds, “ingenuously to confess the truth, that face is formed for the expression of mirth rather than of gravity or dignity.” But, lest he should derange the gravity of the German to whom he was writing, Erasmus cautiously qualifies the disparaging delineation—“though as far as possible removed from folly or buffoonery.” More, however, would assume a solemn countenance when on the point of throwing out some facetious stroke. He has so described himself when an interlocutor in one of his dialogues addresses him—“You use to look so sadly when you mean merrily, that many times men doubt whether you speak in sport when you mean good earnest.”1

The unaffected playfulness of the mind; the smile whose sweetness allayed the causticity of the tongue; the tingling pleasantry when pointed at persons; the pungent raillery which corrected opinions without scorn or contumely; and the art of promptly amusing the mind of another by stealing it away from a present object—appeared not only in his conversations, but was carried into his writings.

The grave and sullen pages of the polemical labours of More, whose writings chiefly turn on the controversies of the Romanists and the Reformers, are perhaps the only controversial ones which exhibit in the marginal notes, frequently repeated, “a merrie tale.” “A merry tale cometh never amiss to me,” said More truly of himself. He has offered an apology for introducing this anomalous style into these controversial works. He conceived that, as a layman, it better became him “to tell his mind merrily than more solemnly to preach.” Jests, he acknowledges, are but sauce; and “it were but an absurd banquet indeed in which there were few dishes of meat and much variety of sauces; but that is but an unpleasant one where there were no sauce at all.”

The massive folio of Sir Thomas More’s “English Works”2 remains a monument of our language at a period of its pristine vigour. Viewed in active as well as in contemplative life, at the bar or on the bench, as ambassador or chancellor, and not to less advantage where, “a good distance from his house at Chelsea, he builded the new building, wherein was a chapel, a library, and a gallery,” the character, the events, and the writings of this illustrious man may ever interest us.

These works were the fertile produce of “those spare hours for writing, stolen from his meat and sleep.” We are told that “by using much writing, towards his latter end he complained of the ache of his breast.” He has himself acknowledged that “those delicate dainty folk, the evangelical brethren (so More calls our early reformers), think my works too long, for everything that is, they think too long.” More alludes to the rising disposition in men for curtailing all forms and other ceremonial acts, especially in the church service.

More, however skilful as a Latin scholar, to promulgate his opinions aimed at popularity, and cultivated our vernacular idiom, till the English language seems to have enlarged the compass of its expression under the free and copious vein of the writer. It is only by the infelicity of the subjects which constitute the greater portion of this mighty volume, that its author has missed the immortality which his genius had else secured.

More has been fortunate in the zeal of his biographers; but we are conscious, that had there been a Xenophon or a Boswell among them, they could have told us much more. The conversations of Sir Thomas More were racy. His was that rare gift of nature, perfect presence of mind, deprived of which the fullest is but slow and late. His conversancy with public affairs, combined with a close observation of familiar life, ever afforded him a striking aptitude of illustration; but the levity of his wit, and the luxuriance of his humour, could not hide the deep sense which at all times gave weight to his thoughts, and decision to his acts. Of all these we are furnished with ample evidence.

Domestic affection in all its naïve simplicity dictated the artless record of Roper, the companion of More, for sixteen years, and the husband of his adored daughter Margaret.3 The pride of ancestry in the pages of his great-grandson, the ascetic Cresacre More, could not borrow the charm of that work whence he derived his enlarged narrative.4 More than one beadsman, the votaries of their martyr, have consecrated his memory even with their legendary faith;5 while recent and more philosophical writers have expatiated on the wide theme, and have repeated the story of this great Chancellor of England.6

“The child here waiting at table, whomever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.” It was thus that the early patron of More, Cardinal Morton, sagaciously contemplated on the precocity of More’s boyhood. His prompt natural humour broke out at the Christmas revels, when the boy, suddenly slipping in among the players, acted an extempore part of his own invention. Yet this jocund humour, which never was to quit him to his last awful minute, at times indulged a solemnity of thought, as remarkable in a youth of eighteen. In the taste of that day, he invented an allegorical pageant. These pageants consisted of paintings on rolls of cloth, with inscriptions in verse, descriptive of the scenical objects. They formed a series of the occupations of childhood, manhood, the indolent liver, “a child again,” and old age, thin and hoar, wise and discreet. The last scenes exhibited more original conceptions. The image of Death, where under his “misshapen feet” lay the sage old man; then came “the Lady Fame,” boasting that she had survived death, and would preserve the old man’s name “by the voice of the people.” But Fame was followed by Time, “the lord of every hour, the great destroyer both of sea and land,” deriding simple “Fame;” for “who shall boast an eternal name before me?” Yet was there a more potent destroyer than Time; Time itself was mortal! and the eighth pageant revealed the triumph of Eternity. The last exhibited the poet himself, meditating in his chair—he “who had fed their eyes with these fictions and these figures.” The allegory of Fame, Time, and Eternity, is a sublime creation of ideal personifications. The conception of these pageants reminds one of the allegorical “Trionfi” of Petrarch; but they are not borrowed from the Italian poet. They were, indeed, in the taste of the age, and such pageants were exhibited in the streets; but the present gorgeous invention, as well as the verses, were the fancies of the youthful More.

More in his youth was a true poet; but in his active life he soon deserted these shadows of the imagination.

A modern critic has regretted, that, notwithstanding the zeal of his biographers, we would gladly have been better acquainted with More’s political life, his parliamentary speeches, his judicial decrees, and his history as an ambassador and a courtier.

There is not, however, wanting the most striking evidence of More’s admirable independence in all these characters. I fix on his parliamentary life.

As a burgess under Henry the Seventh, he effectually opposed a royal demand for money. When the king heard that “a beardless boy had disappointed all his purpose,” the malice of royalty was wreaked on the devoted head of the judge his father, in a causeless quarrel and a heavy fine. When More was chosen the Speaker of the Commons, he addressed Henry the Eighth on the important subject of freedom of debate. There is a remarkable passage on the heat of discussion, and the diversity of men’s faculties, which displays a nice discrimination in human nature. “Among so many wise men, neither is every one wise alike; nor among so many alike well-witted, every man alike well-spoken; and it often happeneth, that likewise as much folly is uttered with painted polished speeches, so many boisterous and rude in language see deep, indeed, and give right substantial counsel. And since also in matters of great importance the mind is so often occupied in the matter, that a man rather studies what to say than how, by reason whereof the wisest man and best-spoken in a whole country fortuneth, while his mind is fervent in the matter, somewhat to speak in such wise as he would afterward wish to have been uttered otherwise; and yet no worse will had he when he spake it, than he had when he would gladly change it.”

Once the potent cardinal, irritated at the free language of the Commons, to awe the House, came down in person, amid the blazonry of all the insignia of his multiform state. To check his arrogance, it was debated whether the minister should be only admitted with a few lords. More suggested, that as Wolsey had lately taxed the lightness of their tongues, “it would not be amiss to receive him in all his pomp, with his (silver) pillars, emblems of his ecclesiastical power, as a pillar of the church, his maces, his pole-axes, his crosses, his hat, and his great seal too, to the intent that if he find the like fault with us hereafter, we may the more boldly lay the blame on those his grace brings with him.” The cardinal made a solemn oration; and when he ceased, behold the whole House was struck by one unbroken and dead silence! The minister addressed several personally—each man was a mute: discovering that he could not carry his point by his presence, he seemed to recollect that the custom of the House was to speak by the mouth of their Speaker, and Wolsey turned to him. More, in all humility, explained the cause of the universal silence, by the amazement of the House at the presence of so noble a personage; “besides, that it was not agreeable to the liberty of the House to offer answers—that he himself could return no answer except every one of the members could put into his head their several wits.” The minister abruptly rose and departed re infectâ. Shortly after, Wolsey in his gallery at Whitehall told More, “Would to God you had been at Rome, Mr. More, when I made you Speaker!” “So would I too!” replied More; and then immediately exclaimed, “I like this gallery much better than your gallery at Hampton Court;” and thus, talking of pictures, he broke off “the cardinal’s displeasant talk.”

This was a customary artifice with More. He withdrew the mind from disturbing thoughts by some sudden exclamation, or broke out into some facetious sally, which gave a new turn to the conversation. Of many, to give a single instance. On the day he resigned the chancellorship, he went after service to his wife’s pew; there bowing, in the manner and with the very words the Lord Chancellor’s servant was accustomed to announce to her, that “My lord was gone!” she laughed at the idling mockery; but when assured, in sober sadness, that “My lord was gone!” this good sort of lady, with her silly exclamation of “Tillie vallie! Tillie vallie! will you sit and make goslings in the ashes?” broke out into one of those domestic explosions to which she was very liable. The resigned chancellor, now resigned in more than one sense, to allay the storm he had raised, desired his daughters to observe whether they could not see some fault in their mother’s dress. They could discover none. “Don’t you perceive that your mother’s nose stands somewhat awry?” Thus by a stroke of merriment, he dissipated the tedious remonstrances and perplexing inquiries which a graver man could not have eluded.

At the most solemn moments of his life he was still disposed to indulge his humour. When in the Tower, denied pen and ink, he wrote a letter to his beloved Margaret, and tells her that “This letter is written with a coal; but that to express his love a peck of coals would not suffice.”

His political sagacity equalled the quickness of his wit or the flow of his humour. He knew to rate at their real value the favours of such a sovereign as Henry VIII. The king suddenly came to dine at his house at Chelsea, and while walking in the garden, threw his arm about the neck of the chancellor. Roper, his son-in-law, congratulated More on this affectionate familiarity of royalty. More observed, “Son, the king favours me as (much as) any subject within the realm; howbeit I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go!”

More seems to have descried the speck of the Reformation, while others could not view even the gathering cloud in the political horizon. He and Roper were conversing on their “Catholic prince, their learned clergy, their sound nobility, their obedient subjects, and finally that no heretic dare show his face.” More went even beyond Roper in his commendation; but he proceeded, “And yet, son Roper, I pray God that some of us, as high as we seem to sit upon the mountains, treading heretics under our feet like ants, live not the day that we would gladly be at league and composition with them, to let them have their churches quietly to themselves, so that they would be contented to let us have ours quietly to ourselves.” Roper, somewhat amazed, alleged his reasons for not seeing any cause which could produce such consequences. The zeal of the juvenile Catholic broke out into “a fume,” which More perceiving, with his accustomed and gentle artifice exclaimed merrily, “Well, son Roper, it shall not be so! it shall not be so!”

No one was more sensible than More that to gain over the populace it is necessary to descend to them. But when raillery passed into railing, and sarcasm sunk into scurrility, in these unhappy polemical effusions, our critics have bitterly censured the intolerance and bigotry of Sir Thomas More. All this, however, lies on the surface. The antagonists of More were not less free, nor more refined. More wrote at a cruel crisis; both the subjects he treated on, and the times he wrote in, and the distorted medium through which he viewed the new race as the subverters of government, and the eager despoilers of the ecclesiastical lands, were quite sufficient to pervert the intellect of a sage of that day, and throw even the most genial humour into a state of exacerbation.

Our sympathies are no longer to be awakened by the worship of images and relics—prayers to saints—the state of souls in purgatory—and the unwearied blessedness of pilgrimages—nor even by the subtle inquiry, Whether the church were before the gospel, or the gospel before the church?—or by the burning of Tyndale’s Testament, and “the confutation of the new church of Frere Barnes:” all these direful follies, which cost Sir Thomas More many a sleepless night, and bound many a harmless heretic to the stake, have passed away, only, alas! to be succeeded by other follies as insane, which shall in their turn meet the same fate. Those works of More are a voluminous labyrinth; but whoever winds its dark passages shall gather many curious notices of the writer’s own age, and many exquisite “merrie tales,” delectable to the antiquary, and not to be contemned in the history of the human mind.

The impending Reformation was hastened by a famous invective in the form of “The Supplication of Beggars.” Its flagrant argument lay in its arithmetic. It calculated all the possessions of the clergy, who though but “the four-hundredth part of the nation, yet held half of the revenues.”

More replied to “The Supplication of the Beggars” by “The Supplications of the Souls in Purgatory.” These he represented in terror at the sacrilegious annihilation of the masses said for their repose; and this with the Romanist was probably no weak argument in that day.

More more reasonably ridicules the extravagance of the estimates. Such accounts, got up in haste and designed for a particular purpose, are necessarily inaccurate; but the inaccuracy of a statement does not at all injure the drift of the argument, should that be based on truth.

With More “the heretics” were but ordinary rebels, as appears by the style of his narrative. “A rabble of heretics at Abingdon did not intend to lose any more labour by putting up bills (petitions) to Parliament, but to make an open insurrection and subvert all the realm, to kill the clergy, and sell priests’ heads as good and cheap as sheep’s heads—three for a penny, buy who would! But God saved the church and the realm. Yet after this was there one John Goose roasted at Tower-hill, and thereupon some other John Goose began to make some gaggling awhile, but it availed him not. And now we have this gosling with his ‘Supplication of Beggars.’ He maketh his bill in the name of the beggars. The bill is couched as full of lies as the beggar swarmeth full of lice. We neither will nor shall need to make much business about this matter; we trust much better in the goodness of good men.”

The marriage of the clergy was no doubt at first abused by some. More describes one Richard Mayfield, late a monk and a priest, and, it may be added, a martyr, for he was burned. Of this man he says, “His holy life well declares his heresies, when being both a priest and a monk he went about two wives, one in Brabant, another in England. What he meant I cannot make you sure, whether he would be sure of the one if t’other should happen to refuse him, or that he would have them both, the one here, the other there; or else both in one place, the one because he was priest, the other because he was monk.”7

Such is the ludicrous ribaldry which runs through the polemical works of Sir Thomas More: the opposite party set no better example, and none worse than the redoubtable Simon Fish, the writer of the “Supplication of Beggars.” Oldmixon expresses his astonishment that “the famous Sir Thomas More was so hurried by his zeal that he forgot he was a gentleman, and treated Mr. Fish with the language of a monk.”

Writers who decide on other men and on other times by the spirit of their own, try human affairs by a false standard. More was at heart a monk. He wore a prickly hair-shirt to mortify the flesh; he scourged himself with the knotted cord; he practised the penance; and he appeals to miraculous relics as the evidences of his faith! I give his own words in alluding to the Sudarium, that napkin sent to king Abgarus, on which Jesus impressed the image of his own face: “And it hath been by like miracle in the thin corruptible cloth kept and preserved these 1500 years fresh and well preserved, to the inward comforts, spiritual rejoicing, and great increase of fervour in the hearts of good Christian people.” To this he joins another similar miraculous relic, “the evangelist Luke’s portrait of our blessed Lady, his mother.”8

Such were considered as the evidences of the true faith of the Romanists; but More with his relics was then dealing in a damaged commodity. Lord Herbert has noticed the great fall of the price of relics at the dissolution of the monasteries: some which had been left in pawn no one cared to redeem.

“The History of King Richard the Third,” which first appeared in a correct state in this folio, has given rise to “historic doubts” which led to some paradoxes. The personal monster whom More and Shakspeake exhibited has vanished, but the deformity of the revolting parricide was surely revealed in the bones of the infant nephews. This, the earliest history in our vernacular literature, may still be read with delight. As a composition the critical justice of Lord Orford may be cited. “Its author was then in the vigour of his fancy, and fresh from the study of the Greek and Roman historians, whose manner he has imitated.” The details in this history of a prince of the house of York, though they may be tinged with the gall of the Lancastrian Cardinal Morton, descend to us with the weight of contemporary authority. It is supposed that More may have derived much of the materials of his history from his early patron, but the charms which still may retain us are the natural yet dramatic dialogue—the picturesque touches—and a style, at times, whose beauty three centuries have not wrinkled—and the emotions which such vital pages leave in the reader’s mind.9

The “Utopia” of Sir Thomas More, which being composed in Latin is not included in this great volume of his “Workes,” may be read by the English reader in its contemporary spirited translation,10 and more intelligibly in Bishop Burnet’s version. The title of his own coinage has become even proverbial; and from its classical Latinity it was better known among foreigners even in Burnet’s day than at home. This combination of philosophy, politics, and fiction, though borrowed from the ideal republic of Plato, is worthy of an experienced statesman and a philosopher who at that moment was writing not only above his age, but, as it afterwards appeared, above himself. It has served as the model of that novel class of literature—political romances. But though the “Utopia” is altogether imaginary, it displays no graces of the imagination in an ingeniously constructed fable. It is the dream of a good citizen, and, like a dream, the scenes scattered and unconnected are broken into by chimerical forms and impracticable achievements. In times of political empiricism it may be long meditated, and the “Utopia” may yet pass through a million of editions before that new era of the perfectibility of the human animal, the millennium of political theorists, which it would seem to have anticipated.

This famous work was written at no immature period of life, for More was then thirty-six years of age. The author had clear notions of the imperfections of governments, but he was not as successful in proposing remedies for the disorders he had detected. A community where all the property belongs to the government, and to which every man contributes by his labour, that he may have his own wants supplied; a domestic society which very much resembles a great public school, and converts a citizen, through all the gradations of his existence, from form to form; and where every man, like an automatical machine, must be fixed in his proper place,—supposes a society of passionless beings which social life has never shown, and surely never can. The art of carrying on war without combating, by the wiliness of stratagems; or procuring a peace by offering a reward for the assassination of the leaders of the enemy, with whom rather than with the people all wars originate; the injunction to the incurable of suicide; the paucity of laws which enabled every man to plead his own cause; the utmost freedom granted to religious sects, where every man who contested the religion of another was sent into exile, or condemned to bondage; the contempt of the precious metal, which was here used but as toys for children, or as fetters for slaves;—such fanciful notions, running counter to the experience of history, or to the advantages of civilised society, induced some to suspect the whole to be but the incoherent dreams of an idling philosopher, thrown down at random without much consideration. It is sobriety indulging an inebriation, and good sense wandering in a delirium. Burnet, in his translation, cautiously reminds his readers that he must in nowise be made responsible for the matter of the work which “he ventured” to translate. Others have conceived “the Utopia” dangerous for those speculators in politics who might imagine the author to have been serious. More himself has adjudged the book “no better worthy than to lye always in his own island, or else to be consecrated to Vulcan.”

But assuredly many of the extraordinary principles inculcated in “the Utopia” were not so lightly held by its illustrious author. The sincerity of his notions may be traced in his own simple habits, his opinions in conversation, and the tenor of his invariable life. His contempt of outward forms and personal honours, his voluntary poverty, his fearlessness of death—all these afford ample evidence that the singularity of the man himself was as remarkable as the work he produced. The virtues he had expatiated on, he had contemplated in his own breast.

This singular, but great man, was a sage whose wisdom lay concealed in his pleasantry; a politician without ambition; a lord chancellor who entered into office poor, and left it not richer. When his house was to be searched for treasure, which circumstance had alarmed his friends, well did that smile become him when he observed that “it would be only a sport to his family,” and he pleasantly added, “lest they should find out my wife’s gay girdle and her gold beads.” When the clergy, in convention, had voted a donation amounting to no inconsiderable fortune, “not for services to be performed, but for those which he had chosen to do,” More rejected the gift with this noble confession—“I am both over-proud, and over-slothful also, to be hired for money to take half the labour and business in writing that I have taken since I began.” And when accused by Tyndale and others for being “the proctor of the clergy,” and richly fed, how forcible was his expression! “He had written his controversial works only that God might give him thanks.”

It happened, however, that his after-conduct in life, in regard to that religious toleration which he had wisely maintained in his ideal society, was as opposite as night to noon. Could he then have ever been earnest in his “Utopia?”—he who exults over the burning of a heretic, who “could not agree that before the day of doom there were either any saint in heaven or soul in purgatory, or in hell either,” for which horrible heresy he was delivered at last into the secular hands, and “burned as there was never wretch I ween better worth.”11 This harmless and hapless metaphysical theologian did not disagree with More on the existence of saints, of souls, nor of hell. The heretic conceived—and could he change by volition the ideas which seemed to him just?—that no reward or punishment could be inflicted before the final judgment. A conversation of five minutes might have settled the difference, for they only varied about the precise time!

In that great revolution which was just opening in his latter days, More seems sometimes to have mistaken theology for politics. A strange and mysterious change, such as the history of man can hardly parallel, occurred in the mind of More, by what insensible gradations is a secret which must lie in his grave.

This great man laid his head on the block to seal his conscience with his blood. Protestants have lamented this act as his weakness, the Romanists decreed a martyrdom. In a sudden change of system in the affairs of a nation, when even justice may assume the appearance of violence, the most enlightened minds, standing amidst their ancient opinions and their cherished prejudices subverted, display how the principle of integrity predominates over that of self-preservation.

1 “Sir Thomas More’s Workes,” 127.

2 “The Workes of Sir Thomas More in the English Tongue, 1557, fo.,” a venerable folio of nearly 1500 pages in double columns, is closely printed in black-letter.

3 Roper’s “Life of Sir Thomas More,” which had been suppressed through the reign of Elizabeth, only first appeared in 1626, at Paris, when a Roman Catholic princess in the person of Henrietta, the queen of Charles the First, had ascended the throne of England; it was republished in 1729. There is also an elegant modern reprint by Mr. Singer.

4 The Life by his great-grandson was printed in 1627, and republished in 1726. This biography is the one usually referred to. Though with a more lucid arrangement, and a fuller narrative, than Roper’s life, the writer inherited little of the family genius, except the bigotry of his great ancestor.

5 Tres Thomæ. The three Thomases are, Aquinas, à Becket, and More—by Dr. Thomas Stapleton. Another Life by J. H. is an abridgment, 1662. These writers, Romanists, as well as the great-grandson, have interspersed in their narrative more than one of those fabulous incidents and pious frauds, visions, and miracles, which have been the opprobrium of Catholic biographers.

6 Macdiarmid, in his “Lives of British Statesmen,” has chiefly considered the political character of this Lord-Chancellor. Others have written lives merely as accompaniments to the editions of some of his works.

7 Works, fo. 346.

8 “Works of Sir Thomas More,” 113, col. 2.

9 Mr. Singer has furnished us with a correct reprint of this history. More’s “Life of Richard the Third” had been given by our chroniclers from copies mutilated or altered. A work whose merits arise from the beauty of its composition admits of neither.

10 The old translation, “by Raphe Robinson, 1551,” has been republished by Dr. Dibdin, accompanied by copious annotations. Almost everything relating to the family, the life, and the works of the author may be found in “the biographical and literary introduction.” It is the first specimen of an edition where the diligence of the editor has not been wasted on trivial researches or nugatory commentaries.

11 “Sir Thomas More’s Workes,” 348.

THE EARL OF SURREY AND SIR THOMAS WYATT.

Not many years intervened between the uncouth gorgeousness of Hawes, the homely sense of Barclay, the anomalous genius of Skelton, and the pure poetry of Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey. In the poems of Surrey, and his friend, Sir Thomas Wyatt,1 the elder, the age of taste, if not of genius, opens on us. Dryden and Pope sometimes seem to appear two centuries before their date. There is no chronology in the productions of real genius; for, whenever a great master appears, he advances his art to a period which labour, without creation, toils for centuries to reach.

The great reformer of our poetry, he who first from his own mind, without a model, displayed its permanent principles, was the poetic Earl of Surrey. There was inspiration in his system, and he freed his genius from the barbaric taste or the undisturbed dulness which had prevailed since the days of Chaucer. His ear was musical, and he formed a metrical structure with the melodies of our varied versification, rejecting the rude rhythmical rhyme which had hitherto prevailed in our poetry. He created a poetic diction, and graceful involutions; a finer selection of words, and a delicacy of expression, were now substituted for vague diffusion, and homeliness of phrases and feeble rhymes, or, on the other hand, for that vitiated style of crude pedantic Latinisms, such as “purpúre, aureáte, pulchritúde, celatúre, facúnde,” and so many others, laborious nothings! filling the verse with noise. The contemplative and tender Surrey charms by opening some picturesque scene or dwelling on some impressive incident. He had discerned the error of those inartificial writers, whose minute puerility, in their sterile abundance, detailed till nothing was remembered, and described, till nothing was perceptible. Hitherto, our poets had narrowed their powers by moulding their conceptions by temporary tastes, the manners and modes of thinking of their day; but their remoteness, which may delight the antiquary, diminishes their interest with the poetical reader. Surrey struck into that secret path which leads to general nature, guided by his art: his tenderness and his thoughtful musings find an echo in our bosoms, and are as fresh with us as they were in the court of Windsor three centuries past.

These rare qualities in a poet at such a period would of themselves form an era in our literature; but Surrey also extended their limits; the disciple of Chaucer was also the pupil of Petrarch, and the Earl of Surrey composed the first sonnets in the English language, with the amatory tenderness and the condensed style of its legitimate structure. Dr. Nott further claims the honour for Surrey of the invention of heroic blank verse; Surrey’s version of Virgil being unrhymed.

When Warton suggested that Surrey borrowed the idea of blank verse from Trissino’s “Italia Liberata,” he seems to have been misled by the inaccurate date of 1528, which he affixed to the publication of that epic. Trissino’s epic did not appear till 1547,2 and Surrey perished in the January of that year. It was indeed long a common opinion that Trissino invented the versi sciolti, or blank verse, though Quadrio confesses that such had been used by preceding poets, whose names he has recorded. The mellifluence and flexibility of the vowelly language were favourable to unrhymed verse; while the poverty of the poetic diction, and the unmusical verse of France, could never venture to show itself without the glitter of rhyme. The heroic blank verse, however, was an after-thought of Surrey: he first composed his unrhymed verse in the long Alexandrine, had afterwards felicitously changed it for the decasyllabic verse, but did not live to correct the whole of his version. Surrey could not therefore have designed the pauses and the cadences of blank verse in his first choice, nor will they be found in his last. Nor can it be conceded that blank verse was wholly unknown among us. Webbe, a critic long after, in the reign of Elizabeth, considers the author of Pierce Ploughman as “the first whom he had met with who observed the quantity of our verse, without the curiosity of rhyme.”

Dr. Nott, with editorial ardour, considers that the unfinished model of Surrey was the prototype of all subsequent blank verse, and was also the origin of its introduction into dramatic composition. A sweeping conclusion! when we consider the artificial structure of our blank verse from the days of Milton, who, not without truth, asserted that “he first gave the example of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.” This indeed has been denied to Milton by those who look to dates, and have no ear; and are apt to imagine that rhymeless lines, mere couplets, with ten well-counted syllables in each, must necessarily form blank verse. Dr. Nott, in quoting the eulogy of Ascham on this noble effort of Surrey “to bring our national poetry to perfection,” has omitted to add what followed, namely, the censure of Surrey for not having rejected our heroic verse altogether, and substituted the hexameter of Virgil, in English verse. It is therefore quite evident that Ascham had formed no conception of blank verse, no more than had Surrey, such as it was to be formed by the ear of Milton, and by some of his successors. All beginnings are obscure; something is borrowed from the past, and something is invented for the future, till it is vain to fix the gradations of invention which terminate in what at length becomes universally adopted.

Could the life, or what we have of late called the psychological history, of this poetic Earl of Surrey be now written, it would assuredly open a vivid display of fine genius, high passions, and romantic enthusiasm. Little is known, save a few public events; but the print of the footsteps shows their dimension. We trace the excellence, while we know but little of the person.

The youth of Surrey, and his life, hardly passed beyond that period, betrayed the buoyancy of a spirit vehement and quick, but rarely under guidance. Reckless truth, in all its openness and its sternness, was his habit, and glory was his passion; but in this restlessness of generous feelings his anger too easily blazed forth. He was haughty among his peers, and he did not even scorn to chastise an inferior. We are not surprised at discovering that one of so unreserved a temper should in that jealous reign more than once have suffered confinement. But the youthful hero who pursued to justice a relative and a court favourite, for a blow, by which that relative had outraged Surrey’s faithful companion—he who would eat flesh in Lent—he who issued one night to break the windows of the citizens, to remind them that they were a sinful race, however that might have been instigated by zeal for “the new religion”—all such things betrayed his enthusiastic daring, but his deeds, to become splendid, depended on their direction. The lofty notions he attached to his descent; his proud shield quartering the arms of the Confessor, which the duke, his father, dared not show to a jealous monarch; his feats of arms at the barriers, and his military conduct in his campaigns,

————Who saw Kelsal blaze, Landrecy burnt, and battered Boulogne render; At Montreuil’s gate hopeless of a recure (recovery),

there, where that twin-spirit, his beloved associate, Clere, to save his wounded friend, had freely yielded his own life; his magnificence as a courtier, the companion of the princely Richmond; all “the joy and feast with a king’s son;” his own record of the brilliant days, and the soothing fancies of “proud Windsor:” “its large open courts;” “the gravelled ground for the foaming horse;” “the palm-play;” “the stately seats and dances;” “the secret groves,” and “the wild forest, with cry of hounds;” and more than all, the mysterious passion for “the fair Geraldine,” cover the misty shade of Surrey with a cloud of glory, which, while it veils the man from our sight, seems to enlarge the object we gaze on.

We see this youth, he who first taught the English Muse accents she had never before tried, hurried from his literary seclusion to be immolated on the scaffold, by the arts of a remorseless rival, of him whose pride at last sent him to the block, and who signed the death-warrant of his own brother! It was at a moment when the dying monarch, as the breath was fleeting from his lips, once in his life was voiceless to condemn a state victim, that Somerset took up the stamp which Henry used, to affix it to the death-warrant of Surrey. Victim of his own domestic circle! The father disunited with the son, from fear or jealousy; the mother separated from the father, to the last vowing unforgiving vengeance; a sister disnatured of all kin, hastening to be the voluntary accuser of her father and her brother! These domestic hatreds were the evil spirits which raged in the house of the Howards, and hurried on the fate of the accomplished, the poetic, the hapless Earl of Surrey.

A tale of such grandeur and such woe passed away unheeded even by a slight record, so inexpert were the few writers of those days, and probably so perilous was their curiosity. The pretended trial of Surrey, who being no lord of parliament, was tried by a timorous jury at Guildhall, seems to have been studiously suppressed, and the last solemn act of his life, “the leaving it,” is alike concealed. Even in the registers of public events by our chroniclers, they unanimously pass over the glorious name and the miserable death—to spare the monarch’s or the victim’s honour.

The poems of Surrey were often read, as their multiplied editions show; but of the noble poet and his Geraldine, tradition had not sent down even an imperfect tale. In this uncertainty, the world was disposed to listen to any romantic story of such genius and love and chivalry.

The secret history of Surrey was at length revealed, and the gravity of its discloser vouched for its authenticity. Who would doubt the testimony of plain Anthony à Wood?

Surrey is represented hastening on a chivalric expedition to Italy; at Florence he challenges the universe, that his Geraldine was the peerless of the beautiful. In his travels, Cornelius Agrippa exhibited to Surrey, in a magical mirror, his fair mistress as she was occupied at the moment of inspection. He beheld her sick, weeping in bed, reading his poems, in all the grief of absence. This incident set spurs to his horse. At Florence he hastened to view the chamber which had witnessed the birth of so much beauty. At the court he affixed his challenge, and maintained this emprise in tilt and tourney. The Duke of Florence, flattered that a Florentine lady should be renowned by the prowess of an English nobleman, invited Surrey to a residence at his court. But our Amadis more nobly purposed to hold on his career through all the courts of Italy, shivering the lances of whoever would enter the lists, whether “Christian, Jew, or Saracen.” Suddenly the Quixotism ends, by this paragon of chivalry being recalled home by the royal command.

This Italian adventure seemed congenial with the romantic mystery in which the poet had involved the progress of his passion for his poetic mistress. He had himself let us into some secrets. Geraldine came from “Tuscany;” Florence was her ancient seat, her sire was an earl, her dame of “princes’ blood,” “yet she was fostered by milk of an Irish breast;” and from her tender years in Britain “she tasted costly food with a king’s child.” The amatorial poet even designates the spots hallowed by his passion; he first saw her at Hunsdon, Windsor chased him from her sight, and at Hampton Court “first wished her for mine!”

These hints and these localities were sufficient to irritate the vague curiosity of Surrey’s readers, and more particularly of our critical researchers, of whom Horace Walpole first ventured to explain the inexplicable. With singular good fortune, and from slight grounds, Walpole conjectured that Geraldine was no Italian dame, but Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, one of the daughters of the Earl of Kildare; the family were often called the Geraldines. The Italian descent from the Geraldi was made out by a spurious genealogy. The challenge and the tournament no one doubted. But some harder knots were to be untied; and our theoretical historian, unfurnished by facts and dates, it has been recently shown, discovered some things which never existed.

But every writer followed in the track. Warton compliments the sagacity of Walpole, and embroiders the narrative. The historian of our poetry not only details the incident of the magical mirror, but adds that “the imagination of Surrey was heated anew by this interesting spectacle!” He therefore had no doubt of the reality; and, indeed, to confirm the whole adventure of the romantic chivalry, he refers the curious to a finely sculptured shield which is still preserved by the Dukes of Norfolk. The Italian adventures of Surrey, and all that Walpole had erroneously suggested, are fully accepted, and our critic observes—“Surrey’s life throws so much light on the character and the subjects of his poetry, that it is almost impossible to consider the one without exhibiting the few anecdotes of the other.” But the critical sagacity of Warton did not wholly desert him through all the circumstantial narrative, for suddenly his pen pauses, and he exclaims on these travels of Surrey, that “they have the air of a romance!”

And it was a romance! and it served for history many a year!3 This tale of literary delusion may teach all future investigators into obscure points of history to probe them by dates.

It was long after the days of Walpole and Warton, and even of George Ellis, that it was discovered that these travels into Italy by Surrey had been transferred literally from an “Historical Romance.” A great wit, in Elizabeth’s reign, Tom Nash, sent forth in “the Life of Jack Wilton, an unfortunate traveller,” this whole legend of Surrey. The entire fiction of Nash annihilates itself by its extraordinary anachronisms.

In what respect Nash designed to palm the imposture of his “Historical Romance” on the world, may be left to be explained by some “Jack Wiltons” of our own. He says “all that in this phantastical treatise I can promise is some reasonable conveyance of history, and variety of mirth.” Must we trust to their conscience for “the reasonable conveyance?”

We now trace the whole progress of this literary delusion.

On Surrey’s ideal passion, and on this passage misconceived—

From Tuscan came my lady’s worthy race; Fair Florence was sometime her ancient seat—

the romancer inferred that Geraldine must be a fair Florentine; Surrey had alluded to the fanciful genealogy of the Geralds from the Geraldi. On this single hint the romancer sends him on his aërial journey in this business of love and chivalry.

This romance, of which it is said only three copies are known, was published in 1594. Four years after, Drayton, looking about for subjects for his Ovidian epistles, eagerly seized on a legend so favourable for poetry, and Geraldine and Surrey supplied two amatory epistles. Anthony à Wood, finding himself without materials to frame a life of the poetic Surrey, had recourse to “the famous poet,” as he calls Drayton, whom he could quote; for Drayton was a consecrated bard for the antiquary, since Selden had commented on his great topographical poem. But honest Anthony on this occasion was not honest enough. He did not tell the world that he had fallen on the romance itself, Drayton’s sole authority. Literally and silently, our antiquary transcribed the fuller passages from a volume he was ashamed to notice, disingenuously dropping certain incidents which would not have honoured the memory of Surrey. Thus the “phantastical” history for ever blots the authentic tomes of the grave Athenæ Oxonienses. A single moment of scrutiny would have detected the whole fabricated narrative; but there is a charm in romance which bewitched our luckless Anthony.

Thus it happened that the romancer, on a misconception, constructs an imaginary fabric; the poet Drayton builds on the romancer; the sober antiquary on both; then the commentators stand upon the antiquary. Never was a house of cards of so many stories. The foundation, Surrey’s poetic passion, may be as fictitious as the rest; for the visionary Geraldine, viewed in Agrippa’s magic mirror was hardly a more mysterious shadow.

Not one of these writers was informed of what recent researches have demonstrated. They knew not that this Earl of Surrey in boyhood was betrothed to his lady, also a child—one of the customs to preserve wealth or power in great families of that day. These historians were unfurnished with any dates to guide them, and never suspected that when Surrey is made to set off on his travels in Italy, after a Donna Giraldi who had no existence, he was the father of two sons, and “the fair Geraldine” was only seven years of age! that Surrey’s first love broke out when she was nine; that he declared his passion when she was about thirteen; and finally, that Geraldine, having attained to the womanly discretion of fifteen, dismissed the accomplished Earl of Surrey, with whom she never could be united, to accept the hand of old Sir Anthony Brown, aged sixty. Lady Brown disturbs the illusion of Geraldine, in the modest triumph of sixteen over sixty.